Norman Bates

In all the-publicity and controversy over the film “Rambo: First Blood, Part II,” an interesting comparison of fictional characters named Rambo might add to our understanding of how and why such characters are created and received. While Johnny Rambo is quickly becoming enshrined in popular and political discourse as a symbol of a vengeful “Captain America” here, a much lesser known Rambo is hidden away.

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FE NOTE: The following article arrived in the mail just as our last issue was going to the printer. Since that time, the government has closed the case on the shooting of Norman Mayer on Dec. 8, 1982 and his name has disappeared from the media. But his actions, and his message, continue to deserve attention. The postscript was submitted later, after two films on nuclearism were aired on national television.

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Within the space of one week in March, two films dealing with different aspects of nuclear madness appeared on Network television. In “The China Syndrome,” a film which had been released right at the time of the Three Mile Island blow-up, the viewer is confronted with an attempt to cover-up a dangerous accident at a nuclear reactor in California.

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“Is any given bombing...the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to public security? All this is equally true and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons.”

--Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

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