MYTHCOMICS: "THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST" (DC COMICS PRESENTS #82, 1985)

 

Though Superman and Adam Strange were created over twenty years apart, and only one of them was explicitly conceived to be a DC Comics hero, both share some inspiration from a hero created over twenty years before Superman: Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter, first appearing in 1912's A PRINCESS OF MARS. The indebtedness of Adam Strange is more obvious. Earthman John Carter was mysteriously spirited to the red planet Mars, where he indulged in lots of fighting in defense of his cherished princess Dejah Thoris, whom he married in the third book. Adam Strange was yanked from Earth by a Zeta-Beam originating on the planet Rann in Alpha Centauri, and once he reached Rann, he indulged in lots of fighting in defense of his girlfriend Alanna (who would become Strange's wife some time after the demise of the original series). Superman's debt, though, is more apparent than real. Though it seems well established that Jerry Siegel was familiar with the Burroughs hero, all he really emulated from John Carter was the idea of a super-strong hero amid lesser mortals. Siegel's original idea seemed to be that all denizens of Krypton had super-powers even on their own world. But once the Man of Steel fell under the aegis of other editors, the hero became much more Carter-like, powerless on his homeworld but empowered by the conditions of an alien planet.

Written by Cary Bates and both penciled and inked by Klaus Janson, "The Ghost of Krypton Past" (which happily does not force any other Dickensian tropes into the mix) opens with Adam and his wife enjoying a picnic on Rann. Alanna thinks Strange is trembling at her touch but it's really a Rann-quake, caused by the advent of a Kryptonian "ghost." The continuity of what happens next is muddled, but Strange apparently rescues her from the cataclysm, after which Alanna falls into a trance and starts speaking Kryptonese. This moves Strange to have his father-in-law Sardath summon Superman to Rann via the Zeta-Beam. 

As soon as the Man of Steel arrives, though, the happily married Alanna greets him like a trollop trying to pick up a sailor, remarking on the "physical and psychic magnificence" of the Kryptonian race. It's immediately evident that Alanna's being possessed by a spirit who's both vixenish and unsubtle-- she comes on to Superman right in front of her "husband"-- and on top of that, she speaks in tongues, or rather, the one tongue of Kryptonese. But even before Superman reveals the significance of the foreign phrase, the spirit changes Alanna into a monstrous form (with risible lobster-claws), wounds Strange, and escapes while Superman's helping his buddy.

Superman then provides a mini-history of the Kryptonian legend of Zazura, "a space-succubus, a female demon who subsisted by devouring the life-force of other human beings." It's not clear if Zazura is an alien creature or a metaphysical construct, though the former seems more likely, since we're also told that Zazura dwelled in space just beyond Krypton's atmosphere. This bit of retconning plays into a commonplace of the Krypton mythos: that for one reason or another, the super-advanced people of the planet eschewed space-travel, so that they were caught flatfooted when their world went boom. Thus Zazura, who for some time devoured any Kryptonian astronauts who came her way, bears indirect responsibility for the near-extinction of the race. Superman further theorizes that Rann has become infected by Zazura's presence since the Alpha Centauri star-system has passed through space once occupied by Krypton, and that the demoness plans to eradicate Rann to devour the energies of its inhabitants.

While Superman flies off to find the demon, Strange characteristically uses brain-power to deduce that Zazura isn't the only phenomenon that has appeared on Rann. Strange and his father-in-law learn that particles of crystal from Krypton's ancient "fire-falls" have entered Rann's atmosphere; crystals which weaken the creature the way kryptonite harms Kryptonians. When Strange finds his way to the locale from which Zazura is working her evil will, he finds that she's already subdued the Man of Steel. But the Champion of Rann shoots her with firefall-crystals, thus separating the spirit from the body of Alanna. This wound weakens the demon enough that Superman breaks free and administers the coup de grace: setting off Strange's second weapon-- a bomb full of firefall-crystals-- so that Zazura is destroyed and Rann is saved.

