ENTERPRISING EXECUTIVES

I've been giving, both in my three-part CLASSIC-LIBERAL TREK essay-series and in a forthcoming review of the first season of the series STAR TREK PICARD, considerable thought to the differing ethical systems of the 1966-68 STAR TREK and the 1987-94 STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION. 

My starting point, almost inevitably, is David Gerrold's observation from his popularization of Star Trek fandom, THE WORLD OF STAR TREK: that Gene Roddenberry's creation was President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society in Space." The idea might or might not have been original to Gerrold, but it's substantially correct, with one major amendment. Though Johnson was unquestionably the man in the oval office during the three seasons of The Original Series (henceforth TOS), the two policies with which Johnson is most associated-- the "liberal" policy of the Civil Rights Act and the "conservative" one of Communist containment via the continuation of the Vietnam War-- had their genesis in the tenure of Johnson's predecessor John F. Kennedy. Thus the ethos of TOS, with its skillful balance of Liberal and Conservative ethical propositions, derives from Kennedy-- who incidentally was also the first "space age" American Prez-- to the extent that said ethos derives from any President at all.

Naturally I am not, any more than Gerrold, arguing a conscious attempt by Roddenberry or any of his collaborators to pattern their work after any public statements by any political figure. Professionals producing television shows in that era sought to reach the largest possible audience by transforming political propositions into fictional flights of fancy. Kennedy and Johnson alike should be viewed less as direct influences and more as cultural touchstones.

With that concept of ethos-orientation in mind, how should one regard the ethos of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION (aka TNG). As it happens, two Presidents reigned during TNG's seven years. However, only one held office during the first three years of the show, which also happen to be the years during which Gene Roddenberry's influence over TNG progressively waned, partly due to the poor health that took his life in 1991.

Was TNG a reflection of President Jimmy Carter's ethos of America? Any resemblances may be less evident than the Kennedy influence on TOS. But where Kennedy was precipitate in his decisions, Carter's tenure was marked by caution. Kennedy sought to inspire citizens with high-sounding rhetoric; Carter was more down-to-earth. Most of all, Kennedy told Americans that they should ask what they could do for their country, while Carter, in the wake of the Nixon scandal, told his constituents "I'll never lie to you."

The characters of TNG, in their earliest conception, have one dominant trait in common with Jimmy Carter: over-earnestness. In the 1980s, as Roddenberry saw the franchise he'd created taken over by other hands, TNG gave him his last chance to infuse a teleseries with his guiding ethos. Yet this time he didn't want a series that stressed heroic action and character conflict. As many TNG critics have observed, Roddenberry wanted characters who had advanced beyond personal interest, not least with regard to that old devil sensuality. As the characters lacked personality in those early years, the players couldn't do much except to pontificate-- though always with the most earnest attitudes possible. For me, as a viewer not much impressed with TNG's early years, the culmination of this tendency appeared most egregiously in the first-season episode "Skin of Evil," which I call "The One Where Picard Has Righteous Conversations with an Oil Slick." 

TNG fans would aver that in later years the show transcended that period. I would have to do a complete rewatch to see if I agreed, but I tend to think that the ethos of TNG was always compromised by its impractical nature. And yet, many fans of TNG did not like the first season of PICARD, and I did-- which promises an interesting if one-sided discussion as to where the TNG universe finally took a good turn.                   

             

BUFFY THE WOKENESS SLAYER

 If there's anything I got from my massive rewatch of all seven seasons (1997-2003) of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, it's a recollection of the days when it was fun to be Liberal.

Not that I think I was ever a hard-and-fast Lib. When I saw Spike Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING on DVD, probably shortly after its 1989 debut, I knew it was not genuine drama, but political agitprop. I don't know when I read Laura Mulvey's essay on "the male gaze," but I recognized it as ultra-feminist garbage. Though the essay came from the 1970s and the movie from the very late 1980s, both represented politicized myths that had a great deal of influence on American entertainment in terms of the depiction of race and sexual nature. Both were harbingers of the Progressive credo known as "wokeness," even though the term predated both works but did not become a mainstream concept until the 2010s. The metaphor of wokeness depended on a simple binary opposition: to be woke was to be vigilantly aware of the many abuses that mainstream American culture inflicted upon the marginalized, while, implicitly at least, to be asleep would mean passively (and foolishly) accepting the status quo.  

Similar metaphors of vigilance surely appeared throughout American history and other national histories. But the concept of eternal vigilance (paging JFK) does not capture what the appeal of Liberalism was for a baby-boomer like myself. Classical Liberalism wasn't just figuring out how to keep Evil Conservatives at bay, it seemed to be about an embrace of plurality across the board. And Liberalism of the Sixties was much sexier as well-- which brings me back to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which might be the last great fictional proponent of Classical Liberalism of the 1990s. 

  Now, if I was being paid to write this essay, I'd probably research all the complex and varied ways that the TV show renounced the sort of simplistic concepts of good and evil beloved by both Far Left and Far Right. But since I'm not, I'll confine myself to a BUFFY episode that's one of the lighter stories, even though it concerns the near-extermination of a marginalized race: the Chumash Indians of California.  

"Pangs" (no idea what the title signifies) premiered in 1999, the eighth episode of the fourth season, which means that a lot of soap opera has gone down the pike at that point. I'm not breaking down any of the characters or their multifarious relationships; that's what the Buffy wikis are for. Some quick points though. Xander has just started dating former demon Anya, but Willow's first major love-interest departed for parts unknown. Buffy's mother has gone to a relative's place for the impending Thanksgiving holiday, and though there's a potential new romance in the Slayer's life, she's still fairly bummed about former Great Love Angel, who decamped from the show at the end of Season 3 for his own series. Buffy talks her friends and her sometime teacher Giles to put together their own Thanksgiving, which of course makes for lots of comic chaos. Angel, by the way, shows up for the first BUFFY-ANGEL crossover, while Buffy's perennial enemy Spike manages to intrude on the holiday cheer as well.

