museimagination: Change
((With special thanks to laws_of_dawes for listening to me ramble on and pointing a few things out.))
George Carlin said that cynics are just disappointed idealists.
Billy explains to people, when asked, that he views the world through a blind of cynical optimism. He always thinks it's hard to understand, but it goes a little something like this: humanity's fucked up, it's fucked the planet up, and here he is, little Billy Hollister, out to change it all, because apparently nobody else is stepping up to the plate. You look at the world like he does, and you think, 'wow, things can be so much better. Things can be better than they are. But the way things are going, it will only get worse. I can't be the only one thinking that...can I? I can't be the only one that needs to do something about it. But I'm the only one doing something about it. If I can.'
He first heard about the Evil League of Evil back in college in New Jersey. Some guys talking about it. Maybe see a poster. And at the time it just sounded cool, somehow. You know. ELE. Be a bad guy. Join a group of elite supervillainy. Comic book fantasies, whatever. It's always the bad guys that get the good lines and the sweet costumes and powers and the good guys are always boring and American and justice and whatever. That's how it started.
His doctoral dissertation eventually ended up being about how every single person in a household had the possibility of being a terrorist just because of what they could do with common household chemicals on a local or large scale, if they had the knowhow. He had the knowhow.
The guy could've been anything. Been a scientist, been homeland security, whatever. By the time he's out of grad school--and especially after the first debacle with his brother--he sees the world in a slightly darker light.
Suddenly the idea isn't that it'd be fun and silly and hey maybe fame and fortune or get his name in a comic book.
Suddenly it's look at this shitty world we live in and this needs to be changed. Global change. He understands the way the world works. He's smart. He watches the news, reads the papers, browses CNN and BBC sites. He knows that there's no possible way that you can get all the world leaders together and make a change.
It's like this.
It's like how Communism's a good idea. Fantastic idea, in theory. Would probably fix everything.
Except people suck.
People will always suck. They will be greedy, and they will be power-hungry. The people that run the world are the people like his brother. Rich and arrogant and don't give a shit.
So you need global change, and the only plausible way you can do that is to simultaneously overthrow everyone at once and one person, one person with a good head on his or her shoulders, they start making new rules. Maybe it's like God and the Commandments. Maybe. But maybe it would work this time.
But who rules the world? Who in their right mind could possibly go around to everyone saying 'ya know, someday I want to rule the world'?
Villains, basically. Good guys are the low man on the totem pole. They get nowhere. They're Penny. They hold no power and no sway but try their damnedest and fix little things at a time.
Evil guys, they wanna rule the world. And that includes the businessmen, the world leaders, the power-hungry. But he's not looking for that, but he has to, because he'd kind of need to rule the world. Evil guys do that.
Which is the start of the hatched plan of 'if I get into the ELE, I'm on the fast track to world domination, and then everything might at last be given the chance to heal', and it's ambitious, yeah, but it's something.
He'd step down as leader, eventually, he doesn't know, after a few years, to someone more trustworthy, or maybe things will have started to right themselves and people can start to run themselves and he'll settle down somewhere warm and nice and busy but clean with a girl and maybe have a family and grow old and die.
But he's just like the good guys. He's nothing. He's nowhere. He can't be near someone he used to admire so much that got turned so rotten, but he has to make it big somewhere big, not nowhere New Mexico. So LA it is.
But in LA he's still nowhere. He needs a job, he needs money, he needs supplies, he needs more than just some half-assed plan that will probably never work, but he has to try because the thought is there.
And anyone can have the thought. Plenty of people probably have. But they also let it go. They let it go because they think someone else can do it, not them, it's someone else's problem. So he does.
He clings to that bit of hope because his father walked out on his mother who sits in an empty house alone. He clings because his brother was a star and the one everyone loved and wanted to be, including him, and he made it in the world, he got into business, he did what he wanted, but it destroyed who he used to be. He clings to it because there are people dying in Africa and there are people crowded in China and there are people in Mexico getting arrested for wanting a better life and there are people that smuggle drugs in their stomachs for cash and there are mothers at twelve and thirteen years old and there are homeless people on the street nobody can spare any money to because they have families to feed and debts they can't pay off.
