I”m a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog. His coverage of the Iranian protests was great, I thought, and he preened a fair bit (and deservedly) about how he was doing much better than the MSM.

Okay. But now you go over there and… — lots on Palin, lots on second stimulus, lots on this and that, but not a blessed word about the conflagration in China, or, for that matter, about the coup in Honduras (which he did cover a few days ago.)

Which is fine, I guess. Iran is pretty clearly more geopolitically important than either of these other messes. And maybe he’s just more interested in it. But it is a little distressing that, when the mainstream media completely folds next year, I’ll only get to hear about the bloody internal conflicts that strike Sullivan’s particular fancy.

A version of this piece first ran on Culture 11.
_________________________

When I first stumbled on a reference to the Indian Cinderella, I thought the phrase must be referring to a South Asian legend. When I realized the title was meant to refer to a Native American tale, I was…well, dubious. The whole Jungian universal-mythological-archetype thing makes my teeth hurt, and it sounded to me like this was some sort of post-facto effort to mutilate somebody else’s folk-tale-foot in order to fit it into a European shoe. I mean, how exactly would the Cinderella legend have gotten to pre-Columbian America? Did Thor Heyerdahl paddle over with it or what?

To those who caught the logical fallacy in the paragraph above, congratulations: you are smarter than me, and quite possibly less racist as well. The trick, of course, is in my knee-jerk assumption that an Indian legend would have to be pre-Columbian. I knew quite well that native life changed immensely in the years, decades, and centuries after the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Marie touched shore. Some cultures, like the Taino people of Hispaniola were wiped out more or less completely by a combination of European diseases and European policies of slavery, mutilation, and mass-murder. Other cultures sprang up, like the Florida Seminole, composed of members of the Creek nation and escaped black slaves — or, more famously, like the Plains Indians, who based their entire way of life on that European import, the horse. I even knew that Squanto, the Patuxet Indian who famously aided the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, was not, as he is often portrayed, some kind of innocent, friendly savage. On the contrary, he had been kidnapped repeatedly by Europeans, had lived in both Spain and England, and had served as a guide and interpreter on multiple British expeditions. He was probably more well-traveled and more cosmopolitan in outlook than the English people he assisted.

As I said, I knew all this before I saw that reference to the Indian Cinderella. And yet, still, when I think of Indian folklore, I tend to think of old, immemorial, stories, unblemished by European contact — stories about Raven, stories about Coyote, trickster tales. Somehow, despite half a millennium of contact, and despite the fact that I’m certainly over-educated enough to know better, in my head, Indians have their stories, we have ours, and never the twain shall meet.

The fact that I tend to say or think “we” when referring to European colonizers is part of what I’m talking about. The truth is that, geneologically, I don’t have anything more to do with William Bradford than I do with Squanto. While those two broke bread in Massachusetts, my Semitic ancestors were half way around the globe, being casually persecuted in Eastern Europe. It’s true that my son probably has some British in him. But then, he’s also got some “black Dutch” — a euphemism my wife’s grandmother used to obscure the fact that she was a quarter Cherokee.

Of course, I suppose you could argue that my culture is Western European even if my blood isn’t exactly. I speak English, after all; I live in a democracy based on an essentially British model; my whole liberal/atheist/scientific belief structure comes out of a Western latitudinarian tradition.

And yet, if it’s easy to downplay the European influence in Indian cultures, it’s even easier to forget or erase the native contribution to contemporary European — and especially American —life and thought. Perhaps most obviously at this time of year, much of what we eat was first raised by Indians — potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, and, of course, turkey. Thanksgiving itself, for that matter, is based on native harvest festivals. And, of course, the American English that I speak is dotted with native words, expressions, and place names — like the Susquehanna River, which flooded my house the year I was born.

It isn’t just food and names, though. Native cultures and traditions have worked their way pervasively into American history and thought. The first American pulp hero, James Fennimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, was an Indianized white man. In Cooper’s five Leatherstocking novels, published through the early 19th century, Bumppo was portrayed as a half-savage, comfortable in the wilderness, and ambivalent towards the white culture he saves. Certainly this view of Indians is romanticized to the point of insult…but its power shows the extent to which the Indians have shaped American identity. Bumpo’s distinctively native manliness has bequeathed a furtive Indian heritage to practically every American loner hero you can think of, from Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, to Han Solo, to Marvel Comics’ Wolverine.

As this suggests, many of our most distinctively American ideas and ideals are distinctive precisely because they have Native American aspects. In North America for the most part, native political structures were much more egalitarian, much more free, and indeed, much more conservative (in terms of limited government, at least) than anything on offer in the monarchies of the Old World. Benjamin Franklin noted admiringly of the Iroquois government, “There is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment.” Centuries later, Lucretia Mott and other feminists were shocked and inspired by the equal status of Iroquois women. Whether Indian government had a direct influence on the U.S. Constitution is still the subject of contentious scholarly debate (not to mention intense whining about multiculturalism by D’nesh D’souza.) But I think it strains credulity to suggest that our Founding Fathers (and/or mothers) built a nation on the principles of freedom and equality, and failed to notice how these virtues functioned in the societies of their closest neighbors.

