This is a work of pornography — not erotica — which also presents itself as a work of art. The graphical style is gorgeous and distinctive, the characters have individual personalities, and their relationships are respectfully and realistically explored in a way designed to appeal to women as well as men. The sex is violent, complicated, straight, gay, sadistic, very occasionally vanilla, and woven seamlessly into the storyline. I’m talking, of course, about Michael Manning’s *Spidergarden* series.

All right, it’s my little joke —I’m reviewing *Lost Girls,* just like everybody else. But one of the things that has annoyed me about the hype surrounding Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s book is the suggestion — promulgated by both authors and reviewers — that our culture is somehow starved for aesthetically pleasing, intellectually serious stroke material. Granted, there is a lot of crappy porn out there — but then, there is an almost unlimited quantity of *every* kind of porn out there. Underage porn? Sure. Porn with people dressed up in bunny suits? Check. Porn created by surprisingly clever people with humor, insight, wit and taste? Yes, indeed, grasshopper, for the Internet is vast, and most of it is devoted to smut. (As just one example, check out EyeofSerpent.) Even the use of pre-existing characters in compromising positions has become common — though, to be fair, slash fiction was a lot less high-profile when Moore and Gebbie first decided to, er, fool around with Wendy, Dorothy, and Alice 15 years ago.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked a lot of things about Lost Girls, even if it doesn’t exactly reinvent porn as we know it. It’s an ambitious and often bizarre undertaking, produced with obvious care. Moore’s decision to refer to it as pornography rather than erotica is admirable, and it is refreshing to see a book with this kind of aesthetic cache and marketing budget present itself so directly as an aid to orgasm, complete with contortionist sex positions, multiple partners, full-frontal everything, and even the occasional gratuitous slurping. In that vein, and purely as porn, it worked for me in the utilitarian way that such things do — there were scenes I found stimulating, they occurred with relative frequency, and the action that happened in the intervals wasn’t so off-putting that it killed the mood. I found the adult Wendy’s progress from buttoned-up, repressed Victorian housefrau to insatiable, big-bosomed tart particularly scorching. (Which means, I suppose, that, like Alan Moore, I enjoy the idea of fucking with the bourgeoisie.)

Despite its pleasures, though, there are some serious problems with the book. Moore and Gebbie clearly have an encyclopedic knowledge of Edwardian smut, but they have some trouble translating that into formal mastery. Gebbie’s artwork is hard to evaluate in the black-and-white photocopies we were sent for review, but the color panels I have seen are underwhelming. I admire her ambition, and I’m all for ravishing confectionary art, but Gebbie just doesn’t have the chops to pull it off. Her drafting isn’t strong enough to render anatomy convincingly, nor is it stylized enough to make up for the deficiency. Her color sense is erratic — some of the panels really work, but others are garish and even ugly. Her designs and layouts are okay, but hardly arresting. When Moore’s script calls for her to mimic the styles of artists like Aubrey Beardsley or John Teniel, her limitations become painfully obvious.

Like the art, the plot and writing both creak audibly. Moore has always been a heavy-handed writer, but in books like Halo Jones and Watchmen, he had such a thorough grasp on the genre material that it didn’t matter. At his best, even his clumsiness takes on meaning, irony, and resonance — the pirate sequence in Watchman, for example, is both ridiculously over the top and cool as hell, just like the pulp masterpieces it draws on.

There are great moments in Lost Girls too: I love the scene where Wendy, says goodbye to her husband from an upper-story window; he thinks she’s wailing in despair at his departure, when actually a bellhop is fucking her from behind. In general, though, throughout the book, Moore seems ever so slightly — well, lost. The idea of sexualizing famous children’s stories is a good one: I certainly found the transformations in the Alice tales weirdly erotic when I was a kid. Moore’s follow-through, however, is only sporadically successful. The Jabberwocky as a giant penis is funny — but it’s ruined when Moore has to tell us that it’s going to “jab” Alice. Dorothy masturbating while the tornado hits is okay; the labored metaphors which transform her subsequent lovers into the scarecrow, lion, and tin woodsman, on the other hand, wander dangerously close to the earnest pretension of literary fiction. In fact, much of Dorothy’s dialogue sounds like it was written in a college creative writing workshop by a Reynolds Price wannabe. One colorful, earthy metaphor per page is plenty, thank you very much.

