ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW PT. 3

I'm sure I'll have more to say on HU's lynch-happy attitudes in future, but this should be the last time I respond to Ng Suat Tong's hubristic advice to the late Frank Frazetta. Maybe if I'd known that Ng would only answer one question, I would have asked why scenes of interracial sex would cause the writer to think, even sarcastically, of the "light under a bushel" aphorism. I would think that an ideologue like Ng would be glad that Frank Frazetta didn't conceal from readers-- either during his life or thereafter-- his supposed mammoth racial complexes. If these Frazetta drawings had not surfaced, Ng wouldn't have had an excuse to compare interracial erotica with actual slavery (cf. his Thomas Jefferson hyperbole).


Here, I'll address only the subject of "non-ideological" art, which I brought up in opposition to all of the completely ideological interpretations of Frazetta's oeuvre. In my addenda to my comment-preservation, here's what I remembered saying before NB deleted it:

It's been a couple of days since I checked back, but the remark that probably scored the deepest hit in that post had nothing to do with bad faith; it had to do with interrogating the defenders of Ng Suat Tong's essay in the way that they pretend to interrogate purveyors of mass entertainment. (Author Ng chose not to defend his own essay.) In essence, I asked one of the defenders-- not NB-- as to whether he liked to think that all of his personal inclinations were entirely determined by ideological factors, since that's the complexion all of them choose to place upon Frank Frazetta. I didn't even directly mention any individual's leanings toward sexy entertainment, though of course that too would fall under the heading of such personal inclinations. 

 Another thought: since one of the defenders said she found Frazetta's work boring, I remarked that were Frazetta alive, he might find her (performance art) boring, too, but why would either opinion be a matter for ideology? Why couldn't both opinions be purely a matter of personal taste?

Now, in earlier ARCHIVE essays I've already expatiated on the subject of the non-ideological elements in art, though in this essay I used the term "non-political," meaning essentially the same thing. At one point I cited this essay to NB when he wanted to know my stance on something-or-other, and he refuted just one aspect of the essay. So even if NB doesn't agree with anything I've written on these matters, he certainly does know pretty much what I mean by "non-ideological." Thus, an angel dies when he claims not to understand my position:

Gene, are you saying that pornography is not ideological? Or that pleasure is nonideological? I think both of those things are really not the case. Saying that these are racist images doesn’t mean that someone who takes pleasure in them is evil. It just means that the images are racist. Not because Frazetta hated black people (we can’t see his soul), but because reproducing racist stereotypes means you’re reproducing racist stereotypes. Sometimes, some people reproduce racist stereotypes in order to undermine them, or to think about them, or to critique them, or reclaim them. Frazetta doesn’t seem to be doing any of that. He just thinks racist imagery is sexy and funny. That doesn’t make him a monster, but it does make him, (a) boring, (b) dumb (c) in these particular drawings, racist (and hey, sexist also, as Nix points out.) If you dont’ think the drawings are racist, you need to do a bit more than say that the characters are enjoying themselves. The black slaves in Gone With the Wind enjoy their servitude; that doesn’t mean it’s not racist. In lots of rape fantasies, the fantasy is that the woman enjoys the rape, so the fact that the woman here seems to enjoy being reduced to little more than the marker sexy-white-woman doesn’t change the fact that these are sexist either. There are various ways for artists to deal with their control of the art too. Frazetta is pretty straightforward; his presence in the art is pretty much always, “hey, I”m a badass”. In this case, that comes off meaning, hey, I’m a badass because I can take this black guy and this white woman and bang them together for my pleasure. It’s interesting that you don’t actually have an alternate reading, Gene. It’s just, “oh, porn, that can’t mean anything, la-dee-dah, sex is just sex, black men, white woman, means nothing.” If the pairing doesn’t matter, why is it repeated obsessively? If sex has no meaning, why represent it? Keep telling yourself that dollar signs aren’t symbols, though, if it makes art easier to bear for you.

