The year in review:
This, too, shall pass.
thirteen billion dollars : thirty million dollars :: political capital : ?
The basic moral issue is why a direct political connection (a la the political bonds of Florida to other US taxpayers) creates a strong presumption of massive US government aid. Obviously, there is a political reason for a better response to Florida, since Indonesians won’t be voting for anyone in the next Presidential election, no matter how much aid we send.
But that’s a pretty pathetic moral response—disaster relief as political pork barrel.
Yup.
Mr. Newman cites a New York Times analysis which says, “even Mr. Bush’s critics do not expect spending on that scale for the far greater disaster in South Asia.”
Count me with the chorus that says, on the contrary. Oh, yes. Yes we do, and more, besides.
Actions speak louder than words.
The ultimate argument against privatization.
It’s not the clear and simple proof that Social Security isn’t in anything remotely approaching a crisis; it isn’t the accounting shenanigans that will make us all look back fondly on Enron’s best practices; it isn’t even Daniel Davies’ immortal question, just as important to ask now as it was then:
Can anyone give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.
These are all important arguments to make, and we should go on making them, as often and forcefully as we can, but much as with the war on Iraq, we’re rapidly approaching a world in which there are two kinds of people: those who know this to be true, and those who know, but choose to believe otherwise.
No, the ultimate argument against mandatory private retirement accounts is this: do you have any idea how much more junk mail you’ll be getting? From multinational financial corporations and fly-by-night penny-stock–pimping quasi-firms? Lurid brochures and badly written come-ons, envelopes tricked up to look like overnight deliveries with that stupid handwriting font misspelling your name in the corner, Kipp, I thought you would appreciate a look at this, Mr. J.K. Manly, you could be making thirteen percent, Ms. Beezel Lee, have you thought about your retirement account? Dire red-inked envelopes with bold block letters RE: YOUR RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS IMPORTANT OPEN IMMEDIATELY, anonymous cheap white envelopes hoping to sneak past your first brute-force Bayesian filter, your own goddamn bank shoving ten-page slick-papered prospectuses financed by your ATM fees through your mail slot every week or so, just because they can.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest a best-case scenario would merely be an increase by an order of magnitude or so in pieces of mail delivered. Do we really want this brave new world?
What goes through your mind.
1. First, establish your bona fides.
I’ve shot guns. I’ve enjoyed shooting guns. Had a pump-action BB gun when I was a kid: twelve progressively stiffer pumps with the plastic stock that levered in and out under the cold metal barrel and you were ready to go. Coke cans stacked in rough pyramids in the chicken barn would tremble at my approach, let me tell you. —It wasn’t till I got to 4-H camp and had a chance to shoot some bolt-action .22s that I figured out I was shooting weird: I’m right-handed, but left-eyed, so I set the butt against my left shoulder, peered through the sight with my left eye, wrapped my left finger around the trigger—and had to awkwardly reach over and across with my right hand to work the bolt to eject the old cartridge and load a fresh bullet. (They didn’t have a left-handed bolt-action .22, and anyway, I wasn’t really left-handed.)
2. But.
HOME DEFENSE
(Three gun match)
Scenario—About 10:30PM you are dressing in your bedroom just after stepping from the shower. Suddenly you hear your daughter scream from the direction of the living room. You grab your home defense weapon and head in that direction. As you come on the scene you see your daughter on the floor, a stranger on top of her, knife to her throat and tearing at her clothes. Proceed as necessary.
Procedure—Start with back to wall three feet from corner with weapon in hand. At signal jump to corner, engage your daughter’s attacker, then accomplice who’s [sic] in foyer. Hit plate to stop clock. Run twice each with pistol, shotgun, rifle. Eighteen rounds minimum. Roll dice to determine which order you will use the three weapons.
Paladin Score—Combine all six times for score. Five second penalty for hits on daughter. Five second penalty for not attempting to use cover.
