Tag Archives: war

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1

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I just finished DC’s Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1, which collects Wonder Woman’s appearances in chronological order. This first volume collects Wonder Woman’s first appearance in All-Star Comics 8 (December 1941-January 1942) through Sensation Comics no. 9 in September 1942, and also includes Wonder Woman number 1.

I’ve already talked about several of these comics in the Bound to Blog series (for example, I talk about Wonder Woman #1 here, and Sensation Comics #1 here.) But there are a couple of things that struck me while reading the collection as a whole.

No Intro

There’s absolutely no introductory material at all, unless you count a small note in the table of contents that says, “The comics reprinted in this volume were produced in a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously.” That is undeniably true

but still, it seems like there might be more to say. Who wrote these comics? Who drew them? How popular were they? What did people think of them? Why are we reprinting them?

Of course, the answer to the last question is basically, “because they are there,” and also, “Wonder Woman still has a fanbase, so if you stick her face on a cover, you can sell some copies, even if no one really thinks this material is particularly worthwhile — or, for that matter, thinks anything about it at all.”

Not that this is just about Wonder Woman. I’m sure DC’s other chronicles editions don’t have intros…the point is to make them as cheap as possible, I’m sure, in the hopes of selling to a not-especially-well-defined audience of WW fans, kids, and the curious or confused. But even the DC Wonder Woman Archive Edition (hard backed, more expensive, slightly more material) has an intro (by folk singer Judy Collins) that is more along the lines of an extended blurb than an actual effort to provide some context.

I’m sure some might say this is for the best — why have some professor get between the kids and their pop culture ephemera? The problem is that pop cultural ephemera is ephemera; if that’s what it is, why reprint it? And, indeed, DC’s various archival projects have tended to founder from lack of interest, being released at glacial speeds before instantly going out of print. Those boring professors, it turns out, are part of minimal cultural validation — and without that minimal validation, old pop cultural ephemera is largely irrelevant.

Steve Trevor, He-Man Convalescent

Steve Trevor appears on the very first page of Wonder Woman’s first story in All Star comics. In that debut appearance, he’s unconscious.

He then stays unconsious throughout the entire tale. He gets some moments of lucidity in flashback, but by the end of the story, he’s still conked out. It’s only in the 2nd WW tale (in Sensation Comics #1) that he comes to his senses. After that he’s in the hospital convalescing. He sneaks out when he learns of deadly danger to the country…but by the end of the comic, he’s back in bed again, with WW as Diana Prince (who changed places with his nurse…don’t ask) caring for him. Next issue he’s up and around, but by the end:

It’s only in Sensation Comics 3, the fourth WW story, that Steve Trevor escapes from the hospital, forcing Diana Prince to get a job not as his secretary, but as his boss’ secretary.

In other words, the ur-Steve Trevor, as Marston conceived of him, is not a fighter nor a love, but a hospital patient. The true Steve Trevor is the wounded — or, perhaps more accurately, infantilized — Steve Trevor.

In Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Reistance, Gill Plain argues that:

War creates a situation in which the gender debate is subsumed by a meta-narrative of power. It represents a conflict that divorces and prioritises the division between activity and passivity from the founding binary opposition masculine/feminine. War almost represents itself as a constructive reinscription, or even a rejection of the age-old formulations of gender…. In the course of purusing the division between a non-gender-specific activity and passivity, woman is ‘decentered’… The woman has once again become invisible.

For Plain, then, war destabilizes gender by divorcing activity/passivity from gender — but in so doing, it erases women’s difference, and so erases women.

I think, though, Marston, radical feminist and dirty old coot, has found a way around this dilemma. He uses the destabilizing effect of war to create an emasculated hero — the wounded soldier, whose incapacity is the sign of his boldness and strength. But for Marston, the fact that passivity is disconnected from women does not result in ungendering. On the contrary, it becomes a masochistic fetish. Steve regresses, authority is upended…and patriarchy becomes matriarchy. Woman isn’t erased; she’s explicitly elevated as caregiver and (maternal) hero. Which is (in Marston) what men want:

That’s an awesomely, fluidly flaccid twisted leg Peter has drawn there — and Steve is, of course, explicitly getting off on his own castration. War for Marston isn’t a disaster so much as an opportunity for men to embrace their weakness…and let women take over.

Myself for a Rival

A number of the stories in this volume end with a panel like this

What’s interesting about this is that…that’s it. The trope is stated…and then dropped, over and over again. The love triangle is pointed at, but never really becomes central to the plot (the way it is with the Clark/Lois/Superman triangle, even in the early years to some extent.)

It seems like, for Marston, there’s a pleasure in the masquerade of changing identities, and a frisson in the unrequited melodrama…but very little interest in actually presenting either Diana or Wonder Woman as angst-ridden or, for that matter, weak. There’s almost a condescension about it, like she’s pretending she’s worried to make Stevie feel important, the little darling. As I’ve mentioned before, double identities in Wonder Woman feel more like play than agonized bifurcation, a polymorphous feminine role-play rather than an agonized Oedipal bifurcation. After Marston died, of course, Diana’s love vicissitudes move from marginal tease to major plot points. With Marston’s feminism removed, everybody seemed more comfortable with a passive object of desire, rather than with the all-powerful Mommy, stooping to love.

