A Punch Line, A White Supremacist Contortion

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Jimmy Johnson

This article examines U.S. public awareness of mass incarceration of Black people through the stories told on police procedural television programs. Though not quoting directly when focusing on mass incarceration and White supremacy I am informed by lectures and writings on prisons and racism by Angela Davis, George Jackson, Michelle Alexander and Mariame Kaba. Please see their works for in depth analysis of prisons and White supremacy and Kaba’s Project NIA (or related efforts across the continent) for ways to take action to end the injustice described in this essay.
_________

The punch line is a common exercise in storytelling beyond comedy. Punch lines are occasionally educational but much more often they depend on what the audience already knows. For this reason they are at least as telling of the audience as they are of the storyteller. This essay examines a particular punch line common to cop shows, with a focus on a 1987 episode of Hunter — that of the comeuppance of neo-Nazis by the police when the neo-Nazis are to be incarcerated in the U.S. prison system and thus, alongside people of color. Further, this essay also looks at what this punch line says about public awareness of and support for the mass incarceration of Black people and how normative White supremacist discourse contorts it into a purported anti-racism.

The Hunter episode “Bad Company” (Season 3, Episode 11 – 10 January 1987) begins with a group of white men and women robbing a Los Angeles gun store and killing the store owner. Police arrive in short order and a shoot-out between the cops and robbers ensues. Two of the robbers are injured, one killed and the other slightly wounded. The wounded party is Angela (Lar Park-Lincoln) who is transferred into the custody of Detective Sergeants McCall (Stepfanie Kramer) and Hunter (Fred Dryer) upon release from the hospital. We soon find out Angela is the daughter of Brother Hobarts (Dean Stockwell), the head of the National Aryan Order, a White nationalist militia on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

Hunter and McCall transport Angela to another location. En route they engage her on her ideology, telling her she is off base as they attempt to turn her snitch. She replies, accurately but against normative liberal White supremacist discourse, that White nationalism is “what America is all about.” She continues while elucidating a fairly mainstream – if a little cartoonish so as to indicate viewers shouldn’t identify with with Angela too strongly – racist narrative “The right of decent Americans to defend their way of life against freeloaders and subversives and the mud races. I mean it’s nothing personal guys, but you’re on the wrong side.”

Angela explains to McCall and Hunter why her version of White supremacy is better than theirs..

Hunter and McCall are captured by the National Aryan Order during the trip when the group rescues Angela from police custody. Up to this point Angela is still loyal to the Aryan National Order. McCall and Hunter do not manage to recruit her until one group member murders her love interest (who is also a neo-Nazi). Now betrayed, albeit not ideologically, Angela helps the cops escape and the group is eventually joined by other police who proceed to stop Brother Hobarts and crew from carrying out a planned attack. Hunter confronts Brother Hobarts, who is by this time in bracelets, and delivers the punchline “you Brother Hobarts are going to prison. Half the men you meet there belong to those mud races you were talking about. They’re gonna like you.”

Hunter gives Brother Hobarts his comeuppance by using racism to fight racism. Wait, what?

This is a somewhat common punch line in cop shows. The Law & Order episode “Prejudice” (Season 12, Episode 10 – 12 December 2001) ends with the incarceration of a racist white man. As the prosecutors prepare leave the office at the episode’s end, District Attorney Nora Lewin (Diane West) says, “Wonder if Burroughs will still have a problem with minorities when he gets to prison and finds out he is one.” In the CSIepisode “World’s End” (Season 10, Episode 19 – 22 April 2010), Nick Stokes (George Eads) says to a white supremacist suspect he is interrogating, “But you know what, I’m gonna do you a favor, since you like to whoop so much ass. I’m gonna have the warden put you in with some African-Americans, so they can give you an up close and personal lesson on race relations.” There are several other examples.

The Racial Caste System As Anti-Racism

These punch lines mean to show the police and the mass incarceration of Black and other people of color as possible tools against racism rather than as baselines of systemic White supremacy. These punch lines are only given meaning by an audience who will understand them as the comeuppance of racists rather than as an affirmation of the racist order of things. For this to work without souring an audience that largely believes it isn’t racist or, at least, not about prisons and crime, Black criminality must be understood as a matter of fact rather than as a matter of racial caste formation. Or, in other words, Black folk must be understood as criminals rather than mass incarceration being understood as the criminalization of Black people. Were it the other way around the shows would be (probably) canceled as the audience would (probably) receive the punch line as cruel cynicism rather than anti-racist comeuppance. (I use “probably” because with White supremacy you never know.)

For example the pilot episode of 21 Jump Street aired four months after the Hunterepisode discussed above. It’s opening scene features a wealthy white family of four seated around the dining room table for a meal when two young Black men with shotguns break through the glass of the patio doors and lay siege to the family. This introductory scene of one of the most successful cops shows is anchored with Black criminality. The 21 Jump Street pilot offered nothing novel but affirmed what was already common knowledge; that Black people were dangerous criminals. The logical consequence is that prisons must be full of such criminals.