Moore also has trouble with another of the goals he and Gebbie set for themselves; that is, creating pornography which will appeal to both genders. Women like all different kinds of porn, just as men do, of course, and I’m certain that there are many women besides Gebbie who will get off on Lost Girls. But there is, in fact, a lot of porn (not erotica, please note) written by women, for women out there, and it has tropes which distinguish it pretty clearly from porn designed for men only. Lost Girls does make some effort to incorporate a few of these: for instance, there is some male/male sex, which (as yaoi teaches) many heterosexual women like. But it’s not very central to the action; certainly it’s much less prominent than female-female sex, which (as most all porn teaches) heterosexual men like. Gebbie’s lacy, pastel artwork is very femme and may well entice some female readers, as may the fact that the protagonists are drawn to look like people, rather than blow-up dolls or supermodels.

But in all porn that has successfully connected with a large female audience, there is one common ingredient which is conspicuously absent from Lost Girls: romance. The possibility of love is only even hinted at a couple of times, and then it’s quickly dropped in the interest of further zipless fucks. Dorothy, Wendy, and Alice may like and care for each other, but they’re not “in love” with each other — they’re friends with benefits, which is to say they all behave like stereotypical male fantasies, not like stereotypical female ones. In Lost Girls, sex is about getting off, not about a particular partner — there’s no jealousy, not a whole lot of idealization, and almost no unrequited anything for even a panel. As a result, the fulfillment of every desire — for a stranger, for a friend, for a mentor, even for a father — feels more or less the same as the fulfillment of every other desire. That’s not the case in romance novels (which can be extremely explicit); it’s not the case in yaoi, or in slash fiction, or in virtually any other subgenre of porn that targets women. It’s consistent enough that I’m willing to go out on a limb and state in print that I am sure that Michael Manning’s hardcore fetish comics — which are all about relationships, relationships, relationships — have a significant female readership. (I do have some anecdotal evidence to back this up; my wife is a big Michael Manning fan.)

A lot of porn for guys is struttingly, or gleefully, or brutally loveless, without any aesthetic disjunction. But in Lost Girls the lack of love creates a sense of strain, and is responsible, I think, for the comics most noticeable and surprising failure, given its source material — a lack of magic. Moore and Gebbie try diligently to suffuse their world with a mystical significance, where bodies and identities fuse and flow. But all of their efforts — from the full-page fantasy money-shots to the game of dress-up the protagonists play at the end — seem didactic and forced. Again, a comparison with Michael Manning is instructive: in Manning’s work, characters change into furniture or animals, change loyalties, change genders, change personalities, duplicate themselves and lose themselves in a seamless erotic blur. Shojo manga too (though often less sexually explicit) projects a sense of trembling possibilities, as if every character is constantly on the verge of dissolving in a wave of longing and desire, It’s romance, of course, with its destruction of proportions and its vertiginous assault on the self, which drives the femme polymorphism of both Manning and shojo; and it’s the absence of romance which makes Lost Girls so frustratingly literal. With love, the most mundane incident can be charged with meaning and pleasure; without it, even meaning and pleasure lead only to a mundane contemplation of genitalia.

With its insistent cultivation of a female aesthetic, the decision to leave romance out of Lost Girls altogether seems strange. Even 15 years ago, before yaoi was around to show the way, a dollop of romance would have seemed a natural solution to the problem of creating artistic porn for all genders. Peter Pan, especially, is at least as much about repressed romance as it is about repressed sexuality — and Moore has said that he’d been turning over the idea of a pornographic Wendy long before he contemplated adding Dorothy and Alice. We know, too, from the rest of his oeuvre that Moore can do romance if he wants — Abby and Swamp Thing remain one of the most affecting couples in the history of mainstream comics, as far as I’m concerned.

The difficulty seems to be that Moore has very specific ideas about what pornography is and what it should do, and those, not coincidentally, happen to be precisely the things romance isn’t, and which it can’t accomplish. Romance is a genre devoted to a celebration of interconnection and complicated ties; it’s not just because he’s into bondage that one of Michael Manning’s books is titled In a Metal Web. For Moore, on the other hand, pornography is about splendid isolation. In a passage that is certainly intended to apply to Lost Girls itself, Moore has his lascivious hotel owner declare that, “Pornographies are the enchanted parklands where the most secret and vulnerable of our many selves can safely play…. They are the palaces of luxury that all the policies and armies of the outer world can never spoil, can never bring to rubble.” Sexual imagination, for Moore, is outside the demands and regulations of our government, our society, and even of ourselves. It is a means of experiencing freedom, both personal and political; an escape from entanglements.

