Category Archives: Original Nonfiction

Kingdoms and Bridges: Online Communication, Activism, and the Price of Conscience

NOTE: I wrote this two or three years ago, sent it off to a handful of places with no success, and then forgot about it. I post it here as a freebie to revisit a time not so long ago when I still felt hopeful we could talk to each other.

When I was in fourth grade, my family moved from small-town Arkansas to an even tinier Mississippi hamlet with limited educational opportunities: an all-white, K-12 private “academy” and a public school with a mostly African-American student body. In Arkansas, itself no bastion of racial equality, I attended integrated public schools. In Mississippi, my parents, not wishing me to be both the new kid and the different one, enrolled me in the private academy. When my peers referred to the “the nigger school,” even during class, it shocked me. Introverted and confused, I had no idea how to navigate a school full of strangers except to do what they did and talk like they talked. So, even though I had begun to question the logic and morality of racism, I, too, used racist language, to my everlasting shame.

My best friend’s name was not Joe, but that’s what I’ll call him. On my first day in that academy, I stood alone. Since most of the kids came from lower-middle-class or impoverished backgrounds and everyone was white, there were few cliques, but these kids knew each other and had formed patterns of behavior of which I was not a part. As they scampered off for their usual recess activities, they did not think to ask me along, and as an introvert, I did not assert myself. Instead, I just walked around, daydreaming and kicking rocks in the gravel driveway. Spotting me, Joe approached and introduced himself. We talked. He suggested that we hang out after school. In short, he performed an act of kindness and empathy: he noticed me and reached out. Soon, he became my best friend. Though we lost touch after I moved away, we found each other through social media in the mid-2000s. We still loved each other like brothers. We could talk about anything.

Politically, I’m a leftist. Joe leans to the right. He provided a dissenting but reasonable voice to some of my farther-left positions, and I suggested new ways for him to interpret situations. Sometimes, we even changed each other’s minds.

In my remembrance, our relationship’s degeneration began with debates over guns. Given the incredible statistics about gun violence, weapons’ ubiquity, and many other factors, I have long believed that this country needs to revise its stance on firearms and its unsophisticated readings of the Second Amendment. I have never claimed that new gun laws alone would solve gun violence. In fact, I have always argued for a multifaceted solution that includes regulation, new law-enforcement methods, destigmatization of and accessible treatments for mental illness, a reassessment of violence as a solution to our problems, and more. In short, I have rejected the idea that we can do nothing about our gun problem, but I have also rejected overly simplistic solutions.

On social media, though, far too many people insist we do nothing. “We cannot limit our access to weapons because of the Second Amendment,” they say, ignoring how we have already limited our access in common-sense ways. You can’t just run down to Wal-Mart and buy weapons-grade plutonium or a surface-to-air missile or a LAW rocket. “Laws won’t completely stop gun violence, so we shouldn’t have any laws,” people say, ignoring logic. As others have pointed out, why have any laws if that’s true? Why have traffic laws when people run red lights and speed and pass against the yellow line anyway? It only stops good guys with cars from getting to work on time. Why outlaw heroin and cocaine when people get high anyway? It only stops good guys from getting high responsibly. Why make murder illegal? It just keeps the good guys from killing bad guys. And so on. Of course, no one wants a meth lab next door or a lunatic driving one hundred miles an hour through their residential neighborhood, but some people believe that guns exist in a sociopolitical and moral vacuum in which normal logic does not apply.

I had these conversations a thousand times on social media—the same people making the same points and counterpoints over and over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. If I suggested that maybe, just maybe, in the wake of Mass Shooting #3,824, we should finally try something, the exact same conversations ensued, often with the exact same people. I would also have to hear the same evidence, often quoted out of context. Chicago is still violent! (As if its violence or lack thereof is directly attributable only to its gun laws.) “Good guys with guns can prevent violence. I know because I heard about somebody who managed to do it.” (No one has yet explained how anecdotal evidence is applicable to the entire nation and all the possible conditions under which violence might occur, to say nothing of the questions raised by the whole “good guys with guns” concept. Who decides what constitutes a good guy or a bad guy? Is it always obvious? If two good guys with guns arrive to stop a mass shooter, how do they recognize each other—a secret password? A handshake? If a good guy with a gun shoots at a bad guy and hits a bystander or another good guy, does that now make the good guy a bad guy? And on and on.) Once you’ve covered all this dozens of times with people who never listen, trying to respect their positions and their rights when they don’t respect yours, you become weary. And so I instituted a new rule for my own social media feeds: I would no longer have these conversations. I would no longer debate whether we have a gun violence problem or talk about these same points. I would only discuss and debate methods to fix the problem. People could still have those same conversations on their own Facebook walls or Twitter accounts if they wished, but I would not participate, and I would delete the posts of anyone who tried to hijack our discussion of solutions.

At first, Joe resisted this idea. He once told me that if I only wanted to talk with progressives who agreed with me, I should not make my posts public, as if making them public meant that I owed the whole world those same useless conversations. I don’t. I was not and am not interested in living in an echo chamber, but I can no longer waste time with repetition while people are dying. Eventually, Joe respected my decision, but that conflict cracked the foundation of our lifelong friendship, even though I never advocated a solution that would affect him or his gun ownership in any substantive way.

As the years passed and Joe drifted further to the political right, we disagreed on more topics, but again, our conversations were mostly productive. Joe refused to acknowledge his privilege as a straight white Christian able-bodied male who lived above the poverty line, but overall, he listened to me, and I listened to him.

With time, though, nearly every interaction turned into a political argument. In the wake of the Orlando nightclub shootings, I shared a Facebook meme in which the writer argued that politicians, especially conservatives, should stop sending us their thoughts and prayers and actually do something. This meme pointed out that LGBTQ people suffer harassment, abuse, marginalization, torture, and worse every day. And it’s true. Anti-LGBTQ legislation contributes to an atmosphere in which treating non-hetero, gender-nonconforming people as subhuman becomes acceptable. So-called Christian politicians attack LGBTQ people as abominations, quoting the usual out-of-context and/or ahistorical Bible verses, which makes it a little more okay for bigots to reject and attack difference. The Orlando massacre highlighted all this. Florida’s own governor said that all we can do is pray. Well, no, we could actually try to fix these problems. We could do something, try anything and see how it worked, rather than shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Huh. Who could have seen that coming?”