It's like when you turn on the news, and what is it that you see, every day?
You see terrorist bombings and gay protests and threats to a president-elect and you hear about the economy and school shootings and go back farther, you get news about local heroes friends family soldiers dead, go back farther, 9/11 has to be the most replayed clip of all time, ever. Go back farther. It's gotten worse this century, yeah, things declining, you see more and more like this, but it's in the news, it's in the papers, it's everywhere.
You are bombarded daily with imagery and it makes you desensitized. There is all of this shit on tv and online and in the papers, you don't know why it happens.
It just does.
It doesn't make sense.
He cannot possibly make sense of why the world is the way it is.
And that doesn't have to do with God or that he doesn't get religion--but even that, there, does anyone get religious wars?--it just has to do with the fact that it does not make logical sense.
And it's even worse now. Why does this happen in a world where he's met so many people trying to change it, just like him?
How can this happen in a world where he can fall in love at first sight with a beautiful, fragile woman who helps the homeless and won't accept a diamond necklace as a gift?
How can this happen in a world where there are lawyers like Rachel out protecting people when it counts?
How can this happen in a world with people who have the power to do what he's trying to do?
How, in all of this beautiful, hateful, amazing, fucked up world, can there exist a person who blows other people up just because he can?
Why is it that the minorities--the single crazy psychopaths and small cults and small radical groups--are able to do so much harm, but everyone else can hardly even pick up all the broken pieces left behind?
Why does he live in a world where he has to fear for his life just by walking outside of his workplace?
Why does he live in a world where sexual gratification works the same as drugs or money and nobody is ashamed of that?
Why does he live in a world where someone is relieved not to become a father because they're terrified they'll end up just like their old man?
Why does he live in a world where it's okay to be shoved around and abused because being intellectual is uncool?
Why does he live in a world where a man who has the potential to be anything he wants can so calmly and happily walk into a church and kill himself for all the world to see?
How can this world even exist when he's seen how good people can be?
But here he is. Here he is, beginning to reach middle age and absolutely no closer to his goal since when he began. Ten years nearly, most of LA still doesn't know his evil persona's name. He nabs a little cash from banks so he can pay the rent. He sees good--he sees what is perceived as good--for how it really is. He sees good as personified in the media taking all the glory and stealing the love of his life just because he can.
This is not the good he knows exists.
What kind of crazy backwards world is this where people can cheer for a guy like this?
Are people blind?
Are they stupid?
Do they not care?
Is it all of the above?
He lives in a world where being in love can hurt and can be illegal and can kill. The world doesn't make sense. For all of his smarts, for all of his education, for all the things he can make sense of--complex things most people can't, math equations, chemical bonding, throw some science at him, he'll figure it out--he can't understand people.
He tries. And he's successful, from time to time. He sees people when they're weak, and he sees them when they're strong, and he can figure out from there that they're not always what they show the world. He understands simple things, like fear as power, terror as control. One does not become a terrorist without first understanding why a terrorist works.
And he understands that simple things can mean the most. A smile. A hand on a hand. A $3 action figure.
He understands tears of happiness and relief and sadness, and he understands anger even if one shouldn't feel it, and he understands because he's felt all that, too, and he can admit it.
In fact, he seems to understand people more than most ever try. But it never feels like a victory.
He realizes, of course, that not everything can have a happy ending. This fact doesn't keep him from trying, even when others have already resigned themselves to dealing with whatever life throws at them instead of doing something about it.
He can do something for his friends. He tries to, anyway. He feels it too hard when he can't but keeps going, because he can't even understand why he allows himself to be weighted down with everyone's problems, he just does. It's what he does. He fixes. But problems he has no need to be in make him tired and weak and--he'll give that time and effort gladly. If only for a moment of respite.
