The only shocking part about this is that the white supremacistsNeo NAZISAlt RightMAGAfascistsbigotsextremistsRepublicans are still dabbling in dog-whistles. Convict Trump put in four years of hard work to inspire the worst impulses in his followers.
Why the euphemisms, then? Why don’t they just come right out and admit that their goal is to delete “The Blacks,” “The Gays,” “The Mexicans,” and anyone else they deem to be undesirable, from any influential positions of prominence?
The basest motivation
You might not know that Candorville wasn’t my first syndicated comic strip. I started it in 1995 for my college newspaper, and self-syndicated it to Black newspapers and a zine called Continental Newstime throughout the Nineties. But The Washington Post Writers Group didn’t launch it in mainstream papers until 2003. In the meantime, I was working on something else.
In 1997, I co-created the comic strip Rudy Park, with New York Times reporter Matt Richtel. We’d meet once a week at San Francisco’s Metreon where we’d eat lunch, people watch, and joke about Bush, Rumsfeld, Paris Hilton, and whatever else was in the news. Then he’d go home and write a week’s worth of Rudy strips, I’d edit them, and then draw them. After he won a Pulitzer and wrote a few best-selling novels, he wisely freed up some time to spend with his small kids. He handed the writing duties to me.
The hardest character to crack, for me, was Armstrong Maynard, the conniving boss. They were all hard, actually, until I decided to zero in on one character trait that I always enjoyed in Matt’s writing. For Armstrong, I decided that the reason why he was always screwing over patrons and his employees wasn’t because he was greedy. It was because he was a sadist. A shameless, amoral, gleefully malevolent soul, for whom the cruelty was the point
Ever since Reagan ran against a fictional “welfare queen” in the disco era, conventional wisdom has told us that Republicans dog-whistle to convince deplorable bigots that they’re with them. And at the same time, they’ve got plausible deniability.
I believe conventional wisdom has missed the point for half a century.
Darrin Bell’s Disobey in Advance is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Republicans do want bigots, xenophobes, and other assorted scumbags to know that they’re with them. But they don’t want plausible deniability. They want to rub it in our faces, to bait us into pointing it out. Because then they get to play another game: they get to gaslight us. It’s not desperation on their part. It’s not trickery. It’s sadism.
Fascism succeeds when people are trained to ignore their own eyes and to instead see what they’re told to see.
There are five lights. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Donald Trump fought to save Obamacare. Donald Trump didn’t shut down the government during his first term.
It’s the Democrats that are racist, not the Republicans. In fact, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would vote Republican today if a racist Democrat hadn’t executed him.
Their glee is incomprehensible
Gleefulsadism is one of the most effective aspects of a fascist movement. It’s beyond gaslighting. It’s a type of gaslighting where the cretin wants to make sure you know they’re doing it, because it produces cognitive dissonance in decent people. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state of distress produced by holding two opposing thoughts at once. Decent people tend to believe that people who lie to them are decent, if misguided or misinformed. It’s hard for decent people to accept the plain truth that there’s no shortage of politicians, Media figures, neighbors, family, friends, or colleagues, who are gleefully and knowingly being disingenuous – or worse – lying to their faces.
When faced with cognitive dissonance, one common reaction is to simply give up. To stop trying to correct misinformation. To stop pointing out wrongdoing. To stop organizing. To stop resisting. To wall oneself off from what’s happening and focus on self care. Maybe take up knitting, or watercolors, to pass the time until the national fever breaks.
The first, and maybe most important way to counter it is, to simply assert to whomever is doing it, that you know it’s happening, that you know that it’s intentional, and that it will never work on you.
Before the election, C-Dog revealed to Lemont that he was considering voting for Trump. Here is why:
The quiet rock stars
I met the reporter Hillary Louise Johnson about a year ago, by my favorite duck pond. She’d driven there to interview me for SacTown Magazine. She wanted the story behind the story in my new graphic memoir THE TALK. But I probably asked her as many questions as she asked me. At the time, I was obsessed with van life.
I created The Talk during the pandemic. I drew the first chapter in my downtown office, until the bail bondsman across the hall from me walked up and down the hallway hacking up a lung. After that, my office basically became a pricy storage unit. I’d visit it once or twice a month to sweep away cobwebs, but I spent most of my days in my car by the lake, drawing and writing on my iPad Pro. Or I’d work at home, while Makeda gardened and tended to the chickens, and the kids played in the back yard.