 The main threat to the Clan Scooby is a vengeful Chumash Indian spirit, name of Hus, accidentally released from a subterranean tomb by Xander. But even before Hus starts killing people for the wrongs done to his people, Willow's first scene includes her reading the riot act to her White ancestors, remarking upon the hypocrisy of Thanksgiving, the status quo's coverup of a racial holocaust. The scene notes that Willow is "channeling" her academician mother, but the script doesn't make fun of the actual evil deeds done to the Chumash by past ancestors. Most of the humor flows from Buffy's frenetic attempts to celebrate a favorite holiday, political implications be damned. She does sympathize with Hus more than most of the foes she fights, and she joins Willow in using the preferred term of "Native Americans" over "Indians"-- even when Hus and some other vengeful spirits show up to crash the Thanksgiving party for an old-fashioned massacre.

Had anyone tried to remake this episode in the 2010s, all the comedy elements would have been gone, and Willow would probably have become a Black Women's Studies major, dissing the Evil White Patriarchy. And there would have been no room at all for Spike, whose primary purpose in "Pangs" is to provide a discordant voice. He snidely laughs at the Scoobies' desire to find a peaceful solution, and he's entirely justified-- as Willow herself eventually affirms-- that the situation is one of "kill or be killed." He also remarks that "the history of the world is not people making friends," and even the most empathetic Liberal can recognize some truth in this statement, even if it's coming from a bloodsucking monster who boasts about his own murderous history at the drop of a hat.      

By itself "Pangs" does not prove my claim that the BUFFY show could be the last major Liberal work of the 1990s, or an additional claim that it's far superior to most Liberal works of the next two decades. Most Liberal entertainments became increasingly infected with the disease of Woke, full of a smug confidence that there were only two clear sides, and that the Wokesters were on the right one. There have been some setbacks to Wokism in pop culture during the last five years, but I've seen no indications that anyone's managed to get back to the humor and pluralism seen in the original BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. This suggests that the rumored reboot from (of all corporate entities) Disney will probably be a shit-show of the first order. But whatever the sins of Joss Whedon might be, they'll never even come close to the driveling banalities of the Disney Corporation.          

Addendum: though Willow frequently disses the tropes of "cowboys vs. Indians" as communicated through cinema, the writers worked in a couple of Western tropes, not entirely with ironic meaning. In the opening scene, Buffy wears a girly cowboy-hat, a piece of headware she never sports again. (In fact I don't think the character ever wears any hat besides this one, preferring caps if anything.) In addition, late in the story Willow, Anya and Xander leave the Summers house on an errand, and when Angel brings news that the house is under attack by the Indian spirits, the three of them steal bicycles and rush to the rescue, accompanied by strains of music I found very "cavalry-esque."    

INDEPENDENCE DAZE

 Independence Day 2025 is long gone, but I found it still on the mind of one of my forum-opponents. Without bothering to lay out the general argument in which the Fourth came up, my opponent's attitude was definitely that of the "slavery is America's original sin" mindset, in that he expressed the view that modern Americans are being hypocritical to celebrate Independence Day, but things weren't so independent for slaves. 

I've already set forth some of my views on the phenomenon of slavery in a few posts here, such as the two-part SLAVE WAGES essay. But for amusement's sake, I decided to randomly flip through Frank Fukuyama's THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, which remains an important work in analyzing the role of the United States in creating what the author called "an ethic of emancipation." I came across the following paragraph in the chapter "The Universal and Homogenous State," and though I'm sure it won't have any impact on the stance of my opponent, I'll reprint the Fukuyama paragraph here as it may prove useful down the road.  

The second way in which economic development encourages 
liberal democracy is because it has a tremendous leveling effect 
through its need for universal education. Old class barriers are 
broken down in favor of a general condition of equality of op¬ 
portunity.

 While new classes arise based on economic status or education,  
there is an inherently greater mobility in society that 
promotes the spread of egalitarian ideas. The economy thus cre¬ 
ates a kind of de facto equality before such equality arises de jure.

THE LATEST KATHLEEN KENNEDY WARS

While arguing the matter of STAR WARS politicization online, I had the notion, "wouldn't it be more interesting to cite recorded statements by a prominent Disney exec, say Kathleen Kennedy, and let her damn herself by her own statements?"  I preface this line of thought by noting that I have no personal opinions on the line of Disney streaming TV projects, since I've barely watched any of them. I don't have streaming Disney now and when I briefly had access, I only watched a handful of Mandalorian episodes and barely remember what I watched. My negative opinion toward Disney SW is taken largely from the movies I've seen.

That's not the case with the podcaster I'm citing, one Mike Zeroh, who appears to be conversant with the streaming projects whether or not one accepts his opinions. This podcast appeared a month ago, made in response to a press release by Kennedy about the impending (June of this year) ACOLYTE project, and Zeroh reads verbatim selections from the Kennedy press release. This I find valuable because it indicates whether or not the virtue signaling I've argued has been sustained over some years, rather than being just a momentary whim. (The "whim defense" is how Kennedy somewhat defended wearing the infamous NIKE "Force is Female" T-shirt, BTW.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN5vRGEgZwM

Here are my takeaways from Zeroh's quotes.

(1) Kennedy claimed that only a "minority" of fans are opposed to the ACOLYTE project. In contrast, Zeroh claims that it has been the most heavily ratio'd SW project yet. One may argue that some fans may be producing more than one ratio-rating, though I don't think there's any way to prove that assertion.

