Nicolas Winding Refn: “White Movie Nerds Must Die” (An Imaginary Story)

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Jog

The first we see of Ryan Gosling, he is shown flexing his hands and squinting with terrific meaning before a statute of a strapping, shirtless boxer, and this, one suspects, is pertinent to why every critic in the world hated Only God Forgives.

I exaggerate, of course. A glance at any popular review aggregator will reveal a modest selection of minds sympathetic to this latest picture from popular Dane Nicolas Winding Refn, whose previous feature, 2011’s Drive, was met with a lingering rapture so disproportionate to its derivative pleasures — seriously, just sit down with Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man for two hours and you’ll get basically all of Refn’s deeper thematics, plus a stellar turn by Peter O’Toole — the observant reader can’t help but catch a whiff of guilty score-settling, or at least the unmistakable grimace of an indulgent teacher left embarrassed by a prize pupil’s misbehavior.

These are good concerns, because this new film is all about authority, and behavior, and guilt.

But before we get to that, I must make a personal confession. Absolutely critical to my experience with Only God Forgives was the realization that it is deliberately mistitled. There is, in fact, no English-language title displayed on screen during the opening credits; instead, the title is a Thai phrase, written in Thai script, which merely translates to “Only God Forgives” via subtitles at the bottom of the frame.

Moreover, it soon turns out that quintessential Hollywood hunk Gosling is not, in fact, the film’s hero, but an arguable co-protagonist with Thai actor Vithaya Pansringarm, whom not a few viewers of the original red band trailer mistook for the story’s villain – as perfect a coincidence as those (over-)sensitive to western exceptionalism could possibly dream!

Or did writer/director Refn plan it all that way? It seems unlikely – and not just because I have no idea who cut that trailer. Supposedly, pre-production on Only God Forgives began in 2009 with a much more traditional action movie scenario, but Refn — having subsequently overseen the mutation of Drive from a purportedly more ‘normal’ crime thriller to its languid final form — re-thought the picture as a moody, ‘foreign’ thing, eventually rolling with production crises to further that impulse: a lack of English-capable local actors resulted in a *lot* of subtitled Thai-language dialogue, and the absence of money for a soundtrack of American tunes inspired a recurring device of Thai characters performing domestic songs via karaoke.

That’s right. There’s three song sequences in Only God Forgives; three less than the average Telugu film, yes, but divvied out at similarly well-spaced junctures, as are the surprisingly modest action scenes. Did you know Refn once authorized a no-budget Hindi-language remake of his debut film Pusher, by a British filmmaker with an eye toward appealing to Indian audiences? This too got me thinking.

Having watched anime from a young age, I am accustomed to feelings of embarrassment. All around you in that peculiar fandom, at all times, is a strange fetish for marginal aspects of a foreign culture, or snatches of culture marginalized by their use: honorifics (mis)applied as a signifier of ‘understanding,’ weird debates over the accessibility of translation, and — since I knew mostly men — desperation-laden desire for an exoticised notion of female perfection, apparently native to Japan. This is not to say that some fans didn’t eventually develop a sophisticated understanding of language, culture and dubiously popular entertainment, but many more remained ignorant of their tourism, convinced instead that the meager abridgement of cultural engagement that is buying (or stealing) shit elevated them above the rabble, away from the debasement of American things and toward a verily rising sun.

I feel much the same way watching Indian movies today, though I am cognizant, of course, that a movie does not care who is watching. Like any single-screen front-bencher settling in for an evening of straightforward masala, I am invited to cheer the swaggering cop heroes and delight in the beautiful women, though I know that, fundamentally, part of my interest will always be the novel character of entertainment not exactly tailored toward a thirty-something heterosexual white American middle-class male, as is a good deal of the U.S. product which more and more seeks to dominate the filmgoing experience of international audiences as a valuable supplement to its already considerable returns.

Guilt, guilt, guilt. Need I mentioned I was raised stolidly Catholic? I do so wonder about Nicolas Winding Refn.

The plot of Only God Forgives concerns a murder of frustration, and the waves of incrimination that radiate outward in the manner of a stone dropped into a lake. The stone, in this case, is played by English actor Tom Burke, who is first spotted seething in a Bangkok kickboxing gym run by Gosling, his younger brother, as a front for the family’s lucrative narcotics smuggling trade. This is not deliberately a foreign expansion – Gosling had to be moved far away from America to escape a certain crime, and Burke, we might guess (though, like much in the film, we are not told), is supposed to be supervising him. Later, Burke skulks around the streets of the city, growling at a local pimp “I wanna fuck a fourteen-year old,” before offering the man an exorbitant sum for his young daughter. It is probably less a serious offer than a sneering display of the economic superiority that will always keep the locals polite, no matter how much it pains them.

Eventually, Burke secures the services of a prostitute, whom he then murders, for reasons which are never revealed, and perhaps unimportant.

Enter: Pansringarm, as a severe police lieutenant who observes only black and white moral distinctions. Instead of arresting Burke, he locks the white man in a room with the prostitute’s bereaved father, who pummels the killer’s skull into hamburger. Yet justice cannot end there, for the father too was a party to his daughter’s exploitation. The man pleads that economic and cultural circumstances led him to this place — he has no sons, which is financially disadvantageous — but because A is A, one of his hands is ceremonially cut off by Pansringarm’s righteous machete.

All of this Ditkovian melodrama is interspersed with images of Gosling staring at his own twisting hands, occasionally suffering precognitions of a confrontation with Pansringarm while wandering long, red-lined halls. He also fancies a local prostitute, though he seems disinterested in paying her to sleep with him – fantasies are crucial to Gosling’s life experience, and so he envisions his hands slipping up between her long legs, those instruments of violence depicted as, essentially, his primary sexual characteristic.

Alas, soon his wicked, wicked mother arrives from America, and Gosling — appalled at his brother’s actions and hoping things will remain settled — finds himself tempted into pursuing unenthusiastic vengeance against Pansringarm, turning those hands again… toward killing!

Pulpy material indeed, presented with a minimum of subtlety and maximal art direction, with a seemingly bottomless appetite for hoary visual metaphors. Flexing your hands in front of a statue of a boxer, washing your hands of illusory blood – by the time Kristin Scott Thomas’ malevolent mommy wraps herself around Gosling’s waist with her face pressed toward his crotch in commemoration of the Oedipal subtext at play, you can understand why connoisseurs across the globe dismissed this picture as the very definition of pretentious trash.