We have some gun magazines in the house; useful for photo-reference and technobabble. The little ditty above is a sidebar exercise from the “Tactics” column in the March 2000 number of Combat Handguns. One Rick Miller. Here’s a full column that he wrote. “When I am not at home, my wife has standing instructions to stay in the bedroom in the event of an intruder.” —Can I just say that me an’ the Spouse have not devised a game plan to cover an intruder in the house? Have not even given it a moment’s thought? Beyond the usual what was that noise oh it was the cat?
There’s a third-page vertical ad next to the “Home Defense (Three gun match)” sidebar exercise. It’s for the Quik2see magazine-mounted flashlight system, and it’s got a picture of a grimly determined man holding a Quik2see-equipped handgun in a nice-enough cup-and-saucer, while a woman cligs to him, fearful, behind and a little to one side. From the lighting and the placement of the night-table lamp, it’s evident they’ve just sat bolt upright in bed. What was that noise?
Ideally, everyone should congregate in the master bedroom or other safe place, where the defense weapon is stored. If that is not possible, the children should be instructed ahead of time to lock themselves in their bedrooms in case of emergency, while you sort the situation out, and your spouse calls the police.
(Oh, to be sure: you could find similarly unselfconscious descents into ghastly self-parody inside of five minutes with any particular magazine from the other side, wherever you might locate that other side to be; that’s not the point. What else are bad writers and advertisements for? —I’m still trying to get past the five second penalty you take if you hit your hypothetical daughter with a hypothetical hunk of metal a notch under a centimeter across traveling at about 350 hypothetical meters per second.)
3. Bona fide.
Our second German shepherd was named Duchess. (Full American Kennel Club name: Duchess Eilonwy. Our first was Indigo. Our third? Schtanzi, after Mozart’s wife.) She had a bad habit of catching bees in her mouth, and once she teamed up with a neighbor’s dog and ran down all but one of our geese, which was a bad, bad thing, but me and my sister and brother hated the geese, so we didn’t mind so much. We always had the plan of paying a stud for a litter of German shepherds at some point, so she was never fixed, and when she was in heat stray boys and otherwise respectable male workin’ dogs would slip the leash and be seen loping through the garden, sniffing up the front porch. “Scare ’em off,” Dad would say. He’d hand me the BB gun. “I’m serious.”
I came home from school one day to find Duchess standing hindquarters-to-hindquarters with a liver-colored stray. She was whining and pulling against him and he, the poor dumb sonofabitch, was pulling against her, and neither of them was going anywhere but in circles in the driveway. I yelled, I waved my hands, I threw gravel. I kicked him. I kicked a goddamn dog. I had no idea what copulatory lock was. All I knew was he was hurting Duchess and I wanted him to stop.
Five minutes later, maybe ten, he fell out of her with an anticlimactic plop and headed for the woods, his tail between his legs, his head down. We let Duchess into the house and made much fuss over her. There were no puppies. —Six months or so passed, and here came the liver-colored stray again, sniffing at the front porch, skulking about the garden. I went out and yelled at him. Waved my hands. “Go on! Get out! Get the hell out! Don’t come back!” Threw a rock. He scooted away, slowed down, circling, started edging back. Guilty look on his face: dude, I know, it’s wrong, but come on, cut a fella some slack?
I went and got the BB gun.
The first shot caught him by surprise. He yelped and spooked. I’d aimed at his backside and stung him, and as he started to trot down the driveway I went walking after him, pumping up the gun, and stung him again. And again. And again.
Our driveway was a little over a mile long.
Just past the second cattle grate he lay down in the ditch and I stood over him, crying, and shot him over and over again, watching the little welts appear on his belly, his haunches. His flopped-over ear was swollen. I’d hit it without realizing on the way down. “Get out!” I was yelling. “Get the hell out of here! Leave us alone!” Could I hit his tail? Yes, yes I could. He wasn’t even looking at me, wasn’t looking at anything at all. Just lay there in the ditch, in the dust, shivering.
I stopped before I ran out of BBs.
“Get out!” I said, and I turned and ran back to the house.
We never saw him again. There wasn’t any blood in the ditch when we went to school the next morning; then, there hadn’t been much blood at all in the first place. I didn’t shoot the BB gun much after that. We lived right on the Ohio River, across from an Indiana state park, and every autumn weekend you could hear the rifles popping like occasional firecrackers.