(2) Kennedy denies at one point that she's promoting an "agenda," but celebrates that she's promoting not only DEI but the celebration of an all-female main cast with female show-runner Leslye Headland behind the camera. This would indicate, to me at least, that she was entirely serious about "the force is female" despite her denials.

(3) She says "George Lucas's treatments with his films" don't matter. She wants to "change the story" to reflect whatever Headland wants to champion. Wikipedia provides evidence of this, indicating that Headland wanted to attack the idea of the Jedi as fundamental good guys, which Headland claims (in separate statements, not in the video above) is right in line with Rian Johnson's positions in LAST JEDI.

The series questions the Jedi practice of training children,[ and also explores differing views on the Force and the amount of power and control that the Jedi have-- Wikipedia, THE ACOLYTE.

(4) She claimed that the sequel films had made money for the company. This avoids the question as to whether the streaming services have justified their expense, and it also does not show her taking responsibility for the box office bomb of SOLO, which barely made a million dollars past its estimated $300 million budget. Interestingly, Ron Howard blamed the failure on toxic fans, just as Headland claims such fans are responsibility for bad reactions to the ACOLYTE trailer.

In a larger sense, there have been times when Hollywood producers embraced this or that cause, and then backed off because the public did not prove receptive. But there's something weird about the Disney producers' utter, unshakable commitment to their ideological agenda. I assume that some of this attitude was brought into being by the political influence of asset manager Blackrock, but it may not be the only factor.

COGNIITIVE CHAINS PT. 3

I won't spend a lot of time on the "cavils" I mentioned in Part 2, but the main one relates to author Ray Nayler's decision to use an eccentric pronoun whenever referencing his intelligent, but sexless, android Evrim-- for that pronoun is the now notorious "them." "Them," as many readers will know, is a pronoun enlisted by "non-gender-conforming human beings" to signal their independence from gendered pronouns. 

As far as I can tell, Nayler's 2022 novel THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA takes no position whatever on the concept of gender neutrality. MOUNTAIN is, however, without question a novel imbricated in Liberal (but not necessarily Ultraliberal) politics. The protagonist is a female biologist of Vietnamese ancestry, and her quest is to learn whether or not the sea holds a new intelligent species of life, derived from the non-intelligent species of the octopus family. The novel largely takes place in Asia, not just because Doctor Ha is conducting her studies on a Vietnamese archipelago but so that the author can focus upon a largely Asian cast of characters. Most tellingly, one of the other main characters is also a female biologist, something of a rival to Doctor Ha, and it's a validation of the infamous "Bechdel Test," in that when these two women get together, they definitely aren't discussing men.

All fine and dandy; I observe these tropes but do not condemn them. However, in Ha's extended lecture on the human propensity for language, and for imagining things that "are not here," I wondered if the author was working in an unspoken defense of just about every subgroup that feels itself marginalized by some more numerically dominant subgroup. After all, the android Evrim, whom Ha claims to be human because he participates in the "symbolic world," despite "how you are born."

All of this could be food for a greater discussion than Nayler provides in his novel. But I will note in passing that in her defense of language's symbolic, "unreal" qualities, Ha mentions that language can also be used to promote "absurdities." Again, as I said in Part 2, Nayler does not attack what I would consider the pat "absurdities" that an Ultraliberal would usually attack. So I will do Nayler the courtesy of not claiming, as do some Conservatives, that "non-gender-affirming" persons are themselves "absurdities." But it's certainly arguable that some of the POSITIONS endorsed by persons in this subgroup are absurdities. For example, if a male is sentenced to a prison term, he can "claim to be a woman" and perforce be confined in a women's prison, simply because the authorities don't want to provoke a legal battle. Such a legally spawned delusion is also a result of language's potential for distortion, as much as any spawned by religion or philosophy.

THE READING RHEUM: THE MOON MAID (1923)

I hadn't read Edgar Rice Burroughs' THE MOON MAID or its two sequels in thirty or more years, and remembered little about them, much less the complications of their origins, as summed up by this site:

Edgar Rice Burroughs began work on The Moon Maid in June of 1922. The Moon Men had already been written but was yet unpublished. The Moon Maid was published as a five part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly on May 5, 12, 19, 26; June 2, 1923. The first edition hardback which contained all three parts of the story was published by McClurg in February 1926. It cut out almost twenty-five per cent from the magazine version (mainly from The Moon Men). The Ace paperback edition, 1962, restored the original material. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote The Moon Men in April and May of 1919 under the working title Under the Red Flag. It was published as a four part serial by Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 22, 28; March 7, 14, 1925. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of Russian communism. The sequel to The Moon Men was first published as a three part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly September 5, 12, 19, 1925. 

So in essence, ERB attempted to branch out and write UNDER THE RED FLAG as a sort of Earth-bound future history, more or less along the lines of Jack London's 1908 THE IRON HEEL. His publishers wanted something more in the vein of his previous successes Tarzan and John Carter, so he wrote THE MOON MAID, revised RED FLAG into MOON MEN, and then concluded the series with a years-later wrap-up in THE RED HAWK. I may or may not get a chance in the near future to re-read the second two parts, which as noted were subsumed into Ace Books' MOON MEN. So, though I've read summaries of what happens in the other two books, I'll confine remarks in this post to THE MOON MAID.

The title alone suggests the first John Carter book, A PRINCESS OF MARS, but though I consider MAID a mythic novel, it's not even close to the level of inventiveness of the first three Carter books. Like many ERB books it begins with a frame-device, in this case a man telling the entire story to another man. This time both the story and storyteller inhabit future-eras of Earth's history, and the frame establishes in a vague way that the storyteller is a reincarnation of the story's hero (who, spoiler alert, dies in the second novel). 

