I love Golden Age Comic Books but stop making excuses for the Bigotry in some of them!

This post was spurred by comments I have seen several Youtube channels make when discussing Golden Age comics, that are being released in impressive hardcover reprints called Omnibuses.

One that is dropping this month and I am looking forward to is GOLDEN AGE CAPTAIN AMERICA Vol II.

And quite a few channels have given an overview on this upcoming book.

I am a huge fan of several genres and eras of comics, to include the golden age. I particularly think the Timely era of comics (What Marvel was called before it was Marvel), especially their horror comics, is very entertaining.

If you have not tried golden/atomic age series like MYSTIC and MENACE and STRANGE TALES I highly recommend them. And I also am a fan of the combat and superhero comics of that period.

I own the GOLDEN AGE CAPTAIN AMERICA Vol I omnibus, and strongly recommend it.  And already have Vol II pre-ordered.

I say all that to say I am the audience for these books, but I have to take objection to one thing various Youtubers and Pundits continue to say during their overview of these books, as if to make apologies for them.

• They say these books have offensive depictions, which is true.
• They say they are a desire to dehumanize the enemy, which is partly true.
• They say it is not racist which is a 100% false.

No, These are bigoted and ignorant depictions, that serve a deeply ingrained racist dogma. Racist depictions were happening long before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or any act of aggression, to the earliest days of comic strips, at the start of the 20th century, and comic books.

So these comics depictions were less about ‘dehumanizing the enemy’ related to people we were at war with, but was about dehumanizing the non-white masses. Hence why Blacks and other ethnicities are portrayed in demeaning ways to cully favor with a “frightened of changing times” majority. It is an attempt to continue to give the majority a minstrel show entertainment, which itself was an outgrowth of the outcome of the civil war, and an attempt to denigrate and have power over the things they feared.

The irony of this is that these new forms of mass media, from Movies to Comics, these 20th century forms of entertainment that in their infancy were looked down on as ghetto entertainment, were largely overseen by Jewish Immigrants that themselves had escaped various forms of European persecution. But saw that the secret of success was swerving into the bigotry and biases of the day, particularly if they could point that ridicule and persecution to other ethnicities.

These pundits say these books are a product of their times, which while a nice sounding statement, obscures the more accurate truth, these were choices of men in power and men aspiring toward power.

And whether 1921 or 2021, the date does not matter, what matters is the choices and the hearts of men.

Some men through racism or venality made horrible choices, such as Will Eisner, and the people he shaped in his shop to perpetuate these denigrations of people of color. And by contrast you had creators like Matt Baker and Mac Raboy, who lived in the same time as Eisner, but decided not to embrace the same bigotry as Eisner. Look at the way Raboy drew characters of color who we were not at war with (his CAPTAIN MARVEL JR and MASTER COMICS work comes to mind) or Baker; largely without caricature,  as opposed to Eisner.

I can enjoy these books despite their failings and their bigotry, but let us not make excuses for the bigotry on display by saying it was the times. In 1921 or 2021, the fault is never the date on the calendar, or our stars, it is always the hearts of men.

Some men make right decisions, and some make Trumpian ones, and rise to popularity on peoples bigotry, and fear, and hate and ignorance.

That is what happened in Comics and in movies, but not all comics, and not all movies, so let us stop saying it is the times. It may have been the publisher, or the editor, or the writer or the artist, but it was not the times.

To make that infantile argument is to obscure the courage of the men who made the right choices, and white wash the culpability of the men who made the wrong/easy choices.

Yes these books are part of history, and we can learn from them, but only if we recognize that these books are demeaning and offensive in places, because people chose to make demeaning and offensive  choices, and not just because of ‘the times’.

Okay, Off my soap box now.

Love the various channels that do cover and champion these Golden Age collections, it is just we have to be wary of spreading an uninformed opinion as fact… namely that these books are reflections of the times.

Theses books are the choices of men, and only understanding this, can we learn to make better choices… regardless of the date on the calendar.

Here Endeth The Lesson!

Review: TED Talk Eric X. Li on China and the US

“We live in the dusk of an era. Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st. Meta-narrative is the cancer that is killing democracy from the inside.