4. Balletic.
“What a wonder is a gun,” sings Charlie Guiteau. “What a versatile invention! First of all, if you’ve a gun—”
Click-chack.
“—everybody pays attention!”
5. And then.
“Why do I recommend two pistols in the night stand?” says our friend Rick Miller.
It is simple. If you must search the house, the second weapon is for your spouse to use. If you confront the intruder and you lose, the rest of the family won’t be defenseless. It is a good idea to make the second gun of similar type and caliber to the first, to avoid confusion in time of stress.
I haven’t shot a gun since I was, what, fourteen? I’ve held a pistol since then, and it’s true, what they tell you: it’s colder and a lot heavier than you expect. I have no intention of ever buying a gun, or of ever having one in the house. One of these days, though, I probably will make it out to a shooting range. Just to see.
Every gun nut I’ve ever known, which, granted, isn’t many, has every one of them been a nut about safety and maintenance. Not a one of them ever had a home invasion drill, that I know of. Or standing orders for their spouses in the event of a bump in the night. None of them had guns in order to feel safer.
A week ago, maybe fifteen minutes after I got off the bus, Michael Egan got up from where he’d been sitting on the sidewalk and went up to Vincent Stemle as he was getting off a bus. They got into an argument about something. Prescription pills, somebody said. Spaynging, somebody else said, but that was on Fox, and who believes them? —Egan started slapping Stemle. Knocked his hat off. His glasses. Stemle pulled a .357 and shot Egan three times, then turned and ran.
Did he say go away? Get out of here? Leave me alone?
“He almost thought everybody had something out for him,” [Willie] Spakes said.
An ill wind.
Apparently, I must say something, anything, about a hideous and unthinkable disaster, whose awe-striking natural terror (islands shoved to one side or the other, the planet left thrumming in its orbit) is not matched, no, but certainly compounded by a willful blindness and stupidity that is as criminal as it is all too human—I, me, this guy over here with a weblog on the sinister side of the Islets of Bloggerhans, I have to say something cogent, something approved, or every blue-state blog will stand condemend with the entire Left for just not caring enough.
All right, then:
Actions speak louder than words.
A cheap monkeywrench is thrill enough.
At some point or another I got put on the American Family Association mailing list, which makes for a sour splotch in my inbox every week or so. But here at the arse-end of the year, the Rev. Wildmon is making another touchingly naïve attempt to harness the power of the web. He wants us all to advise the President as to what sort of judges he ought to appoint to the federal courts. If one were to click here, one could send an email which says roughly,
I feel a Federal judge should seek the original intent of the Constitution, and make his or her rulings based on the original intent. Please nominate individuals who have this concept toward the Constitution.
Whereas, if one were to click here, one could send an email which says something rather like,
I feel a Federal judge should have a “progressive mind” and make laws he or she feels are needed regardless of the Constitutional intent. I think the Constitution is a “living” document and must be interpreted by Federal judges willing to make needed laws that Congress refuses to make.
And if one were to click here, one would see the total number of each email sent to date. —At the moment, it stands at 16,380 fans of “original intent,” as opposed to 288 progressive minds.
Let’s do something about that, shall we?
This ahistorical dreamlike landscape where action is situated—
—broke asunder and fell from her hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked. Right at the Balrog’s feet it broke, and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf, while the rest remained, poised, quivering like a tongue of rock thrust out into emptiness.
With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard’s knees, dragging her to the brink. She staggered, and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. “Fly, you fools!” she cried, and was gone.
And just what the hell is up with all that coal in Newcastle, huh?
So I’ve got a minute (a single, precious, golden minute) while I’m waiting for a database to rebuild its sorry ass, and what do I do with it? I go check out the Ain’t it Cool report on last night’s Serenity screening, that’s what I do. —Spoiler free, y’all. Almost entirely. Anyway. What else did I do? I scrolled the messages posted at the bottom (since rebuilding its sorry ass takes more than a single, precious, golden minute: I also calculated next week’s production, figured out some staffing issues, and pulled an executive decision about a document type from thin air), that’s what I did, and buried in the shitstorm, I stumbled over this gem of a plaintive cry for help:
Fucking sci-fi fanboy shit. That’s all this site cares about anymore.