21 Jump Street kickstarts its franchise with Black criminality

The crudest neo-Nazi articulations fall far enough outside of White supremacist normativity for the mainstream public, especially though not quite exclusively the mainstream white public, to reject them. So long as mass incarceration of Black and other people of color is not understood as a racial caste system the public can comfortably agree with a punchline which suggests that Black criminality is desserts for incarcerated neo-Nazis.

An Inversion Version

What this essay describes is one example of White supremacy’s incredible discursive flexibility.The Hunter, Law & Order and CSI episodes described above contribute to normative discourse a perfect inversion of the racial caste system. Mass incarceration of people of color is a baseline of White supremacy. Yet the punch line to these stories is one where said systemic baseline is re-imagined as an anti-racist tool against individual white supremacists while the enforcers of the baseline (the police and prosecutors) relish in their enlightened anti-racism to a produce a feel good moment for the audience. The contortion is horrifyingly impressive.

These punch lines demonstrate another thing. This essay focused on the Hunterepisode for a reason; it aired in 1987. United States liberals – largely unfamiliar with the radical Black tradition that produced critical prison analysis decades ago – are ‘discovering’ mass incarceration as a phenomenon of a racial caste system since the 2010 publication of Michelle Alexander’s tome The New Jim Crow. But the Hunteraudience over two decades before that book had to understand that the United States fills its jails in a wildly disproportionate manner with Black folks, otherwise the punch line doesn’t work.

Point being, White America knows and been knowing, it’s just not considered a problem. Mass consciousness is not critical consciousness when embedded in normative oppression. That the broad contours of an oppressive system are common knowledge might, however, offer opportunities for organizing. The same knowledge in a framework rejecting Black criminality, mass incarceration and White supremacy produces a very different discourse. To assist with efforts to produce a liberatory discourse please visit the “Resources” page on the Project NIA website.
_____
This piece originally appeared on Jimmy Johnsons’s blog.

Thoughts on Bree Newsome and the United States of America

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Nix 66

Anarchy is.

We can insist in the “existence” of laws until we’re blue in the face. But the truth is: There are none. There are only traditions, conventions, norms, and prejudices that have been passed down to us by our ancestors.

Our ancestors… who seemed to have been greedy, violent, racist, colonialist, competitive, cookie-monster Patriarchs frightened by their own shadows. Or at least, the loudest and most talky-talk of them were.

This makes me think of Bree Newsome and how she faces three years in prison for:

A. Committing a crime.

B. Heroic acts in the face of national terrorism.

Q: Who or what did she violate?

A: “Federal Property,” I assume. Which is to say: “Our Property,” collectively.

Q: And how did she violate this property?

A: Trespassing (OK) so as to take down a national symbol of racism, hate, violence, and subjugation that commemorates the ongoing, and historical, national “self” constitution wherein one segment of the nation’s citizens systematically attack, oppress, and destroy another segment of this nation’s citizens under the pretense of some essentialist supremacy.

Are we, as a Nation, comfortable with the thought of Bree Newsome being locked in a cage for 3 years after gifting the American people with freedom from the Confederate flag?

And do we really want to lock up one more Black Civil Rights leader? Seriously?!

I really hope not. Because up to this point, it seems like the previous generations have given their offspring really great reasons to hate them. I’d like it if we stopped doing that.

We could even start celebrating Bree Newsome’s courageous living right now. Nationally. While we can still show her how thankful we are. I mean, wouldn’t that be something different?

The Neverending Battle Made Easy

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Donovan Grant

The July 2015 issue of Action Comics (vol.2 #42) has garnered instant praise from critics. In the current storyline, Superman has his secret identity revealed and his powers severely dampened. In a further controversial and news-making development, cops and SWAT teams confront local Superman supporters and engage in a violent attack that prompts the Man of Steel not only to defend the neighborhood from the onslaught of police, but to end the conflict with a right cross to the chief officer’s face.

The images of a riot instigated by police naturally conjure up memories of Ferguson Missouri. As a result, the issue has led such online publications as International Business Times and Business Insider to label the story “gripping”, “breathtaking” and “compelling”.

So why is it so lousy?

I’m unsure what’s worse, the lazy storytelling or the mindless praise for it. It’s as though the aforementioned websites happened upon Google images of the issue and quickly churned out a glowing recommendation for the benefit of appearing both pop culture savvy and socially conscious.

