We Live Here

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

I’m not generally inclined to like right wing agitprop. Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen were some of the worst films I’ve ever seen; cheerfully swaggering calls to genocide, unrelieved by either intelligence or any conviction beyond, “blow up those non-white people, yeeha!” Their bland irresponsibility was only rivaled by their cynical opportunism; the first used North Korea rather than China as the villain because the Chinese market means we have to pretend we don’t hate the people from that part of the world; the second deployed Morgan Freeman as vice president to show that non-white people are okay as long as they’re played by perennial comforting side-kick black person Morgan Freeman.

On the surface, Red Dawn, from 1984, is in the same vein as these turkeys. As in Olympus Has Fallen, the U.S. suffers an invasion—not from North Korea, but from Cubans and Russians raiding middle America from Mexico. And as in Olympus Has Fallen, the exciting fantasy is to see righteous Americans kicking the invaders butts. It’s all turning America into the scrappy underdog resisting oppression, a paranoid wish-fulfillment/fever dream in which someone does to the US what the US is always doing to everyone else, allowing us to expiate our guilty consciences in an orgy of xenophobic violence.

What makes Red Dawn different, though, is the ruthless, tragic vision. Olympus Has Fallen is a cheerful empowerment fantasy for macho imperialists; the heroes are a virile secret service agent and the American president. And the good guys unequivocally win; it’s a rousing ode to the awesomeness of coastal elites and the national security state. The right people are in the right place, and they’ll kick some terrorist ass.

Red Dawn, though, really thinks that the United States is on the verge of collapse. The heroes here aren’t the national security personnel, who, from the little we hear of them, are distant and probably incompetent. Rather, the protagonists are a group of high school football dudes—a scared, battered band who survive on team slogans (“Wolverines!”) and tearful determination.

The whole thing is preposterous, of course—the idea that the Cubans somehow gain immediate air superiority is as goofy as the fact that the Wolverine resistance fighters appear to have a virtually limitless supply of high tech weaponry. But the melodramatic details have the vivid, dumb terror of overdetermined nightmare. The way the black history teacher —the only black man in the film—is the first one shot by the enemy; the grizzled dad telling his boys through the concentration camp wire that he was tough on them in anticipation of just such a Communist invasion; the NRA sign declaring that you’ll remove my gun from my cold dead hand, flashed right before one of the Commies removes a gun from some poor bastard’s cold dead hand.

What makes the film, I think, is the yearning—for justification, for apotheosis, for death. People talk about liberal guilt, but I’ve never seen a film so utterly sodden in maudlin self-loathing, like a sentient sponge adrift in the stale beer of bad conscience. From the reflexive, furtive references to Native Americans to the Cuban officer recalling his own days as a partisan, America’s history of imperial atrocity wafts over the Wolverines like a ragged, hacking football cheer. The heroic deaths, one by one, seem both expiation and justification. When Patrick Swayze is asked what’s the difference between them and us he declares “we live here!” before standing by as one of his teen soldiers shoots another to death for treachery. That’s a pretty forthright stand against imperialism—or a forthright, desperate declaration that good football players like Swayze are incapable of imperialism, as the case may be.

Olympus Has Fallen is happy with the status quo; it just wants the same Americans to triumph who always triumph, with maybe a few more explosions and dead bodies thrown in. Red Dawn, on the other hand, is about an American heartland that feels both alienated from and implicated in power, and sees the only honorable resolution in apocalypse. It’s America’s death wish on screen, the last stand of god-fearing freedom lovers, knee deep in blood, building their own gulag.

Ancillary Imperialism

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

I’m currently whipping through Ann Lecki’s Ancillary series. It’s great fun; page turning space opera adventure with twisty plots and thoughtful meditations on justice, identity and gender along the way. I love the LeGuin/Butler/Russ/etc. tradition of feminist sci-fi, and Leckie does too, so that makes me happy.

I can’t really recommend this as highly as LeGuin/Butler/Russ, though, nor with the enthusiasm I have for more contemporary writers like N.K. Jemisin and Gwyneth Jones. Leckie has plenty of smarts, and she writes well, but she’s just too…cheerful.

Some might be taken aback at the idea that the Ancillary series is cheerful. The central event of the books is when the main character—a spaceship, with connected ancillary human bodies—is forced to kill its captain, the love of its life. The ship is then dismantled, and one escaped ancillary body, now calling itself Breq, fless across the universe, consumed with sorrow.

