Still need to read this. IIRC they had the author do a cameo on the Simpsons when Lisa and Marge to an indie comic called Sad Girl.
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I just can’t understand why diversity bothers anyone. I know there are cultural prompts, I know the stated reasons, but they all seem like such bullshit to me. The fears these people have should theoretically appeal to me demographically: white, male, generally toward the straight end of the spectrum, and born in the Northern Midwest.
They just don’t, though. I’m not intimidated by changing demographics, I’m not afraid of women having more control over the world, or the ostensibly waning emphasis on white/Western European/Christian values, or any of that stuff. I struggle to understand why other people are–this is a good thing, and one that is inevitable if we want to survive as a species. Humans are a single species, and we’ve been converging and homogenizing for centuries.
Sorry to let whatever the hell people seem to think “Middle America” is about down, but I can relate to these supposed “cultural invaders” more easily than I can to your crybaby bullshit, so I guess I’ve chosen my side.
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The film adaptation of Persepolis is worth checking out too.
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Fear.
That combined with living in a society built on perpetually undermining the self esteem and mental well being of its populace in order to turn a hefty profit, consistently.
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I wonder how much carefully-laundered Russian and Evangelical money will prop this up.
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That seems like a fair assessment.
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The term “colored man” can be interchanged for just about any ‘nontraditional’ demographic and it’s still just as accurate.
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IMHO this was a subtle but powerful message in Maus. The people who resisted: all dead. The people with pride: all dead. The people who started poor: all dead. The people who put other people before themselves: all dead.
The survivors were the jerks who started out fat and kowtowed to the captors and always put themselves first. They played the game and managed to last long enough to be liberated. Many many good people died in the camps. It’s a powerful lesson on what happens to humanity in times of great stress.
It has been awhile since I’ve read the book, but I don’t remember Art having a bad relationship with his father, just that he was embarrassed at how his father was a racist old jerk.
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“Nazi-quoting nationalist” = NAZI
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I got the sense it was strained because he was a racist old jerk. And he was trying to come to terms/acceptance of it.
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That’s a pretty good reference.
LBJ was far from a great person, but he certainly wasn’t wrong about that. It’s all fear. Nearly all of American politics right now is being conducted through the manipulation of people’s fears, and at least on the conservative end of the spectrum. It’s being used by the Democratic party in some cases to try to get newly energized voters to vote for the candidates that the party wants (if you vote for a socialist we’ll lose the general election!), but the greatest perpetrators are on the right and they are doing exactly what Johnson spoke of: Give some people someone to look down on–An easy culprit for everything that ails you, no matter how absurd, (sometimes absurdity helps, think Hitlers “big lie” rhetoric) and lots of people will not only embrace it, they’ll shower you with support both socially and monetarily in order to keep feeling superior.
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My only problem with that, and it’s a minor one at that, is how do you determine what is acceptable and what is unacceptable? If I can use a historical example, Huckleberry Finn has been banned in various places for much of its existence, much to Mark Twain’s delight. In more recent years, it has been edited or even banned for its use of one particular word, one which I won’t post because I know the end result. I’ve even been given an argument that even Huck’s turning point–“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”–is itself racist, based on his words afterwards and his description of Jim as being “white on the inside”. I can’t even.
But let’s go further. Imagine Cory Doctorow sending in his next manuscript, and the literary agent wrinkling her nose and saying, “ugh, another manuscript from another straight white dude,” and tossing it in the trash. But in that case, we know what would happen: Cory would probably shrug, and if he couldn’t find another publisher, it’d show up on his blog as a DRM-free epub.
I’m not a big fan of censorship, even if the writing is flaming garbage like the Sad Puppies. I think ridicule and refusal to buy are much more effective tools. These clowns would probably just distribute .cbz files if they couldn’t find a publisher. Is this idiot actually making any money? I have to doubt it.
How about, “A group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and a young man born on September 11, 2001, set out to thwart Ambassador Usama bin Laden’s plans to nuke New York City.”