In the sotry, the denizens of the local neighborhood in Metropolis, calling their block “Kentville”, are showing their support of Superman, now publicly known to be Clark Kent. While Superman is away battling a giant monster, a SWAT team arrives to break up the assembly, and within minutes fire an errant canister of tear gas into the crowd. One of the citizens knock it back towards the police, and the neighborhood resigns to sit on the ground and commit to a silent protest, welcoming the oncoming march of the cops who are more than willing to beat everyone to a pulp. Superman arrives with a giant chain held over his shoulders, standing between the SWAT team and the crowd. The lead cop named Binghamton announces that he and the other police will beat everyone on the block including Superman, and then proceeds to do so.

With the Ferguson analogy inelegantly at the forefront, let’s describe how this doesn’t work and what makes its evocation of recent events improper.

1. The SWAT team is brought to disrupt the gathering for Superman without the presence of any sort of protest to disrupt. Unlike in Ferguson, where at the very least tensions had built over an already ever-present sense of racial profiling, the cops are only arriving due to the mustache-twirling machinations of the lead policeman Binghamton.

2. Binghamton’s problem isn’t portrayed as any sort of prejudice or distrust towards Superman because he’s an alien. He openly admits that he’s sick of the praise and adulation Superman has gathered over the years at the expense of the public’s recognition of regular police and firefighters. The conflict isn’t borne out of systemic and long-held prejudices; it’s created by one man’s jealousy of a fictional character.

3. As a result, the conflict between the police and Superman and the protestors is nothing more than a bad guy and his army attacking innocent civilians. It makes the conflict into a too simple case of good vs. evil, removing any semblance of reality. The situation makes the police into supervillains, so that they’re easy to recognize and easy to fight.

Thus any resemblance to tensions in the real world is removed, and the conflict can go down as easily as any other superbattle. Moreover the way in which the storyline uses the imagery and context of racism is nothing short of appalling.

For one thing, the image of Superman holding a gigantic chain to put himself between the police and the crowd is quite blunt. It’s no doubt supposed to represent shackles of oppression imposed by white authority, but in the hands of a white superhero, it ends up coming across as unearned cultural appropriation. A figure of super-authority such as Superman, powers or no, can’t subsume himself in the community of the subjugated masses when he has traditionally aligned closer to that of a policeman for most of his life. It rings hollow and condescending, as if the story is parodying the resistance to police brutality.

Worst of all is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people the police are attacking, the ones Superman is defending and the ones that serve to match the Ferguson protestors in this analogy, appear to be white. The firefighter who puts herself at the front of the crowd is recognizably black, but the neighborhood consists of a veritable “who’s who”, or “what’s what” in ethnic diversity. Folks young and old with large noses and middle class clothing make up the whole of the group, with black people ironically the minority of the whole block. This shows that the policemen’s grudge is really no more than a plot necessity that has no bearing in reality. A line by a Hispanic character reads “This is America! This is what I fricking fought for! I’m not gonna let them take that away!” which is answered by the firefighter “If you fight, people are gonna die. Our people. Is that what you want?” This would resonate so much better if both characters were black, not to mention if a majority of the crowd was. As nice as multiculturalism is to see in mainstream comic books, it doesn’t make sense within the context of the story this issue is trying to tell. The police are shown to have such a blasé disdain for the citizens they’re about to brutalize that it makes the story come off as anti-police propaganda more than anything. There’s no nuance, no sense that this could at all take place within the real world.

Superman is supposed to be a Champion of the Oppressed as evidenced by his original Golden Age adventures and later stories as well. He is most effective when battling real world society ills that his readers face every day. So what’s the point in making a story where there’s no actual ill of society or systemic oppression for him to overcome? Was the writer Greg Pak too gun-shy to actually engage in the topic his story’s imagery advertised? The connection between police brutality and racism is not a very difficult concept to grasp, and who better than the world’s first superhero (other than black superheroes) to tackle it head on.

Ultimately the story serves to say “Superman’s one of us!” in a way which doesn’t actually say that. He, like many other costumed heroes, is just like us presuming that we too have a specific and unrealistic villain to face and defeat, rather than the innate problems in our society. As much as people like to lambast the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow series, that comic at least had the respectability to tackle the problems it saw head on without thinking of misrepresenting it. It named what it saw as what it was and didn’t ignore difficult conversations in a bid for misplaced solidarity. I believe that super hero comics can truthfully engage in contemporary topics—that they can be relevant and contribute to a national conversation. It’s so unfortunate that when it comes to the most pertinent conversation in our nation today, the best superheroes can offer is Action #42.
_______

This is part of our ongoing series, Can There Be a Black Superhero?

H. G. Wells in Thigh Boots

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

H. G. Wells lived in Essex, not Bath, but he did visit here in 1920 while having an affair with feminist icon and fellow eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Both thought birth control would save the world from the breeding of the economically unfit. They also liked the view of the river outside my flat:

“Our visitors began to realize that Bath could be very beautiful.”

Bath is one of Wells’ Secret Places of the Heart, the fictionalized autobiography he published in 1922. He’d been famous since his 90s hits, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, which is at least partly why Sanger agreed to meet him while she was visiting England.

