Watching the Hobbit

A friend and I took in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey last night, somewhat against my better judgement. I’ve actually read the book, which wasn’t the case with The Lord of the Rings, despite a youth spent, in part, playing Dungeons & Dragons and an adulthood reading, in part, some fantasy lit. I was concerned that Peter Jackson–or the movie execs funding the films–made the decision to stretch the book out to a trilogy. Early reviews confirmed the mistake: where Jackson cut The Lord of the Rings to a well-paced trilogy of films, he added material (from various Tolkein sources) to pad the lightweight, overly episodic narrative in the original novel to make a trilogy that, from the evidence at hand, has an at-best viscous flow.

I’ll also note that though I know that Tolkein’s partisans point to the detail with which he sketched out his world’s mythology, ethnography, and history. Jackson put a bunch of this stuff into the film to pad the length to three hours and, I am told, to resolve some inconsistencies between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I don’t find the hobbit to be a “great novel,” nor Tolkein a “great writer,” but he definitely knew what he was doing, and all the backstory he sketched he, significantly, kept out of his novels. Putting the backstory back in to the narrative does violence to the work, and does not make for a better experience. The Hobbit would have been better left as a light, fun, kids’ story.

None of the foregoing was original thinking. What I will report is that I found myself becoming sickened and angry at the amount and character of the slaughter in the film. I am well aware that this is all part of the novel itself and Tolkein’s general take on the genre. Personal qualities are applied to wholesale to races or species. There are only good hobbits, and there are no good goblins.

Slaughter–witness the bloody scene when Gandalf, the dwarves, and Bilbo escape from the goblins. I would count the number of the dead and calculate the ratio against dead good guys, but division by zero is impossible. Not a single one of the adventuring party, dwarf, wizard, or hobbit, dies in the film. Lots of goblins, who as a group only threaten harm to the party when the party enters, uninvited, their underground kingdom.

Judge, jury, and executioner.

Orcs and trolls are slaughtered, as well. Orcs are the most vicious, and by appearances congenitally so. They seem to have no cause for grievance against anyone, but grievances against everyone. They live to kill. Trolls–the first slaughter of the film is of three trolls–kill for food, and are notably, in the words of a dwarf, “half-witted.” To be clear, we have three creatures who are hungry, who capture and cook other creature for food, meat, that is, and who are not smart enough to walk through the full ethical implications of their actions. The dwarfs, wizard, and hobbit slaughter them all without remorse.

The point isn’t whether Tolkein was or was not a decent human being. He seems to have been personally very decent. The point is the content of the structure of his literary creation. Above all, somewhat obviously, and somewhat frequently discussed is the racialization of subjects in his work. Distinct personalities only show through in the “good” races, hobbits above all. Hobbits are stand-ins for good English country folk, of the Village Green Preservation Society type. Specific instances of the “bad” races are distinguished only by the extent to which they’re able to be bad. The big, white orc isn’t ethically any worse than the other orcs, he’s just physically able to do more damage.

More interesting is that it is precisely in their ability to slaughter what appears to be hundreds of the “bad” races without a trace of regret that the “good guys” distinguish themselves as “good guys.” None of the goblins here would have been convicted in a court of law, at least of murder, because they hadn’t killed any of the principals in the narrative. Their crime, worthy of death, was that they were goblins enforcing the laws of what everyone agreed was their kingdom. Gandalf and crew we could argue had a higher calling, but in that case the goblins capital offense was that they were in the way.

This doesn’t strike me as simply an expression of racialized thinking that I’d expect from any member of a settler class. Though it bears noting that Tolkein wasn’t born in England, but as a white child in British South Africa. It seems to some great extent to be the collision of this racialized thinking with the personal experience of warfare. Tolkein himself noted the importance of the experience of the First World War:

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

Tolkein’s mental world, a product of the world through which his life passed, was one in which slaughter was normalized. War on a massive scale was unifying experience of people of not only his place and generation, but the generation to follow. All of his fiction was conceived, if not entirely executed, while this slaughter was going on or in the fairly immediate aftermath. The experience of British soldiers at the Somme was that they were to slaughter as many Germans as they possibly could, not because of something those Germans had done, but because they were Germans. And what aim did those Germans have? To slaughter as many British (or British colonial subjects) as possible, because of who they were.