That sorrow never goes away, nor really gets revenged (at least not after the first two volumes) which is why some folks might not immediately see the books as particularly happy. In fact, though, Breq’s personal pain becomes a kind of guarantor of a broader, more thoroughgoing justice. Breq in fact functions as a kind of superhero. She (most people in the novel default to the pronoun “she”), as a former ship’s ancillary, is incredibly physically adept, ancient and knowledgeable, and, as a former slave-body, uniquely attuned to the trials of the marginalized and oppressed.

In the second book, Ancillary Sword, especially, Breq’s unique qualifications and sympathies become a literal social justice deus ex machina. Dispatched as a powerful commander to Atoehk Station in the wake of a chaotic breakdown of the empire, where Breq encounters fairly transparent analogues of earth prejudice, ghettoes, and slave plantations. With vast political and personal abilities and an infallible sense of morality, Breq swoops in to show the locals the error of their ways. She orders repairs to the ghettoes, sparks wage negotiations on the plantations, and forces the recalcitrant citizens to confront their unjust preconceptions every one.

Part of the problem is that, as ship’s captain, Breq has access to instantaneous information from her ship which allows her to function as a semi-omniscient narrator; she knows what other characters are doing, and, often even what they are thinking and feeling. With this kind of panoramic view, Breq and the voice of the novel become almost simultaneous; Breq might as well be the author, which means that the book feels like Leckie setting up the other characters as problems to be solved by Breq. “Everything necessitates its opposite,” Breq says. “How can you be civilized if there is no uncivilized?” She’s reprimanding the Radchaai for their imperial ways…but she could be talking about the structure of the book itself, in which a plentful of foils are presented as less civilized so that Breq can show them the way.

There’s an instructive parallel here with the Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, in which creepy tentacled alien things descend from the sky after earth has destroyed itself to heal the humans and show them the path to happiness, great sex, and the acceptance of difference. The thing is, though, that Butler’s Oankali have their own selfish motivations—and also don’t exactly have the readers sympathies. The aliens are more noble and smarter than the humans—but they’re also imperial invaders, and since the reader is human, this imperial conquest comes across in sharp relief, even though in other respects the Oankali are clearly superior (morally and in other ways) to the folks they conquer.

Imperialism in, say, Afghanistan is often launched in the name of justice and mercy. If the imperialists impose women’s rights, is the imperialism justified? Isn’t there a problem with even phrasing the question that way? Butler’s novels are about this…but the Ancillary series is not, really. Leckie deals with many issues of injustice and marginalization, but she never really confronts the imperial implications of an outsider swooshing in to solve all of some backwards planet’s problems. Breq sees the problems with other power disparities, but her power as an occupier is never effectively interrogated or questioned. As a result, the problems the novel raises are resolved with an unconvincing neatness. The emperor is just a little too wise, a little too strong, and a little too good to be true.

Alice in Colonyland

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

The potential imperial metaphor in Alice in Wonderland had never really occurred to me before, but Tim Burton’s oddly formulaic,and formulaicly odd 2010 remake stumbles into it. In this version, Alice’s father is a visionary merchant, who dies organizing trade to Sumatra. Alice is trapped in a conventional life and arranged marriage, until she falls down the rabbit hole into a strange backwards monarchy, which she saves before returning to her own land and setting off on an adventure to China. Adventure in the colonies gives white women scope to escape their limited lives; freedom means both freedom from England’s restrictions, and freedom to be a white savior somewhere else.

The connection between freedom and non-white people is emphasized at the end of the film when Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter performs the goofy Futterwacken: i.e., break dancing. Alice when she returns to the mundane world takes a shimmy about with the same dance herself, demonstrating she’s also a free spirited white woman who is down with black culture (somewhere Miley Cyrus was watching.)

So how much of this imperial dynamic was there in the original Alice? The connection between the colonies and freedom wasn’t there; Wonderland isn’t a venue for self-actualization in Carroll’s original story. Alice doesn’t get to be the hero slaying the Jabberwocky; nor does she find delightful friends and allies. In Carroll’s version of the tale, everyone Alice meets has their own impenetrable agenda, and treats her with impatience and rudeness when they don’t ignore her all together. Really, the Carroll Wonderland has less in common with Burton’s Underland than it does with his just plain old regular Britain, where Alice’s relations and friends casually bully her for not entirely clear motives, and demand she play their games without telling her the rules.

