It’s MLK Day, and the world seems more peaceful than it has in years. I was scrolling through the New York Times, as a good liberal media elite should, and while there are still plenty of articles and opinion pieces documenting the final days of Donald Trump’s epic travesty of a presidency, I just can’t bring myself to click on them. This stuff feeds my anger, and I’m tired. My Facebook feed is filled with talk of healing, of unity and a better future, mainly because I’ve spent the last four years weeding out nearly all of the Trumpers from my list of friends.
While I’ll be truly surprised if all of this warm and fuzzy lasts more than 48 hours, I’m willing to try. Will 2021 really be a year when Trumpism returns to simply normal Republican delusions, ideas that seem almost quaint and even reassuring after all that we’ve endured? Are at least a few of the Q-Anon crazies realizing that they’ve been played for fools? Maybe they’re tired, too.
One of the headlines from the NY Times used the acronym BIPOC without any explanation of its meaning, which I find pretty silly and actually elitist. Is that tiny sliver of common ground something I can build on?
It has been said that Trump was the symptom, not the disease, in the same way that bleeding to death is a symptom of getting stabbed in the neck. It’s a really bad symptom, but not the original problem.
Another headline reads “Javicia Leslie on Becoming TV’s First Black Batwoman.” While I’m glad to see that The Times included the word “TV’s,” which indicates that the editors understand that Batwoman is a fictional character, this hints at the bigger problem.
When I was 10 or 11 years old, I was captivated by Marvel comics. I immersed myself in the whole mythology, which even now seems pretty brilliant. I started out by drawing posters of Thor and the Hulk, and by the time I was 13, I had hundreds of issues sealed in individual plastic bags. I rode my bike every week on Tuesdays to the comic book store a few miles away, just so I could get every single new issue as soon as it was published. Even today, I can tell you a whole lot of details about the Kree-Scrull war or the strained relationship between Gallactus and the Silver Surfer.
When I turned 14, a lot of things happened. For one, my neighbor, who was in his 20’s and had a wife and a kid, gave me two albums that he used to love, but that had apparently lost their appeal to him. I had never heard anything like Led Zeppelin I and II, and I’m sure i never will again. Sorry, Dr. Strange, this was sorcery of the highest order. Around the same time, my friend Bill and I smoked our first joint together. It was wrapped in strawberry flavored rolling papers. I liked it, a lot. Also, I knew about girls, but at 14 that knowledge became something much more urgent, a sacred quest that would consume many years before the promise would be fulfilled.
I still read comic books, but something had changed. It wasn’t long before I sold my whole collection for $100, most likely to buy weed.
I was growing up. My interests changed and continued to evolve as I became an adult, albeit one whose arrested development is still apparent today, with this blog being only one obvious sign. Comic books developed, too, and I discovered the raw humanity in the baroque words and images of Chris Ware, or the satirical bite of Daniel Clowes’ Eightball. These comics were purposely leaving super heroes behind in order to realize the full potential of the form.
Sometime in the early 2000’s, The Spiderman movies debuted, along with the first X-Men and the Fantastic Four. To my adolescent self, this would have been the realization of all the potential of comic books to tell supposedly adult stories about teenage angst, or hamfisted morality plays about the evils of racism. To somewhat more grown-up me, they were pretty exciting, it was cool to see CGI reaching new heights, and if Sir Ian McCellan was in it, that meant it was like Shakespeare, right?
Not really. Each time I watched a new super hero movie, I was wowed by the flash and the spectacle, even drawn in to the stories, but there was always a little bit of disappointment at the end. What promised at first to be a new summit of pop culture was still about super heroes in muscly costumes with magical powers. It seemed a little silly and childish.
We all know what happened next. A new Wonder Woman movie is the greatest cultural event of the pandemic, not to take anything away from the first black Batwoman. Grown-ass men fill entire internet servers with pseudo-intellectual debates about the director’s cut of The Justice League. Robert DeNiro and Joaquin Phoenix, two of the greatest actors of our time, star in an R-rated movie about The Joker, featuring dialog that might seem really profound to a 10-year-old. Comic book super heroes, created to entertain children, are the highest form of American culture for our nation and the world.
Anyone who really knows me would scoff at the idea that I would try to take the intellectual high road. The only show I regularly watch on TV is Letterkenny, which is fascinating just because it seems to legitimately break new ground in jokes about farts and your mom. But I know it’s dumb. I know it’s like a drug, to turn off my brain and stop all of the actual thinking. If all it takes to be elitist is to recognize that “Hulk smash!” isn’t really a cultural high water mark, what does that say about our shared experience?
Thanks for enjoying my latest angry diatribe. Next time, shitting on Star Wars!