Page 20 - Just Deserts

The Decimator

pay the ultimate price, assassinated by gangsters twenty minutes
after the opening credits: Sunderbar would not allow any greater
incursion into his role as avenging angel.
On screen Detective Johnson backed quickly around the corner of
a deserted tenement, service revolver in hand. He bumped into Rod
Deal, coming from the other direction in the identical posture. The
mirror images recoiled, about to shoot each other, when recognition
dawned on their surprised faces. “Deal!” hissed the policeman.
“What the hell are you doing here? You want to get yourself killed?”
“No.” replied the unflappable Decimator. “I’m trying to keep us
both from getting killed. I’m after drug dealers the same as you are.
Let’s work together on this thing, okay?” In a head shot, Johnson’s
face went through a rapid transformation. “You know,” he purred,
amity and glycerin oozing from his pores, “I had you all wrong.
You’re one of the good guys.”
The clip ended and Keller began talking, his delivery speeded up
by a surreptitious hand signal from Hathaway. “Okay, again we have
a subtext. The main message, of course, is that you, Crag Sunderbar,
are always on the side of justice, despite your outsider status, and that
the few honest people in the government are forced to admit it. You
come across with a strong law-and-order message, and most of the
boobocracy think the best way to deal with America’s drug problem
is to blow away everyone connected with it. The racial content is
more ambiguous, getting into that hidden persuader I mentioned: the
disadvantaged minority group member appears, however briefly, on
the same level as the Anglo-Saxon hero, the brotherhood of man
affirmed. But what’s really communicated here, unconsciously
apprehended by Caucasian viewers, is that the blacks can’t handle
their own problems, that a white man has to take charge and clean up
the mess—no matter how brutally. The non-WASP audience will see
what it wants: racial equality. And there is a significant number of
blacks in your constituency, but they are a sleeping dog; most of
them will not vote unless their rage can be awakened and focused.
This will act as an effective soporific. Now, moving right along, we
have our fourth little morality play.”
With a burst of sound and a swirl of smoke and fire, a sleek
low-slung sports car careened out of the garage exit of a burning
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