Still, in nineteenth century England, any trip to a strange and exotic land has to recall the greater imperial context. The Red Queen wandering around shouting off with their heads is of course a joke in part because Queens didn’t have that sort of authority in England any more—though in the colonies it was another issue. The way in which British customs are parodied and warped in Wonderland —that eternal tea time—also suggests a kind of other who both is and isn’t the self, like the colonized people conforming and yet not, quite.

Carroll’s Wonderland ultimately has a not very buried undercurrent of nastiness and cruelty; everyone casually despises Alice, and she doesn’t much like them either. There’s an authoritarian violence that lingers everywhere, treated as a joke, but never really dispelled. In Burton, the colonies are an exciting adventure, and a chance for exotic triumph. In Carroll, invading that distant land is less of a dream, and more of a nightmare for everyone.

The Iraq War as Blogging Psychodrama

Posted on February 1, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared at Splice Today.
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I Was Wrong: A Real Time Chronicle of the Iraq War, 2001-2008, Andrew Sullivan’s recently released ebook, is a compilation of his blogging on the Iraq war. As such, it begins with a post on September 11, 2001, a few hours after the attack on the World Trade Center. “When our shock recedes,” he writes in that first entry,

“our rage must be steady and resolute and unforgiving. The response must be disproportionate to the crime and must hold those states and governments that have tolerated this evil accountable. This is the single most devastating act of war since Nagasaki. It is the first time that an enemy force has invaded the precincts of the American capital since the early nineteenth century. It is more dangerous than Pearl Harbor. And it is a reminder that the forces of resentment and evil can no longer be appeased. They must be destroyed – systematically, durably, irrevocably. Perhaps now we will summon the will to do it. “

Sullivan’s initial reaction, is, then, a narrative — and a familiar one. It is a story of evil revenged, good triumphant, and violence unleashed. World War II is summoned up, through references to Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and appeasement. The accuracy of these past allusions (Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurds in 1988 caused more deaths than September 11, to name just one post-Nagasaki example) is less important than the future they point to. That future is just war, and a new greatest generation, of which Sullivan (through that collective “we”) will be a part

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. I Was Wrong is the story of a story gone awry; it’s about how Sullivan thought he was in a book about good defeating evil, and instead discovers himself in a different tale altogether. The arc of that tale is traced clearly enough in the chapter subheads of the ebook: “Trauma”, “Doubt” and “Regret.” Shocked by 9/11, Sullivan hoped for, demanded, and was finally thrilled by the reality of war. As the Iraq quagmire deepened, and the extent of Bush’s “feckless” mendacity became clear, he began to re-examine his support. And finally, with the revelations of Abu Ghraib, he realized that the war should never have been waged, and that he had been complicit in an atrocity. “Those of us who supported this war cannot wash our hands of the blood of tens of thousands of innocents it has now claimed,” he wrote in October 2006. And he adds, in an epilogue, “Although my intentions were good, I feel ashamed of some of the sentences in this book.”

Sullivan’s recognition of his errors, and his willingness to admit them, are both extremely admirable. Yet, there are unsettling ways in which the story he thought he was telling in the beginning and the story he ends up telling fit together almost too well. In his second post on the day of 9/11, for example, Sullivan writes:

It feels – finally – as if a new era has begun. The strange interlude of 1989 – 2001, with its decadent post-Cold War extravaganzas from Lewinsky to Condit to the e-boom, is now suddenly washed away…. The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society.

In this story of 9/11, the fall of the towers becomes an awakening; a traumatic shock that erases the past and leads to moral and spiritual renewal. Though the specifics are somewhat altered, isn’t that also the story of I Was Wrong, with its path from benightedness to revelation to knowledge, awakening, and renewal? Sullivan here, waxing lyrical about America and freedom and democracy, doesn’t sound so very different from Sullivan at the end of the book endorsing Obama and “a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.” We always seem to be regenerating in one way or another, always involved in a never-ending American apotheosis of purification and renewal.