I didn’t meet Wells until 1973 when Marvel published its own War of the Worlds. Set after a second Martian invasion and conquest of earth, its hero Killraven (improbably co-penciled by Neal Adams and Howard Chaykin) sports over-the-knee boots, bare thighs and a navel-plunging neckline.

I showed the cover to my son, who blinked and then mumbled, “Do they give some reason for dressing him like that?”

Which is the question that needs to be asked of thigh-booted superheroines too. X-Men artist David Cockrum was soon sketching Killraven’s boots onto Storm and Phoenix. Valkyrie and the Scarlet Witch got the fashion upgrade too. And starting this summer, Wonder Woman’s new costume includes thigh boots.

Back in the 70s, Omega the Unknown continued the trend among Marvel males, but the All-Time Best Man in Thigh Boots Award goes to Sean Connery in his gloriously obscure 1974 scifi film Zardoz, in which the post-007 he-man plays a eugenic superman designed to exterminate and/or save Mankind from feminist costume designers from Mars.

Though the look may have originated with Dumas’ ever-so-manly Three Musketeers, thigh boots have spent more time strolling the women’s side of the fashion aisle—usually under red lights, as indelibly displayed by Julia Roberts’ 1990 Pretty Woman.

The same was true in 1890, when the thigh boot was first making its way up the legs of London prostitutes. H. G. Wells visited his first at the tender age of 22, when his “secret shame at my own virginity became insupportable.” He termed the woman “unimaginative,” so she probably wasn’t up on the newest in fetish footwear.

The experience, Wells reports in his surprisingly sexual memoir, only “deepened my wary apprehension that round about the hidden garden of desire was a jungle of very squalid and stupid lairs.” Which might explain his Martians. Although they “wore no clothes,” they’re nothing like the genetically engineered super-seductive Sirens Killraven faces in the final panel of Amazing Advenures No. 18. H.G.’s Martians “were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men.”

His Martians bud from their parents like fresh-water polyps. And yet they probably “descended from beings not unlike ourselves.”Imagine the human race devolving into a single sex. Writers for Syfy’s Warehouse 13 (my wife and I watched a season or two with our then pre-adolescent son) cast actress Jaime Murray as a thoroughly female H. G. Wells, a gender-bending experiment that thus far has not plunged our world into asexuality.

Helena (“Herbeta” must have sounded too lame) almost got her own spin-off series, but Stephen Spielberg has shown no interest in sequeling his 2005 War of the Worlds remake. Some scenes were shot just outside my town. Tom Cruise even stopped by our ice cream shop and left a personal check in the change jar for a needy local. Tom is 5’7”, the cut-off height for extras advertised in our weekly paper and one of many reasons I did not apply.

Wells couldn’t have applied either. The average Victorian male towered under 5’6”, though Wells was short even in that stunted context. He’s also been called tubby and squeaky, and yet he was a male siren to the string of mistresses he wooed after shedding his virginal shame. He titled one of his autobiographies H. G. Wells in Love, which remained unpublishable until well after his conquests’ deaths. He must have had a thing for feminist icons, because Rebecca West makes the list of not-so-secret lovers too. One of my sister’s coffee mugs quotes her: “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”Actually, the mug makers deleted the last three words, even though they do reflect Wells’ continuing interests. He was still visiting the jungle lairs of American call girls at the tender age of 74.

I don’t really want to know how “imaginative” they were, but Killraven grew more so after artist P. Craig Russell inherited the series. He kept the thigh boots, but slipped on a pair of trousers and an asymmetrical battleblouse. The style was chaos to my eight-year-old eyes, but looking back now I see why Russell has been likened to art nouveau, the fashion rage when H. G. Wells first serialized War of the Worlds in 1897. Superheroes were supposed to throw hard-edged punches, but Russell’s lines are soft, his vision literally flowery. Killraven’s battle with the butterfly-woman may not reach Maxfield Parrish heights, but even as a kid I sensed something perplexingly androgynous in those curves.

Wells’ sexless Martians avoid such tumult. They’re just brains with tentacles—though, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula published the same year, they have a lust for human blood. Russell serves them infants on platters, and Killraven was bred to feed their appetite for gladiator sport. Scenes from Dracula have been anthologized in Victorian erotica collections, but Tom Cruise’s bouts with the Martian blood-suckers included no sex scenes. It’s just as well costume designer Joanna Johnston didn’t lace him into thigh boots.

But Tom did accidentally gender flip himself when Angelina Jolie took his role in the 2010 spy thriller Salt. Jodi Foster only reads for male parts, which, sadly, is how she ended up in Elysium. Sigourney Weaver turned Alien into a four-film franchise the same way. And even Sean Connery has to admit Judi Dench is the best M in Bond history.

