Gothism, or the Goth subculture of our contemporary youth, and Gothicism, the cultivation of the aesthetic aspects of the Gothic period, have attitudes in common, such as a romantic penchant for the macabre and grotesque, but Goth culture recently acquired an even more sinister reputation than Gothicism as a result of the real gratuitous violence at Columbine High School: the evil doers had dabbled in Goth culture, hence Goths were condemned by way of association. American Gothism has waned considerably since then: its blatantly morbid aspect was no longer merely amusing or reluctantly tolerated by parental authority. Innocent young Goths were suspected of having at least a propensity to act out their favorite scenes of wild and wanton violence. Many Goths went underground while others simply outgrew the faddish cult. The events of 9/11 seemingly sealed the tomb, but the wooden stake was not driven home in the heart of the matter.

Gothism was a handy scapegoat; we certainly would not want to blame everyone, for then what would we do? And let us not blame the Establishment either, although violence is deliberately cultivated by the Establishment and its media; scenes of small-scale mayhem and murder are explicitly depicted, and such is the tolerance of the audience that it wants ever more and is more easily provoked to clamor for the massive organized terrorism of war. Explicit scenes of sexual intercourse, considered a dirty thing even between consenting adults, are popular but must be reserved for Off-Off Broadway showings, so to speak.

Hardly anyone in the cowering mass wants to be associated with domestic terrorism nowadays. Police brutality is tolerated to a certain extent; it is viewed as an aberrant or politically incorrect but natural exercise of the legitimate monopoly on violence; many of the victims probably deserved the abuse anyway; and would-be criminals would behave better if they had greater cause to fear the consequences of misbehavior. Is not the police power organized for the greater good through a consensus of terror? Does not a monopoly on violence establish fearful order?

The same may be said of the flattening effect of the military power exercised abroad if only larger and larger surges of troops were sent in to terrorize terrorists. The rules of engagement might be changed to specify that anyone found on the streets with a gun or bomb must be shot dead on sight; if the same is found hidden inside a structure, all the occupants must be executed along with a few neighbors for good measure. Soldiers subject to the stress of war should be immune from prosecution for war crimes including rape and murder because they could not help it or were just following orders. Of course torture must be legalized; the resort to dungeons and torture chambers is nothing new: it is a traditional practice, regardless of the laws against it if any. We cannot help but note that the almighty military power of the only superpower and its allies has not restored any semblance of order to Iraq after plunging it into chaos; the hit-man who had established and maintained the consensus of terror brought to ruin is to be executed at any moment. Ironically, hanging not decapitation is the method of capital punishment adopted in Iraq. Still, the Goths of the future will have no lack of gory details to exercise their imaginations on –at least the hanging will be filmed for posterity.

Since the Columbine murders, Gothism has gone the way of the Patriot Movement after the Oklahoma Bombing. The Goths of yesteryear are wearing combat fatigues today. The highly organized terrorism of the United States, designed to fight fire with fire and to get revenge in the name of god and nation on terrorists both real and imagined, and to spread consumer democracy to boot, was wildly popular after 9/11. But now that the shocking and awesome world war on terror has proven unprofitable in terms of lives and dollars, the overwhelming majority would renege on their commitment to massively organized terrorism. Therefore the self-righteous Commander-in-Chief, widely suspected of being a pathological liar, is hawking the long-term advantage of legalized murder and mayhem and the destruction of livelihoods: The cost of winning the war someday is an investment in world peace. No matter how costly, the war must go on or the nation will lose its credibility for violence; it has already wasted its honor and political capital. The pseudo-conservative politicians are democrats when the people are for their military misadventures, and they are Burkean republicans when the demos is opposed; in neither case is the voice of the people the voice of the arbitrary god whose name is cited in chambers.