This is, perhaps, just another way of saying that Andrew Sullivan is still Andrew Sullivan; he may have reversed his opinions, but he’s still the same excitable, starry-eyed blogger in 2008 that he was in 2001. From this perspective, the most important part of the title I Was Wrong is not the “Wrong”, but the “I”. In his afterword, Sullivan says that “a blogger writing daily…has nowhere to hide,” by which he means that he can conceal nothing. But it also seems to suggest that he, himself, conceals everything — that he’s so close to the camera that you can’t see past him. Thus, September 11 becomes his revenge fantasy. Thus, I Was Wrong turns the Iraq war and its aftermath into the confessional, spiritual journey of one, Andrew Sullivan.

Blogging as a form explains a good deal of this self-absorption. You read Andrew Sullivan for news to get not just Andrew Sullivan’s take, or opinion, about the news, as you might find in an op-ed. Rather, you read Sullivan’s blog, or Sullivan’s book, to get Andrew Sullivan’s story of the news — an ongoing narrative about the world, filtered through his particular perspective. The fact that the Iraq War ends up being about Andrew Sullivan isn’t because Andrew Sullivan is a navel-gazing narcissist; it’s simply a genre default. In superhero comics, the superhero wins; in romance novels, the girl gets the guy; in blogging, the blogger is front and center. If you don’t like the trope, you read something else.

Whether you like them or don’t, though, tropes have meaning. In this case the narrative impulse to turn piles of dead bodies into a story by, and/or about, this one guy watching seems like it has more than a passing relationship to American policy. The invasion of Iraq, as Sullivan’s book painfully shows, was about a desire for revenge and for American renewal and goodness — it was about us, first and last, in other words, rather than about the WMDs that weren’t there, or about human rights which Abu Ghraib showed we didn’t much care about in the first place. Sullivan can change the story about himself from revenge to regret, but he can’t stop making it about himself. One way or another, for us the meaning of Iraq is not Iraq, but us. The real moral error in I Was Wrong is not believing Bush or miscalculating the costs of war, but treating a country full of people as characters in one’s own psychodrama. That’s called imperialism. As this book shows, even for someone as honest and thoughtful as Andrew Sullivan, it’s a hard vice to break.

Spare Them Our Good Intentions

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared in edited form in the Chicago Reader.
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We tend to think of imperialism as motivated by greed and racism, but the truth is that it is just as often actuated by altruism. Whether it’s Rudyard Kipling urging the U.S. to take up the white man’s burden and colonize the Philippines or Christopher Hitchens urging the U.S. to take up the white man’s burden and occupy Iraq, humanitarian concerns and foreign adventure are inseparable. As counterintuitive as it may seem, in case after case, “empathy” turns out to be another word for “invasion.”

Of course, many anti-imperialists like to argue that the conflation of empathy and invasion is simply cynical spin. From this perspective, talk of democracy is just to cover up a real obsession with (or example) oil. Imperial altruism becomes, then, a kind of complicated conspiracy theory. It is this conspiracy theory which Richard Huzzey meticulously dismantles in his new book Freedom Burning.

Freedom Burning focuses on British anti-slavery in the years following the abolition of the slave trade in 1833. Though the topic is fascinating, and certainly relevant to our own imperial moment, Huzzey is not an especially engaging writer. His book is a dry read, as it winds its way through a maze of Foreign Office policy, Parliamentary politics and long-past controversies. In many cases, Huzzey seems to go out of his way to avoid telling a good story; he references the British Niger expedition of 1841 as a disastrous result of anti-slavery ideology, but he repeatedly eschews the opportunity to explain even the outlines of that disaster, in which more than a third of the 159 Europeans died from disease.

But Huzzey’s bland delivery only emphasizes the bitterness of his conclusion — which is that anti-slavery was not a cover-up for British imperialism. On the contrary, it was a central engine of expansion, and the coherent consensus which made that expansion possible. British determination to search all shipping on the high-seas, for example, was motivated in large part by the desire to prevent the transportation of slaves. When the British torched a West African settlement on the Gallinas River in 1845, they were not enslaving the people, but fighting for emancipation by punishing local leaders who had allegedly had dealings with slave traders. They were, sincerely, burning the village in order to save the people. (18-19)