Semi-Memoir and Stylization in Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths

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This review originally appeared in the Comics Journal.

When I was thirteen I spent a week with my grandparents at their house in New Jersey. At the time I was interested in Japanese console role-playing games, and increasingly frustrated with how few games actually made it into English translation. In fact, I told my mild-mannered Catholic grandfather, a man who loved radios and computers and science fiction novels, I was thinking about learning Japanese. “Japanese, huh,” he said quietly, looking away from me. “Only one word I ever learned in Japanese.” He paused. “That was “surrender.””

It is doubtful that 89-year-old cartoonist Shigeru Mizuki will ever forget his war time experiences, either. At the age of 20 he was drafted into the Japanese army and stationed at Rabaul, on New Britain in Papua New Guinea, where he survived several near-collisions with death. His friends were not so fortunate. Possibly his most significant personal loss, though, is one immediately apparent from photographs of the man himself—the loss of his left arm.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (Soin Gyokusai Seyo!) first appeared in 1973, and was inspired by Mizuki’s unintentional reunion with his commanding officer, which led him back to Rabaul after a 26-year absence. It is, according to Mizuki’s afterword, a book of “90 percent fact.” And for that reason, as well as its many strengths and virtues, it is a very difficult book to criticize.

OTOND is an on-the-ground perspective on the inanity and ultimate inhumanity of war, told from the viewpoint of a detachment of soldiers who occupy a portion of New Britain. The soldiers themselves are differentiated mainly by their facial shapes and the unique ways they deal with their hunger and their misery. They pick their noses, build encampments, run fruitless errands for their superior officers who berate and beat them. They dream about women and food, and attempt to satisfy both cravings through talk and pursuit of the latter, including hunting fish with grenades.

The inevitability of death hangs over everything, not just for the reader, but the soldiers as well. As Mizuki said in an interview with the Japan Times, “You feel death already when you receive the call-up papers.” In OTOND, which smartly confines its scope solely to the island on which the soldiers are stationed, the suggestion of the tenuous nature of the lives of these characters comes immediately. Their history- and honor-obsessed (and very green) commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Tadokoro, leads them to claim a bit of new territory south of their current position. When they arrive, bayonets affixed and rifles ready, to find no resistance at all, no people other than themselves, their commander bellows, “WE HAVE TAKEN THIS PLACE WITHOUT BLOODSHED!” “We took this place, he says,” one soldier says to another. “It is almost like heaven, just like you said,” says another as the sun goes down, men silhouetted among the lush palms. And overlapping that sunset, one of the sole instances of narration in the book: “Actually, we were not that far from paradise…”

“Not that far from paradise…”

But death doesn’t need a machine gun and an American flag—death is all around these men. The first to go is crushed by a tree he was carrying, killed in his weakened condition by dengue fever, no doubt made worse by his exhaustion and malnutrition. Another is felled, with no witnesses, by an alligator, another, horrifically, by a fish that he has in his hunger stuffed greedily into his mouth.

And then the enemy arrives.

The early fighting is scatter-shot, furtive, small pockets of men shooting at great distances and then retreating, picking off a few here, a few there. The first truly significant encounter with the enemy is not face-to-face, but with their superior foodstuffs—after driving off a presumably small contingent of American soldiers (presumably, because we as reader haven’t seen them at all at this point), the soldiers find a hut full of provisions, including canned goods and chocolate. “Those bastards are living like kings fighting this war,” says one of the soldiers. “Now that I’ve eaten all of this food I can die a happy man,” says another.

When the fighting finally comes, it comes in bursts of violent punctuation, at a distance, the violence gruesome, inevitable and also somehow impersonal. “Maybe during the Russo-Japanese War you had a chance to ‘see’ the enemy forces,” Mizuki told the Japan Times, “but in the Pacific War, the moment you met the enemy you knew whether you were dead or alive. It was that fast.”

The conflict escalates. Engaging a force superior in numbers and equipment, the specter of annihilation that has so far hovered over the soldiers finally descends. Against the recommendations of his advisers, who plea for strategic retreat, Lieutenant-Colonel Tadokoro orders his men in a suicide charge against the enemy. The men spend their last nights drinking and singing. In the morning Tadokoro instructs his men to turn “towards our beloved homeland and bow in farewell.” “To the RIGHT!” he bellows to the bewildered men. “RIGHT!” They bow, affix their bayonets, and plunge headlong into the enemy.

But not all men are so eager to die as their commander, and some survive the horrific battle. The survivors make their way back to their division base, only to find that their deaths have already been reported to headquarters. The only possible reaction to their cowardice in surviving, they are told, is another charge. Coerced from a new arrival from division HQ, beaten down and demoralized, the eighty-odd remaining men raise their voices to sing and charge the enemy in one last pointless push. The last to die is Maruyama, who earlier we have seen illustrating playing cards for his commanding officers, offering to draw their portraits when they all return home. Now his face is grotesquely distorted, maggots in the fresh hole in his face, a song still on his swollen, bleeding lips. He stands, laughing, among the dead, facing an American tank. His abdomen bursts from artillery fire, and he falls, facing us in closeup. He is the last to die, this artist’s surrogate, the sole character with any interiority, whose thoughts we hear at the moment of death.

