Originally published November 19, 1993, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1044
“Is Doc Samson Jewish?”
The alarmed question was posed to me several years ago. It was coming from a concerned, and even slightly confused, assistant editor on The Incredible Hulk.
What had prompted the query was the plot that I had just turned in. Bruce and Betty Banner, on the run from the army (what else is new?), had taken Shakespeare’s advice and gotten themselves to a nunnery. The gag that I had then developed was that the Mother Superior, taking offense at the multiple guns pointed towards the nunnery, had stormed out and confronted the commanding officer. The CO, as the writer would have it, had attended Catholic school. Thus I was depicting this big, tough army guy quaking before this nun that was twice his age and half his height.
I then needed to advance the story. And Doc Samson was just standing around, so I figured that I’d have him handle the nun.
How to do it?
An easy way sprang to mind.
“Leonard Samson,” I said out loud. Yup. Sure sounded like it could be a Jewish name. Doctor Leonard Samson. “My son, the doctor,” I could almost hear his mother clucking proudly.
Why not?
So I write Doc Samson striding forward and saying placatingly to the CO, “Don’t worry. I attended a Yeshiva. The only thing that intimidates me is a really tough rabbi.”
I wrote the rest of the plot, sent it in…
And got the concerned call from the assistant editor.
“Why not?” I asked, falling back on the usual Jewish tactic of answering a question with another question. “Doesn’t `Leonard Samson’ sound Jewish to you?”
“Has he been established as Jewish?” asked the AE.
“We’re establishing it now,” I told him.
There was a pause.
“Can we do that?” he asked.
Can we do that? I wondered. What a novel concept. Establishing a character as worshipping something other than death or violence. Not enough that I’d established Betty as Catholic; now Doc Samson was a Jew. It’s not like I was contradicting any continuity. We’d never shown Doc celebrating Christmas. Lord knew that the matter of whether he was circumcised had never reared its head.
“I don’t see why we can’t,” I told him.
Another pause.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay,” he said. “If you’re sure,” he said.
“I’m sure,” I told him.
And lo and behold, Doc Samson became Jewish.
That’s how I usually wind up developing any sort of ethnic background for a character that is other than WASP. I toss it in because it seems like a good idea at the time.
Unfortunately, this is not a country that adores good ideas.
People of specific ethnic groups will frequently complain that they are not being represented in the entertainment media. Not in comics, not in TV or movies.
Certainly, lots of statistics can be trotted out to support this view. Reasons for it are harder to come by.
The most obvious, of course, is lack of imagination. When writers produce fiction, invariably they create reflections of themselves. Characters are frequently splintered, disguised shards of their creators. And if the majority of creators are white males, then the natural and immediate tendency is to favor white male characters. That’s not meant as an excuse, but merely an observation of the creative process. One has to take the extra time to say, “There’s no reason this character has to be white. He can be black. He can be Hispanic. He can be Asian. He can be she.” Whatever.
Another reason, however, is a more insidious one:
It’s a pain in the butt.
Garry Trudeau did a story arc in a recent Doonesbury in which the Dean of a college riddled with special interest groups decided to “desegregate” the school. Rarely has Trudeau been more bang-on target than with that particular run. This country is called the United States of America. The key word is “United.” And we are becoming more and more splintered. This splintering has left millions of chips, and they’re being sported on millions of shoulders.
There is a great temptation to keep comic book heroes—indeed, all fictional heroes—as vanilla pudding as possible. Why? Because it’s safe. Because you know you won’t offend anyone.
I wanted to have characters in X-Factor engage in spirited political debates and was told I couldn’t. To ally any character with any one point of view meant that a reader who didn’t share that point of view might no longer like that character.
And political agendas aren’t the half of it. The fact is that when you present any character who is other than WASP, you’re opening the door for hassles.
Thus far, in my writing career, I’ve been accused of being gutless in portraying homosexuals; of presenting insulting stereotypes of Hispanics and Japanese; and—my personal favorite—of being anti-Semitic.
Boy… and that’s for someone who’s been a liberal democrat since the age of eighteen. Could you imagine if I were a right-wing conservative?
How did I get this marvelous rep? Let’s explore each example:
1) Peter the Anti-Semite: While writing a Star Trek novel called Imzadi, I found myself at a story point where I had to introduce a bunch of alien raiders. Naturally I had to give them names. I wanted the names to sound remotely like they belonged together, but unusual. Sam or Fred wouldn’t do.
I did what I always do when casting about for names. I looked around my office to see what caught my eye.
I was writing the novel during Passover, and I happened to glance to the left of my computer. And there was a Haggadah, left over from the previous night’s Seder.
I flipped it open to the diagram with the Passover plate and, moments later, had named all the characters after things on the plate. I thought it would be an amusing in-joke for Jewish readers. Just think: Our heroes being menaced by guys whose names meant things like “Bitter Herb” or “Lamb Shank.”
The joke, as I expected, went right past the goyim at Paramount, and the book saw print.
And reviewers started calling Pocket Books, and several fans wrote in, wanting to know about this anti-Semitic so-and-so who had named these villainous characters after the food on the Passover plate.
I contacted each and every one of them personally to let them know just how the whole thing came about. It literally never occurred to me that anyone would think it anti-Semitic. I mean, the whole purpose of anti-Semitism is to make Jews look bad to gentiles. So how could a joke that only Jews would get possibly be considered the work of a Jew hater?
