KEEPING VS. SHARING PT 3

 In my previous recent essays, I've been examining the way two ethical systems, the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing, have interpenetrated human history in the past and continue to do so. principally through their modern manifestations as "conservatism" and "liberalism." However, I added a couple of subdivisions to the mix. Keeping and Sharing can both manifest into extreme forms, both of which can be subsumed under "radicalism." The less extreme forms of both are best described as "meliorism"

Routine political discourse often distinguishes between radical and meliorist forms of liberalism. In the meliorist form, the ethic recommended to those that hold power can be summed up as "You Should Share" such things as rights and privileges with those that do not have (or do not think they have) said capacities. In the world of American civil rights, it's almost de rigeur to name Martin Luther King Jr as an exponent of persuading powerholders to cede power to the marginalized. In the radicalist form, the prevailing argument says, "You Must Share" and the best-known advocate from the same Civil Rights era, Malcolm X, favored the stick rather than the carrot.

Conservatism, though, displays the same two subdivisions. Liberals are usually only able to recognize the extreme form, so that everyone from the KKK to the guy running the Christian cake-shop are viewed as equals in tyranny. Naturally there are specific agents who want to Keep Power under all circumstances and cede nothing.  However, meliorist conservatives display the ethic that "You Should Share," albeit only under the right conditions. Franklin D. Roosevelt earned the reputation of a Liberal for measures like empowering the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Yet, the act of interning Japanese-Americans was fundamentally a conservative act, even if one takes the most charitable view of FDR's action.

And so I come to my first fictional example, that of the opposition between meliorism and radicalism seen in SPIDER-MAN #68-70 (dated January, February and March 1969). Yet to examine this scenario, a little grounding is necessary, since the conflict revolves around one of Spider-Man's support-cast, Joe Robertson. Though introduced in ASM #51, not until issue #55 does Stan Lee set up the newsman's role as a regular character, where he's a voice of reason as against the mule-headedness of publisher J. Jonah Jameson. He's also the epitome of a Liberal meliorist view: Joe Robertson ascends to his position of authority purely on the basis of merit. 

Jumping forward a year and some months, Joe's son Randy Robertson is briefly seen in ASM #67, but only in #68 do we see Randy's purpose: to show Stan Lee's negative view of radicalism. Thus, almost as soon as Peter Parker encounters Randy on the campus they both attend, up comes the shadow of Randy's friend Josh-- who, since he never has a last name, might as well be called Josh X.

Though Lee was often criticized for the piddly nature of the "campus protest" involved here, he shows considerable acumen in showing how militant Josh X is. There's no "hey, how they hangin,'" just, "are you joining the cause?" Lee obviously means readers to find Josh abrasive here and later, even though Peter Parker nominally approves of his cause. The campus protest will tie into Spider-Man's adventure with his frequent foe The Kingpin, but the cause is less important here than showing how Randy, the offspring of a meliorist parent, is being influenced by a radical who demands that the campus authorities "Must Share," while said authorities are taking the radical conservative posture, presumably currying favor with alumni to garner donations (though Lee does not say this).

Josh X is even less appealing in his second scene in the story. Though Randy is the first to invite Parker to help the students fight the good fight, Josh not only acts like Parker owes him allegiance, he addresses a near-stranger as "Whitey" as if he doesn't owe Parker the slightest courtesy. Stan Lee doesn't have Parker react to the racial slur, but rather to Josh's statement that the young militant doesn't think he has to listen to, or account for, the response of the authorities to the protesters' demands. On the next page, an unnamed Black protester casts aspersions on Randy for being "the son of an Uncle Tom," and Josh, for whatever reason, defends Randy as a "soul brother." But it's not hard to imagine Josh flinging the same insult if Randy failed to follow Josh's lead.