The story proper begins with protagonist Julian V captaining a spaceship from future-Earth of the 2000s, on its way to Mars. But the ship's crew includes Julian's rival Orthis, who like the hero came up through Earth's military hierarchy but who fiercely hated Julian for always being the better man in all departments. Orthis sabotages the ship so that it crashes on the Moon. Julian and Orthis are quickly separated from the ship and its forgettable crewmen, and both fall into the hands of an intelligent quadriped species, the Va-gas. While Orthis conspires with these feral creatures, Julian encounters a hot young humanoid named Nah-ee-lah, the "maid" of the title, and helps her escape the Va-gas. After various exploits, during which Julian and Nah-ee-lah fall in love but don't express their feelings, they reach (albeit separately) the maid's home city of Laythe. But not only does Laythe face trouble from within, from a rebel uprising (led by a guy who wants to move in on Nah-ee-lah), there's a "mongrel" race of Moon-humanoids, The Kalkars, who end up annihilating the city. The novel ends with Julian and Nah-ee-lah escaping to Earth, where I assume Julian has just enough time to sire at least one offspring for the events of the next book. In that book, the Kalkars, aided by the renegade Orthis, will succeed in conquering Earth. Thus MAID is a setup for that event, and as a result Julian V's story doesn't so much end as wind down temporarily, albeit conveying some of the cliffhanger-vibe seen in PRINCESS OF MARS.

Julian V, Orthis and Nah-ee-lah are all adequate but unexceptional representatives of their respective roles. ERB does his story no favors by resorting to the hackneyed idea that Orthis simply hates Julian for being his superior, and that Julian V hates him back in response. Despite ERB's muddled attempt to provide some convoluted theory of a strange identity between Julian V and his future incarnations, he comes off as a crude John Carter imitation, and Nah-ee-lah, the only named female in the story, is a routine helpless femme who doesn't assume any greater dimensions, as does Dejah Thoris.

The antagonists supply all the mythic content of MOON MAID. Late in the book Nah-ee-lah gives Julian a compact history of how Laythe (possibly named from the river of the dead from Greek mythology), the usual pre-lapsarian society, creates its worst antagonists. The four-legged Va-gas originate as herd animals who escape the control of the Laytheans, though it's not clear as to when they develop intelligence. Having been bred to provide meat to humans, the Va-gas perhaps understandably enjoy feasting on the flesh of the Laythean people. However, during Julian's time with them he's horrified to witness that the quadripeds also eat their own kind, even those fallen in battle with enemies, and this naturally does not set well with the Earthman's morals. In one memorable scene, the ability of cannibalism to eradicate familial bonds is seen when Julian describes the females of the tribe chowing down on their dead relations, with mothers eating sons and wives husbands.

The Kalkars derive their name from a Laythean work meaning "thinkers." They became an offshoot from their own people thanks to their forefathers, who liked to sit around and imagine injustices-- which is ERB's on-point critique of the instigators of the Russian Revolution. The Kalkars sow chaos within the ordered, guild-like structure of Laythean society, but Laythe somehow survives while the Kalkars form their own separate tribe. But Orthis, having escaped the Va-gas, uses his knowledge of Earth-tech to help the nasty mongrels conquer the ordered hierarchical society, thus presaging a similar conquest on Earth. Even if one doesn't agree with ERB's take on the rise of real-world Communism, in the Moon-world he creates two malign beings of opposed natures: one characterized by too little thought, and the other by too much (bad) thought.

I don't know about the other two parts, but MOON MAID is part of a loose continuity with the Mars books. It's through Earth's radio contact with Mars that future-Earth perfects space travel with the use of Martian "rays," and Storytelling Julian even mentions John Carter, though it's not clear just what he knows about the Martian hero.

NEAR MYTHS: BLACK ADAM/JSA BLACK REIGN (2004)

Though I'd already seen the 2022 movie BLACK ADAM without having read this JSA compilation, I decided I would give the TPB a read in order to determine whether or not the film's writers for the movie had borrowed any important plot or character points. The short answer is that, if one subtracts all the over-complicated subplots provided in the Geoff Jones-Rags Morales graphic novel, there is a rough similarity of the main plotlines. 

In REIGN, Black Adam somehow assembles a small coterie of super-powered aides with which he overthrows the local dictatorship of his native land. (Note: in the comics-character's original appearance in 1945, he was an Egyptian of an archaic era, but at some point in his DC revival he was reworked as an archaic native from a fictional DC country named Kandahq.) Though the character had been reworked in other ways when DC took over the Fawcett library of characters, I imagine that in 2004 Johns probably was not bound by any previous iterations, and so Adam's conquest of Kandahq here may be the "first" time he ever did so in Johns' version. Adam's ruthless conquest of the country suggests that he may planning the conquest of other neighboring nations. To prevent that contingency, about a dozen well-known Justice Society heroes descend upon Kandahq and have an involved battle with Adam's forces. In the end, enough chaos erupts that Adam pledges to the JSA that he will remain within his own borders unless attacked.

In the film, Adam is newly revived by a band of Kandahq freedom fighters seeking to oust a vaguely defined occupying force. Logically enough, Adam does not attempt to collect any allies, given that as a possessor of the "Shazam lightning" he's almost unstoppable. Adam doesn't take any immediate action to take over the country of his descendants, but four members of the JSA descend upon Kandahq on the theory that Adam's very existence is a threat to cosmic order. In contrast to the graphic novel, the JSA heroes and Black Adam are forced to work together against a common menace. 