This is simply how modern warfare works and at some basic level both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings reflect this arrangement. I won’t say that Tolkein or Jackson glorifies the slaughter itself, though surely they glorify the ones doing the slaughter. What Tolkein does do, however, is simply accept this type of mass killing as a normal part of the process of human life.

It is not, however, normal. It is a total aberration from the precedent of our species’ development over hundreds of thousands of years. For most of our history–before the development of states some 10,000 years ago–we surely had inter-group conflict, warfare if one wishes to call it that. But there’s no evidence of genocide per se, which is, be clear, what Tolkein depicts. That’s a thoroughly modern crime, and certainly one impossible to imagine without the development of states. This I think is what sickened me as I watched the film.

We need a fantasy series that examines how the process of war itself brutalizes all sides involved. To some extent George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice, on TV as Game of Thrones, does this, though not from a pacifist perspective.

Future

I agree with BooMan’s point that the important target it the insanity on the right. That said, I wonder if Krugman and I are on the same side.

Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

I was drawn in to Krugman’s piece by its enormously sexy title: “Is Growth Over?” Of course, it’s a title to draw people in but a possibility Krugman seem congenitally incapable of conceiving. The end of growth would be, ipso facto, the end of capitalism. You can’t engage that possibility in the New York Times.

The broader context, if you didn’t follow the link, is Krugman’s riposte to Bob Gordon’s suggestion that US economic growth is very likely going to, for most of us, diminish to nothing or next to nothing. We have a media that is designed to mask as much as it informs. Yet, it masks not through censorship but by the making available of material that doesn’t get read and doesn’t get discussed. Were it censored, we’d hunt for it. Available, we ignore it.

Here we have a case in point: Krugman cites Gordon, but proceeds to not respond to the important point of his piece, that he envisions an end to economic growth. From Gordon:

Figure 2. Growth in real GDP per capita, with actual and hypothetical paths

What goes up…

The key here is the time scale. Gordon shows a rare willingness, for a professional economist, to engage the long-term. It’s on that scale that we find the really important questions, where economics ceases to be simply a technical matter and becomes a real discussion of what it means to live as a human being. And what do we see? We see somewhat static growth between 1300 and 1800, ticking up at 1700. Surely things were less static than a flat line, but we are worried not so much about details as orders of magnitude.

Correctly, Gordon links UK and US growth into a continuous, if multicolored line. He is actually looking at hegemonic capitalist societies, not at the UK or US particularly. He is talking about capitalism. The growth in that capitalism spikes and then, declines. Data shows a decline to our present moment, which he suggests is a continuing, downward trend.

Yes, yes. World temperatures may just decide in 2013 to turn back around and cool down, too. But the data doesn’t suggest they will.

It occurred to me, as a matter of my own development, not as a brilliant, original idea, that we didn’t need a socialism that would outproduce capitalism. If capitalism has taught us anything, it’s at minimum that we are killing ourselves with stuff. What capitalism did do–long since, actually–is provide a means through which scarcity transformed from a natural to a social phenomenon. There continues to be scarcity, and our system could not function without it. But it’s not because it has to be that way. It’s because we organize ourselves, through private property, in a way that necessitates it.

So what does Gordon say? He says, and Krugman alludes to it, that

Even if innovation were to continue into the future at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the US faces six headwinds that are in the process of dragging long-term growth to half or less of the 1.9% annual rate experienced between 1860 and 2007. These include demography, education, inequality, globalisation, energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt. A provocative ‘exercise in subtraction’ suggests that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99% of the income distribution could fall below 0.5% per year for an extended period of decades.

Krugman doesn’t know what to do with this. Krugman is like Keynes: he wants to save capitalism from a world in which workers make economic decisions for themselves.  So, Krugman does what anyone desperate to be right does when confronted with data indicating he or she is wrong:

I’ve been looking into technology issues a lot lately, and I’m pretty sure he’s wrong, that the IT revolution has only begun to have its impact…Consider for a moment a sort of fantasy technology scenario…

Our paper of record goes to the fantasy scenario as proof. People will often posit Krugman as a counterweight to the inestimable Brooks, but they’re wrong. The two are cut from the same, fantastic cloth.