When I shared the meme, Joe jumped on me with both feet, arguing that only a victim or a victim’s friends and family had any right to reject politicians’ lip-service “solutions.” I don’t pretend to understand Joe’s reasoning, but I pointed out that anyone can speak out against injustice, hatred, and inaction. I argued that the writer was correct in saying that individual hate crimes happen every day in America and that much of our rhetoric and politics actually encourage such events. For the meme’s author—for me, and millions of others—the Orlando tragedy was not an abstract, distant event. it was one more link in a long historical chain. It was not a matter of politics or culture wars. It was a matter of survival. In terms of our personal relationship, Joe and I could find little common ground in our positions.

Arguments about race finally fractured our friendship. Heated debates happened every time a white police officer killed an unarmed black person or people of color protested racist actions. To be fair, Joe clarified that he does not hate people of color and finds obvious acts of racism as repugnant as everyone else. When Eric Garner died on a New York City sidewalk, rasping “I can’t breathe” while caught in a white officer’s chokehold, Joe condemned the officer’s actions.

Whenever events seemed more ambiguous, though, or conflicting evidence surfaced, Joe tended to side with white people. He insisted that Mike Brown was guilty and Darren Wilson innocent. While this conclusion is hardly uncommon, Joe’s vehement rejection of racism’s possible role in Brown’s death and Wilson’s fear bothered me—as did Joe’s refusal to acknowledge our own privilege in debating racism as a theoretical possibility instead of a concrete, everyday reality. Given the history of Ferguson, Missouri, and America in general; the institutional racism and ethnocentrism that European settlers brought to North America and perpetuated through chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynch culture, and a thousand other manifestations; and the fact that Darren Wilson represented a traditionally white supremacist authority during a time of increasing police militarization, it seems all but certain that race played some role in Brown’s death, even if Darren Wilson himself never had a conscious racist thought in his life. Institutional racism tends to ingrain in white people a fear of color, particularly blackness. Too many people respond to fear with violence, and if those people are white, our system tends to exonerate them, as it did Wilson. At the time, I argued that racism is so deeply entrenched in the American psyche that it almost certainly contributed to the conflict between Mike Brown and the police and to Brown’s death at their hands.

This is a complex position that asks us to shine a harsh, introspective light on our nation and its myths. It requires us to remember that people seldom, if ever, make decisions in moral/ethical/sociohistorical vacuums. It reminds us that we must treat the disease, not just the symptoms. This is not to say that the position is perfect or always true, but its premise of complexity encourages deeper thought and intricate, tough solutions.

In this instance, though, Joe was more comfortable painting Mike Brown as a questionable character who should have complied with authority. I found this position too simple.

Then there was the response from Ferguson’s enraged citizenry. So much of the country condemned their actions as mindless rioting perpetrated by thugs. To me, it seems much more likely that the post-trial violence represented an emotional breaking point for marginalized and persecuted people. I do not condone violence as a solution, but I can understand the appeal of violence as a response to generations of oppression and anger and frustration and fear. In the wake of Ferguson, I found myself in several arguments wherein some people wanted to dismiss the town’s citizens’ concerns and their life experiences. Some even demanded that we never criticize the police and always comply with them, no matter what. A truly puzzling aspect to these arguments: the people making them also often insisted that we need an unlimited arsenal of automatic weapons to resist the tyranny of the very government that the police represent. But recognizing this contradiction would require introspection. Thus, many people on social media defaulted to arguments about nonwhite bogeymen from whom we (whoever “we” are) must defend ourselves and our property.

For Joe, Black Lives Matter particularly struck a nerve. He believed that Black Lives Matter is responsible for an atmosphere of hatred that led to events like the murder of Dallas police officers. This conclusion seems akin to blaming the French Resistance for World War II. Several times, I pointed out that Black Lives Matter is not about hating white people or trying to hurt/abuse/oppress white folks. It is about calling attention to violence against black people and peacefully trying to stop it. I pointed out that BLM has disseminated a manifesto, which does not call for violence or Othering white people. I pointed out that, in Dallas, the police and the peaceful protestors coexisted well, even posed for pictures together, before one very troubled person murdered people from ambush. I pointed out that Black Lives Matter spokespeople condemned these killings. I pointed out that the killer had perverted the aims and methods of BLM.

Whenever I posted about issues like this, Joe argued every point, never considering any possibility other than the ones he had already accepted as fact. He conflated a group responding to hatred with groups that act hatefully. My wife and friends privately expressed concern and wondered why I endured an alleged troll. I answered that we were like brothers, that I loved Joe, that I was willing to listen even when I disagreed, that I need people like him in my life to make me question my own beliefs and assumptions. It is also worth repeating that he is, in his own way, forward-thinking on many issues. He is not some back-to-1800 knuckle-dragger.

None of that made it any easier for other people who love me to tolerate his barrage of aggressive rhetoric, though.

Once, I shared an article about a burglary victim in Oklahoma who hung from a tree on his property several nooses and a sign suggesting that would-be thieves should not linger after dark. The sight of this display upset many locals. According to the article, the man removed the sign after he realized that people found it racist.

I commented that this situation demonstrated one more reason why we have to keep fighting racism and privilege rather than shutting down conversations about them, the latter strategy being one that Joe had advocated in a previous exchange. Joe made the first comment on the thread, simply asking how this situation related to racism. I responded that nooses hanging from trees evoked the long and brutal history of lynching, not frontier justice, which no longer exists and always seemed problematic anyway. Such an evocation causes real pain for people whose family members suffered such a horrible fate. Moreover, the sign echoed the history of “sundown towns,” in which nonwhite peoples were warned not to be caught inside the city limits after dark. These evocations and the resulting pain and anguish further diminish the ability of nonwhite people to live full, happy lives. I also suggested that the Oklahoman’s ignorance of all this history might have sprung directly from shutting down conversations about race, meaning that he was, in his own way, a victim.

