Very skeptical about the Comedian

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Now that I think about it, I don’t believe the Comedian would be so shocked by Veidt’s master plan. Kill 5 million people to scam the world into a new era of peace? The Comedian didn’t mind Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden or the bombing of Vietnam, all mass killings of innocents for higher goals. In fact most people don’t mind those deaths, not unless they’re forcefully reminded and hectored a bit, and even then …

Of course Veidt’s body count is higher, but the Comedian doesn’t mind shooting a woman pregnant with his own child if she gets in his face. If the ordinary person is, at most, regretful and occasionally troubled by politically motivated aerial slaughter, then I would expect the Comedian could keep his soul together in the face of even an extra-size jumbo slaying like that engineered by Veidt. At least I don’t see any reason to assume otherwise unless you feel like doing Alan Moore and his script a favor. It’s quite a big gimme at the heart of a classic.

UPDATE: Another note of disgruntlement about the Comedian. His keynote line goes as follows:

“What happened to the American dream? You’re looking at it — it came true.”

I guess the idea is that America’s all about kicking ass when the other guy can’t kick back, and a case could be made highlighting that particular strain of the American experience. But I’ve always seen the phrase itself, “American dream,” used this way: In America you can work in a factory and earn enough to raise your kids in a house and then send them to college so they can become middle class. The idea managed to be true for a couple of decades but has since hit the wobbles. Still, nothing to do with shooting protesters.

Inadequate instructions from an omnipresent authority

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On the Greyhound coming down from Montreal, I sat next to a window with an emergency exit. The little message read:

EMERGENCY EXIT
LIFT this bar, PUSH window OPEN

But what bar? If you looked, there was a lever a couple of inches to the right of the little message. But that’s not a bar, and I would think you pulled it up instead of pushing it.

This kind of thing used to drive me crazy when I was a kid.

The Mystery of Mark Waid

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A while back I read one of Mark Waid’s JLA stories and found it one of the more depressing iterations of super-hero genre douchebaggery extant. (Update: I also had a troll tussle with Waid, which you can read about at that link.) On the other hand, Waid’s goofball pseudo-Silver Age comics’ covers were deliriously demented in the best possible way. I didn’t figure that Waid’s Captain America would be as good as the second, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be as lousy as the first.

And I got my wish…barely. Operation:Rebirth — the trade collection of Waid’s first few issues on Captain America — isn’t quite as thoroughly godawful as Waid’s Midsummer Night’s Dream storyline for JLA. The art by Ron Garney is marginally better than the JLA art, for one thing. And with only one hero, there’s less self-congratulatory puffery about how we’re all just the greatest heroes ever, aren’t we so cool?

I mean, don’t get me wrong; there’s still plenty of that. Tthe comic opens with a by-the-numbers eulogy about how Cap is the best in all of us, how will we survive without him, and on and on and on. Because everyone thought Cap was dead. But he’s not. And then he wakes up and Sharon what’s her name is there back from the dead too, except now she’s all cynical and hardened and has a frizzier hairstyle. And then the Red Skull pops up and has to stand in line to kiss Art Spiegelman’s ass, after which he travels back in time to take Noah’s place on the ark — but Captain America and Sharon dress up as warthogs (Cap in red, white, and blue, of course) and then they….

Okay, right, none of that happens, no matter how much I would have liked it to. Instead Cap and the Red Skull team up to find the cosmic cube inside of which Hitler may or may not be trapped and then Cap goes inside it and lives his perfect dream life until he self-actualizes and comes back to face reality. And then he and Sharon whatshername banter a little. Along the way, Cap hits a soldier or two and tightens his jaw like Tom Cruise to show us that it pains him. Sharon makes some cracks about what a goody-two-shoes Cap is. And there’s the obligatory panel where we see her dim-lit, perhaps nude ass and she makes some vague comment about how she was degraded because intimations of prostitution are always welcome.