Still, I was utterly engrossed by the cultural dynamics central to the film. Put simply, all of the white characters are consumers, tourists, and their consumption is what causes much of the trouble for Bangkok’s luckless citizenry. Thomas contracts with an Australian fixer to assassinate the people who killed her son, an assignment then subcontracted to local thugs who shoot up the clientele of an entire cafe to get to Pansringarm, who himself then battles frightfully up the racial/class ladder until he has the white fixer pinned to his seat in a prostitution bar with needles plucked from ladies’ formal hairdos and flower arrangements, gouging out his eyes and gashing open his eardrums to relieve him of the senses he has misused.

The director is plainly thrilled by this old-school manliness, having once described his scenario as a ‘take’ on the great American cowboy films (though Bollywood movies too are full of heroic police who abuse due process to bring about Good); interestingly, though, the locus of manliness appears to have shifted from Gosling to Pansringarm during the film’s sequential shoot. You can easily picture him in a tall white hat, dispatching baddies without any angst. During the Australian’s torture, a theatrical police assistant urges all of the women in the club to close their eyes, while all the men are bidden to look closely, so they might appreciate the wages of sin. What showmanship!

Meanwhile, Gosling takes the prostitute with whom he is besotted to a fancy dinner attended by his mother, who proceeds to berate and humiliate the two of them in a fantastically vulgar manner, pausing only to turn to an off-screen waiter and order the table food. There is a certain ambiguity to exactly how much of Thomas’ absurd ugliness is occurring in Gosling’s imagination — and Thomas growls her dialogue with such lusty camp that she provides the film its sole source of comedy relief by virtue of performance alone — though plenty of external confirmation establishes her as a racist, grasping, misanthropic terror on her own terms, the kind of woman who perhaps sees a problem with what her older, departed son has done, in the abstract, maybe, but will inevitably choose the bonds of family over any exercise of empathy toward the funny local people who delay her activities through their broken English.

Outside, the prostitute expresses disbelief that Gosling would put up with such shit. Angered, the white man demands the girl remove the lovely dress he bought for her. She complies, standing proudly in her underwear and holding the fabric out toward Gosling, who is so ashamed he can scarcely reply.

Never have I seen an action-thriller so intimate with shame.

The ‘evil mother’ is a favorite character type of Alejandro Jodorowsky, to whom Only God Forgives is dedicated. And by this point in the plot, it is clear that Refn is sending Gosling out on a quest of spiritual and psychological evolution, as does Jodorowsky with so many lost souls. Santa Sangre — in which a man is maneuvered into violence by the specter of his mother guiding his *hands* — is a good reference point. Of course, to Refn, the idea of ‘evolution’ is to understand one’s true nature, like Gosling’s Driver in their prior collaboration, who is stunned to discover that he really is the super-cool expert killer he’d been playacting for so long.

But here, evolution terminates in annihilation.

Only God Forgives, you see, is also reminiscent of Eli Roth’s Hostel series, in which tourists are ushered onto the next level of humans-as-commodities by their own bad behavior. But Refn does not characterize Pansringarm’s working class machete cop as himself an uncontrolled evil of capitalism; instead, he is unambiguously righteous, like a slasher movie’s killer cast as the hero, or a comic book avenger given a religious twist. Pansringarm himself has suggested a polytheistic reading of the character, positioning him as a literally magical “superhero” character, if but only one god among many Thai deities; Gosling’s situation, however, is specifically applicable to his domain, leading viewers of a certain religious disposition to inevitably conjure visions of a looming, Old Testament-style fire ‘n brimstone Gawd.

Politically, this is arguably problematic. Thailand’s recent history is marked by periods of military crackdowns on democratic activity, yet Refn places all of his enthusiasm in a brutal representative of Authority, one whose tolerance of prostitution/intolerance of individual prostitutes can easily be taken as advocacy for retrograde gender assumptions. No questions are asked by Refn – this is all necessary, one assumes, to combat the hellacious rudeness of capitalistic white condescension, of which Gosling, try as he might, cannot wriggle free.

Yet Refn knows he himself cannot do it either.

***SPOILERS FOLLOW***

In my addled little head, the act of Refn’s filming a movie in an exotic foreign location, for occidental delectation, became a metaphor for consuming foreign entertainment. Gosling is the ‘good’ consumer, looking to forge real relationships with women, respecting local performers/athletes, not murdering anyone, etc. But he learns, gradually, that he is still implicitly in the position of abuser, unable to escape the dread orbit of his mother; he cannot really accomplish terrific feats with his hands, and he is impotent as a lover – it is exactly the reverse of Drive, the bloody fantasies of which were so loved.

Inevitably, it comes to pass that Gosling asks Pansringarm for a fight. The powerful cop absolutely destroys Gosling, who doesn’t land so much as one punch, leaving the room with his pretty Hollywood face rearranged into a monster makeup mosaic of bruises reminiscent of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist. The climax of the movie quickly follows. Pansringarm confronts Thomas, who reveals that Gosling murdered his own father, and suspected her and older brother Burke of having an incestuous affair. Not one to abuse his emotions, Pansringarm cuts her down.

Intercut throughout is Gosling’s own attempt to track and kill Pansringarm at his home. Too late, Gosling realizes that his backup thug has orders from Thomas to murder not only Pansringarm, but his wife and young daughter. The white man stands still as the woman is shot dead, but he acts in time to prevent harm from coming to the little girl, who in an earlier scene expressed to her daddy an interest in people solving their problems by talking them out. In a Christian sense, she is the peaceable [Son] to Pansringarm’s wrathful Father, and she stares silently at Gosling while he departs, as proud and stoic as the prostitute he shouted at, perhaps having already forgiven him.

Doubtlessly, many viewers will expect the film to conclude with a final battle between crook & cop; they will have to content themselves with memories of Albert Brooks’ stabbing. Gosling discovers his mother, slices open her womb, and fiddles around inside, perhaps eager to return; this could be the ultimate goal of his incestuous urge, to be like a child again, and not care about anything. This is futile, so he goes again to pay and watch his favorite prostitute, who can’t entirely get rid of him so long as he has money.

Pansringarm meets him there.