His body joins the bodies of his friends, now all texture and value, rendered how one might draw a mass of palm tree logs, felled and scattered. As our view gets closer, the piles of bodies turn to stacks of bone, and, finally, crushed remnants, barely recognizable save a few stray bits; a femur, a portion of a skull.

The decision to stage the book solely on the island neatly side-steps details and potential arguments about cause for the conflict and instead forces the reader to address the situation from the situation of these conscripts—men without hope, trapped in a absurd, grotesque situation in which they have few choices, no individual agency to act.

I said earlier that it’s difficult to criticize a work like this. This difficulty is not just in its subject matter, but also in its status as semi-memoir, a category that allows a work to gain significant power from the story of its creator. Regardless of how someone might feel about OTOND, there’s no doubt that it’s enriched by its proximity to Mizuki’s life story, which is truly remarkable. Mizuki is one of the most popular cartoonists in the world, having with his studio created thousands of pages of comics, and yet he did all of this after having lost his left arm in an air raid. He debuted at age 33, ten years later. His biography is inextricably bound to his war comics. When I reacted emotionally at the conclusion of the book, it was not just for the senselessness of the conflict, nor for the loss of Maruyama, who like most of the other soldiers in the book is very loosely characterized; it’s also for the connection of this character to the man who created him, mulling over all of the complex and contradictory reasons that Mizuki might send his stand-in to a death that he himself escaped.

But this connection is also problematic. Earlier in the book, when a character is killed attempting to eat a large fish alive, I found the sequence, and the explanation for the death, grotesque and unbelievable. But my reaction was quickly tempered by the thought: “This is a sort-of-memoir, right? He wouldn’t add something like that in unless it was true, would he?” And ultimately I have no way of knowing whether people have really asphyxiated from attempting to eat large live fish—but the reader’s likelihood of believing it is much greater because of that semi-memoir status. It’s that “semi” that’s so tricky.

“An unintentional peek inside the process—a paste-up Mizuki head atop a photo-referenced body.”

The visual style of the artwork can also be a stumbling block. The dissonance between the crude but communicative figures and the naturalistic, presumably assistant-drawn and photo-referenced backgrounds can be jarring at first, but soon works fairly well, at least for this reader. What’s problematic, though, is the hand-off—when characters suddenly leap modes, bouncy and expressive one moment, and photo-rendered and flat the next. This isn’t just a visual failing—it’s an opportunity lost. There were moments on my first read-through when I thought these translations of style would prove to be thematic—for instance, maybe the enemy would be rendered naturalistically, in the mode of the backgrounds and the hardware, personality-less, cold, and remote. But then the enemy would appear rendered in Mizuki’s style. Perhaps only the dead could have been rendered in this mode—certainly the transition into death at the end of the book is accompanied by this visual transition—but the power of this potential coherent visual statement is diluted by its use elsewhere. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that the decision to render some panels, and even only certain figures in panels, in this mode was most likely a pragmatic rather than artistic one; either assistants are rendering those figures or Mizuki himself is using photo reference. Either way, it is a major fault of a book that is otherwise very smart and deliberate in its decision-making.

Drawn and Quarterly’s adaptation has problems of its own, not the least of which is the unsympathetic and overly primitive lettering (“font design” is credited to Kevin Huizenga, but no one is credited with the lettering itself, perhaps understandably). Every sound effect in the book is rendered in the same font, which at its largest display sizes looks crude, wobbly and distractingly thick. The translation by Jocelyne Allen is readable, but has its own problems, including anachronism (the word “meh” out of the mouth of a Japanese soldier in 1943?), lack of clarity (a soldier is asked to “draw some cards” for his commanders, without any clarity as to what type of “drawing” might be indicated), and even outright error (the commander’s shifting rank). The translation is especially awkward in the area of the song lyrics that appear at numerous parts of the story.

This might seem like picking at nits, but these aren’t insignificant issues, considering this is in all likelihood the only English-language release this book will ever have. And to my mind, it is a compelling work by a major cartoonist who, like so many of his contemporaries, is woefully underrepresented in English. As for the visual inconsistencies, some would say that’s the price to be paid for volume production, the manga equivalent of television’s pragmatic cinematography, or indifferent musical scoring. Maybe it’s enough, after all, that this story is told, and perhaps it’s petty of people like me to pick at the details.

As for Mizuki himself, he’s long since moved on, his drawing time occupied primarily by manga about y?kai, for which he is widely known. But the past has a way of drawing you back. In 2003 he returned to Rabaul, where he had been held prisoner in the latter days of the war, where, after almost 60 years, he visited the islanders he had befriended during the war, the people that treated him with a humanity so strikingly absent from his commanders.

“We were […] creatures lower than a horse,” Mizuki writes in the afterword. “I wonder if surviving the suicide charge wasn’t, rather than an act of cowardice, one final act of resistance as a human being.”

The Long Peace and the Guillotine

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A slightly edited version of this ran on Splice Today.
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Towards the end of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, he asks “whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded.” “The answer”, he concludes, “is yes.”