Pornography does presuppose at least one connection, of course — that between the creator of the pornography and its consumer. This bond is to Lost Girls what love is to romance: the central, endlessly fascinating theme, both engine and end of the action. Instead of talking to a psychoanalyst, Dorothy, Alice and Wendy talk to each other, turning their traumatic Freudian relationships with various father-figures into deliberately arousing, pornographic narratives for the delectation of their friends — and, of course, for the reader as well. In repeated and insistent asides, each of the women talks about how turned on she is by the others’ narratives: Wendy, for example, admits that, “The more awful and dangerous these stories get, the more I want to play with myself.” This talking cure liberates not through simple revelation, but by turning an unmanageable network of relationships and desires into a single bond of functional arousal.

Freudian psychoanalysis is supposed to treat sexual neurosis and allow the patient to become reintegrated into society. Similarly, in Lost Girls pornography fixes various ailments, most involving a reluctance to have intercourse of one sort or another. There is a certain logic to this, anyway — if pornography is the cure, too little sex must be the disease. [Pre-Freudian therapists may even have agreed with Moore’s prescription. Hysteria, a commonly diagnosed ailment afflicting females in 19th century Europe, was often treated by bringing the patient to orgasm, sometimes through the use of vibrators, which were invented for the purpose.) Through profligate intercourse, Wendy ceases to be frigid. Alice is cured of her lesbianism, at least to the extent that she is now willing to have sex with men as well. Dorothy gets over her father fixation and talks, semi-seriously, about starting a family: I guess the fact that she’s the only one in the book who ever mentions birth control is supposed to suggest that, before dirty stories set her free, she was unreasonably worried about becoming pregnant.

If that’s a little snide — well, art as therapy has that effect on me. And while pornography as therapy at least has the benefit of novelty, I don’t see that it’s much different in kind. The tedious work of healing grinds on, and every encounter, whether with lover, enemy, wizard, elf, or double, is perceived through the monochrome fish-eye of self-actualization. As I noted above, sexualizing Oz, Wonderland, and Never-Never-Land doesn’t bother me, but turning these bizarre stories of nonsense and adventure into another pedestrian opportunity for personal growth is simply egregious. Moore has said he wanted to explore childhood sexuality without the hypocritical judgments usually attendant on such an exercise, but when it comes time to do so, what he comes up with is a bundle of trauma and some lame platitudes about embracing your inner lost girl.

Self-help manifestos are solipsistic by nature; nonetheless, they often try to present themselves as offering solutions to macrocosmic problems. After all, if everybody were happy within themselves, the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it? Moore buys the logic, anyway . Fucking and sucking in a heap of bodies and pleasures may seem politically innocuous — but Moore thinks otherwise, and to prove it he’s willing to drag an entire World War onto the scene. As German tanks roll towards the girls’ erotic idyll, the mere act of exchanging sexual fantasies and bodily fluids becomes pregnant with gynocentric political meaning. It’s brave little Eros vs. big bad Thanatos, and you’ll never look at an orgasm in quite the same way again.

I’m a good little liberal myself, and as such I’d much rather read Lost Girls than bomb Iraq. But to suggest that the first is some sort of meaningful resistance to the second seems kind of ridiculous. Sure, if you’re jerking off you’re not likely to be shooting anyone at the same time (though I guess you could if you were really determined). But you could say the same thing about shopping at Wal-Mart or taking a dump. So what?

Even if you want to see some sort of profound Jungian psycho-social link between creativity (sexual or otherwise) and violence, that link doesn’t have to be oppositional. Moore likes to quip that “War is a failure of imagination,” but why should we let imagination off the hook so easily? It’s hard to see, for example, how World War I could have happened without the help of a lot of violent fantasies filled with heroic nonsense — the exceedingly militaristic Peter Pan not least among them. Sexual imagination itself has led to preposterous amounts of violence, as Homer tells us. And you don’t have to be a fan of Andrea Dworkin to note that pornography may, occasionally, have something to do with the more unpleasant aspects of the sex industry.