At the same time, there’s a point here to be made, but Krugman doesn’t engage it. Marx‘s famous “Fragment on Machines“, from the Grundrisse:

As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. (705)

Here, there’s actually some discussion about what overwhelming mechanization, the likes of which Krugman postulates, might mean. It might mean that we, as people, might have a lot more time on our hands. It might mean that instead of working ourselves to the bone during the day only to self-medicate (choose your poison) at night, we might be able to think and talk with each other, intelligently. It wouldn’t be just the “non-labor[ing]” few who get to philosophize.

All this would take real organization. The task at hand now, then, is to develop that organization.

Executive Committee

I don’t disagree in the least with Marx’s famous assessment:

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

I would qualify his use of the word “executive” in our case to include the decision-making parts of the Federal Government generally. That said, we need to understand what this means in practice. Above all, it doesn’t mean that the people on the committee agree with each other, and it doesn’t mean that the people on the committee have a clue how things actually work.

Harry Reid, this morning:

This matters.

“The American people are waiting for the ball to drop, but it’s not going to be a good drop. Because Americans’ taxes are approaching the wrong direction,” he said on the Senate floor. “Come the first of this year, Americans will have less income than they have today. If we go over the [fiscal] cliff, and it looks like th

at’s where we’re headed, the House of Representatives — as we speak with four days left after today before the first of the year — aren’t here. … I can’t imagine their consciences.”

I’ll leave off arguments over terminology–”austerity” or made-for-TV “fiscal cliff”–and go to the real point. Fairly clearly and somewhat predictably, no deal to avert “sequestration” is likely to materialize before the end of the year. Smartypants pointed to this likelihood in November, citing the President:

So when you combine the Bush tax cuts expiring, the sequester in place…we’re going to be in a position where I believe in the first six months we are going to solve that big piece of business.

“First six months,” not “before the end of 2012.” At some level, and I think the President would agree this is the right tack, my point is not to understand the President himself, but to understand what is actually going on. He is not a socialist revolutionary, rhetoric on the right aside. He does, however, show a clear intent to “go over the fiscal cliff.” This is critical, because it exposes cracks in our bourgeois executive committee. It’s those cracks that allow for positive change.

We see the contours of Obama‘s governing economic thought. The idea clearly is that our economy does in fact need an executive committee, or what Habermas, to make a hip reference, called a “steering mechanism.” Obama is entirely within the realm of mainstream economic and social theory here.

So, we need to re-emphasize the overarching logic of a capitalist economy. The logic is for capital to grow. It’s not about owners of capital getting richer. It is about the capital itself. That’s the point: people are not.

What’s of interest is that the prime steward of the executive committee–the President–is very consciously taking a course of action that will diminish growth in the short term. To be certain, the idea is that, in doing so, the longer-term functional health of the system will be improved. Above all, the President is intent on never having another dustup over the debt limit.

So here are the two camps in our executive committee: on the left, relatively, the President and his cohort, whose goal is to maintain the longer-term stability of the system. On the relatively right, we have those whose sole interest is to maximize immediate-term profitability. The question for these is not where capital will be in 20 years, but whether course of action A will produce a higher rate of return this quarter than course of action B. It’s not about people, it’s about capital itself.

Individual motivations are not the issue. It seems clear to me that the President came to the conclusion some decades ago that a proletarian takeover of the means of production was not imminent in the United States, and that the best way to make life better for working people was through marginal improvements in a well-functioning system. Other Democrats likely have a more venal motivation, that to facilitate long-term growth capital needs regulation of some sort. Agreed, but it’s really about protecting capital rather than people. House Republicans represent those who profit off fiscal crisis. Remember: lots of people got rich off the crash of 2008.

I am not someone who envisions a socialist future that outproduces capitalism. Nor do I imagine a workers’ state that replaces, in its structures and borders. It seems to me we are some distance from “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” I know capitalism as a system will cease to be. My question is what will cause its end and what will replace it. Immediately, will we move past capitalism because of a social mechanism or natural causes, i.e., will people consciously act to change things or will climatic crisis simply break the system to pieces?

Too often those of us on the left imagine a system that is monolithic. There may be few spaces at this point which are truly outside the system, but that’s a very different premise than positing a monolithic executive committee of the bourgeoisie. Those interested in long-term growth will also at least take the time to look at long-term inequality (diminishing consumer demand) and long-term climatic questions. Those interested only in the next quarterly report are the most dangerous. They’re on the same committee, but not the same team.