Strong Female Characters have been taking the initiative for a while now. A 2007 study in Mass Communication & Society investigated “whether or not animated superheroes were portrayed in gender-role stereotypical ways.” To the researcher’s surprise, they found “that females are being presented as more masculine” by adding “the masculine trait of aggression to a character who is already portrayed as having traditional feminine traits such as being beautiful, emotional, slim, and attractive” while deleting “domesticity” and “passivity.”

Although the authors acknowledge their findings could suggest “female superheroes are finally breaking down the gender-based stereotypes,” they’re also why the Hawkeye Initiative wants to “fix every Strong Female Character pose in superhero comics” by replacing “the character with Hawkeye doing the same thing.”

It’s a great project, but even the best of the parodies can’t touch the accidental parody of the original thigh-booted Killraven.

The long-running trend to hyper-sexualize superheroine bodies is a reaction to female characters taking on that so-called masculine trait of aggression. Comics creators are afraid we’re devolving into unisexed Martians. Like Wells, they are big believers in “that difference.” Since domesticity is extinct, artists like Todd McFarlane counter-balance female aggression by inflating female sexuality. They’ve bred superheroines into battle-prostitutes.

I think humans have more in common with Martians than we care to think, but I’m glad no fashion aliens are trying to fit me into thigh boots just yet. Killraven started wearing his in the no-longer-distant year of 2017. That’s a future I hope humankind avoids. But it beats Wells’ alternative:

Interpreting Oz

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Ken Derry

1. Behind the Curtain

I don’t remember exactly when or how it was that I first learned that L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz series of books, had called for the murder of all Native American people. But I do remember the information both shocked me and, in some ways, did not shock me at all. I had been doing research into colonialism and Indigenous history for a little while – mostly focusing on Canada, but including the rest of the Americas as well – and had become sadly used to encountering horrifying material.

Baum is not circumspect in his opinions about Indians, which he expressed just twice in editorials written for The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer . In the December 20, 1890, edition he declared: “The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” Just over a week later, on December 29, the U.S. Calvary killed hundreds of Sioux at Wounded Knee. In direct response to the massacre, on January 3 Baum wrote: “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

Among folks doing Indigenous studies Baum’s editorials are well known, so there never seemed much reason for me to write about them. At least that was the case until a friend of mine, Michael Ostling, invited me and three others to participate in a panel using The Wizard of Oz as a jumping off point to talk about issues related to the academic study of religion. That may seem like an odd idea, but it was based to some extent on two key points: 1) “religion” is a notoriously slippery term, and as a result it’s possible to link it to just about anything; 2) the machinations of the Wizard have been previously used by scholars as a metaphor for some aspects of religious activity. Russell McCutcheon, for instance, states:

In attempting to manufacture an unassailable safe haven for the storage of social charters and “worlds,” mythmakers, tellers and performers draw on a complex network of disguised assumptions, depending on their listeners not to ask certain sorts of questions, not to speak out of turn, to listen respectfully, applaud when prompted, and, in those famous lines from The Wizard of Oz, to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” (207)

The curtain metaphor applies very differently however to work by Sam Gill on a particular Indigenous ritual, the rite of passage ceremony for young Wiradjuri males in eastern Australia. In this ritual the older men at first fool the boys into thinking that a powerful spirit being is present among them, but then actually reveal their own trickery – much like if the Wizard himself had pulled aside the curtain, rather than Toto. In this way (according to Gill) the men induce in the boys “a disenchantment with a naive view of reality, that is, with the view that things are what they appear to be” (81). In other words the ritual helps to foster an understanding of religion, and life, that is complex and nuanced, that moves beyond the theatrics of smoke and thunder.

Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/232498399487979240/

All of which is to say that in many ways the stage had been set for some time now for a more detailed consideration of The Wizard of Oz and how scholars think about religion. In the end, the five of us presented our different takes on at the 2012 annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. Four of us subsequently published versions of our papers in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture in 2014, the 75^th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz.

My own contribution to the panel centered on Baum’s editorials. Aside from studying Indigenous traditions, I have long been interested in conversations about religion and violence. One pattern in these conversations – the ones held both by academics and by regular humans – is that people tend to come to them having already decided what they think. Very simply: if you believe that religion is essentially “good” then you likely will make the case that “real” religion is not inherently violent (and so religion can be used as a kind of Ozian smokescreen to cover up the underlying motives of violence, but is never the “real” cause); and if you believe that religion is essentially “bad” then you likely are convinced, à la Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, that it is in fact wholly responsible for a great deal of violence and suffering, and that the world would be much better off without it (religion in this view is the smokescreen, presenting itself as good and true and obscuring its underlying evil heart).