I won't expatiate on the film further here, since I'll review it separately. BLACK REIGN is a very ordinary superhero punch-em-up, and I say that as a critic who believes that fight scenes can have a lot of extra-ordinary significance. For my taste at least there are far too many subplots, with the result that no single plot stands out, though since some of the issues appeared in the HAWKMAN title, there's a strong emphasis on the contentions between Adam and the Winged Wonder, just as one sees in the movie. The closest thing to a myth captured in REIGN is not sociological, as it is in the film. Johns' script emphasizes psychological trauma about the loss of loved ones and roads not taken, but the only scene that has any resonance takes place when Adam demonstrates to his uncertain ally "Atom Smasher" the fruits of their violence: the preservation of innocents.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SPIDER VS THE EMPIRE STATE (1938)

 

I preface this review by stating that I'm far from an expert on the pulp character The Spider. Over the ten years in which the character appeared in his own magazine, a little over fifty novel-length stories appeared, of which I may have read a dozen or so in reprinted forms. Norvell Page wrote the vast majority of these novels, and it's probable that most of the works I've read, with their grotesquerie and blood-curdling ultraviolence, were stories by Page. What I value most in SPIDER stories is their apocalyptic delirium, in which the hero's domain of New York City is often razed to the ground in one narrative, only to appear in the next totally back to normal. So when I heard that Page had written a big story, "The Black Police Trilogy," which extended over three consecutive issues of the magazine, I ordered it.

The short verdict: delirium is hard to sustain over a long haul.

An excellent foreword by scholar Thomas Krabacher explains that Popular Publications, the house that issued the SPIDER adventures, also came out with a magazine with a similar apocalyptic feel. OPERATOR FIVE began in 1934, the year after the SPIDER began. Whereas the arachnid protagonist confined himself to menaces to New York, in OPERATOR FIVE hero Jimmy Christopher always dealt with huge invasions of the United States by predacious foreign armies. While many modern readers might deem this focus on foreign threats to have fascist overtones, Krabacher demonstrates that publisher Harry Steeger was a thoroughgoing liberal. His publications conjured up larger-than-life menaces so that heroes, whether empowered by the government or operating on their own, could vanquish them and return a devastated populace to normalcy. Krabacher asserts that Steeger may have been trying to cross-pollinate the approaches of the two magazines by having the Spider battle a more long-range threat. 

In EMPIRE-- a title apparently imposed on the trilogy by some modern editor-- a criminal schemer called "The Master" duplicates Hitler's 1933 feat: that of getting a repressive political party legally elected to supreme power, if only in the state of New York. (Very little is said in EMPIRE about how the other 48 states react to this state of affairs, much less the Federal government.) The Master immediately enacts through his proxies draconian laws, and liberates from the state's prisons a horde of ruthless criminals. These hardened crooks become the Black Police, who devote all their time to collecting illegal taxes and torturing citizens who don't pay. The Spider, a,k.a. millionaire Richard Wentworth, cannot counteract this peril with no more than his usual small band of helpers. Instead, the Spider must become a revolutionary figure, inspiring countless brave citizens to take up arms against the tyrants and their servitors.

Though Page's trilogy is never completely dull, its many scenes of inspiring derring-do and sacrifice become repetitive after a while. My overall impression is that, since Page could not concentrate his imaginative talents in a compact story of apocalyptic action, he resorted to repeating his revolution-themed scenarios as a strategy to simply extend the story artificially. A handful of new characters appear to assist the Spider's band, but none of the newbies are memorable. Nita Van Sloan, Wentworth's inamorata and the pulps' epitome of the courageous woman, gets some strong scenes but these too fall into something of a rut, while familiar aides like Ram Singh are often sidelined. The Black Police are one-note villains and the Master is just a standard mystery-fiend. (Given the evildoer's name, Page foregoes to use the hero's usual epithet, "the Master of Men.") The Master has a few gimmicks, like a virulent plague he uses to quell rebellion. But he has no personality and the Big Reveal of his identity carries no weight.

So THE SPIDER VS. THE EMPIRE STATE adds up to little more than a so-so pulp adventure with no real political connotations and excessively padded. It's surely one of the few times I found the foreword more entertaining than the novel proper.

IT'S STRONGER THAN DIRT

 (The title is taken from a jingle in an old old commercial for Ajax laundry detergent, and the following is a quick commentary from a political forum in which one poster had linked to an article on Asian "whitewashing," i.e, artificial skin-bleaching, and its putative connection to "whiteness.")

____________

Yes, it's not always clear how much some of these "lightness fetishes" really stem from "whiteness as such."

For instance, I remember a tidbit from Burton's ARABIAN NIGHTS translation, where translator Burton claimed that the high-caste Brahmins of India did not consider the British colonials "white" in comparison to themselves. He claimed that they called the Brits "red men" because they had so little resistance to the Indian sun that they were frequently sunburned. If this nugget is veracious, those Brahmins weren't fetishizing "lightness" because of any hidden envy of the British overlords; it was their strategy of differentiating themselves from the more numerous darker skins of India, somewhat along the lines of Doctor Seuss's "Sneetches." 

It's also a little hard for me to believe that a huge swathe of Asians still seek lightness of skin because they remember the decades-old dominance of colonial Europe. I guess it's a little more possible that they harbor some subconscious envy of the economic juggernaut of the United States and its worldwide promotion of capitalism. But of course Asians had their own version of capitalism long before Marco Polo, as we see with feudal China's colonial attitude toward neighboring Asians. So the argument of "whiteness as such" still seems forced at best.

THE SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES

There was a time when the majority of liberal thinkers distanced their political and philosophical statements from anything falling under the rubric of "myth." For much of the twentieth century, myth meant "untruth," and neither Lefties nor Righties wanted their thoughts to be associated with the fantasies of archaic tribesmen. Marxist Roland Barthes was particularly insistent about distinguishing his ideology from the "mythology" that he claimed pervaded his society, as I showed in this 2010 essay.