On my TV, van life videos would play on a loop. While I was reliving disturbing memories and pouring them into my graphic memoir, I’d also vicariously travel the highways of four continents and half a dozen languages, in the vans of those strangers (probably the only safe way to get into a stranger’s van). They didn’t so much brave the pandemic, as escape it. They became nomads, roaming the post apocalyptic roads of Europe, the USA, New Zealand, and Asia, alone. Tabi Ie, in particular, was good company. But several of them had become quiet rock stars, to me.
And now I felt as if I’d just seen one of them exit what was clearly a home on wheels, and cross the street to the duck pond to interview me.
Those were storm clouds gathering on the horizon
She wanted to talk to me in my office. I gestured to the park itself, which was devoid of humans, but full of ducks, turtles, and Canadian geese, and she seemed to understand. I needed to make this my office, I told her, because I’d spent more than two years reliving some of the hardest moments of my life. Memories I’d successfully spent half a lifetime burying, until Derick Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and a goon squad with badges assassinated Breonna Taylor, and my publisher asked me to write a book that spoke to that moment. While I worked on that book, I needed to feel a breeze, and to hear leaves rustling. I needed to be in the company of animals who wore beaks and feathers, and who knew nothing about the savagery of the animals who wore clothes and badges.
After a couple hours, she asked to finish the interview in my office, so she could see me in that element. I took her there, even though it felt as if I were putting on clothes that didn’t really fit anymore. She asked whether I’m hopeful for the future. I replied that these years we were living in – the Biden years – were just the eye of a storm. Heavy turnout among Black voters that tipped the scales in 2008, 2012, and 2020. But the rest of America wouldn’t be able to count on Black voters to save them this time – partly because of Republican voter suppression efforts, but also because the Democratic Party had just played one too many games with us.
The precedent that wasn’t
In 2004, as Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom directed the city to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This sparked a backlash from those who insisted “marriage is between a man and a woman.” For much of a decade, it was a losing battle. Dozens of states passed laws or constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage. But years later, when the laws eventually wound their way to those states’ supreme courts, they were struck down, one by one. In 2015, the Republican Supreme Court stepped in and recognized once and for all that marriage was a Constitutional civil right that belonged to everyone, no matter their orientation, in all fifty states.
I had no illusions about that court, though. They’d stolen the 2000 election for George W. Bush. They’d permitted racial gerrymandering (as long as the people doing it weren’t stupid enough to admit it was racial). They’d just eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, allowing the former Jim Crow states to immediately begin purging millions of Black voters from the rolls without having to pre-clear their schemes with the Federal government (last year, another Federal court hammered the final nail into the Voting Rights Act’s coffin). And just a few years earlier, they’d ruled in Citizens United that Elon Musk could buy himself a presidency in 2025 (not the exact text of their ruling, but that’s the gist of it).
But still, Gavin Newsom was the bold visionary who set it all in motion at time when nobody thought it was possible. He opened America’s eyes. He made the impossible seem inevitable.
If he did it once, he could do it again
So in 2020, when Newsom said it was time to make reparations a reality, Black Americans paid attention. After the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked a summer of protest and a supposed “racial reckoning,” Newsom signed bipartisan legislation establishing a reparations task force. Other cities and states followed his lead. Some came up with concrete proposals, the centerpiece of which were cash payments.
Some of the pillars of American history – the ones white supremacist movement wants to erase from history books – are grotesque. The more well known are slavery, the North standing by and watching the South murder Reconstruction, the Black codes, the razing of prosperous Black towns and businesses, and Jim Crow. But there continues to be a constant hailstorm of creative methods of preventing Black people from getting ahead.
HOAs, for instance, were created specifically to keep Black people from buying homes, and those “racial covenants” are still on the books in most states. I might buy that these are just vestigial laws that nobody ever got around to deleting, if it weren’t for cell phone videos. We’ve seen countless videos of HOA board members (and random white homeowners who seem to believe they’re one-man or one-woman HOAs) harassing Black residents and visitors.
Black people often can’t even cash a check in this country without bankers and police trying to put us back in the place where they think we belong. None of this is by accident. The country is so steeped in a ubiquitous and concerted white supremacist effort to prevent Black people from attaining generational wealth, that it’s become a reflex. It’s why the footsoldiers of that movement tried so hard to stigmatize and discredit any successful effort to educate people about that movement. It’s why they foamed so much at the mouth over the 1619 project and the teaching of “critical race theory.”