Anti-slavery, then, became not just the excuse, but the motive for extending and exercising British power. As Huzzey says, “anti-slavery was the popular aspect of imperial expansion,” and “Anti-slavery ideologies were one of the principal ways that commercial, spiritual, and moral objectives could be combined.” (190) This didn’t mean, or didn’t just mean, that politicians couched their policies in anti-slavery terms in order to appeal to the public. It also meant, as Huzzey shows, that politicians, like their constituents, thought about, and conceived of, foreign policy against the background of an anti-slavery consensus to which virtually everyone, politicians and public, had to conform. Huzzey notes that it was basically impossible “to be taken seriously in public debates if an author defended slavery.” (46) Thus, for example, some Brits advocated against the naval suppression of the slave trade. But they did so on solidly anti-slavery grounds, arguing that forcing the trade underground could worsen conditions for transported slaves, and even caused slavers to throw their cargo overboard when a British ship approached. (133)

Anti-slavery ideology was so flexible that it could even exist alongside open and vicious racism. Indeed, as Huzzey depressingly chronicles, anti-slavery actually provided white Britons with a strong rationale for hating their black countrymen. In the first place, the prevalence of slavery in African nations, and the complicity of African leaders in the slave trade, were attributed by white Europeans to black racial inferiority and immorality. (192)

Even more damaging, though, was the coalescence of anti-slavery and racism in the West Indies. There, freed British slaves were reluctant to return to the plantation system, preferring instead to work for themselves. This understandable desire for autonomy and self-respect was interpreted by white Britons as laziness and backwardness, and solidified racist stereotypes of black people. Even the anti-slavery argument that slavery was catastrophically dehumanizing was turned against black people. If blacks were dehumanized, then they shouldn’t be treated as human, the reasoning went — and so anti-slavery provided the foundation for coercive laws forcing black people back into virtual slavery on the plantations. (192)

An ideology of freedom, then, did not lead to an ideology of equality. On the contrary, a belief in freedom ended up justifying and enforcing inequity. Not only did British anti-slavery ideology encourage racism — it arguably encouraged slave-trading. Even as the British boarded the ships of other nations in search of slaves, their own vessels carried hundred of thousands of Indian laborers across the empire. These Indians were not technically “slaves,” but were instead indentured servants or people working under debt bondage or contract. There was some outcry against the treatment of these workers, who were certainly coerced in many cases. However, this coercion was not necessarily seen as incompatible with anti-slavery. On the contrary, since ex-slaves were viewed as lazy and irresponsible, it was generally thought that some form of forced labor was needed to secure a stable post-slavery economy. East Indians were brought to the West Indies to make blacks work without slavery. Thus, again, anti-slavery required (wage or contract) slavery. (201-202)

Huzzey points out that one of the main contributions of anti-slavery to imperialism is simple attention. The suppression of the slave trade provided much early interest in Africa where otherwise there would have been little or none.” (191) Thus, the very energy and focus that had allowed for the abolition of slavery within Britain flowed naturally, once that slavery was abolished, into a continued focus on, and meddling in, Africa, with devastating long-term consequences.

Were those consequences worth the abolition of slavery? If slavery had been abandoned earlier, might there have been a more thorough and rapacious imperial presence in Africa? If slavery had been allowed to continue for longer — say, till after the American Civil War — would Africa have been subject to shorter and less crippling European colonization?

Huzzey raises these questions, but is too careful to attempt to answer them. Still, I wish every would-be do-gooder, whether of left, right, or center, would read his book — and not just because turning pages might briefly distract them from their violent schemes of world-betterment. Huzzey’s book suggests not just that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that the road to hell is paved specifically with our good intentions. Freedom, democracy, empathy, even equality — all America’s ideals are WMDs waiting to be armed and detonated wherever our attention happens to alight, whether it’s in Africa, Kosovo, or Iran. U.S. humanitarian efforts throughout the world are, of course, laudable, and do enormous good. But even so, it’s hard to read Freedom Burning without wondering whether it might be better for everyone else if we cared about them a little less, and minded our own business a little more.
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Empathy and Iconicity, cont’d

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

My most recent post on Lefèvre’s and Guibert’s The Photographer received some insightful, but contentious, comments that I haven’t had a chance to respond to. And since I don’t have much else to post about at the moment (copies of Chloé Cruchaudet’s Mauvais Genre and Rutu Modan’s The Property are both in the mail), I will respond belatedly to these comments, which came from Noah and Suat, here in the form of a post.

