“The life-impulse can exist without fascism, but fascism cannot exist without the life-impulse. Fascism is the vampire leached onto the body of the living, the impulse to murder given free rein, when love calls for fulfillment in spring.”

(Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. xvii, Preface to the Third Edition)

We live in a culture that worships violence and death and mass-produces violence and death, a culture epitomized by such TV shows as “24″ with its 21st Century, testosterone dripping, ruthless American male prototype, Jack Bauer. The Fox Network, the semi-official propaganda organ of the White House, has created a complete caricature of the TV heroes I can remember as a kid, such stalwarts as Lorne Greene’s Ben Cartwright, Richard Boone’s Paladin, and James Arness’s Matt Dillon, characters that were fair, honorable and just, slow to anger and measured in their responses to provocations. Hell, Paladin even quoted Shakespeare. But all that was before the era of the arrogant, hate-spewing Neocons, of the descent of the collective American psyche into a paranoid, delusional state of endless victimization and revenge. And art, imitating life, has reflected this.

Read it all here at the …

Mosquito Blog: Jack Bauer, Wilhelm Reich and Confronting Fascism.