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Exactly. America's demons, in the OUTLAW NATION worldview, were all homegrown: school shooters, goth kids, Bible-thumping preachers, crazy vets stockpiling weapons in the woods, white supremacists, militias. The Big Bad then was Timothy McVeigh. Foreign Parts were just somewhere for Asa to play his power-games and for Story to escape to—what happened there never really touched America.
For a series as deeply cynical as OUTLAW NATION, it's an astonishingly restricted worldview. I've no doubt it was intentional—Jamie Delano is no fool, after all, and one of his targets in the series was America's grotesque sense of self-importance.
But one effect of 9/11—and if there's any lasting good to come out of that horrorshow, I think this is it—is that we are all internationalists now. It may be in a superficial, self-interested way—most Americans still can't find Iraq on a map, after all—but there's an increased (if still dim) understanding that what happens in Foreign Parts is necessarily connected to what happens Here.
OUTLAW NATION depended, in large part, on the conceit that America and its history are self-contained islands, largely isolated from the world stage. It was always a fiction, of course—but it was a fiction that seemed easier to buy into during the Clinton years. These days, I reckon the weight of disbelief might be simply too much for a new reader to suspend. |
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