Too true! Too true!
An atheist, a feminist, and a rabbi walk into a bildungsroman—
A couple years ago, Barry was wondering if he’d ever do a comic book again.
Today, Hereville’s written up in the Washington Post.
(And while we’ve got it up, ponder a moment the volatility of this brave new digital world: that two-year-old post of his is already showing the wear and the tear. Not that I’m any better: my links rotted away in the interim. The blog post he was talking about is now here.)
—It is presumed that all you habitués of the pier subscribe to Girlamatic already, the better to get your weekly fix of Dicebox. But for this week, the first 20 pages of “How Mirka Got Her Sword” are available for free, so go, read, get hooked, subscribe. Hoopla, Barry!
Ladies and gentlemen—
—the Finnish Men’s Shouting Choir.
Things to remember.
I’d never suggest How Much for Just the Planet? was in the same league as Singin’ in the Rain; not as sublimely silly, for one thing, but neither is it so athletically earnest. —But it’s all a matter of degree and not of kind: I would not hesitate, would in fact leap to recommend it, as an antidote to the sort of day I’ve had. Splash of Maker’s Mark and sleepy kitten optional.
(When the old skool Klingon security officer Happy Gilmores his first tee-off to within thirty yards of the green, you will have to pick the kitten back up and apologize most sincerely for having giggled him off your chest and onto the floor. I’m just sayin’.)
Utterly unrelated (except in all the ways it’s not), you have got to get yourself some Lady Sovereign. Read here, here, and, oh, here; then download here and, oh, shit yeah, here, while you still can.
Once more, Patrick Nielsen Hayden saves the day.
Well, he did. —I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell a bit back, and enjoyed it quite a bit, finding the digressive length (both of opening acts and footnotes) muttered over elsewhere to be delightful and ultimately necessary: groundwork to build a proper floor from which to kick off into, well. To say much more would spoil; I’ll just note that magic is abominably tricky to pull off, and Susanna Clarke manages to step nimbly from Potteresque cantrippery to Lovecraftianesque occultiana (the latter as architected, perhaps, by Peake) while playing allegorical games on several levels: John Holbo reads it as philosophy, naturally enough; I read it as writing, with Norrell as critic to Strange’s writer, and if that explains why I still found Norrell the more sympathetic when all was said and done, well, it doesn’t make me any happier about it.
But: the day, and its salvation. While reading it, I’d perk up whenever I stumbled over its discussion elsewhere, like this Crooked Timber post, which led me to John Clute’s review, which I dropped like a hot potato halfway through, when I learned of a plot twist I hadn’t yet tumbled to. (Should have paid attention to those spoiler warnings.) Stung, I slunk back to the book, consoling myself with the idea that I would have seen it coming soon enough, and anyway, the gotcha is the least important part of a plot twist; otherwise, we’d all save time with Cliffs Notes. —What I hadn’t noticed was how the book had been spoiled on a more fundamental level: Clute, you see, tells us that Strange & Norrell is but the first book in a proposed series.
Which surprised me—the book is a long way off from your door-stopping wodge of extruded fantasy product, and though I couldn’t tell you how exactly it doesn’t step like a volume one, nonetheless, it quite clearly doesn’t; it carries itself neatly, of a piece, whole. —Now, this doesn’t prevent it from being volume one of a proposed series, any more than keeling over suddenly in the middle of a jungle prevents Cryptonomicon from being a single book, prequels notwithstanding. And series and sequelæ are pretty much a fact of life in the Beowulf game these days. So I didn’t question Strange & Norrell’s status as volume one of; even began reading it in that light (indeed, couldn’t help but), wondering how the story would go on from here, wondering which characters would play what roles the next time ’round. Wondering, but also worrying, even fretting, because Clarke pulls off her magic trick about the only way you can: by hinting, alluding, suggesting, glossing; by taking crucial bits for granted, by knowing when to let up, so the readers come the rest of the way themselves. And because Clarke’s enterprise is to thin the walls between worlds and bring the magic back, the only place she can go is where Strange & Norrell stops: right up to the gates themselves, or maybe a step or two beyond. The stuff Clute presumes would fill out the next two volumes of Clarke’s three-book contract—the stuff, in fact, he seems to think is missing from the story—would be too much; would leach the magic away by nailing it down. Those gaps, I thought, were there for a reason, and while it’s hardly impossible that volumes two and three wouldn’t be worthless, still: they felt like they’d be mistakes. I began to resent the shadow they cast over what I was reading here and now. —There and then, rather.
