Superman the fascist

Moral panics are as old as civilization itself. Socrates was executed for ‘corrupting the minds of the young’, a perennial fear among the old, among those who have reason to fear. Socrates was a threat to any kind of self-satisfied gerontocracy, but moral panics have alighted on far more innocuous things than his demanding dialectics; things like comic books!

I’m continually indebted to the stimuli I receive from other bloggers, paths opened before me that I might not otherwise have explored. Jeremy Janson drew my attention recently to an article in The Washington Post by George F. Will, published towards the end of last month. It concerns a case before the Supreme Court, a challenge to a law passed in California banning Postal 2, a violent video game.

Lawyers acting for the games manufacturer are arguing that this ban violates the First Amendment, guaranteeing free expression. They have also, rather ingeniously, drawn the justices' attention to previous moral panics over cultural ephemera, including one in the 1950s over comic books. The whole thing is just so amusing, an insight not only into the character of moral panics, the absurdity of moral panics, but also into American cultural history.

In the early 1950s American legislators were so concerned over what was referred to as ‘juvenile delinquency’ that the Senate even established a sub-committee to look into the problem. Comic books, read by an estimated 90% of children, were quickly singled out as a possible contributor to the phenomenon.

It should not be assumed, though, that this was just more evidence of prejudice and conservative reaction against popular culture. The Senators would have been able to draw on sociological support for their deliberations, including the work of one Frederic Wertham, a political progressive. A psychiatrist by profession, he had previously opened a clinic in Harlem, which he named after Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, the man responsible for translating the old beast’s Das Kapital into French, “thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals”, which Will offers as the sting in the tail of the scorpion!

Since 1948 this fellow had been campaigning against comic books, in 1954 publishing a book entitled Seduction of the Innocent, suggesting a causal connection between them and the desensitisation of young criminals – “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry.” I find it difficult to believe, but this tendentious, pseudo-scientific rubbish quickly became a best seller. It was even praised by C. Wright Mills, left-wing sociologist and the doyen of progressive thought at the time.

So, would you like to know what concerned Wertham the most? Was it pulp fiction horror comics? Was it ghouls and vampires? Yes, but his targets also included Superman. Superman! Gosh, if one were to choose an archetype for the all-American ideal one could do no better than alight on Superman, clean-cut, decent and horribly goody-goody! Not so, said Wertham: in his ongoing fight against the bad guys Superman paid no attention to due process, which made him a “crypto-fascist.” And as for Batman and Robin, they demonstrated “homoerotic tendencies.” Absolutely, it could not be clearer: the older man and his little chicken!

It’s all terribly droll, but just as the Fatty Arbuckle scandal had been responsible for a crackdown on movie makers in a previous generation, lurid suggestions like this quickly impacted on the comic book industry. Hill says that more than a dozen states passed laws restricting the sale of comic books and some civic groups even staged book burning sessions, I suppose reducing that ‘crypto-fascist’ Superman to ashes.

As movie producers previously adopted their own standards of censorship in response to the political climate so, too, did comic book publishers. But silly panics of this kind are most often replaced or sublimated by other panics. By 1956 the hysteria over comics had been replaced by Elvis and his pelvis!

Will concludes his article with some pertinent observations about Progressivism in general, which he defines as a “faith-based programme”, a secular substitute for the religious admonitions of a previous age. Though Progressivism is a uniquely American intellectual and political phenomena it belongs to a wider current, to what I would refer to as the fascism of the left, the fascism of any philosophy based on the belief that people can be made perfect through the actions of the state. At the one extreme there is the attempt to modify action by censorship; at the other there is eugenics and the sterilisation of ‘bad stock’, a programme that at one time united people as diverse as Adolf Hitler and H. G. Wells.

Flaming Internet; the Charge of the HobNob Mob

I love old horror movies, really old ones, the old black and white flicks with people like Boris Karloff. I’m sure people will have seen some of the original Frankenstein movies. Quite often there are scenes of indignant mobs out with flaming torches, hunting down the monster. But that’s so old-fashioned, don’t you agree. The mob is still with us of course, but it has long since lost the torches. Now it expresses it’s righteous indignation on the internet, haunting down the creatures who have happened to offend, hunting in a mood of righteous indignation; hunting like a pack.

I became aware from reading reports over the weekend of the power of the mass tweet, the power of the self-righteous pack. It was turned recently on Jan Moir of the Daily Mail, who was hunted down in something called ‘trending’ over her article on the death of Stephen Gately. Trending, as I understand it, is a way of uniting ‘tweets’ around a particular topic. Those who united in this particular witch-hunt (yes, it was a witch hunt) included Stephen Fry, who managed to harness the voice of a least a part of his mass following. I understand this man is approaching the status of a ‘national treasure’, though I think of him more as a fat, self-regarding creep. No matter; he tweets and twits follow.

We face a new danger, the instant anger of the HobNob mob, as Nick Cohn put it in his column in The Observer. HobNobs? Ya, this refers to the ‘biscuit’ episode of the BBC’s This Week politics show, hosted by Andrew Neil with Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott as regular guests. Oh, for those who do not know her Abbott happens to be black, a point material to the tale I’m about to unfold. Anyway, Neil introduced the show by mocking Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who failed to respond to a question about his favourite biscuit. Well, a man who watches the X Factor surely has a favourite biscuit! Neil went on to introduce Abbott and Portillo as “our very own chocolate HobNob and custard cream of late night telly.” Immediately complaints about Neil’s ‘racism’ were lodged by some humourless ‘get a life’ losers, though he did not write the script. Instead of telling them to eff off the BBC in its new mode of abject cowardice pulled the broadcast from its iPlayer repeat.

You see, the thing they are afraid of is the kind of mass campaign that saw the immolation of Jan Moir. Protests of this kind are now virtually instant. There is no need for the hard work of the past, the hard work of organising, campaigning and writing; just find likeminded folk on Facebook and Twitter and a-trending we will go with a sudden ‘flash mob.’ You may not like what Jan Moir wrote but I, for one, would defend her right to write. So, too, would Matthew Parris, so he did in last week’s Spectator, and who is better qualified to comment on such matters?

The problem is that these surges of indignation are a threat to free speech in general. Newspapers don’t make money from readers; they make money from advertisers. In a sign of a new and frightening trend, Marks and Spencer responded to the Twitter campaign against Moir by pulling its advertising from the Mail. Is this a sign of things to come? Will editors have to veto comment for fear of losing revenue? Are we to have thousands of censors instead of one? Are we on the threshold of a ‘you can’t say that’ culture? Is political correctness about to break through the final barrier? I fear the answer to all of these questions is yes.

It’s easy, is it not, to defend those people and those causes we happen to like, we happen to agree with. But the real test of democracy, the real test of a democrat, is being prepared to defend those people we do not like, defending their right to express an opinion without bullying them into silence, without frightening them with the power of the herd. Some tweets, I believe, even included Moir’s home address, so if people wish to take up the torches again they will know exactly where to go. A mob fighting for a ‘good cause’ is still a mob, as Cohn rightly says;

To fight back, you need to remember that although the internet age is hugely expanding the number of complaints, the old rules still apply. Whether you are the owner of a tiny blog or the editor of a national newspaper, if someone points out an incorrect fact, you correct it; if someone challenges an argument, you argue back; and if someone says that you must think what they think, you ignore them.

Yes, even if they come in a mass; especially when they come in mass.