Beats me. But I still get questions about it.
2) Peter and the Gutless Gay Portrayal: I wrote an issue of Hulk about AIDS. In the course of the story, there was a couple of characters who were clearly gay lovers. I forget their names: Let’s call them Tony and Doug. When Rick Jones met them, Tony said, “Hi, I’m Tony. And this is my companion, Doug.”
Which brought down the wrath of a number of critics who said that I was being politically correct, and that the gutsy thing would have been to have Tony say, “Hi, I’m Tony. And this is my lover, Doug.”
Number one, that sounded bizarre to me, because I’d never had anyone introduce someone of either gender as their “lover.” Maybe I’m old fashioned, but that seems far too intimate a term for a casual introduction. So I thought “companion” was the more appropriate, natural term.
Number two, I figured that if I had the words “gay lover” appear in the book, that the panel would be pulled out and run on CNN, causing a tremendous brouhaha and potential grief for other writers at Marvel. So I didn’t do it.
A couple months later, Scott Lobdell did so in Alpha Flight, and everything I predicted would happen did happen.
3) Peter the portrayer of Hispanic stereotypes: When I was developing the alter ego (and supporting cast) for Spider-Man 2099, I decided I wanted to go as far away from the All-American whitebread Peter Parker as I could. So I created Cable. (Whoops. Sorry. Wrong column.) So I created Miguel O’Hara: half Mexican, half Irish. I felt there were too few portrayals of people with any Hispanic or Mexican blood. And, more often than not, they were so Hispanic you could fry a tamale on them. They’d greet people with lines like, “How joo doin’?”
This proposal brought a double take from the editorial office, but the decision was made to go ahead with the notion. Thus the flagship character of the entire 2099 line was as utterly un-WASP as you could get.
I figured, that should shut the critics up.
It didn’t.
A letter that saw print in CBG several weeks ago (a similar one had been sent to me some weeks before that and remains in my pile of about 300 letters to respond to) complained of how the portrayal of Miguel’s mother, trapped in an abusive marriage, was a negative and stereotyped portrayal of Hispanic women. There was also complaining about depicting Miguel joining a gang.
The latter complaint I didn’t understand at all. Miguel had joined no gang. Neither had his brother. I wondered if perhaps the reader was seeing a different comic than I was writing.
The former complaint I thought was the height of irony. In my career, I have shown three different instances of women trapped in abusive marriages. In the first two instances, the women were—you should pardon the expression—generic white women. No protest was raised on the basis of race. But doing the exact same subject matter in Spidey 2099 prompted grievances, purely because the woman was Mexican. There was no similar outcry from Irish fans from the unflattering depiction of Mr. O’Hara.
What is most intriguing is that the situation was based on a real-life couple. The only difference? In real life, it was the man who was Mexican and the woman who was Irish. I can just imagine the reaction I would have gotten if I’d made the abusive husband Mexican. Oh, that would have gone down a lot better.
4) Peter the Japan basher: I was concerned that the Specialist, a Samurai assassin also created for Spider-Man 2099, would draw fire from Japanese readers, as might the notion that a Japanese conglomerate had bought out Stark Enterprises.
I was wrong.
Who attracted the ire of Japanese readers?
Hiro and Larry.
Who are Hiro and Larry? The two camera-toting Japanese tourists wandering through the pages of Incredible Hulk.
First there was a petition against them. And then the editor, Mr. Bob Chase (not to be confused with Ms. Bobbie Chase) received a letter of protest from the Japanese American Citizens League, “this nation’s largest Asian American civil rights organization,” citing poor Hiro and Larry as being “inappropriate,” “insensitive,” and serving to exacerbate “negative stereotypical characters” that ultimately lead to “anti-Asian sentiment and violence committed against Asian Americans.”
I read this letter and couldn’t believe it.
I mean, I hope I’m not sounding insensitive here—but has anyone in the JACL walked down the streets of New York during the tourist season? I can just see it: JACL reps running up to Japanese tourists and saying, “For God’s sake, put that camera away! Don’t you know you’re a stereotype?” For that matter, there was one comics convention where, about half a dozen times, I ran into the same two Japanese guys, carrying cameras. And they posed with me every time, chattering excitedly in Japanese. Am I supposed to look down my nose at them because they don’t fit the image of the Japanese that others have decided they must adhere to?
OK, I could see their point if Hiro and Larry were speaking pidgen English or something. (“Rook! Rook! Eetsa big gleen guy!”) But we had them speaking Japanese (not the greatest lettered Japanese, true, but our letterer gave it his best shot). And the dialogue, for anyone taking the trouble to translate it, was completely off the wall. The second time they showed up, one of them said, “Look! We’re making our second appearance! One more time and we get our own limited series!”) If that’s not going to great extremes to show respect, I don’t know what is.
The point of all this is that special interest groups or oversensitive readers act as watchdogs, and do it with such zeal that it becomes overkill. A character with any ethnicity is going to be watched carefully, motivations and actions pored over to make certain that it all fits in with the notions of what is politically correct.
The argument will always be made that, because there are so few representations of (fill in your preferred group here) in the media, then those that do appear should be free of blemish and possible insult. But it’s a vicious cycle, because so much potential aggravation awaits anyone who dares enter the realm of (fill in your preferred special interest group here). Easier to stick to WASPs—which means (fill in—oh, you get the idea) is going to continue to complain about underrepresentation, and here we go ’round the Mulberry Bush again.