The battle between the spider and the gang-lord continues into ASM #69 and #70, but Stan Lee devotes just a handful of scenes to winding up his mini-debate about meliorism and radicalism. In the first of the two scenes above, Joe is aghast that a son of his was involved not just in protest, but in causing damage to personal property, which is something neither Randy nor Josh apologizes for. (In the next issue, Lee changes his mind and says no damage was caused by the protesters.) Randy, probably channeling whatever Sidney Poitier movies Stan had seen, complains that he has to be more "militant" because his meliorist father is part of "the White Man's establishment." Joe makes the more reasonable argument about proving oneself, though oddly, Josh gets the last word, claiming that "we" (meaning Black people) won't get anywhere unless they "kinda shake Whitey up a little." Given that Stan Lee was almost certainly a meliorist, it's fairly generous that he at least acknowledges the rationale of the radicalist in this issue. In #70 the voice of the "Must Keep" authority is at last heard, as the dean admits having failed to listen to the voices of his students, and that he was on their side but was busy fighting the real entrenched interests. the college's trustees. Josh admits the need to think about things a bit more, but no one's ever privy to his thoughts since I don't think he ever appears again.  

So in this late 1960s tale, some respect is accorded the "You Must Share" ethos even if the "You Should Share" is clearly the superior ethic. Yet what about one of the principal franchises of the era of identity politics?

The 2018 MCU film BLACK PANTHER presented audiences with a world where "You Must Share" is the only game in town. However, it's not a power structure based on the racial politics of America. Rather, Wakanda, an idealized African fantasyland, is called upon to pledge fealty to the radicalist ethos. In a loose way Wakanda is also governed by an Ethos of Keeping, though it's implied to be a world without the racial divisions found in the outside world, only a heritage of tribal quarrels that can be solved with rituals of combat. Wakanda keeps its miracle element vibranium out of the hands of the powerful and the powerless alike. However, their isolationism takes a major blow thanks to a poor relation of the realm's hereditary ruler, The Black Panther.   

Considering that T'Challa's uncle N'Jobu is critical to the end of Wakanda's isolationism, the character is barely more than a bare function of the plot. We are never told what radical influencer managed to persuade N'Jobu, brother of the reigning Wakandan king T'Chaka, to betray his country's policies and try to sell weapons to radicals in that hotbed of political activity, Oakland. Nor does the film tell us why T'Challa is so traumatized by the death of his traitorous uncle. N'Jobu's main purpose in the movie is to spawn Erik Killmonger, whom many critics described as the film's "real hero." Even though Killmonger takes over Wakanda with zero concern for its people and with the agenda of using their weapons for his network of blacktivist conspirators (also never defined), all that counts is forcing Wakanda to Share with the downtrodden, "By Any Means Necessary." Of course, Whitey is still the main villain even when no White person is directly involved in Killmonger's plans. Thus CIA agent Everett Ross is automatically a "colonizer" according to one of T'Challa's guardians. Yet none of the Wakandans uses that term for Killmonger, even though he's applying CIA tactics to ruin their country for his own agenda. Even though Killmonger dies, he succeeds in ending Wakanda's isolation. And the audience knows this must be a good thing because the nation starts donating money to American Blacks-- who I guess are supposed to be way worse off than all the impoverished tribes of real-world Africa.            

It's clear from BLACK PANTHER that without any sort of compensatory ethos, the radicalist ethos loses all control of whatever moral compass it might potentially possess. I would like to think that PANTHER's success at the box office was a short-lived anomaly, since most of the radicalist MCU movies since then have tanked. But as another famous Liberal-with-Conservative-tendencies observed, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance."                 

   

KEEPING VS. SHARING PT 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I offered a broad characterization of the two political philosophies, conservatism and liberalism, as overt manifestations of two deeper ethical systems, the Ethos of Keeping for the first and the Ethos of Sharing for the second. I also showed just a few historical examples of how the two systems interwove, but here I'll focus on how they played out in two historical periods, the 1960s "Civil Rights" era and the 21st-century "identity politics" era, and I'll use illustrations taken more from fiction than from history.