And so I wondered: did attitudes about Baum similarly impact scholars’ views of his work (or vice versa)? More specifically, were there connections between academic treatments of his genocide editorials and interpretations of both the first book in the Oz series, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and its 1939 movie adaptation? I wasn’t surprised to find that the answer seemed to be “yes.” (But while I was not surprised, I was [and am] still cautious: given that I’m looking at the ways in which people’s views of reality are shaped by their assumptions, it makes me itchy when my own assumptions appear to be borne out by the data I uncover.)

I am incredibly, unbelievably fortunate to have access to the University of Toronto library system, which seems to contain just about every book and article ever published on anything, ever. Which made it possible for me to read pretty much everything ever written on Baum, his work, and The Wizard of Oz. The first thing I noticed is that most scholars who write about this stuff do not mention Baum’s genocide editorials at all. The ones who do consistently fall into one of three categories:

The majority see Baum’s work as very positive in various ways, and excuse the editorials (“he didn’t really mean them”; “you have to consider the context”; etc.).
A few see Baum’s work as very negative in various ways, and accept the editorials more or less at face value (basically: “he was a genocidal racist”).
A tiny minority see Baum and his work, including the editorials, as complicated and open to various, possibly contradictory, interpretations.

Anyone who’s interested can read the full account of my discoveries in excruciating detail in my article. Here, I thought I would just summarize some of the key ideas.

2. Baum is Good / Baum is Bad

The reasoning here is circular: Baum was a good guy, therefore the editorials clearly don’t show us who he “really” was, whereas his books reveal his innate positive qualities. There are three main points that scholars who like Baum and who also mention the genocide editorials tend to make about the initial Oz stories – both the 1899 book and the 1939 film:

The stories are feminist: Dorothy is the hero/savior/protagonist. The most powerful characters in both Oz and Kansas are women (the good and wicked witches, Auntie Em, and Mrs. Gulch).
The stories are anti-imperialist: The Wizard is revealed as both fraud and monster, sending a young girl and her friends on a suicide mission in order to protect his power. The more explicitly evil tyrants, the wicked witches, are destroyed and their people liberated.
The stories celebrate diversity: Many different types of beings co-exist peacefully in Oz, a situation symbolized by the team of living scarecrow, mechanical man, anthropomorphic lion, human girl, and small dog. The only real inter-species problems are caused by the evil tyrants (e.g., the flying monkeys attack others because they are controlled by the witch).

These same three topics appear in the more negative readings of Baum, his first Oz book, and that book’s most famous movie adaptation:

The stories are anti-feminist: The most powerful women in Oz who are in conflict with male authority (the Wizard) are the witches of the east and west, characterized as evil and deserving of assassination. Dorothy does not defeat these witches using her skills or intelligence, but by accident (using a house and a bucket of water). And the ending of the film makes it clear that the girl’s true “place” is at “home” – where she is now more than happy to do her domestic chores.
The stories are pro-imperialist: The Wizard, in the end, is shown as kindly and avuncular; everyone seems to quickly forget that he tried to send Dorothy et al. to their deaths (!). Dorothy for her part is a helpful invader/colonist, who receives thanks and praise from the native inhabitants for her interference in their world (unlike the United States’ 2003 experience in Iraq, Dorothy is in fact greeted as a liberator upon her arrival in Oz).
The stories are segregationist: Oz is (mostly) peaceful because its constituent “races” are kept separate from one another, each community in its own place (like Munchkinland). The diverse team of Dorothy and her new friends is the exception that proves the rule.

One of the more interesting examples of how assumptions about Baum impact interpretation of the Oz stories involves the poppy field. Batting for the pro-Baum side, Evan Schwartz in Finding Oz refers to the fact that, after WWI, poppy fields came to represent war victims: “The red color was said to come from the blood of the slain, serving as an emblem of commemoration” (190). Schwartz combines this perspective – which emerged of course after the original publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – with his belief that Baum in fact disapproved of the genocide of Native Americans, and concludes that the poppy field in Oz “can be read as a powerful symbol of Frank’s – and America’s – sadness over the destruction of native cultures” (190).

Thomas St. John sees things differently. In the unambiguously titled “Indian-Hating in ‘The Wizard of Oz’”, St. John argues that various symbolic elements of the story reveal Baum’s generally racist perspective, and his particular desire to help bring about “the extermination of the American Indian.” The poppies in this reading are not about the war dead, but dangerous narcotics, associated with Native Americans through an impressively convoluted, if not entirely coherent, line of reasoning: “The Deadly Poppy Field is the innocent child’s first sight of opium, that anodyne of choice for pain in the nineteenth century, sold in patent medicines, in the Wizard Oil, at the travelling Indian medicine shows. Baum’s deadly poppies are the poison opium, causing sleep and the fatal dream.”

3. It’s Complicated

Essentially, folks who take the third approach to Baum and the Oz stories recognize that there are merits to many different interpretations, that whether or not Baum really meant what he wrote in those editorials his Oz stories are nevertheless ambiguous and complex, and lend themselves to a host of (often contradictory) understandings. Dorothy performs selfless, heroic acts and wants to go back to the farm. The Wizard is both murderously duplicitous and genuinely helpful. Oz is both diverse and segregated. The Witch of the West is both villain and victim.