Now, I want to clarify something. I’m not here to make an indictment of democracy. On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world. It is the universal claim that many Western elites are making about their political system, the hubris, that is at the heart of the West’s current ills. If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others, and a little bit more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance.

China’s political model will never supplant electoral democracy, because unlike the latter, it doesn’t pretend to be universal. It cannot be exported. But that is the point precisely. The significance of China’s example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist.

Let us draw to a close this era of meta-narratives. Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over. Let us stop telling people and our children there’s only one way to govern ourselves and a singular future towards which all societies must evolve. It is wrong. It is irresponsible. And worst of all, it is boring. Let universality make way for plurality. Perhaps a more interesting age is upon us. Are we brave enough to welcome it?

Thank you.”— Eric X. Li’s TED talk: A TALE OF TWO POLITICAL SYSTEMS

I do not subscribe to China’s one party system, but the faults of China’s system aside, it is maintaining itself and its people, unlike the US and its western model that is increasingly about survival through annexation.

The US model is about putting off the problems of here and now, by putting effort into destroying and annexing always the next thing, the next country, the next resource.

However a country that does not resolve the issues of its own back yard before expanding and enforcing its will on other countries, is like a dog with rabies, running around the neighborhood and jumping fences and killing and mating with other dogs. It is a policy of barbarism and ultimately genocide and madness.

So while I do not think China’s system is an answer, compromised as it is by corruption and human rights violations, it is clear to me that unchecked Capitalism masquerading as Democracy, what the US and other Westernized Nations are calling Democracy… is a more compromised, more untenable, more destructive, and ultimately more evil system.

So the crux of Eric’s closing speech (quoted above)is sound, not that we should adopt China’s system, but that we should be flexible, and open to a changing and changed system, and the idea that there are a multitude of systems and solutions that remain untried.

Open to the idea that we as individuals, groups, and nations must always be looking to form… a more perfect union.

A successful nation is perhaps not an end, but a journey. And it is the things we allow a nation to do on that unending journey, in our name, that defines not just the success and the failure, but the good and the evil, of our lives.

The News Thing, a boat of lost souls, and the cross

This is me, ranting. Bat crazy ranting. Those who want to avoid Bat Crazy ranting, avoid this one, come back tomorrow and hear about super-heroes punching each other in their under-wear. 🙂

I don’t really do… the news thing.

I mean the major stuff I keep abreast of, if the president and congress are trying to sell first borns to big business, etc. But the 24 hour, FOX/CNN/SS constant “thought police, be afraid, believe, color coded terror, be afraid”… not really my bag.

You tell me something one time a day, that’s news. You tell me something 72 times a day, the same thing, 3 times an hour, that is not about news, that is about programming. That is about conditioning. That is about terror.

That is about you, the media, in ways deep and dreadful and not at all healthy, trying to touch me.

I watch people, sit in front their tv god… constantly just soaking up and regurgitating another man’s hate.

Older women in my family, god love women, but they are like sponges for the dreams of madmen, raised on serialized entertainment, on soap operas, so news and talk shows are just more soap operas to them. Idiocy is just more entertainment to them. And they will open up their mouths and parrot out of their mouths whatever is on television… without questioning.

“Oh isn’t it good we’re invading Libya” one recently said to me, when this nation (under God?) was committing yet another coup in a sovereign nation.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Cause of all the bad things the leader has done to his people.”

“Do you mean Gaddafi, who was supporting the civil rights movement in this country, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, when the American government wouldn’t let great quantities of the population drink out of faucets or use a bathroom, and was siccing dogs on marchers, and bombing churches and lynching Black children? That Gaddafi?”

Needless to say I’m really popular at family reunions.

It’s just amazing to me, how few people in America, think. Not Black people, or White people, or Brown people, or Yellow people, but any people… think, beyond what the idiot box tells them.

Oh it is to be wept at, how all you victims of Rome, so gleefully are turned into victimizers.

Here’s the thing with me. You have to earn the moral high ground.

YOU HAVE TO EARN the moral high ground.

Be you a man, or a nation, you have to earn the moral high ground.

America is forever taking the moral high ground. And no country, in the history of this world, is less suited to walk that walk. America began as a terrorist nation, and America grew fat through fostering a level of inhumanity and terror, that no Iraq or Iran or Cuba or Korea or Russia or Libya, has ever come close to.