Gosling imagines they are in a field.

The white man offers both his hands in penance for his and his family’s sins.

Only God Forgives.

And then we are back in the karaoke bar, where Pansringarm takes the stage to sing the song from that original red band trailer. There are no white people in the theater. The lyrics are not translated; it is a communication Western audiences will not understand. The dream of obliteration is realized. Closing credits are displayed over the performance, again in Thai script, but with English translations now provided just below each name, instead of out of the frame. Hope remains, at least, for the future.

Aku no Hana and the Politics of Decadence

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Patrick Carland

Before going any further, let’s see what mental images a synopsis like this conjures: “Takao Kasuga is a shy, book-loving high school student who’s had a crush on classmate Saeki Nanako for as long as he can remember. One day, in a moment of lust and foolishness, he steals her gym uniform from class, only to be caught in the act by the quiet and lonely Sawa Nakamura. Knowing she has sway over him, Nakamura forces Kasuga to make a contract with her, or else risk having his secret revealed to the entire class!”

What you might expect from such a synopsis is a harem anime where a bemused, stand-in protagonist finds himself pulled into wacky situations by a cast of cute and quirky moe girls. What you get is one of the most genuinely disturbing and hard to watch anime series of the past 5 years.

From the outset, the most striking feature of Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil) is the use of rotoscoping in all of its character animation. Rather than being originally designed and drawn, the characters of Aku no Hana are played by actors in live action and then painstakingly redrawn in a way that both captures their original movements and gives them an unnerving fluidity. This technique creates a visual juxtaposition between the beautifully drawn and lingered over backgrounds and the airy, almost two-dimensional characters, who are distant drawn without any distinguishing features, like strange, faceless simulacrum posing as flesh-and-blood humans. The effect is distinctly unnerving, and has been a predictable source of outrage in fan communities in Japan and abroad, who wanted a series that sticks to the more standard moe conventions which value cuteness and stylization over realism. While most anime try to draw equal attention to foreground and background in their composition, Aku no Hana specifically prioritizes its environments over the characters; while each scene is painstakingly drawn and lingered on throughout the series, the characters within them remain insubstantial wisps, almost featureless even when viewed up close. There is no typical cuteness to be found in this series. There will be no figurines, no body pillows of its characters. There is instead an empty, boring town, filled with empty, boring people.

Kasuga Takao knows his town is a boring and hollow place. As he says himself, there’s nothing but “weeds and pachinko parlors here”. He, however, is in his own mind anything but hollow; he is a connoisseur of fine literature, a sensitive and intellectual soul who finds solace from the world in his favorite book of poetry, Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. Those familiar with Baudelaire’s work, of course, will know that the French poet had little interest in providing solace; Baudelaire was a hedonistic, scandalous libertine whose arch-nemesis was the unceasing boredom of modern society, a bête noire as potent in 19th century Paris as it is in 2013’s Japan. Although he thinks himself a poet and intellect inhabiting an ethereal world all of his own, Kasuga quickly demonstrates he’s as fallible as anyone else, and in a moment of irrational lust, steals the gym clothing of his crush, Saeki Nanako, an act witnessed by the class outcast Sawa Nakamura.

Upon seeing Kasuga’s moment of deviance, Nakamura begins to believe that he is different from the rest of their classmates and town, albeit for reasons Kasuga denies; like her, she believes him to be a fellow “deviant”*, someone who sees the world for the sad and boring place that it is and seeks to liven it up with chaos and anarchy. She seeks out Kasuga, and under the threat of revealing his crimes to everyone, forces him to make a “contract” with her, doing whatever she commands to do while she tries to break down “all the walls you’ve built around yourself.”

In a different anime, this premise might make for cute, lighthearted hijinks, but Aku no Hana plays up the inherently disturbing nature of it as often as it can. Over the course of the series, Nakamura forces Kasuga to wear Saeki’s stolen gym clothes as he takes her out on a date, stalks him and constantly undermines his ideas of Saeki being pure and virginal, and ultimately tries to make him confess to his sins to the whole classroom on a blackboard. A peculiar bond develops between Nakamura and Kasuga; even as Kasuga denies being a deviant and clings to his poetry and erudition as a way of distinguishing himself, Nakamura belittles and mocks his false sense of superiority, telling him that beneath it all what he really wants to do is give in to his base principles, fuck Saeki and fuck the world up in turn. In principle, it’s easy to see Nakamura as a standard crazy-anime-girl archetype, without a real personality besides being cute and chaotic. But the reality is more complex; even as Nakamura seeks out chaos and some end to the boredom and insubstantiality of modern life, what she truly desires is a companion, somebody who recognizes the world for what it is and hates it as much as she does. Her desire is not to destroy things, but to escape, to find what lies on “the other side of the hill” beyond the town and the world she knows.

Slowly and methodically, Nakamura breaks down the walls around Kasuga’s psyche, revealing to him the hollowness of his life and self. Midway through the series, she tries to force him to break into their classroom and write all his crimes on the blackboard, something Kasuga point-blank refuses to do. Raging at him, she accuses Kasuga of being just as boring and empty as everybody else, and ultimately tells him never to speak to her again. And for the first time since stealing Saeki’s gym clothes, it is this threat that prompts Kasuga to act autonomously and take action. He admits he’s a deviant, he writes on the board with furious tears in his eyes, and together, he and Nakamura trash the classroom in a blaze of youthful joussiance, neither feeling more alive than in destroying their shit classroom and the shit world it represents.

The anarchic impulses and desire for stable, “real” identity in Aku no Hana are reminiscent of much young adult literature and media, with their shared hatred of the mundane world they’re trapped in, the desire to escape, and the search for meaning in an empty landscape. The key difference, of course, is that while other young adult media valorize their protagonists as seekers of a purer, greater truth, Aku no Hana mercilessly savages such ideas for their naivety. In another series, a sensitive, erudite protagonist like Kasuga might be portrayed as the pure hearted hero, but here, he is mercilessly mocked for the falseness and vapidity of his character. As Nakamura continues to break him down, he also finds himself in conflict with Saeki, who genuinely cares about him even after she learns that he stole her gym clothes. When she learns that he was the one who vandalized their classroom, Kasuga and Nakamura attempt to flee to the place “on the other side of the hill,” only to be confronted once more by Saeki. Realizing he can’t make a choice between the two of them, Kasuga breaks down and admits he doesn’t even understand Baudelaire’s poetry, that he just liked the idea of himself reading it, and that he’s truly, completely empty inside. In the end, both Nakamura and Saeki draw away from him, as both realize he’s not the person they want him to be.