It’s hardly limited to comics, of course. As I noted a year ago, gays protested Basic Instinct, when my feeling was that police officers had far better grounds for protest. (Then again, at least gays have a sense of humor sometimes. The new “Magic Earring Ken” has been embraced by the gay community as the most conspicuously fey doll in the history of toys because it looks gay. Stereotypically so. Now if it had been marketed as “Gay Ken,” or Ken’s gay brother Bob, there would have been massive protests. As it is, it’s selling briskly to an audience that was not exactly the target market.)
Then there’s the tempest in the teapot of Ted Danson’s blackface gig at the Friar’s Club Roast for Whoopi Goldberg. “It crossed the line,” we are told, totally ignoring the fact that the whole point of the Friar’s Club is to cross the line. If you’re Jewish, they make Jew jokes. If you’re fat, fat jokes. Bald, bald jokes. And if you’re black, that’s what will be targeted. Cripes, it’s not like Danson showed up looking like Al Jolson at a memorial service for Martin Luther King.
This country has no sense of humor. Like most individuals with no sense of humor, we think we have one—but we don’t.
Humor, by definition, revolts against the status quo, because humor invariably finds someone or something and makes fun of it. And we laugh until the humorist hits too close to home, at which point we pull back and say, “Well, that’s not funny.” But if humor is indeed revolutionary, then we’re put in mind of what John Adams said in 1776, namely: “This is a revolution, dammit! We’re going to have to offend somebody!”
What’s amazing is that America was founded by people fleeing religious persecution. In other words: They didn’t want someone else telling them what to think. So what have we got now? A national mindset geared around people telling other people how to view each other, how to handle each other—in short, how to think.
As for me…
Well, the next issue of Incredible Hulk reveals that one of the members of the Pantheon is gay. We don’t say the word “gay” or “homosexual,” but it’s incredibly obvious from the context.
I guess I’m just too liberal or too dumb to learn.
Keep those cards and letters of protest coming in.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, singles out no particular groups for approbation. He is an equal opportunity destroyer.)
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As only a sporadic reader of comics at the time, I had no idea until today that Leonard Samson was Jewish. But you know what, it does make sense and it fits with his already established personality very easily.
It makes perfect sense that Leonard Samson is Jewish. I believe I’d always assumed that. He’s based on Jewish mythology, after all.
I don’t see the tsimmis here. Ben Grimm’s a Jew. Benjamin Jacob Grimm. Does that define him? No. Being a big walking pile of orange rocks does that. Len Samson is what he is.
You’re right, Peter. This country has no sense of humor by and large.
I, on the other hand, have a great sense of humor, and the Passover aliens was a terrific gag.
I had forgotten about the Ted Danson bit. I do remember the Japanese tourist “controversy.”
I remember your final response to JACL. It was truly wonderful.
Leonard Samson jewish??
Sorry, but that makes no sense at all. I’ve known several jewish in my life, and none of them had green hair.
He’s related to Krusty the Clown.
I tend to look for Hebrew words to show up in your books. They make me laugh. People thought that was anti-semetic? Sheesh, even when I first read Imzadi it made me laugh. (And it was right after it came out, so I was 12 or 13 at the time.)
Sometimes I think people want to be offended. :/
That’s pretty common, yeah. It’s often because someone is looking for an “acceptable” direction for airing offense that should have another target. It’s easier to take shots at a distant target than one feared for the possibility of retaliation.
Y’know, I always liked Miguel O’Hara’s ethnicity more than most non-WASP comics characters. Maybe it’s because I’m mainly of Irish decent and my wife is a full-blooded, Spanish-speaking Mexican from Texas. When I tell people we have potato burritos for breakfast, they think I’m making a joke about the mixed cultures, but I’m not…and they’re delicious.
Preach the truth Rich. Check out the special features on the deluxe DVD for Sin City. Robert Rodriguez potato breakfast burritos have become a staple in our house. Don’t forget a couple serrano peppers in there…
I wonder if this is pretty much the same way writers feel today with established characters at Marvel and DC. I would imagine that there has been some improvement, at least with regards to homosexual characters in independent comics (or new characters) because there are more of them in comics now. With other “groups” there’s probably been little progress in this area.
As for the Ted Danson thing, I watch the comedy central roasts whenever they come out and they make tons of black jokes, gay jokes, and whatever else is recent and offensive (Heath Ledger, Gary Coleman, etc.) as they can come up with, and it’s usually pretty funny. Still, if somebody wore black-face to one they would probably get ridiculed for crossing a line, just as if a white person said the “n” word. Regardless of my feelings on the issue, it seems like it will be quite some time before anything like that is considered acceptable in any context.
What was the reaction at the time when it was revealed that Ben Grimm was Jewish? I wasn’t reading the FF back then, and if there was an uproar about it, I don’t recall.
Are there any atheists in mainstream comics? The only times I can even vaguely recall reading any, they were generally there to be straw men in a thinly disguised minor pro-faith theme in a book.
Wolverine, for one, is an atheist. Although I wonder if he doesn’t fall in the strawman category, since his lack of faith is often mentioned when he talks with this blue teleporter guy.
I have limited knwledge about DC characters, but Mr Terrific from the JSA seem to be well known for his atheism.
I remember that because those people who want to be offended pretended that conservative writer Bill Willingham was going to kill him or turn him into a believer after a “comics fake death experience”.