I said earlier that there's no precise proof that Zazura was in any way connected to Krypton's worship-systems; that she could as easily be an alien force interpreted as a "space succubus" (though negative incarnations of femininity were certainly a big part of the Judeo-Christian religion that influenced much of the Superman mythology). Being an alien rather than a magical demon doesn't keep Zazura from having metaphysical significance, though, and in any case the conclusion of "Ghost" reveals a different sort of mystical import. Rann, having passed into the space-sector of vanished Krypton, also came into contact with the spirits of that long dead race. Those spirits (whose plurality means that the title should have read "Ghosts") were aware of Zazura's malign plans. They, not Zazura, caused Alanna to speak her initial Kryptonese words, so that "their planet's last surviving son" would be called to Rann. As that world passes out of the Krypton sector, the final two pages show Superman enjoying a fleeting communion with his deceased ancestors.

"Ghost" is definitely far better than the usual run-of-the-mill stories seen in DC COMICS PRESENTS, and possibly artist Klaus Janson had some uncredited story input, in addition to his producing a stark yet evocative take on the wonderworlds of Rann and Krypton. Both Janson and Bates do credit to the classic Jerry Siegel-Wayne Boring story "Superman's Return to Krypton," wherein the Fire-Falls and other Kryptonian spectacles debuted. In addition, as shown above, a 1965 Supergirl story by Leo Dorfman deserves credit for first using the fire-falls as an exorcism-device, for when Supergirl becomes demon-possessed, only the surviving phenomenon of the falls can purge the evil in a Kryptonian's heart.

ADDENDUM: I initially didn't make much of Zazura's name, since it didn't seem to correlate with any established names from myth and legend. Of course I noticed that the demon's name begins with the last letter of the English language, while Alanna's begins with the first letter. This by itself could be an example of positive-negative mirroring, where "A" is "the beginning" and "Z" is "the end." But I then noticed that Bates (assuming he created the name) went a little further by (a) having the two names possess the same number of syllables, while (b) the first three letters of each name is a palindrome: ALA for Alanna, ZAZ for Zazura. A little more evidence of non-formulaic thinking in the story as a whole.

THE READING RHEUM: TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1953)

I've reviewed all three of Dennis Whealtey's occult novels starring his characters "the Three Musketeers," but Wheatley had other serial heroes cross swords with evil magicians. Another series, consisting of just two novels, focused upon a middle-aged former espionage agent, Colonel Verney, and both of his exploits involved Satanic evil. It's of some interest that the publication date for the first Verney outing, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, is 1953, the same time that Wheatley claimed the last Musketeers novel took place, though the author almost certainly wrote that story in the 1960s.

Middle-aged British thriller-writer Molly Fountain gets a taste of real danger when a young woman, Christina Mordant, moves in next door. Nosy Molly finds it odd that Christina seems utterly isolated save for occasional visits from her father, so Molly offers herself as a sounding-board. What Christina reveals moves Molly to summon help, first that of her strapping grown son John, and then that of her former espionage colleague Colonel Verney. 

In brief, Christina's father consecrated his daughter to the Devil, and there's a Satanic cult waiting until the young woman reaches the age of 21, at which time it will be propitious to sacrifice her. The heroine doesn't actually know that this is her fate, but she does suffer a schizophrenic nature, seeming virginal and innocent by day but sexually rapacious by night. Molly for the most part fades from the main story as Verney and John Fountain join forces to keep Christina from falling in Satan's hands.

Though the basic plot sounds unremarkable, Wheatley devotes quite a bit of effort to showing all the detective work Verney and John must do to ferret out the truth, as well as showing the many stumbling blocks that impede their efforts. John handles most of the action-scenes, partly justified by the fact that within a few days of knowing Christina the two fall in love. Most of the romance-elements are routine, though I did like an early scene in which on the first meeting of the two youths, each one begins thinking about the physical shortcomings of the other-- which is meant to denote their resistance to their initial attraction.