More than anything, Aku no Hana is about identity; it is an exploration on how human beings are supposed to grow and bloom in a world of empty concrete. As I suggested earlier, the aesthetics of Aku no Hana depict the ephemerality of their characters while emphasizing the unchanging nature of their environment; even as individual humans live, breathe, and expire, the concrete and steel they build around them long outlives their own ambitions. In a world where identity and meaning making have been subsumed to commodities and the act of living is conducted in the sterile, alienating urban condition, what choice do people have but go large or go crazy? Surely there are more constructive ways to channel one’s frustrations, but Aku no Hana isn’t interested in them.
Gleefully borrowing from the Decadent literary tradition of 19th century France, the anime savages the idea of modernist progress and the sublimation of human identity to the rigidity of codes and institutions. It wants only to incite violence and chaos, even as it suggests that there is a way to overcome the ennui of modern life through interpersonal relationships and genuine human contact. But it simultaneously is suffused with a postmodern understanding of the world, and recognizes that the antediluvian time when humans could understand one another without the artifice of code, symbol and language dividing them has long passed. All beauty, the beauty Kasuga seeks in his books and in Saeki, the beauty striven towards by the effete constructions of modernism and postmodernism, are compromised and tainted, and the human drive towards something more than emptiness is to blame for it. Beyond the facades, the feeble attempts to rationalize the boringness of quotidian life, a true and utter deviant lurks, a lunatic whose only crime is wanting to find something more, something more than the boring, boring, boring shit hole they’ve found themselves in.

As the first part of the series ends, we find Nakamura and Kasuga’s roles reversed; while Nakamura attempts to leave Kasuga behind, Kasuga asks her to make a contract with him, so they can “crawl out of this shit hole together.” Gone are Kasuga’s self-fulfilling and illusive attempts to define himself as different from everyone else, as superior because of his books and his learning. As Nakamura shows him, there is no path towards self-realization that exists within the system, that isn’t always-already compromised by its subsumation to the authorities and processes that deny autonomy to anyone. To become a person, in the adolescent and neoliberal sense, means to define oneself as free of all others, and so to fulfill the teenage fantasy of becoming more “real” than others implies nothing short of destroying everything that ties you down to the world from whence you came. This is what the final sequence shows; in order to escape the town and the people that inhabit it, Nakamura and Kasuga engage in a surreal whirlwind of violence, a premonition of what they would ultimately have to do for their fantasies of escape to succeed. The liberal idea of individual self-actualization is shown to be a split-level trap; even as one wants to escape and subvert the system, the only way to do so is to give into violence and decadence, and thus fulfill a notion of the individual that places them at the heart of violence itself. It is this paradox, between being someone without any autonomy or claiming it through violence that renders the autonomy and validity of other human lives moot, that Aku no Hana positions itself to engage by the end of its first segment.

I have not read the manga, so I do not know what ultimately happens beyond the first 13 episodes. But in speculating, I can’t help but revisit the ending poem of the series, about a flower which wants to bloom, but should not even exist:

“The flower bloomed. The flower, the flower bloomed. It was terribly afraid of the wind. Nobody had ever seen it before, and it bloomed. Nobody had ever seen it before, and it seemed to bloom. [None had seen it before..and it seemed to bloom. “There’s no flower.” “There shouldn’t be a flower.” Some were convinced it was so. But they were wrong, and it was there. None had ever seen it. It should be harsh to listen to. A flower bloomed that should not have. There it is, yes, there it is. There it is.”

As the series closes, we see the one-eyed flower, depicted on the front of Kasuga’s cover of The Flowers of Evil and a recurring motif elsewhere, finally open its eyes and look towards the viewer. The flower, it seems, has bloomed. The flower has awoken, it has become autonomous, and its time has come. But it is an evil flower. It is a flower that should not exist.

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*The word that is used, as far as I’m aware, is hentai, which is usually translated to pervert; however, the elastic use of the term in this series, as it refers to both sexual and social deviance, may be the reason translators use the word “deviant” instead.

Racists vs. Imperialists

Posted on July 21, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today. The time references are a little old, but I think the overall issues are still relevant.
____________________

“Barack Obama is the food-stamp president,” Newt Gingrich declared last week on his way to the South Carolina primary. Some have called this a racial dog-whistle. Others might argue that, given its quintessential Newt subtlety, it is more of a racial slime-trail. Either way, you still apparently can’t go wrong in South Carolina by equating black people with big government. John Calhoun is no doubt chuckling with senile glee on his traitor’s dung heap in hell.

Andrew Sullivan made the argument recently that libertarianism is not inherently racist. He argues that he would not legislate against private expressions of racism…but that is not because he supports racism, but because he believes that such legislation would backfire, resulting in less freedom for all.

The social power of homophobia and hetero-sexism in a free culture is crushing. I oppose it; and recognize it. I have spent a great deal of my life pushing back culturally and intellectually and morally against it. But I do not want to compel it into submission. I want to persuade it into toleration. And that is the core difference between power exerted by the state and power exerted by non-state actors: the former is ultimately backed by physical force deployed by the government; the latter by public opinion, economic and social power, and the willingness of minorities to buy into the ideology of their oppressors or haters.

Sullivan’s certainly right on the philosophical point; there’s nothing structurally or logically that says that a desire for small government has to coincide with racism. Indeed, you can imagine societies — say, apartheid-era South Africa, or Nazi Germany — where opposition to government control and opposition to racism would be entirely congruent.

The problem is that those societies are not the society in which we live, and that history matters. Tim Wise makes this painfully clear in his brisk new book Dear White America. Addressing his fellow white people (like me!), Wise not so gently informs us that most of our presumptions and self-congratulatory musings on race are bunk. Barack Obama’s election has not ended racism (he lost among almost all white demographics except the young.) Asian Americans are not a model minority (they’re relatively high income is because they are concentrated in high-income cities; adjusted for location, their poverty rates are double those for whites.) And in America, where “state’s rights” was used as a rallying cry for slavers, fighting against the central government does in fact have something to do with racism. Which is why when Ron Paul says, “South Carolina is known for its respect for liberty,” it’s hard not to think that he’s speaking not for all people, but for white people in particular.