I do think, having read this, that Waid is at some sort of extreme of what super-hero comics can be. It’s not that he’s the worst writer in the world. Steve Gerber’s Man Thing is worse. The original Power Man is worse. But they manage to be worse by actually making some sort of effort. Gerber and the folks who worked on Power Man had pretentions to social and moral relevance that were tediously presented and hideously executed, and which made them very bad comics indeed.

But those same pretentions gave you at least some sense of why the comics existed in the first place. They were hackwork, no question…but you felt like the creators had put something of themselves into the creation. Gerber had a whiny, existentialist persecution complex; the guys who did Power Man had some sort of ax to grind about racial and social justice. Stupid, sure, and poorly handled, but the stuff from which actual artists who don’t suck have created actual art.

Whereas with Waid, there’s just nothing. Oh, sure, there’s the usual mouthings about truth, justice, and the American way, and there’s the fight against the Nazis. But there isn’t even a token effort to pretend that Waid or the readers give a crap. The Nazis are just central casting heavies; there’s no ideology involved. The best Waid can do is burble on about how Cap was born or reborn or rereborn or manufactured to defeat HItler…which, what does that even mean? Cap is Hitler’s natural arch-enemy? I mean, what about Winston Churchill? If anybody was going to go into a cosmic nether-space and self-actualize about trouncing Adolf, why not Winston Churchill? Oh, sure, he doesn’t wear his underthings on the outside, but he looks kind of like a bulldog. Surely that counts for something?

Anyway, the point is…Waid wrote this thing with his brain on call-waiting and his heart in the other room snoozing to infomercials. Really, it could have been composed by a computer or a monkey — except then there’d be absurdist touches. But here…you finish this and you figure, Mark Waid must be the absolute dullest man on earth. Cliché after cliché flows effortlessly across the page (teaming up with the villain; spiritual reunion with lost partner; saving enemy from certain death, and on and on) without any spark of life or even interest. The bland grey surface is unmarred by either skill or incompetence. There are no ideas, either bad or good. The book just sits there, like a lump on a bump, but without that much personality.

So I’m baffled. I know Waid does have a personality; that he can be witty and arch and goofy and mean-spirited. Maybe he feels it’s just not appropriate to bring that stuff to his mainstream bread-and-butter series? But, good lord, if you have a brain and heart, not to mention a sense of humor, as he appears to, how could you sit down and write this without slitting your throat? Even if it’s just hackwork for a paycheck…how could you resist doing something, anything, to show that it was you, and not some faceless drone, who put this book together?

In my review of JLA, I said that Waid made me despair of super-hero comics, and that kind of holds true here as well. When I read Man-Thing, I just hated Man-Thing and Steve Gerber and wanted it to stop. But you can’t really hate Waid when you read Captain America, because there’s no sense that he even exists. You’re left with just absence; with characters who move and speak and pretend to be human, but who are really just empty masks perched upon a void. The super-heroes seem like hollowed out tropes, dead but somehow upright. It’s uncanny and depressing. Management missed a trick, I think, when they didn’t have Waid write Marvel Zombies.

Stepbrothers

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The commentary track on the dvd is one of the stranger things I’ve heard lately. God knows how long they worked on preparing it. Even more impressive if they just winged the thing.

Partially Concealed Pundit: Picture for Edra

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This actually is a recent drawing.Edra Soto has an exhibition at the MCA. She asked a number of artists and friends to contribute drawings combining her face with the face of a gorilla. Most people followed the assignment, but, unfortunately, I can’t really draw, so I ended up with this:

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Edra’s face is under there somewhere, truly.

Anyway, you can go to the MCA at the moment and see the original drawing, with many other more competent drawings of Edra as a gorilla and an amazing stage set constructed by Edra’s husband Dan if you happen to be in Chicago. Here’s Edra’s description of her show, open through June 28.