So many promises
Reparations task forces across the country figured cash payments would go a long way toward making up for that.
The racial reckoning was a big deal. Democrats in Congress promised meaningful structural change and criminal justice reform, and a new, stronger voting rights act. Nancy Pelosi and other leaders – many of whom were about 1/3rd as old as the country itself – even wore kente cloth and took a knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in honor of George Floyd. I ignored the cringe. Well, suppressed it. Well, experienced it, but then tried to forget it right away. There was always the chance they’d rise to the occasion, I thought, before I saw staffers struggling to pull the politicians back onto their feet because after nearly nine minutes of kneeling immobile in silence, their legs had gone numb.
Surely this moment wouldn’t become a metaphor for anything, right?
A few years later…
When San Francisco decided to give Black residents $5 million cash payments, the local NAACP leadership – of all people – objected to it. They said they’d rather have a new community center, or new programs, or some other grift that would fall far short of compensating all the city’s eligible descendants of slavery for centuries of denied opportunities and stolen wealth.
Instead of direct cash payments, Brown and the NAACP called for investments in “five key areas,” those being education, jobs, housing, healthcare and a cultural center for Blacks in the city. – ABC News
Everyone I cynically vented to about thiscalmly discussed this with seemed to agree with both of my hypotheses:
(1) The San Francisco branch of the NAACP wanted the state to funnel any “reparations” money through them so those corrupt motherfuladies and gentlemen could siphon as much of it off as possible and deliver nothing life-changing to the people.
(2) This rejection of cash payments had the fingerprints of both state and national Democratic Party leaders all over it. I’m more convinced of that now, after Newsom echoed the San Francisco motherfuNAACP in rejecting the state task force’s cash payment recommendation. Just as the NAACP did, Newsom tried to make it seem as if a cash payment would be some sort of insult to Black people. Something insufficient to remedy the situation. Something that would be better handled by funneling money to cronies to manage a few nebulous programs.
Newsom, Harris, Biden, Pelosi, Jeffries, Schumer… They were all loudly supportive when the task forces began working, but then deathly quiet once the task forces finally recommended action. For an understandable reason:
White Americans overwhelmingly voted for Trump in every election (not to mention for Republicans up and down the ballot, in every race from governor to HOA board, to dog catcher), to the tune of about 60%. If Democrats actually delivered cash payments to Black people, that 60% would probably become 28,980%, give or take.
It’s an understandable reason. But then, there usually are understandable reasons for betrayal.
The endless game
I told the interviewer, these people aren’t amateurs and they’re not stupid. Their rejection of cash payments wasn’t something they came to after a careful consideration of the task forces’ findings, it was something they knew they would do from day one. They caused Black Americans to set aside our well-earned cynicism about the country ever making good on its promises to our ancestors and to us. They caused us to hope, all the while knowing they would one day dash those hopes. But in the meantime, they could squeeze at least a couple more election cycles out of us.
I said that whether I’m right about that or not, that’s the impression they’ve created, and it’s going to take root, probably in time to help Trump win in 2024. I firmly believe in the virtue of voting for manipulative and weak when the alternative is malice and evil. Even if social justice turns out to be just words to them, words can inspire entire generations to believe that the impossible is inevitable. It can inspire younger generations to make good on the promises older generations never intended to keep.
Not enough people seemed to agree with me on that this time. Like Clyde, I’m hopeful that another four years of Trump will change that. I’ve been wondering for the past couple weeks why I’m not as devastated about the election results now as I was in 2016, even though the outcome is likely to be far worse. Then I stumbled upon that 2023 interview conducted in the wake of Newsom strangling real reparations to death, and I remembered everything I told Ms. Johnson. I knew then, that it was going to lead to this:
But it’s okay. This too shall pass, because just a few weeks ago, Newsom signed a bill apologizing for California’s participation in slavery. All is saved. I didn’t watch the signing, so I can’t tell you whether he was kneeling in a kente cloth when he did it.
I’m not sure how this next Candorville cartoon (today’s cartoon) is related to all this, but somehow I feel it is:
In 2017, the co-creators of the Game of Thrones series announced they were developing an alternate history series called Confederate. From Deadline:
“Confederate chronicles events leading to the Third American Civil War. It takes place in an alternate timeline, where the Southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution.”