Pinker condemns his (and our) forbearers for two reasons First, he shows that the rates of violent death throughout the world have been declining for almost as long as there are records. Hunter-gatherer tribes with no state system has higher rates of homicide than ancient empires; ancient empires had higher rates of violent death than did 18th and 19th century Western societies, and so forth. Second, Pinker argues that the decline in violence has been the result of enlightenment — in its technical sense. The ascension of Western Enlightenment values like democracy, free trade and human rights have civilized the formerly barbaric, religion-haunted, blood-soaked planet. Locke and Voltaire and Darwin said “beat your swords into abacuses,” and that is precisely what the world has done.

Pinker’s thesis is both optimistic and polemical. It suggests that the human species has made massive progress, and that that progress is attributable to Western Enlightenment ideology. Among the aspects of that ideology that Pinker praises are:large states (the Leviathan) which monopolize violence and thereby reduce interpersonal murde; democracy, which statistically appears to make states less prone to violence; free speech and broad education, since literacy and the distribution of books increases the ability to see other’s perspectives (and since the availability of books seems to correlate with the widespread decrease in violence); and the expansion of women’s rights, since women are overall less violent than men, and their influence tends to stabilize and civilize. Most importantly, Pinker praises scientific thinking itself, which Pinker credits with giving individuals a non-parochial perspective, allowing them to break free of the blinkered Prisoner’s Dilemma and see that peace is best for all.

The spectacle of a Western author and scientist triumphantly proclaiming the virtues of the West, books, and science is not especially surprising — though I was a bit taken aback when Pinker, a prosletyzing evolutionary psychologist, proudly proclaimed that one of the causes of the decrease in violence might be the spread of the ideas of evolutionary psychology.

But however clear Pinker’s biases may be, and however skeptical one may be of the thesis that we are the best people in all of history (and I am quite skeptical), Better Angels is an imposing, not to mention mammoth, brief. With 700 pages and graph after graph moving inevitably down and to the right over time, he shows, at the least, that by many measures violence per capita in our society is at world-historical lows. The claims that ours is an age of terrorism, or that Americans are less safe than they have ever been, is, patently, bunk.

Some of Pinker’s other assertions are more questionable. Here are a few.

—Pinker’s absolutely right that gay rights have improved enormously since 1950. But that ignores the fact that many the 1950s in the West was a particularly horrible time and place to be gay. Gay people were certainly worse off in the mid-20th century West than they were in Ancient Athens, or even in early 19th century England.

—His insistence that animal rights have been constantly improving since the Middle Ages seems somewhat contradicted by the rise of vivisection and animal testing. Even if, as he contends, people treated animals horribly in the 14th century, and even if, as he claims, vivisection has declined over the 20th century, science still tortures animals at rates that would impress (if not particularly horrify) our morally retarded ancestors. And this is without even discussing humanity’s role in our current ongoing planetwide species mass extinction event.

—Weapons have improved over time. This suggests that weapons, and war, have become more violent over time. Pinker responds to this by explaining that swords and arrows were plenty deadly — which rather begs the question. Nobody denies that arrows are deadly. But machine guns are a lot more deadly than that, and nuclear weapons are more deadly again. If you read John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, which discusses Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, you are impressed first by how utterly, hideously horrible Agincourt was — and then by how much exponentially worse Waterloo was — and finally by how monumentally, unbelievably terrible the Somme was. Pinker spends a lot of time discussing the deadly effects of low tech weapons and medieval torture devices, but he spends little to no time talking about the much, much more deadly effects of our current arsenal. His silence on these matters speaks for itself.

One of the biggest question marks in Pinker’s book, though, is his handling of the first part of the twentieth century — the lovely years from World War I in 1914 through Mao’s famine in 1964, with the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, and several neighboring atrocities thrown in. If you’re trying to prove that the world has been becoming more peaceable, that’s an awful lot of relatively fresh bodies to sweep under the carpet.

But Pinker goes for it. He first attempts to make World War I and World War II vanish into statistical noise mostly by adjusting them for world population. At 55 million, World War II is overall the largest catastrophe in the history of the world. However, if you adjust for world population, it is only the 9th largest. The biggest would instead be the An Lushan revolt in 8th century China, which Pinker says killed 36 million people over 8 years; a number which would work out to 429 million dead proportionally in the 20th century. Other conflagrations which beat WW II proportionally are the Mongol Conquests (40 million raw, adjusted to 278 million by population) the fall of the Ming Dynasty (25 million raw, adjusted to 112 by population) and the annihilation of the American Indian (20 million raw, adjusted to 92 million by population.)

It’s certainly worth remembering that people have done hideous things to each other for a long time. Even if no one is really sure that the An Lushan rebellion killed quite 36 million people, there’s no doubt that a staggering number of people died. Even if the Fall of Rome lasted over three centuries as opposed to the 6 years of World War II, 8 million dead is still a ton of dead people, as are the 40 million killed over the century of the Mongol Conquests. The recent past was by no means the first era of murder on a massive scale.

