Friday, August 23, 2019

TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 3

Here's a follow-up statement to my two July issues on the above topic, originally written on DEBATE POLITICS.

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The original "shame culture" was the one that a dominant WASP population promulgated against all those who were not WASPS. It was bound to fail as Classic Liberals showed its ideological stupidities.

The current "shame culture," though, has an advantage. It's just as stupid as the first version, but it piggybacks on the genuine accomplishments of  Classic Liberals, much the way a dum-dum like Al Sharpton piggybacks on the accomplishments of Martin Luther King.

I think that real racism still exists, as can be seen with the much delayed, and just, firing of Daniel Pantaleo. However, there is as yet no real metric, no standard of measurement, for what is or is not a racist act. Joe Biden telling a black audience that Mitt Romney wants to put them back in chains is not a just identification of a racist act or even a racist attitude. It's just bad, overblown rhetoric, much like the supposed anti-racist rhetoric that Biden still attempts to use against the Donald.

As I said in the OP, Trump is not even close to being a person able to evolve or enable such a standard. But now that he's stood up to the new shame culture, maybe someone better than him will come up with such a metric.


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As it happens, in the last week the racial politics of anti-Trumpery manifested in a minor comic-book kerfluffle, courtesy of Art Spiegelman. As detailed on this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay, someone or other asked Spiegelman to write an introduction to a collection of Golden Age reprints from Timely (later Marvel) comic books. An editor asked Spiegelman to remove a political reference that had nothing to do with Timely Comics in the 1930s: one in which the artist compared the CAPTAIN AMERICA villain the Red Skull with Donald Trump, cleverly disguised as "the Orange Skull." Spiegelman refused to remove the reference and retracted his essay. He then publicized the disagreement, with the result that, as he himself states, far more people saw what he wrote through online news-media than would have read the intro in the Timely reprint.

No one will be surprised that, whatever my own reservations about Donald Trump, I find comparisons between the President and Nazi leaders to be yet more "bad, overblown rhetoric," much like the anti-Trumpery that appears at the conclusion of Spike Lee's BLACKKKLANSMAN. Spiegelman went on to claim that Marvel wanted to be "apolitical," which just shows that he's apparently read less current Marvel comics than I have. Though a lot of current Marvels use their fictional platforms as bully pulpits, it seems likely that someone on the editorial staff thought that an introduction to a bunch of Golden Age funnybooks was not a fit place for such a pulpit.

Most of the respondents on the BOUNDING thread tended to agree, and I for one thought it ironic that a comics-artist who has made much of his Jewish heritage would align the Donald with Nazism, given that he's been pretty supportive of both Israel and Jewish heritage, even if he's shown his usual goofiness by, say, claiming that all Jews ought to vote Republican. Nevertheless, I chose to chime in with the following:

All political leaders, before entering office, must ask themselves, "What Would the Red Skull Do?" And of course, the logical conclusion would be-- acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Yep, that's just what the Red Skull would do

While Spiegelman is free to make any comment he pleases to anyone willing to give him a podium, no one is required to give him such a podium, particularly in a venue that has a dubious relationship to politics. Yes, Captain America was seen punching out Hitler, and other Marvel heroes made forays against the Axis or doppelgangers thereof, but the stories were barely "political" in the true sense of the word. And though Trump is certainly guilty of his own political sins, conflating them with the heritage of even fictional Nazis like the Red Skull is ridiculous in the extreme.

4 comments:

  1. Not really. Kids are being locked up in cages, denied medical care, and allowed to die mostly because they're Mexican. He has white nationalists (basically nazis) and people aligned with nazis like Sebastian Gorka on policy. Calling trump a nazi is ENTIRELY fair. That he's too stupid to actually commit genocide is a small comfort. Even Trump's acknowledgement of Jerusalem doesn't change that anti semites like John Hagee support Israel. Trump is not pro jewish. He engages in stereotypes himself. Bibi Netanyahu also supports anti semites who say nice things about Israel.

    Bounding into Comics is a site that thinks women should be sex objects, that blacks are subhumans and that muslims should be exterminated. They're scum.

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  2. Likewise Marvel has no obligation to give conservatives a podium.

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  3. The second comment went bye-bye because it was just a meaningless screed against "Classic Liberals" as somehow being Nazis-- which, ironically, was indeed the sort of mendacious charge that Frederic Wertham leveled at liberals like Jerry Siegel and William Gaines.

    I didn't know that committing genocide was a mark of one's intelligence. Thanks for clearing that up.

    All of your other anti-Trumperies are routine in the extreme and hence not interesting. But equating genocide with intelligence-- wow, I gotta keep that one.

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  4. Nowhere did I say that Marvel had to give conservatives a bully pulpit like the ones they've given to ultraliberals. I merely stated that Spiegelman's claim that the company was "apolitical" was utter nonsense. Much like you, he simply denounces everyone who disagrees with him on any issue, with no attempt at reasoned debate.

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