Didier Lefèvre, Le Photographe

Noah’s comment:

I think there’s in general a question about whether empathy in these situations is helpful or useful. I think Suat wrote about this recently; engaging the West’s attention/sympathy isn’t always such a great thing for people experiencing war or human rights violations. Sometimes having us pay attention or having us put ourselves in your place is really dangerous/bad. (I think in general the Middle East probably wishes we’d stop paying attention to them, for example.) So, I guess I wonder whether the combination of photography/comics really changes the ethical calculus all that much. Obviously, failing to help a little girl in front of you is pretty repulsive, but framing the issue in terms of “if you don’t help you’re repulsive” — is that accurate? Or does art’s tendency to make geopolitical issues into a personal “you-must-help!” actually increase our tendency to try to solve other people’s problems by dropping bombs on them?

Probably the biggest thing we could do to help people in need throughout the world is (a) open our borders, and (b) end our crop subsidies. Neither of those really have much to do with representing the suffering of others in comics or photographs…which I agree raises really uncomfortable ethical questions.

Suat’s piece on the Walking Dead does make a powerful argument along these lines and I agree completely that humanitarian aid projects often hide pernicious forms of cultural and economic imperialism, whether you’re talking about immediately harmful cases such as US evangelicals driving hate legislation in Uganda or, more subtly, the way in which humanitarian aid from NGOs in post-conflict states like Sudan and Liberia has eroded their sovereignty by creating economic and political dependency. And certainly much of the funding for these humanitarian aid projects is generated through photography, video, copywriting, and art that aim to draw sympathy from their Western donors. So it is actually important, even necessary, that we be suspicious of cartoonists and photographers such as Lefèvre and Guibert (and while we’re at it, why not add Guy de Lisle, Joe Sacco, and company, to the list?) who deal in ethnographically oriented representations that seek an empathetic response from their readerships. But I don’t think the fact that discourses of humanitarian empathy are co-opted by American imperialist politics should lead us to dismiss or abandon artistic projects that elicit empathy towards those who suffer in faraway places. If anything, it should be the opposite.

However, it also doesn’t excuse artists from being uninformed about the perverse global circuits of “empathetic” Western cultural imperialism in which their work will inevitably find itself complicit. And so I guess another way of saying this is that what I meant by “ethical response” is very different from an impulse to simply donate or volunteer at, say, Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. I mean it in a more absolute sense, I suppose. A fully ethical response would involve exactly the kind of delicate critical concern that Noah’s comment demanded. Of course, one can only fail in the face of such an absolute demand but this shouldn’t stop people from working towards it. I also agree completely with Noah’s point that opening borders and ending crop subsidies (or de-commodifying food) would make a more meaningful impact on people in need throughout the world. But the world of representation and the world of “ethical action” are always caught in a dialectic with one another, so we shouldn’t pretend that they can be thought of separately.

Guy Delisle, Pyongyang

Suat’s response to Noah’s comment:

Scott McCloud’s assertions about the iconicity of simple cartoon drawings are one of his more lasting contributions arising from Understanding Comics but I would also say that they are quite unprovable (how many things are in art?). In fact, from my point of view, the idea is anecdotally false or at least constitutes only a small part of the equation. For example, I found Persepolis thoroughly unmoving but found the Iranian movie, A Separation, considerably more humanistic and emotionally engaging. At least part of this is down to Satrapi’s poor cartooning skills. The idea that readers give life to stripped down iconic forms is nice but fanciful.

Similarly, Noah will be glad to hear that Lefevere and Guibert’s War Photographer stands very little chance of engaging anyone’s empathy. It’s been a few years since I read it but the lasting impression I have of it is my sheer irritation at the reading experience. For one, Guibert goes out of his way to make Lefevere a thoroughly unlikable person especially in the second part of the comic. More importantly, as is made clear in your article, the comic is entirely obsessed with his work as a photographer. It’s very much a “look at me” kind of comic. It has very little time for the people being photographed and one would be better served reading a book on the subject. I think this may be a subset of the self-centeredness elaborated on at length later in the comic.

