Tempting as it is to point fingers at George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, serious students of geopolitics know the root causes of our reduced status in the world precede our adventures in Iraq: The real villain is Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland.
In the late 1990s, rap-rock ruled the airwaves, and the United States was potent and prosperous, the world's undisputed super-power. Rap-rock provided the perfect soundtrack for global peace-keeping. It was sure of purpose, aggressive and triumphalist, ready to party. But if the situation warranted it, it was even more ready to bust heads. To music critics, the helium caterwaul of Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst may have sounded like an ear-splitting air-raid signal. To the rest of the world, it sounded like, well, an ear-splitting air-raid signal. Fly planes into our buildings? Then we will skin your ass raw, beeyotches. With a chain-saw!
Limp Bizkit was our Army, Papa Roach our Marines, Kid Rock the Navy. Then Wes Borland forsook national security for artistic expression, went AWOL from Limp Bizkit to make experimental dork rock, and the entire rap-rock genre imploded. And who was left to protect us? The Strokes may have saved rock 'n' roll, but they were as threatening as a squirt gun loaded with chamomile tea. Osama bin Laden took one look at Julian Casablancas and realized that the time to strike had come: A nation's resolve is reflected in the biceps of its rock star du jour, and Julian's were invitingly pale and flaccid.
Before 9/11, Hollywood's greatest fear was the American heartland. The scariest psychopaths, in movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, were rural flesh-eaters who seemed to be rugged individualists but were in fact the ultimate welfare recipients, literally surviving off the blood of those who were typically younger, urbanized, college types.
It was a sly commentary on the way red states feast on blue-state tax revenues, but after a half-decade of homeland threat advisories and growing resentment abroad, backwoods cannibals are no longer Hollywood's most telling boogeymen: That honor goes to the rainforest organ-jackers of Turistas and the Eastern European snuff merchants of Hostel. While both movies flirt with Ugly American stereotypes and seem to take their cues from the dank aesthetics of Abu Ghraib, they ultimately conclude that Ugly Foreigners are a greater evil than horny Yankee assholes. There are savages out there, they insist, and they don't just want to kill us. They want to do it slowly, painfully.
Finally, a slasher subgenre that pre-emptive strike xenophobes can call their own! But in outsourcing our bloodthirsty maniacs to the Third World, what have we lost? Would horny Kazakh asshole Borat have felt so free to perpetrate his cross-country punking of America had there been a chance that some local yokels might turn his head into a soup bowl?
At least Kid Rock seems to have said enough is enough. He's dumping Pamela Anderson; perhaps he also understands it's time to dump his Blond Seger shtick, sequester himself inside Rick Rubin's beard for 40 days and finally produce a suitable follow-up to Devil Without A Cause. With the Mideast edging toward meltdown, North Korea flirting with nuclear armageddon and Hugo Chavez angling to "finish off the American empire," the shock-and-awe power of a full-scale rap-rock revival may be our last best shot at maintaining world order.