I have a lot of thoughts & I'm trying to funnel them together because they all one way or another affect a wide range of issues that have been bothering me. Let's call the broad topic "the erosion of morality," and contrast my meaning with how the phrase gets used by politicans.

Most recently, when politicians use this term, they are usually referring to the public no longer reflexively being afraid to question aspects of life and culture that were considered pillars of American society. That's not what I'm talking about, for the most part.

I AM talking about using phrases to mean things that they don't mean, because people don't feel like thinking with any depth or meaning about the topic on which they engage.

A lot of my heroic ideals from my youth don't act the way they did in my youth, even though that was formative for me. It wasn't formative because they said "don't do this thing, it was formative because they went though stories that showed why they cared about what they did.

When I was young, I remember a Mark Gruenwald Captain America story where Cap had to pick up a gun and kill a terrorist that was firing on a crowd, and Cap went on television to talk about the event to the public.

Cap wasn't saying it was wrong to shoot a terrorist that was attacking hostages. He was saying that since WW II, he has been a superhero, and not a soldier, and he didn't want to blur the lines, and wanted the public to understand his anguish at making this decision.

I feel like too often in superhero stories, kill/don't kill gets way oversimplified. Sometimes it's just left to sit there as a sign that a superhero doesn't live in the real world, and other times, a "no kill" code gets defined by weird logic and not morality.

In my youth, again, Batman didn't kill and didn't torture, because he knew he was already a vigilante using fear as a weapon, and he didn't want to cross a line since he was already operating outside the law, and he didn't want to strain his relationship with Gordon.

But then we get Frank Miller era Batman, and he doesn't really care about torture so much anymore. Sure, he doesn't have torture DEVICES, but why not punch someone helpless over and over again or break their bones?

Killing becomes an arbitrary line, because he's perfectly okay with permanently crippling people. And that's not just implied in Miller's work. Batman literally says that he knows he's permanently bestowing people with disabilities with his actions, and smiles about it.

That's why now, so many authors have such a hard time with "why doesn't Batman kill," because it became an arbitrary line, rather than part of Batman's desire not to remove himself from accountability.

We also see this even in wrestling narratives, which were super popular in the late 90s to early 2000s. At one point in time, a Face cared about rules and doing things the right way, and a Heel was a cheating monster.

Steve Austin's definitive story arc was Steve versus Vince McMahon (his televised personality, at least). Steve was very much an anti-hero in the traditional wrestling sense because he broke rules and threatened people.

But when this storyline started, Steve felt more like a unique outlier, and the resolution of his main, original story arc was that Vince was manipulating everyone, every faction to screw with Austin.

The point being, even the meta construct of the heel/face dichotomy was part of the plan that Vince had enacted to make Austin's life a living hell. That's actually some deep meta examination, and it's part of what made the storyline compelling.

The problem is, Vince didn't actually look at what the storyline was saying on a meta-level, and just extrapolated, "what if a face is just someone that cares what the crowd things of them, and otherwise, there is no difference."

Now it's not uncommon for "faces" to threaten family members, kidnap people, and constantly break rules, but if they are doing it "for the fans," then they are the hero. If they hate the fans, they are the villain.

Now, let's get to the real stuff. I'm not going to blame anyone for believing a sanitized version of American history, because I went to school in the 80s, and I get it. History class failed us hard. We were always told we were the heroes and we didn't do bad things.

But in the 2000s, we started to ignore this pretense entirely. We allow people to have due process, and we don't torture, ONLY because we agreed to this silly Geneva Convention, and if we can find a technical way around it, we're still being heroic.

Torture is regrettable, but sometimes you have to cross a line. When? Whenever it feels like it would be more convenient to cross the line than uphold a previously stated virtue. Also, we'll call it enhanced interrogation. If we quantify how we're doing it, it's not torturing.

Torture is only if someone uses "freestyle cruelty."

So, that brings us to modern culture, both in media and in actual political morality. If you can associate yourself with "a team," what that team does is right, because the ends justify the means. No need to examine anything further.

In media, that means it's more important for your peaceful, introspective character to be able to engage in graphic, emotionless scenes of violence, and it's cool, because they are coded as the hero. Introspection is weakness.

In politics, it means ignoring or enforcing laws is all about political maneuvering, rather than actually understanding why the laws were established, and caring about communicating morals and ethics to the population. Your team is strong, one way or the other.