Along these lines, Wise points out that Tea Party activists who oppose high taxes and big government are not actually interested in going back to a time when government was really small — to the nineteenth century, for example, when there were no regulations preventing children from working in industry (even the pro-child-labor Gingrich isn’t agitating for us to start chucking ten-year-olds back into coal mines — at least not white ten-year-olds.)

Instead, when Conservatives say they want to roll government back, they generally mean back to a time before the 1960s. Of course, as Wise says, tax rates in the 1950s were exponentially higher than they are today — the highest was ninety-one percent. But there was something different in the 1950s. There were big government hand-outs…but they were restricted to whites. White folks, Wise says, supported the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave Indian and Mexican land to white people. White folks supported the New Deal programs of the 1930s. They supported the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration Home loans which were largely responsible for creating the affluent American middle class. “In other words,” Wise says

government had always been big for people like us, and we were fine with that. But beginning in the 1960s, as people of color began to gain access to the benefits for which we had always been eligible, suddenly we discovered our inner libertarian and decided that government intervention was bad, perhaps even the cause of social decay and irresponsible behavior on the part of those who reaped its largesse. [….]
Doesn’t it seem convenient that growing opposition to government intervention in the economy, the housing market, the job market and other aspects of American life parallels almost directly the racialization of social policy, and the increasing association in the white mind between such efforts and handouts to the undeserving “other”?

I can’t deny any of that. Which makes my own flirtations with libertarianism (including reading Andrew Sullivan and kind of liking Ron Paul) somewhat embarrassing. Wise turns the screws further in a recent blog post on Ron Paul in which he points out that racist shithead David Duke opposes imperialism abroad and the government security state at home, just like Paul. He adds:

And yes, I realize that Ron Paul — this election season’s physical embodiment of the broken clock — is not, literally, as bad as David Duke. Yes, he supports all those incredibly ass-backwards policies rattled off above (about welfare, immigration, abortion, taxes and education), but he is not, like Duke, a Nazi. He is supported by Nazis, like Stormfront — the nation’s largest white nationalist outfit, which is led by Don Black, who’s one of Duke’s best friends, and is married to Duke’s ex-wife, and is Duke’s daughters’ step-dad — but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Surely it’s not because Paul wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, and allow companies to discriminate in the name of “free association.” And it couldn’t have anything to do with those newsletters that went out under his name, with all kinds of blatantly bigoted commentary about black people being IQ-deficient predators, at a time when he was promoting those very newsletters (and so, presumably, reading them), and not objecting in the least.

Ouch.

And yet, while I am chastened, I’m not necessarily convinced. Yes, it’s true that libertarianism, freedom, and self-determination in this country have all been soaked in racism. You can’t use those terms in reference to the United States without taking part in the history and ideology of white supremacy. Wise is right about that.

But…the problem is that the alternatives to libertarianism, freedom, and self-determination aren’t exactly pure either. As mentioned above, Wise himself points out that most big government interventions, from the Homestead Act to the FHA housing subsidies, were explicitly white supremacist in intention and in effect. Slavery was enabled by large-scale government intervention. So were our many, many big government, racially inflected imperial adventures — from Columbus’ extermination of the Arawaks which kicked off white folks’ control of this continent to our current bloody slog in Afghanistan. So, for that matter, is the drug war.

There certainly have been anti-racist big government interventions. The Civil War was one. Civil Rights legislation was another. But, by the same token, there have been anti-racist anti-government movements as well — such as the Civil Rights movement. But the Civil War doesn’t excuse our adventure in Iraq from its racist imperial tradition any more than the Civil Rights movement excuses the Tea Party from its racist libertarian tradition.

The difficulty in America (and not just in America, but America is where we live) is that there is no ideological path you can take that isn’t tied to the history of racism, because racism is our history. This country was built on the genocidal elimination of Native Americans and on the enslavement of Africans. It wasn’t built on only those things, but still, those things were pretty important. And when a President — even a black President — sends drones halfway across the world to intentionally kill terrorists and happens to kill other people who don’t look like us, that history is implicated, and implicates us.

The point here isn’t that Paul and Obama are equally racist, or that their supporters are equally hypocrites. Rather, the point is that it behooves every white person, whoever they support, to think about their ideologies not just as abstract systems, but as living histories, with all the bloodshed and compromise that that implies. Wise is doing God’s work when he vilifies the racism of Conservative libertarianism, but I wish he’d found it in his heart to spend a bit more time vilifying the racism of bi-partisan big-government as well. I guess white people, to no one’s surprise, find it easier to see the beam in the other person’s eye. That’s why whites need to follow Wise’s example and check each other.

Voices from the Archive: Kurt Busiek on Copyright Extension and Comics

Posted on July 20, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Kurt Busiek weighed in in comments a while back about what rights the original creators should have when copyright is extended on works owned by corporations (i.e. Superman.) His thoughts are below.

>> What is your view of the termination rights that have been introduced along with the copyright extensions? >>

I’m not Noah, but I think they’re a necessary corollary of the extensions.

When someone buys an intellectual property, they’re essentially licensing it for the term of copyright, after which point it goes into the public domain. So they were never buying it “forever,” they were buying it for a clearly-defined number of years.

If Congress extends copyright, they’re changing the deal, making their license last longer. The reasoning behind the termination rights is that if the term lasts longer, the purchaser never bargained for that extra period. So who owns the IP for the extended period? It was supposed to be the public, but it isn’t. So should it be the purchaser? The creator? Someone else?

The solution they came up with was to give the creator an opportunity to reclaim the property for that extended period, rather than simply to give the purchaser that extra chunk of ownership time for free. If you’re going to extend copyright in the first place, that seems reasonable — when the company that is now DC bought Superman, they did not have any expectation that they would still own him today. So them owning him today is not part of the initial deal — it’s an artifact of copyright extension, and not something they ever bargained for in good faith. And having the government just hand it to them is a preposterous transfer of value from the public to corporations. [Not that the copyright extension wasn’t a preposterous giveaway anyway, but it’s slightly less preposterous this way. If the deal is going to be made longer, then the terms have been altered, and the other terms should be subject to renegotiation too.]