Critics preemptively attacked the series as “slavery fan fiction.” HBO publicly stood by the show, but two years later, Confederate had never materialized and its creators departed for Netflix (where they created Three Body Problem and other shows).
I recall thinking in 2017 that Confederate would never air because it just wasn’t needed. We already lived in the Confederate States of America.
Neo NAZIS and disenfranchising Black people
Neo NAZIS and other white supremacists had just rallied in Charlottesville, VA. The electoral college, a vestige of a system built to reconcile the power of free and slave states, had selected the loser of the popular vote to be our president. That president was a vile bigot who put migrants in concentration camps and kidnapped their children (many of whom still haven’t been reunited with their parents). Florida wrongly purged Black voters in 2000, giving that presidency to George W. Bush.
One of the lawyers who helped prepare Bush’s legal argument in Bush v. Gore was John Roberts, who Bush later appointed as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Roberts later declared racism to be a thing of the past in the South when he and the rest of the corrupt Republican justices eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Immediately, red states that had been subject to pre-clearance under the VRA implemented concerted plans to purge Black voters and suppress the votes of those they couldn’t purge.
Half the nation systematically prevented Black people from voting, from the moment the Black Codes ended Reconstruction in the 19th Century, until the moment LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. A society that denies the vote to an entire segment of its population is not a democracy. The United States of America was an anti-democratic tyranny from its founding, until 1965 when it finally gave everyone the vote.
But then it ceased to be a democracy in the year 2000, when Florida said “not so fast.” Immediately after that, gerrymandering and then the 2014 Supreme Court decision gave the Republican Party’s voter suppression strategy the green light. The USA, the supposed paragon of democracies, was only a democracy for 35 short years.
The slave patrol police forces, the justice system, and the slavery that never ended
Our police forces evolved from the Confederacy’s slave patrols, and still operate as if one of their core mandates is to control Black bodies – to make as many of them as possible available to the privileged classes who can exploit them for their labor and for their sadistic pleasure. It’s been their mandate since the adoption of the 13th Amendment at the end of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment permitted involuntary servitudeslavery to continue, but only as a punishment for crime.
It’s not a coincidence that America imprisons more of its population than any other nation. More than 2.2 million Americans are rotting in prison precisely because the state, which operates public prisons, and the corporations, who own private prisons, have a financial incentive to make that happen.
One of the main functions of state and federal legislatures is ensuring a steady supply of criminals to feed the system. Between the end of chattel slavery and now, our lawmakers have enacted thousands of measures making much of what we do illegal. There are over 5,000 Federal statutes and over 300,000 Federal laws and regulations (who knows how many state and local ones exist) that litter the law code like land mines. Some, like assault and theft, are obvious crimes.
But most are obscure. You’ve probably unwittingly committed half a dozen crimes this week alone. For instance, in some locales, if you catch an under-sized fish in a lake and take it home, the Feds can slap you with a large fine. But if you figure out too late that the fish was undersized and you throw the dead fish away so you won’t get in trouble, that’s obstructing a Federal investigation. That crime could land you in prison. Once there, your jailers masters could rent you out to flip burgers at Arby’s for a few years.
A kinder, gentler slavery
The difference between this and chattel slavery is, children of modern-day inmates slaves are not destined to share their parents’ fate. But they are more likely to, and the system knows this. Research shows that children of incarcerated parents are six times more likely to wind up in prison themselves.
The prison industry forces prisoners to work in the prison, and it also rents them out on “work release” to clients. We already have the “modern institution” the TV show Confederate was trying to imagine. From Mission Investors Exchange:
“Prison labor in the U.S. started with convict leasing during slavery and has ballooned into a billion dollar industry that is rooted in the racially-skewed nature of excessive incarceration. The abundance and use of prison labor, rather than being challenged by legislators, has been monetized through the sale of cheap labor to companies and state-funded entities, thereby supporting the expense of expanded incarceration and providing a hidden slave labor force.
“While a small percentage of prison labor lies within one specific federally-regulated program, the vast majority exists in state, federal, and private prisons that have no centralized regulatory body. Prison labor is pervasive in the United States penal system, but the extent to which that labor is used to supply American corporations with goods and services is shrouded in secrecy.”