I do agree that Lefèvre is almost as unlikable as Kevin Carter. But the narrative does insist on outlining a process of self-mortification and eventual transformation, which makes him, at the very least, forgivable. More importantly, I wasn’t trying to argue that Lefèvre is a sympathetic character. I think of him rather as a kind of focal point for the reader’s empathy towards the Afghani war wounded during the Soviet War. I might go as far as to say that it is somehow Lefèvre’s failure to be a good person that opens up a space for the reader’s empathy towards the latter’s photographic subjects. (And of course, the depiction and thematization of this failure is only possible through the addition of Guibert’s drawn panels).

Jean-Philippe Stassen, Deogratias

As for iconicity, I don’t know how to defend my use of the term other than by calling on my own reading experience, which may not be generalizable. I do however believe that a correlation between iconicity and reader empathy might be proven through some sort of psychological experiment. Reader empathy has already been the subject of psychological experimentation, experimental designs are already in place, and it wouldn’t be too hard to add “iconicity” to the mix of variables, so why not? But I also don’t think iconicity is the only mechanism through which readers give life to drawn figures in comics and I worry that I may have sounded as if that’s what I think by opposing photographic realism and cartoon iconicity in such stark terms. And I certainly don’t think that iconicity is necessarily a defining characteristic of comics. Some of the most moving graphic novels I’ve read are those of Edmond Baudoin, which are more painterly than iconic. Let me add that my interest in these questions comes less from the angle of formal definitions concerning the nature of the medium than from the angle of empathetic reading. I’m interested in how it is that artists engage the empathy, and to a further extent, the ethical responsibility, of their readers. So I will need to reframe the question to reflect that better.

Edmond Baudoin, Éloge de la poussière

Tibet, Superhero Tourist Destination of the World

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Zarathustra came down from the mountain in 1883. He’s Nietzsche’s reboot of the ancient Iranian prophet Zoroaster—which means the first Superman came down from a mountain in Asia. It’s been a popular continent for superheroes ever since. When DC rival Victor Fox needed a Superman knock-off for Wonder Comics in 1938, artist Will Eisener sent Wonderman to Tibet where a turbanded Tibetan was handing out magic rings.

Wonderman couldn’t survive the kryptonite of DC’s court injunction, so for Wonder Comics No. 2 Eisner swapped his colored tights and briefs for a tuxedo and amulet-crested turban. Yarko the Great was one of a dozen superhero magicians to materialize in comic books over the next three years. Nine of them shopped at the same turban store—though Zanzibar the Magician got confused and grabbed a Turkish fez instead. Three of them imported Asian servants too.

The tights-and-brief crowd rallied and sent a half dozen new supermen East, three specifically to Tibet, with Egypt as a solid runner-up. My favorite, Bill Everett’s Amazing Man, is almost as naked as his earlier Speedo-sporting Sub-Mariner, but Amazing Man has the power of the Tibetan Council of Seven on his side. He could also turn into “green mist,” which must have annoyed the hell out of the Green Lama. Jack Cole threw in a Fu-Manchu supervillain too: the Claw attacks America from “Tibet, land of strange religions and mysterious customs.”

When Stan Lee’s boss gave him the same assignment (do what DC is doing), he bee-lined back to Tibet for his and Jack Kirby’s first (and mostly forgotten) attempt at a superhero, the 1961 Doctor Droom. Kirby even gives the formerly Caucasian physician slanted eyes and a Fu Manchu moustache as his lama explains: “I have transformed you! I have given you an appearance suitable to your new role!”

Droom flopped, so Kirby sketched an iron mask and Lee dropped the “r” and, voila!, supervillain Doctor Doom was born. The following year Doom was “prowling the wastelands of Tibet, still seeking forbidden secrets of black magic and sorcery!” Another year and Doctor Strange returns from Tibet as “Master of Black Magic!” Strange also picked up Wong, one of those handy manservants Tibetans hand out with their superpowers. The third Doctor emptied Lee’s Tibetan well, but Roy Thomas and Gil Kane’s Iron Fist kept Orientalism thriving at Marvel into the 70s.