Source: http://www.juxtapost.com/site/permlink/d8a43760-91e6-11e1-a833-533dd5490f0e/post/wizard_of_oz_is_a_pretty_messed_up_story_honestly_/

Katherine Fowkes is one of the few commenters who not only recognizes the inherent impossibility of arriving at a definitive reading of The Wizard of Oz, but regards this impossibility as a selling point. In The Fantasy Film she suggests that “the popularity and staying power of Wizard and other classic films may lie precisely in their myth-like ability to juggle conflicting ideas and impulses, thereby providing the possibility of various and sometimes opposite interpretations” (61). Her point here reminds me of Chris Gavaler’s discussion of Cinderella and the “minimally counterintuitive superheroes,” the key idea being that stories and characters are often particularly memorable because they occupy the “sweet spot” of the “weird-but-not-too weird.” That seems an apt description of many tales from both Baum and the Bible.

Fowkes’ take on The Wizard of Oz also reminds me of one of Paul Ricoeur’s central ideas about interpretation, namely that texts comprised of metaphors and symbols lend themselves, by their nature, to various understandings. We must “resist,” he says, “the temptation to believe that each text has its own correct interpretation, its own static, hidden meaning,” and instead recognize that “reading is, first and foremost, a struggle with the text” (494-5). The point is not that a given text can mean anything – interpretations must still be based on reason and evidence. There is virtually no evidence that Baum’s poppy fields, for instance, symbolize either his sadness over the treatment of Native Americans, or his desire to see them wiped from the face of the earth. But there is reason to think that his Oz stories have several things to say about gender, imperialism, and diversity – even if those things don’t always agree with one another.

For me, this is where the real (and really simple) connection to religion comes in: however you define it, “religion” is waaaay more complicated than The Wizard of Oz (!), and religious stories are not just myth-like but involve actual myths. It therefore seems entirely sensible to imagine that religions are also open to a host of reasonable yet divergent interpretations. This is of course a HUGE topic on its own, and one that I’m not going to go into here. I really just want to suggest that recognizing actual complexity – in stories, religion, people – can help us avoid shallow, one-sided, and possibly harmful interpretations based on simplistic, and simplifying, assumptions. Again, it’s a ridiculously simple idea, but one that I think too often gets lost in all the shouting about what things “really” mean.

Works Cited

Fowkes, Katherine A. The Fantasy Film. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Gill, Sam D. Beyond the “Primitive”: The Religions of Nonliterate Peoples. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1982.

McCutcheon, Russell T. “Myth.” Guide to the Study of Religion. Ed. Russell T. McCutcheon and Willi Braun. Cassell: New York, 2000. 190-208.

Ricoeur, Paul. “World of the Text, World of the Reader.” A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Ed. Mario Valdés. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. 491-497.

Schwartz, Evan I. Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

St. John, Thomas. “Indian-Hating in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’” CounterPunch 26-28 June. 2004.

Utilitarian Review 7/4/15

Posted on July 4, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Our complete Joss Whedon roundtable.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sales dates of comics from June-August 1943, including Wonder Woman, Carl Barks, Plastic Man, and more.

Me on the fact that Joss Whedon doesn’t exist.

Phillip Smith on Indonesian comics’ representation of the May 1998 riots.

Kristian Williams compares Mad Max and Fury Road.

Me on how gay marriage changes marriage for everyone.

Chris Gavaler on Thomas Jefferson, the 4th of July, and zombies.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Playboy

— I wrote about The Wind Done Gone and why removing Confederate symbols matters.

—I argued that sex can be radical (or at least political)

At Vice I wrote about Terminator: Genysis and being colonized by robots.

At Splice Today I wrote about why David Brooks is confused about Robert E. Lee.

Other Links

Arthur Chu on Dollhouse as Whedon’s self-parody (inspired by our Whedon roundtable.)

Nix with an open letter to Meghan Murphy from the other side of feminism. (Nix says some kind things about me in the piece.)

Thomas Jefferson: Schizophrenic Zombie-Fighter

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I’m shocked to report that spending July 4^th in Bath means no Fourth of July fireworks. For some reason England doesn’t seem to celebrate the holiday. So this year I’ll have to settle for all-American superhero analysis instead:

The Declaration of Independence is, according to Noam Chomsky, the first American superhero text. A student asked the world-renown linguist and political commentator about the onslaught of zombies in American theaters and TVs, and he explained that in American pop lit, we’re always “about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy, and at the last moment we’re saved by a superhero.”