A few nitwits ignored the complexities of this position and posted racist responses. I refuted their arguments and then banned them from my page, since I didn’t know them or how they found my wall in the first place. I am uninterested in debating entrenched bigots, especially ones I don’t know. Joe posted several times, mostly about how nooses don’t signify lynching to him (an idea I attributed to his white privilege) and how Black Lives Matter was guilty of far worse offenses. At this point, some of my other friends got involved. One investigated Joe’s wall, found some anti-BLM posts, and called Joe a racist. Others groaned at his not-uncommon belief that progressive open-mindedness means we have to respect to every idea, no matter how dangerous or offensive. My wife even responded, which she had resisted for a long time, mostly to point out Joe’s use of unintentionally belittling language when speaking to one of my female friends.

When Joe replied, my wife told him not to mention her name again. Rightly or wrongly, she was fed up. Joe responded aggressively.

After that, we fed off of each other’s anger. We were both at fault. I said things I shouldn’t have said. Unable to understand his own role in my wife’s attitude and seemingly shocked that I would defend her, Joe unfriended me.

We have since reconciled to a certain extent. We are no longer friends on social media, but we have exchanged private messages that re-established our affection. I still love him like a brother, and when my wife experienced a serious health problem, he reached out with well-wishes and prayers. He is a good man, no more flawed than most of us.

Still, our conflict made me think about the costs of activism.

When I speak out online, I risk the wrath of trolls who will dog my every word with illogical, offensive, angry diatribes. I also risk being misunderstood. If I do not communicate an exact, unambiguous meaning and cover every possible counter-thought in a single Tweet, I can expect a deluge of missives from the human equivalent of rabid wolves. They snarl and bark and bite, driven by motives at which we can only guess.

When I participate in rallies or marches or protests or Pride Parades, I risk violence—verbal abuse, terroristic threats, Photoshopped pictures that ridicule or mislead, thrown objects, fisticuffs, knives and bullets and bombs.

When I advocate for causes and beliefs that do not match those of my family and friends, I risk censure, angry lectures, calls for me to fall in line. Several people have disappeared from my life because they disagreed with me, even if my advocacy and my causes/beliefs do not directly connect to them.

Yet when I do nothing, I risk losing my self-respect. When I abandon those in need, I do not just ignore their problems; I contribute. When I remain silent, I consent to the status quo and disconnect myself from the world spirit that should unite us all.

I am no saint. I do not hold the moral high ground over anyone but the worst of humanity. I do not consider my positions to be correct because they are mine. Rather, I adopt the positions that seem right, independent of my first reactions, and I am willing to alter my positions based on new evidence. I try to champion causes that will make America what it has always claimed to be and never yet has been—a land of true equality and love and peace, the city on a hill. In serving my conscience and my ethics, I can live with the verbal abuse and the threats of violence. I can give as good as I get, and I deal with trolls and social terrorists in much the same way I deal with political and religious ones. I say that you can harass me and even kill me, but you cannot make me afraid. You cannot stop me from trying to live a life of truth and integrity.

I wonder, though, how America has come to this point, where we have to choose between our beliefs and the people with whom we have shared our lives. When did our default mode of discourse become antagonistic and spiteful? When did our lives become an Internet article’s comments section? We lament similar attitudes and actions in our politicians, yet we build ever-higher walls around ourselves every day.

The idea that social media may isolate us as much as connect us is not new, nor is the conception that these media can be used as tools for bullying, domination, unprecedented hostility. What seems newer, in method and severity, is how social media and their instant call-and-response discourse can kill long-time, otherwise solid relationships. All of us, including me, can and should do better. If we cannot communicate civilly with our loved ones, how much chance do we have of reaching strangers? We have to find a way to share our differences, listen to each other, learn, and act without surrendering to the vagaries of our worst selves. Our choices should not be limited to silent and oppressive consent or isolation. Otherwise, social media, the connections they make possible, and even activism itself are threatened as we shout at each other across the borders of what David Foster Wallace once called “our tiny, skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.”

One answer, I believe, is empathy—the simple ability to see a situation from another’s perspective, to understand how they feel, to realize that we don’t know the specific circumstances of their lives and have not experienced their pain, to get out of our own heads and see the world in fresh ways. Through blind certainty and obstinacy, we break our connections and shrink the world. Through empathy, we build bridges to new possibilities.

The world needs fewer kingdoms and more bridges. We can build the latter one word at a time.

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No More Retcons and Reboots: Rules for a Good Comics Universe

From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, I was as avid a comic-book reader as you could find. In grade school, I begged my parents and grandparents to buy me comics every time we went to any store that carried them. I was mostly a Marvel fan, though I followed the biggest names in the DC pantheon—the Justice League, Flash, Batman, Green Lantern, and to a lesser extent, Superman and Wonder Woman. In those days, I lacked the funds or the influence to purchase every issue of every title, but I tried my best. Once I was old enough to earn an allowance, I spent most of it on comics. As a teenager, I would take the money I got weekly—some earned, some provided by my doting grandmother—and buy my comics first, worrying about concerns like how much I could spend on dates later. Somehow, this did not impede my social life. I guess I was lucky.

From my late teens to mid-20s, I bought dozens of titles a month—nearly everything Marvel produced, the Batman and Justice League family of titles, the various Green Lantern-related books, the one-shots and annuals and crossover specials and multiple-cover cash-grabs, the mature titles from DC like Sandman, Hellblazer, Shade the Changing Man, and more. I hoped that writing comics would one day be part of my professional life.

But then, something changed.