Moore’s a thoughtful writer, and whatever his broader ideology, there are several instances in Lost Girls where porn and sexual imagination are shown to have a down side. Moore’s Peter Pan analogue, for example, grows from an over-sexed young urchin into an unpleasantly hardened male prostitute. And in Dorothy’s narrative, she realizes that her “horny little daydreams” about incest have ruined her step-mother’s life. This moment of clarity even contributes to Dorothy’s decision to stop fucking her father and leave home for Europe — though once there it doesn’t seem to have any moderating effect on her sex life.

Perhaps Moore’s most focused discussion of the damaging possibilities of erotic narratives involves Wendy. After fantasizing about sex with a dangerous child molester (Captain Hook), she semi-unconsciously seeks him out, and is almost killed as a result. In Faulkner’s novels, this sort of collaboration between victimizer and victim is a recurring theme, and is used to raise questions about how our dreams, identities, and destinies are attached to cultural expectations that we often can’t control, even when we recognize them. Led to the brink of such a depressing insight, Moore backpedals frantically, assuring us that Wendy’s real nemesis is not her fantasy per se, but rather her misguided feeling of responsibility for it. This is a big fat cop out, and the immediately following scene, wherein Wendy scares off the rapist by thrusting her cunt at him, was for me the least convincing in the whole book, and perhaps the only one that felt genuinely exploitative.

This failure of nerve is emblematic of the book as a whole. Moore and Gebbie make extravagant claims for pornography, but (or perhaps because?) they don’t really seem to have faith in the genre. Do readers really need to be constantly assured that they’re fighting the man and/or finding themselves in order for it to be okay to read a book with explicit sex in it? Porn has some ugly implications, but so do most genres and mediums, from the police state paranoia of superheroes, to the militarism of science-fiction, to the casual disregard of life in mystery novels, to, for that matter, the gushy disempowerment of romance. It would be a surprise if they didn’t, considering that all are part and parcel of a reality, which is, after all imperfect. Despite what some critics of porn might tell you, that’s not a reason to stop imagining (as if such a thing were possible), or to endorse censorship, or even to wallow in guilt. But it is something to think about before you ram a dildo up your ass and call it freedom.

A version of this essay first ran in The Comics Journal.

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Michael Manning is going to contribute to a symposium on the Gay Utopia which I am organizing. The symposium should be online in late January or early February. Other contributors will include Ursula K. Le Guin, Johnny Ryan, Dame Darcy, Neil Whitacre, Lilli Carré, Bert Stabler, and lots of other folks.

I saw John Carpenter’s The Thing for the first time a last year, and became kind of obsessed with it. Since then, I’ve been renting other John Carpenter movies, but I haven’t liked anything I’ve seen nearly as much. I just saw Halloween, which is supposed to be one of his best, and…eh. It was certainly okay, but I’m not exactly sure why it’s supposed to be so special. Maybe it’s because so many of its tropes (the final surviving girl, the killer in the mask, slaying the villain and having him come back over and over) have become cliches — but were any of them really such great ideas in the first place? The way the teenagers keep getting killed whenever they express sexual desire is pretty entertaining, and Carpenter’s eerie synth score is creepy. The camera movement is very fluid, and the perspective-of-the-killer shots are fun — especially in the opening scenes where Michael puts on the mask and you see through his restricted vision. But the psychologist nattering on about how ultimately bad, bad, bad Michael Myers is just kind of tedious, and the movie’s efforts to turn a serial killer into some sort of primal force of eldritch evil seem overblown and dumb. I guess that’s really where the film loses me; if you’re going to have a supernatural villain, have a supernatural villain. If you’re going to have it be a bad guy, have it be a bad guy and expend some effort on making him seem actually dangerous. As it is, Myers inability to kill Curtis just seems like incompetence — he keeps missing her with the knife, and she then beats the crap out of him over and over. The only thing that makes him at all credible as a threat is that he keeps getting these totally un-earned do-overs, coming back from the dead for no apparent reason. It’s like the movie couldn’t come up with a really dangerous threat, so has to fall back on special pleading. (Texas Chainsaw Massacre does a much better job having villains who are really scary but vulnerable. The murder scenes also manage to be a lot more shocking and visceral.)

