Monsters, Norms and Making Up People

Abstract

Written at the dawn of the twenty-first century, pre-9/11, Edward J. Ingebretsen’s At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture focuses on an America in which monsters have familiar, even unremarkable, faces. There is Susan Smith, the cold-hearted mother who drowns her sons to appease her lover. Smith is joined by Andrew Cunanan, a troubled young man who goes on a killing spree. And perhaps counter-intuitively, there is Bill Clinton, whom Ingebretsen paints as a moral monster in his propensity to cheat and lie in an effort to cover his sexual escapades. Ingebretsen calls Smith, Cunanan, and Clinton “three monsters of notoriety” (Ingebretsen 2001). In the wake of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the inclusion of Clinton in this triad of evil seems anti-climactic, if you will excuse the pun. Clinton’s sexual appetites were prodigious, his excesses perhaps grotesque. Yet in a time when Americans face crushing debt and mounting fears – of violence, terrorism, penury borne of job loss and foreclosure – a cheating, perjury-prone, self-absorbed and self-important president seems more a source of bemusement, even amusement, than monstrousness.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.

Friedrich Nietzsche