First came the crossovers—at first occasional multiple-title events that felt special and universe-shaking, then like annual and cynical attempts to boost company-wide sales, storytelling be damned. Then came the cover variants. Again, this aspect of comics publishing started out as a cool way to grab a very special issue and quickly devolved into a rush to snag every variant of 3-D foil-stamped die-cut foldout art you could imagine. Then it seemed that every popular character had to have at least three titles dedicated to their monthly adventures. Then both major companies started killing off or replacing their major characters—the death of Superman! Batman broken by Bane! Captain America disenfranchised! Thor banished! And on and on. Then came the constant parade of deaths and resurrections, many of which were trumpeted on the comic’s (variant, unusually expensive) cover—“This issue—someone DIES!!!!!!” Of course, later resurrections completely undermined the impacts of the deaths, rendering the whole exercise as the storytelling equivalent of running laps in gym class—tiring, repetitive, even boring.

For me, the final straw came when Marvel replaced Peter Parker with Ben Reilly. See, way back when, a mad professor cloned Peter Parker, and a big to-do ensued. Allegedly, the clone died, and Spider-Man disposed of the body in a smokestack, but not before wondering if he was, in fact, the real deal, or if he might be the clone who only believed he was the real deal. The storyline was a very effective head-scratcher. The mid-90s storyline, though, posited that the “dead” clone was very much alive and not the clone at all. The Spider-Man we had been reading about for twenty years was now supposed to be the clone, and, understandably freaking out, he stepped back from the superhero world. In effect, Marvel was telling us that the past twenty years had been a lie, that we had invested in the wrong character.

I quit. I resigned. I walked away. Oh, I stuck with the Vertigo titles for as long as I could, especially Sandman, but I had come to realize that, in the world of superhero comics, nothing mattered. There were never any stakes. What one writer created, another scribe erased in twenty years, or even just a few months. No one ever died; they just took vacations of varying lengths. No story was ever canon; nothing was sacred. Bucky? Still alive. Norman Osbourne? Still alive. If a story touched you, you had best forget it, because the companies sure would.

Now we’re in the era of constant universe-wide resets. In my comics-buying life, we experienced exactly one universe reset—Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story whose purpose was to simplify what had become, over fifty years or so, a labyrinthine continuity of parallel universes and character histories and retcons that often made little sense. Okay, fine, fair enough—a reset after fifty years, one that did not ignore or erase past continuity but streamlined and simplified it, seemed understandable, even effective. Since then, though, the Big Two companies have continued their interminable retcons, meaningless deaths, resurrections, and resets, reducing the shelf life of any universe by as much as four-fifths.

Why do I want to read stories today that will be meaningless tomorrow? Why do I want to read about characters who might be replaced, killed for a few months, resurrected, killed again, changed beyond recognition only to be changed back again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum?

Still, the major comics companies control a ton of characters that meant a lot to me. I have therefore been thinking of how I would run a comics universe, partially because I would like to start my own (if only I knew artists!) and partially because I hope someone at these companies will somehow stumble across these ideas and think about them in the future.