My Best Present/Star Trek

I am currently engaged in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from start to finish. I came to the show late it its lifetime, but quickly came to appreciate it more than the original series. This morning, I am on the sixth episode of the first season, “Where No One Has Gone Before.”

The clip above–I’m not here to violate copyright, however problematic it is as a legal structure–doesn’t get to the interesting point of the episode. Will Wheaton, who plays “the boy,” Wesley Crusher:

Wesley says, “you mean that space, time, and thought aren’t the separate things they appear to be?” Deadheads everywhere put down their bongs and cough out, “Duh.”

The assistant totally freaks out, and tells Wesley that humans aren’t ready for such “dangerous nonsense,” but if he has any extra weed laying around, it would, like, totally help take the edge off that whole phasing out of reality thing.

The Enterprise travels at unprecedented speed–past warp 10, which certainly sounds fast–because “The Traveler,” manipulates the ship’s warp drive. The Traveler is a being who has functionally bridged the distinction between thought, energy, and matter.

Wheaton’s own assessment of the episode is on point:

‘Where No One Has Gone Before’ is the first time The Next Generation really started to come together.

I find as I get older, I’m on the one hand reading more books than I did when I was younger, but on the other hand I’m simultaneously watching fewer films and more TV. The only current shows I’ve watched are “Parks and Recreation” and “Game of Thrones.” What I like to do is start a series at the beginning and watch the whole thing straight through, like I’m doing with the “Next Generation.”

Ever since I was a kid, I was drawn to artistic production of all sorts. I am somewhat well-educated, and am able to reference various, ostensible classics. But while I love education, I never liked being schooled, and the truth of the matter is that while I am confident that my sensibilities are in their way refined I prefer low-brow forms to high-brow. The best visual art of the 20th Century United States, for example, came from Gee’s Bend, so people could keep warm:

The low-brow is higher than the high-brow.

Star Trek strikes me as about as great as low-brow gets. One can point to any number of flaws in the work, but it deals with real stuff, and does so in a way that encourages participation from a wide audience rather than discourages it. Despite what the high-brow crowd may believe–and I’ve sat at those tables at times–working people ask just as serious questions as high-artists. Here, in “Where No One Has Gone Before,” we are asked as people to engage with the relationship between thought, matter, and energy, and we do. That’s what it’s really about, and that’s what the Buddha asked us to face, from the translation in Sheng Yen‘s commentary on the Heart Sutra:

Sariputra,
form is not other than emptiness,
and emptiness is not other than form;
form is precisely emptiness,
and emptiness precisely form.

There you go. And we can return to the beauty of low-brow:

It’s Christmas, a day I haven’t enjoyed in decades. This Christmas, I’m remarkably at ease. The only thing I feel like giving today is thanks. I woke up today, and Star Trek gave me a gift of the Dharma, and today is a great opportunity. From the Diamond Sutra:

“Let me ask you Subhuti. If a person filled over ten thousand galaxies with the seven treasures for the purpose of compassion, charity, and giving alms, would this person not gain great merit and spread much happiness?”

“Yes, Most Honored One. This person would gain great merit and spread much happiness, even though, in truth, this person does not have a separate existence to which merit could accrue. Why? Because this person’s merit is characterized with the quality of not being merit.”

The Buddha continued, “Then suppose another person understood only four lines of this Sutra, but nevertheless took it upon themselves to explain these lines to someone else. This person’s merit would be even greater than the other person’s. Why? Because all Buddhas and all the teachings and values of the highest, most fulfilled, most awakened minds arise from the teachings in this Sutra. And yet, even as I speak, Subhuti, I must take back my words as soon as they are uttered, for there are no Buddhas and there are no teachings.”

The Monetization of Everything

It’s very clear that the President intended from the start to shore up US manufacturing, and it’s clear that doing so is an uphill battle. What we have definitely beats the rapid deindustrialization that came before, but is still far from producing conditions where those who want to work can do so and receive remuneration to live securely, as manufacturing jobs tend to do for working class people. This means–critical to understand for some points below–diminishing demand, in the broad sense.

From the Washington Post, recently:

Total industrial output at factories, mines and utilities rose also rose 1.1 percent last month, after a 0.7 percent decline in October.