And the thing about America, is her present shows no sign of having repented of her past.

America has never stopped being a terrorist nation. It’s her one, last great product.

So yeah when the military industrial complex, pulls the strings for the 24hour propaganda show we call CNN or Fox, etc… I’m not really big, on goose stepping along.

I guess because I have a long memory, and I potentially can forgive, but I will never forget and I will never cheer you into a position to do it again. To anyone.

Now you, the tides of war, can come through me, or you can try to walk over me, but you’ll never reach your goal with me.

It’s the same reason I’ll never be a Christian as practiced in America. I have no particular issue with Christianity, I think the ideology is grand, however in practice especially in America it has been an abomination in the eyes of God.

That’s not a dig, and it’s not an insult, it is however a fact.

From the Witch trials on. The odious form of Slavery that took place in this nation, the most depraved the world has ever seen, happened not despite Christianity. It reached it’s peak of evil BECAUSE of how Christianity was practiced in this country.

Slavery, in the vile form practiced in the US flourished… because of Christianity.

That’s a hell of a thing for anyone to say, I know it… and I take no pleasure in the saying.

More hell still, because it’s the truest thing you’ll ever hear anybody tell you.

I have seen the torture devices. I have seen your abominations. I have seen ships with names like HOPE, and CHARITY, and GRACE (all we need is one named OPERATION FREEDOM), loaded down with tortured men, women, and children. I have seen the machinations of righteous men and women. Shielding their abominations under the name of Christ and god.

And I have seen one more thing, that we are our fathers even onto the 7th generation, and crimes not grappled with, not resolved… are repeated: there or there or there.

Christianity as practiced in this country, has more of Rome in it, than of Christ, and this country has the crucifixions to prove it. The cross itself, having nothing to do with a Christ, being a Roman symbol long before any such messianic birth or death, a roman symbol of power, and dominance, and torture. The devil going up and down, and to and fro.

How does a person wear a cross and not know that? Not think one minute, of one hour, of one day, of the millions upon millions who died screaming their guts out on that most sacred torture device of Rome… on the cross.

That cross.

Think about it, logically for a second. Who would carry around an idol, a symbol of a lynched man except the lyncher. Much the way lynchers in America would cut trophies from the bodies of their victims to wear around their neck.

Such… Christian people. Such, righteous people. God forbid you accuse anyone else in this world of terror.

So to, who would wear a symbol of a crucifixion around their neck, except the crucifier? For one second, think, actually think, about the dogma, the ritual that Christians do, that has nothing of Christianity in it… but everything of Rome, even onto the forsaking of the Sabbath.

I honestly don’t care what people believe.

But I do care that your choice of good or evil be informed. Whatever you choose to believe, make it an informed choice.

It’s not evil men that worry me.

It’s the masses that cheer them as they go marching by, too busy to make a choice not handed to them. The careless masses are the engine without which, the dreams of evil men… could not fly.

Try an examined choice.

I’ve done that, and I’ve found I can’t wear lynched or crucified men or the symbols of their suffering around my neck, I can’t bend my knee to bloody priests, and I can’t follow a nation of terror.

But I’m wacky that way, your examined choice may be different.

That’s been my news for today.

Cheery son of a gun, aren’t I?

But it’s past now, my mad fit of absinthe and peyote, it comes only rarely, when the spirit moves.

Perhaps even when the spirit needs,

For a man, supposedly shorn of faith, I do believe in fate.

I needed to speak.

Perhaps becomes someone needed to listen.

Who knows.

Wild is the world, and occasionally wonderful.

But the mad compulsion has left me, until the next blue moon.

Which is fitting, because I find the truth you don’t have to repeat as often as lies. If a lie, it will touch you not, without a constant barrage, and you will be unmoved by my mad ramblings.

But if the truth, it lived in you long before you read these words, and my words simply, like a stone waiting for a sculptor… revealed it.

If the truth you will know it. And if a lie you will know it.

And how you make of that news, something new…. well, who knows, the world is wild and wonderful… his miracles to perform. 🙂

1st Corinthians 15:51

Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
King James Bible

Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall all indeed rise again: but we shall not all be changed.
Douay-Rheims Bible