I’d forgotten about Mr. Terrific, though I think he’d have to fall into the straw man category because he was later shown being visited by the spirit of his dead wife as proof of a higher power.
Of course, that’s kind of the catch 22 of a fictional comics world where there ARE higher powers that interact with the populace on a daily basis.
In particular I rather liked one of the fights between the X-men and Dracula for that very reason. Wolverine makes a cross with his claws and Dracula laughs if off, saying that it’s not the cross, it’s the force of the belief of the wielder. At which point Kurt picks ups a small cross saying, “But I, Monster, *I* believe.” — causing Dracula great pain.
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Good Stuff.
For a long time, the original Starman (Ted Knight) was shown as atheist in James Robinson’s STARMAN, shrugging off the Spectre and other magical heroes as manipulators of some sort of energy science still doesn’t understand, but someday will. But in the end he died and went to the piece of heaven reserved for heroes, and had a afterlife conversation with his son, so it was sort of “straw man.”
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The original Quasar, Wendell Vaughn, also was shown as atheist in his 1990s series. I seem to remember it was showcased when his father died, and he said that dead was dead, and that both him and his dad didn’t believe in God (his Mom was a believer). And I think he remained an atheist.
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Wolverine is probably the most popular character that could be considered an atheist, but it has always been inconsistent. He has also often been linked to eastern mysticism and philosophy (though I remember reading that you could be a philosophical buddhist AND an atheist?)
Technically you can be a Buddhist and an atheist, since Buddhists don’t claim divinity for Buddha, but most atheists shy away from the mysticism of Buddhism due to its lacking the same verifiability as other religious beliefs. Philosophically, you can certainly have Buddhist leanings (particularly Zen)and maintain an atheistic stance.
And yes, I concur that Robinson set up the elder Knight as an atheist so he could knock him down. Again, though, I’d forgotten about Quasar’s dad. That may be the one logically explained, staunch atheist in comics I can recall.
Rich has a good point–in both the marvel and DC universe God exists. Or, at the very least, something every bit as godlike as God.
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being an atheist in either universe would be pretty pointless. What’s your beef? There’s no such thing as the afterlife/ Pretty funny coming from folks who have returned from the dead at least 6 or 7 times on average. reject the supernatural for science? tough toodles, the supernatural is at LEAST as real as science. Just ask Dr Strange or Morpheus. If they aren’t too busy talking to God.
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We have religious nuts. In comics, you’d almost have to be nuts not to be religious.
You guys are forgetting the way ‘Starman’ ended. When Jack Knight met his father, Ted, in the afterlife, he was _still_ an atheist; to his mind, the fact that he had a post-death existence wasn’t, by itself, proof that religion had it right. He planned to spend the rest of eternity performing a scientific investigation of his own spirit to find out what was really going on. Far from being a straw man, he was a wonderful example of someone who didn’t get a forced “road to Damascus” moment.
Rich: I’m not entirely sure I agree with the atheist/Buddhist combination, though I’ve heard of it before. Just to emphasize: I’m literally and truly not sure.
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My brother is an atheist (I’m Catholic – and before you ask we get along great) and he’s pretty sure of the idea that it requires NO belief system of any kind. The same goes for my atheist friend from college who gets upset with the confusion over what is and is not an atheist.
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If leanings and teachings can be held then couldn’t someone be of any religion? The life lessons are just as (if not more) important than what happened in the past. Of course, this doesn’t work if you’re Catholic and actually have to profess the details of your faith at every mass.
Also, since people noted the oddity of atheists in the Marvel universe (actually this applies to ALL religions in the Marvel universe…all hail Thor!… And abstract cosmic entities!… And Jack Kirby from that Fantastic Four comic!)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FlatEarthAtheist
Jeff M said:I’m not entirely sure I agree with the atheist/Buddhist combination, though I’ve heard of it before. Just to emphasize: I’m literally and truly not sure.
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My brother is an atheist (I’m Catholic – and before you ask we get along great) and he’s pretty sure of the idea that it requires NO belief system of any kind.
Atheists have lots of beliefs. The only stipulation is that they don’t believe in a deity or deities. There are atheists who believe that Bigfoot is tromping around in the woods and aliens sticking probes up peoples butts on a routine basis.
What you may be thinking of are skeptics. Skeptics and atheists are often one and the same, but while every hard core skeptic is an atheist, the reverse is not true.
Your brother is correct though. It requires no belief, but it doesn’t preclude all belief. Thus you can indeed have a Buddhist atheist, but not a Buddhist skeptic.
Tony Stark has stated on a number of occasions that he does not believe in gods, however it has usually been in relation to Thor and the like (he thinks of them as a sort of alien/creature from another dimension).
I remember Tony Stark’s atheism specifically during the “Infinity Crusade” when the Goddess character tried to convert him. (I also remember that at the end of the first Infinity Gauntlet, Adam Warlock gained ultimate power (Thanos described himself as God when he had it) and had an argument with certain heroes right after it. The Hulk, the Eric Masterson version of thor, the silver Surfer, and Doctor Strange if I recall. Something about how they’ve always lived at the behest of greater powers, but before the Gauntlet, they were “Benign, and unfocused.” Sort of an atheist materialist belief the way it was described.
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I also remember reading all of the Starman comic and I don’t think Ted Knight ever commented on the spiritual aspects of the afterlife whil having a last conversation with his son; mostly it was, “I love you, I’m with your mother now, and here is your last mission as Starman.”