So…what about the Indian Cinderella then? The story was apparently originally told in the mid-1800s by a member of the Catholicized Mik’maq tribe in Nova Scotia. It was written down by Silas T. Rand, a Baptist missionary, and published in 1884 by a scholar named Charles Leland. It is clearly influenced by Perrault’s “Cinderella,” which the Mik’maq teller had certainly heard. But it is ominous and melancholy in a way Perrault never was.

The tale is called The Invisible One. The title refers to a being of great power, who no one can see. He lives in a lodge by a lake with his sister, and it is said that if any girl can see him, she will marry him. Many try, but they all fail. Finally, a girl named Oochigeaska decides to make the attempt. She lives with her sisters, who treat her horribly — they even pushed her into a fire at one point, so that her face is covered with scars. Nonetheless, she gathers together some rags and goes off to try to see the Invisible One…and as she goes all the people of the village laugh and mock at her. Finally she reaches the lodge, and she does indeed see the Invisible One — who rides through the air on a sled tied with the rainbow, a symbol of death. Having seen him, Oochigeaska’s burns are washed away, and she prepares to marry the being — though no one ever seems exactly happy at the upcoming nuptials. Indeed, it seems possible that we are to take the Invisible One as death; Oochigeaska may have escaped her tormentors simply by going to the grave.

Paula Giese, a native author argues that this tale is a bleak satire.) Certainly Perrault’s assumption that blood-kin do not perpetrate injustice; his appeal to fine apparel as salvation; his reliance on the ultimate goodness of the nobility; all are here systematically and bitterly upended. Family cannot be trusted, money and its trappings are useless, hierarchies mean nothing. What matters instead are vision and faith — which lead to awe, to knowledge, to death…and perhaps to joy, or renewal.

This tale, made out of European materials, but decidedly un-European, is — obviously — a Mik’maq tale. But it is also an American one — or at least, set as it is in Canada, a North American one. The story is about a promise; a turning away from a decrepit civilization and looking, in hope and dread, for a new and unseen truth. That’s always been the promise of the New World. It’s what the Indian’s gave, not to the Europeans, or to the whites, or to “us,” but to the America of which they are a part. And it’s why, when America is most itself, it is — not alone, but in part —Indian.

I am back home…but I still need to catch up on things, so there won’t be much new blogging this week. Next week, though, I promise to be back in the saddle…with reviews of mini-marvels, space pirates, maybe the New Frontier, and, of course, Wonder Woman.

My apologies for the dawdling. Sometimes life gets you….

My latest guess: the David Letterman flap went to Palin’s head and now she wants to do media flaps full time.  The guy behind the new career direction is John Ziegler; he’s got her ear. She’s going to be picking fights over news coverage and leading boycotts because of “anti-faith” and “pro-gay” programming content. Seems like a good way to raise money. Maybe she’ll have a show on Fox or CBN, as part of her operation. She’ll be like a televangelist but working the political side. Instead of interceding with God for the viewer, she’ll be interfering in society on God’s behalf, and mainly that will take the form of 1) loudly disrespecting big-name media personalities and institutions (Dan Rather, Letterman, the NYT, whoever else), and 2) staging video ambushes and embarrassing office sit-ins so as to target executives of the companies with ads on the wrong programs. (On second thought, maybe you don’t pull ambushes/sit-ins on people with access to corporate lawyers. Well, whatever Michael Moore used to do.) Her show’s basic fodder will be outrage over cable programming, especially snotty comedy shows; some of these will then make a point of baiting her to get exposure on her show, and the two sides will develop a degree of mutual reliance.

This originally ran in Culture 11 a while back.
________________________________________

Kids love super-hero comics, but super-hero comics don’t always love them back. At first, of course, and for a long time, super-heroes were aimed exclusively at the under-12s. The initial Siegel-Shuster Superman tales from the 30s were G-rated, and — thanks in part to the industry’s self-censoring Comics Code instituted in 1954 — even the supposedly “mature” Stan Lee Marvel titles from the 60s are amazingly inoffensive. The swinging Mary Jane Watson, for instance, is a lot more bubbly than sultry, and never have so many evil masterminds propounded so many evil schemes with so little loss of life…or even loss of blood. I read that stuff to my four-year-old.

