My mother is terrified of aliens.
She cites the premise: Aliens are something foreign, something other – creatures that invade, abduct, probe and brainwash. No doubt these fears stem from the sci-fi movies of her childhood throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s – films whose little green men reflected the cultural anxieties of nuclear fallout and communist infiltration throughout the ‘50s. She remembers in vivid detail one scene in particular: A woman abducted from her home wakes up in a coffin-like box, paralyzed, helpless, when the aliens begin to probe her brain. Horrifically, she is consumed and mutilated by monsters, her mind no longer her own.
Monsters are real, or at least made real by people. King Kong may have started as the innocent creative product of Merian C. Cooper’s imagination; however, his representation of peaked racial anxieties throughout the early 1900s is very real. Deemed by critics as the greatest monster story of all time, the horror of King Kong roots itself in the monster’s representation of black men and interracial sex – the large black “beast” from Africa who violently steals the beautiful, virginal white woman. And like most “good” monster stories, in the end, Kong is destroyed. From the late 19th to the late 20th century, an estimated 4,000 African Americans – mostly men, though women and children too – were mob lynched in Jim Crow’s South, most often under the guise of protecting white women from black, African violence. We were simply playing the monster slayer.
American history is stained with the blood of monsters: From the 15th to the 20th century, the original population of 10 million Native Americans living in the now-United States would be decimated to less than 300,000 in acts of cultural genocide against heathens, savages and cannibals. During the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, nearly 150 men, women and children would be accused of witchcraft; at least 20, most of them women, hanged or burned alive. This same hysteria would appear again in the 1950s, in which McCarthyism would accuse thousands of liberal American citizens of communism or communist sympathizing, and imprison others. Throughout history, we have been snuffing out parasites, staking vampires, destroying motherships, exorcising demons, hunting beasts.
It’s easy to look back at these events with hindsight and think: “oops.” Leading justice Samuel Sewall would publicly apologize for the tragedies imposed by the Salem witch hunts in 1697, providing financial “restitution” to the heirs of condemned witches for years to come. The Massachusetts Colony would spend centuries sweeping their ashes under the rug.
We look at these events now – with slight guilt or embarrassment or plain indifference – and scoff. How barbaric of the Puritans to believe there were witches and devils and demons among them. How inane of them to persecute anyone without due process or reason. How awful that so many fathers, mothers and children were brutally burned, drowned, hanged, flayed alive for – what? Suspicion and superstition? We’re far too civilized, too rational now to succumb to spectral evidence and paranoia. Though the 1950s were only 60-some years ago, and King Kong less than a century-old.
After the horrors of 9/11, new monsters emerged within the cultural sphere – body snatchers and flesh-eating neighbors. Monsters that, unlike aliens, are homegrown and infected. The war on terror was just that: a war against the man, woman and teen next door possibly turned terrorist; against “radical Islam;” against possible carriers of “radical Islam” – Muslims, religious Muslims, Muslims who wear hijabs, people who aren’t Muslim but look like they could in fact possibly be Muslim. We’d go to war with them, bomb them, imprison them, relocate them, burn down their homes, build walls between us and them. A “necessary evil” to protect us from them. Or do we even consider it evil at all?
American-born Omar Mateen gunned down 49 people and wounded 53 others in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., on June 12, 2016. In a recording with the Orlando police, he claimed retribution for the bombings in Syria and Iraq. And he was declared a monster.
When does fear justify oppression? Violence? Murder? When does it – if ever – excuse genocide?
We’re a paranoid bunch – but this is nothing new. Historically, we’ve conjured up ghosts and boogeymen and imagined things that go bump in the night. These stories are inevitably human, and the monsters very real: King Kong, after all, was a murderer of men. Or was it the other way around?