  • Characters’ creators should always get paid when their creations are used. If I create or co-create a character, I should get a set royalty rate for every issue with which I am directly involved. If I turn the character over to other writers/artists, I should still get a residual for use of my character. When or if my character and/or storyline is adapted for film or television or the stage or a novel, I should get paid for that, too. If I am not the creator of the character but my storyline is used in some adaptation, I should get paid. The same goes for reprints, video game rights, and so forth. Exactly what those rates should be and how/when they are distributed is debatable and negotiable, but no creator should have to sit by and watch while other people get rich off of his/her creation.
  • Second, the company should commit to its titles and its creators. Few reading/viewing experiences are more frustrating than when you get invested in a character and story, only to have the comic or show cancelled before the writers can bring the storyline to a conclusion. Writers would be required to map out story arcs for a certain number of issues, which seems to be industry practice anyway. Then, even if sales tanked, the company would keep publishing the series until those arcs were completed. If sales look promising in the midst of a storyline, the company can then offer the creative team additional issues. In no case would the fans get shafted by having a title cancelled without any resolution—unless the lack of resolution was an intentional decision by the creative team.
  • Third, we come to the first of several storytelling rules—when a character dies, he or she stays dead, period. Deaths should have consequences. They should not be written into stories haphazardly or with impunity. Apparent deaths don’t count. If a character is supposedly in a burning building when it blows up, or if he/she falls from a high place and we assume he/she is dead, writers can bring them back. Those sorts of things can be explained away. If we see the body, though, and it is positively identified as the character, then he or she should be gone for good, barring a) some story element that we already know about (a second character who can control others’ perception, for instance—making up this character after the fact feels like a cheat and so is disallowed), or b) a supernatural event of world-shaking proportions. Speaking of which….
  • Supernatural events of literal world-shaking proportions should be used sparingly. Think of Anton Arcane’s resurrection in Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing and the titular creature’s subsequent visits to Heaven and Hell, or Lucifer’s abandonment of Hell in Sandman’s “Season of Mists” storyline. These were major events with worldwide consequences. They did not occur in every third issue, which would have diluted their impact. Should a potential apocalypse occur every week? You can get used to anything. This rule also applies to full-scale alien invasions and/or dimensional rifts (though not from lower-key visitations), natural disasters that affect more than a small region, wholesale destruction of major cities, global pandemics or famines, and the like. It always bothered me when Marvel or DC characters could pop in and out of the Afterlife as if it were a convenience store just down the street. Smaller-scale events involving any of these story elements are fine, as long as they do not violate the dead-is-dead rule.
  • Also related to dead-is-dead—clones should never be used. Ever. They have become go-to crutches for writers who want to explain a character’s resurrection from verified death. Sometimes they are even used to explain why someone acted out of character, which seems like a way to excuse bad writing. So no clones, period. Also, no using any other form of the clone device—perfect robot replicas of a character, Life Model Decoys, and so forth. Clones have been so overused in comics that they usually just muddy the continuity to little good storytelling effect. Again, we want our stories to have consequences and for those consequences to last beyond the storyline in question.
  • Creative teams should avoid time travel stories. See above re: muddy continuity. With a few exceptions, such as X-Men’s fantastic “Days of Future Past” storyline, most time travel stories only serve to confuse us. They often ignore the potential effects of time travel on the timeline itself or serve as yet another crutch to undo some other writer’s work. Any writer who wants to introduce time travel should have to work with editors to determine that the story makes sense, that it is not gratuitous, that it makes good sense from a scientific perspective.
  • There should be no minor villains. Again, there are exceptions. If you’re writing a superhero story and the point is to have your protagonist quickly dispatch his or her opposition so that you can, say, tell the story of a bystander, then it’s fine to create a one-shot minor antagonist or one whose bumbling will occasionally serve as comic relief. Otherwise, don’t waste the reader’s time with throwaway tales of easily dispatched, dull, silly villains. It’s pretty tough, for instance, to take Marvel’s Stilt-Man or DC’s Crazy Quilt seriously.
  • On a related note, major antagonists should be used thoughtfully. The best use of such a character would be in a multi-issue storyline that establishes clear motivations for their actions and the seriousness of their threat. Many of Batman’s major villains are insane and obsessed; otherwise, it would be hard to understand why, say, Two-Face keeps pulling jobs in Gotham after Batman has kicked his ass two hundred times. Each subsequent use of an antagonist should build on the character’s previous appearances. If we reach a tipping point where it no longer makes sense for the antagonist to operate in a given location or fight a certain foe, we need to change something about the character or retire them for good.
  • Characters, including the supporting variety, will not be kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, or killed gratuitously. If it is necessary to drive the story, that’s one thing, but we will avoid the “Robin the Boy Hostage” and the “Love Interest Found Dismembered in a Refrigerator” syndromes. Overuse of such certain storytelling devices—for instance, horrible abuse heaped on a straight male character’s wife or girlfriend by bad guy after bad guy after bad guy—begins to look like misogyny in disguise.
  • We should not replace our main characters with other versions of same unless the original version is absolutely, positively never coming back. If I ran DC, Bruce Wayne would always be Batman unless we are willing to deal with the consequences of losing Bruce Wayne forever. If I ran Marvel, Peter Parker would always be Spider-Man. There are exceptions; Marvel’s “replacement Captain America” storyline back in the 80s actually made sense, as it was a way to explore the nature of the character and his relationship with/responsibility to the government. But unless a writer could convince me that there is a legitimate dramatic reason for doing so, we would not rotate people in and out of the same costume just to shake things up. That’s lazy.
  • We should avoid thinly disguised marketing gimmicks, whether we’re talking about a company-wide crossover in which creators are forced to stop their own stories and crank out a tie-in to the macro story or the old multiple-cover scam. Every single thing we do should serve the narrative and the reader’s emotional investment in our dramatic situations and characters. If we have a company-wide crossover, we should have a good narrative reason, and we should use them sparingly.
  • We will not constantly cancel and bring back titles. If a title gets cancelled, it stays cancelled for at least five years. We will not constantly start our numbering system over in what amounts to another thinly disguised attempt to woo collectors.
  • And finally, much like with DC back in the day, we are allowed one universe reboot every fifty years if it is absolutely necessary for storytelling reasons. We will not render years of fan investment moot because we wrote ourselves into a corner after just a few years. Our job is not to write ourselves into a corner in the first place. The fifty-year rule allows for the fact that having multiple titles of varying genres in one universe, all written by ever-changing creative teams, might eventually muddle continuity to the extent that streamlining is necessary. If we’re having to do that every few years, though, we’re just lazy and careless. Our job is to tell good serialized stories that make sense and fit together. If we can’t do that, we shouldn’t be writing comics in the first place.

Serial stories in comics are supposed to invite readers into a longstanding community with its own history and its own internal logic. These are some of the ways I would maintain that history and logic without alienating the readers who have invested in the stories we have already told. I quit reading comics in the mid-90s because I felt my trust had been betrayed, my intelligence insulted. I would not want my own readers to experience that. Neither should Marvel or DC. Audience is an artist’s lifeblood. Let’s not cut our own throats.

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Mother of Exiles

**NOTE** I wrote this approximately one year ago. I sent it out to two or three of the usual MSM outlets, where it was summarily ignored, and then moved on to other writings. I figured it would just go in my metaphorical trunk, where half-finished and unpublished manuscripts sleep in silence. In the wake of today’s Supreme Court ruling upholding one of Trump’s travel bans, though, I thought I’d post it here, in its original form (I’m not even sure the original links work). Perhaps there is relevance here; perhaps not. Make of it what you will.

***

As the Predator-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump, took the oath of office, whitehouse.gov pages for climate change, LGBTQ issues, healthcare, and civil rights vanished, as did Spanish-language content. In the coming weeks and months, Americans of conscience will resist any attempt to roll back or eliminate laws and rights that protect all people, not just the members of the white rich nativist conservative (allegedly) Christian ableist heteropatriarchy. Others will uncritically accept the Predator’s vision.

Recently, one of my old friends, caught in the grip of a patriotism that seemed closer to jingoism or nationalism, conflated my anti-Trump stance with anti-Americanism. This is, of course, an old argument, and a highly problematic one, as measured, thoughtful, researched criticism of one’s nation is much more patriotic than blind devotion. I refused to recount all my reasons and evidence for resisting the Predator’s positions and values—reasons and evidence that I have stated and defended for the better part of two years—but I did summarize a few of the positions that I find unconscionable, including his characterizations of the Mexican people.

“He didn’t call all Mexicans rapists and murderers,” said my friend. “Show me where he did that.”

“Look at his speeches,” I said, “and do your own research, from multiple sources.”

It’s true that Trump did not characterize every Mexican immigrant as a rapist or murderer. But it’s also true that he purposefully, strategically downplayed their humanity. His racist and distorted attacks on Mexicans, and Hispanic people in general, outweigh his disingenuous praise. Parsing all of these comments would take more time and space than I have available here, but an examination of the Predator’s inflammatory comment about rapists and murderers might be useful, especially when juxtaposed with self-serving, thinly veiled advertisements for his own products.