I commented in Part 1 that the pietistic religions strongly emphasized the Ethos of Sharing, but there were different degrees of emphasis. Early Christianity did not suggest that all slaveholders should free their slaves-- even though the Jewish custom of Jubilee at least indicated that this was a beneficial act-- but rather enjoined slaveholders to treat their slaves with charity and humanity. Thus the message to conservatives here was "You Should Share." At the same time, Christianity was founded upon the template of the Old Testament, which sometimes put forth the countervailing message, "You Must Share." One can see this illustrated by the Exodus story of Moses and the Pharaoh, in which Pharaoh's desire to "Keep" the Jews as slaves was finally overthrown by God's will that the Jews must be liberated. Pharaoh himself represents the extreme of conservatism, that of "You Must Keep" one's perceived property no matter what. Yet, going back to the slavery-rhetoric from early Christianity, some masters followed a milder version of Keeping, which I'll call the commandment "You Should Keep," unless one sees a good reason not to do so. Within this form of ethical compass, even if one decides to liberate this or that meritorious slave-- as Philemon releases Onesimus in the Epistle of Paul-- that does not mean that the slaveholder releases all his slaves, or renounces the belief that slavery is a perfectly normal societal practice.

Vaulting over centuries to the American Civil Rights era, it's possible to see these commandments on both sides of the liberal/conservatism spectrum manifesting in the political persuasions often called "meliorism" and "radicalism." The radical conservative swears by the commandment "You Must Keep," which resulted (for one example) in banning free Blacks from being educated in any way, for fear that they might have a better chance at escaping a second-class citizen status. The meliorist conservative, swearing by "You Should Keep," by contrast would be okay with allowing Black Americans to be educated in Black schools, but would still want Blacks to stay within certain boundaries. The meliorist and the radical attitudes with respect to liberals have received much more commentary. The meliorist liberal wants to work within the system, to prove that he deserves a seat at the table on the basis of merit-- again, telling conservatives "You Should Share." The radical liberal insists that, on the basis of past treatment, the whole table should be overturned so that only his people (and maybe some fellow travelers) can be seated, telling conservatives that "You Must Share," even to the extent of beggaring oneself.

I'd originally planned to address my fictional examples in this post but now it seems to me that the length of the post will become ungainly, so I'll hold the rest for a Part Three.           

      

KEEPING VS. SHARING

 It's now a week and a day since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I'd heard his name off and on but only had become aware of him in the last month, thanks in large part to SOUTH PARK. I don't regularly watch the show but some podcast on YT featured Kirk reacting to a 2025 SP episode. From the clips shown, the show spoofed Kirk by having Cartman give extremely racist speeches, supposedly modeled on those of Kirk. The real Kirk was highly amused by SP's hyperbolic satire, and he stated something to the effect that he felt he'd "arrived" by getting lambasted by the famous teleseries.  

The SP episode may have been clever or stupid, but it falls within the realm of art, and so it can't be judged as pure political discourse. Not so, the dozens of contemptible reactions on the Left to the murder, in which people felt it more important to virtue signal about Kirk's alleged racism than to show common respect for a man shot down for his words. Even worse were the bottom-feeders who tried to make a hero of the left-leaning assassin, or to romanticize him, or to make him part of some convoluted conspiracy on the Right.

But this is a philosophy-blog, not a political rant blog, so I do have some thoughts about what I consider the "two ethical systems" that underlie all forms of political endeavor-- the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing. They are the two sides of human nature, which have taken many forms in history. In this century we know the Keeping-Ethos as "conservatism," which connotation is baked into the very word "to conserve." Now, the word from which "liberalism" descends means "to free," not "to share." But no actual liberal in modern times advocates simply "freeing" marginalized people without also letting those people "share" in whatever rights or privileges have supposedly been denied them-- ergo, liberalism is predicated on an Ethos of Sharing. The two words are even traced back to the same century, the 14th, while in another century, the 19th, they became rhetorically linked to the two dominant U.S. political parties.

