On HU
Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on writing Stevie Nicks fan fic as a nine year old.
Chris Gavaler on Frankenstein superheroes.
Me on Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It and the virtues of heterogenous apocalypse. (This was a Patreon supported post, so, if you like it, consider contributing.)
Me on the awesome doomy death and spiritual torment of Immolation.
We were off for pray for woodstock day.
Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics from summer 1950 (lots of EC.)
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Quartz I wrote about the documentary Killing Them Safely and how tasers escalate violence.
At the Establishment I wrote about how spewing racism isn’t braver than protesting it, and neither are part of a culture of fear.
At Ravishly I wrote about how Mockingjay can’t imagine non-violence.
At Splice Today I wrote about:
—Kelela, Girlyboi, and how R&B has always been everything.
—all the cultural journalists binge watching Jessica Jones.
—how Iron Man won’t save Jessica Jones.
Other Links
Terrell Jermaine Starr on how Ben Carson inspired him as a kid.
Mojo has the first year end best of list. Dylan, Keith Richards, Richard Thompson *and* David Gilmour? That’s a lot of fogeys on there.
And another example of political correctness run amok.
It’s like they think old people aren’t worthless!
(Not that these particular old people deserve it, but you know, in theory, they could.)
Rock is rough on old people. There’s a high premium on newness, and it’s a very rare performer who is making even marginally worthwhile music into their second decade, much less their fourth or fifth.
It’s rather different with other genres. Ralph Stanley’s album from this year sounds pretty great, and I’d be totally fine with him being on there. There’s a lovely Marion Williams anthology by Anthony Heilbut out this year that would be deserving. That Bob Dylan album is an embarrassment though, as is David Gilmour and Keith Richards. Old people can make good music, but hidebound music mags also sometimes knee-jerk bestow laurels on folks for old achievements because they can’t be bothered to listen to anything more current.
Or maybe it’s the response to genres that’s different – that is, maybe you’re more willing to give Ralph Stanley a pass for repeating himself than Keith Richards.
Anyway, the piece for the Establishment is good, and would be better if you’d said the thing you almost said, that being, yes, the bottom line for anti-immigration groups is “a rejection of outsiders and people who are different” – partly because they know that after the “outsiders and people who are different” are here, they’ll make them take the names of their own cultural heroes off of buildings and take down their statues. (Of course, in the case of Woodrow Wilson, it’s not a case of recent immigrants, but rather a group that was here long before him finally becoming powerful enough to get rid of his monuments, but it can happen the other way too, and the anti-immigration groups know it.)
“Or maybe it’s the response to genres that’s different”
Wait…you mean that there’s not an objective stance in aesthetic matters? Horrors.
I do think that genres have their own take on “repeating themselves.” The Rolling Stones are about being young and hip nad cutting edge. Ralph Stanley was always about staying true to a tradition. Of course, Rolling Stones were backwards looking in lots of ways, and Stanley was certainly an innovator. But your stance towards your art matters, and can matter in different ways 60 years on (though, as I think I’ve said, the Kanye/McCartney collaborations sound great; not sure when that’s coming out, but I’d expect it to be on best of year lists, including possibly mine.)
Glad you liked the Establishment piece!
One more, re the Iron Man/Jessica Jones piece – superheroes may not account for structural causes of crime and may be conservative (or not), but the one doesn’t follow from the other. Conservatives believe in structural causes of crime: It’s because abortion and extramarital sex ruined family values, or because welfare prevents poor people from learning the value of hard work, or etc., etc., etc.
I wasn’t really talking about what conservatives believe per se…though crime is actually a huge issue defining conservatism (and racism for that matter) at the moment. Your list of conservative causes seems a little out of date.
I was arguing that the refusal/inability to imagine change is conservative. I’ll stick with that, more or less.
Oh, I see what you mean. The solution to those structural causes is always more individual responsibility though. i.e., more supeheroes, or people inspired by superheroes.
Banning abortion and abolishing what’s left of welfare (e.g. food stamps) aren’t “more individual responsibility,” though. (Not sure why you think those causes are out of date.) Or maybe they are, in the sense that they’re supposed to make individuals more “responsible,” but they’re not exactly the same as “more supeheroes, or people inspired by superheroes.”
Sure; banning abortion and abolishing what’s left of welfare are both predicated on the idea that people need to take more personal responsibility (for sexual choices, especially). It’s not exactly the same as more superheroes, but the idea that the solution to all problems is better, more empowered people is analogous.