This all extends from the copyright extension, but it makes sense. If you’d only leased your Camaro for a period of time and the government decided that the lease was going to be extended, you wouldn’t expect that the extension would be free. Not that the Camaro comparison makes any sense — you own that Camaro, but you don’t own the right to make sequels to it, to spin off a line of She-Camaros and the Legion of Teen Camaros and Camaro’s Girl Friend Caprice. Those rights remain with GM.

Still, Congress was giving away what belonged (or would belong, after copyright expiration) to the people, so as the people’s representatives, they got to decide whether to give it to corporations for free or to make it possible to renegotiate the term at the point the deal would have ended under the old rules. It’s almost shocking that they didn’t wholly benefit corporations, but it’s logical that they didn’t — it’s not merely that nobody knew Superman would still be valuable today, it’s that nobody expected Superman to still be an ownable property today, so if he is, there’s room for other changes.

I think copyright lasts too long. I think 25 years for corporate copyrights is too short, but somewhere in between there’s probably a good number. Good luck to anyone trying to get that past Congress against the will of Disney, though.

And I think $11 million is a lot of money, but it’s a fraction of what Superman should have earned for its creators. As a comparison, CARRIE was an early sale, too, and the deal was weighted heavily toward the publisher, but it’s made its creator a lot more money than the first couple hundred pages of Superman. Or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, to pick another first novel. That the Superman creators were profligate with what they got doesn’t mean it was enough — and while they might well have been legally stuck with it, DC shouldn’t be any less stuck with copyright expiration and/or reversion, but as noted, corporations change the rules in ways we’d call greedy if it was individuals doing it.

The freaky part is, the value in having Bob Kane happy and pro-DC versus the expense and public-perception damage of having this kind of case go on is a monetary issue, too, and it’s not like this stuff came as a surprise. The point at which to head off this kind of case — not just for Superman, but for Kirby creations and Gardner Fox creations and so forth and so on — was ten years before the termination window opened, and through something more generous than a nice pension that’s dwarfed by the scale of the profits rolling in.

These days, of course, contracts are written to get around the specter of potential future copyright extension and reversion, though who knows whether that’ll be held to be legal in decades to come? If it doesn’t, I expect that we’ll be hearing that creators who take advantage of changes in the law are greedy, while corporations taking advantage are being fiduciarily responsible.

So it goes. And $11 million is a lot of money, but how much of the $4-plus billion George Lucas is getting is about the IP rights to STAR WARS? Lots of heated argument to be had on that, I’m sure — but circling back to the start, I think termination rights are an artifact of extension. If termination shouldn’t be allowed, then extension shouldn’t have been, either.

In which case, Superman would have entered the public domain in 1994, and been free for anyone to use for the past 18 years. Every day of DC’s ownership of the character since then (plus the years of ownership still to come) was a gift given from the public to DC, and one of the restrictions we put on that gift was that the creators had the right to take it back during a particular window.

Considering the value of that gift, the public had the right to put whatever strings they wanted on it, really, and if one of those strings was that Siegel and Shuster and their estates got a shot at benefiting from that gift too, that’s not really so bad.

Utilitarian Review 7/20/13

Posted on July 20, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Miriam Libicki on Terri Moore and Jaime Hernandez.

Ng Suat Tong on the Korean War, Kurtzman/Toth, and propaganda.

Jog on late Ditko.

Betsy Phillips argues Superman isn’t Jesus, but Moses.

Isaac Butler on the Walking Dead video game and narrative.

Ng Suat Tong on Krazy Kat, Jack Chick, comics and kitsch.

Chris Gavaler on supervillains, the Silver Age, and the Boston Marathon bombing.

Me on Kim Thompson, negative criticism, and loving comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I write about:

why psychologists are too much like superheroes.

Realism and banality in the Conjuring.

At Splice Today I talk about

The Trayvon Martin case and misandry.

how a client screwed me out of thousands of dollars.

Other Links

Domingos Isabelinho asks whether comics criticism ever existed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on racial profiling.

Another Ambivalently Elitist Editorial

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

In a 1980 essay titled Another Relentlessly Elitist Editorial, Kim Thompson made the argument, on behalf of the old Comics Journal in general, and curmudgeon Gary Groth in particular, that negative comics criticism is worthwhile and necessary.

And to those who, fists tightly clutched around the latest issue of Micronauts or Warlord, indignantly shriek, “Comics—love ’em or leave ’em!” we can only respond: We do love them. But we refuse to become apologists for the mediocre and the worthless in the process. To wallow in that which is artless and dishonest is an act not of love but of betrayal. The Comics Journal’s sights are pointed obstinately at the stars. Perhaps reading it is depressing at times; but I think the disappearance of the magazine, or of the basic philosophy that makes it what it is, would be more depressing by far. We haven’t given up hope for comics yet. We’re still waiting for the medium to flower.

Thompson’s response to the purveyors of anti-negativity negativity is, then, that only through (selected) negativity can you express true love. Folks who refuse to admit that Micronauts is a piece of crap denigrate the medium they claim to reverence. If you value comics, then you must have standards. If you promote any old piece of dreck, then you’re treating comics as any old piece of dreck. You are, as he puts it, a gluttinous gourmand, lacking respect for your pallet and yourself, rather than a discriminating gourmet.

The issue, therefore, is framed specifically, and competitively, in terms of love. Thompson is responding, he says, to a question that many people at the time asked of the Journal: “Why, if you have such contempt for the medium, do you publish a magazine about comics?” Kim’s response is a turnabout: it is not we who point out flaws who have contempt. It’s you, who refuse to hold comics to the highest standards, who are spitting on the medium. If Gary calls most mainstream comics “bland, useless garbage,” it’s because that bland, useless garbage is smearing filth upon the face that he reveres.

Kim’s points seem reasonable enough. I might question whether Roy Thomas or Steve Gerber have actually “achieved superior works in the medium,” or whether the O’Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow proves the worth of comics rather than the opposite — but those are quibbles. Different folks have different canons, and in terms of worthwhile comics, there were even slimmer pickings in 1980 than there are today. The general point that respect for the good in art sometimes involves contempt for the bad stands, even if one doesn’t quite agree on the merits of a given work.