Still, economists cautioned that the rebound in manufacturing was almost entirely related to Sandy.

Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, noted that when averaging data over October and November, industrial output and manufacturing both were up just 2.1 percent over the past year — less than half the growth rate from the start of the year.

“Looking beyond Sandy’s impact, U.S. manufacturers continue to plod ahead,” Guatieri said.

The broader context is everything. From the Atlantic:

Actually-existing capitalism boomed, stagnated, and then crashed. I do not suggest for a moment that all of out social problems are simply a function of the theory of surplus value. However, and here is where I part analytical company with my progressive siblings, I insist that when one multiplies the number of decisions we make as people in this society by the relative influence they have on people’s lives, it’s the economic considerations that matter above all for producing the conditions in which we live.

So, the chart above. The watershed moment is 1973. The 25 years following the Second World War were boom years, releasing demand pent-up since 1929 or so. All quintiles saw growing incomes. This was also the point at which social safety nets developed most fully in the capitalist world. Why? Because the very rich could afford relatively high taxation because overall growth was so massive. That, and the recent memory of the real cost of socio-economic collapse was a deterrent of source to their baser instincts.

Memory, however, fades. Following 1973, two things happen in response to declining profits. First, we see an attempt to boost profit by cutting taxes to compensate for diminished aggregate growth. Ideologically, this took the form of Howard Jarvis‘ and Grover Norquist‘s nonsense.

Second, and more to our point, we saw a concerted effort by capital to intrude into area of social life previously unscathed. That is to say, if steel production or autos in the US weren’t as profitable as before, we find ways to get rich off of schools, for example.

Some stats on the growth of for-profit eduction, from ProPublica, edited a bit for format.

Growth

766,000: number of students enrolled in for-profit higher education schools in 2001

2.4 million: number of students enrolled in for-profit higher education schools in 2010

225: percent by which enrollment at for-profit colleges grew between 1998 and 2008

31: percent by which enrollment in all degree-granting higher-ed institutions grew in same time frame (schools awarding an associate or higher degree)

Cost of education

$35,000: average cost of a two-year associate’s degree at a for-profit college

$8,300 :average cost of an associate’s degree at comparable community college

$63,000: average cost of a four-year bachelor’s degree at a for-profit college

$52,500: average cost of a four-year bachelor’s degree at state flagship university (Note: Such schools, of course, often benefit from significant taxpayer subsidies)

$19,806: average cost of a certificate program at a for-profit college

$4,250: average cost of a certificate program at a comparable public college

The function of education in our economy is to provide an avenue for profitable investment for idle financial capital in search of an opportunity. Our role as people is to pay the interest on our student loans. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m still all for education, but of the liberal arts kind, and it should be freely available to all.

Speculative profiteering is not just for the commodities markets but for necessities, such as housing. From Wonkblog:

The highest return among stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index for the year so far is Pulte Homes, the major homebuilder; as of Wednesday morning it had returned investors 195 percent. No. 6 on the list is Lennar Corp., a Pulte competitor. S&P’s overall index for the homebuilding industry is up 59.4 percent this year, and across the homebuilding industry, sentiment rose to its highest level since the middle of 2006, the National Association of Homebuilders said Tuesday.

A greater percentage of our shrinking–go back to the chart above–incomes goes to shelter. And why? Because the titans of financial capital find it easier and, in today’s capitalism, to screw as mortgage holders and renters than as laborers in the manufacturing sector.

Then, guns. Smartypants noted yesterday the persistent, foul rhetoric from the NRA and, in particular, its Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre, to divide society into two camps of good, law-abiding, gun-needing citizens and dangerous monsters in human clothing.

This has always been at the crux of the argument against gun control…that the world can be divided up between the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” Its all black and white (literally sometimes) for them. And since the “bad guys” are irredeemable, our only recourse is to arm ourselves so that we cankill them.

It should be added that LaPierre is paid to do this:

since 2005 contributions from gun industry “corporate partners” to the NRA total between $14.7 million and $38.9 million.

There is an underlying, economic process here. Wayne LaPierre expressed it with breathtaking succinctness:

“I mean, the strongest defense of the Second Amendment is the marketplace,” he said.