I also finally saw the Japanese horror classic Ring-U recently — and that was a whole lot more satisfying. The evil is more clearly occult, and while it’s not exactly what you’d call coherent, it does have a poetic consistency. The plot involves a video; once you see it, you have one week to live. The tension created by the time limit, and the character’s desperate efforts to find out what’s going on, are much more suspenseful than the random, sudden violence in Halloween — where the viewers know that something bad is going to happen, but the victims generally don’t. The mix of eldritch magic and modern technology is very well done, and the pacing is perfect — we don’t see how the curse works until the very end of the movie, and the payoff is suitably bizarre and eerie. Halloween also doesn’t have anything anywhere near as weird as the scene where the Ringu heroine stands up to her waist in water at the bottom of a well caressing a child’s skeleton. You’ve gotta love that.

I consumed a couple of devil narratives recently: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Lolly Willowes and John Carpenter’s movie Prince of Darkness. As both of my regular readers know, as I’ve gotten older and more crotchety I’ve increasingly tended to prefer pulp fiction to the literary variety, so by all rights I should be enthusiastic about Carpenter’s exploitative gore-fest and dump all over Warner’s slow-moving domestication of the infernal.

Not this time though. I love Carpenter’s “The Thing” with a deep devotion, but “Prince of Darkness” is, alas, a lame imitation. The characters are thoroughly uninvolving, and the special effects are — especially by Carpenter’s standards — supremely half-assed and unimaginative, but what really sinks the endeavor is theological confusion. Carpenter’s Satan is kind of a space alien, kind of an extra-dimensional particle, kind of somehow related to theology, maybe related to the future; in other words, it’s Satan as a poorly thought out conspiracy theory, which ends up resolving into Satan as just another boring monster. The characters are constantly making impossible leaps of logic and then looking at each other with deadpan amazement — the corrosion on that eighties-looking sci-fi tube is millions of years old? My god, it must be…Satan! There’s a power surge on the combobulating thingamawhatzit! The horror, the horror! Without a central core, Carpenter trys to distract us with every horror trick in the book; dead men rising and walking, woman transformed into scabrous demon, a plague of insects — even a brief demonic pregnancy which, like the rest of the film, results in precisely nothing. The story lacks the cahones to actually deal with the cultural weight of pretending your special effects monstrosity is actually THE ancient evil, and th. In the end, the idea of Satan as space villain waiting to destroy the earth is a lot less scary than the Church’s conception of Satan as eternal personal tempter, and the final Christ-like sacrifice seems deeply unearned; a parody of, rather than an evocation of, the crucifixion.

“Lolly Willowes” on the other hand, is delightful. Most of the book is a delicately sad, but always witty, account of the painfully restricted life of Laura Willowes, an unassuming woman from a high bourgeois family who is just slightly too eccentric to marry (she tells one suitor he reminds her of a werewolf) but not eccentric enough to actually do anything unconventional. She lives fairly happily with her father until he dies, and then fairly unhappily with her brother, who, along with his devout wife, bores her quietly but steadily. Then, suddenly, about three-quarters of the way through the book, Laura decides to move to a tiny rural town (Great Mop), where she promises her soul to Satan, acquires a black cat as a familiar, and lives, as far as we can tell, happily ever after. The confluence of domestic drama-of-manners and black magic is handled with subdued humor; my favorite moment is when Laura realizes that “Even as a witch, it seemed, she was doomed to social failure, and her first Sabbath was not going to open livelier vistas than were opened by her first ball.” Shortly after this, though, Laura is whirled away in a dance by a comely village maiden — the diabolical lesbian subtext is certainly intentional.

Towards the end of the book Laura speculates on the Devil’s nature:

To be this — a character truly integral, a perpetual flowering of power and cunning from an undivided will — was enought to constitute the charm and majesty of the Devil. No cloak of terrors was necessary to enlarge that stature, and to suppose him capable of speculation or metaphysic would be like offering to crown him with a few casual straws…. Instead his mind brooded immovably over the landscape and over the natures of men, an unforgetting and unchoosing mind. That, of course…was why he was the Devil, the enemy of souls. His memory was too long, too retentive; there was no appeasing its witness, no hoodwinking it with the present; and that was why at one stage of civilisation people said he was the embodiment of all evil, and then a little later on that he didn’t exist.