In contradistinction to Wheatley's 1934 DEVIL RIDES OUT, the book that made him famous for occult thrillers, there's no advanced occult theory propounded, nor are there any mentions about non-Christian religions that are on a par with the Christian religion. DAUGHTER seems firmly entrenched in British interpretations of Catholicism and its "Church of England" analogues, in that the reason Christina can be promised to Satan is that her father deliberately fails to have her baptized. Also, spinning off from the belief that a Black Mass can only be performed by a defrocked Catholic priest, the leader of the Satanists is a canon of the Church of England, but not a practicing priest. To be sure, this character, Augustus Copley-Syle, is fully conversant with modern theories of Magick, and he and Verney descant learnedly on one of Wheatley's favorite topics, Aleister Crowley. Also, the villain's main scheme isn't just a standard Satanic ritual. Rather, the master plan involves animating an artificial creature, the "homunculus," an occult notion that had been in the wind at least since Somerset Maugham's 1908 novel THE MAGICIAN. 

In keeping with Wheatley's penchant for black-hearted villains, Copley-Syle is surely one of his best, and proves in many ways more memorable than any of the good guys. In addition to all the thriller elements, Wheatley devotes a great deal of attention to the theme of Christian redemption, exemplified by the heroes' successful attempt to redeem Christina's Satanist father. At the same time, the author goes the extra mile by coming up with novel settings. Instead of staging the climax in the usual abandoned church, the ritual takes place in a hell-like series of underground caverns, "the Cave of the Bats," rumored to have been a site of sacrificial rituals from pagan times.

I have not read the second Colonel Verney novel, but I have the impression that it dispenses with John Fountain and introduces a new young swain to do the heavy lifting for Verney. There's a marginal crossover-element introduced during the conversation between Verney and Copley-Syle when they discuss "that business with Mocata"-- Mocata being the villain defeated by the Three Musketeers in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT. Said business would have taken place about nineteen years before DAUGHTER, but I don't know if Wheatley ever again intimated connections between his various serial universes.

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD

Though there are ways in which my new categories, "novelty" and "recognizability," apply to stand-alone works (henceforth called "monads"). the categories are intended mostly to describe the dynamics of old stuff and new stuff in a serial format.

I.A. Richards, summing up his definition of all mental activity as "sorting," imagines the response of a single-celled organism to a stimulus and recognizing it as something encountered before.

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Such a sorting, of course, is only possible if the organism can distinguish between things it has or has not encountered before. I think Richards is correct in his intuition, though with the caveat that the amoeba can't conceptualize anything about the things it finds familiar or unfamiliar.

Serial franchises depend on a constant "new and old" dynamic. The majority of serials focus on a particular character or ensemble of characters. (I have addressed the concept of non-character icons here.) Even if no other elements are repeated within the serial, the main character(s) provide the reader with "recognizability." In adventure-oriented serials, "novelty" is most often supplied by the hero's opponents, though after a time they too may take on a strong aura of recognizability.

To be sure, serials with a domestic tone may focus not upon opponents but upon foils. The comic strip BLONDIE stars the duo of Blondie and Dagwood, and most of their conflicts with other characters stem from stock figures in the subordinate ensemble: the neighbors, Dagwood's boss, the mailman. New characters may appear-- for instance, Dagwood constantly faces an onslaught of annoying salesmen who importune the house-holder with aggressive sales techniques-- but usually these characters have no names and never make a second appearance as such.

Crossovers exist to extend the "cosmos" of a given icon by relating it to the "cosmos" of another icon. Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE is one of the first such crossovers. The entirely fictional main character encounters a few historical characters, such as Richard the Lion-Hearted, but they are not crossovers because they are aligned with the cosmos of Ivanhoe. However, Scott also works the mythology of Robin Hood into the narrative, and Robin Hood even in 1819 was a highly recognizable figure with his own "cosmos." Since IVANHOE is a novel without sequels, everything aligned to the knight's mythology-- the hero himself, his romantic interests, and his enemies-- are all "novel" compared to the mythos of Robin Hood, at least from the viewpoint of most readers.

In serial narratives, it's more often the case that the author seeks to promote two separate fictional universes by having them intersect. Often this means the encounter of two characters-- She and Allan Quatermain, Daredevil and Spider-Man-- though it can also mean a crossover of a character and an established physical environment. TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE does include David Innes, one of the heroes of the "Earth's Core" series, but Innes barely appears in the story, and the greater focus is upon Tarzan's encounter with the savage world of Pellucidar.

