Pax et Justitia

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of comics. I’m a Marvel guy—outside of Batman, DC has never held much interest for me—so I started with some relatively modern runs on The Amazing Spider-Man and Avengers and Thunderbolts. Eventually, I remembered how much I enjoyed some older stuff, too. Years ago, guys like Jim Starlin and Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart were among some of my favorite writers. I won’t go through the entire progression that led me there, but ultimately I went back as far as the Kree/Skrull War (1971) and the First Thanos War (1972).

These are comics from an entirely different age and social order than modern comics. I’ve read some of it before, but I had forgotten how deeply ingrained the anti-war and civil rights movements were in many of those stories. I think a lot of purported “fans” of that age either remember those stories through the lens of their current political beliefs or never really read or understood them in the first place. These were hardly conservative stories and they assumed their audience was sophisticated enough to understand real-world conflicts.

Until 1972, Stan Lee was the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. Starting sometime in the 60s, he wrote a monthly column called Stan’s Soapbox that appeared in all their publications. Usually, he talked about behind-the-scenes anecdotes and goings-on around the office. He sometimes celebrated and brought recognition to specific creators or titles, and he generally tried to form a personal connection with readers that went beyond the stuffy persona of being the boss.

In December of 1968, Stan wrote a Soapbox that made Marvel’s position on civil rights and equality absolutely crystal clear. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had both been assassinated in the preceding year, and George Wallace was the vocal champion of racial segregation nation-wide. Race riots were everywhere on the news, and law enforcement was deploying tear gas against protestors with abandon. In the midst of this, Stan spoke about real-world issues to his mostly young audience. He didn’t hide behind fantasy or metaphors, and he didn’t pretend that his readers were too young to know about such things.

“Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today,” he wrote. “The only way to destroy them is to expose them — to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are.”

These were not words lightly written or published. Stan was risking a massive backlash in such a politically charged time. Like today, sides were polarized, anger was rampant, and there seemed no hope of compromise. Marvel could have easily faced financial catastrophe at the hands of angry parents and political figures who didn’t want their children indoctrinated into beliefs they didn’t share. But Stan felt it was too important an issue to stay on the sidelines. The stories he wrote in the 60s had spoken his mind loud and clear for anyone who paid attention, but now he spoke up in full print, not just handwritten word balloons.

“Although anyone has the right to dislike an individual, it’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race — to despise an entire nation — to vilify an entire religion.”

That’s powerful stuff, not just for a kid to read in a comic book, but for anyone watching as American society seemed to be at war with itself in 1968. I think Stan needed to get his thoughts out there for his own mental health just as much as his readers needed to hear it. And lest anyone dismiss these as the ramblings of a naive fool, don’t forget that in 1968 Stan was a middle-aged man of 44 years. Stan was hardly a hippie, but he knew right from wrong and that was something that pervaded his comic book work his entire life.

So for anyone who thinks Marvel is too “woke” (a term I saw used to describe the Marvel Cinematic Universe just this morning), I’d like to say this: I don’t think you’ve been paying attention. I don’t think you truly understand the people who built that universe, from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin and on and on. I think you’re remembering those stories through the lens of the way you wish they had been, the way they fit comfortably into your modern, conservative opinions of today. I think you’re having trouble wrapping your brain around the idea that you’re the bad guys Stan was writing about back then.

“Pax et Justitia,” Stan signed off with. “Peace and justice.” I’m sorry to say that almost 60 years later, we’re still having those same arguments, and still fighting that same fight.

Larger Than Life

This morning’s segment of The Intellectual Devotional was about Homer, the legendary Greek bard who is said to have lived around the 7^th Century BC. Specifically, it was about The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer’s most well-known works.

For those who don’t know, The Iliad is an account of the Trojan War, in which the various city-states of Ancient Greece came together to make war on the City of Troy across the Aegean Sea. It follows the exploits of Achilles, a great warrior of Greek myth, and most famously gives an account of the Trojan Prince Hector’s death at Achilles’ hand. For centuries, The Iliad was thought to be wholly fictional until the city itself was discovered by a team of archaeologists in the late 1800s. While many aspects of The Iliad are undoubtedly fictional, it now seems likely that there are some broad truths to the narrative and that there likely was a war of some kind that ended with the city’s destruction.