Within the liberal view, conservatism is evil, the domain of money-hoarding tyrants, but this is false logic, and not only because there are a lot of rich liberals too. From the tribal level up, every organized society depends upon an Ethos of Keeping, particularly with respect to resources. If Tribe A has control of the headwaters of a river, then Tribe B will not be allowed to Share in this bounty, for that would mean less for every member of Tribe A. Tribe B can only access the river only through (1) reciprocal trade, which exchanges goods from B to A, which is still the opposite of Sharing since each party Keeps the fruits of the exchange, or (2) killing off Tribe A or somehow managing to merge with the other tribe consensually. Obviously small societies often merged to make larger ones, but often this strategy, like trade, was executed for mutual advantage, such as defense against a common enemy, Tribe C. The primary mode of non-reciprocal Sharing appears within families, where parents share with children and may get nothing out of the bargain except a sense of familial immortality. One may assume that some tribes extended familial charity to tribe-members who were injured or indigent, and that this eventually led to a sense of philanthropy toward the poor as tribes coalesced into city-states. But this still constitutes Sharing within a particular ingroup.         

The Ethos of Keeping also applies equally to the ethos behind slavery, which is in modern times supplies both sides of the political spectrum with a source of conflict. In archaic times no citizen would have thought that any society was obligated to free slaves. Slaves were often taken during wars with other nations, along with other plunder. The idea of simply letting enemy slaves go free would not have made any more sense than a request for the return of any other sort of plunder. Ancient citizens might have understood a slave wanting to be free, but that would not mean that the slaveholder had any moral duty to free him. The closest thing ancient societies had to the modern idea of liberation would be related to Nietzsche's concept of the largesse of the nobility. Nobles might choose to free slaves-- say, during the Hebrew festival of the Jubilee-- as a gesture of generosity. Something similar may inform the story of Cyrus the Great releasing Jewish slaves in Babylon from captivity once the Persian ruler took over the country. One does not need to believe the Old Testament's account of the event, and one may fairly speculate that Cyrus may have liberated the Jews with the notion of being able to garner a return favor from Israel down the line. But since the Jews did not to our knowledge render Cyrus any goods in exchange for freedom, his gesture is still defined as a gesture of magnanimity.    

Though one can find evidence of the Ethos of Sharing in early societies, its manifestation in the form of charity became arguably more cental to what some have called the "pietistic religions"-- Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism. With the rise of these beliefs, the Ethos of Sharing became a general commandment. It's also during this period that two of the greatest empires of the Old World, Imperial Rome and Imperial China, had their Keeping-systems of empire-building interfused with the Sharing-oriented systems of Christianity and Buddhism. Granted, Imperial Rome had to take a "fall" before it rose again in a more religiously oriented form, while Buddhism had to share China with Taoism and the secular "faith" of Confucianism. In both domains, strong limitations remained upon the Ethos of Sharing, for the institution of slavery continued in both empires. More egregiously, the later Empire of Islam turned the practice of slavery, which had most often been the consequence of warring tribes and nations, into a transnational moneymaking business.    

So when I write something about the American Confederacy and don't react with a knee-jerk excoriation of the evils of slavery, it's because I recognize that slaveholders in all of the twelve original slaveholding states were governed by the same Ethos of Keeping that applies to any other form of property. American slaveholders in the North and the South didn't bring Africans to the States for any other reason but to be slaves, the same way the captive Africans would have remained slaves had they been sold anywhere else, in Persia or Turkey or China. But in the United States, there had arisen a secular "ethic of emancipation" due to the American Revolution. This combined with the Sharing-ethos of mainstream Christianity-- as well as offshoots like Quakerism-- and so produced abolitionism. The abolitionists were far too few to have influenced the nation's course, but their aims happened to coincide with (1) Great Britain's early-19th century ban on slave-trading, and with (2) the desire of Northern politicians to nullify the congressional power of the Southern states. The "liberals" of this period were no less devoted to their Ethos of Keeping than were the "conservatives." Aside from real abolitionists, who often sacrificed life and property campaigning for slaves' rights, most Northerners had only one real goal: to bend the Southern states to their will. These early "liberals" sometimes wrapped their quest for power in an alleged Ethos of Sharing. But they often expected the South to do all the sharing of resources, by enforcing codes that kept even free Blacks from emigrating into certain states, such as Illinois.  