Now, while the author of such a work knows that the intersecting icons may both be recognizable to some readers, the base idea is to interest those readers to whom one of the icons is "novel," the better to convert that audience. Usually, within the diegesis of the story, the first meeting of two icons is marked by novelty, just as it is in real experience, though afterward the icons are generally familiar with one another, and within the diegesis they become recognizable, even if their next interaction may provide some elements of novelty.

Lastly, a great deal of "icon emulation" relies on at least a superficial level of recognizability, even where that recognizability contradicts everything known about the icon's established history. For instance, the film BLOODRAYNE: DELIVERANCE pits its heroine against a vampire named Billy the Kid, ostensibly four hundred years old. If this version of Billy has been around that long, then clearly he has nothing to do with either the real or folkloric history of Billy the Kid, and the film-script makes no attempt to rationalize the discordances. But because the writer sought to make his villain recognizable, the film nevertheless delivers a "strong template deviation" type of crossover.

MYTHCOMICS: MARTHA WASHINGTON GOES TO WAR (1994-95)

 In the first installment of RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS, I said:

...I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures.

I wasn't particularly seeking to validate my take on Miller's "megalothymotic" tendencies when I got around to reading the second of his serials about futuristic soldier Martha "named-for-wife-of-first-U.S.-President" Washington. Some years previous I'd read the introductory arc of Martha stories, GIVE ME LIBERTY, and the last arc, MARTHA WASHINGTON SAVES THE WORLD. Both were very good adventure-stories, but without rising to the level of modern myths. However, WAR, the middle arc, not only satisfies my criteria for mythicity but also shows the artist adroitly frustrating many of the political labels comics-critics have affixed to him.

WAR commences with the status quo set up from GIVE ME LIBERTY. Martha, a Black American raised in the squalor of Cabrini-Green, joins the Pax Army of Future United States, less out of patriotism than expedience. The young woman proves to have exceptional military competence, which comes in handy in a period when America is being broken apart by a horde of secession movements. (My favorite, seen in GIVE ME LIBERTY, was a group of gay Nazis, the Aryan Thrust, whose motto was "America's future is white-- and male-- and gay.") In LIBERTY, Martha keeps a usurper from taking over the Pax government, but at the start of WAR, it's clear that there's something rotten in the United States. While she's fighting in the field, Martha's equipment repeatedly fails, and the soldiers she encounters pass rumors of strange invisible beings called "ghosts." 

She survives a battle but gets wounded, during which time she apparently hallucinates her friend Raggy-Ann, a mutant she liberated from Pax before she died. Her injury puts her in the hands of an old foe, the Surgeon General, one of several robots-or-cyborgs presumably modeled on some unscrupulous original. While in the Surgeon's power, Martha beholds another friend she believes dead, her Apache-chief boyfriend Wasserstein, who "ghosts" into the installation to let her know he's still alive.

She's rescued from the Surgeon by a superior officer and taken to the orbital satellite Harmony as security. There Martha finds that even this superlative construct is suffering from constant breakdowns that emphasize Pax's attrition. Sure enough, no sooner does Martha arrive than the Ghosts strike. She pursues the Ghost craft into an irradiated zone, where she meets a bunch of mutants who, surprisingly, don't try to eat her.

Then, by dint of her relentless quest into a domain that ought to kill her with radiation poisoning, she finds her way to a mysterious redoubt-- the home of the Ghosts, whose membership does include her old friends Wasserstein and Raggy-Ann, both still alive and part of a movement to overthrow the illegitimate Pax government. Martha is converted to this movement when the Surgeon General uses her radio transmitter to send missiles to destroy the redoubt-- after which Martha leads an assault upon her former superiors.

I return to the popular canard that because Frank Miller has produced stories about violent heroes, he must perforce be a fascist. But the amusing thing about WAR is that all of the things that Miller critiques about Pax are the same things liberals always attack about conservatives: pointless militarism, an "old boy network" (which ties into the rottenness of Pax technology), the reduction of the marginalized (like mutant Raggy-Ann) into property, and the use of religion to justify government policies.