The Odyssey focuses on the Greek hero Odysseus (for whom the story is named), at whose suggestion the famous Trojan Horse was built and the city conquered at last by the Greeks. Unlike many of the other Greek kings and generals involved, Odysseus’s trip home took many years, owing largely to his having offended the Greek God Poseidon, who continuously used his power over the seas to make Odysseus’s life miserable. He encountered a multitude of obstacles, villains, and monsters seeking to prevent his journey, ultimately killing his crew and destroying his ship. Odysseus did eventually return home only to discover his house full of suitors seeking to marry his still-faithful wife Penelope and seize control of his wealth.

I’ve been familiar with The Odyssey since I was a child. I think we read about it in elementary school sometime, but I re-read it several times after that on my own. I was aware of The Iliad as well, but it never really captured my attention, possibly because it’s the story of a war, but The Odyssey appealed to me on several levels, mostly because it was the story of someone who just wanted to go home to his family and had to fight through obstacle after obstacle to get there. In many ways, I think of it as a very early superhero story (which are really just modern myths). Odysseus is very much a precursor to characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Captain America, just as Hercules, Achilles, Paul Bunyan, the Lone Ranger and Zorro are. We seem to have a psychological need for heroes, for people who are larger than life and who we can aspire to be like. And there’s nothing wrong with that so long as we don’t take it too literally or unquestioningly.

The Brainwashing of my Dad

No, not my dad.

The Brainwashing of my Dad is the title of a 2016 documentary written and directed by Jen Senko. It explores the rise of right-wing media and the “hardening” of conservative opinion, starting with the John Birch Society to the Ronald Reagan administration to the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and up to the “present” at the time the film was made. Senko relates these broad topics through the lens of watching her own father gradually change from what she describes as a kind, generous, loving person into a much angrier, hostile person as he embraced Rush Limbaugh and Fox News in the 90s.

What was remarkable to me when I first saw it was that I remember a lot of that. I wasn’t nearly as engaged with news or politics then as I am now, but I remember listening to Rush in my dad’s car on the way to school in the mornings and deeply, deeply disliking the man. Even to my young self, he sounded like someone who got out of bed every morning and actively looked for something to be outraged about, and I found that repulsive. Why would anyone want to live like that? The adult me answers: because it makes money.

Fast forward a few years. By 1999, I was married and had my first child with a second on the way. (Yes, my first was born when I was 19 years old; that’s a subject for another time.) I was in college taking courses in (among other things) history and political science. I had also become a news junkie, and in an effort to be as objective as I could I flipped back and forth between the three major cable news channels at the time: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Over the course of about a year, something became very clear to me: one of those channels consistently made me angrier than the other two, but for me it wasn’t because anyone told me to be outraged or angry or fed up with anything, it was because as I took more and more history and political science courses I recognized the flat-out lies coming from commentators on Fox News. I almost fell out of my chair a few times when I recognized complete fabrications presented as fact. That’s not to say I always agreed with commentators on CNN or MSNBC, but it was rare for me to hear anyone on those networks being just plain dishonest or deceitful. I couldn’t say the same thing about Fox.

It was then that my now-ex-wife gave me possibly the only good piece of advice she ever did. “If it makes you so angry,” she asked, “why do you keep watching it?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have a good answer. I was trying so hard to be “objective” and “fair” and “balanced” that I was going to give myself a coronary. I had bought into the conservative argument that to find the truth I had to give both sides equal amounts of my attention, even if one side’s argument was patently ridiculous or unworthy of attention. The real truth is that if 1,400 scientists in a poll all agree that climate change is real and man-made, while only 4 disagree, I’m not actually obligated to give “both sides” equal space in my brain, particularly if the arguments put forth by the 4 sound incredibly ignorant. The real truth is that no one is entitled to my time or attention, and arguments to the effect that I’m obligated to listen to fools are predatory and manipulative.

Today, right-wing media is not only plentiful and pervasive, but it’s also highly profitable. As Senko points out, it taps into emotion rather than reason, outrage instead of rational thought. It’s an easy pill to swallow for many because it doesn’t require much effort: the media has explicitly done all the thinking for the viewer and provided an easy scapegoat in the process.

I’m grateful my dad never fully bought into Rush Limbaugh, and I’m grateful we can still have discussions on politics where we can find common ground. That’s not to say we agree on everything, but we do live in the same world of facts and reason. I know not everyone can say the same. Personally, I was never drawn into those emotional appeals, and any outrage I felt because of them was because of the deceit and dishonesty I saw in them, along with the blatant manipulation. I think there’s an argument to be made that I felt that way because two of the earliest influences I can remember in my life were Star Trek and comic book superheroes, neither of which are conservative concepts, but for whatever reason I count myself lucky that I escaped the rise of right-wing media with barely a scratch. Even more fortunately, all three of my kids did, too.