It’s not enough for a capitalist enterprise to sell someone a gun that they keep in a closet for the rest of their lives. The capitalist enterprise needs, to grow, to sell guns again and again, newer guns, bigger guns. To most of us, an assault weapon ban would diminish the number of high-capacity firearms in society and make us generally safer. To a gun manufacturer, an assault weapon ban would diminish effective demand for assault weapons. To repeat myself, I’m not suggesting that capitalism caused Sandy Hook. But it damn sure created the conditions it which it happened. Step by step:

• Capitalism requires constant growth.
• We live in an era of stagnating or declining incomes, which diminishes aggregate demand.
• Capitalist enterprises, to produce growth, must in this context fight for a larger slice of a shrinking (if only measured against inflation) pie.
• Capitalist enterprises actively stimulate demand (advertising, etc.)
• Fear sells guns.
• The gun industry pays the NRA to sell fear, which boosts demand.

Nancy Lanza responded to a climate of fear and found the NRA’s solution, big guns, comforting. I think we can take that assertion to the bank.

Superheroes/The Scale of Problems

I return to Conor Sen’s tweet from a few days ago:

At some level, this is the basic problem we face as people. The context in which I write is important. Looking at Sandy Hook or another killing like it, or, in a different but related direction, the anonymous killing of modern warfare, we see this fundamental disconnection of human beings from a human scale of of social being. I am convinced that, encountering in our lives vastly more faces than we can possibly process–encountering anonymity–at some level we just shut off the part of our brain that sees others as human. Actual people become abstract bodies.

Adam Lanza may very well have killed his mother had he lived in a society where everyone knew everyone else by name. I doubt very much that had he lived in such a society he would have killed the children he, in our actual society, actually did. I’m not trying to understand murder per se, but the specific murder of people one doesn’t know who could not have harmed one in any way. This seems to me to be a specifically modern crime.

It’s very clear to me that one of the basic contradictions of the United States is its democratic rhetoric weighed against its functional lack of democracy. I’m not suggesting that voting doesn’t matter, but I take the idea of democracy to be about humans exercising agency in their own lives. There are many systemic brakes on personal agency in the US, but none so great as the deeply held, widely popular belief that the circumstances of our lives are beyond our control. No Republican gerrymandering could stifle democracy as thoroughly as own deeply-held sense of powerlessness.

Nothing illustrates this better than the persistent popularity of superheroes. To be sure, one reason that more money is being made off superhero properties is the fact that aside from being an indigenously US mythology of sorts, it is precisely because superheroes themselves are properties, and corporate ones at that, that superheroes sustain themselves in mass culture. They’re big business, and as such they represent our real gods at whose whim we feel we live.

Superman first appeared in 1932, when capitalism as it existed collapsed. It is not surprising that someone with superhuman powers showed up on the cultural scene at the very time when people faced economic problems far beyond the scale of individual or even communal solubility.

Mass-produced culture exists for profit, but in order to profit it has to sell. Despite the overriding imperative of the capital involved, you have culture produced and sold that works, usually surreptitiously but at times explicitly, against the exploitive contours of the system. Much is made of Alan Moore’s Watchmen in this regard, with reason, but of greater interest for the point at hand is Kurt Busiek’s work.

Busiek, I’ll go on record saying, is my favorite writer of superhero comics, hands down. His work is often discussed as a rebuttal to the trend, following Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, to present “high art” comics by making them “dark.” His work, in which we have superheroes without fascist impulses, is often discussed as “lighter” fare than Moore’s highbrow references or Miller’s sociopathy masquerading as moral ambiguity. This totally misreads his project.

Busiek, more than any writer of whom I’m aware, pulls back the curtain on the sense of helplessness, of living in a world whose problems are too big for mere people to solve, implicit in the genre and lived, psychologically, in the sense Sen mentioned in the tweet above. Things are too big for us to deal with ourselves.

Busiek’s Marvels, more than any other single work, made his reputation. In the short series, he re-told various Golden and Silver Age Marvel narratives from the perspective of bystanders rather than the heroes themselves. Here, the Human Torch appears. The faces are straight out of Munch:

Things are stranger than we knew, and it’s out of our control now.

These are people who are certain they are now helpless in their world.

Busiek’s major work is Astro City, a comic “universe” of his own creation and the work in the medium which, for my money, is the one that sits beside Gilbert Hernandez’ Palomar stories as the best the medium has to offer. Astro City #5, entitled “Reconnaissance,” points not only to individuals but institutions:

Us, facing life.