So tonight I’m bopping about old posts and threads and decide on a whim to check on John Holbo’s midstream review, where I find this comment from the electrolit Patrick—
Allow me to presume on my small acquaintanceship with Susanna Clarke in order to tell you that John Clute’s assertion that Jonathan Strange was planned as the beginning of a series was entirely pulled out of John Clute’s ass. There is no such plan. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a complete work.
Susanna has more recently said she might write a different novel with the same background, but it would not be about the same people. And yet people keep repeating Clute’s entirely erroneous assertion that the book is the start of a planned-out series à la Jordan, Martin, Donaldson, etc. It’s not, and it never was.
And it’s astonishing: not one word of the book I read has changed, and yet it’s suddenly so much better. What a wonderful trick! My thanks to you, sir; kudos and hosannahs.
Canary watch.
Remember galiel’s canaries? Americans United for Separation of Church and State has a one-click email thing you can send to your various elected representatives about four of them: the “Constitution Restoration Act,” the “Safeguarding Our Religious Liberties Act,” the “Ten Commandments Defense Act,” and the “Marriage Protection Act of 2003.” —Y’all don’t need a sermon, and we can argue the political expediency of Marbury v. Madison later: the names of those bills alone ought to be enough to chill you into whatever action you can take. (Hearing that Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.) has been paraphrasing Stalin—
When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy… The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We’re not saying they can’t do that. At the end of the day, we’re saying the court can’t enforce its opinions.
(Well, hell. That’s just an extra shiver.)
—Hat-tip to Majikthise.
And when we say everything changed—
Twenty-five years after Alvin Toffler coined the term “Prosumer” in his book The Third Wave, Consumer Anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff says the Prosumer is officially here to stay and that this holiday season is their coming of age. “Think of it as the coming out party for a new species, an evolution in a consumer mindset. It is now the producers—companies, manufacturers, marketers and retailers, who need to adapt,” said Blinkoff.
A Prosumer is part producer part consumer [sic]. Prosumers are engaged in a creative process of producing a product and service portfolio with guidance from trusted friends—the companies they’ve trusted for years and the new ones they’ve come to love.
Certainly Toffler’s prophesy was becoming a reality with mass computer consumption, Internet, Cable TV and digital technologies available, but Blinkoff, a Principal Anthropologist at Context-Based Research Group in Baltimore, says something dramatic happened to the Prosumer landscape that sped up the evolutionary process. That monumental event was 9/11.
“9/11 unleashed a full scale remapping of the cultural landscape. People were and are re-establishing their identities—their sense of who they are,” said Blinkoff. “And given that consumerism is at the core of our culture, its no surprise that we went to our culture core to help us regain our identity.”
—RedNova, “The Prosumers Have Arrived and Will Be Out in Full Force This Holiday Season, According to Context-Based Research Group,” via Purse Lip Square Jaw
For some value of “our.”
The state of the industry.