He feels it easy to make all of these wild accusations and associations even *after* I've repeated my stance that art can have aspects that have nothing to do with the political and ideological:

If you’re saying that the material is not totally reducible to ideology, as Ng did, then that’s not contrary to my basic position. I’ve stated above that I can see *some* ideological content in certain scenarios, like the “white goddess” trope mentioned earlier. I don’t think simple pornographic drawings are automatically implicated in whatever ideological content *may* be present in Tarzan narratives though, so that really would be a “contra.”

Since I clearly said in my first sentence that ideological content could appear in 'certain scenarios," clearly I'm not saying that art as a whole-- be it in the form of pornography or with respect to the many pleasures art generates-- never has ideological content. NB does answer the question I posed to another poster: that he can't countenance what he deems "racist stereotypes" unless they're serving an ideological purpose (critique, reclamation, etc.)  It's pretty amusing that he tries in his opening sentence to make me the mirror of his own ideological obduracy.


It's also ironic that NB cites GONE WITH THE WIND; a work that strongly appealed to a racist audience within the U.S (though not only to them). The racists in the overall audience would have been outraged by the consensual white-black sex Frazetta depicted, but of course that can't be allowed to matter. NB's trying to draw a parallel between objectionable stereotypes in the novel and in the drawings, but his whole case for the Frazetta drawings being objectionable is based in an unsupportable interpretation. One minute NB says we can't know if Frazetta hated black people; the next he mind-reads the artist to say that his only reason for drawing this erotica was because he Frazetta found it "sexy and funny," as well as taking pleasure in being an artistic "badass."


To answer one of NB's few coherent questions, I haven't said that depictions of interracial sex "mean nothing," I just don't think their meaning inheres in passing a political purity test; that they're good if they're used to "subvert the dominant" and bad if they're primarily for pleasure. I think it's possible Frazetta, being an artist, undertook the project just to see if he could pull off (in a technical sense only; ha ha) a set of erotic images involving black and white pleasure. It's even possible that, even if Frazetta never intended the drawings to "go public," that he took some pleasure in imagining how such images would have scandalized Middle America; the same Middle America that might have called him a "wop," or so it's been alleged.


To do my own mind-reading act again, I think what's really at issue here is that Frazetta validates the fantasies of white males, whether he shares them all or not: hence the shots Ng takes at Frazetta's jungle comic books (about sixty years old at the time of Frazetta's death). Is that what NB means black-white imagery being "repeated obsessively?" Who knows? With most if not all HU people, it's "sentence first, evidence not at all"-- especially if it's a white male who dares to play with racial (not racist) imagery without having it vetted by ultraliberal sensibilities.


In closing, I'll note that one of my other deleted remarks responded to NB's wacky reference to Jung, asking me if I thought Jung was a capitalist. I didn't directly respond to this nonsense, except to say that though I'd critiqued his affections for Freud and Wertham on other threads, on this one I hadn't brought up anyone's ideological influences and that I'd only responded to things posters had said, so he ought to do the same. Maybe that's the real reason that last big post got deleted.

ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW PT. 2

What a complete and totally piece of Leftist Liberal Progressive Democratic Trope & horseshit! Gee Whiz, man, look at it for what it is…FREAKING ART!, and leave all the self-loathing, delusional, Leftist psycho-babble angst manure out of it…complete and total nonsense, and so totally typical of the self-centered introspective auto-flatulent smelling morons that have ruined this country…. -- Poster under the name "DaleinAtlanta"," from a 2013 post on this HU comment-thread.

I found this apt summation of the HU mentality while buzzing through the site's longest thread relating to Frank Frazetta. I don't agree with the poster on everything. What I call "ultraliberals" haven't as yet "ruined this country." They're just annoying because of their hypocrisy; the way they pretend to intellectual honesty when in fact they're as primed to lynch their pre-selected victims as any Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. I also don't know that any of the HU staff suffer from the horrors of foul body odor. I'm only aware of the *intellectual* stench of their "delusional, Leftist psycho-babble manure." (I left out "angst" and "self-loathing" because these qualities can't be logically demonstrated via the critics' own printed words.)