The key here is the policeman. The old man, in the comic book, is actually an alien sent to observe people on Earth–it is, after all, a comic book. The point is that we have come to a place where we are convinced that the institutions that we create as people to protect ourselves are not a match for the system we have inherited nor the problems it creates.

The point is not that Busiek himself sees things this way, nor that his work naively contains ideas he himself doesn’t understand. On the contrary, by making clear the position of the bystander on the genre, Busiek, much more than a self-consciously radical Moore, provides some tools to revise the relationship.

The sense that we inhabit a world we are too small to control let alone influence is deep in the United States. Again, again, and again, I’ll repeat that we’ll do we’ll to make decisions bring things to a smaller, more local, and more human level. Then, we’ll tell stories about people like us, and while we will still face violence it surely will me less random and on a smaller scale.

Monsters

As per usual, Smartypants makes a crucial point:

And so one of my first questions is “what are the ramifications of calling Adam Lanza a monster?” At the outset – let me state that I see no problem calling what he did monstrous. It was. End of story. At the same time, I always cringe when we decide that we’re comfortable calling another human being a monster.

Indeed. There are a lot of moral issues involved in making any sort of moral generalization about anybody. More important here, though, and maybe in fact part of the same point, is that there are huge analytical problems with any of these types of labels.

To be clear: this isn’t about making a high falutin’ intellectual point to seem “smart,” another label. The point is that if we are going to have a real discussion about gun violence, which seems to be happening at a level unprecedented in my memory, we need to get it right. Obviously, the stakes are high with this.

If we really want to think clearly the first step of course is to gather data. The thing that stands out here is the overwhelming preponderance of white men in the group in question, mass killers. Even someone as relatively mainstream as David Sirota makes this point unequivocally, with a degree of honest subtlety that’s too rare in his circles. Very good for him.

…I said that because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men, there would likely be political opposition to initiatives that propose to use those facts to profile the demographic group to which these killers belong. I suggested that’s the case because as opposed to people of color or, say, Muslims, white men as a subgroup are in such a privileged position in our society that they are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way. Indeed, unlike other demographic, white guys as a group are never thought to be an acceptable topic for any kind of critical discussion whatsoever, even when there is ample reason to open up such a discussion.

This is certainly the case, and at some level we need to account for it. I would point to historical and cultural socialization to normalize violence as a form of expression for white men, but while I’ll bet I’m right it’s just a guess. Research has been done, I’m sure, but I haven’t read it.

My real issue here, to get back to Smartypants’ point, is that any clear thinking must, following the acquisition of data, include both a formulation of analytical categories and then a critique of the categories themselves. We don’t simply place our data in categories like we put our toys in their boxes, we refine or even discard our categories as we apply them to our data. Our categories need to fit our data more than just “pretty well.” They need to fit down to the narrowest detail.

The category of “monster” is not just a more blunt instrument than this investigation demands. It very simply does not fit the detail at hand when one looks at it. It’s more complex than the fact that everyone has a story, but possibly that truth is a good enough place to start.

I went to high school with someone who, in our early 20′s, went on a killing spree, making the national news even before he murdered someone famous. It’s been a few years since anyone’s asked me, “oh, did you know __________?” but for a while it seemed like I’d get asked once a year or so.

I remember him now and again. He was brilliant and outgoing. We took one class together and he not only was intellectually dazzling himself but generous in his praise of others, including me. I hated myself deeply for various reasons at the time and I have always felt deeply grateful for the kindness he showed me and the encouragement he gave.

He later went on a killing spree. So, we confront the analytical category, “monster” with this data. My friend’s last few weeks–I will always consider him my friend–were monstrous and his last act was to kill himself. I remember his smile and his sense of humor. He was complex, carrying some trauma I have some sense of but about which I am not fully sure, with different possibilities, the worst of which came to be. Getting back to the analytical point, if we were to put him in the category with the static descriptor, “monster,” I literally can’t see how we could make this data fit.

In Buddhism, we say “causes and conditions never fail.” This seems a good place to start. What causes and what conditions produce killings like these? I would start by pointing out that when both my friend and Adam Lanza reached for that gun, it was there. Were it not, at that moment there would have been no killing.