But the lure of money titillates a lot of authors, even ideologues. Even anti-Jungian Richard Noll, toward the end of THE JUNG CULT, admitted that Jungianism had gained ground over other psychological systems thanks to the "New Age" subculture. Jung was gone by that era, but Joseph Campbell rose to prominence in the sixties, and many of his books have remained in print for the past sixty years. I think it's likely that Campbell's success in the marketplace led to many liberal thinkers putting aside any qualms about myth and trying to draft the allure of mythic discourse to validate political ideologies. I've shown this by demonstrating the anti-mythic agendas both in 1998's DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME, which I view as a "proto-woke work," and in 2011's THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, wherein the author tried to prove that fairy tales were all about Marxist dialectic.

Maria Tatar's 2021 HEROINE WITH 1001 FACES is at least partly honest, since her agenda is to break down the masculinist emphasis she claims to find in all of Joseph Campbell's works. (Strangely, toward the end of her book she cites a quote from a 2013 collection of Campbell essays, GODDESSES, but Tatar does not in any way engage with anything Campbell said in that book.) Her main target, as her book's title indicates, is Campbell's 1949 HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, in which the author promoted a "monomyth" that unified all the major motifs relating to male heroism, which left female heroes without any say in the matter.

Having a say is extremely important to Tatar, so much so that her volume might have been better titled "1001 VOICES." Tatar never critiques Campbell in depth, either fairly or unfairly. She only attacks those aspects of Campbell that she views as attempts to stymie or silence the voices of women, and she pursues the same strategy with respect to archaic myth and folklore. If the story's about men winning glory in battle, it's bad. If the story's about women exposing male perfidy through speaking out, it's good. It's no coincidence that an early chapter of HEROINE is subtitled "From Myth to #MeToo." At all times, Tatar remains lockstep within the boundaries of that ultra-feminist ideology. Thus, even though she sometimes evinces impressive erudition, everything she writes about is distorted by that determination to make her own monomyth that excludes the supposedly male province of glory and violence.

One amusing thing about HEROINE is that Tatar duplicates one of Campbell's minor vices: that of assuming a commonality of meaning between archaic fables and modern literature. I call it a minor vice because Campbell was a good enough writer that his comparisons were usually interesting if not always logically supportable. But when Tatar windmills from talking about the English folktale "Mister Fox" to modern works by such authors as Philip Pullman and Toni Morrison, she fails to build even a loose chain of associations.

If Tatar had merely claimed that there had been plenty of writings about male heroes and that she was simply going to focus on what she deemed examples of female heroism, she would have been on surer ground. But the #Me Too ideology requires the demon of toxic masculinity. Thus Tatar sprinkles her text with glib indictments of masculine myths. In her first chapter she inextricably associated archaic myths of male heroism which "we no longer lionize but call toxic masculinity" (p. 20). No hero in Tatar's ideology ever protects a woman from rape; men are just in it to force women into servile bondage, keeping them barefoot and pregnant.

I will give Tatar this much: though many of her potential readers will assume that she's going to address the presence of martial heroines in antiquity and in present-day pop culture, Tatar gives this "face of femininity" short shrift. On page 258. she tosses out a short list of "pumped-up, tough-talking women," including Diana Rigg, The Catwoman, Wonder Woman,Lara Croft and the Bionic Woman,"  but then chimerically changes the subject to first GAME OF THRONES and then to Disney heroines. Why? Well, on page 26 she also listed martial heroines of antiquity, but opined that it was a "perversion of the feminine" to show female characters "usurping the power of the heroic." So at least she's consistent in her antipathy to a power she wants to view as strictly male and therefore toxic.

That's not to say she's consistent about anything else. Wonder Woman is the only martial heroine to whom Tatar devotes any extensive attention, but her analysis is wonky, even leaving out the outright error on page 152, when the Amazon is said to be "the first female action figure in the Marvel Universe," but that she owes her live-action cinematic debut to "DC Films." At the start of Chapter 4 she excoriates Frederic Wertham for his hostility toward Wonder Woman because Wertham believed that the Amazon might keep young girls from becoming homemakers. But how is that any different from complaining that such heroines are a "perversion of the feminine?" On page 232 Tatar claims that "the love of justice-- avenging injustices and righting wrongs-- is what makes Wonder Woman so powerful a force in the pantheon of superheroes." Wait-- so aside from Wonder Woman, no other superheroes, even other female heroes, had any interest in avenging injustice or righting wrongs? I should note in passing that Wertham's ideology also could not see fictional violence as being anything but anti-social in its effects.

Her nastiest inconsistency, though, is that after having burned up a lot of hyperbole inveighing against male violence, she unleashes snark against the late Campbell in her first chapter, implying that he promoted his 1949 adulation of heroism as some sort of compensation for his having "sat out the war" (that is, World War II). This armchair psychology takes up about a page and a half, and amounts to nothing more than character assassination. (At least Richard Noll provided a detailed critique against Jung.) But this side-swipe shows Tatar's basic hypocrisy. Is it good to refuse the allure of toxic male violence, or is it not? 

Tatar doesn't care; any dirty trick will serve her ideological agenda, making her a kindred spirit with the #MeToo movement, whose leaders ranted about believing all women but decided to ignore a woman who leveled charges of sexual harassment against Presidential candidate Joe Biden. If one goes into HEROINE knowing that it's a snake pit, one may learn some interesting facts about serpent behavior, but not much more.

PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS

In my previous post I cited a 2008 essay in which I argued that "big events" in commercial comics were nothing new; that the industry had started using such events at least in the 1960s. I associated this old essay with one subject covered by the YouTube link I provided, in which author Yellow Flash argued that the Big Two companies in the US had become dependent upon rebooting their franchises in order to boost sales. Yellow Flash offers an interesting parallel to the 2008 jeremiad of one Dick Hyacinth, in which the latter was arguing that "story values" were being neglected in favor of "big events." But the new version of the old argument is that because of the dominance of Modern Progressive values in the Big Two comics, those comics have lost their readership, principally though not exclusively to American reprints of Japanese manga-- which presumably appeal to their audience thanks to the aforementioned "story values."

