“YOU’VE BEEN DRINKING POISONED WATER FROM THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH…”

[fpb]

By now, all my friends, as well as a very large number of people who will never be my friends, know that I have a kind of gift for online brawls and battles. I once made carlanime laugh by remarking that there was something unnatural about having a great big online brawl without me. That was a joke; in point of fact I am not particularly happy about this

Comments

[mindstalk]

Your old essays seemed initially compelling, but Wright's reply to the second was a sobering antidote. Your analysis works, but it can as easily be inverted, with mutants as the Jews/blacks, X and Magneto as MLK and Malcolm X, etc. The pseudoscience about "next step in human evolution" and the Kree/Skrull stuff may fit your theory better: the deeper the analysis, the more noxious it seems... but I suspect most analysis is never that deep, including on the part of the ever-changing stable of writers.

There is something individualist and anti-social about the superhero, and much fantasy in general.

As for this essay... yes, medieval Europe seems to be due more credit than it's given, and much of what liberals don't like about the past is relatively recent. OTOH, serfs, religious warfare, and religious oppression are not 16th century innovations; don't whitewash the past too much. And there's real progress in technology, which can lead to beneficial or harmful social changes. (E.g. domestic appliances and markets in mass-produced consumer goods releasing most women from the home.)

I suspect your critique of "progressive" reads too much significance into the label, but I have no time for further criticism.

[fpb]

Thanks for reminding me of serfdom in the Middle Ages - it points to another point in which the civilization of the eighteenth century had greatly degenerated from its ancestors. In the Roman Empire, slavery had been the norm; in its later years, it had effectively been extended to the whole class of cultivators by the reforms of Diocletian. However, by the twelfth century slavery had been reformed out of existence in Europe. Serfs were not slaves: they were tenants with obligatory, fixed dues to be paid to their landlord - dues which over the course of time were monetized and turned into pure rents. Medieval European society had no slaves. However, the concept was reintroduced in 1436, when the Portuguese, trading on the coast of West Africa, received a supposedly temporary permission from the Pope to trade in human beings. With the discovery of America in 1492, the trade in African slaves ballooned, while at the same time the rising autocracies of continental Europe, especially France and Russia, drove down the status of serfs in various ways. In Russia especially, serfs, who had been a variety of tenants in the first written Russian code, were reduced practically to slaves by Catherine II's rule, and were not coincidentally freed from their obligations at the same time as America was freeing her blacks with gunpowder. In this field, too, we observe how atrociously the Europe of absolutism - including even free commonwealths such as the USA - had degenerated from its medieval ancestry, and what a price it cost to recover our soul.

[fpb]

As for the mutants as Jews/Blacks, I already answered that. The defining characteristic of Marvel mutants is their role as genetic saviours. To imagine that either Blacks or Jews or, for that matter, Catholics, could be seen as the genetic future of the race, is to commit the most ludicrous absurdity in the history of analysis. We are talking about an entirely different idea. In fact, the use of Jews as types for the "persecuted" mutants is, to me, deeply offensive.

[mindstalk]

Hmm, fair point, and I'm not an expert in mutantology. OTOH, I'd wonder if the "defining characteristic" really is a role as genetic saviors, or if you're reacting to one theme in an incoherent mess. I'd have said the defining characteristic is simply being mutant, different, and sometimes powered. Aren't the majority of mutants relative wusses? (Then there's Wild Cards, with an explicit division between aces -- powers -- and jokers -- ugly mutations -- sometimes coincident.) But the stories get told about the superpowered ones, not the one who looks like Nightcrawler but doesn't have any cool power.

I'm relevantly Jewish; the analogy isn't obviously offensive to me.

[fpb]

Read, if you can find a reprint, Uncanny X-Men Annual 12 (I think), the one drawn by Alan Davis and featuring Wolverine in a space temple. The centrality of mutancy as the genetic future of the human race - even as its sacred future - could not possibly be made clearer; it even includes a nasty depiction of Wolverine as the genetic saviour, dying and being reborn to save the genetic future of mankind - a description I found odiously similar to the Nazi "Aryan Christ" who "died to save us from Jewish degeneracy".

[mindstalk]

I believe you; and the description of alien races on genetic trial to be "allowed to evolve" was offensive and ludicrous in so many ways. I just don't know if that's a dominant theme; it's certainly not one I'd picked up from casual exposure to X-Men stuff.

The movies did the death-rebirth thing a few times, but differently: Rogue and Wolverine to save thousands of people in the first movie, Jean Grey to save her friends in the second.

[fpb]

Yes, that's actually one of the things that went wrong, in my view (and not only in my view) after Chris Claremont lost it following the original Phoenix' death. Deaths and resurrections, sacrificial or otherwise, became way too common in the X-Men. By now, Phoenix and Wolverine together must have had deaths in double figures. But that is chiefly a matter of bad taste and bad writing, and of the unpleasant suffering-porn that was often evident in the series.

[fpb]

I am also surprised at your stating that "you suspect that most analysis is not that deep". The point is whether I am correct or not. If I am, then the fact that most people do not realize how poisonous is the content of Marvel comics today only makes it worse. The content of a story is determined by the world-view of the author, and that does not change whether author and reader are conscious or not. You almost seem to be implying that, by discovering certain ideological features in the stories, I am placing them there! The opposite has to be the case: either I am correct - partially or totally - in my analysis, in which case these features are present and damaging; or else I am wrong, in which case these features were never there at all, and nothing I can do can place them there.

[mindstalk]

Well, the poisonous features could be there, but not perceived even unconsciously by most readers. If you think about something more, or know more about relevant things, you can get more (for good or ill) out of it. Lewis meant the Narnia stories as guides to Christianity, but for a lot of readers the allusions just went *whoosh* past them, I think not even particularly predisposing them to Christian ideas.

So no, I don't think you're placing elements there, but the actual poisonous effect may be minimal. There's also that a story can have multiple legitimate readings, especially if we're talking about cultural elements thrown together semi-consciously by a bunch of authors. Pseudo-biology and intimations of racial superiority are there; *so are* the archetypes of the peacemaker and the revolutionary, co-existences and violent struggle, with the authorial side of 'good' being pretty heavily on the former camp. Mutant stories support both "Nazi eugenics" and "persecuted minority" readings. Which reading is more significant for most readers, that's another matter.

[fpb]

I think it goes deeper than you think because it works together with the suffering-porn and repeated dystopia that are a major feature of the mutant world. There is also the fact that Lewis was conscious, almost to the point of allegory, of what he did; whereas I doubt that Claremont and his followers were awake to any of the implications of the world they created. The unconscious assumptions are what I wanted to bring out.

[thefish30]

The thing is, it is precisely the unperceived poison that is the most dangerous. When ideology is obvious and upfront, you can accept or reject it on your own terms. But when an ideology is wearing a play-costume--one that attracts or excites while hiding its true form--then people can be lulled into adopting mindsets that dispose them toward ideas that they would have spit on 'unprepared'.

Lewis understood this from his own conversion experience and meant for readers to *whoosh* past the allusions, in order to sneak truth by the "watchful dragons" of the mind and "baptize the imagination". I believe the cagey Rowling was up to much the same thing.

[fpb]

Maybe so, but I do not see JKR's stories - whatever her beliefs - as Christian: http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/fabio_p_barbieri/AGWBC01.html