a sense of joy and then a panic

... this one just came out of the swamp."
- Radiohead, "Optimistic"

Orson Scott Card is no longer contributing to the Superman mythos, and people are very happy about that because of his stance on gay marriage and homosexuality in general (being a Mormon).  This being the first I'd heard about any Card/Superman shenanigans, my reaction was "Well, of course he wants to write about Superman.  Superman is probably perfect for him.  He probably thinks Superman is the perfect Mormon, just like Stephanie Meyer wrote vampires as the perfect Mormons."

This blog, for instance, explains that Card should not write Superman because "I do not think that an admitted bigot, whether bigoted for religious reasons or no, is qualified to write for the comic universe’s greatest symbol of truth, justice, and equality."  I don't read Superman or Card, but I'm sure - sure - that Card thinks he's got at least truth and justice on his side.  Most people with strong beliefs don't think they're fighting for injustice and falsehood.  Here's an example of the defunct British political party, Veritas (note their primary policy, liberals).  Here is the famous USSR paper, Pravda.  Islamist Justice Parties are all over the place, like Indonesia's own Prosperous Justice Party - and most Western liberals don't think of Islamic law as the foundation for justice.  Truth, Justice, it just sounds like a good place to start.  And a character like Superman - who to me is the boyscout superhero with an unshakable dedication to all that is good - is going to be an appealing totem for any movement that thinks it's got righteousness on its side.

I don't begrudge Chris Sprouse, the would-be illustrator, his decision not to work with Card.  I don't begrudge not supporting Card.  I don't begrudge liking Superman.  I'm not even saying there is no absolute Truth or Justice.  But Superman is a symbol anybody can claim.  Card writing Superman is not like a misogynist writing Wonder Woman, because Superman's not gay.  Superman is a boy from a farm in Kansas who just wants to help people with his incredible strength. Sounds like a good place to start.  Boys Wanna Be Him, Girls Wanna Be Him.  DBZ fandom was the same way - jam-packed with conservatives and libertarians who read totally different messages in what I thought was The Great Post-Colonial Disaster.  Stephen Chow explained it very graciously: "the airy and unstrained story leaves much room for creation."  The main reason I'm writing this is because I am familiar with the feeling of frustration you get when something you love is terribly "misread."

I also know that with that feeling of indignation is a little hint deep inside that maybe you're the the one misreading things all along.  There was once a xenophobic facebook group, for example, that used The Lord of the Rings and Aragorn's "I Bid You Stand, Men of the West" in particular as its mascot.  I love LOTR, and I love Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn, and that is not what they represent to me, but I'm not going to pretend there is no xenophobia in that story, and that the facebook group creators were totally coming out of left (right) field.  l do think there's something about simple hero epics that appeals to a more conservative - and more ideological, on either side - audience overall.  It's the absolutism, I'd guess, and the masculinity.  So I also think Superman is a symbol someone like Orson Scott Card can easily claim.  Hooray.

Also, this is why I study -isms like fascism and nationalism: because there's a reason people sign onto these things.  These are words, ideas, symbols, codes that work.

This song helped me come to terms with this.  Hope it helps:

Last night I was researching Iris Chang (the writers who committed suicide page is always interesting!), a Chinese-American journalist-cum-historian who got noticed when she published The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.  She wrote in her introduction that at a conference on the Nanking Massacre, she was "suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it."  It was an emotional response and an emotional book that was criticized by historians but was a bestseller in the U.S.  Chang was researching her next book - another account of another group of people victimized by the Japanese in WWII, the U.S. soldiers who were forced to participate in the Bataan Death March - when she suffered a break of some kind, was put on anti-depressants, and killed herself three months later.  

Chang immediately reminded me of Sarah Kane, the English playwright whose play Blasted used "extreme and violent stage action" to forge connections between England and Bosnia (Kane wrote "The logical conclusion of the attitude that produces an isolated rape in England is the rape camps in Bosnia and the logical conclusion to the way society expects men to behave is war"), whose personal despair was posthumously linked to a sort of global despair - that she was depressed "because [she sees] the world around [her] and think[s] what an awful place it is." 

But Chang's wikipedia page instead directed me toward Minnie Vautrin.


Vautrin was an American missionary who established and led the Ginling Girls College in Nanking prior to WWII.  During the Japanese invasion she tried to save as many women and children as she could by harboring them in the college ("up to 10,000 women in a college designed to support between 200 and 300") within the Nanking Safety Zone, established by the handful of Westerners in Nanking who stayed behind when the Japanese approached. 

