First, I must apologize for the long hiatus that this column has taken. A few sudden brushfires in my day to day life called for an abrupt withdrawal from the web and I’m just now making my way back.
As a result, I’m a slight bit behind in my blogreading, but I am fortunate enough to have friends who email me particularly good pieces like this analysis of politics and race in a 1960s war comic from bitterandrew at Armagideon Time:
In a sane world, this facsimile of logic where “falling short of ultimate evil” somehow equals “good” would be greeted with universal shock, horror, and/or rage, but in this world, it is seen as a valid argument by a large segment of the populace.
Because people are fucking stupid, and as Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #56 (July 1968; by Gary Friedrich, Dick Ayers, and John Severin) shows, it’s a form of stupid that has been with us a while. “Gabriel, Blow Your Horn!” is not so much a story as it is a straw man formed from privileged white liberalism and patriotic platitudes and held together by Godwin’s Law.
The post gives us a history lesson, a tie to modern political discourse, but what interested me the most was the list of wrongs committed by the writer:
1. Projecting blame and fault back onto the oppressed party
2. A white writer using a black character as a mouthpiece to add credibility to his argument
3. The disingenuous and untrue dismissal of America’s racial issues as the work of a “handful of white people.” In any case numbers mean less than the institutionalized and (officially and unofficially) sanctioned nature of racism in both 1942 and 1968.
4. The evocation of post-racial patriotic platitudes that fail to address the existing problem
One of the problems with any form of fiction addressing real-world social issues is the danger of oversimplifying the matter and bitterandrew has outlined four ways of doing this that I believe–and I’m looking specifically at #2 and #4–are still very common.