Still, one might argue that geeking out on statistical weighted tallies of dead is more than a little obscene. And one would be right. Human beings aren’t just numbers. Every dead person matters. Pinker insists again and again that the romantic ideology of the Nazis had nothing to do with enlightenment modernity and its march towards clear eyed utility, but he is least convincing on this point when he starts to fiddle with his death tolls in order to make his graphs look pretty. Counting World War I, World War II, Mao’s famine, Stalin’s purges, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War, 142 million people died through atrocity in the first part of the twentieth century. That’s twice as many people as lived in the entire Roman Empire, and probably 10 times as many as lived in the entire world before the agricultural revolution. Does that make the number less obscene? More? What exactly does even asking the question accomplish? People look back on the early twentieth century as one of unique horror not because they’re naïve, or foolish, or because they’re not as scientifically astute as Steven Pinker. They look back on it as a period of unique horror because it was a period of unique horror.

For all his tables and weighted numbers, Pinker is honest enough to admit as much. He argues, however, that the unique horribleness is not a function of modernity, but an aberrant blip caused by the insanity of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. “Tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals,” he insists. He adds that without the assassin who shot Archduke Ferdinand, there would have been no World War I. The early twentieth century, therefore, tells us nothing about violence in general, except that bad luck sucks.

The problem with this is that bad luck is universal. Insane assholes have existed forever. Genghis Khan (who Pinker discusses) for example, was a blight on the face of the earh Christopher Columbus’ genocide of the Arawak peoples ranks him as one of the monsters of history.

Both Genghis and Columbis killed and tortured lots of people. But they didn’t kill and torture anything like the number of people Hitler or Mao or Stalin did, for the simple reason that state apparatus and technology had not developed sufficiently to allow them to do so. As Tyler Cowen argues , the increase of state power, damps down individual violence, but it can vastly increase state violence as well. Thus, slavery has always been a bad thing, but it took centralized European states to create the rationalized, large-scale African slave trade that even Pinker calls “among the most brutal chapters in human history.” Cowen suggests, therefore, that “one way of describing the observed trend [in violence over time] is ‘less frequent violent outbursts, but more deadlier outbursts when they come.’”

Which brings us to nuclear weapons. Pinker argues forcefully that nuclear weapons need never be used, and that our ever-growing conflict-aversion may help keep them in their silos forever. One data point he uses here is the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to Pinker

Though the pursuit of national prestige may have precipitated the crisis, once Khruschev and Kennedy were in it, they reflected on their mutual need to save face and set that up as a problem for the two of them to solve.

That’s certainly a comforting way to think about it. However, in most accounts I’ve read, the resolution was achieved less through mutual face-saving, and more through Khruschev unilaterally deciding that he didn’t want to destroy the earth. This wasn’t, in other words, an example of an ultra-civilized meeting of minds; it was, instead, the usual pissing match, which one monkey ended by baring his throat.

This interpretation seems to better fit the facts, inasmuch as Khruschev’s face wasn’t saved; he had to back down and remove his missiles from Cuba. Kennedy’s quid pro quo — removing missiles from Turkey — was done in secret so that the President wouldn’t be punished at the polls for “weakness”. Gary Wills in Bomb Power concluded that Kennedy “risked nuclear war” rather than lose public standing. I’m able to type this today not because two world leaders behaved in a civilized and dignified fashion, but because Khruschev was not as much of an insane asshole as Kennedy. And he was not as much of an insane asshole, arguably, because he didn’t have to worry about an electorate. So much for the peaceful influence of democracy

The thing that is most troublesome about Pinker’s book, though, isn’t so much the occasional fissure in the argument as the tone. The suggestion that your grandparents and mine were moral fools is not exactly typical, but it’s not isolated either — and it’s not confined to the past. John Gray points out that Pinker tends to label certain peripheral groups (Muslims, for example, or hippies, who he blames for the rise in murder rates in the 1960s) as less civilized. Therefore, violence is associated with these groups because they are backwards or not sufficiently rational, rather than a function of power disparities or politics. As Gray says:

A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Was the immense violence that ravaged southeast Asia after 1945 a result of immemorial backwardness in the region?

Pinker’s disavowal of the effects of politics is consistent with his vision of rational enlightenment, which he sees as specifically outside of power relationships or communities. Science and reason, he argues, allow for “an Olympian, superrational vantage point — the perspective of eternity, the view from nowhere.” For someone who claims to find so little of worth in God-talk, that’s some oddly theological language there interlaced with the self-vaunting. Or does it not count as theological if your divine ideal is human? And on what grounds, then, do you so entirely disavow the enlightenment’s relationship to Marx?

None of this upends Pinker’s thesis, of course. But it does suggest that some caution might be in order. We should acknowledge, and celebrate, the reduction of violence in the world where and when it occurs. And we should acknowledge the part modernity has played in that, and in many other advances. But Pinker himself notes that elevated self-esteem — perhaps we could say hubris? — is one of the many factors that can lead people to violence. There are others of course, such as a faith that one has discovered the ultimate true path that will lead the world to peace. Or, for that matter, a faith in the transformative power of evolutionary progress, sometimes known as eugenics, from which some bad things have flowed in this, our modernity.

Pinker likes to see himself as a contrarion, but reason, science, progress, and self-regard are hardly anathema in our world’s wonkish corridors of power. Since one of the gifts of the enlightenment is a questioning of orthodoxies, it seems only reasonable to question the orthodoxy of enlightenment as well. Among other things, we might consider the possibility that there is something morally retarded in believing that we are the most morally advanced individuals to ever walk the earth. Perhaps we could also think of peace less as an algorithm and more as a gift, for which we make ourselves continually worthy through humility and contrition. Acknowledging our successes is certainly part of that, but so is admitting to our failures. Modernity is both our long peace and the guillotine. I don’t think that downplaying the second will extend the first.

