Why I hate superheros

I hate superheroes. I hate them with a passion. In fact, it is my opinion that the whole super hero genre, as a genre, is leading to the collapse of any semblance of communitarian or even democratic values in contemporary America. Why do I believe this? Because of the cult of the ubermensch that surrounds superheroes today. These magical beings are to be worshiped, loved, never questioned, and generally obeyed (minus the good '86 revisionist trend). Superheroes are a genetic elite, who engage in vigilantism for the sole purpose of beating up some poor innocent street kid whose only crime is not being born with the superhero's elite genes. And, oh yeah, they're almost all white and even more male. If they're females, they have to have breasts that stick out into the stratosphere and be surprisingly easy to get into bed with. Does anyone see a problem with this? Sieg Heil, Superman, even if you were created by two Jewish kids from Brooklyn. We know what direction you're taking the world in.

Keywords: Nazis, Superman

Is Frodo Baggins a Holocaust Revisionist?

Mcsweeney's has a hilarious send up of both academic criticism and the Lord of the Rings. They have another send up of Return of the King in addition to their send up of Fellowship of the Rings. One of the questions that bears asking from their work, however, is whether Frodo and Bilbo are in fact post-de-facto Holocaust revisionists, trying to justify the orcicide of Mordor. I thought that idea, while hilarious, actually is pretty serious at the same time. Is Frodo Baggins a kind of David Irving, saying we "Only killed 500 orcs, not 500,000"? The problem is, Lord of the Rings, while never consciously racist, does have a strong undercurrent of unconscious racism going through its text, and that racism can not easily be denied. So, perhaps in the future, we should have a movie entitled "Judgment at Hobbiton", though unfortunately Spencer Tracy won't be able to star in it. So, I throw this out to you LOTR fans. Are you sure you're getting the real story about Mordor? We only have Frodo's word for it.

P.S. Supposedly Lord of the Rings is the Nazis favorite current reading material. Go figure.

It Happened Here and Alternative History on Film

One of the most fascinating movies of the last four decades is It Happened Here , an alternative history set in a Britain which the Nazis successfully invaded. It Happened Here is significant in that the film does not pretend that the Brits would have acted particularly nobly under German occupation. The main character is in fact a collaborator, who is portrayed as no worse or better than the British partisans who are fighting the Nazi occupation. The movie was somewhat controversial when it came out, and some scenes had been removed until quite recently, because they were thought to encourage fascists.
Alternative history rarely appears on the silver screen. Watchmen, Fatherland, C.S.A., Death of a President (an alternate history in which George Bush was assassinated), and It Happened Here are the only cinematic alternative histories I know about. On television, Sliders portrayed alternative histories quite frequently, but not particularly persuasively. It Happened Here, along with C.S.A., remains the definitive classic of the genre, though Watchmen had its moments. But this genre is hugely underexploited and hopefully in the future Hollywood will see the potential for both entertainment and education in the alternative history style.

The Holocaust and Contemporary Science Fiction

Contemporary science fiction, particularly television science fiction, does not often deal with the Holocaust, and when it does it does so in relatively allegorical terms. The most concrete references to it occur in "Genesis of the Daleks" and the 3rd and 4th seasons of Babylon 5, but both series ultimately shy away from the precipice. I think that for the genre to evolve, it has to be willing to take such portrayals to the hilt. For instance, a depiction of an interstellar Nazi state could be a major work of art, if done correctly, and a good cautionary tale as well. Some of the best depictions of the Holocaust have come from alternative history tales, such as The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., Boys from Brazil, After Dachau, and Iron Dream. These are truly memorable portrayals of evil that deserve and demand a second reading. More complex visions of fascism, such as those offered in movies like The Believer and books like Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. Realizing that Nazism has a perverse fascination on us that is not always salutatory will go a long way to at least partially mitigating its evils. I hope that in the future, television sci-fi can have the courage to show the Shoah, in the hopes of creating a more productive dialogue about what might have been, had the Nazis won the war.

Category: Politics

The Gerstein Dilemna in Science Fiction and Real Life

The Gerstein Dilemna, as I've termed it, is the choice between saving millions by killing thousands, or doing nothing and walking away. I've given it that term in reference to SS officer Kurt Gerstein, an anti-Nazi who infiltrated the SS in World War II and subsequently tried to alert the world about the Holocaust and sabotage the Holocaust from within the SS. Gerstein is believed to have destroyed a number of gas shipments to the camps, but in order to destroy those shipments, he had to let others go through. Thus, in order to try to save hundreds of thousands, he had to kill tens of thousands. Few literary works have taken on Gerstein's life: The Deputy being the most prominent. But though science fiction has never dealt directly with Gerstein (to my knowledge) it frequently brings dilemmas like these up, because of the epic scale on which it is set. Unfortunately, sci-fi seldom shows its heroes making the hard choices, and when they make the hard choices, they are always spared the consequences. Rosselin considers genocide in BSG, in order to save the human race (killing milllions to save thousands, in that case) and Ender commits a "guiltless genocide" in Ender's Game, but neither of those examples are particularly encouraging. A true Gerstein-like scenario is needed in sci-fi, as a cautionary tale, if nothing else. Sometimes the only way to resist the enemy, is to fight the enemy within. In the process, you don't have clean hands. But then, in war, no one really does.