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Rorscharch in the Watchmen was portrayed as a somewhat nihilistic atheist; I can’t think of too many other atheists in comics off the top of my head. The police officer Atticus in Gotham city was portrayed as an atheist at times, but we also saw him praying with his family, and he became the Spectre. I guess in the Star Trek comics you have a general Atheism, mirroring Gene Roddenberry’s worldview, although there are Klingon, Bajoran, and Ferengi belif systems (and I remember a Native American belief system in an episode of Star Trek TNG.)
It really is dámņëd if you do, dámņëd if you don’t. Don’t put in minority characters, and you get flack for not being diverse enough. Put them in, and you get flack for not doing them right.
None of this, of course, deterred me from making my latest protagonist a black woman. Because that’s how she appeared in my head.
The problem I have with ethnicities in comics isn’t usually with their portrayals; it’s that writer’s fiat or just plain editorial circumstance seems to target them. Ethnic heroes seem to be killed or sidelined far more frequently per capita than others. The new Atom was recently murdered. The Arabian Knight was killed in a one-panel offing in Thunderbolts. The Falcon and War Machine both retired for several years until their partners, Captain America and Iron Man, enjoyed new popularity. The Hispanic, female Wildcat and the Black, female Dr. Midnight were killed by Eclipso.
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I realize none of these characters were fan favorites (Though I really liked Wildcat. She was the first Hispanic woman character that I remember that wasn’t a devout, angst-ridden Catholic stereotype), but it’s almost as though there’s a rule against ethnic heroes who aren’t currently in the spotlight of a regular series being allowed to operate as heroes. I mean, Infinity, Inc. introduced the new Wildcat and Midnight along with the new white, male Hourman (who also didn’t catch on at the time), but which one of the three managed to survive?
I don’t think editorial targets them. I think what they really target is minor, supporting characters. Whenever the newest bad guy arrives, they have to find some lesser known heroes to be sacrificed to make new villain look dangerous.
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The real problem is that many ethnic heroes are lesser known and/or substitute versions of white heroes, making them disposable when a sacrificial lamb is needed. I’d rather attribute Hourman’s survival as luck. Many male, white heroes that are minor have been killed or maimed in “events” too.
Was there ever any feedback or complaint on the issue of Legends of the DC Universe that was supposed to be Crisis issue 4.5? The one with the multi-cultural Justice League? I always thought that issue brought out very clearly just how white-washed “our” JLA really is.
Of course, now I have to run out to my car and get my Imzadi CD’s.
See, PAD? This is why people just worship The Incredible Hulk. In the beginning, there was nothing. Then He said, “Hulk Smash.” Then nothing was broken. The end.
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As a Catholic I can say that there have been just as many retcons to the Bible as there have been to Hulk’s mythos over the years.
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As for rights groups overreacting, I’m pretty sure in modern political instances I’m more at odds with those groups than I’m with them but I always remember that they are fighting a persistent, ancient enemy (intolerance).
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Yes, sometimes they come off as obnoxious but I think there’s an intentional need to overreact and not give any ground so that they can achieve some kind of balance. They are, essentially, attempting to realign a world that’s been in disarray for millennia. As for how much realigning must be done today, well that’s where the headaches and political debates start.
>”I always remember that they are fighting a persistent, ancient enemy (intolerance).”
Yes, and often fighting it with intolerance. Somehow this seems self-defeating. This is a big part of the reason why I’m opposed to the so-called ethnic ‘quotas’. Teaching people that discrimination is wrong by indulging in discrimination really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The message – however unintentional – you’re sending out as far as many people are concerned is that discrimination is indeed fine. Depending on who it sides with. Same problem with intolerance where, for example, some store chains were instructing their staff not to wish customers “Merry Christmas” up here because it might offend non-Christians. You can imagine the backlash this deservedly provoked.
Regarding quotas, I used to think it was a terrible idea. Hëll, in theory it still sounds like a terrible idea. But I suppose that as I got older, I realized that if a ideologically crappy idea has only positive results in real life, then why not do it.
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In my country, ethnic quotas started a decade ago influenced by the US already have created a new middle-class of educated, influential blacks. And they don’t seem to be any less competent at their jobs than whites. And no, I don’t see how whites are being harmed, when they’re still more than 90% of the workforce in jobs that pay well. And I also don’t see any increase in racism due to quotas and policital correctness.
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So, I don’t see the downside of quotas in real life, practical terms.
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I agree with you about Christmas, though. There may be things in Christianity that are worth fighting against, but I don’t understand how something as festive and positive and harmless as Christmas is one of them.
Same problem with intolerance where, for example, some store chains were instructing their staff not to wish customers “Merry Christmas” up here because it might offend non-Christians. You can imagine the backlash this deservedly provoked.
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Well, here’s the problem: If someone wishes me “Merry Christmas,” I just nod and say, “Same to you” But there are other people who don’t celebrate Christmas and feel that their beliefs are being given short shrift if someone just assumes they celebrate the birth of Jesus (who, for that matter, apparently wasn’t born December 25 anyway.) Now obviously if a town council wants to pass a law banning saying “Merry Christms” in the streets, then they’re quite obviously out of their minds. But if you’re a retailer, it’s not unreasonable not to want to risk insulting customers.