The Brain Is…Afraid!

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I just saw Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. It’s an uncannily prescient movie. Released in 1997, it imagines a quasi-fascist future in which the earth is militarized to fight the bugs — a race of giant insectoids. The war really kicks into high gear after the bugs launch an asteroid from space and destroy one of the earth’s major cities, Buenos Aires. (As a television announcement says: “Out of the ashes of Buenos Aires comes first sorrow…then anger. The only good bug is a dead bug!”)

One of the best parts of the film is the very end. The humans had always assumed that the bugs had only rudimentary intelligence. But while this is true for the most part, it turns out that there are a few “brain bugs” — giant gelatinous larvae-looking things, which can suck out human brains the better to understand the enemy, doncha know. Our heroes are drafted for a suicide mission to bring one of the brain bugs back, dead or alive. They succeed, of course — and it only takes them about a year, as opposed to ten for us (though to be fair, they’ve gone farther down the road of authoritarianism, and so are of course more efficient.)

Anyway, all the troops get together and they haul the giant larval brain bug out of its dank cave in the mountains, and then the creepily psychic military intelligence guy (played by Neil Patrick Harris, believe it or not) walks down to confront it, stylishly dressed in Nazi-chic full dresscoat.

“What’s it thinking corporal?” his superior officer asks him.

He walks up to it and puts his hand gently on the side of its head, not too far from its vagina-like mouth. There is a long pause.

“It’s afraid,” he says softly. And then louder. “It’s afraid!”

And all the grunts explode into cheers! Happy ending! Terrified, captured, evil sentient lifeform can now be systematically tortured to death! Huzzah!

(I can’t embed the clip for some reason, but you can watch it here.)

The best part of the conclusion is that capturing the bug does not, of course, end the war. This is a fascist fantasy, after all. As Nietzsche says,

Ye shall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory…. Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity.

The happy ending to a war is more war, more courage. Victory doesn’t mean truce; it means everybody gets promoted and you get to torture the enemy and discover new and better ways to grind him (and her!) into ever finer bits of ichor. The last we see of the brain bug (in a scene that I think is excised form that Youtube bit) some faceless tech is sticking a phallic laser drill into that suggestively formed mouth, and a giant “CENSORED” sign appears on the screen, the better to allow us to imagine the stimulating shenanigans.

And what do those shenanigans stimulate us to do? “We have the ships…we have the weapons! We need soldiers!” the movie blares in its closing moments. And that surely applies even more to us. After all, the Starship Troopers are only fighting one war. We’ve got three going (if Afghanistan/Pakistan is one, and not counting Yemen because it is secret.) There will be much more heroism to come, and many more brains to kill. To paraphrase the last words emblazoned on the screen, we’ll keep fighting…and we’ll win!

War, what is it good for?

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Blazing Combat
Editor and Writer: Archie Goodwin
Original Publisher: Warren Publishing (1965-66)
Re-published by Fantagraphics Books

Blazing Combat was a war anthology edited and written by Archie Goodwin in collaboration with a dozen artists. It was also a commercial flop back in the sixties, getting canceled after only four issues. According to its publisher, James Warren, the tepid sales were due to politics. The book earned the ire of comic distributors (many of whom were veterans) for its perceived anti-war bias and they refused to sell it. It was outright banned from stores on military bases, meaning that active servicemen (who made up a sizable share of the market for war comics) could not buy it.

But authoritarian politics and government censorship are no match for comic book nostalgia. Decades later, Blazing Combat was resurrected by Fantagraphics, and it’s not hard to see why. Forget the stories or the politics; the list of artists who worked on this title is an aging fanboy’s wet dream. Frank Frazetta (on covers), Wally Wood, John Severin, Alex Toth, Gene Colan. And these artists brought their “A” game. As mainstream comic art goes, few books look as good as Blazing Combat.

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Review: It Was the War of the Trenches

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When two specks in the distance start shooting at Ferdinand Bardamu on the first page of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, he quickly comes to the unshakable conclusion that it is all a big mistake. His only viable option is to get out of that situation as soon as possible. The colonel overseeing his fate, a man with no use for fear, is deemed a “monster” and “worse than a dog”, but absolutely typical of the army as a whole:

“…I realized that there must be plenty of brave men like him in our army, and just as many no doubt in the army facing us. How many, I wondered. One or two million, say several million in all? The thought turned my fear to panic. With such people this infernal lunacy could go on forever….Why would they stop? Never had the world seemed so implacably doomed.”

Bardamu’s attitude is one of absolute revulsion for his commanding officers. The report that his sergeant has been blown up while going to meet a bread wagon is an occasion for celebration (“that makes one less stinker in the regiment!…In that respect you can’t deny it, the war seemed to serve a purpose now and then!”). The countryside? Even on the best of days “dreary” and godforsaken, “if to all that you add a war, it’s completely unbearable.”