What’s that? I haven’t told you that all the cool kids are bookmarking the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon’s new(ish) source for comics industry news and reviews? Oh. Sorry about that. I meant to, that’s for damn sure. Anyway, today he links to this Ninth Art diatribe on the current industry practice of relaunching struggling titles with a brand new issue number one, with an eye towards those last few folks left in the world who’ll buy any goddamn comicbook on the shelves, so long as it’s got a number one on the cover. —And I know I’ve told you before that no matter how badly the industry might be doing, the state of the art in comics has never been better, and I know that we’re in the midst of a long and painfully drawn-out shift from periodical pamphlets sold on a non-returnable basis through a tightly knit network of specialty shops to bound books and web-based content sold through a mix of venues yet to be determined, and I know the numbers you’re about to see reach back to the dim ’n’ misty newsstand days, when Spider-man tussled on a regular basis with Look and TV Guide, but hey—every now and then a little perspective slapped upside the head like a cold fish doesn’t hurt:
Everyone knows that the market is much smaller, but it’s worth throwing in a historical comparison to flag up the scale: when X-Men was cancelled in 1970, the final issue contained an editorial explaining that “the plain truth is that the magazine’s sales don’t warrant our continuing the title. We feel that the artists and writers involved can better devote their time to other projects, other characters.” Two inches below, the Statement of Ownership appears, revealing that the previous issue had a total paid circulation of 199,571. Dipping below 200,000 was disastrous in those days. Today, Identity Crisis is considered a hit with sales in the region of 125,000, and Fallen Angel hovers around the 10,000 mark. No wonder the publishers are more interested in licensing.
I mean, sometimes the state of the art just isn’t enough, as Spurgeon’s eulogy for the late lamented Highwater Books will tell you.
Atlas leans back everywhere.
You’ve seen it by now, I hope? —At the very least, you’ve seen the preview, and I bet you giggled at the bit where Frozone’s looking for his longjohns, which goes a little something like this:
FROZONE:
Honey—where’s my super-suit?
HIS WIFE:
Your what?
FROZONE:
Where’s my super-suit?
HIS WIFE:
Why do you need to know?
A helicopter explodes.
FROZONE:
We’re talking about the greater good!
HIS WIFE:
I am your wife! I am all the greater good you need!
Frozone, of course, gets his super-suit, and saves as much of the day as a sidekick can, with some stylin’ speedskating moves: the great power that necessitates the great responsibility he feels. (Well, that, and the adrenaline rush.) —Hooray for the greater good!
Now, there are some folks tut-tutting this flick for being excessively Randian. “The Incredibles is ‘brilliantly engaging,’ [Stuart] Klawans says—which makes it ‘more worrisome, if you lack blind faith in the writings of Ayn Rand.’” —Which reminds me of a minor strain of Trekkiedom that insists Spock’s bloodless Vulcan logic must in its particulars resemble Rand’s Objectivism, because, y’know, Vulcan logic is logical, and Objectivism is logical, so hey presto. Not entirely sure what those Trekkies do with the image of Spock slumped on the floor, his green Vulcan blood smeared melodramatically along the glass wall, huskily telling Kirk with maddening imperturbability that “it is logical: the needs of the many outweigh—”
Then, it’s not really my problem, is it?
Nor am I entirely sure how to apply a Randian reading to a superhero flick in which the superheroes end up right back in the obscurity from which they came, danger their only reward for pulling on the tights—okay, danger, and some small government help in dodging the occasional catastrophic insurance claim and class-action suit. And their pictures on the covers of magazines. And free bullet-proof supersuits. And the adulation of millions. —But aside from all that.
As with any superhero work, there are echoes and resonances, responses and repudiations of Rand and Nietzsche. That stuff’s built in, like the secret identities and the underwear on the outside: even if you try not to do them, you have to take the time to let the audience know you’re not doing them, which means you end up doing them. Whoops. —So, yes: there’s a there there in The Incredibles, sure, but mostly because it is what it is. Brad Bird wanted to tell a story with superheroes in it; along with that genre comes certain baggage; that he hauls it about without complaint does not mean he’s crafted a candy-colored piece of crypto-Randian propaganda.
For instance: to read the conflict with Syndrome, the villain, as a “class war” of Übermenschen v. Lumpen is to miss the whole point of his costume, his tropical island, his lava curtain, his expendable henchpeople, his Heat Miser hair, his zero-point energy gauntlets. Syndrome doesn’t want super powers. He’s had super powers ever since he was a wee tot: he’s the mad inventor, the kid genius, the gadgeteer: a super-powered archetype with a long and pulpy pedigree. What it is that Syndrome wants is to be a superhero—without, y’know, the pesky bother of all those superheroics. He doesn’t get the altruistic end of the stick; he just wants to shortcut straight to the adulation.