Over at Charlton Comics, Peter Morisi’s Thunderbolt returned from his Tibetan adventures with the standard superhero package. Since Alan Moore’s Watchmen were borrowed from Charlton characters, twenty years later his Ozymandias not only “traveled on, through China and Tibet, gathering martial wisdom” but was “transformed” by “a ball of hashish I was given in Tibet” and next things he’s “Adopting Ramses the Second’s Greek name.” Even the 21^st century Batman, as retooled in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, hops over to the Himalayas to learn his chops from yet another monkish mentor. And you’ll never guess where director Josh Trank sends his teen superhuman for the closing shot of the 2012 Chronicle.

The 1930s mystery men loved the Orient too. Before Walter Gibson’s Shadow emigrated from pulp pages to radio waves, he first “went to India, to Egypt, to China . . . to learn the old mysteries that modern science has not yet rediscovered, the natural magic.” When Harry Earnshaw and Raymond Morgan conjured Chandu the Magician for film serials, they sent their secret agent to India to study from another batch of compliant yogis. And not only did Lee Falk’s comic strip do-gooder Mandrake the Magician pick up his powers in Tibet, his Phantom found his dual identity in the India knock-off nation of “Bengalla” (which magically wanders to Africa in later stories).

Before Doctors Strange, Doom and Droom (not a practice included in Obamacare) earned their degrees in Tibet, Doctors Silence, Van Helsing and Hesselius interned their first. You can add Siegel and Shuster’s pre-Superman vampire-hunting Doctor Occult to the list of eligible providers too. Like those turban-obsessed magicians, these world-touring physicians are armed with Oriental knowhow. Algernon Blackwood’s Silence was a 1908 mummy-battling best-seller, cribbed from Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. Stoker’s Van Helsing is an expert on “Eastern Europe” and labels his vampire nemesis “a man-eater, as they of India call the tiger who has once tasted blood of the human.” Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 Dr. Hesselius hunts vamps too, but his first patient is an English reverend driven to suicide by visions of “a small black monkey” caused by his addiction to the “poison” green tea imported from China, ever the land of strange religions and mysterious customs.

Since none of the doctors bother to mention their mentors, the ur-guru award goes to Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 Kim. While no superhero, Kim is the prototypical colonial adventurer, and Kipling supplies him with his very own “guru from Tibet,” one who conveniently needs an English boy (for some reason Asian kids won’t do) to achieve his life-long spiritual quest. Kim in turn treats the guru “precisely as he would have investigated a new building or a strange festival in Lahore city. The lama was his trove, and he purposed to take possession.” Which soon became official policy for all aspiring superheroes trawling the Orient for superpowers. Kim and his guru even prefigure Batman and Robin—only reversed, since Asian mentors are just like underage sidekicks.

Despite Kim’s Superman-like influence on the genre, even Kipling has his predecessors. The first superhero to pinch his powers from an obliging Oriental is Spring-Heeled Jack. The masked Victorian used to leap through a dozen plays, penny dreadfuls, and dime novels. I like the Alfred Coates 1886 version. Jack’s dad reaps his fortunes in colonial India, and Jack returns to England with the workings of a “magical boot” that “savoured strongly of sorcery.” Jack “had for a tutor an old Moonshee, who had formerly been connected with a troop of conjurers—and you must have heard how clever the Indian conjurers are. . . Well, this Moonshee taught me the mechanism of a boot which . . . enabled him to spring fifteen or twenty feet in the air.” That old Moonshee (Jack must mean “munshi,” an Urdu word for writer that the Brits decided meant all clerks) is the first incarnation of Wonderman’s turbaned Tibetan.

The endlessly exotic Orient, the planet-spanning ring of Britain’s 19^th century frontier. A superhero is the ultimate colonialist, seizing his fortunes in faraway lands and shipping them home to maintain his nation’s status quo, its global supremacy. It used to be the British Empire, then the American, but superheroes always serve as the imperial guard.

While Eisner’s imaginary Tibetan was handing out magical treasure in 1938, real Tibetans were arguing national autonomy with China and rights of succession with warring regents. Unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the actual Zoroaster did not declare, “God is dead.” He was all about exercising free will in the service of divine order and so becoming one with the Creator. I’ve not read any of his surviving texts, and I seriously doubt Nietzsche did either. I’ve also never set foot in Asia—though I did gaze at it from a cruise ship docked in Istanbul, and that’s a lot closer than most comic book readers ever get.

[For more on this topic, my related essay, “The Imperial Superhero,” appears in the new PS: Political Science & Politics, as part of an eight-article symposium on the politics of the superhero.]

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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