The modern-day plantations are ecstatic
Trump’s first term was just an appetizer for the private prison industry, which scrambled to benefit from his “zero tolerance policy” that turned refugees into inmates. Just days after Trump’s 2024 victory, private prison companies are practically orgasmic over the fortune awaiting them. From the Huffington Post:
“Private prison executives imagined tracking “millions” of people electronically, transporting hundreds of thousands by plane, and expanding detention centers. On earnings calls Thursday, private prison groups expressed a nearly unrestrained glee over what one called the “unprecedented opportunity” that a second Trump administration brings.
“Key Trump advisors have also openly discussed building mass deportation camps along the border capable of detaining tens of thousands of people at a time as judges process their deportation orders, attached to ‘constantly’ operating runways with deportation flights around the world. While Democratic presidents have also massively expanded the immigration incarceration and deportation system in recent years, Trump is proposing his own generational escalation.
“That sort of thing is music to the ears of private prison operators ― whose stock prices soared upon the projections of Trump’s second term in the White House. (On Wednesday, GEO Group was ‘the single biggest winner in the U.S. stock market — among companies of any size,’ according to the investment news site Sherwood News, which is owned by Robinhood.)”
The millions of legal and illegal immigrants (and probably Dreamers) who stand to be corralled into Trump’s concentration camps stands to increase the involuntary labor slave population in this country by an order of magnitude.
Aristotle is a Republican rock star
Aristotle was so keen on the institution of slavery that, next to Jesus and the Bible, Aristotle and his works were the most popular and influential “influencers” in the Antebellum South.
Guess who keeps talking about Aristotle these days. One guess.
MAGA is quite fond of the goofy old philosopher. As their predecessors did in the Antebellum South, MAGA refers back to that ignoramus-savant’s f***ed-up worldview to justify the caste system they mentally rope Americans into. We’ve all got a role to play in the society they envision, and it’s dictated by our innate natures. Some of us are genetically, inherently criminal. Some of us are breeding-stock.
Obviously, the straight white male’s role is to lead or to otherwise protect the sanctity of the caste system by any means necessary. Anything they do to protect that system is not only justified, it’s virtuous. Miseducating our youth, spreading misinformation via social media, or the churches, or Prager U videos, or via a right wing media ecosystem they created, is all just part of their duty. Violence, wrongful incarceration, gerrymandering, stealing Supreme Court seats, stealing Florida in 2000… all of it is in service of an Aristotelian worldview.
Most MAGA fans have probably never read Aristotle. But they’re all influenced by those who have, and by generations of thinking handed down from ancestors who were steeped in it.
The 2024 election was America America-ing
Today’s electorate is still steeped in it. MAGA has successfully persuaded much of America that preventing white kids from feeling guilt or shame (or more likely, any sense of empathy that might cause them to see the caste system as illegitimate) is more important than white kids learning lessons from accurate history. They’ve spent two decades now mocking “social justice warriors” and “wokeness.” They’ve banned books that might generate empathy among their children, who might then stray from their roles as Aristotelian guardians of the social order.
That crowd has spent decades infesting every level of power from the White House to the courts to state offices, all the way down to local school boards and HOAs. White people – including white women – have voted overwhelmingly (three times, now) for the worst and most venal career criminal to ever inhabit the White House. Many of them probably can’t put their finger on why. But they just know they’re doing the right thing.
Befriending Jaws by feeding it chum
And now a growing percentage of minorities has decided they can’t beat them, so they might as well join them.
There’s a term Gen Z uses for people like that: “Pick-me.” A pick-me does what they can to show that they’re not like the rest of their group, in the hope that the dominant caste will embrace them. They hope that by pledging their allegiance to the worldview of the dominant class, that class will recognize their value and their utility, and reward them. They imagine that will earn them the same benefits the members of that dominant caste inherit.
Africans who sold other Africans into slavery were Pick-me’s. Black soldiers who fought for the colonies rather than Britain even after Britain vowed to free them, were pick-me’s. The scores of Mexican citizens and free Blacks who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War, were all Pick-Me’s, who sought to prove they deserved a higher social status in whatever society a successful Confederacy might build. Our society’s 400-year-long history is lousy with individuals from historically marginalized groups who chose to align themselves with the white supremacist movement that’s infested and shaped our society since 1619.
