In case comic fans across the world haven’t seen it yet, Frank Miller posted a rant about the Occupy Wall Street crowd that basically says they’re a bunch of whiny spoiled brats and that if they really wanted to make a difference in the world they’d go out and join the army instead of fighting the made-up villains at home. I’m sure by now a lot of people have focused on the generally-accepted irony of the man who popularized Batman as taking down the status quo and Daredevil standing up for the little guy—not to mention the man who wrote all those Sin City yarns about life on the streets pulling down the corrupt in power—saying that the people who are right in the real-life application of his ideology are the Kingpins, the Sal Falcones and the Roarks. (If you’re interested, you can see his rant here: http://frankmillerink.com/ )
You know, I despair of what Frank Miller has become, but I can’t exactly fault him for it. You see, his apparent ideological shift to championing the Roarks of Sin City coincidentally mirrors another Miller whose ideology shifted in the wake of 9/11: Dennis Miller.
For those unfortunate individuals who did not get to see Dennis Miller before he became exclusively Fox News’ parrot, you missed a great comedian. He owed a lot of his attitude to George Carlin, but he had a sense of intelligence and wordplay that really made you pay attention to him. Who else would compare a transparent vending machine to watching people commit suicide? Who else would say, “I was in LA recently…always love Louisiana.” Or who else would compare East and West Germany’s reunion with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis? “I was never a fan of their material before, and I don’t want to see what they have cooked up this time.” I loved it all, and I shamelessly stole a lot of his jokes in countless failed attempts to be cool in high school.
Then September 11th, 2001 happened. Then George W. Bush and Dick Cheney really seemed to take us down the rabbit hole, rights were thought of as quaint fads of yesteryear, and some genuninely scary news started coming out, including the little fact that Osama bin Laden was no longer considered a high priority, as opposed to staying in Iraq forever and ever, despite the ever-increasing obviousness of the fact we’d gone to war with them for no reason. Okay, from all this you can probably tell that I’m not a George W. Bush fan, but I do know that even as there were people who were really against what Bush was doing, 9/11 hit a lot of people hard. We were at war with a hidden enemy, and the only things we knew about them for sure was that they were terrorists, and they were Muslim.
The reaction was actually pretty similar to how people felt about the Japanese in World War II. If you looked Asian, then you were probably a Japanese sympathizer. The reaction at that time was to gather up anyone who looked Japanese and stick them in an Internment Camp. If you notice any parallels with the German concentration camps, you’re not alone. I will say, in the defense of the U.S., that the treatment of the Japanese was slightly better than at Auschwitz or Dachau. There were no gas chambers and no mass graves, but they did live in tarpaper shacks with very public communal bathrooms and has only $0.45 a day for rations. Even in 1943, this wasn’t a lot.
My point in all this is when you look at history, a lot of people reacted badly to the surprise attack on our country. It shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of people’s ideologies took a hard right to conservatism, because after the Trade Centers were attacked, after all those people were killed…it’s pretty easy to reach the conclusion that national security and defense is not all that matters, they are the only thing that matters. As a corollary, if a few rights have to be given up in order to achieve this…well, the ends justify the means.
Here’s the problem with taking a side in politics, though—you start to get sensitive to attacks on “your side.” I know that once I got to the point where I was pretty sure I wouldn’t vote Republican for a long while, attacks on liberals became less funny. And I had LOVED making fun of such liberal staples as political correctness! I’ve laughed at attempts to decriminalize marijuana, and thought that people who staged sit-ins were being unrealistic in solving the world’s problems. Granted, I realize this, and even though I have apparently taken a side, I can still laugh when somebody calls someone “differently abled,” which to my mind seems to be needlessly sugarcoating an issue, or make a good joke about the fact that Democrats in Congress have less spine than a paramecium. I think that’s missing from Frank and Dennis Miller, and I also think that’s why their work has suffered in recent years.
See, if you’re an artist like a comic book writer or a comedian, you have to have an open view of the world. Artists reflect what they see around them, and if you wholeheartedly cling to one ideology, you eventually find yourself getting swept up in it. It’s like Catholics who refuse to acknowledge that the Catholic church has a problem with child molestation, or like Penn State students refusing to acknowledge their football program had a problem with child molestation. If you believe too deeply in an ideology, you can find yourself saying that, as Dennis Miller said when talking about cutting benefits, “It’s time to acknowledge that there are people out there that aren’t worth saving. Just let ‘em die!” OR you can find yourself on the opposite end of the spectrum from where you were years ago, saying things you might have previously found abhorrent. I don’t know that Frank Miller or Dennis Miller actually really changed, but they ended up believing so deeply in one part of the conservative ideology that they had to accept the rest of the conservative ideology as well.
I don’t mean to tear into conservatives here, just so we’re clear. It can happen to almost any group. I think the solution is not that you shouldn’t believe in anything, but to keep in mind a sense of persepective. Otherwise, you may find yourself on Fox News. Or you may find yourself ranting against people and looking foolish online. Or, you know, you may find yourself pressed into service as a suicide bomber.
No comments:
Post a Comment