Soto’s installation, The Chacon-Soto Show, focuses on Iris Chacon, the charismatic Puerto Rican performer who starred in the 1970s variety television show El Show de Iris Chacon. Despite sexually provocative costumes and performances, the legendary diva became a popular family entertainer. Flamboyantly dressed and flanked by male backup singers and dancers, Chacon became a symbol of the liberated Puerto Rican woman. For this work, the artist analyzes issues of sexuality specific to Puerto Rican culture through the double filter of her adult understanding of US feminist issues and childhood memories of Chacon on television.

Soul Code

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My good friends Bert Stabler and Katie Fizdale were obsessed with the late, lamented Terminator TV series. In the wake of its cancellation, they had an email back and forth about whether or not Terminators have souls. I wanted to reprint it, so, with their permission, here it is.

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Bert: In the context of the Terminator franchise, the immortal second movie and the regrettable third, and the maudlin but epic television series, cyborgs buiilt and programmed to destroy humans (“Terminators”) can, with important side effects and caveats, be re-oriented toward assisting humans and protecting human life. In this pretty explicitly Biblical narrative (“Judgment Day” is one of many frequently invoked sound bites) these reprogrammed Terminators echo the redemptive New-Testament-style narrative of defklecting the impending apocalypse through time-travel– a memorable line from the sequel, Terminator 2: “No fate but what we make.”

Katie: Terminators don’t kill all humans, that is not what they are programmed to do, they are programmed to follow out (mostly killing) assignments. (Remember Quib – the submarine captain – on SCC?) They kill with discretion, they kill only their targets, and whatever gets in their way, which sometimes very sadly includes dogs. Their ability to carry out an assignment is what sometimes may be seen as a sign of a “soul” or a sense of morality. (” I love you, John”) Though that is destroyed whenever a Terminator kills quickly and without remorse.

B: A little background- SCC stands for the Terminator TV series, Sarah Connor Chronicles. “Quib” (I think “Queeg,” like Melville) was a submarine officer on SCC, in the future narrative, is a reprogrammed Terminator, who was given a secret mission, but I don’t believe killed anyone? Cameron, reprogrammed protector Terminator of show hero John Connor in 2009, said “I love you, John” when he was about to crush her, after she had gone haywire and killed people.

Anyway– being a robot assassin does not by itself mean the robot has no soul. The question is, what gives a human assassin a soul? The SCC show makes clear that Terminators have “urges” to kill even after reprogramming, just as humans have primal and problematic, some would say sinful, urges, and these cyborgs can, in some sense, choose to favor their socialization over their deep programming. In the context of the show, and I would say in general, the ability to make moral choices and value life are meaningful (though perhaps not the only) criteria for having a soul.

K: Queeg did kill someone. He killed the insubordinate soldier that released the liquid terminator, that is what caused the big upset with the aussie, her losing her baby, the reason why she has such a problem with metal etc, etc…..

A human assassin has chosen their profession, they can stop being an assassin if they chose and become a plumber. They are human and can use their free will to decide their life decisions. Metal can’t. Metal is whatever their duties dictate. They have urges because they are programed to. This makes them a better killing machine. The terminator is interested in killing – it’s an obsession. In the future, metal kills all humans because that is their constant task since they’re at war with the humans, but when metal gets sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, they only try to kill her and John. That doesn’t mean that they are the only ones that get killed. A lot of people get killed in the crossfire, but those people aren’t given a second thought by the Terminator, because the Terminator sees them as being superfluous, non existent because the only thing that exists for the Terminator is their mission. Human life is not important to them because their lives mean nothing to them because they are a machine.

B: Right, he did kill that guy. But I think death for mutiny is quite possibly a standard sentence, especially in a non-democratic situation. Does that makes him (Queeg) an extension of the “state” in a way that is different than a human officer would be? Maybe, but perhaps not. One reason the Terminator franchise is compelling is that the killing robots are almost always depicted side-by-side with desperate humans, who are often soldiers, in a formal or an informal capacity. The death sentence for insurrection underscores the reality that soldiers have very few choices, especially when the fate of the entire species is at stake. Can we really say that the Connors chose their fate, as potential saviors if humanity?