This idea of the devil as implacably outside of time sounds a lot like the Kantian vision of God and the moral law — always the same, judging and/or knowing mortal souls that bob through time. It’s a personal devil, who cares about human souls intimately, though for what purpose and to what end isn’t exactly clear. Partially, the book suggests, simply to mark those who wish to be marked, folding in those who reject God? Or to show the arbitrariness of civilization, the crumbling around the margins of respectability focused in those who are excluded? In any case, he uncertainty here seems to me to be that of mystery and suggestion, rather than incoherence. The “cloak of terrors” in “Prince of Darkness” certainly isn’t necessary — Warner’s devil is more mystical and more mysterious without it (though he does condescend to turn some milk sour.)

Warner’s isn’t my favorite devil ever (that would probably be C.S. Lewis’ version in Prerelandra, which manages to be evil, banal, creepy, mysterious and despicable all at once.) But I do think that, if you’re going to use Satan, you really need to be willing to engage in some level of thoughtful theology. I know the Enemy died when God did, but it seems like if they’re good enough to put in your plot, they should be good enough to treat with a modicum of respect.

I just finished reading the “Marvel Zombies” volume, which is really pretty much complete shit. The premise is that all the marvel heroes and villains have been turned into zombies, and they’re hungry for meat. As a zombie tale, it misses the point entirely. The best zombie stories rely on a tension between one’s enthusiasm for seeing the zombies destroy and main and one’s sympathy and identification with the human victims. They also draw an ambiguous line between zombie and human; on the one hand, the zombies look like us and are similar to us in some ways (greed, rage, etc.). On the other hand, they’re clearly and obviously different. Most of all, zombies win because of numbers — they’re scary and disturbing because they lose their individuality and become animal, undifferentiated id. But in this story, all the zombies retain their personalities; you’ve got the guilty spider-man zombie, the leaderly Captain America zombie, the angry hulk zombie. They’re just hungry, decaying bad guys — another bunch of super-villains. Ho-hum.

As a super-hero story, it sucks too. Basically it’s just a series of cutesy punch-lines for continuity buffs. The wasp can shrink down and make her Magneto dinner last longer. When the Hulk turns into Banner the human flesh he just ate breaks through his stomach. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Silver Surfer pulled off his board and devoured? How about Galactus, huh? Of course, little effort is made to explain who all these characters are, or even to create some sort of context or, god forbid, a story. If you wanted those things, you wouldn’t be here, would you?

Not that it’s entirely unentertaining. As an act of puerile desecration for the aging geek, it’s kind of fun to see the Hulk bite off the Silver Surfer’s head, or hear Peter Parker whine incessantly about eating his aunt. But you’ve gotta wonder about the future of the super-hero endeavor when the shrinking fandom is increasingly fed on decayed, self-cannabilizing tidbits like this. Marvel zombies indeed.

So, as happens every four years, I’m obsessed with the presidential election — I”m now trolling political blogs regularly to find out whose ahead of whom or who said what stupid, boring thing that Iowa voters are supposed to care about because each and every one of them is was, like me, born without the brains god gave a louse turd. Seriously, is there any more pointless, vile way to spend one’s time than listening to John Edwards explain that his new year’s resolution involves reminding himself that somewhere in America a child is hungry? Or listening to Hillary Clinton say anything? Arggggh.

Anyway, I’m a Barack Obama supporter, pretty much — I even gave his campaign $20, which is probably the kiss of death for him (everyone else I’ve ever contributed to went down in flames.) Obama actually lives less than a block away from me; he was my state senator, and I’ve voted for him in multiple elections, including in his unsuccessful run for the House of Representatives against Bobby Rush a while back. He tends to actually be able to answer a straight question with a straight answer; he’s smart and thoughtful; he was right about Iraq when it counted, he’s fairly liberal, and in general I think it would do this country a lot of good to have a black president.