It should be evident from the toss-off title of this post that I wasn't anticipating a major altercation with respect to Ng Suat Tong's recent essay about the black-on-white sex-art of the late Frank Frazetta. I also stated that I wasn't going to try to preserve all the comments I put on HU-- which may or may not disappear in future-- but I am going to expand on the arguments already there. The only reason I gave a quick-read to HU's earlier Frazetta essay, and its resultant comments-thread, was to see either one discussed anything of substance with regard to Frazetta's use of alleged racist tropes. I don't claim to be an expert on the oeuvre of Frazetta, and I was willing to see whether or not the HUddites could present evidence more compelling than Ng did. I found little substance, but an awful lot of psycho-babble circle jerking, though a few readers tried to argue against the dominant tendency to lynch the then-recently-deceased Frazetta-- and yes, in more nuanced terms than Dale above.


So I return to Ng's essay, which, in one of the deleted comments, I called "thoroughly illogical." No one will read that condemnation now, but I can at least expand on it here.


In his opening paragraph, Ng displayed his capacity for even-handedness:

What could possibly be so disgusting that it could be auctioned but not included in the printed catalog? Surely nothing as pathetic as cunnilingus, female ejaculation, or facials. So perhaps bestiality or necrophilia? Don’t those horrible Europeans also sell Crepax doggy art? What’s wrong with that? As it turns out, it was nothing quite so gross, just a “simple” case of white slavery (+/- rape).

So far NB has not deleted any of my numerous attempts to get Ng to justify the remark re: "slavery."
Ng himself only responded to a side-point I addressed-- which I'll get to later--, and thus the essayist himself never enlarged on why he felt that the Frazetta drawings implied any element of compulsion. The posters who commented never showed the cojones to admit that (1) there was nothing in the sex-pictures that indicated that any slavery at all, be it historical or contemporary, or (2) that,  counter to Ng's proposition, the white girl is enjoying her sex with the one black stud who does her. In one of the drawings she even encourages him to commit what looks like that "horrible Crepax sin" that Ng works into his essay.


At no point does Ng say anything about the provenance of the drawings, but he claims that their subject matter is comparable to pornography's "white slavery/inter-racial trope." He also claims that these antics are usually presented as "fun and games." I don't want to know how this species of porn gets from Point A-- "interracial slavery of any kind"-- to Point B, "fun and games." But I know that there's nothing in the drawings presented on HU that involves slavery, or even the trope of rape, which another HU contributor laid at Frazetta's door.


Surprisingly, it's not even clear from Ng's short, muddled piece that he has a problem with the way Frazetta had rendered the Negroes in the sex drawings: this objection is raised only by other persons in the comments-thread. So, without even proving his charge of slavery-- except through a very tenuous association on the part of the author-- Ng then tries to prove racism in the drawings through a second association, even more tenuous. He reprints a Frazetta pen-and-ink drawing of Tarzan battling a bunch of African savages, using it to "prove" that this in itself is a racist image. I've made my own observations on problematic aspects of Edgar Rice Burroughs in my essay TARZAN THOUGHTS, but it would never occur to me that a simple illustration of the white ape man fighting with Black Africans was automatically racist. If one reversed the races of the principals, would it still be racist?


I knew that abstract thoughts like this would receive no substantive reply, so I queried Ng about his most fevered assertion: "The Tarzan of the comics (let’s forget about Burroughs for the moment) was, of course, deeply invested in white supremacy and purity; with the great apes afforded an even greater status than the Africans who appeared in them periodically." Ng did answer my question, and sure enough, he proved his statement about the superiority of the apes with one incident from a 1930s Hal Foster comic strip-- which I think may come down to projection on his part. I guess the fact that he mentioned a few other non-Tarzan jungle comics also constituted some sort of proof in his eyes.


I'll expand on my other responses in Part 3, but I'll close this part by saying that one of Frazetta's best known artworks should have been used to head Ng's essay. And why--?

BECAUSE. IT. WAS. A. HATCHET. JOB.

ANOTHER QUICK COMMENT-PRESERVATION

In reaction to this Ng Suat Tong essay at HU, I wrote:

I don't think it's correct to take a single incident from one Tarzan continuity and assert that it was standard across the board. Cite several, along the same line, and then you've got something.