Their latching onto it does not turn that movement into a benevolent, multicultural one. It turns those individuals into ramora fish who think sucking on the body of the Great White Shark will provide protection from that shark, and allow them to enjoy everything the shark enjoys. They imagine that in some way, by latching on and assuming the contours of that shark, they’ve basically become sharks themselves. If they imagine hard enough, they can forget that if they ever annoy that shark, it can shake them off and devour them.
Moving on already?
On that cheerful note, I’ll leave you with today’s Candorville:
We’re coming to the end of a four-year-wide eye of a storm. MAGApublicans have spent four years eating away the structural impediments that forced them to abort to their last attempted coup. With Elon Musk’s help, they’ve spent four long years preemptively convincing too much of America that the Deep State has rigged the 2024 election against America’s whiniest professional victim, Donald J. Trump. Starting tomorrow night, we’ll begin to discover whether they’ve rotted away enough of those old structural impediments to bring the whole house crashing down. (Continued below the cartoon…)
The threat of armed political violence MAGA poses probably won’t materialize, but it may not need to. Since 2020, MAGA stooges have overrun the legislatures and election boards in many of the “red states.” They’ve won one branch of Congress. One of them said the quiet part – that the Republican Party has given up on the concept of democracy – out loud, when he suggested it would be legitimate to simply give Trump North Carolina’s electoral votes before any votes are even counted.
The Little Secret
The “little secret” Trump alluded to sharing with the MAGA Speaker of the House is probably this poorly kept one: The red states are going to muck up the election however they can. They’ll declare voting irregularities (regardless of their existence) are concerted and overwhelming. They’ll claim some portion of the electorate was illegal immigrants, or brazenly appoint an “alternate” slate of electors who’ll vote for Trump even if Harris wins. It doesn’t matter how they’ll do it. They’ve planned to create chaos, to sue over the chaos they’ve created, and to appeal those lawsuits all the way up to the corrupt Supreme Court. Extremist Republican Supreme Court (In)justices, who’ve eagerly and repeatedly ignored precedent, laws, and even the Constitution, to issue rulings Republicans desire, are probably already writing rough drafts of their ruling, and stretching, and practicing their best straight face in the mirror, or whatever they usually do when they’re getting ready to betray the nation.
The MAGA endgame
The Court would throw the election to the House of Representatives. Even if Democrats retake the House, there’s no guarantee that they’d be able to stop the House from stealing the election for Trump, because every state’s delegation would get only one vote. Wyoming’s congressional delegation consists of one representative. Wyoming would get one vote. California’s delegation consists of fifty-two representatives. California would also get just one vote. Red states outnumber the blue. You can guess the outcome of that vote.
If Republicans successfully game the system this way, Harris can win both the popular vote and the electoral college, and still lose. There’s not a lot the blue states could do about it, short of seceding from the Union and starting a civil war. And since Republicans own most of the private arsenals in this country, that probably wouldn’t be a war democracy fans would win.
The Good News
The good news is that something like this requires hundreds of people to have nerves of steel. Dozens of those people are bound to decide that turning the USA into a MAGA utopia is not worth the risk. If they fail, they can expect to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or more) hiring criminal defense attorneys, and they’d face years or decades in prison. In the end, many of these cogs in the MAGA machine are going to prioritize their own freedom, and the machine will grind to a whimpering halt.
My wife and I have been married for ten years, so I’ve heard “where would you be without me?” a number of times. Early on, I would answer that question honestly. I was blissfully unaware that it was supposed to be rhetorical. She wasn’t interested in gaming out scenarios alternate-me was experiencing in alternate timelines. She simply wanted me to say I needed her in my life. That her presence had somehow changed me.
I have a vague recollection of the before-times — the year when I was single after the dissolution of my first marriage. During that year, I always seemed to know exactly what I wanted for dinner and what movie I wanted to watch. I also knew where my socks were at all times. I knew which outfits looked best on me, I knew how to decorate my home, and I knew what colors looked best on my walls. Ten years later, my wife’s begun informing me that I’ve apparently off-loaded most of those functions to her like she’s an external hard drive, to free up resources in my own brain for other mental computations. I think that’s one reason breakups (no, we’re not breaking up) leave us feeling untethered and hollowed out. We’ve lost our external hard drive and have to recreate the data we lost bit by bit.