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Bombs in NeverNeverland

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I wrote this almost twenty years ago for a course on representations of war when I was a junior in college. It touches on some issues raised in the comments section of Alex Buchet’s recent post on war comics, so I thought I’d resurrect it. I think I still agree with the main points, though the prose would probably be a trifle less earnest if I wrote it now. But, for better or worse, here it is.
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“All children, except one, grow up,” writes J.M. Barrie at the beginning of Peter Pan. In many ways, the fictional constructions of war created by Tennyson, Kipling, Remarque, and Zola, appear to be attempting to deny this insight; appear to be attempting to suggest that war provides a return to an idyllic youth and innocence which allows the men who participate in it to escape from the mores and constrictions of adult society and return to an idealized childhood in which manners and restraint are cast away and replaced by simplicity and exuberant enthusiasm. War, for these authors, is an arena in which adventures can occur; in which heroism and enthusiasm triumph over the stodgy grind of day to day life. One can almost hear the cavalry in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” declaring, with Peter Pan, “I’m youth, I’m joy” as they thunder towards the artillery guns, can almost hear Peter’s cocky self-assurance in Kipling’s breezy assumption that “of course” the British forces broke the “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”. The soldiers of which Kipling, Tennyson, Remarque and Zola speak have no fear, they have no doubts. They live, like children, in their own world with their own rules, in their own “NeverNeverland” separated entirely and forcibly from the reach and understanding of adult society.

Yet, despite this separation, the soldier is not ostracized, not attacked or unaccepted by the society which he seemingly rejects. He is not, in fact, a threat to civilized society, but is rather a delightful dream, an idea with great appeal both to the emotions and to the imaginations of people of the time, as the popularity of Charles Gordon demonstrates. Thus Kipling’s “Tommy” is a man (or, perhaps more correctly, a boy) who should be admired and loved even though he does not really fit the mores and norms of society, even though, as Kipling puts it, his “conduck isn’t all your fancy paints”. It is, in fact, Tommy’s separation from fine society which make him an attractive figure; his very simplicity, the very fact that he does not want luxuries but only wishes to be treated “rational”, composes his glamour. Tommy does not want “better food”, but only to be accepted by society without having to conform to its rules. He wants (and appears to receive from Kipling) to be given the freedom not to conform and to be admired for his very possession of that freedom; wants, like Peter Pan, to receive unconditional affection and yet to never have his mind cleaned.

It should, of course, be impossible to be at one and the same time independent and dependent, impossible to be heroic for the sake of the sympathy and admiration which that heroism brings. Only if one is capable of a total lack of self-reflection and self-awareness is this contradiction resolvable; it is only through his total naivety that Peter Pan is able to both expect admiration and receive it. Through war, Kipling, Tennyson, Zola and Remarque appear to suggest, through becoming a soldier, this simplicity can be (re)gained, this idealized childhood can be (re)found. Soldiers, like children, are, for these authors, not concerned with whether what they do is correct or incorrect, they do not agonize–they simply are. The soldiers whom Zola describes are “Like children and savages, their only instinct…to eat and sleep in this rush towards the unknown with no tomorrow”, Remarque’s Paul notes that “The national feeling of the tommy resolves itself into this–here he is.” The soldier is unthinking; in fact, thought is his enemy, his destroyer. The self-reflection which connotes adulthood, the loss of innocence and unselfconsciousness, results, in these fictions, in age and death. When the soldier begins to think, as Lapoulle does after killing Pache, he is destroyed. As Remarque’s Paul says, “we [the soldiers] are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.”

Remarque, of course, is contending that it is the horror of war, not of adulthood, which makes this jollity necessary; that to think about war would cause madness, insanity. But in many ways Remarque’s novel makes a statement not that war is too awful to think about, but that it is, in fact, aging which is the greatest horror. It is for this reason that the older men in the War are not as tragic as the men of Paul’s generation, for the older men have no youth to lose. For Remarque, the tragedy of the war is a loss of childhood, is the fact that through the war, Paul discovers death and sexual initiation (“the curse of a soldier” as Kipling writes), fear and vulnerability. Yet all of these discoveries are, in fact, not unique to wartime; as Paul himself realizes, they are instead the necessary adjuncts of adult life, the manifestations of a superficial society which delivers coffins punctually before a battle and places you under the arbitrary control of a postmaster. The war is the extension of civilian societies cruelties and artificialities, stupidities and absurdities. But even as it is so, the war also provides a means of escape, a strategy of resistance, a means whereby youth can be retained through “the finest thing that arose out of the war-comradeship.” Through this camaraderie, the trappings and foolishness of civilization, the unnecessary clutter of the school room, can be shrugged off and subsumed in the contentment of a good meal tasted among good friends. Paul relishes the experience of sitting with his comrades on their makeshift toilets not in spite of the primitiveness of the facilities, but because of it. Remarque views culture and civilization with suspicion, and finds in war a way to sidestep them, to return to the idyllic childhood which Zola describes the young intellectual Maurice finding in the arms of the simple peasant Jean when “Maurice

…let himself be carried away like a child. No woman’s arms had ever held him as close and warm as this…Was this not the brotherhood of the earliest days of the world, friendship before there was any culture or class, the friendship of two men united and become as one in their common need of help in the face of the threat of hostile nature?

