Joss Whedon's Dollhouse only has two more episodes to go, alas, but it's not going down without a fight. Last night's episode, "Getting Closer" had so much going on, it was enough to fill half a 22-episode season of a lesser show, but I really just want to talk about one rather amazing thing that happened: The lead character (sort of) in an American TV show self-identified as a terrorist.
Let me say that again: The lead character in an American TV show self-identified as a terrorist.
It wasn't entirely accurate, of course. But in a sense, that only makes it better.
The last two weeks since the Christmas/underpants bomber episode have seen the utter and complete collapse into meaninglessness of "terrorist" discourse. As Rachel Maddow noted, Rudy ("A noun, a verb and 9/11") Guiliani has effectively destroyed his political career once and for all in the process of trying to make 9/11 disappear, and that's pretty much the symbolic crown of the mountain range of stupid that's been trotted out in the past two weeks.
In essence, the post-underpants GOP attacks on Obama can be summarized thus: "You can't fight terrorism, because you're not scared! And you're not scaring us and the American people!" You're not screaming "terrorism" every other word, just like Osama bin Laden wants!
And so now that "terrorism" has been made utterly meaningless as the final reductio absurdum of those who flew so high for more than half a decade based on their own spectacular failures, it's only fitting that a fictional character from Joss Whedon's fevered imagination should turn the ultimate linguistic trick, and--quite impossibly--turn "terrorist" into a Good Thing.
One has to ask, what does it mean that this could happen?
In the episode, Caroline (the young woman whose personality is erased to create the "doll" Echo) appears in flashback sneaking into a facility with a security guard she's seducing, when she suddenly turns on him and handcuffs him. It's classic Joss Whedon, a scene that doubles the very first scene in Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (the series, not the movie). When the security guard bewails his own foolishness for letting a thief into the facility he's supposed to be guarding, Caroline reassures him, "I'm not a thief, I'm a terrorist."
She's not, of course. Her goal is not to terrorize anyone, even those who run the facility, but to expose their deepest, darkest secrets (which even she cannot yet imagine) to the blinding light of day. In short, she's not a terrorist, she's a whistle-blower. And yet, by a sheer act of will, if nothing else, she fuses to the two different concepts into one.
There are so many layers of meaning here, it would take a decent academic paper to sort them all out. But the bottom line is that January 8, 2010 marks the end of the spell that "terrorism" has cast over America. The rhetoric is utterly exhausted, utterly bankrupt, utterly devoid of meaning. The attempt to use "terrorism" to turn off people's minds has failed, once and for all.
We are all terrorists now. Every single one of us who thinks for themselves. Every single one of us who questions, "Why?"
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