Super Villain Civic Duty
In the most recent issue of the Amazing Spider-Man (#584) there are a few panels dedicated to a conversation between two super-villains (the Shocker and Boomerang) that really struck me. As soon as I read them I knew I was going to have to write about them because they hit on a topic that regular readers of my blog (and people that know me personally) know is one I talk about often, especially during the months leading up to the last presidential election).
In the panels, the two villains are discussing not the presidential election, but the fictional mayoral one that the current events of the Spider-Man title have being swirling around for a while now. However, it is fairly clear (to me at least) that the writers took the occasion of the fictional election to comment on the actual historic one that took place a few months ago (and comics being written how they are, these panels probably pre-date November 4th) and that is back in the forefront of our minds with the inauguration. (Actually, last week’s issue had a lame back-up story involving Barack Obama, which served no purpose other than to put Obama’s face on an alternate version of the cover and thus sell more comic books).
When asked whom he is voting for, the Shocker scoffs. He’s a super-villain, why should he vote? To which Boomerang (whom as far as I have ever known is Australian and a felon, so shouldn’t be able to vote anyway) responds that it is his civic duty. He says, “Dude, thousands of men and women are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan right now to preserve democracy. You don’t vote, it’s like telling them everything they’re sacrificing doesn’t matter.”
Wow. Where to begin? I am amused that by putting these words in the mouth of a villain, the writers here are trying to color this idea of voting as virtue as such a basic moral force that even the foes of law and order, people who put the lives of innocents in harm’s way in countless comic tales feel that it should be adhered to. The myth of voting as virtue and the essential goodness of democracy runs deep in our nation, and I guess that should be no surprise. It replaces the fire of the revolutionary movements that found democracy with a new narrative that preserves power for those who fill the roles of leadership in a post-revolutionary society.
There is the possibility that the writers understand the irony of having a so-called super-villain saying these words - and whether or not it was intended, we can certainly read Boomerang’s assertion as flagrant disruption of the narrative of democratic virtue. Perhaps instead of seeing these words as underscoring the essential virtue of voting, we can see, through their source’s willingness to contravene law and endanger people’s lives that this so-called virtue is a joke, no more good or evil than any other social institution. It could be argued that our own leaders willfully disregard the law and put the lives of countless innocents at risk for nothing more than their own hubris, with the added benefit of lining the pockets of their corporate cronies with the blood money profits earned serving soldiers hot meals and maintaining the logistical infrastructure of a war effort. Maybe Cheney and Rumsfeld and Haliburton are to be thought of as Baron Zemo, Doctor Doom and Hydra… Certainly the naïve and/or disingenuous reference to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan makes an educated person reading this comic think as much, because who believes that they are really dying to preserve democracy?
Too many people…That’s who. The comic book’s words are just echoing the platitudes and justifications long used to support the cause of war, and the truth is that most people reading this comic probably aren’t all that educated about the war, about why wars are really fought (and what they accomplish - what I call 'the myth of the efficacy of war') and are happy to swallow some bullshit idealized vision of democracy that could exist even if its current incarnation under eight years of Bush/Cheney might not have been it. Or worst of all, that might have actually existed at some time in the past, as if Captain America could be a real person.
And of course, the most awful part that these panels brings up for me, is that Boomerang’s words echo another more poignant and troubling truth that most people, even those who oppose the wars have a hard time accepting, and that is that those men and women are sacrificing their own lives, the lives of innocents abroad, and destroying the peace of families back home for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Voting isn’t going to change that, whether you vote for Obama, McCain or LaRouche. Voting awards you a tiny bit of power, the smallest increment of change within a pre-determined range, and elections have never changed that range.
All the important changes that have happened in this country have happened not because of voting, but because people went into the streets, whether it was women’s suffrage, the labor movement, civil rights, the Vietnam War. The threat of civil unrest changed the country enough to make voting leaders that might take up those causes even an option. When it looks like shit might get burned down, you make concessions… Or when the ugliness required to try to quell those mobs raises the ire of enough people who are at home watching it all on TV, or else somehow threatens their own kind even if they are not involved, it is then that “working in the system” has a chance to work, but first you have to threaten that system - see how it breaks and bends. Hell, even slavery ended as a side-effect of civil unrest caused by a force that happened to be pro-slavery and that were frightened by even unsuccessful attempts to force the issue like that by my ill-fated mad hero John Brown.
Every time I have a chance to put my body out there to be one of thousands or millions of others for some cause or another, I try to put my body out there. And when I get a chance to document how the institutions of our local and federal governments react to those bodies, I do that too. But don’t tell me that my not voting somehow downplays some other person’s sacrifice, rather it is people’s willingness to accept that it is a sacrifice and a noble one at that that continues to make such meaningless slaughter acceptable.
If voting is a form of individual power, it is important to keep in mind that all exercises of personal power are essentially corrupt. Power itself, all kinds of it, is the real problem. It is a transaction that always leads to loss that raises the strong above the weak and justifies itself on that basis regardless of the pontifications that seek to obscure it.