And now, about a hundred and fifty years after the close of the Civil War, modern liberals are still telling conservatives that they Must Share whatever liberals think ought to be shared. To that imperious command, conservatives reply that they Must Keep what they hold rather than becoming de facto slaves to the Left. While there are real racist movements within the Far Right, and while there are reactionary elements within the "Center-Right" that I don't always countenance, the anti-racist screed of modern Liberals has become removed from all practical considerations. Thus, they only command others to Share on their own terms-- yet they cannot share condemnation of the political murder of a man who only contended against them with words. Thus the Left's alleged narrative of Sharing becomes that of Keeping one's political stance in place, no matter what. I'll add that I imagine a lot of Righties want to keep the controversy boiling too. But the Left missed a real chance to participate in a Sharing that would have made them look a lot better than they do now.     

    

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 1

As I begin this post, I'm not sure how many parts this essay-series will run. Meditations on the nature of evil tend to lead anyone down a lot of unusual, if not perilous, alleyways, though I have a few directions in mind. The subject came up in a comment by AT-AT Pilot, which I reprint here so that it will be clear what I'm responding to.

Is it possible for literature to be "evil"? I understand that there have always been critics who consider some book or other to be morally grotesque. But they are approaching art in the wrong way, I presume? In the MYTHCOMICS: ["RINGSIDE BLONDIE"] BLONDIE #169 (1963) entry, you mentioned Frye's "protective wall of play." Does it encircle all fiction? From your writings and those of Frye, I would guess that such a barrier does exist and makes all fiction inherently "good." Is that correct? I imagine that controversial literature is allowed to be in print because readers are sophisticated enough to restrain the realm of fantasy and keep some distance away from it, preventing the possibility of negative influence within themselves.

I ask because I find it difficult to effectively defend a work that is deemed to be morally noxious. How would someone, for example, be able to defend a work like Kamasutra (or other manga like Berserk) from accusations of perversion and misogyny?

Now, I already wrote, in the same comments-section, a short answer to the questions, but I think they deserve extended commentary as well. My present plan is to break down some of my short answers and expand upon them in piecemeal fashion and bring in some new commentary as well (some of which should justify my title, a deliberate misquote of the line Milton gives Satan in PARADISE LOST).

What I want to expand on first is my statement about how literary works encompass both "play" and "work:"

My first (short) answer is that *potentially* the wall of play might encircle all fiction. However, it's also axiomatic that fiction always has an equal potential to be used for "work"-- that is, to achieve specific ends-- and using that potential reduces the potential to see the work only in terms of play. Whenever a specific goal is advocated in a fictional work-- Upton Sinclair using THE JUNGLE to persuade Americans that socialism was better than capitalism, or Superman trying to convince young readers to exercise more in line with the health programs of President Kennedy-- that's "play being used for the ends of work."

I should also give the context for my quotation of Frye from his ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, though I may have already done so in previous posts. I also want to clarify that he's in no way responsible for my dichotomy of "play" and "work."

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there.

Probably my most specific attempt to break down categories of "fiction used for play" and "fiction used for work" appeared in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4. In this essay, I cited two works in each category, one of which was of superior literary quality and one which was inferior: Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND and Dixon's CLANSMAN for "play-fiction," and Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST and Coetzee's DISGRACE for "work-fiction." 

In line with my remarks above, I would now kick Dixon's CLANSMAN out of consideration, because even though it was "popular fiction" like GONE WITH THE WIND, Dixon's books were polemical, trying to convince readers that Negro slaves should never have been emancipated. The best substitute that occurs to me now-- and one that was short enough to give a quick read online-- is Florence Kate Upton's TWO DUTCH DOLLS AND A GOLLIWOG. This is admittedly a children's book in verse, but it was phenomenally popular in England and America and spawned twelve sequels-- which I imagine were probably as unserious in their chauvinism as the first book. A pertinent image from the first book follows...