If you’ll notice, there’s nothing in that endorsement which mentions any sort of policy positions. It’s basically, “I like him”, which, as this article notes, is why people tend to support Obama, or any candidate. Pundits will often whine and groan about this; the whole problem with our system is that people focus on personalities, why won’t anyone pay attention to the issues, etc. etc. I agree that the process is debased, and that part of why it’s debased is that it is about ineffable personalities…but I don’t think that the reason for this has anything to do with the American people’s foolishness. Instead, I blame the Fouding Fathers. In their infinite wisdom, those white guys in wigs designed a system where the President can’t really do anything. Voting on policy is dumb, because once the candidate gets into office, there’s a very limited number of things which he (or she) can actually do. It all has to go through Congress and the courts and so on and so forth. In a parliamentary system, you actually vote for a whole party with a platform, and then when they get in they enact it — or, if they can’t, the government falls, and you try again. But our system is deliberately personality based, so it’s no wonder that people tend to vote on personalities.

Not that the policies of the person in power don’t matter — they do. But you can’t really tell what they are from the campaign. Bush started as a “compassionate conservative,” remember? But unlike in a parliamentary system, there’s no way to actually hold anyone accountable once they get into office. You can just flat out lie about what you’re going to do, and once you get in you can blame your failures on Congress, or on just not getting around to it, or on whatever — what’s to stop you? So the solution is to vote for someone who’s not a liar, which again puts you down to personality. But, of course, the candidate’s all come off as plastic pre-fab overly solemn sentimentalists; the question then is, which of these assholes do you dislike least? For me at the moment that’s Obama, but I’m sure that if I’m exposed to him for four years, I’ll have had my fill of his particular brand of arrogance, condescension, self-regard, and sentimentalism.

I can’t believe I care about this stuff. Even arguing about Art Spiegelman is less despicable. I should go wash my keyboard out with soap now….

Feeling Their Pain

Origin myths are as much about the present as they are about the past, which is why they can be so contentious. Is a monkey your great-uncle? Who cares? And nobody would, except that the answer has implications for how we think about ourselves, and for how we run our society.

Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains: Prophets, Slaves, and Rebels in the First Human Rights Crusade is, as the title suggests, not a dry-as-dust account of the dead past, but rather an origin story complete with a Moral Lesson for Our Time. As is usual with such things, this last serves primarily to muck up a perfectly entertaining narrative.

And make no mistake: Bury the Chains is entertaining, with enough drama, irony, and blood to fill a wildly successful Ken Burns mini-series. The book traces the rise and fall and final success of abolitionism in Britain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Along the way, it talks about the horrible conditions under which British seamen lived, slave revolts in Haiti, the French Revolution, growing crops in Africa, and the state of infrastructure in England. Slavery, Hochschild argues, touched virtually everyone in the world during its heydey, and the narrative breadth of Bury the Chains goes a long way towards proving that point.

But while the theme is epic, the handling of it is merely serviceable. Hochschild writes with the ingratiating self-consciousness of a determined popularizer. Every historical figure, it seems, is described with a burst of pseudo-Dickensian enthusiasm: thus, Granville Sharp, a leading British anti-slavery campaigner, has “thin lips, a long nose, [and] a fierce, determined gaze accentuated by an outward jut of the chin.” Nor will Hochschild say “attitudes towards slavery changed” when he can say instead that “forces burst into life.”

This is not great prose, obviously, but it bounces along quickly enough in the breezy style of a Time magazine article. That contemporary touch is intentional. Hochschild is a progressive — he is one of the founders of Mother Jones magazine — and he is using the past as a tool to inspire present-day liberals. For Hochschild, abolition in Britain was the grand-daddy of all progressive movements. Abolitionism, he argues, was the first human-rights campaign. Moreover, it was the abolitionists who, during the mid-1700s, first developed the tactics of activism: the boycott, petitions, the left-wing-celebrity book tour. The abolitionists even had perhaps the first radical reporter; a man named Thomas Clarkson.

Clarkson is a neglected figure, much less well-known than William Wilberforce, the Member of Parliament most associated with anti-slavery legislation. But though he’s been largely forgotten, Clarkson’s story is a compelling one. While a clergyman-in-training at Cambridge, he wrote a prize-winning essay in Latin denouncing slavery. This was merely meant to be an exercise, but the details Clarkson uncovered while researching his composition so horrified him that he devoted the rest of his life to abolition. After making this decision, he threw himself into the cause, spending sixteen-hour-days looking through the records of slave-ships to learn all he could about the industry and its practices. Later, he traveled incessantly to drum up support for emancipation; on one trip he logged almost two thousand miles, a phenomenal distance in the late 18th century. His greatest work was probably a pamphlet called the Abstract, which summarized the anti-slavery evidence placed before Parliament; it became, according to Hochschild, the best-selling non-fiction anti-slavery document in history, and the first piece of modern investigative journalism ever published.