The leader of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, interestingly, was a German businessman for Siemens AG, John Rabe.  He was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, and was elected leader for that very reason (the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact, the Westerners hoped, would give him extra leverage).  Rabe wrote "there is a question of morality here... I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me, and it is touching to see how they believe in me."  His efforts to delay the Japanese to allow Chinese civilians to escape were credited with saving the lives of 200,000 to 250,000.  When he returned to Germany in 1938 he showed photo and video evidence of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in Berlin, and wrote to Hitler himself asking him to get the Japanese to stop.  The letter never reached Hitler, Rabe was interrogated by the Gestapo, and ordered not to speak about the subject again.  After the war he was arrested by the Russians and the British for being a Nazi, but declared de-Nazified in 1946.  He and his family lived in poverty thereafter until his death in 1950, sustained by food and money parcels sent by the Chinese government.  His tombstone was relocated from Berlin to Nanjing.  An interesting flip-example is Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul in Lithuania during WWII who wrote travel visas on his own initiative to enable 6,000 Jewish refugees to escape death at the hands of Soviets and Nazis via transit through Japan - "an extraordinary act of disobedience."  He hand-wrote visas for 18-20 hours a day, wrote them all night before his departure when the consulate was closed, and was still writing them as his train pulled out of the station, throwing them into the refugee crowd gathered outside.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center, however, notes that these 6,000 were heads of household who were allowed to take their families, and therefore considers Sugihara to have saved about 40,000 - he and his family were granted permanent Israeli citizenship.  As his train left the station he said to the crowd, "please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best."

Back to Minnie Vautrin, who stayed in Nanking until 1940.  All she had was the somewhat less powerful American flag, but she went back and forth to the Japanese Embassy to get papers banning soldiers from committing crimes in overcrowded Ginling College (papers that were subsequently torn up by the soldiers themselves).  After the siege, "She even helped the women locate husbands and sons who had been taken away by the Japanese soldiers. She taught destitute widows the skills required to make a meager living and provided the best education her limited sources would allow to the children in desecrated Nanking."  Vautrin wrote in her diary - both her diary and Rabe's were discovered by Iris Chang - "I suspect every house in the city has been opened, again and yet again, and robbed. Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out 'Jiu ming! Jiu ming!'—save our lives."  Vautrin's diary, which I've read a little of (555 pages of her papers are available from the Yale Divinity School), consists of her running around the campus beating back Japanese soldiers with her presence alone: "Went up to South Hill three times I think, then to the back campus and then was frantically called to the old Faculty House where I was told two soldiers had gone upstairs.  There, in room 538, I found one standing at the door, and one inside already raping a poor girl.  My letter from the Embassy and my presence sent them running out in a hurry - in my wrath I wish I had the power to smite them in their dastardly work."  Days later she wrote, "The days seem interminable and each morning you wonder how you can live through the day; twelve hours." 

Vautrin was "unnerved" by the war.  Seeing doctors at home in the U.S., she "blamed herself... and added that she was a burden and a failure." She felt "responsible for not being able to save more lives."  She had written in late December 1937, "The looting of our residence has been light and even that would not have taken place if I could have been in about four places at one time.  Our looting, therefore, is all to be blamed on me, because I have been too slow!"  She killed herself in 1941.  The idea that Vautrin was a failure who had not done enough seems totally ludicrous.  Who among us would have stayed in Nanking if we didn't have to, let alone commit to trying to save tens of thousands of people at the risk of death-by-bayonet?  Without even a weapon?  And yet: a failure.

She reminds me of Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian Force Commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the genocide.  He had asked the UN for more assistance - the UN said no, because the US said no, and the last Belgian troops (Belgium had colonized the Congo, and was as such the de facto "babysitter") withdrew, leaving Dallaire's peacekeepers to try to stave off killings alone - an impossible task, although he is credited with saving 32,000 people.  Dallaire now suffers from PTSD.  He was dismissed from the army because he was not responding to treatment and "was trying to kill himself through work."  He has tried to commit suicide - because "After Rwanda, Dallaire blamed himself for everything."  He says, "I failed, yes. The mission failed. They died by the thousands, hundreds of thousands."  Again - he failed?  

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the news is too depressing, so we need something to escape to, some way to shut our eyes and keep ourselves from even being witness.  We stigmatize mental illness.  We live "Fitter, Happier" lives - "concerned (but powerless)."  "(The ability to laugh at weakness)."

He died on Saturday. 

He was someone I looked up to, from an academic distance.  I quoted his essay, "American Militarism and Blowback: The Costs of Letting the Pentagon Dominate Foreign Policy" in my thesis: 

• "The United States is currently the most powerful country in the world, boasting a large, technologically-advanced, and widely stretched military with 800 Department of Defense installations overseas (2002, 25)" and
• "Johnson, for example, aptly describes the reinforcement of American imperialism through the culture of militarism (2002, 29)" and
• "Johnson uses the 800 Department of Defense installations the United States has built abroad to argue that the United States has created 'a new form of imperialism' (2002, 25, 28)", and
• [quoting Johnson directly], "[empire in Japan] was costly to the United States in terms of lost American jobs, destroyed American manufacturing industries […] The American government continued to accept these costs as the price of keeping its empire together" (2002, 27)" and
• "As Johnson writes, the United States operates 'on the wrong side of history' (2002, 28)."

But by then he was already influential to me, and that alone doesn't describe how much.  He was one of the very few political scientists that felt like "my kind of people" - a security specialist concerned about empire and expansion and militarism (it started with his post-Cold War observations on Okinawa).  When I first read him, I remember thinking "finally!"  Professor Cooley recommended him - and especially his theory of blowback - to everyone.  Johnson on the theory:

"In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes - as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 - the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback."

R.I.P., Chalmers Johnson.