THE CONFOUNDING ELITE
And the long shadow we live in.
There seems to be a subset of humans that believe themselves elevated above all others. They believe themselves to be delivered there, into those golden gilded echo-chambers, by whatever grace the gods they worship ordained - and for some of them that god is money. There are those amongst them that actually believe they deserve to be there through their own efforts, as if chance and access - the random nature of their born-into community, country, family - played no part in their success at all.
These creatures (‘people’ no longer seems the right term) have no real connection to, or empathy for, the rest of us - we who are here merely to service their greed, to entertain them, and to die for them. We are useful in so far as we transfer their memes to each other, pass on our DNA and keep replicating that we might continue to be sold to, and fed off. Our own precious sentience means nothing at all to them, our hopes, wants and needs trivialized or entirely disregarded.
I would love for them all to be dropped, penniless, phone-less, deprived of all the trapping of luxury, into areas of true poverty. Where nothing they value matters. Where their survival depends on sharing, communication, where the next meal comes from and how - the stark basics of survival. That’s the ‘Running Man’ show I would watch. Not about learning to survive by violence, but rather about the re-learning of what it is to be human, truly human. It would be interesting to see if such a return to a more compassionate state is even possible. Somehow I doubt it.
As humans, we have lived with this imbalance for all recorded history. So it’s almost hard to believe that twenty years ago, more or less, the first murmurings of the top 0.1% having more wealth than the rest of the world combined sounded like ridiculous conspiracy nonsense. Impossible to conceive.
Now we know it to be irrefutable truth.
Increasingly, and similarly, we see the notion that the true battle humanity faces is not left v. right, but top v. bottom. In that battle even we who consider ourselves lucky and blessed have more in common with the poorest of the poor, fiscally, than those who believe themselves to be always and forever superior to us.
I've tried to tell people, in the past, that comics have always responded to current events & social problems, especially when I hear anyone complaining that comics are too woke now. Some of the first comics I read as a boy were about serious problems. Green Arrow & Green Lantern stories that looked at addiction, or God Loves, Man Kills, one of the old large graphic novels Marvel did, which was so obviously about racism.
My old man thought hero comics were stupid, but he did understand the medium could be profound & he proved it by giving me the Maus books about the Holocaust. But over the last 10 years, even if we just leave the social justice stuff out, where more creators of color, or in the queer community, have been invited to tell their own stories, or make familiar characters more true to their backgrounds - I have never seen as many comics responding & trying to examine current affairs.
So many books, from the top classic superheroes to the little Indies, people are trying to navigate this insanity. I wish there were better resources, or that people at least had a better idea of how to find the resources, to remind them we have power, even individually. I really appreciate anyone with a platform speaking so directly as well.
I'm not really seeing the medium responding acutely to the social rot. As a young teenager I WAS impressed by the political call outs, the anti-drug stuff, etc. As I aged those did not age well. The anti-drug stuff wasn't as thought-out or even researched as they should have been (for instance, drug addiction wasn't as common or as easy as it was alleged, not even heroin). It echoed the exact same fear mongering that kids and others eventually laughed off. Frazetta's famous anti smoking ad in the Warren mags was ironic as Frank was and remained a smoker until the early nineties, and Ellie, his wife, was likely the victims of that addiction. Right now none of these comics are addressing, or have EVER addressed how the west profits from war. Corporations OWN the DC, Marvel and Dark Horse comic lines, and probably too many others. So we're going to see lip service to gender issues, ethnic diversity, much like the reaction to Ethiopian famine. Sadly, many years later that "crisis was revealed to be both not as severe as we were told AND it was used as cover while what happened behind the scenes increased hostilities in the region over access to "cheap" resources along with arms smuggling. Just as famines are STILL happening, and the WEST is causing them, gender and ethnic issue WILL remain because we're NOT culling the cause (perpetual greed is at the heart of those issues and ALWAYS has been).
Where are the comic writers calling out the increased surveillance state, our crop manufacturing being bought up by tech billionaires, our coup that led to the war in Ukraine triggered by a better loan deal offered by Russia, our bombing Iran, our support for a genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon, and all while our own homeless numbers and poverty rates are increasing? I know I'll get some push bash on the take on Russia, but the homework supports what our own and west's politicians continually lie to us about (hence the 30 years of Russian boogey men in mainstream comics). Frankly, comics aren't "woke" at all. The fact that they still refuse to even note how corrupt the entire political system truly is explains the vapid virtue signaling the've always done. They still treat Marxism as an existential "threat" while a certifiable loony in our White House considers nukes to punish civilians because they haven't overthrown their government (and the prevailing narrative in the leadership and their loyalists in the USA, and elsewhere, is a grudging notion that it's what Iran "needs", as if we're the model to live by).
I know, none of that is popular, so attend a "no Kings" rally while the world keeps burning under our live fire events, or funded and supported by our war criminals. The money they rake in -even when we lose- is insane.
It's gotten to where all the research I do into these issues, things the more daring Soc, History and ethnic studies professors and instructors admit to- too often after class is out, because keeping a job requires towing that line shared by our western leaders, the more folly there is to it. I was in a rare, but useless position, listening the war stories of soldiers fresh from down range (we lived in the Kaiserslautern Germany area, because of my wife was stationed at Ramstein AFB during the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and that's where most of them came for R&R). The stories I was told by everyone from medics, to grunts, intel officers, to aspiring general officers- because most assumed that I was a retired service member- revealed the chaos of our campaigns. What they told me WAS what I expected, but also far worse.
Here we are, having learned nothing, because waving a flag while being exactly what we say we're combatting is STILL insanely profitable for a tiny few. War comics (like Stars & Stripes, ironically) are better about telling the truth than our modern comics are. Our comic creators take their cues from MSM news outlets, know where their bread is buttered and some of their audience. The elites are still in charge and their numbers are growing and no intellectual or populist revolution is in sight. We are cowed. In the USA the "opposition" has yet to invoke the 25th Amendment for a constantly lying and clearly unhinged war criminal who is alleged pedophile and proven guilty of sexual assault in the White House. Talk about the teflon Don. But because of him, "..donate now, donate often (while we sit on our hands) and we PROMISE, next time we'll 'do better'".