In the last twenty-five years or so, though, the Code’s influence has waned sharply, and super-hero comics have marched from G, past PG, to at least PG-13 — and some particularly unpleasant PG-13 at that. In DC’s 1988 Killing Joke, Batgirl — Batgirl, mind you — is shot in the stomach, turning her into a paraplegic, and then the Joker strips her and takes nudie pictures to show to her father. (When Alan Moore, the writer who has since disavowed the title, spoke to editor Len Wein to ask if this plot point was okay, Wein reportedly responded, “Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.”) In 2004’s Identity Crisis, Sue Dibny, the wife of the Elongated Man — of the Elongated Man, mind you — was raped. And then she was murdered. Oh, yeah, and she was pregnant at the time. Meanwhile, over at Marvel, one of their most successful projects has been Marvel Zombies, a group of mini-series and one-shots set on an alternate world where all the super-heroes are turned into undead monsters who eat every civilian on earth. While we were in a comic-shop, my son saw one of these uplifting tales on the shelf and asked, with mild concern, “Daddy, why do all the super-heroes look scary on that cover?” “Oh,” I said. “That. We’re leaving now.”

Obviously this stuff isn’t for kids. And it’s not meant to be. The average reader of super-hero comics these days is a guy in his thirties, and guys in their thirties want to see blood and tits, or, preferably, as the above narratives suggest, both at once. Still, that leaves something of a vacuum. As you’ll notice if you go out this Halloween, little boys still want to consume Spider-Man merchandise and paraphernalia. But the baseline commodity which started the media juggernaut is aimed at their dads, not at them. You can get collections of back issues, of course. But given the huge demand, wouldn’t these companies want to invest in creating some new product for a younger audience?

The answer is yes, sort of. Both DC and Marvel have all-ages super-hero titles, though they mostly float under the radar in terms of promotion and company attention. One of the best writers working in this marketing backwater is Jeff Parker. I recently bought two of his all-ages books to read to my son, Marvel Adventures The Avengers Vol. 1: Heroes Assembled from 2006, and Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four: Silver Rage from 2007.

Both titles are a delight. Parker has a lovely, kid-friendly sense of humor. For sex and realistic bloodshed, he substitutes slapstick and some gross out goofiness. My son almost hurt himself laughing at the scene in Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four where the Human Torch wakes up, turns over in bed, realizes that, while he slept, his prankster pal the Thing has placed said bed on the roof, and then falls off the building (he’s not hurt because, of course, he can fly.) Another high point features the Impossible Man, a shape-shifting green and purple alien nuisance who gets zapped into vapor early in the story while in close proximity to Spider-Man. Spidey, who breathes in some of the vapor, spends the rest of the story feeling queasy — and at the end the Impossible Man unexpectedly reappears when Spidey abruptly vomits him up in a green and purple impossible puddle.

What really separates these stories from adult comics, though, is the pacing. As super-hero comics have skewed older, they’ve gotten more and more frenzied — even strident. Read Grant Morrison’s run on Justice League from 1997, for example, and in every issue you’ve got four cosmic threats, three alternate realities, dozens of dead bodies, and lots of over-heated prose about how amazingly awesome this super-hero team is and how we’re going to save the earth better than it’s ever been saved!

Jeff Parker has a fair bit of action in his comics too, but it’s all somehow …leisurely. It reminds me a little of the Oz books, or of Peter Pan, which are chock full of adventure and preposterous happenings, but which nonetheless seem to proceed at a gentle trot. In Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, the main baddy spends most of the series behind an impenetrable force field, amicably chatting with the heroes as he calmly goes about his plans to take over the world. In Marvel Adventures: Avengers, the evil robot Ultron wants to kill the captured Avengers immediately, but his super-villain insist instead on talking about their master plan…and then they start to squabble among themselves…and then there is a big battle for about two pages, but the final clash between the two most powerful adversaries actually takes place off-stage, while the rest of the heroes wait companionably for the impending victory.

This sort of world-being-threatened-surprisingly-slowly is quite true to the spirit of super comics past, where the heroes always seemed to have unlimited time to natter with the villains or escape from the death trap. We’re used to thinking of kids as being the ones with the short attention spans, but the truth is that children’s narratives can actually be a lot less cluttered and frantic, because the audience doesn’t need to be constantly reminded of how important or worthwhile the proceedings are. Kids are happy to just stroll along with narrative — the story’s there for the story. It doesn’t need to be justified.

And that’s really the kind of faith you need if super-heroes are going to make any sense at all. Don’t get me wrong — there are some great super-hero comics for adults, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, which, in different ways, consciously and imaginatively attempt to reconcile juvenile material with a senescent audience. As a long term aesthetic strategy for the genre, though, crippling your super-heroes, raping them, turning them into monsters, or having them race around while bloviating self-importantly like over-caffeinated CEOs in tights — it all starts to look rather desperate and sad. The basic point of super-heroes is that somebody gets amazing powers, and then uses them to do good. It’s simple, and as kids are well aware, the simplicity is the charm, and even the wisdom. Complicating it just makes it dumber.