This line of thought got me wondering, though: when do fan-writers say that the Progressive Era of American comics got started? It's of personal interest to me since, as I stated in the previous essay, I feel that I was "cancelled" because of a Progressive author (little though the cancellation mattered to my overall welfare). But it also bears upon the history of this blog. Unlike, say, the defunct HOODED UTILITARIAN, the ARCHIVE has never been primarily political. But I like to think that even in the late 2000s I took a lot of shots at flawed thinking both liberal and conservative, even if it often took the form of picking at the statements of Heidi McDonald. However, I'll freely admit that since I stopped buying a lot of comics in the middle 2000s, I didn't personally witness the rise of the Progressive Wave in American comics.

So where did it start, the "patient zero" of Comics Progressivism? I found two distinct answers on YouTube.

The podcaster Thinking Critically focuses in this essay on the 2007 rise of the website Comics Alliance. It's a good if biased examination of the Progressive mindset of the period. However, Comics Alliance was just a bunch of vocal fans, with no real power to change things, unless people in the industry chose to regard them as a bellwether. Liberal ideology had come to dominate comic book fandom since the Silver Age, and a lot of liberal fans continually stumped for more diverse racial representation, more equitable treatment of female characters, and so on. But the industry did not change from the impact of fans alone.

Probably more on target is this essay from The Fourth Age. The author cites Joe Quesada as his "patient zero," though I would somewhat fault the essay for not providing more context for Quesada's career from 2000, when he became Marvel editor-in-chief, to 2009, when Quesada took the fatal step that bound his star to that of the Progressives. This act, according to Fourth Age, was the "diversity hire" of Muslim-American writer Sana Amanat, still best known today for her co-creation in 2014 of the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel. In this Wikipedia quote, Amanat herself mentions that she was hired to bring a "different voice" to Marvel Comics:

According to Amanat, an executive at Marvel approached her for the job because she was different from their average employee. She said that the executive told her she had "something different to offer than the regular fanboy who has read comics since he was a kid. She has a different voice, and they need her voice in order to change Marvel."

Fourth Age extensively quotes Quesada in support of the thesis that Quesada, believing that the hardcore comics-audience was not enough to sustain his company's fortunes, sought to enhance Marvel's reputation for diversity with a "non-fanboy" readership. Roughly twelve years later, there's no evidence that Progressive comics wooed a new readership to the medium, and that despite what might have been a vital cross-fertilization from the MCU movies, beginning with the 2008 IRON MAN. Quesada's hiring of Amanat might not be quite as consequential in itself as Fourth Age asserts, but there can be little doubt that Marvel Comics, and possibly DC to a lesser extent, became very concerned with projecting the image of diversity in many if not all of their projects. What I see happening is that established hardcore fans who already held Progressive sympathies became emboldened by the diversity agenda, while others reacted against the politicization, one reaction being the somewhat later Comicsgate conflict of the late 2010s. 

Of course all of these things happened within the greater context of American political events, and perhaps Sana Amanat's hiring mirrors in a small way the ascension of Barack Obama to the Presidency that same year. As yet I have not found a good overall history of the rise of Progressive Liberals, but I would imagine that their agenda too was given an ideological boost by Obama's election, particularly their endorsement of intersectional representationalism. Quesada was clearly seeking to be intersectional by hiring a Muslim-American woman who in 2009 had little experience in writing commercial comics. That said, her early issues of MS. MARVEL (the only ones I read) are at least pleasant and not infected with the fanatical righteousness I've found in the few Progressive comics-writers I've encountered. 

I should also stress that under the right circumstances, a "diversity hire" can be a good thing. Prior to Gail Simone being hired by DC Comics, she was best known for launching the 1999 website WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS and for a Comic Book Resources column. She may or may not have been a diversity hire, though there were so few female creators at Marvel and DC in the early 2000s that her hiring would have had the same effect, regardless of intention. However, in contrast to Sana Amanat, Simone showed with her long run on DC's BIRDS OF PREY (2003-07) that she was fully engaged with superhero mythology and the expectations of its "fanboys." I disputed WOMEN IN REFRIGATORS' flawed logic in my essay NEGATIVE I.D., but I found BIRDS OF PREY to be more engaging than its author's ideology, and unlike MS. MARVEL I followed the former to Simone's final issues (and a little beyond). Though PREY focused on boosting the reputations of DC's female characters from a POV of a female author, I recall none of the viciously divisive ideology of the Progressive feminists, no harping on toxic masculinity and the like. 

In conclusion, I'm now of the opinion that a lot of the Progressive measures of the 21st century were a politicized version of "big events"-- the Falcon becomes the new Captain America, Carol Danvers takes on both the name of Captain Marvel and assumes the status of "The Marvel Comics Wonder Woman." Most of these I admit I have not read, so that I can't be entirely sure that they lack all "story values." But the comics-reading audience certainly favors the story values of Japanese manga-- some of which may not even be all that remarkable, like (say) the popular NARUTO-- and it would appear that the comics industry's link to cinema is the only thing that keeps Patient Zero on life-support.

QUICK LINK TO SOGGY MELTDOWN

 Though I frequent a lot of YouTube sites that detail the devolution of commercial comics, I couldn't resist mentioning this one, the hyperbolically titled CAPTAIN MARVEL WRITER HAS A TOTAL MELTDOWN.

Years ago, I had a public argument with said writer Kelly Thompson, while I wrote (unpaid-for) online essays for a company I'm now ashamed to have dealt with. Thompson had authored for Comic Book Resources a highly politicized reading of the role of female characters in comics. I, a man, had the temerity to disagree. I'm not going to link to my own posts regarding that exchange. Any interested party can find them via Google, but the upshot was that the company "cancelled" me in deciding that they didn't want any more of my reactionary essays. 