Back in June of 2015, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Like George W. Bush before him, the Predator-in-Chief lacks linguistic sophistication. His use of “bigly” still staggers me. In the above quote, “they’re” is confusing. At first, “they” refers to Mexico, a place—an “it,” or, if you accept traditional gender assignations of objects and places, a “she.” Later, though, “they” refers to immigrants. Sometimes, he uses both in the same sentence; they send people with problems, and they bring those problems to us. Trump seems to conflate the entire country of Mexico with “people that have lots of problems,” and those same people are next characterized as drug-runners and/or mules, criminals, and rapists. He uses Othering language, establishing a victimized us and an evil, corrupt them.

To some people, that might seem like splitting a grammatical hair, so let’s look at his presentation of these ideas.

The quote begins with the idea that Mexico “sends” people across the border, as if the land has a mind of its own and wants to stick it to Americans. This anthropomorphic characterization of a geographical locale seems nonsensical unless Trump is speaking of the Mexican government, which would suggest a series of offices where mustache-twirling bureaucrats interview citizens and assign “bad hombres” to cross the border en masse. Nothing is impossible, I suppose, but one would think such an organized and wide-ranging assault on American stability from a border country might attract the intelligence community’s attention.

Next, look at how Trump organizes his ideas—the generalized “people that have lots of problems,” followed by a general list of what those problems allegedly are, drugs and rape and the much vaguer “crime,” which could mean anything. He states all of this as if it were fact, and he provides no specific support for his assertions. Like so many things he says, he wants us to believe these statements are true because he made them. Only after he spends five sentences denouncing immigrants from Mexico does he tack on the qualification, which is notable not only for its lack of development but for his admitting that their goodness is hypothetical. Trump seems to be saying, “Factually, immigrant criminals rape and run drugs, but because I am so magnanimous, I am willing to assume that some of them don’t.” Gosh, isn’t he nice?

In short, Trump did not say that all Mexicans are rapists or criminals, but he emphasized criminal traits when describing them, a rhetorical strategy meant to make his audience fear immigrants and support whatever Fascist strategy might keep them out or deport them. Even his “I love Hispanics” taco-bowl tweet, so ridiculous and self-aggrandizing, reduces an entire culture to servers of food for rich white men.

To combat this influx of marauding chefs, Trump continues to insist on a border wall. What does he plan to do about the existing barriers or the enormous stretches of land along the Rio Grande—drain the river? Which Goldman Sachs executive will get that job?

Trump wants to make Mexico pay for this wall, but he can’t even manage to pay his own contractors. To be fair, he has said that he would be fine with having a big door in that wall for legal immigration, but then why not just embrace President Obama’s call for an easier path to citizenship? How does Trump factor in the ever-expanding Border Patrol, and why doesn’t he mention that illegal border crossings have already been declining for years? (See the “Unauthorized Immigrants” section here.) Why doesn’t he say much more about the good, desperate people who come to America, which still casts itself as the Biblical/Winthropian “city on a hill,” seeking a better life? Has the light of the world burned out?

Why hasn’t he spent much time discussing unauthorized immigration from other countries, across other borders, including victims of sex trafficking? Why the focus on Mexico, Hispanics, “bad hombres”?

Something is going on here beyond a concern for national security or economics—perhaps blatant racism or a cynical appeal to his base’s xenophobia.

In any case, as of this writing, whitehouse.gov’s new, and rather spare, “Issues” page lists nothing about immigration reform. Instead, the Predator-in-Chief has given us something called (rather problematically, from a grammar perspective) an “America First Foreign Policy.” It’s a blustery statement, vaguely threatening to nations that have the temerity to put their own concerns above America’s. You can read Trump’s pre-election positions on immigration here. As for details about the wall, or immigrants who have lived in America most of their lives without citizenship, well, it’s all anybody’s guess. We can, however, glean more about his conscience, or lack thereof, from his recent executive order banning immigrants, especially Muslims, from certain African and Middle Eastern countries. Trump’s abandonment of those in dire need, such as Syrian refugees, and his anti-Hispanic, nationalist, exceptionalist rhetoric echoes Nazi Germany’s demonization of Jews and the contemporaneous call for a national identity predicated, to a great extent, on destroying this Demonic Other.

Near the Statue of Liberty, a plaque bears Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, “The New Colossus.” This sonnet names America the “Mother of Exiles.” Though this romanticized view of the country glosses over our blood-soaked bedrock of Native American genocide and displacement, we cannot ignore that, even before its Declaration of Independence, America as a nation has always consisted of immigrants and their descendants. Yet the Predator-in-Chief rejects our national valuation of embracing those in need. He uses language and imagery that dehumanize the desperate and the destitute. He wants to turn off the lamp and shut the golden door.

We all need to ask ourselves if we can live with that.

Suicide Squad and the Dangers of Critical Consensus

If the critics are to be believed, David Ayer’s 2016 film Suicide Squad represents one of cinema’s greatest failures in terms of artistic vision and commercial appeal. Its record-breaking opening and its 6.2-out-of-ten rating on IMDB (as of 19 September 2017) notwithstanding, moviegoers’ discourse about the film often mimics the film’s critical reception—a 40 out of 100 on Metacritic and a rather stunning 25% on Rotten Tomatoes. On the latter site’s sampling of critical quotes, we find gems such as the following:

  • “To say that the movie loses the plot would not be strictly accurate, for that would imply that there was a plot to lose.”—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
  • “This is what happens when the comic book fanboys have taken over the asylum. It is damaged goods from the get-go, the kind of film grown in a petri dish in Hollywood.”— Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
  • “Sometimes it’s good to be bad. In Suicide Squad‘s case, bad is just plain bad. It gives villainy a bad name.”— Adam Graham, Detroit News
  • Suicide Squad had the potential to be an awesome superhero summer blockbuster, but feels more like a rushed unification of underwhelming action, a disappointing story, and stale character development.”—Chris Sawin, com
  • “Taken from a popular DC comic series… helmed by a star quality director… peppered with a highly skilled, all-star cast … What could go wrong? Nearly everything.”—Leonard Maltin, Leonard Maltin’s Picks (All quotes taken from “Suicide Squad (2016), com)