I remember the sequence you describe, though I would have to see it again to see if I agree that the apes are extolled over the black natives. I would say that your case is stronger just for the base idea of the "white goddess" trope; at the very least, the trope certainly isn't terribly complimentary. FWIW Burroughs does show white primitives believing in godlike outsiders as well, but I guess one could argue that they are just blacks in whiteface.

Going strictly by the excerpts from the porn art seen here, I don't see racism going on here. I see Frazetta drawing a handful of Black Africans as lustful characters, maybe even with predominantly brutish features, but that may be part of the erotic thing going on here, whatever it meant to Frazetta himself. I think that's a little different from making fun of Blacks for filing their teeth and dumping missionaries in cook-pots, which would, like the "white goddess" thing, suggest a complete and irreversible primitivism.

Nice, how you snuck in that shot at the EC comics. 

ADDENDA: I'm not going to try to preserve all my comments on this thread, but I'm copying this one for future reference because it's an overall putdown of the HU mentality.




"He rejects it for ideological reasons."




Cute, but the correct word is "non-ideological," as in, "those things in life that are not strictly reducible to ideological means and ends."




"Frazetta’s art is always about his virtuosity, so these images are about him giving up control and still being the awesome dude in control."




And a female artist isn't "in control" because-- yeah, reasons.




"I think what Noah was trying to convey (please correct me if I’m wrong here, Noah) was that all art implies and expresses ideology, regardless of whether the purpose of its creation was ideological."


It's one thing to note that ideological aspects may have sneaked their way into a work with no express ideological purpose. It's another to try to fit everything into a Procrustean bed, which is the usual practice here at HU.




What's really at issue in Ng's article? That Frazetta fantasized about either being a hung black dude, or about laying waste to black dudes in the persona of Tarzan? No, none of you care about Frazetta's inner demons. You care about the fact that these erotic drawings, which you (incorrectly) deem racist, are going to sell for a lot of money-- and that there's nothing you can do about that, any more than you can go back in time and convince people about the racial injustices of Tarzan.


I really you could find some real injustices to tilt at. But there's one positive thing. At least you're illustrating the fallacies of taking even a liberal viewpoint too far into la-la land.

SECOND AND LAST ADDENDA: Damn, I almost never anticipate what excuse NB will use to terminate a discussion. Often I've preserved comments here because I thought he would take offense and delete them, and I've usually been surprised that he didn't remove them.


My last couple of posts, which I found inoffensive, were deleted because of what he liked to call "bad faith trolling." Since the posts are gone now, I can only approximate what I said. In response to his claim that I was indulging in ideologically-based arguments while defending the idea of non-ideological factors in art, I said that I was simply turning their own type of arguments against them. That's the only thing I wrote that could be halfway construed as "bad faith," though in truth it's nothing of the kind. Patently it's merely an excuse to terminate the discussion because I'm touching on issues he NB doesn't care to deal with.


It's been a couple of days since I checked back, but the remark that probably scored the deepest hit in that post had nothing to do with bad faith; it had to do with interrogating the defenders of Ng Suat Tong's essay in the way that they pretend to interrogate purveyors of mass entertainment. (Author Ng chose not to defend his own essay.) In essence, I asked one of the defenders-- not NB-- as to whether he liked to think that all of his personal inclinations were entirely determined by ideological factors, since that's the complexion all of them choose to place upon Frank Frazetta. I didn't even directly mention any individual's leanings toward sexy entertainment, though of course that too would fall under the heading of such personal inclinations.


Another thought: since one of the defenders said she found Frazetta's work boring, I remarked that were Frazetta alive, he might find her (performance art) boring, too, but why would either opinion be a matter for ideology? Why couldn't both opinions be purely a matter of personal taste?


Not only does NB not care to answer such questions,  evidently he doesn't want his visitors troubled with them either-- which puts the HOODED UTILITARIAN right square in the same bailiwick as SEQUART-- censoring posts to keep their visitors content. There was a time that no one who professes liberal tendencies would indulge in such small-minded scapegoating, at least not with so little evidence of wrongdoing-- but as noted here, this era has bred a new sort of "liberal-so-called."