If I agree with Kim up to a point, though, I’m also a little leery of the way he frames the issue…and perhaps of the conversation in which it occurs. Reading Kim’s editorial, it’s hard not to be struck by the extent to which TCJ, and its editors, were embedded not just in the medium, but in the industry they were critiquing. Kim isn’t jousting with internet trolls; the folks who are telling him he’s too negative are editors and writers at DC and Marvel. One guy basically sounds like he’s threatening the Journal that he won’t help with news or cover reproductions if the reviews aren’t more positive.

Given those kinds of incentives (and/or that kind of frank thuggery) it’s a credit to Gary and Kim’s integrity that the Journal didn’t back down, and did continue to call out crap when confronted with steaming piles of it. At the same time, though, it seems like being embedded in that world would have to affect your worldview — or, to look at it another way, to have wanted to be in that world, and to have worked to be in that world, means that your worldview would have to sync up to some degree with that of the folks you’re criticizing. Kim may not agree about what it means to love comics — but he does agree that loving comics is a reasonable criterion by which to judge comics critics. And that love should, in this view, extend to comics as a whole — very definitely including super-hero comics. he takes care to show that he has the right and the standing to sneer at the most recent X-book, by declaring that he has no prejudice against the genre as a whole. Recognizing Steve Englehart as a glorious treasure is part and parcel of recognizing the lousiness of the Micronauts.

This is not really where I’m coming from. I would never say that I loved comics, nor would I necessarily say with Kim that it’s “a great and wonderful medium.” Certainly, there are some great comics — and then there are lots and lots and lots of terrible comics (some of which Kim signals out for praise.) Certainly, comics isn’t any greater a medium than music, or art, or literature, or film…or possibly video games, which I know almost nothing about. Comics perhaps can do some unique things — but doing unique things isn’t unique. Every medium has its own history and its own formal potential. Why praise one in particular? Why love one in particular? And why should loving one in particular be a condition for criticizing that one? Or to put it another way, why do I need to be a fan to point out that Green Lantern/Green Arrow is clumsy, overblown agitprop, in which the vivid, dramatic visuals mostly serve to emphasize the self-parody?

One reason to be a fan, perhaps, is that fandom — to some extent in 1980, and even more now — is the way that our cultural interests are organized. Kim’s love of comics (and TCJ’s love of comics) was an essential part of what the magazine was and how it became so important; that love was the reason it could be so connected, however ambivalently, to the institutions and communities that Kim is, in this essay, both defending himself from and insisting on his own place within. It was the love that powered his long, long list of achievements as publisher, translator, critic, advocate, and editor.

Criticism without a basis in a fan culture of love, on the other hand, isn’t likely to produce such achievements. The common community, the common audience, and the common institutions, which spring out of commitment to a particular medium are vital to organizing and perpetuating communities, audiences and institutions. Placing yourself outside of community puts you outside of community; you end up, by definition, not talking to a whole lot of people.

Still, I like to think that there’s some worth in comics criticism, or any criticism, even by folks like me who don’t necessarily have a special fondness for comics in particular. Different perspectives can, perhaps, pick out different gems, as well as different warts. And different loves, or different kinds of loves, can maybe create different communities, or different connections between existing ones. Kim and TCJ and Fantagraphics are a longstanding and impressive demonstration of what those committed to comics can do for comics, and for art. But I think too that one measure of comics’ worth is, or will be, that they can speak not just to fans, but even to those who don’t have a stake in loving them.
________
As most folks reading this probably know, Kim Thompson passed away last month. The last time I communicated with him was when he, graciously as always, declined an invitation to participate in our anniversary of hate.

…and I just went back through my too-few emails from Kim and found one where he was talking about how much he loved translating that just about made me cry.

The Thermodynamics of Sympathetic Supervillainy

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

1. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a homicidal monster who deserves the death penalty for the Boston Marathon bombing. (True/False)

2. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a sweet-natured adolescent who fell victim to the corrupting influence of his terrorist older brother. (True/False)

If you circle “True” for either one and “False” for the other, then you are probably living a happy life in a world free of ambiguity and cognitive dissonance. A comic book world. Superheroes and supervillains slice the universe into unambiguous halves, absolute good and absolute evil. No overlap, no gradations, no headache-inducing Venn diagrams, just the world reduced to black and white.

It’s also the world Tsarnaev lives in. “The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians,” he said before his arrest. “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished.” Tsarnaev was arraigned in Boston last Thursday, and though Massachusetts hasn’t executed anyone since the Golden Age of comics, Attorney General Eric Holder may still try for the death penalty. It’s what all supervillains deserve.

Except are comics really that simple?

“It all started long ago!!” shouts Moleman in Fantastic Four #1, “Because the people of the surface world mocked me!”

That’s the improbably sympathetic motivation of Marvel Comics’ first supervillain. Stan Lee’s caption labels him an “evil antagonist,” but by the end of the issue, Reed scoops him up the way I used to grab my tantrumming son when he was a toddler. Reed even lets the little guy escape, reasoning that “It’s better that way! There was no place for him in our world . . . perhaps he’ll find peace down there . . . I hope so!”

Issue two and Reed is letting more supervillains go free. It turns out those nasty shapeshifting aliens just want to live a “contented” and “peaceful existence”: “We hate being Skrulls! We’d rather be anything else!” So he tells them to turn into cows and hypnotizes them to forget their race’s earth-conquering ambitions. Problem empathetically solved.

But is this how comic books are supposed to work? Aren’t supervillains the cultural standard for one-dimensional evil? Of course this is only 1961; the Silver Age had barely launched. Maybe Lee and Kirby were just warming up. FF issues 4 and 5 we get the real villains. The return of the Gold Age Sub-Mariner and the birth of that ultimate arch-nemesis Dr. Doom!

Except, wait, Sub-Mariner is a poor amnesiac stranded in a Bowery flophouse until the Human Torch dunks him in the harbor. Then he swims back to Atlantis to find “It’s all destroyed! That glow in the water—it’s radioactivity!! The humans did it, unthinkably, with their accursed atomic tests!” His vow to destroy the human race is revenge for the loss of “My family—my friends! My undersea kingdom!” It doesn’t make him a nice guy, but evil? (Would the last survivor of Krypton have responded differently if Earth had A-bombed his home?)

