Hotel St. George – Little children’s bones
Germany, circa 1600, the story of the werewolf is born.
Whenever humans face something inexplicably tragic, we tend to justify it creating impossible explanations and out of this world creatures to prove that humans aren’t inherently evil.
Written accounts say that when the habitants of a small village in Germany back in the 17th century, found the corpses of children in the outskirts of their homes, wolves was the only natural explanation as it was their most feared enemy back then.
Obviously, when signs of the children been raped as well as murdered without the distinctive marks a wolf would leave them came to be the main conversation, the villagers started questioning what was going on.
One day, they found it was one of them, raping and murdering children.
But that was impossible, it couldn’t be one of them, he was a monster they said, obviously part wolf part human, but a monster, not a member of the community. Not the son of a father and a mother.
A monster.
Ironically, now in this day and age, “everyone” loves a werewolf who is trying to shag a self-conscious and insecure teenage girl who needs to pay a visit to Ann Summers before her vagina explodes.
Greek mythology, the bible, dragons… the list goes on and on.
Everything that is wrong with us, is justified by supernatural beings, we are not evil, monsters are evil, not us. Rapists, killers, Josef Fritzl, power-ballads songwriters… they are all monsters.
But in the last century something happened, America started to create its own mythology, but contrary to that of the old continent, the supernatural creatures are the good guys.
Even though the Greeks had heroes in their mythology, they always fought supernatural villains.
With the birth of the comic book superheroes, we now have put our dreams and hopes in something good that it’s protecting us, superman, spiderman, batman… they all fight robbers or killers (hopefully one day someone will make a comic book about Batman beating the shit out of power-ballads’ songwriters)
We as a race have matured, we no longer justify the evil in our society by saying; is a monster, is the hand of Satan, it was God’s will.
But we accept that we’re a bunch of bastards, and looking up to the fantasy of a good man who can fly gives us comfort.
Like the end of 2001, we will be born again in the stars. We look to the future with optimism.
If we look at America today, we see it as a decaying empire that designed the blueprint for the modern world. Greedy wars, christian fundamentalism or the heart of the markets, the only and true power behind our law system.
But there’s much more to America.
Americans have learnt to look past the old traditions, the monsters of our ancestors and have created a new mythology of supernatural good things.
And this brings me to the reason for this post.
Hotel St. George – Little children’s bones.
This video, with their dogs with capes, wizards and robots, their use of fantasy and mythology on the modern landscape, portraying the alienation of youth as a good thing, proves how much America has matured. The world is not a place full of monsters lurking in the shadows to take our children, but a place where good things happen at 3 am, with beers, with friends, where a wizard and a robot are as real as the werewolf who took our children away.
This video proves that we all live in America, and that’s a good thing.