In contrast, the unnamed government that Martha brings forth is defined by dissent: the fact that even those governing constantly disagree with one another but manage to unite for the common goal of improving the world. For all the current tendency of Ultraliberals to shame people about American history, be it over slavery or colonialism, they overlook that American politics are infused by the desire to improve life. Miller, the alleged "fascist," incarnates this American spirit in a far more intelligent manner than any liberal comics-writer of the past few decades. 

NEAR-MYTHS: METROPOLIS (1949)

As a prelude to reviewing the animated movie made from this 1949 Osamu Tezuka work, I read the online scans of the comic. According to available histories, METROPOLIS was one of a trio of science-fiction works Tezuka produced prior to making his major breakthroughs with more popular fare like JUNGLE EMPEROR LEO and ASTRO BOY.

In his commentary Tezuka avers that in that period he did not see the silent Fritz Lang classic of the same name, but that he was impressed by a still showing a scene in which the robotic Maria leads the discontented citizens against the leaders of Metropolis. I can well believe that the mangaka took no more inspiration from Lang, because there are no plot-similarities between the two works. Tezuka's 160-page "graphic novel" is certainly one of the first times the artist tuned into the dramatic possibilities of robots with human feelings, which concern would later lead to the artist's success with Astro Boy. 

In the aforementioned commentary, Tezuka also says that he, as much as Lang, modeled his super-city on the megalopolises of the United States, particularly New York. The early scenes of METROPOLIS don't dwell on the city's system of government, as did Lang's film, but they do display a great deal of wit in depicting a Babel-like confusion of voices of those who live there-- talking of, among other things, a dangerous revolutionary gang, the Red Party. After a brief look at the citizens, though, Tezuka narrows his focus to a scientific conference, also filled with a Babel of natterings, and then discards this trope in favor of depicting two of the opposed powers that will bring forth the novel's robotic protagonist. One is "good father" Doctor Lawton, who has invented a type of synthetic cell with which to build an android, and the other is "bad father" Duke Red, scheming leader of the Red Party, who wants Lawton's android to be a superhuman pawn. (Tezuka claims that he hadn't read Superman in 1949, but it's hard to believe that he didn't at least know the rudiments of that character's appeal.) 

By authorial coincidence, one of the Duke's plans-- using a rare elements to create black spots on the sun-- enhances the viability of Lawton's artificial cells. When the super-criminal finds this out, he's even more insistent that the scientist create a super-android for the Red Party. Lawton does create an android in the form of a young boy, but then creates a conflagration, making it look as though he Lawton and his creation are destroyed. Duke Red drops the project and goes on about his business, which largely seems to be enjoying the trouble caused by his sunspots: mainly that of mutating normal animals to turn into giants. (These include rats that end up looking like man-sized versions of Mickey Mouse.) But Lawton escapes with his android and raises him as his child, naming him Michi (like Mickey?). The scientist also keeps his faux-son ignorant of the fact that he possesses the powers of flight and super-strength, or that, more oddly, he can shift from male to female if an area of his throat is touched in the right way. 

Inevitably, Michi's powers are exposed, and Duke Red comes calling. Lawton is killed, but his associate Detective Mustachio takes over, acting in loco parentis toward the android boy, though still not telling him of his origins. Eventually Michi finds out his true nature, partly due to his interaction with children his own "age."  At one point the Red Party tracks down Michi, but one of the android's friends activates the sex-change device, and the thugs are fooled. But despite many sorties between Mustachio and the Duke, eventually the revolutionary tries to gain control of Michi. 

Michi then goes berserk, and usurps the Duke's control of an army of robots in order to defeat not just the Duke, but all humanity. The city is rocked by Michi's invasion, but the embittered robot boy is defeated by his own biology. Around the same time as the attack, agents of the government destroy the device with which Duke Red made black spots on the sun. Thus Michi's cells degrade because the black spots no longer exist. After he perishes, humankind mourns for the misunderstood artificial human and regrets the Frankensteinian excesses of science.