Which is how a relationship is supposed to be, I guess. We each focus on what we do best. That’s probably why opposites attract. Person A is happy to let person B take charge of the aspects of their lives Person B is good at, because person A isn’t interested in mastering it anyway, and vice versa. Makeda hasn’t taken out the trash or plunged a toilet in a decade, and I think it’s been just as long since I knew where my clothes were without asking someone (and I know she’s been moving them around just to make sure I need her to find them — it’s the only logical explanation).
Get your copy of the brand new, eighth Candorville collection: “Color-Blinded“!
INSIDE:The 8th collection of the syndicated comic strip “Candorville” by Darrin Bell. Lemont’s a single dad raising a mysteriously smart two year old. He’s also a journalist single-handedly running one of the top news sites in the country. Will he figure out how to cover breaking news in Uganda and Russia, interview every buffoon in the 2016 presidential race, and win the never-ending struggle to get his toddler to go to sleep at night, while still trying to find the perfect woman? Will he figure out how to explain to his son why he’s supposed to respect the police, when the police don’t seem to face any repercussions for killing so many unarmed people who look just like his dad? Meanwhile, despite his best efforts, people start to wonder if the dumb “thug” C-Dog is secretly the smartest, most morally upstanding man in the neighborhood. At the ad agency, Susan discovers why her boss won’t ever let her fire her evil, conniving assistant. And Lemont accompanies the recently-departed comedian Robin Williams on his final journey.
Contains more than 500 comics, an introduction about Black Lives Matter and police brutality, and an article about the Robin Williams story arc. Many of the strips are also annotated by the author.
To order:
Get the Kindle e-Book edition ($2.99) or the annotated paperback edition ($19.99) straight from AMAZON
…or you can buy an autographed edition ($30+shipping) right here:
Get your copy of the brand new, eighth Candorville collection: “Color-Blinded“!
INSIDE:The 8th collection of the syndicated comic strip “Candorville” by Darrin Bell. Lemont’s a single dad raising a mysteriously smart two year old. He’s also a journalist single-handedly running one of the top news sites in the country. Will he figure out how to cover breaking news in Uganda and Russia, interview every buffoon in the 2016 presidential race, and win the never-ending struggle to get his toddler to go to sleep at night, while still trying to find the perfect woman? Will he figure out how to explain to his son why he’s supposed to respect the police, when the police don’t seem to face any repercussions for killing so many unarmed people who look just like his dad? Meanwhile, despite his best efforts, people start to wonder if the dumb “thug” C-Dog is secretly the smartest, most morally upstanding man in the neighborhood. At the ad agency, Susan discovers why her boss won’t ever let her fire her evil, conniving assistant. And Lemont accompanies the recently-departed comedian Robin Williams on his final journey.
Contains more than 500 comics, an introduction about Black Lives Matter and police brutality, and an article about the Robin Williams story arc. Many of the strips are also annotated by the author.
To order:
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I’m sharing this Batman v Superman review because it’s representative of pretty much every negative review of the film. An entertaining critic who generally gives thoughtful reviews gives a few valid critiques, but ultimately seems to have not paid attention to huge chunks of the film. And seems not to remember that part of a film critic’s job is to look for metaphors (maybe because, as good as Marvel’s films have been, they seem to be straight-forward, relatively metaphor-free and easy to understand, and they may have trained us all to expect that from superhero movies).
Watch this review, and then read my own beneath it. If you haven’t yet seen the movie, there are MASSIVE SPOILERS ahead, so don’t watch the video and don’t read on…
Still there? Ok:
One of this critic’s main gripes is that Batman kills people in this movie. Several people. Well, Batman’s been murdering people left and right in films ever since 1989’s Batman (where he did it with a psychotic smirk. Go back and watch it). This Batman’s body count isn’t any higher than Keaton’s, or even Bale’s. This is as strange as all those people who claimed “Superman doesn’t kill” when Superman’s killed plenty of times (even killing Zod twice in the comics and again in Donner’s Superman II… again with the psychotic smirk that we all found charming at the time. Maybe it was an Eighties thing.).
The critic says the movie didn’t even attempt to explain why Batman’s moral code has been abandoned. Of COURSE it explained why his moral code had eroded over the years. Bruce delivered an entire monologue about it to Alfred, just after Alfred (contrary to what this guy says) told him he was going too far.
If the critic’s real complaint is that Batman doesn’t seem to feel any *guilt* over the killings, well, maybe. But here’s the thing: that’s one of the main themes of the movie! Possibly THE main theme! It’s the reason your gut is probably telling you this was more a Batman movie than a Superman one: it was about *Bruce’s* painful journey into darkness and back out again.