But now, with all those reconsiderations out of the way, the TRIP essay was focused only upon my estimation of literary quality. I would still maintain that both Coetzee's DISGRACE and Upton's DUTCH DOLLS lack the better qualities of both the Faulkner and Mitchell books. But even though both Mitchell and Upton have often been attacked for racial content, I would probably still find Coetzee's book the most morally objectionable, if not "evil" as such, partly because the author was "working" with didactic ideas but did a much poorer, less subtle job of handling them than did Faulkner.

Next up: some possible definitions of "evil."

QUICK POST ON ROOT CAUSES

 My response to a political post regarding the "root causes" solution of illegal immigrant incursions.

___________

Now, we've heard for a long time about "root causes," which in this case consist of the U.S. taking steps (which will almost certainly cost the country money in some manner) to "build up" the chaotic countries so that in theory their citizens won't want to travel to the U.S. I have no faith in this solution. I understand why Liberals of all stripes would like this latest manifestation of dollar diplomacy, since it allows them to think of themselves as generous sponsors of our "little brown brothers." (The Taft quote applies here since the Left has repeatedly characterized border security as racist.) One major problem with this solution is that a lot of immigrants-- even the ones who intend to work an honest day's work if they get in by hook or crook-- are coming here not just for free stuff (though that doesn't hurt) but because the U.S. already has the advantages of a fully articulated system of social benefits. Underdeveloped countries may or may not develop such systems if we give them lots of patronage, but they won't develop them any time soon. And the cartels that have battened onto the Liberal permissiveness toward illegal immigration-- what do they care about preying on penny ante operations in Honduras, when they've already got a foothold in the richest country in the world?

Even if this "root cause" approach could have *some* limited good effects, the plan also fails overall in that its main motivation is to allow Liberals to virtue signal in order to gain political advantage. Building up other countries is not, in the final analysis, America's responsibility.

SHARKS AND REMORAS

 In response to Joe Rogan's podcast interview with Bill Maher, I wrote the following, which I'm reproducing here mostly because I like my "shark-remora" metaphor.

_____________

I listened to the "BLM" segment of the Rogan/Maher interview twice, and at no time did Maher make any statement that Black people are more violent than other racial groups. At most he said that a lot of the killings, specifically in Chicago though the principle applies elsewhere, took place because of "stupid shit" like people quarreling over being dissed in one way or another. It is quite possible to criticize elements of particular ethnic subcultures without being racist, though you wouldn't know it from Progressives (and Maher makes an astute case about why these people should not be called Liberals, BTW).

The idea that all of this shitty behavior would stop if you address "social causes" with money is a dumb idea beloved by Progressives. The truth is, give an immoral person money and he won't become moral. If anything he'll feel like you paid him because of his immoral actions. Thus the Black gangbanger who kills or terrorizes ordinary Black citizens, upon being given money, may well become the BLM organizer, who in theory terrorizes both ordinary Whites and Whites in the power structure. But wait, did any of those organizers actually change the power structure? Or did they just become remora-like attachments to the Great White Sharks, sponging off the sharks while their poor Black brother-fish are still being targeted by the gangbangers?

I don't have much faith that Maher's idea of getting Black civic leaders or sports figures to decry illegal activities would have any effect. There's too much short-term gain. But I agree that there are ways they could make a stand just for its own sake. "Silence is violence," after all.

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 READING RHEUM: BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP (1919)

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP was written before STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER but saw print after CARTER, both appearing in amateur zines before seeing reprint in WEIRD TALES. SLEEP is therefore the first true manifestation of HPL's great talent.

Herein the author first articulates his idea that human who experience dreams that suggest weird, transmundane realities are in truth tuned in to such cosmic abnormalities. The narrator is an employee at a mental asylum who just happens to be experimenting with a telepathy machine. He gets the chance of a lifetime when Joe Slater, a dirt-poor, uneducated Catskills man, is sent to the asylum for having killed one of his fellows in a moment of violent delirium.

The "alienist," as he is sometimes termed, is fascinated that an utterly ignorant specimen of "white trash" can relate "chaotic but cosmic word pictures." In particular Slater rants about beholding some malign entity, a "thing that shines and shakes and laughs," that seems to be his enemy, and that Slater feels "himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy." The alienist has no empathy for the confused mental patient, reflecting much of the author's contempt for Slater; the narrator just wants to get to the bottom of the mystery. 

His early efforts are unsuccessful, but Slater takes a turn for the worse, apparently dying due to the "turmoil in his brain." It's at this point that the experimenter attaches his telepathy machine to both Slater and himself. Falling asleep, the alienist finds himself experiencing spectacular extraterrestrial planes of existence. He also communicates with a being of pure light, who purports to be "an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep." HPL may have derived this basic notion from occult concepts of "higher selves," though he ties the concept into SF-concepts such as time-travel and alien life, since the light-being's kind can also inhabit the dreams of creatures like "the insect-philosophers" from the fourth moon of Jupiter. The light-being concludes his colloquy with the narrator by expressing the hope that he will someday re-encounter the alienist in his light-form, but only after the light-being gains vengeance on his enemy, located out near "Algol, the Demon Star." The narrator wakes and finds Slater dead, and later hears of what seems to be a massive stellar explosion in the area of Algol.

Many commentators have talked about HPL's abhorrence for non-white races, and sometimes even for white ethnicities that the author considered decadent. I don't deny that he sported these racist views to make himself feel superior. Yet it's interesting that the first example of a wretched ethnicity in HPL's fiction-cosmos is lowborn "white trash," and the author treats Slater just as condescendingly as he would ever treat any other ethnic figure. Even when Slater is dead, the alienist can't resist commenting on his "hideous face" and "repulsively rotten fangs." In my opinion HPL was always separated from most of humanity thanks to his superb intellectual attainments, meaning that he related no better to most whites than he did to non-whites. Yet because HPL knew that he was of the same common clay as the most ignoble human being, and thus his fiction is filled with examples of his fear of degenerating into something inferior. (In Jungian terms Slater would be "the shadow" who incarnated that dominating fear of bodily devolution.) But in contrast to this trepidation, HPL poses the possibility of enchanting, ethereal vistas of the sort he experienced in his most cosmic dreams-- and SLEEP is notable for giving both sides equal symbolic representation.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #24: "NOAH'S ARK FROM SPACE" (BLACKHAWK #162, 1960)

 Largely by accident I chanced upon this forgotten issue from the generally forgettable DC BLACKHAWK title that lasted roughly from 1956 to 1970. "Noah's Ark" features a nuclear family of aliens who come to Earth seeking a new home, and who get aid and comfort from the justice-loving Blackhawks. For no explicit reason the three aliens bring along some alien beasts from their dying world, which of course cause some of the story's conflict. Arguably the story's raconteurs did come up with a menagerie of monsters that was slightly more imaginative than the average. 

Not so much the Dridath Bull:

But rather the Lightning-Lion--

And more importantly for Students of DC Anthropoidology, an "Octi-Ape" on the cover.

But what's curious about this 1960 story is that the three aliens are opposed by hostile, prejudiced Earthlings, who call the ETs "Greenies." 

By story's end, exigent circumstances force the ark-aliens to depart. Still, minor though the story is, I'm not aware of any DC superhero stories between 1955 and 1965 that even address any sort of prejudice. Yes, some war stories and PSAs, but not so much the fantasy-content books.

THE RETURN OF THE TWO ELITISMS

 Back in 2013 I took advantage of a public debate between two comics critics, Gary Groth and Ng Suat Tong to show how both were wrong about their chosen subject (the artfulness of EC Comics) and I, of course, was right. In my essay ELICITING ELITISM I observed that although I considered both critics to be elitists (in contrast to the pluralism I practice), Tong's approach consisted of "form elitism," in that he only recognized art in terms of the form of a given work, while Groth's approach (at least in his defense of the EC comics he was re-publishing) consisted of "content elitism," in which he recognized art in a work's elements of content. This week I found a similar opposition in the public arguments of one acclaimed artist and one not-so-acclaimed performer, put on display in this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay. 

(Note: before proceeding I should note that I have not seen the MCU "Shang-Chi" film, so I have no opinion of the merits of Simu Liu's performance in that film, only of his public remarks.)

Liu's remarks respond to two interviews given by Martin Scorsese and one given by Quentin Tarantino. I don't know why Liu includes Tarantino in his screed at all, given that Liu's main complaint is about "Hollywood racism," and Tarantino has distinguished himself for having scripted strong starring and supporting roles for POC actors. Further, though Tarantino has made his share of ideological statements over the years, his comments about not wanting to be a "hired gun" for the MCU are merely practical in nature, and do not condemn the superhero genre as a whole as does the remarks of Martin Scorsese. So I'm focusing here on Scorsese's remarks, which show him to be a "form elitist."

Scorsese takes exception to the box-office dominance of Marvel films, by which he means superhero films, though he says nothing about the films of any other studio. Scorsese says:

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

The famed director's remarks spring forth as a defense of his personal tastes, and that's why they are vague at best in a critical sense. Phrases like "revelation" and "mystery" may have special meaning to Scorsese, but they mean nothing in a wider critical context. Both in this excerpt and the rest of the essay, Scorsese's main complaint is that superhero films depend on "a finite number of themes," while with the filmmakers he loves, Scorsese feels that he's going to be "taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience."

Without my defending the overall quality of 21st-century superhero films, though, I believe what Scorsese really wants are works that fit the mythos of drama, in which most of the central characters are put through rigorous tests of their beliefs or personal loyalties. In contrast, most though not all superhero works fall into the mythos of adventure, where the main purpose of each narrative is to fill the viewer with excitement and invigoration rather than the purging of one's belief-system. Even in the many botched storylines of the MCU, this potential is always present. It's certainly possible to work purgative elements into an adventure-context. In my review of the BLACK PANTHER film, I pointed how it had given shorter shrift to its dramatic elements than had the Don McGregor comics on which the film was partly based. But had Scorsese been exposed to the original "Panther's Rage" arc of the Marvel comic, I tend to think the director would not have recognized the dramatic elements therein, because they weren't as important to the story as the hero physically triumphing over his various opponents. Almost all of Martin Scorsese's work falls into the mythos of the drama, and though he probably enjoys films that fall into other mythoi, most of the filmmakers he applauds also excel in dramatic works, not those of comedy, adventure, or irony. This is what causes me to label Scorsese a "form elitist," who cannot fathom excellence apart from the form he likes best.

Scorsese's essay ends with a complaint about the "financial dominance" of the films he cannot bear to call cinema, and his case is at least strong in terms of his personal tastes, not just his own prosperity. Simu Liu's remarks, as represented in the BOUNDING essay, start and end with the philosophy that "if it's good for me, it's good."

Even if Liu had only attacked Scorsese and left out Tarantino, his vile "everything that doesn't benefit me is racist" would not be any better. Since Scorsese does not bring up racial concerns of any kind, aside from (over)praising Spike Lee, Liu's attack seems grounded in nothing more than. "Scorsese doesn't like the genre which allowed me Sam Liu to get a starring role." 

Liu also manages to talk through both sides of his mouth, praising the two directors' "filmmaking genius" but condemning them as "gatekeepers" who, unlike Woke Disney and the MCU, would never have allowed an Asian star to star in a major Hollywood film." Of course Liu also tries to link his ascension to the entire Asian-American community, to their "lived experience." The entirety of White Hollywood existed for no reason but to keep POC performers down, and any work that does the opposite, no matter how meretricious it might be, is good for possessing that racism-defying content-- making Liu a person who makes his choices on the basis on content, though calling him any sort of "elitist" is a stretch.

I acknowledge that Liu is not engaged in an intellectual discussion as were Scorsese, Groth, and Tong. Yet the ideology he represents (but certainly did not originate) has permeated much of the Hollywood business community, insofar as even hard-hearted businessmen perceive the need to virtue-signal to gain cultural approval. Indeed, though Scorsese makes no comment upon the political content of MCU superhero films-- which it's possible the director did not even notice-- the virtue-signaling aspect of those films bears much of the blame for the aesthetic failure of most modern superhero films to measure up to the comics they pretend to emulate.