Tezuka's fertile imagination is consistently impressive, but the parts of METROPOLIS don't cohere into a pleasing whole. Support-character Mustachio takes up so much space that Michi never becomes a compelling central character. As noted earlier Duke Red's schemes seem quite haphazard, as he never seems to take advantage of the chaos caused by his black-spot scheme, and he apparently makes his army of robots just so that they'll be around for Michi to subvert. Neither the sociological nor cosmological themes are explored with any depth, much less the notion of the robot boy's bisexuality. Later Tezuka would get better mileage out of the latter theme in the PRINCESS KNIGHT stories, while Astro Boy's adventures would offer a much stronger central hero. Thus METROPOLIS the graphic novel, while entertaining, is largely significant as a repository of tropes that the "God of Manga" would later exploit to much better effect.

Minor point: at one point METROPOLIS seems to guest-star the redoubtable detective Sherlock Holmes, but the revelation that "Holmes" is just Duke Red in disguise disallows the narrative from crossover-status.

THE READING RHEUM: SONG OF SOLOMON (1977)

 In Part 1 and Part 2 of my blog-series RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS, I leveled a general criticism against all literary works that use the tropes of either "the despised overclass" or "the despised underclass" for nothing more than fantasies of mastering the respective class involved. In addition to the formal consequences-- that such a utilitarian fantasy is so focused on political advancement that the literary value of free variation is neglected-- such works also encourage the idea that no evil enters the righteous hearts of those opposed to the anathema-class.

I had never read Toni Morrison before this year, but I was happy to see that her third published novel SONG OF SOLOMON evinces the quality of mental freedom that I've termed "self-mastery." SONG bears superficial resemblance to dozens of other works in which members of a Black culture-- usually that of Afro-Americans, but sometimes of native Africans-- ceaselessly disparage the majority culture of Whites, be they Americans or Europeans. I do not reject the base trope of "the Evil Outsiders," since I respect that it was used in folklore and myth long before the rise of formal literature. But the uses made of the trope by someone like Spike Lee are banal in the extreme.

SONG, however, manages to use the Evil Outsiders to achieve self-mastery of her own vision, the vision of Afro-Americans as they exist on the margins of American society of the late 1950s and early 1960s. White Americans do not exist as characters in SONG, but White Society exerts an inexorable influence upon all Afro-Americans of the period, like the gravity of the Earth affecting the course of the moon. In the view of those who live on the margins, Whites are insane, senselessly driven to take Black lives the moment they are given some paltry excuse to do so. White Liberals of the period barely exist in SONG-- there's a passing, distrustful allusion to President Kennedy-- and Morrison elides White Liberals precisely because she wants to use the trope of the Evil Outsiders to its full potential.

But unlike Spike Lee, Morrison does not pretend that everyone within her ingroup is given a halo of nobility by the fact of being marginalized. SONG is built around the central character of "Milkman" Dead, who's about thirty years old within the novel's  main timeline. Though Milkman is as aware as anyone of the unpredictable dangers of the White Overclass-- the 1955 murder of Emmett Till is discussed in his presence early on in SONG-- the young man also incarnates some of the worst indulgences for which his ingroup is known. Despite coming to his mother's defense against his father's tyrannies, the novel shows Milkman as having contempt for the many female relatives in his family-- not least his father's sister Pilate and her daughter Hagar, since Milkman persuades Hagar to give him regular sex but eventually rejects her when she becomes clingy, which action has tragic results for both Hagar and her mother. Given Morrison's own gender, it's not surprising that she would be less than approving of the negative attitudes of Black males toward Black females.

But Morrison goes further in articulating a mythos of Black Society that draws upon the many tropes of folklore. The main character is basically an everyman with no special visionary propensities, and so in order to articulate the vision of Black Society, Morrison must send Milkman on a somewhat mundane mission of a "treasure-hunt." Within the space of a blogpost, I can't explore the nature of the rich society Milkman discovers on his quest. But in contrast to the naturalistic tradition of most Afro-American fiction, Morrison's approach is closer to the South American concept of magical realism. Many of the questionable phenomena witnessed by SONG's characters might best be judged as "uncanny" rather than "marvelous," but this orientation does not in the least dim Morrison's ability to lend the ordinary world the patina of magic, without diminishing the real world's mortality. 