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I could see a store chain-wide mandate that simply substitutes “Happy Holidays” for Merry Christmas. But the alternative is to trust your staff to be able to make snap judgments as to who is likely to be celebrating Christmas and who isn’t. They’re certainly on safe ground if the customer is wearing a cross or is buying Christmas decorations. Beyond that, it’s best guess, and some of these sales folks aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box.
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PAD
Problem is, with “Happy Holidays” you’ll probably be insulting costumers who are hardline Christians that think their beliefs are under attack by weak-kneed liberals.
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So, it’s a lose-lose situation.
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And it takes us to the original point of the column. There will always be a-holes that take offense at everything, even something as harmless as a holiday greeting.
Rene – Perhaps the fact that I wound up years ago with a supervisor who everyone felt was hired specifically to fill quotas (female and visible minority – two birds with one stone as some put it) and they mayt have been right because she was terrible at managing people (two consultants quit their contracts rather than have to go on working for her and one term employee refused to have her term extended for the same reason) and not much better at programming. The section practically cheered when she transferred to another Department. I am NOT saying this is the usual. In fact it is very likely a minuscule exception. But it poisoned the process for a lot of people who now can’t help thinking “how good can they really be if they had to get in via quotas?” Is it fair? Of course not. But I’ll bet it’s true that people think that way a lot more often than we’d like. This can’t be good. And then there are those who do get in that way. How many feel it’s great to have the job … only … did they really get it on merit, or was it to fill a quota slot? I know it would bother me if I thought this was the case where I was concerned. Too, quotas assume that there a sufficiency of adequately trained people who WANT the job. Ontario’s top cop put out a requirement that police forces in the province be made up of a proportionately representative ethnic mix. Sounded great in theory, unworkable in practice. Just one example being the refugee/immigrant communities which came from parts of the world where, the less one had to do with the cops, the longer and happier one’s life was. And they expected these people to line up to join those ranks? Good luck with that.
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As for the Merry Christmas thing, Canada has long been mostly Catholic/Protestant with some smatterings of Judaism. As long as I’ve been around they’ve gotten along here – the fortunately only very occasional anti-Semite idiot aside. It’s only recently that, in an effort to be ‘all-inclusive’ or ‘ thoroughly accommodating’ some people are trying to change traditions or words to songs such as Christmas ditties because they don’t want to offend the relative newcomers. Excuse me, but when I go somewhere else, I learn the customs and do my best to fit in, I don’t make a fuss about not being treated as I would expect to be here. There’s a big difference between being told “you can’t do this” or “you can’t practice that religion” and “this is how we treat each other and if you find it offensive, well, it’s not meant to be so, sorry, but it’s your problem. Don’t make it ours.” Or should women here all start to wear burquas(sp?) or the like for fear of otherwise offending Islamic fundamentalists in the population? And if you think I’m exaggerating, tell it to those who were seriously trying to get Sharia law accepted as part of the Ontario legal system. There’s being accommodating and there’s going way too far.
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PS PAD – You’d get a Happy Hannukah(sp?) as I know to do so in your case and that of a couple of friends. Otherwise, I default to the customary standard and if someone gets annoyed at that, well, I tried.
“But there are other people who don’t celebrate Christmas and feel that their beliefs are being given short shrift if someone just assumes they celebrate the birth of Jesus.”
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Which is so silly. I mean, most people don’t “celebrate” the birth of Martin Luther King, but nobody (except maybe KKK members) would get offended by someone saying “Happy MLK Day.”
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Heck, I’m an atheist, and nobody loves Christmas more than I do. What do Santa, Christmas trees, and pretty lights have to do with Jesus? I don’t even think of it as a Christian holiday (or even as a pagan holiday coopted by the Christians, which is what it really is), but simply a winter festival named after Jesus (in the same way that Easter was named after a pagan goddess).
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Besides, everyone celebrates Christmas, whether deliberately or not, since it’s impossible to get away from it.
Rene, let me be the first to wish you Shana Tova, and a happy and healthy new year.
PAD, absolutely the same to you and your family. May the upcoming year be your best one yet!
Which is so silly. I mean, most people don’t “celebrate” the birth of Martin Luther King, but nobody (except maybe KKK members) would get offended by someone saying “Happy MLK Day.”
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Well, I didn’t say it wasn’t silly. Personally, I think it’s absurd to take offense when someone is just trying to say something nice to you. But I’m not trying to run a retail chain and endeavoring to avoid offending easily offended customers.
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PAD
Thanks, Saul!
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I’m not Jewish myself, but I live in one of the few neighbourhoods in Brazil that has a lot of Jewish population and you can see men wearing the kipa.
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And it’s a very nice, very calm neighbourhood too.
The secret to appeasing people who complain that you said Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas is to tell them you were wishing them both a Merry Christmas AND a Happy New Year. 😛
And now it appears to be Official Gay Terminology, along with “partner”.
I sometimes wonder if Danielle Corsetto gets any grief over her talking Mexican-Scottish alcoholic cactus, McPedro. (Who may well be an alcoholic hallucination himself.)
Ever see Under the Rainbow?
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It’s pretty universally reviled, to a great extent because it goes out of its way to be offensive to anything and anyone the makers could think of. And it features a tourist group from Japan, whose bus bears the sign (with oversize initial caps) “Japanese Amateur Photographic Society”…
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(I love it.)