Even Dr. Doom isn’t innately bad, just “badly disfigured.” He was once a “brilliant science student” before his “forbidden experiments” literally exploded in his face. Lee introduces him as an “evil genius,” but later reveals that those tragic experiments were an attempt to contact his beloved mother in the nether world. Next thing he’s a persecuted gypsy seeking revenge on the baron who killed his father. When What If tackled him in 1980, the writers averted that disfiguring accident all together and, what do you know, Doom becomes a superhero.

Before Stan Lee inherited the world of costumed do-gooders from his Golden Age forebears, supervillains were villainous, pure and simple. Luthor wanted to conquer the world for the same unexamined reasons that Superman wanted to protect it: Plot requirements. Forget psychological motivation. It was World War II. Readers needed good guys who were all good, and those good guys needed bad guys who were all bad. But 1961 was a different world. As much as America hated Commies, they were no replacement for purebred Nazis. Comics were ready to reflect the cultural shift.

Lee did not invent the figure of the sympathetic villain. Look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein creature or Milton’s Satan. Or, for more immediate influences, Tolkien’s Gollum and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, both published in 1955, a year before Silver Age superheroes started their return to newsstands. When Moleman swallowed his first atomic plant, Alfred Hitchcock was already famous for replacing the dog-kicking moustache-twirler of early motion pictures with his own brand of monster, “an ordinary human being with failings.” Moleman is only a few months and a few ticks past Norman Bates’ mother-loving Psycho. A decade later the motif had grown so culturally rampant that when The Who’s Pete Townsend was writing his second (and, alas, never finished) rock opera, he composed the quintessential sympathetic bad guy theme song, “Behind Blue Eyes.”

But Stan Lee did more than ride the zeitgeist. His villains changed only because his heroes changed too. He kept the two yoked, with the universal constants of good and evil flowing up and down their moral seesaw. The victimized Moleman is possible because the Thing is such a jerk. Every time Ben badmouths Johnny or throws a punch at Reed, one cosmic unit of sympathy rolls to the villains’ half of the universe.

Only comic books maintain that equilibrium. Ms. Highsmith’s diabolically talented Mr. Ripley is a lone (and lonely) figure; because his murders are investigated by irrelevant lawmen who soak up little narrative attention, our horror and admiration pivots only on Ripley. Even when sympathetic villains are coupled with worthwhile protagonists, our emotions operate separate pulleys. We can, for instance, feel pity for Gollum (the poor guy started out as the hobbit-like Smeagol before the Ring deformed him) without Frodo losing any of his own hobbity (if rather homoerotic) goodness.

King Kong, HAL, Tony Soprano, they all have their fuzzy side, but none demand a corresponding give-and-grab from an orc-mannered protagonist. Comic books are different. Once Stan Lee recalibrated the universe from its Golden Age settings, other writers obeyed his narrative logic as if obeying laws of physics: When superheroes are assholes, supervillains have to be the nice guys.

Look at Dr. Impossible in Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible. His quest for world domination is just his way to make superhero bullies respect him. Especially that obnoxious jock CoreFire, the biggest jerk in his middle school of a multiverse. Joss Whedon’s Captain Hammer is worse. Dr. Horrible of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a tender-hearted sweetheart. Sure, he wants to rule the world, but, unlike Hammer, he would never steal another guy’s gal and fake his way into her bed.

Alan Moore revolutionized comics in the 80s by pushing Lee’s laws of conservation to their ultimate end. The homicidal Rorschach skids so far down the moral seesaw, there’s nowhere for his nemesis Moloch to go but into retirement. He’s just some old guy (albeit pointy-eared) terrified of superheroes jumping out of his refrigerator. Rorschach’s own teammate gives Moloch cancer and then a bullet in the brain. Moloch is purely sympathetic. Why? Because the villainy of those Watchmen tips the scales over. There’s no room for supervillains in Moore’s lopsided universe. The so-called heroes hog all the traits, both good and bad.

When Bob Kane and his writing team dealt out the Joker in 1940, he was an unabashed lunatic. His nominal motive was theft, but he took way more demonic glee in his murders. Why? No reason. Not till Alan Moore gave one in his 1988 The Killing Joke. Turns out the Joker was a sweet young newlywed before being grabbed by some thugs and set up as their red-hooded fall guy. Next thing Batman’s knocking him into a vat of chemicals, and what crawls out is now tragic by contrast. Moore’s supervillain rewrite was only possible after Frank Miller’s 1986 Dark Knight Returns. Miller emphasized the Dark over the Knight, catapulting Batman into the old Joker’s half of their ying-yang universe.

By the time Mark Waid and Alex Ross put out Kingdome Come in 1996, there was no longer any difference between the new generation of supervillains and superheroes. Right now I’m reading Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors. The students are all “adorable” middle school Molemen in the making. I bought it for my son because his favorite novels are about misunderstood supervillains or misunderstood sons of misunderstood supervillains. Catherine Jinks’ Evil Genius, Eoin Colfer‘s Artemis Fowl series. More evidence of seismic flattening.

Gladstone creators Mark Andrew Smith and Armand Villavert uphold Lee’s principles of cosmic proportion too. Good and evil have completely leveled out. Superheroes and supervillains are pals, staging fake battles in order to prevent a “return to the draconian days of old.” One retired villain does volunteer garden work at the school: “It’s relaxing and peaceful for me.” The same quiet fate Reed gave those shapeshifting cows from outer space.

Or, as one Skrull declares in the final frame: “Mooo!!”

If I could, I’d transform and hypnotize Dzhokhar Tsarnaev too. Yes, he’s a terrorist monster (3 dead, 260 wounded). And, yes, he’s also a nineteen-year-old scholarship student who people considered “a sweet guy” with a “heart of gold,” “a lovely, lovely kid,” “so grateful to be here in school and to be accepted, ” “a model of good sportsmanship,” “never in trouble,” “not the kind of guy who would hurt anyone,” someone who “believed in people,” “one of ‘us.’”

His twenty-six-year-old and conveniently dead brother, Tamerlan, is uglier, a competitive boxer arrested for assaulting his girlfriend. His YouTube account includes a playlist of terrorism videos. He bragged, “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.”

We don’t understand you either, Tamerlan. Which is the heart of our mutual problem. It’s easy to call you a monster and go back to our unexamined lives. Who doesn’t want to live in an old school comic book? They call it the Golden Age for a reason.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon