SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICISM PT. 1

 When I began this blog in 2007, ultraliberal SJWs were still in the process of attempting to brainwash American audiences into viewing straight white male privilege as an unforgivable sin. Back then, the paradigm claimed, this privilege was expressed in the form of the hegemony’s employment of sadistic acts upon the bodies of all those who did not share this privilege, be they women, nonwhites or LGBT. In the world of comic books, Superman could get beaten to death and Batman could have his back broken, and those manifestations of extreme violence said nothing about the repressiveness of conservative America. But ifa female hero like Tigra got beaten up, or if Spider-Woman lifted herbutt up high enough for males to gawk at,  SJWs insisted that this represented nasty straight white males exercising their privilege, and so It Had to Stop. It was, as I’ve pointed out before, the rebirth of a liberal form of lynch law that had in the forties had been largely confined to outliers like Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman.

In the greater world beyond comics, most such lynchings came from the conservative side of the tracks, as per the Moral Majority’s ill-fated 1980s attempts to “cancel” extreme sex and violence in popular entertainment. However, the 1990s gave rise to a subtler form of censure: the view of America as the “fruit of the poisoned tree.” In the 1960s the radical Malcolm X had more power to inspire the aggrieved than to effect change for Black people. However, American culture’s uncritical acceptance of Spike Lee’s 1992 biography (or hagiography) of Malcolm X might serve as a flashpoint for future developments, promoting the view that those who had suffered most from the old hegemony ought to become the arbiters of the new one.

The past five years gave rise to spectacles like the 2017 Oscar Awards, in which Hollywood liberals lined up to be flogged for the sin of whiteness. But once Americans started seeing once marginal groups achieving dominance, we started seeing less of the politics-as-sadism argument. Once the new boss is in charge, how credibly can he complain that the old boss is still putting the screws to him? Given far fewer depictions of marginalized groups being subjected to physical torments, the SJWs found a new lyric for an old song: preaching that SWM privilege leads to everlasting economic abjection. Since it’s also a given that, as someone in the Bible said, “there will be poor always,” ultraliberals finally found a cornucopia from which they can draw endless supplies of social outrage.

Most of the SJWs in the comics subculture who had pursued the old Wertham-Legman legacy seem to have dropped the sadism angle. I confess I don’t read THE BEAT regularly these days, but I’ve the impression in the past five years none of the BEAT’s clickbait has been as audacious as the 2008 post “The One with All the Comments.” In this blogpost—which did indeed garner a lot of comments —Heidi McDonald aligned American superhero readers with the audiences of the woman-bashing site “Superheroines Demise.” The Heidi-post has been deleted for whatever reasons, so it may be that the only surviving references to its audacity (and philosophical dishonesty) are those on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, particularly an essay entitled SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND.

I suppose that nothing I wrote back then to refute Wertham, Legman and McDonald can be used to combat current SJWs and their reliance on the “economic abjection” argument. Still, on occasion the anti-sadism meme still crops up, most often in modern anti-pornography crusades that often sound barely distinguishable from the WAP crusades of the 1970s. I’ve repeatedly argued that sex and violence are integral components of literature, though without validating a given work just for being either sexy, violent or both. Therefore, in part 2, and the “near myths” essay following, I’ll explore some of the ways that sadism in literature can be fairly evaluated.

TRAPPED IN THE NEGATIVE EQUITY ZONE

At the end of my PHARMAKON essay I wrote that “a second wave of Covid will be the least of our problems” in comparison to the ruthless exploitation of the American racial divide. A mere week later, as unhinged protesters assault statues of every political stripe and erect “police-free zones” in major cities, I find myself missing the old days. Back then, my greatest worry was charting the obnoxious virtue signaling of crappy movies like Jordan Peele's US or crappy TV shows like various Greg Berlanti shows, whether attacking them individually or collectively. (So far STARGIRL has kept the politicizing to a minimum, though I imagine it too will be drafted into service sooner or later.)

Observant readers will note that I said “protesters,” not “rioters.” I’m aware of the distinction, having been hugely amused during Spike Lee’s CBS interview, when he used the word “rioters” and quickly corrected himself. However, said distinction is specious. I don’t doubt the overall reports—even from Fox News—that the majority of protesters have not committed overt acts of violence, However, I would not call their protests “peaceful,” as the newsmen do, simply due to a lack of overt violence. Peaceful protests are those in which the protesters define their goals so that politicians can understand them, and then choose whether or not to accede to those demands, be it “save the whales” or “get us out of Vietnam.” But these protesters seek to bring not peace, but a sword of unending division. Their original demands were absurd enough, focusing on the impractical goal of defunding the police. Now those demands have escalated into the notion that America can purge the country of everything they deem to be politically incorrect—which includes, for some, the entire history of the United States.

On a political forum I responded to the idiotic statements of Senator Tim Kaine, who is apparently seeking to promote himself through the narrative that America was tainted by the sin of slavery from the country’s origins. I wrote:

The problem I have with Kaine’s pronouncement is that he willfully overlooks some facts about the forming of the nation. If the Constitutional Congress had not made compromises in order to allow slavery in some states, we would not have managed to form the strong Union that we have now.

The pro-slavery proponents were, without doubt, greedy and venal people. But you know what? Every damn country has to make allowances for greedy, venal people in power. That’s the only way anyone ever manages to create a unified nation, and it’s only with a unified nation that wrongs can be redressed and slaves liberated.

Kaine seems to be framing his complaint along the same absolutist lines as the 1619 Project: “Slavery is the Original Sin of America, and every white person is equally responsible for it.” I don’t agree with that verdict.

In this essay I’ve critiqued the transparent one-sidedness of the 1619 Project, in which Nikole Hannah-Jones excoriated the people who bought slaves but found no fault with the people who sold them. She did so for the same reason Tim Kaine chose to ignore the role slavery has played in society since archaic times: such a perspective makes America’s Original Sin seem less unique. Liberals are often fond of expressing great admiration for other countries and their political systems. How many of those admired countries, though, relentlessly cover themselves in sackcloth and ashes because of the deeds of their ancestors? If it were up to manipulative ideologues like Hannah-Jones, no one would even know anyone in Ghana ever contributed to slavery’s horrors.

In post-Covid America, the species of ultraliberal now called “the Progressive” has found a new way to purge himself of guilt: to project it upon everything that seems to signify the “systemic racism” of the existing power structure. All of the protesters, violent or not, have chosen to subscribe to this paradigm, and so the peaceful storks are implicated in the acts of the violent cranes, as the Aesopian moralist might frame it. Because they all believe in the fallacy of systemic racism, the rabble rousers pulling the strings have been able to turn their dogs loose on everything that supposedly represents the corrupt power structure—be it statues of musicians, abolitionists, or the guy who freed the slaves. It’s not really a purgation, but a dumb-show, in which the real target is not past sin, but present sin. Demonstrations with no true demands have only one agenda—to terrorize the more complacent members among the elite, in order to gain meaningless concessions. Many of these lily-livers are so chicken-hearted that they’ve sought to eliminate potential sources of controversy, in the delusion that such gestures will placate the mob.

There’s only one way in which the protestors have managed to promote racial equity: by bringing together the predominantly black plotters of Black Lives Matter with the predominantly white members of Antifa—an unholy alliance not unlike the one featured at the end of AVENGERS #74.

This superhero tale dealt with a white supremacist group, the Sons of the Serpent, seeking to foment a race war in America. Two TV pundits, a white conservative and a black radical, constantly stoke resentments with their inflammatory rhetoric, and in the end they're revealed to be the secret leaders of the Serpent coalition. This purely fictional resolution by writer Roy Thomas now seems prescient of current conditions, though what's occurred in reality is the unholy union of two factions of the Far Left: Black Lives Matter, whose best known representatives are of course black, and Antifa, whose members seem to be dominantly Caucasian. Both groups have been ardently trying to tear down the American government for some years now, but the perfect storm of Covid-induced frustrations and the single searing image of George Floyd's humiliating death have given both radical groups a following such as they could never have imagined earlier.

It is possible that some positive reforms may come of this Progressive uprising, but it will be impossible to prove that the same reforms might not have happened even without the protests. However, the negative effects-- what I've called "negative equity" elsewhere-- are entirely attributable to the protesters. Said effects range from actual Progressive demands to cancel this or that politically incorrect item, or the craven virtue signaling of those who "holler before they're hit," as seen in HBO's temporary sidelining of GONE WITH THE WIND broadcasts and Disneyland's elimination of cartoon characters from SONG OF THE SOUTH. Anti-Southern fanaticism has of course remained in the wind since the vogue for removing Confederacy statues. But the current fanatics have followed the lead of hatemongers like Spike Lee and Hannah-Jones, claiming that every aspect of the American political structure is hopelessly corrupt and can only be cleansed by burning it all down, as one BLM member recently opined.

I have a modicum of faith that they will not succeed. Yet on the whole, these alleged do-gooders will actually cause far more havoc than the most brutal cops out there, and with far more lasting effects.

QUICK THOUGHTS ON SPIKE LEE'S BLACKKLANSMAN

The above image is the cleverest thing to have come out of the 2018 BLACKKLANSMAN, partly because of the juxtaposition of the threatening-looking hair comb with the Klan hood.

Prior to viewing this Oscar nominee, I'd heard that BK was something of a return to form for Lee, whose 1989 DO THE RIGHT THING remains a major cinematic work despite its agitprop politics. I confess that as a white guy I grew tired of seeing white people portrayed as either active racists or naive fools (more or less aligned with the two Italian brothers in RIGHT THING). Consequently I'd given all Lee films a pass since 1994's CROOKLYN. Thus I can't speak to whether any of the films in between CROOKLYN and BK showed any improvement in his ability to characterize white people. However, since there's no improvement in BK whatever, I tend to doubt it.

True, the script for BK, based on a real-life book by former black police officer Ron Stallworth, was concocted without Lee's direct input, so those writers may be partly responsible for any and all fatuities of characterization-- which, in fact, include all of the black people as well. All of the characters are thinly drawn: the fictionalized version of Stallworth, a Colorado Springs cop who initiates contact with local Klan members, his girlfriend, the cops he works with, and the Klan-dolts being investigated. It doesn't really matter that the goons of the Klan are portrayed as cretins, since their belief-system justifies cartoonish treatment. But when the film has Stallworth and his girlfriend argue about the role of  cops in relation to Black American culture, and Stallworth can't justify his profession beyond the fact that he always wanted to be a policeman, I think I'm justified in suspecting that none of the authors really cared anything but putting across the ideology.

And what is the ideology? Well, it comes down to the ideal of Nietzschean ressentiment, which has become almost the only ideology of the American Left today. Going on the assumption that, given his still considerable clout, Lee probably reworked everything in the script to suit his ideology, he has but one message that he tiresomely reiterates in most if not all of his movies: White People Have Done Black People Evil in the Past and They Will Keep Doing So, Unless Stopped Somehow. No individual evil springs from any historical contingency: the resurgence of the KKK following the success of Griffith's 1915 film BIRTH OF A NATION is one with the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and even with the negative depiction of Black Africans in TARZAN movies.

But while Lee has much to say about the ways black people have been persecuted, his depiction of the Klan's harassment of Jews is underwhelming. Though the Klan-members do spout a lot of anti-Jewish sentiments, there's no attempt to glean what activities the Klan undertakes against the Jews of Colorado Springs. Only the Klan's activities against the city's blacks are depicted. Lee and his collaborators try to hoax reviewers into thinking that he has some concern for Jews. A real-life character from Stallworth's book, whose name and ethnicity are not revealed beyond the bare fact of his being white (so that he can infiltrate the Klan using Stallworth's name), is made into a Jewish-American white guy named Zimmerman. However, I'm tempted to believe that the only reason he's Jewish is so that Lee and Co. could avoid the trope of "black and white cop fighting racism together." If Zimmerman is, in the view of the Klan, " non-white," then the alliance can be read as two non-whites battling against the "white devils," and so the anti-white ideology remains intact. Zimmerman only gets one character-moment, when he considers resigning from the operation. This gives the Stallworth character the chance to chide his fellow cop not just for his unprofessional reluctance, but also for the real sin Jews commit in the eyes of radical black activists: the sin of being able to "pass" by concealing the fact of Jewish difference. Stallworth even references "light-skinned" blacks who have chosen to pass, implying that this is a betrayal of The Cause. Not surprisingly, Zimmerman utters no more protests for the rest of the film.

Lee was at his most honest about his true feelings in a MALCOLM X scene. A young white girl approaches Malcolm during the latter's years of political celebrity, and asks what can someone do about the sins of whites against blacks, only to be told, "There's nothing you can do."  No enormities against any people in history-- not Jews, nor Native Americans, not even Black Africans-- outweigh the sins against Black Americans, and Lee is entirely mendacious when he pretends otherwise. Lee neither wants nor thinks feasible any rapprochement between the races such as MLK imagined. He stokes resentment to no end except encouraging black rage and white guilt, which combination he must think will work to the benefit of Black People. For him, the rise of Trump can only signify that the White Devils have not yet been made guilty enough. Lee would never consider the possibility that Trump might be the result of a little too much white guilt.

Though a minor film, BK is at least coherent in its single-minded ideology, which puts it miles ahead of the odious THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI. But in terms of dramatic development, it's not even as good as Costa-Gavras's film on a similar theme, the 1988 BETRAYED.