Things can change, he knows they can. But the disappointed idealist in him tells him that he can't rely on anyone else to make that change happen.
George Carlin said that cynics are just disappointed idealists.
Billy explains to people, when asked, that he views the world through a blind of cynical optimism. He always thinks it's hard to understand, but it goes a little something like this: humanity's fucked up, it's fucked the planet up, and here he is, little Billy Hollister, out to change it all, because apparently nobody else is stepping up to the plate. You look at the world like he does, and you think, 'wow, things can be so much better. Things can be better than they are. But the way things are going, it will only get worse. I can't be the only one thinking that...can I? I can't be the only one that needs to do something about it. But I'm the only one doing something about it. If I can.'
He first heard about the Evil League of Evil back in college in New Jersey. Some guys talking about it. Maybe see a poster. And at the time it just sounded cool, somehow. You know. ELE. Be a bad guy. Join a group of elite supervillainy. Comic book fantasies, whatever. It's always the bad guys that get the good lines and the sweet costumes and powers and the good guys are always boring and American and justice and whatever. That's how it started.
His doctoral dissertation eventually ended up being about how every single person in a household had the possibility of being a terrorist just because of what they could do with common household chemicals on a local or large scale, if they had the knowhow. He had the knowhow.
The guy could've been anything. Been a scientist, been homeland security, whatever. By the time he's out of grad school--and especially after the first debacle with his brother--he sees the world in a slightly darker light.
Suddenly the idea isn't that it'd be fun and silly and hey maybe fame and fortune or get his name in a comic book.
Suddenly it's look at this shitty world we live in and this needs to be changed. Global change. He understands the way the world works. He's smart. He watches the news, reads the papers, browses CNN and BBC sites. He knows that there's no possible way that you can get all the world leaders together and make a change.
It's like this.
It's like how Communism's a good idea. Fantastic idea, in theory. Would probably fix everything.
Except people suck.
People will always suck. They will be greedy, and they will be power-hungry. The people that run the world are the people like his brother. Rich and arrogant and don't give a shit.
So you need global change, and the only plausible way you can do that is to simultaneously overthrow everyone at once and one person, one person with a good head on his or her shoulders, they start making new rules. Maybe it's like God and the Commandments. Maybe. But maybe it would work this time.
But who rules the world? Who in their right mind could possibly go around to everyone saying 'ya know, someday I want to rule the world'?
Villains, basically. Good guys are the low man on the totem pole. They get nowhere. They're Penny. They hold no power and no sway but try their damnedest and fix little things at a time.
Evil guys, they wanna rule the world. And that includes the businessmen, the world leaders, the power-hungry. But he's not looking for that, but he has to, because he'd kind of need to rule the world. Evil guys do that.
Which is the start of the hatched plan of 'if I get into the ELE, I'm on the fast track to world domination, and then everything might at last be given the chance to heal', and it's ambitious, yeah, but it's something.
He'd step down as leader, eventually, he doesn't know, after a few years, to someone more trustworthy, or maybe things will have started to right themselves and people can start to run themselves and he'll settle down somewhere warm and nice and busy but clean with a girl and maybe have a family and grow old and die.
But he's just like the good guys. He's nothing. He's nowhere. He can't be near someone he used to admire so much that got turned so rotten, but he has to make it big somewhere big, not nowhere New Mexico. So LA it is.
But in LA he's still nowhere. He needs a job, he needs money, he needs supplies, he needs more than just some half-assed plan that will probably never work, but he has to try because the thought is there.
And anyone can have the thought. Plenty of people probably have. But they also let it go. They let it go because they think someone else can do it, not them, it's someone else's problem. So he does.
He clings to that bit of hope because his father walked out on his mother who sits in an empty house alone. He clings because his brother was a star and the one everyone loved and wanted to be, including him, and he made it in the world, he got into business, he did what he wanted, but it destroyed who he used to be. He clings to it because there are people dying in Africa and there are people crowded in China and there are people in Mexico getting arrested for wanting a better life and there are people that smuggle drugs in their stomachs for cash and there are mothers at twelve and thirteen years old and there are homeless people on the street nobody can spare any money to because they have families to feed and debts they can't pay off.