Sadly, given some of the later examples I've cited of "mastery fantasies without self-mastery," I have the impression that few later talents have pursued the theme of marginalized Black Society with anything like Morrison's combination of wit, social respnsibility and pure joie de vivre.

QUICK GENERAL LEE POST

 Getting into one of my usual online debates, this time the subject has to do with whether it's proper or not to build memorials to General Robert E. Lee despite his history of serving a slave-advocating system.

NOTE: "Mad Libs" is what I'm currently terming Progressives and ultraliberals.

________

Given that it is a fact that Robert E. Lee was idolized by later generations, what did his veneration mean to the venerators?

The standard Leftie response was that every time Southerners put up any sort of memorial to the  Confderacy, it was either (a) an attempt to rewrite history to make the South look heroic, (b) an attempt to keep Black people in their place, particularly during Civil Rights battles, or (c) both.

There's no way to persuade Mad Libs not to favor these conspiracy theories. One can only state that the attribution of such invidious motives is tainted by the fact that it makes the Lib feel all warm and fuzzy about his superiority to such deplorables.

What other motives might there be? Well, the other motive stated here has been just as an admiration for raw military talent, much as some WWII experts admire Erwin Rommel. But that seems a pretty cold reason to put up a memorial.

It's possible Lee gets honored not for what he did but what he represents to Southerners, and even occasionally persons outside the geographic South. Not necessarily the championing of slavery in itself, but the willingness to stand up to a superior force that has dealt badly with you and yours. 

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS PT. 2

The subject's fundamental nature is to overturn all external constraints, and then to realize that this is a futile and irrational activity.-- HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT: AN INTRODUCTION, Larry Krasnoff, p. 65.

At base the ressentiment ethic is one that continually says, "It was unjust for this terrible thing happened to us or to our ancestors, and so everything in our conceptual universe reflects that injustice." In Part 1 I noted that in theory the fantasy of the despicable overclass is no better or worse than the fantasy of the despicable underclass, in practice it's become much more difficult to assail the former fantasy without some detractor resorting to the usual attack: "Oh, so you're against the advancement of Black people/Asians/women/transexuals etc." 

Rather, I reject the application of fantasies, that have their aesthetic use within fiction, as direct analogues of reality. Within the past twenty years the Liberal subculture has embraced its addiction to eternal victimage, which is a ploy they use to minimize contrary voices and to gain cultural hegemony. Ironically, they don't appreciate the irony that this is precisely the strategy that was often (though not always) followed by their hypothetical overclass in maintaining their hegemony. There is also no appreciation that the standard Liberal-Conservative opposition duplicates Hegel's slave-master dichotomy, but without any of Hegel's insight that the "slave" may replace the "master" and so become come to realize that doing so is "futile and irrational." On this theme, Hegel said:

...although the fear of the lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not therein aware that it is a being-for-self.  Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.

Without troubling about Hegel's exact meaning of "being-for-self," this excerpt makes clear that "fear of the lord" plays a role in the bondsman's journey to consciousness. In my experience, the usual Liberal response to this concept comes down to claiming that the speaker is trying to excuse the lord's activities/tyrannies. This reaction is at least comprehensible when talking about hegemonies based in race or religion, for these inequalities arise from one ingroup seeking to control another. But the reaction is stupid when dealing with hegemonies based in gender. The Left's attempt to impose an identical condemnation upon such disparate forms of inequality is characteristic of the lack of discrimination found in Nietzsche's "man of ressentiment."

For this reason, I'm often frustrated with the mediocrity of much fiction that endorses simplistic Ultraliberal (or Progressive) ideals in order to indulge the fantasy of the despicable overclass. Some examples I've railed against include (1) Jordan Peele's film US, (2) N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, and (3) almost anything by Spike Lee, though particularly THE BLACKKLANSMAN.

All of these works share the trait of not being able to evince self-mastery in their quest for an illusory mastery of external hegemony. However, as I said in Part 1, I did find an example of a superior work that did combine self-mastery with the fantasy of the despised overclass-- which I hope to address soon.