In any event violence in entertainment still reigns supreme over love stories. In the years to come many movies will be based on the last war no matter how bad the cause or outcome was, and thus will the appetite of youth for violence be whetted while hormones are raging and the brain’s reasoning power is temporarily forestalled. A poor young man can then legally be all he can be; maybe he can get an education and go off on a killing spree.  A young woman can behave like a traditional man and follow suit. A woman may be no match for a man on the ground, but put her in the cockpit of a jet fighter and he has met his match – during an interview with a female fighter pilot, an anchorman did not raise the issue of female combat, but speculated on what might happen to her plane went down and she fell into enemy hands – may god forbid!

Unfortunately, few people are aware of the subterranean link between relatively isolated incidents of domestic violence such as the Columbine killings and the massive foreign violence of wars such as the pre-emptive or unprovoked war on Iraq. The audience bemoans high-school casualties; the trench-coated suicidal killers are duly cursed – true Christians like the Amish would forgive and pray for them and console their families. But respectable people are proud of the body count of an enemy designated to play the subhuman role. Patriots  may then vicariously vent the aggression legislated against at home – fictional violence does not serve the purpose. They count their own soldiers as heroes instead of murderers because soldiers are licensed to kill according to what is really the law of the jungle despite its “humane” conventions: international anarchy prevails. The nice ways of war take a greater toll including the collateral damage from massive bombings of densely populated areas – high technology, low morality. In the final analysis, the civilians who deserve the leaders they elect or fail to assassinate deserve to be killed. The war on exploited peasants and committed communists in Vietnam would not have been a glaring exception to the idolization of warriors if Vietnam had been quickly “turned into a parking lot” for consumer democracy by a mercenary military force.

We have cause to repress the work of the devil lurking underground rather than face him or her in the mirror. The scenic picture of people happily consuming and producing and producing and consuming is rather superficial and constitutes a denial of reality, but who wants to face reality, especially the reality that too many human beings love violence? Therefore the law is established by force: we contract not to kill one another absent the authority that absolves us of blood-guilt. Not everyone is content with the peace. Not all criminals feel guilty: perpetrators of abominable crimes have confessed that they felt a tremendous sense of relief as the deeds were done.

In times of relative peace and prosperity we notice that one seemingly random act of violence against fleeting happiness follows another. Prophets remind us that the sense of security under prosperity is false and makes doom imminent, but prophets do not get much press because they have a “negative mental attitude.” The established media fans the fires, raising the worst things and people above the best. A bored and desensitized people want not peace but violence now, and will have it in the name of the sword-wielding, so-called god of love who advised them against it while dividing instead of uniting them. Fear might cause a novice to vomit and faint at the sight of blood and death; but we may grow accustomed to the operating room and morgue and battlefield, and might even enjoy the scenes – viewed remotely, without personal risk to ourselves, we might think the awful is really awesome or sublime. The sight of human blood makes sadistic masochists feel good – we should not ask them to do unto others what they would have done to themselves. Killing makes sadistic killers feel powerful; they have conquered their fear of death by causing others to die first. On the one hand, every individual would persist forever it could, and without impedance; but then individuality would be lost in the Total. Every anarchist by definition would be his own arche, but that would not do – the anarchist, then, to save anarchy, might become a hyphenated-anarchist, an oxymoronic anarcho-Christian, for example, with Jesus as authoritative model. Anarcho-Communism, another self-contradictory compound, would subserve society, whatever that might be. Only philosophic anarchy works because the mind can run wild without doing too much damage, but then again philosophy depends on social terms and questionable authority, so it is not as free as we think. Authoritarian governments arise to organize terrorism to contest the anarchistic terrorists whose “ism” does not really matter. Otherwise, pending the institution of absolute love in place of relative strife, havoc and panic would run amok until the world is awash in the blood and the gruesome gore the Gothic kids merely imagined in their dissident response to homely authority.