Well, isn’t “more empowered people” also the leftist solution?
Not necessarily. Or at least, you don’t get a better world through people self-actualizing. You need to change the world in order for people to be able to live complete lives.
There’s certainly an empowerment leftism (like lean in, etc.) It’s not the only option though.
But just about every method today’s left has for changing the world is empowerment: Minority empowerment, women’s empowerment, economic empowerment, global south empowerment. Maybe not restrictions on the police, but that’s as much a libertarian cause (in theory, anyway) as a leftist one – and then, the quintessential superhero isn’t the police but a vigilante, which means we’re talking about protection from vigilantes, which means we’re back to empowerment.
This is all somewhat beside the point, of course.
Well, the left in the US is pretty centrist, you know?
Health care isn’t really about empowerment. Decarceration and black lives matter isn’t either. There’s some crossover with libertarians…but the difference is instructive. Libertarians tend to want to close down prisons and then you just cut taxes and give the money back to rich people. BLM folks want reinvestment in communities, an end to segregation—a change in communities. That’s pretty different from individual empowerment (imo.)
America is such an individualistic society it can be hard to think outside the ground rules of empowerment. Which is why superheroes are so popular, I’d argue.
– Conservatives think cutting taxes and giving the money back to rich people will make everybody richer, though.
– Japan is as non-individualist as an industrialized society can be, and superheroes are popular there too (including indigenous ones). To be clear, I think a lot (not all) of classic superhero stories don’t have anything in particular to do with conservatism. Sometimes the bad guys are the actual working class, and sometimes they represent the liberal elite, but so many supervillains just don’t represent anything. There’s an aspect of superhero stories that I think has to be understood as emerging from the same context of detective stories: people want stories about fighting, but the old standard version – epic poem about how our side hacked up the foreigners – has become problematic for a number of reasons.
re: Iron Man not saving the world, I’m glad you admit that that’s a genre limitation as much as/more than an ideological one due to inherent conservatism. It’s true that “realistically”, if the “real world” had had Mr Fantastic and Iron Man around for 5-10 years (which I think is around about the sliding timescale of comic-book Marvel continuity), our technology would be unbelievably more advanced than today — which would change the genre, as you say.
Occasionally the comics try to address this diegetically — e.g. the Porter/Morrison/et al. Justice League starts off with a story about how Superman can’t end world hunger because uh something something let them develop their own destiny something. The villains are a group of superheroes who do try to make the world a better place, but it’s all a sham and falls to bits quickly. But fuck that — why shouldn’t Superman cure cancer? (Doesn’t he fly all the nuclear weapons into the sun in the fourth Superman movie?)
Alan Moore addresses this in the last issue of Miracleman, IIRC, and just goes for it. The follow-up by Buckingham and Gaiman goes a lot deeper, really burrowing down into “how would the world be different if?”. And Warren Ellis has addressed it a few times — first in the Authority, who basically go “yeah, fuck this status quo, let’s change the world”, and then again in Planetary. Planetary is interesting — it blames the Fantastic Four (well, their analogues) for keeping all the cool technology to themselves, which doubles as a meta-generic criticism for how the Kirby-Lee model of superheroes colonised the pulp/sci-fi imagination/market and killed all competitors.
Ha – Superman meets theodicy.
Superheroes generally work somewhat differently in Japan, as far as I can tell. Sailor Moon is a very non-individualist superhero.
Law and order is a big part of conservatism in this country. Supervillains fit into that in obvious ways, even if they don’t necessarily represent anything other than supervillains.
About as plausible/obnoxious as real theodicy, too.
The Marvel universe is essentially the world outside your door only with all kinds of bizarreness thrown in that still somehow never changes the equilibrium. Asking why the heroes don’t cure cancer, stop 9/11 or solve other real-world problems takes it into a different subset of story, either a meditation on hubris (Watchmen and others) or more rarely utopianism (Miracleman). But Marvel in its default mode isn’t about what life would really be like in a world full of aliens and magic any more than those Silver Age Superman stories where he grows a lion’s head and deceives Lois Lane are a literal study of life with a superhuman. There’s nothing particularly conservative about what’s really a magic realist approach, unless you’re telling one of those stories about hubris in which the superhero’s efforts either fail or create a dystopia, but that’s only one kind of superhero story.