To be sure, some of this criticism is warranted. When graded on the scale of truly great films to truly awful ones—say, Citizen Kane to The Room, or Casablanca to The Castle of Fu Manchu—Ayer’s movie falls squarely in the mediocre range. If we grade it on a sliding scale in which summer popcorn entertainment gets more of a pass for “not pretending to be any more than what it is,” the film scores a bit higher. Entertainment Weekly’s grade of B- (well above average, far from perfect) seems fairer than, say, Maltin’s claim that nearly everything goes wrong. Many things in the film go right, especially for its comics-fan target audience. Having read John Ostrander’s run on the comics title in the late 80s and early 90s, I felt more excited for this movie than I did for any other summer movie this year, even the superior Captain America: Civil War and the Ghostbusters reboot. This pre-fab investment in the film biases me; I probably came more prepared to like the movie more than the general audience or younger comics fans who have had less time to pine for an adaptation. It should therefore come as no surprise that I enjoyed Suicide Squad.

That does not mean that I am blind to its flaws, of which there are many. Nor am I taking issue with thoughtful critics who provide strong reasoning and textual evidence in their negative reviews. Honest, robust, and passionate criticism is essential to art and entertainment.

I admit to wishing, though, that so much of published criticism didn’t seem petty and mean-spirited, as if some critics are looking for any excuse to excoriate an artist’s work in snappy soundbites aimed more at entertaining than in improving the substance of the art. I am, in fact, unsure of how such criticism, masturbatory and self-important as it seems, differs from the very audience-baiting, cash-grab cynicism that these same critics often bemoan. An article written by Eve Peyser for Gizmodo is titled, “Suicide Squad Sets Box Office Record Because We Don’t Deserve Better Movies.” The only criticism of the film in this short post consists of linking to a Deadspin article about the movie and a claim that Suicide Squad is a “deeply mediocre film” (Peyser par. 2) Fair enough, but I would have been much more interested in reading Ms. Peyser’s thoughtful critique of the movie, rather than a simple statement that she hated it and that others probably did, too. Her thesis, as noted in the title, seems to be that we are to blame for bad movies because we keep paying to see them. That is an idea worth exploring, though to do so, we need to establish a commonly accepted definition of “bad movie” and prove that Suicide Squad fits the definition. Such an essay would require more time and space than was devoted to Peyser’s short post, but it would have been a much more interesting and substantive addition to our discourse about the film, its quality or lack thereof, and what our gravitating to it says about us.

To be clear, I am not taking issue with Peyser’s post, which also doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is—a short opinion piece making a provocative statement in order to increase site traffic and generate discussion about a major pop culture moment. What distresses me about American discourse on art and popular culture is that whenever critics overwhelmingly love or hate a film and then phrase their admiration or displeasure in language that is less than measured or thoughtful, their opinions take on the power of fact through sheer force. In simpler terms, once enough critics have passionately declared that Suicide Squad is bad, their opinions become our discourse. We all talk about the film as if it is factually bad to the extent that many fans and writers feel no need to justify their opinion—this in spite of the actual facts that critical consensus often changes over time and that one person’s waste of talent and budget is another person’s fun, thought-provoking entertainment.

The Big Lebowski was a critical and box office bomb, but it has since become a beloved touchstone for its own subculture, and not in the ironic, we’re-in-on-the-joke way that Plan 9 from Outer Space or The Room has become a cult favorite. Citizen Kane, often called the greatest film ever made, received mixed critical reviews upon its release. Conversely, Oscar winners like The English Patient and Crash have lost both critical and popular momentum over time. Donnie Darko has become a cult classic, even though it did woeful box office and puzzled many critics. Often, it is only with time and consideration that we can recognize a formerly overlooked classic or a work we initially rated too highly.

This phenomenon is not limited to cinema. Moby-Dick was a failure it its day and is now considered one of the great American novels. The most popular poets of the American nineteenth century have given way to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. John Donne has gone in and out of style over the centuries. In spite of all this, we—both professional critics and audience members—often speak about a film as if its fate has been decided definitively, for all time. And for every thoughtful critic like a Leonard Maltin or Peter Travers or Lisa Schwarzbaum, there are a thousand trolls filling comments sections and Twitter feeds with recycled criticism and pure human ugliness instead of original thought.

For those who believe that Suicide Squad is flawed or just plain awful, all I ask is that you show your work. I ask the same of the film’s defenders. I ask that we wait until we experience a text for ourselves before we decide with whom we agree. And for the love of all that’s good and true, let us leave behind the flame wars and the name-calling and just talk to each other.

I’ll start. I’ve said that I enjoyed the movie as a biased comics fan, though I am not blind to its flaws. I loved the performances by Viola Davis, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Will Smith, and Jay Hernandez. Jai Courtney disappeared into his role of Captain Boomerang. I found the characterizations and development of Harley Quinn, El Diablo, and Deadshot to be intriguing and fun. The movie had the best soundtrack you could ask for, and many of the visual effects were strong. I appreciate Ayer’s decision to scrap King Shark for Killer Croc, a character who could be rendered by a living actor and makeup. And what we saw of Leto’s Joker whetted my appetite for more.

As for some flaws, here, in what I hope is conciliatory and thoughtful language, are some problems I had the picture. These points contain spoilers, so if you have not seen the film, beware.