So Syndrome isn’t an unpowered drone with delusions of acting above his station. Syndrome’s an asshole.
Okay, how about when Bob Parr, née Incredible, bursts out with “They’re constantly finding ways to celebrate mediocrity!” Classic Ü v. L, right? —Except he’s griping about Dash’s “graduation ceremony”—for moving from fourth grade to fifth grade. It’s not the people, powered or un-, that are mediocre; it’s the experience. Bob’s railing at the insidious successorized insistence that every moment be special, everything be wonderful, that we’re always happy, no matter what, always game, always up for it, always closing, that we’re always safe and satisfied and sound: the awful logic that actually believes nine hours a day in a fluorescently buzzing cubicle end-running legitimate insurance claims really is a rewarding position that utilizes your talents and skillset in a meaningful fashion that best satisfies your life-goals.
(“If everyone’s special,” sneers Syndrome, whines Dash, “then no one will be.” —Yes, yes. I never said this was a slam-dunk.)
And then there’s the somewhat more grounded criticism of the family’s superpowers, and how they mimic and mirror and reinforce white-bread patriarchal family values, ew, ick: Dad’s hella strong; Mom stretches herself thin to keep up with everyone; the adolescent daughter just wants to disappear; tweener son’s a hyperactive blur—
Bird’s biggest achievement in The Incredibles is to have inflated family stereotypes to parade-balloon size. His failing is that, in so doing, he also confirmed these stereotypes, and worse. Helen mouths one or two semi-feminist wisecracks but readily gives up her career for a house and kids; women are like that.
Klawans again, and again he’s missing a point that superhero aficionados know in their bones—but, more shockingly, one that’s right there on the screen, one of the major themes of the movie, one he checks himself in the very next sentence: “they chafe at their confinement, like Ayn Rand railing against enforced mediocrity.” —Hell, Bill got it, even if he did crib it from Jules Feiffer:
When Superman wakes up in the morning, he is Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red S is the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby, when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses, the business suit, that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak, unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race, sort of like Beatrix Kiddo and Mrs. Tommy Plumpton.
Helen Parr doesn’t give up her career for a house and kids because women are like that; she gives it up because a spate of lawsuits drives the supers into hiding, and so she tries to live up to the normal idea of what women are like—and it fails, miserably. Bob’s miserable when he tries to carry the weight of his family on his back alone. Violet blossoms when she’s able to take direct action to save and protect her parents. Dash—well, let’s give Dash props; he knows what he wants all along, and when he finally gets it, it’s a blast of sheer, unadulterated joy that leaves you whooping and hollering and forgetting for the moment the distressing bodycount. The triumph of the movie is seeing the family set aside its constraining, restraining roles and work together to get something done: rather less patriarchal than the good Dr. Dobson might want, I should think.
Of course, at the end of the movie, the status quo is mostly resumed: the Incredibles return to incognito, and though Dash gets to run track, he can’t do it full-out, y’know? Rational, egotistical Objectivism is not followed to its seemingly logical conclusion: they don’t end up living in their supersuits, imposing the super-powered diktatoriat that is their Nietzschean due. —Their secret identities are lies, yes, but not lies to be repudiated: they’re roles, to be put on and taken off as needed—necessary compromises we all must negotiate with the expectations of the world around us. The Parrs’ mistake was to think that the Breadwinner or the Homemaker were somehow more real and true than the supersuits.
No, if you want to read The Incredibles as some sort of Randian parable, then it becomes a tragedy. Syndrome is our protagonist: the genius inventor whose fabulous wealth was created—rationally, egotistically—by the focussed application of his singular talents. He dreams of a world in which cheap, zero-point energy puts the mythic powers of a select few within the reach of us all—the ecstatic epiphany of Flex Mentallo; “Harrison Bergeron” run in reverse, like some madcap technicolor dream. —But here come the Incredibles, representatives of that select few, who destroy his wealth and smash his dream and grind him back into the dust, hogging the glory all to themselves: call it Incredible Planetary, if you like.
“If everyone were special.” —There are some problems it might be fun to have. Y’know?