Hochshchild makes every effort to spread credit around in his book. He does not, for example, try to deny Wilberforce’s contribution. In addition, as a politically correct liberal, he takes care to point out the important contributions of female anti-slavery societies and of blacks themselves — the Haitian revolution made it clear that if the slaves were not freed by law, they might well free themselves in a much more bloody manner. Yet, despite this even-handedness, it is Clarkson who Hochschild singles out early in the book as his “central character.” Why?

There seem to be two reasons. First, Clarkson lived a long time. He was there when Parliament first debated abolition in the late 1780s, he was there when the cause foundered in the 1790s, and he was there when it was taken up again in the early 1800s. He saw the slave trade banned in 1807, and was still alive to celebrate when all British slaves were finally freed in 1838. Large sections of Bury the Chains don’t mention Clarkson at all, but the narrative always comes back to him, still committed, still working away.

The second reason for the focus on Clarkson, however, is probably more important. Clarkson is the hero of the piece because he is the figure who seems most analogous to a modern human rights activist. Clarkson, like other abolitionists, devoted his life to fighting for the “rights of others people, of a different skin color, an ocean away….” But where men like the Evangelical Wilberforce were clearly motivated by religious concerns, Clarkson was more secular. Earlier anti-slavery literature had relied on arguments from Scripture, or on the religious doctrines of the Quakers, who were, as Hochschild acknowledges, the leading force behind the early abolition movement. Clarkson eventually became a kind of honorary Quaker himself, but his anti-slavery writing were based less on theology than on humanity, in both senses of the term. His best-selling Abstract read “more like a report by a modern human rights organization than [like] the moralizing tracts against slavery that had preceded it.” Clarkson relied on reports of atrocities against bodies, not against souls, to move his audience.

For Hochschild, then, the great achievement of the abolitionists is the replacement of God with “empathy” as a motivating force in world affairs. This substitution is, of course, an unalloyed good in Hochschild’s view. God was for remorseless hypocrites like John Newton, the Evangelical slave ship captain, who thanked his Lord for allowing him to prosper in his chosen profession. Empathy is both more honest and more trustworthy.

But is it? The empathy of the abolitionists was, as Hochschild points out, closely linked to condescension. One of the most powerful images of the abolition movement was a drawing of a slave kneeling in chains with the inscription, “Am I Not a Man and A Brother?” Hochschild points out that abolitionists preferred to see slaves as helpless victims begging for aid, rather than as dignified men and women like themselves. But while Hochschild sees this as lamentable, he does not view it as an essential part of the anti-slavery ideology. Liberals, he feels, can take the empathy and leave out the contempt.

Well, perhaps. But the history of modern activism suggests that things aren’t quite so simple. Hochschild says that the abolitionists would be thrilled by the trial of Slobodan Milosevich, for example, but I think that their imaginations would be much more fired by a less distant, less legalistic campaign: pro-life. The anti-abortion movement — with its ties to evangelicals, its focus on helpless victims, its gripping horror stories — is much closer to the abolitionists in spirit than any left-wing movement I can think of. And the pro-lifers are perfectly aware of the connection, as you’ll find if you type “William Wilberforce” and “pro-life” into a search engine.

The truth is that the abolitionist’s legacy of liberalism and progressivism belongs at least as much to the political right as it does to the political left. It was Kipling, an imperialist, who argued in “The White Man’s Burden” that imperialism is justified on humanitarian grounds. It is The Economist, a libertarian magazine, that provides the best investigative coverage of world events. It is George W. Bush who speaks idealistically of a democratic — but not a Christian — Middle East. We live in a world where all have been injured, and all must have empathy. Morality used to be measured by how loudly you prayed; now its measured by how loudly you sympathize. Perhaps this is an improvement, though I doubt it makes much different to the vast mass of humanity, who just wish we’d shut up and leave them alone.

A version of this essay first appeared in The Chicago Reader