ANOTHER VIEW: New villains rise from U.S. economic turmoil

From ashes to hisses?

DEARBORN, Mich. -- "The better the villain," Alfred Hitchcock said, "the better the movie." And in the epic production that is the United States of America, we have followed that advice since the earliest settlers landed. For every hero the American story factory produces, a vivid new villain comes off the assembly line in short order.

We love bad guys in America -- even when they're not really bad. Demonizing helps define the best in us. Here's an incomplete list from the history books: Indians, Quakers, witches, Englishmen, the federal government, Southerners and Northerners, Chinese "Celestials," Tammany Hall Democrats, Germans, Jews, Japanese, North Koreans, communists, socialists, Vietnamese, liberals, conservatives, gays, lesbians and Muslims. The Evil Empire and the Axis of Evil.

Now, a fresh group has been dropped into the cultural dunk tank. Bin Laden? Back-burnered, at least for now. Saddam? Gone and forgotten. Instead, in these jumbled days of economic uncertainty, fairly or unfairly, America's newest Snidely Whiplashes bear faces like those of Bernie Madoff, AIG executives and the private jet-flying heads of the Big Three automakers.

Just look at the March 2 cover of New York magazine, which doctored a picture of Madoff into the grinning, bloodshot-eyed Joker, the diabolical supervillain who delights in terrorizing Batman's Gotham City. "Bernie Madoff, Monster," it says. Or consider General Motors Corp. Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, eviscerated by a congressional committee in November and lampooned on "Saturday Night Live" before he was forced out by the Obama administration in late March.

And in October, when the former CEO of the freshly bankrupted Lehman Bros., Richard Fuld, sat down before Congress, he was promptly informed by Florida Rep. John Mica: "If you haven't discovered your role, you're the villain today."

"Someone always needs to get dragged into the hot seat. It's part of the American process," says Imad Hamad, who would know. He is regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and is based in Dearborn, a town just outside Detroit where Arabic script is ubiquitous and more than 30 percent of the population is of Arab descent.

In the eyes of some Americans, Muslims and Middle Easterners became the cultural bogeymen after 9/11, and Hamad's organization and community are still dealing with the fallout. Even with a new president whose grandfather was Muslim, he says, suspicion continues to make life difficult for people stereotyped by anti-Muslim sentiment. "In the Middle East, they cut you one time," Hamad says. "In America, they put you in the death machine over and over."

Villainy shift

The minting of villains, justified or otherwise, is a time-tested human response to threat and fear. When something horrible happens, it's easier to blame a group than to blame a process or to look inward. But in America, where big narratives have always ruled the day, it seems especially pronounced. You'd think a nation of immigrants might be warier of demonizing outsiders, but history says otherwise.

Yet there's something different about this crop. Most denizens of American history's rogues' gallery were cast as evil "others" who represented threats to the American way of life. Now, though, it is more complicated. These finance folks are the darker side of American ideals -- getting rich, succeeding, living large, the pursuit of happiness.