  • Other than the aforementioned Harley, Diablo, and Deadshot, most of the major characters were underdeveloped. Much of this problem can likely be attributed to having so many major players in one film—eight or nine Squad members, plus Rick Flag’s SEAL team, plus Amanda Waller and her flunkies, plus various military personnel and prison guards, plus the Joker and his henchmen. That’s a bunch, folks. This leads to several other problems, noted below.
  • One major plot point we’re supposed to buy is that Rick Flag is in love with June Moone, a.k.a. the Enchantress, and his love for her is what keeps him under Waller’s thumb. However, we don’t see that love develop on screen, and the characters share so little screen time together that it’s tough to buy even after the fact. Ayer chooses to address this point by having Waller say, “We put the two of them together, and they fell in love just like we hoped, and now I own Flag.” The logic behind this plan makes no sense, and we are given nothing on which to base an investment in this relationship, even though many of the film’s attempts to connect with the audience’s emotions hinge on said investment.
  • Speaking of Waller, those unfamiliar with the comics will likely find her to be, as Deadshot describes her, a gangsta, but as for her methods and motivation, we don’t have a clue. We know she’s worried about the threat of metahumans—that the “next Superman” will be a villain—but we have no idea why she believes that only other villains can fight such a threat. Perhaps we’re supposed to infer that she believes only bad guys can be controlled, but if so, this film’s plot pretty much scraps that notion, since the antagonist comes straight from the team itself. In fact, as the credits’ Easter Egg shows, she already had files on heroes—files that she gives to Bruce Wayne. If she knew of trustworthy good guys, why depend so much on bad ones that you have to threaten and bribe? Why couldn’t she try to form the Justice League, other than the fact that such an act would ruin the plot of the upcoming film?
  • Killer Croc is given almost nothing to do until the end of the film and has no scenes that would require an actor of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s caliber. He is unrecognizable under the makeup. Croc’s lack of both development and necessity makes the waste of a good actor almost as awful as what the film does with Adam Beach. It’s fine to kill a character to establish that, yes, the neck bombs keeping the Squad in line are real, and Waller or Flag are willing to use them. But why bother with hiring such a strong actor to do so little?
  • Katana is criminally underdeveloped, which makes her big emotional scene fall flat. It’s hard to care about the fate of a character we have spent no time with and know very little about.
  • Why does Deadshot almost never wear his trademark helmet and glowing eyepiece—except that it would rob us seeing Will Smith’s face?
  • Much has been made of how the lead-up to the movie spent so much time on the Joker and Leto’s method-acting craziness, only to give us very little of what was shot. Even Leto has spoken out against how much of his performance ended up on the cutting room floor. I would not want to see the Joker overshadow the main storyline, but it seems unfair to both fans and Leto to give us so little footage, most of which is only marginally connected to the plot.
  • Speaking of the plot, there are holes. Waller and Flag talk about how fighting the Enchantress’s transformed lackeys is useless, but then the Squad fights them and takes them out handily. What was Waller and Flag’s conversation based on, and why were they so wrong, and how did they feel about it? Why did June Moone bring forth the Enchantress in that hotel room, which allowed the villain to escape? Why does it take the Enchantress days to build her machine, and how is destroying military hardware the same thing as destroying all humanity? How does an ancient witch know how to make an intricate machine, anyway? Why didn’t Waller just have her retrieve all the secret information from every country instead of just Iran’s, and what were the generals going to do with that information? Why wasn’t the Enchantress’s big bad brother released at the same time she was? Flag kills the Enchantress by crushing her heart; why didn’t Waller do that in the first place, especially after just poking holes in it didn’t work? Why does Killer Croc never seem to get rattled? Why does finding out that Flag hid letters from his daughter cause Deadshot to complete the mission instead of just, you know, shooting Flag in the head? And so forth and so on.
  • Sound editing—when the Enchantress is speaking English in the final scenes, I could barely understand a word she said. Since these are the climactic scenes, it seems kind of important.
  • Many critics have said that the movie becomes too conventional in the last two acts. I think part of what they mean is that these unrepentant, scum-of-the-Earth bad guys start acting like good guys and doing good-guy stuff. The Captain Boomerang of the comics would never have come back to the team after being given an out; Jai Courtney’s character does, with no real explanation except that he’s apparently been affected by team spirit, the sense of which is then undercut when we learn that he is serving three consecutive life sentences and is therefore unlikely to get any benefits from his work. (For that matter, his trick boomerangs are so underused here that the audience might be forgiven for thinking they are ordinary.) Deadshot, Diablo, Harley, and even Captain Boomerang seem to form genuine bonds and become invested in each other’s fates, just as good guys would, even though they constantly talk about how awful they are. Complications and complexities are fine, even necessary and desirable, but you probably shouldn’t talk constantly about how you’re a vicious killer without a conscience and then undercut that concept with your every act. It would have been better if the Squad had continued as an anti-team, one that worked together out of mutual selfishness instead of an increasing sense of duty to each other. In the absence of that, what separates them from the Justice League, other than their criminal pasts?
  • We are never really certain about the nature of the Enchantress’s henchmen—what they can do, why they look the way they do, what purpose they serve other than distraction.
  • Why does the Joker look like a pimp?

Again, if you’re a comics fan, you might overlook some of these flaws. You know about Waller’s motivation and personality, and so when the film doesn’t show us, you can fill in the blanks yourself. As a stand-alone movie, though, Suicide Squad should have done better than that, especially since so many of the characters and events have been altered.

Given all of that, I can understand why many critics and viewers found the film to be mediocre or worse. And if you overlook the film’s flaws because all you want from it is to turn off your brain and go along for the ride, well, fine. What we should not do is let an apparent critical consensus at one moment in time take on the characteristics of fact, so that we ignore why a film might be good or bad and simply yell at each other about how good/bad it is. We cannot let unsupported statements of opinion stand in for substantive criticism. To do so teaches us nothing about the text or ourselves; it only widens the divide between camps, until, like the Suicide Squad itself often does, we turn our slings and arrows inward and leave each other bloody and battered but not enlightened.

Works Cited

Peyser, Eve. “Suicide Squad Sets Box Office Record Because We Don’t Deserve Better Movies.” Gizmodo.com, Gizmodo Media Group, 7 August 2016. http://io9.gizmodo.com/suicide-squad-sets-box-office-record-because-we-dont-de-1784950994. Accessed 28 November 2016.

Suicide Squad (2016).” IMDB.com, IMDB, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1386697/. Accessed 28 November 2016.

Suicide Squad (2016).” RottenTomatoes.com, Fandango, 2016, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/suicide_squad_2016/. Accessed 28 November 2016.