Through his relationship with Jean, Maurice regains infancy; he is tended too, sheltered, cared for. War in The Debacle provides Maurice with a way to return to simplicity, with a means of becoming both noble and tragic. He becomes one of the “poor boys, poor boys” to whom his sister refers; he becomes innocent. In its creation of an arena in which life becomes more simple and true, war also, then, absolves of guilt even as it confers naivete. The soldier makes a sacrifice for crimes he did not commit. Like the men of the Charge of the Light Brigade, he goes unquestioningly to his death, following orders to the last. The betrayal of the soldier by civilians and generals is made all the more poignant because the soldier has done nothing wrong; has, in fact, placed his whole trust and hope upon civilian assurances of glory and easy victory. The betrayal is, in fact, like the betrayal which Peter Pan experiences at Hook’s treachery on the rock in the lagoon, the betrayal of a child’s total trust by a parent’s unfairness, after which, Barrie writes the child “will never afterwards be quite the same boy.”

It is this betrayal which Paul feels has robbed him of his youth when he says that, “I am young, I am twenty years old yet I…see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. [italics mine]” Remarque claims, then, both that the soldiers have lost their innocence, and that they retain it. Remarque says that their parents have failed them, and yet he still conceptualizes them as children. They have discovered that the world is unfair, and yet Remarque, through Paul, still perceives them as innocent. Paul repeats over and over that his generation is lost, it is useless, it is old and destroyed, but he never once decides to stop fighting, and even pushes Himmelstoss forward when the former drill master falters. Self-consciously martyred, Paul cannot solve, but can only revel in his troubles, just as Mr. Darling revels in his sojourn in the kennel.

Mr. Darling is, of course, not really comparable to Paul. He is not as young, nor in as much distress; he was not in the trenches of the First World War. Yet, in a deeper sense, Mr. Darling is very much like Paul, very much like Maurice, very much, for that matter, like Charles Gordon. He is a man who wishes more than anything to be admired, as Paul and Maurice did when they joined their respective armies, but who, through that very wishing, has condemned himself to an unadmirable existence. He is a conceited fool, a whining incompetent, a desperately contemptible figure when placed beside the apogee of unconscious grace and youthful innocence which is Peter Pan. And yet, while no one would want to be Mr. Darling, no one can wish to be Peter Pan either, because the very wishing dooms the attempt. One either has “good form” or does not have it. To have good form is to be young, unconscious, free. But “All children, except one, grow up.” And that one, as Barrie surely knew better than anyone else, was not real.

This is, I think, Barrie’s central insight, is the reason that Peter Pan , if it does not really oppose war, offers a way to oppose war that none of the other pieces of literature we have studied manage to suggest. For if, in fact, childhood is unattainable, if simplicity is gone, then the attempt to recapture that simplicity and childhood through war is not only misguided, but is actually dangerous, futile, and pitiful. Barrie loved children, he loved childhood. But he knew that he was not a child, and that he could not become one by travelling to some foreign field with a rifle and a battalion of comrades. Childhood games played by adults are not touching or cute; they are pitiful and even terrible. When Mr. Darling pours the medicine into Nanna’s bowl, he does not appeal to the reader in the same way that Peter does when he plays the game of question and answer with the pirates. Similarly, Peter’s comment that “to die will be an awfully big adventure” is charming and witty only when uttered by Peter’s naive voice. Kipling’s effort to capture what appears to be a similar sentiment sounds incredibly cold-hearted and callous, advising as it does that a soldier wounded on the field of battle and facing imminent mutilation ought to “Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains.” On the other hand, the French mutineer’s letter telling his sweetheart that, “I love you, and I don’t want to die”, is touchingly painful, and would be just as out of place in Peter Pan as would Kipling’s injunction. Real horror (though apparently Kipling, whose brain may itself be scrambled in some anomalous fashion, does not know it is real horror), and real fear are not part of the world which Barrie describes.

This is, of course, because Barrie’s world is not real. NeverNeverland is named so for the obvious reason. Tennyson, Zola, Kipling, and Remarque, in attempting to locate it within the context of reality, in attempting to suggest that NeverNeverland is obtainable within a historical rather than an imaginary framework, trap themselves within the very mundane existence that they wish to escape. In trying to escape adulthood, in trying to leave behind their responsibilities, they succeed only in making Mr. Darlings of themselves, only in placing themselves in a continuum where they refuse to face their problems because they wish so badly to transcend them. Tennyson cannot feel outrage or shock at the death of the Light Brigade, Zola can create only shallow caricatures in the place of real characters, Remarque can not move past self-pity and gruesome imagery to register any deep and meaningful moral objection to the carnage he witnessed, and Kipling appears to have buried any decent human compassion at all beneath a glut of imperialist fervor. Each is left romanticizing stupidity and horror in the hope that in doing so they can rediscover the childhood that they have lost.

Barrie offers no alternative to this quest. He, too, cannot turn from childhood, cannot stop seeking Peter Pan. But he knows, as Tennyson, Kipling, Zola, and even Remarque do not seem to, that the quest is futile, knows that Wendy and John and Michael and the Lost Boys must grow up eventually, must take up a mundane existence no matter how boring or dull it appears. And once it is recognized that war is not a return to some idealized NeverNeverland of childhood, then perhaps a convincing opposition to it can begin to be formulated.