Free will is extremely meaningful as a component of the soul (it makes the argument for the souls of animals a little less tricky than the morality criterion), But Terminators do make choices and calculate tactics– recall the immortal “fuck you” chosen from the list of responses that reads out on Schwartzenegger’s retinas in the first Terminator film– and, while methodical, their complex grasp of the world is a pretty strong argument for intelligence. As far as their emotional inner life is concerned, I don’t think we know really what it is. Arnie saying “I know now why you cry” before being melted down in Terminator 2 is a cheese line, but it doesn’t seem inconsistent with what kind of beings these are. What they might lack in empathy I would say they make up for in loyalty and bravery. If those don’t apply to robots, is it only because humans have fear?

K: To me what is compelling about Terminator is that they illuminate the choices that we do have. Sarah and John Connor often show this in their strict no body count rule, and every time that a Terminator violates this rule it only adds to their hatred of them. It’s true that soldiers are working with very few choices, but what is different between a Terminator and a human soldier is that humans are accountable for their actions. All humans feel an emotion in reaction to taking a life, it is not always a feeling of regret, but there is always a response. You need to have emotions in order to react to them.

B: There is highly circumstantial evidence that the reprogrammed Terminators experience emotions, but that’s enough for me to not dismiss them as expendable. Cameron (the 2009 protector Terminatrix on the TV series), John Henry (the Terminator we saw being reprogrammed in the series), and Arnie Schwartzenegger’s character in T2 all reported having feelings. Cameron certainly had a motive to lie, but the other two didn’t, and Cameron did later give John a.device to end her life if she ever threatened him again (not that we know if it works, but Terminators don’t seem to go around lying all that much).

Sooner or later we have to deal with Darwin– the fact that most of what humans are inclined by nature to do, including nurturing one another, may very well contribute to our survival as individuals and as a species. The mechanical nature of our mental experience of reality, including a certain way of experiencing emotions, is not enough to justify our souls. Our souls are the essence of life viewed from another perspective, an outside and transcendent view, that values our subjectivity. There is plenty of evidence to not simply dismiss the possibility, given the shows and movies as “evidence,” that Terminators might experience themselves as subjects..

K: John Henry and Cameron cannot be compared. John Henry has been reprogrammed entirely and from all indications is not a killer, rather he is trained to be curious and that curiosity plus his capacity to obtain and disseminate information is what it seems is going to make him a powerful asset to whatever army he is apart of. I don’t think that curiosity and highly sophisticated coding can be mistaken for having emotions. We see examples of such curiosity in our everyday travels on the internet. For instance, Google’s “did you mean” tool and gmail’s sidebar advertisement based on algorithm’s that it picks up from your e-mails (ones that are currently being advertised are based on our e-mail exchanges are “Artery Clearing Secret” and “Human Resource Job Open”…huh. (not to be included in the blog)) except John Henry has these capabilities times a bagillion. He can override elaborate computer systems (like ones in prison – he was able to hack into their system and get all of the locks in the prison to unlock in a matter of seconds to help Sarah escape).

I don’t know if Cameron’s explosive device is real and guessing from the “season” finale of SCC we won’t find out because the show is obviously canceled. Cameron has lied several times to John regarding her “health” and has gone through many attempts to try to fix herself without John knowing. And thanks to the magic of television…surprise…John found out! Then Cameron presents John with her self-destruct button. It may be more for John’s peace of mind more than anything, but bottom line is I trust Cameron to protect John, she in some ways knows him better than he does because she knows what he is like in the future.

B: Curiosity implies an experience of pleasure in learning (and power), but I guess that doesn’t qualify as emotion. Even economists can experience that. Har. But John Henry had an extremely difficult time when he was shut down (experiencing death), and Cameron’s sexual-allure programming and her protect-John programming have overlapped in numerous weird situations that have made her behavior seem irrational– or, more precisely, justified based on her psychological state. I think the possibility of Cameron fighting her urges and loving John Connor, and John Henry fearing death and keeping secrets, cannot be dismissed as mere non-subjective output on the basis of the evidence in the show.