It's like when you turn on the news, and what is it that you see, every day?
You see terrorist bombings and gay protests and threats to a president-elect and you hear about the economy and school shootings and go back farther, you get news about local heroes friends family soldiers dead, go back farther, 9/11 has to be the most replayed clip of all time, ever. Go back farther. It's gotten worse this century, yeah, things declining, you see more and more like this, but it's in the news, it's in the papers, it's everywhere.
You are bombarded daily with imagery and it makes you desensitized. There is all of this shit on tv and online and in the papers, you don't know why it happens.
It just does.
It doesn't make sense.
He cannot possibly make sense of why the world is the way it is.
And that doesn't have to do with God or that he doesn't get religion--but even that, there, does anyone get religious wars?--it just has to do with the fact that it does not make logical sense.
And it's even worse now. Why does this happen in a world where he's met so many people trying to change it, just like him?
How can this happen in a world where he can fall in love at first sight with a beautiful, fragile woman who helps the homeless and won't accept a diamond necklace as a gift?
How can this happen in a world where there are lawyers like Rachel out protecting people when it counts?
How can this happen in a world with people who have the power to do what he's trying to do?
How, in all of this beautiful, hateful, amazing, fucked up world, can there exist a person who blows other people up just because he can?
Why is it that the minorities--the single crazy psychopaths and small cults and small radical groups--are able to do so much harm, but everyone else can hardly even pick up all the broken pieces left behind?
Why does he live in a world where he has to fear for his life just by walking outside of his workplace?
Why does he live in a world where sexual gratification works the same as drugs or money and nobody is ashamed of that?
Why does he live in a world where someone is relieved not to become a father because they're terrified they'll end up just like their old man?
Why does he live in a world where it's okay to be shoved around and abused because being intellectual is uncool?
Why does he live in a world where a man who has the potential to be anything he wants can so calmly and happily walk into a church and kill himself for all the world to see?
How can this world even exist when he's seen how good people can be?
But here he is. Here he is, beginning to reach middle age and absolutely no closer to his goal since when he began. Ten years nearly, most of LA still doesn't know his evil persona's name. He nabs a little cash from banks so he can pay the rent. He sees good--he sees what is perceived as good--for how it really is. He sees good as personified in the media taking all the glory and stealing the love of his life just because he can.
This is not the good he knows exists.
What kind of crazy backwards world is this where people can cheer for a guy like this?
Are people blind?
Are they stupid?
Do they not care?
Is it all of the above?
He lives in a world where being in love can hurt and can be illegal and can kill. The world doesn't make sense. For all of his smarts, for all of his education, for all the things he can make sense of--complex things most people can't, math equations, chemical bonding, throw some science at him, he'll figure it out--he can't understand people.
He tries. And he's successful, from time to time. He sees people when they're weak, and he sees them when they're strong, and he can figure out from there that they're not always what they show the world. He understands simple things, like fear as power, terror as control. One does not become a terrorist without first understanding why a terrorist works.
And he understands that simple things can mean the most. A smile. A hand on a hand. A $3 action figure.
He understands tears of happiness and relief and sadness, and he understands anger even if one shouldn't feel it, and he understands because he's felt all that, too, and he can admit it.
In fact, he seems to understand people more than most ever try. But it never feels like a victory.
He realizes, of course, that not everything can have a happy ending. This fact doesn't keep him from trying, even when others have already resigned themselves to dealing with whatever life throws at them instead of doing something about it.
He can do something for his friends. He tries to, anyway. He feels it too hard when he can't but keeps going, because he can't even understand why he allows himself to be weighted down with everyone's problems, he just does. It's what he does. He fixes. But problems he has no need to be in make him tired and weak and--he'll give that time and effort gladly. If only for a moment of respite.
Things can change, he knows they can. But the disappointed idealist in him tells him that he can't rely on anyone else to make that change happen.