Batman’s taken a step into the dark side. Alfred warns him that his branding criminals and becoming more ruthless is crossing a line. He told him that sort of thing is what turns good men bad. Bruce himself said it’s rare that good men (at least in Gotham) remain good, and whether he knew it or not, it was pretty clear to the audience (the audience that was paying attention) that he was also referring to himself. The movie was showing us that Bruce was at a crossroads. Seeing Superman as a two-dimensional alien monster who needed to be murdered was representative of that, and if he’d gone through with it there may have been no coming back for him.
Zack Snyder brilliantly shocked Batman back into his senses during the moment that most critics seem not to have understood at all (and if they did understand it, they just didn’t appreciate it): the moment when Batman was stunned just by hearing Superman utter the name “Martha.” And here is where the film is at least an order of magnitude smarter than its most vehement critics:
“Martha” was not just Martha.
In Bruce’s nightmares, his mother Martha represented the good in him. We didn’t see her get shot over and over again just to remind us Bruce had a traumatic childhood. The repetition of that nightmare was to show us the goodness in Bruce being snuffed out by the surrounding evil. When the dream finally showed the light fading from Martha’s eyes, and Bruce’s father whispered “Martha” with his own dying breath, that was a *metaphor* for Bruce completely losing his way. Bruce knew this himself on some level. That’s why hearing Superman also whisper “Martha” just before he was about to die gave Bruce pause.
The necessity of murdering Superman had been a two-dimensional, black and white matter to him. But then Superman said the one word that reminded Batman of the goodness that was supposed to be within him. And Lois (the reporter, a metaphor for “the truth”) dived between them, literally adding a third dimension to the fight. This combination forced Batman to see Superman not as an alien object to be destroyed, but as a person with a human mother — a person who, even as Batman was about to murder him, was only worried about the safety of his own “Martha.” A person who was BEGGING Batman to save her once he’s gone. That’s why Batman threw away the kryptonite spear and swore “Martha will not die tonight” (metaphor, people); he didn’t just decide to save Clark’s mom, he decided to save *himself.* To pull himself back from the precipice.
The resulting fight with Batman alone in the darkness facing more than a dozen killers, culminating in him shielding Martha (who was now the personification of goodness) with his body from the exploding flame thrower couldn’t have been a more blatant visual metaphor for his jaded, blind rage at last being burned away in a crucible. That was the significance of Bruce NOT branding Lex at the end. The encounter with Superman and Bruce’s choice to save “Martha” had restored him to the man he’d always tried to be.
It’s just astounding to me that very few professional critics seem to have noticed any of that. They’ve been too busy saying how confused they were, and how disappointed they were that it wasn’t a simpler story, to even bother dissecting the abundant – and expertly deployed – visual metaphors. I remember a time when that’s the sort of thing critics loved to discuss. I remember a time when critics saw a “confusing” movie and were eager to find the meaning in it, instead of annoyed (or even oblivious to the fact) that they were being asked to.
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INSIDE:Lemont’s written a memoir, but when Susan gets to the part where Lemont explains how he and the demon La Llorona accidentally caused the end of the world, Susan questions his sanity. Also, can couple’s counseling fix Lemont’s dysfunctional relationship with his television? After discovering she was Phil Anders’ “other woman,” will Susan give the jerk a second chance. or will she find true love thanks to the sure-fire Date-a-Dude.com profile Lemont writes for her? When Susan runs afoul of the cops in Arizona, can she talk them out of deporting her to Mexico? Plus, Lemont’s political blog explodes, but can he win the war at home where it’s his need for a good night’s sleep vs. his baby boy’s pathological need to jump on the bed all night long? And lastly, Lemont accompanies a 94-year-old World War II veteran on his final journey.
Contains more than 470 comics, the author’s 2008 election night blog post about watching the election of the first black president with his 90 year-old grandfather, as well as his account of the last few months he was able to spend with his grandfather as his caretaker.
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Our police forces evolved from the Confederacy’s slave patrols, and still operate as if one of their core mandates is to control Black bodies – to make as many of them as possible available to the privileged classes who can exploit them for their labor and for their sadistic pleasure. It’s been their mandate since the adoption of the 13th Amendment at the end of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment permitted 