Deny it as we may, we know very well what lurks underground, beneath the placid countenance of domesticated peace. Contempt and even hatred for the social scene that is supposed to be good; the scene that requires individuals to lie to be good or else be cast out and even to perish. The obscene of the Goths and other unkempt dissidents was a protest against the official scene, the Scene of Clean sometimes referred to as the Big Lie. The obverse of the scene, the obscene, is the so-called spiritual or romantic protest by the 'noble' individual and by 'aristocratic' groups of 'nobles' against the hypocritical social restraints of the materialistic mass, the self-hating, competitive 'bourgeois' or middle class who preach physical and moral hygiene, godly brotherly love, and even immortality, but who are actually, at least from the obverse perspective, bags of filth with dirty minds; conservatives who cannot mind their own sexual business and get their heads out from between other people’s legs; conventional people who unwittingly love the devil, who hate and murder their brothers en masse, and who, instead of going to heaven, rot in graves if they are not cremated or otherwise disposed of.

Since the young are engaged in a struggle to distinguish themselves as individuals and since that struggle is typically a rebellion against homely authority or small-scale homeland security, we should not be at all surprised or shocked by the postmodern Goth culture that threw the awful truth in authority's face. Each generation has forms of protest, and similar forms appear. Each form has its significance. The foundation of Gothism in fact is as old as the hills. The experts who deny any link between our recent Gothic youth culture and the inspiring Gothic period following the Black Death are mistaken; they do a great disservice to children who should know about the positive aspects of that period as well as the positive influence of modern Gothic literature on the Romantic periods. Mind you that when we went out into the field and interviewed our Goths we did not find Columbine killers. We found confused teenagers, of course, many of them intelligent and introspective, interested in music and literature, uninterested in promoting political ideologies. They were mishandled by authority and seem to have melted into the crowd. Beware, however, when the Sun goes down on the Big Lie.

Young rebels turn to adults for their identifications; the more exotic and oriental the better. For instance, our own Goths took interest the noble Arab knight whose designation 'arab' means 'noble,' and whose poetry inspired poets to wax romantically in the West. It was not long ago that Western men dreamed of participating in desert jihads waged by ruthless freedom fighters on camelback; and they went on to seize a goodly portion of the settled world –capitalism, on the other hand, finds its tutelary fathers in the pirate culture. It is with that threat to the commercial caravan in mind that conservative social scientists urge the immediate 'modernization' and 'reformation' of Islam, that it might put its Allah in a transcendental closet too, and join Protestantism in bourgeois feel-good faith; that is, faith in Anything Goes - as long as there is a profit in it. If it were not for the religious particularism of fundamental Islam that contradicts its pretensions to universality; if the propagandists focused on the general protest against bourgeois, capitalist culture; - titanic homeland security would no longer be able to recognize the face of evil and would soon be overwhelmed by the evil empire it conjures while fanning the flames under the smoke signals in order to fatten payoffs.

Considering that it is really up against, the terrorist within, Homeland Security shall fail. Not much has changed since the building of the latest bureaucratic Titanic. There is confusion onboard. Security is scarcely better now that everybody is supposed to be watching; the aim of the security game is to milk the holy cash cow dry for private profit. Chairs and people are shifting around on the deck. Some people make fortunes in the security business while others complain that they do not have basic equipment. People with clearances continue to live the Big Lie, while thousands die needlessly at war.

The Goths warned us about the Big Lie, about the patriotic hypocrisy, but we thought they were obscene. What patriotism? There was no Pater overlooking his brood with a loving eye. There was scant brotherly love or neighborly love. Indeed, experienced security agents denied that widespread brotherly love could even exist. Of course not, for everything is done for the want of money, according to the competitive, American way, which we think is only human. We have good reason to be paranoid, for everybody, not to mention Nature and God, is out to get each and every one of us. We must make sure every good thing is scarce if it is to have any value for those who would accumulate the most of it. If food grew on trees, and if we could live in peace under them, not enough people would want to produce the mountains of trash and junk we are sold on having. Life and liberty is confined to the pursuit of property and the god behind the Almighty Pater - the Almighty Dollar.