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Back in the 1060s, Leslie Charteris remarked that it was getting to the point that soon the only viable choice for a villain was likely to be an Anglo-Saxon named “John Smith”.
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Until the Anglo-Saxon Anti-Defamation Society and the Organisation for the Prevention of Libels of People Named Smith found out…
Well, the Pilgrims and the Puritans were fleeing a society that wouldn’t let them persecute other religions. (Sort of like why the Romans tried to suppress Christianity – the Christians wouldn’t leave other religions alone, often violently attcking them and smashing their idols, which was against Roman law.)
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And one of their early actions was to expel a Baptist minister who wound up founding Rhode Island…
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(L. Sprague deCamp has fun with that in his “Connecticut Yankee” style novel Lest Darkness Fall</a., in which a modern archaeologist is tossed back into Gothis ROme, and everyone complains about religious oppression, because they aren't allowed to persecute the heretics…)
Arrrgh.
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“Gothic Rome”.
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And i meant to mention Paul Taylor’s heroine, Monica Villareal (Wapsi Square), who is Irish-Mexican and an assistant curator at a museum in Minneapolis … and has Amazing Adventures, much as she’d rather not.
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And has as friends a female Comanche body-builder/mechanic, three Incredibly Powerful Golems, a barista who died ten or twelve years ago and is now animated by a collective of demons and a Sphinx.
It’s me again, Margaret.
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Tina the demon Barista and Phix, the Sphinx, are two different people, no matter what my omission of a comma above might imply.
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I console myself with Glenn Haumann’s observation that typos are in invisible ink that turns DaGlo orange as soon as you hit the “Send” key…
Martin Padway. I own a copy of the book, and reread on occasion. The barroom brawl over religion is hilarious, and if you read it while listening to Frank Zappa’s “Dumb All Over”, it just gets funnier.
I don’t know if I find it humourous or depressing, to learn that the Christian habit of assuming that persecuting others is somehow a “right” is a lot older than I thought.
“(Sort of like why the Romans tried to suppress Christianity – the Christians wouldn’t leave other religions alone, often violently attcking them and smashing their idols, which was against Roman law.)”
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Christians faced persecution in Rome because requirements needed to be met to take communion. This fit the Roman legal definition of a secret society which was, by definition, illegal. They also refused to recognize the Roman gods, including the emperors. This was something to which only the Jews received an exemption. When Christianity became the state religion some 300 years after the death of Jesus, idol-smashing became vogue, but that was well after the days of persecution.
They also refused to recognize the Roman gods, including the emperors. This was something to which only the Jews received an exemption.
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Seriously? There was a period in our history where we got a break somewhere? I wonder how we pulled THAT off.
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PAD
That’s seriously true. The Romans didn’t understand the Jews because they couldn’t conceive of a god they couldn’t make. When Pompeii penetrated the Holy of Holies, he was famously confused because there was nothing there (btw, nothing ever went right for the great general after that).
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The Jews were actually treated quite well by Rome, causing their rank-and-file soldiers to hate duty in Judea. To the Jews it wasn’t a matter of how well they were treated, it was a matter of independence. There were other problems like the Herods being installed in the kingship when they were Edomites, and a couple of bad governors, but Rome’s official policy towards Judea was quite conciliatory.
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Of course, Romes tolerance for the Jews ended during the revolt that culminated in Jerusalem’s destruction in AD 70. And the Bar-Kochba revolt roughly fifty years later resulted in the Romans renaming Judea as Palestine after the Philistines.
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As an aside, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian brilliantly parodies that period. Some of the funniest moments (The Judean People’s Front vs. the People’s Front of Judea, for example) in the movie are rooted in historical fact.
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/end tangent
From what I’ve read, the Romans had a general policy of respecting the religious traditions of every tribe they conquered. Their own view of religion was that all gods were the same, but with different names and different aspects in different places. Each place and each tribe had its own local rituals and taboos because that was what the gods had instructed for those people.
So the Jews worshipped Jove (or so the Romans decided), but they did so according to their own rules, and they refused to pay homage to any other gods, which the Romans thought was strange, but acceptable. (And there were other tribes which only had a few gods, so ignoring some of the gods was not unheard of.)
Christianity was considered different, though, because it was new. Since they were not following traditions dating back to time immemorial, they had no excuse for refusing to bow to Roman gods, and their refusal was seen as an attack upon Rome itself.
Jews were persecuted here and there at different times, but Malcolm is right. Most of the time they were treated no differently than any other Romans. (And there were other religions in Rome that were persecuted occasionally for various reasons, such as the Cult of Isis.)
But it was Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius), not Pompeii (a town on the Bay of Naples).
From what I’ve read, the Romans had a general policy of respecting the religious traditions of every tribe they conquered
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The Romans rightly realized that it was easier to let a conquered people keep their old traditions than to try and beat those traditions out of them.
They also refused to recognize the Roman gods, including the emperors. This was something to which only the Jews received an exemption.
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Seriously? There was a period in our history where we got a break somewhere? I wonder how we pulled THAT off.
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PAD,
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My understanding is that Judaism was granted an exception to the required worship of Roman gods (in addition to whatever gods the followers of a particular religion worshipped) because it was a long established religion, dating back millennia. The Romans respected tradition. If they’d been comics fans, they wouldn’t have favored reboots and renumbering of long-running series.