John Lawrence and Robert Jewett call it The Myth of the American Superhero: “Spiderman and Superman contend against criminals and spies just as the Lone Ranger puts down threats by greedy frontier gangs. Thus paradise is depicted as repeatedly under siege, its citizens pressed down by alien forces too powerful for democratic institutions to quell.”

“So you go back to the early years,” Chomsky explains, “the terrible enemy was the Indians,” those flesh-devouring monsters Thomas Jefferson called “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

They include those folks who mercilessly rescued the first boatload of pilgrims from starvation. Also please ignore the fact that Jefferson’s fellow founders signed a treaty with some zombie hordes that would have made the Delaware tribe the fourteenth state of the new Union. Like the vast majority of U.S. treaties, things didn’t work out as stated.

“It turns out,” says Noam, “this enemy, this horrible enemy that’s going to destroy us, is someone we’re oppressing.” He explains the reversal as “a recognition — at some level of the psyche — that if you’ve got your boot on somebody’s neck, there’s something wrong, and that the people you’re oppressing may rise up and defend themselves, and then you’re in trouble.”

So Jefferson put the focus on the supervillainous King George instead: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The list of offenses includes plundering, ravaging, and completing “the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”And for a final outrage, George also “excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers,” those aforementioned, George-like savages.

Since its founding document, America has defined itself as a champion of the oppressed—even when it’s been busy oppressing the oppressed. I grew up in Pittsburgh, home of the first recorded act of germ warfare. When two chiefs visited Fort Pitt in 1763 to offer its besieged inhabitants safe retreat from Indian territory, the British commander declined but presented them with a gift of smallpox-infected blankets, hoping they would “have the desired effect.” Next Rev. John “Fighting Parson” Elder was rousing hordes of merciless vigilantes to ride to the rescue and attack Indians living among settlers. “These poor defenseless creatures,” wrote Ben Franklin, “were immediately fired upon, stabbed, and hatcheted to Death!” When the Pennsylvania governor posted rewards, no one turned in the murderers because, Rev. Elder explained, “the men in private life are virtuous and respectable; not cruel, but mild and merciful.”
&nsp;

America is schizophrenic. We were founded on alter egos. And yet Francis Parkman, while chronicling Pontiac’s so-called Conspiracy, declares the Indian to be full of “contradiction”: “A wild love of liberty, an utter intolerance of control, lie at the basis of his character, and fire his whole existence. Yet, in spite of this haughty independence, he is a devout hero-worshipper; and high achievement in war or policy touches a chord to which his nature never fails to respond. He looks up with admiring reverence to the sages and heroes of his tribe.”

That same liberty-loving hero-worship infuses the schizophrenic character of our American supermen. Of course we adore alter egos. Robert Bird’s proto-Batman, Nick of the Woods, isn’t the only frontiersman suffering from multiple personalities: the Quaker-by-day doesn’t seem to know he’s also an Indian-killing demon-by-night. I prefer Doc Savage and the contorted narrative tricks his writer Lester Dent has to play to avoid the obvious. The character is named after a real-life Colonel Savage, “a hero of the Spanish-American War,” in which the U.S. seized Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain. In his 1932 debut, Doc Savage travels through Central America to find “the Valley of the Vanished” where no “outside races have intermarried” with “the high class of Mayan” believed extinct since Spanish colonization. Though a Mayan princess, apparently attracted by Savage’s racially ambiguous bronze skin, would love to intermarry, he returns to New York with a gift of gold from “the treasure trove of ancient Maya” to finance his do-gooding missions.

It’s a peculiarly American take on colonization, where the colonized are not only willingly plundered but must remain hidden in a static preserve unrelated to any of those actual Indians openly impoverished within the borders of the contemporary U.S. John Carlos Rowe calls it our “contradictory self-conceptions”: “Americans’ interpretations of themselves as people are shaped by a powerful imperial desire and a profound anti-colonial temper.”

That duality also accounts for America’s “paranoid streak.” “The United States is an unusually frightened country,” says Chomsky. “And in such circumstances, people concoct either for escape or maybe out of relief, fears that terrible things happen.” Chomsky’s list of later zombified fears include revolting slaves and “Hispanic narco-traffickers.” If his classroom Skype interview hadn’t lurched to the next question, I think he would have added the hordes of Muslims currently clawing at the gate of America wilderness fort.

Osama bin Laden’s “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” bears an uncomfortable resemblance to “The Declaration of Independence.” Bin Laden wrote two fatwas before 9/11, both roughly the length of our founding text. He lists “crimes and sins committed by the Americans,” calling them “facts that are known to everyone.” Jefferson lets his “Facts be submitted to a candid world,” detailing England’s “abuses and usurpations.” Like King George’s “establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” America is “plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors.” Both declare the “duty” and “honor” of the oppressed to fight for “justice,” evoking Allah and “Nature’s God” in support: “Our Lord, rescue us . . . and raise for us from thee one who will help!”

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Category Archives: Blog