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Remember those kids in 5th grade who liked to draw swastikas and 666?
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That’s not censorship though, that’s a comic book label looking at the contents of someone’s work and saying, “we don’t think this will sell because most of our customers don’t like, or think this way and therefore will not buy it.”
That’s a business looking at what its audience will like, and deciding that, eh, you know what? The majority of our audience isn’t going to want a comic book that is ostensibly about an angry white guy who murders leftists. Some might like it, but the number of people who want hate-based comics is very small relative to the number of people who don’t. Furthermore, a fair majority of the ones that don’t want them would see an imprint or publisher selling them as a reason to drop support of that imprint entirely.
Your comparison to Mark Twain is kind of nonsensical. Huck Finn was banned first because it was considered to be too sympathetic to black people, and then much more recently people have been uncomfortable with it because the book helped to destroy the context in which it made sense. The fact that a great number of us have progressed socially beyond the at-the-time progressive perspective of the book means the Mark Twain accomplished what he was trying to do in the first place. He knew damned well that if the book worked there would come a time when it needed miles of footnotes and errata just like every other ancient or even moderately old bit of literature that was written from a time and perspective that is no longer relateable.
In other words, Mark Twain would be thrilled that telling an African American that they’re “white on the inside” is now considered a derogatory thing to say. He wasn’t a troll, he had an agenda.
Either way, not being able to find a publisher because what you want to publish isn’t going to appeal to enough people to cover the cost of publishing, and because publishing it might produce a lot of backlash from previously loyal customers is not censorship. That’s just how publishing companies work.
If the guy wants to start his own stupid racist imprint and the US government steps in and says, “you’re not allowed to say these things because we don’t like them, so we’re taking you to prison” that would be censorship.
People being, as a whole, not super jazzed about overtly racist/bigoted media, and complaining on the Internet about the fact that it’s being published isn’t censorship, neither is it censorship when consumers choose not to buy it when it is published. It’s also not censorship when comic and book stores choose not to carry those comics or imprints because they know that most of their customers won’t buy them, and that many of them are going to be so put off by them that they might not come back.
One ostensibly has the right to freedom of speech in the United States, but that does not mean that speech will be treated or received equally by everyone, nor does it guarantee you a right to an audience or to be published. Bigots are complaining a lot right now about censorship, but the reality of it is, while their “brand base” might be very enthusiastic right now, it’s still not very big, and much of what they are calling censorship is them misinterpreting “virtually nobody likes or agrees with us” as some kind of conspiracy against them.
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Do you consider it “censorship” when a publisher decides they want no part in promoting some would-be-writer’s racist garbage?
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I think Storm Saxon from V For Vendetta is more their thing
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It doesn’t matter if they ‘mean it’ or not; the havoc they help wreak is still the same, regardless to their true intentions.
Anyone who stands with my enemies, even ‘just for laughs,’ is also my enemy.
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You may be overthinking this, Lovecraft was considered acceptable in his time…But, by whom?
Publishers, who thought the books would sell.
The same thing would happen today, it’s not that society collectively would agree that something is acceptable but that publishers would, based on past sales (and hopefully some value judgment by the editor/publisher), believe there is a market for a book.
Having seen print, the book will now either reinforce or challenge the status quo, but many a work would not even get to this point if somebody doesn’t believe they can at least avoid losing money on it.
WE don’t really get to choose what is acceptable to publish, we get to accept or reject the ideas that are out there for us to consider, which is why we worry about somebody publishing hateful ideas, because we know that they are now out there to be considered but that’s almost inevitable nowadays, you can do one of two things: Be reactive and oppose hate or be proactive and propose better ideas for consideration.
I would argue that you’ve just described twitter, facebook, soundcloud, et al.
Acceptability is an afterthought for these sorts of “publishers”, their main concerns are profit and liability.
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That is a complicated question. I would argue that none really believe, but @Melz2 is right:
And yet their legitimacy rests on their purported earnestness of their beliefs. See @Boundegar above.
Stop if you’ve read this twice.
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