Thompson went on to get hired by Marvel editors, who wanted, then as now, to virtue signal about how liberal and forward-thinking they are. I naturally have read none of Thompson's work, and the YouTube site is only of interest to me in that the site Yellow Flash tags her as one of the many comics-writers to attack fans for their desire to be entertained rather than lectured to.

Her "meltdown," to be sure, isn't much of anything in itself; hence my rating of it as "soggy." Its only significance in the social sense is that it prompted Yellow Flash to break down just how well her heavily touted run (close to fifty issues) on the Current Captain Marvel is doing in terms of making money. Yellow Flash concludes that the only way Current Marvel manages to keep its numbers high is to regularly cancel and reboot comics-titles, which may mean that the allegedly long run of Current Captain Marvel is due for such a reboot.

I noted in a 2008 essay, EARTH-SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE, that comic books frequently have used "events" to goose their sales in one way or another, and I used a Silver Age "death of Superman" storyline as an example. I noted that the "story values" defended in another writer's essay might be somewhat deceptive when seen through the lens of what I then called "game theory." I won't rehash those observations now, but I did speak of a "shadow of didacticism" that made it possible for fictional narratives to take on the appearance of being "useful" rather than pure recreation.

I also found it interesting that Thompson follows the thinking of most SJW comics writers in claiming that if readers don't like their progressive ideals, they must be purblind reactionaries. "The more things change," eh?

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. 

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.

OH CAPTAIN! BLACK CAPTAIN!

I stated some of my opinions of "Black Captain America" in my review of THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER, but here's another take on it that I wrote for a political forum.

________

Disney/Marvel devoted a whole series to the idea that it was terrible to have a white guy be Captain America, and that having a Black Cap would be the best solution to intersectional injustices of the past.

On the contrary, though, if your vision of America is one of White guys making everyone else go to the back of the bus, then what does a Black Captain America say about that? The fantasy is that it says, "we're overcoming all the intersectional injustices by casting a Black person in this role." But it could also say, "we, Black Americans, are claiming all of the power White people accrued when they conquered this country, but we don't accept any of the guilt of those acts." 

The advantage of a White Captain is that it captures the way White Americans thought about themselves at a point in history, when they were unquestionably the dominant racial group in America. Now you can take that idea and play it straight, as most conservatives would, or you can satirize it, as liberals would. But the idea of Black Captain America doesn't lend itself to any multivalent interpretations. You either follow the Lib program of what it's supposed to mean, or you don't. 

And frankly, I liked the Falcon. He's the first Black American superhero, so why is that heritage so easy to put aside for a mere gesture of phony intersectional triumph?

ADDENDUM: And if the showrunners were really trying to sell the idea of the new Black Captain-- why didn't they entitle the series CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE WINTER SOLDIER?

RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS PT. 2

 I'm reviving this essay-title after having not used it in roughly thirteen years, because Nietzsche's idea of ressentiment seems so appropriate to these times. Here's what Big Friedrich said in "On the Genealogy of Morals:"

“While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself (gennaios 'of noble descent' underlines the nuance 'upright' and probably also 'naïve'), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble."

And here's what modern nerd Kevin Feige said in an egotistical comparison between himself and Stan Lee:

In July 2021 he detailed to Rotten Tomatoes, “Representation is important across the board. And the comics has charted…charts the path in almost all ways for what we do in the MCU and in the comics there are many LGBTQ characters and we want to showcase that on the screen as well. We want to bring those characters to life on the screen.”

“We also, as Stan Lee used to say, Marvel represents the world outside your window. And outside of our window, there are all different types of people in all different types of places with all different types of preferences and we want that reflect in the MCU and in our fictional world as it is in our real world,” he continued.

Feige then stated, “So it is of utmost importance that when people go in and see one of our films or log on to Disney+ and watch one of our series that it represents the true world outside their window when it comes to the types of people portraying the heroes and the characters.”

To say the least, I doubt that Lee shared Feige's concept of representational realism. Lee may well have made a few statements about realistic depiction of certain aspects of life, but he was first and foremost a fantasist. Not even in the sixties could anyone have said with certainty how much Lee expoused liberal causes out of personal conviction, and how much he was influenced by a will to appeal to liberal readers. Maybe even Lee himself could not have said with certainty. But even though he must have made the conscious decision to increase Marvel's diversity-- almost exclusively in terms of more Black characters, ranging from superheroes to support-characters-- Lee never forgot that he was crafting fantasies for kids. He was never a preacher of political ideology, and in many of his stories with political content, he would come off to ideologues as being (to borrow Nietzsche's term) "naive." But any naivete on his part would have informed by a concomitant "upright" belief in telling good if simple stories.

Feige has none of this noble nature. He pretends to be the humble servant of liberalism, showing "the true world outside [one's] window," but he shows his covert egotism in his advocacy of a particular political agenda. I'm surprised that he doesn't default to his avowed passion for generating scads of new heroines. Given that in the US there's usually a 50-50 distribution of males and females in the populace, it would fairly logical to state that if half of the population is female, there should be more heroines in the MCU. But because he wants to make himself look even more the staunch Progressive, his first reference to diversity is to "LGBTQ characters." This effectively destroys his point, for only in tenderloin districts can one look out one's window and see people sporting overt signifiers of their sexual preferences. 

Feige represents the most extreme representation of nerd ressentiment: the idea that he's being open and honest about things when in truth his true ideal is manipulation. Nothing shows this better than the covert dishonesty at the heart of the MS. MARVEL series, in which the series misrepresents the history of the Partition just to bag on Evil White Colonials. Of course, Feige, lacking any of the creativity of Stan Lee, could never have originated any of the icons he so casually trashes for his political ends. Maybe his very lack of creativity is the thing that makes him popular with his fans?