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I’ve been getting a lot of the Great Courses series of lectures (highly recommended) from the library over the past year or so, and if memory serves, that bit about the Romans granting the Jews an exception to the worship the Roman gods was addressed in a course called “From Jesus to Constantine” by Professor Bart Ehrman (I’ve listened to a few of his courses, so may be thinking of the wrong one). I believe that same course also addressed why the early Christians came to declare that Jesus fulfilled prophecies of the so-called Old Testament, making Christianity the “continuation” of Judaism from their point of view (Jews, of course, did and do disagree, arguing, among other things, that the Messiah wasn’t/isn’t supposed to be executed as a common criminal). A new religion would have carried no weight with the Romans; a religion claiming roots going back thousands of years would have carried some respect.
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And to a degree it worked. Seems the persecution of early (first century) Christians (who were likely seen as a Jewish sect to begin with by the Romans (and in some cases early Christians themselves)) wasn’t as wide-spread as we might believe. And not necessarily based on religious belief. Nero, for example, didn’t blame the fire on the Christians because they were Christians, but because they were a new minority group in the empire. “Blame the ____. It’s their fault.” The name in the blank space changes from time to time, but the cry is the same. And, I suspect, being made by the people who are actually responsible for whatever the problem.
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But again, Judaism was exempted because the Romans liked tradition over new ideas, and Judaism had been around a very long time.
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Rick
Regarding the Roman persecution of Christians– They were targeted because of their refusal to pray to the Emperor (as stated by others above). But it should be stated that few Romans actually saw the Emperors as true gods (at least not while they were alive); they were worshipped because they were seen as the embodiment of Rome itself. Praying to the Emperor was primarily an act of loyalty to Rome. It was considered a patriotic duty, and few people had any objections to the practice, even when they hated the Emperor they prayed to. The worship of the Emperor was simply a symbolic act of patriotic fervor.
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Kind of like the Pledge of Allegiance (which some religions, notably Jehovah’s Witnesses, refuse to do today).
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So it’s important to remember that the greatest persecution ever against the Christian faith was due to the Christians refusal to say the Roman Pledge of Allegiance, and this should always be kept in mind whenever someone wants to impose similar pressures on anyone today.
This reminds of Gruenwald’s run on Captain America. He decided to make the new Bucky a black man. Then someone in the letter column wrote a rather indignant letter explaining the many (in his mind) reasons why Bucky was an racist and insulting codename for a black superhero. Shortly after that, in the book, a black character (a janitor, I think) came up to Bucky and repeated (nearly verbatim IIRC)the diatribe from the letter column. At which point, in a serious case of making lemonade from lemons, Gruenwald had Bucky become Battle Star.
Man, I miss Gruenwald.
Interesting article that, i think, touches on some of the same points:
How Casting a Black Actor Changed ‘Night of the Living Dead’
Just met George Romero for the first time at the horrorfind convention. Great guy.
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George is a genuine liberal. When they recast the role of Ben in Night of the Living Dead he did NOT feel obligated to alter the character because of it. What changes there were came from Duane Jones altering the dialog to make Ben better reflect his own intelligence and education.
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(personally I wish george Romero eased back a bit on the politics in his subsequent films in the series–dates them in a way that NOTLD avoids. But it’s his sandbox, the rest of us should just be grateful it’s there and we get to play with it.)
Remember, half the population falls below the median in intellect and that’s none too high to begin with.
I wonder if JACL has taken the makers of the very funny ASTERIX ET OBELIX: MISSION CLEOPATRE to task? In one scene the two leads are visiting a noted tourist venue, the site of the recently completed Sphinx. And there, among the teeming throngs, a Japanese tour group, kimono and all.
Slightly off-topic, but i was wondering how you feel about what they have done with Doc Samson in the current storyline.
From my point of view, i hate it. I think they ruined what was one of my favorite supporting characters ever.
“Boy… and that’s for someone who’s been a liberal democrat since the age of eighteen. Could you imagine if I were a right-wing conservative?”
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How many right-wing conservatives are there in the business? My impression is that they are an almost non-existent minority.
Among the writers, I’d say there are only 5 that could fit the definition of conservative: Frank Miller, Chuck Dixon, Bill Willingham, Dave Sim, and Orson Scott Card. The later being more a writer of novel than comics.
Only five conservative comic writers? I think you forgot Steve Ditko.
Frank Miller is a conservative? When did that happen?
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Objectivism was famously tossed out of the conservative movement by William F. Buckley jr. in fifties and early sixties, so most conservatives might have a problem claiming Steve Ditko.
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I said Miller was one of the few that “could fit the definition” (perhaps if you stretched it a little), not that he was conservative.
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Honestly, I don’t know what the hëll Miller is. Perhaps just a weirdo with a fixation on “manhood”. His kind of macho worldview and extreme distrust of Islam is stereotypically more associated with conservatives, but who knows?
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I read somewhere that even back in the 1980s, Miller’s Dark Knight Returns was a sort of political Rorschach blot. Conservatives thought his Batman was a Conservative. Liberals thought his Batman was a Liberal.
Peter,
Do you recall that anti-gay letter written by an Australian with regards to the AIDS storyline, where he suggested Hulk should have pounded the “gay” characters.
I could not believe someone would take the effort to put pen to paper with those words.
I don’t remember it off the top of my head, no. Then again, I may have blocked it out, disliking the notion that my story prompted that sort of bile.
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PAD
Obnoxious Australian gay-basher? I wonder if the name of the fan was Mel Gibson?