March 13, 1992
One of the most often-repeated observations being made of late is that heroes in comics have changed to their very core…and not for the better.
There have been, to my mind, three stages of comic heroes so far. The first was the Element Age, so-called for two reasons: It encompasses gold and silver age, and the heroes of the time were elementary. Their purpose was clear. Their morals were spotless. If there was any initial flaws in their characters (Batman originally killed people and was hunted by the police, notions that were clearly ahead of his time; relatively quickly he stopped packing guns and became an extension of the Gotham police force) they were done away with. Oh, maybe the Spectre was somewhat creepy, but he pretty much had God backing him up, so it was okay.
Perhaps it helped that, at the time, there was such a clear and present evil in the world–namely the Axis powers. The good guys of fiction had to be that good because the bad guys of reality were that bad. Heck, perhaps it’s no coincidence that as America moved into the 50s, leaving Hitler and his evil behind, comic heroes lightened up more and more. Superman and Batman, notably, had less and less of an edge to them. But they were still morally stand-up guys.
Then we moved into the second hero age of comics, which can only be termed the Marvel Age, because the angst-ridden characters were so closely associated with those published by Marvel. The tortured Thing, the hard-luck Spider-Man, the Thunder God who could command elements but not a woman’s heart…they wore their difficulties on their sleeves, and were extremely appealing to readers. Teen-agers in particular, who are, by definition, little more than angst on two legs.
The emotionally-plagued heroes became so popular that DC even endeavored to graft angst onto their own characters, which is like trying to parallel park an 18-wheeler into a space large enough for a VW: You can do it, but the final result isn’t going to be pretty.
An outgrowth of angst was “relevance.” Excessive aggravating about their own problems began to wear thin, so heroes began agonizing about the problems of society as well.
And then we rolled into the third age of heroes. The age that I refer to as: The Mess Age.
Why? Two reasons. First, because heroes went from having problems to being complete societal messes. The hero community of the Mess Age includes, among its membership: alcoholics, drug addicts, emotional cripples, psychos and mass murderers.
And second, because the more popular a hero is seems to be directly related to how much of a bloody mess he can leave in his wake.
Look at Superman, for heaven’s sake. Once upon a time, the icon of perfection and flawlessly moral behavior. But in “Dark Knight” he was portrayed as a puppet of the American government, a mindless object of scorn. In his own title, he carefully and deliberately killed renegade Kryptonians and agonized over it for months afterwards.
And Batman, Superman’s long-time pal? He became dementedly singleminded, alienating Kal-El, Ðìçk Grayson, and going through kid sidekicks like they were potato chips. (The last thing you want to do is really draw attention to the fact that Batman routinely engages in child endangerment, as Bob Ingersoll has pointed out. But that’s precisely what they’ve done.)
Jailing badguys was no longer enough. Their bodies piled up like cordwood, as the Punisher, Wolverine, Lobo and their brethren cut a bloody swathe through the legions of the nasty. The line between heroes and villains has blurred as to be invisible. Not only are the most popular heroes guys who you can’t count on for rational and just behavior…they’re not even people you’d want to share a cab with.
Why has this happened? Why is the notion of a hero with a stable moral center…a hero who is heroic… suddenly so passe?
Look around you.
Art reflects society, and at this point, society is extremely aware that many of its heroes are hardly paragons of purity. Each new revelation, each new sordid action, each new headline that’s splashed across supermarket tabloids or ballyhooed on the evening news, rips away at the fabric of heroism in this country.
(A recent local newscast led off with politicians hurling racial epithets, and closed with covering a new sport: Nude Bungee jumping. Personally, I think they should have combined the two stories: Any politician who’s into nude bungee jumping would get my vote. It beats heaving on the Japanese Prime Minister.)
Where do we look for our heroes? Who have our heroes been in the past?
Sports figures. Magic Johnson recently played what will probably be his final game, voted to his position by fans who didn’t care that he hadn’t played a single game this season. And he responded with a bravura performance that earned him the game MVP award. He deserved the accolades, and it added to his rightful stature as an heroic figure.
But what can’t be ignored is that he became exposed to AIDS through sexual conduct that was–to put it delicately–not thought out. If he’d had the moral center that heroes are “supposed” to have–the moral purity that people wax nostalgic for when they speak of the current crop of the comic book Mess Age–he wouldn’t have been sleeping around in the first place. The one who’s really heroic is his wife, who is standing by her man rather than, say, appearing on Oprah and complaining about his less-than-sterling conduct.
What’s heroic is that Johnson has tried to turn his own misfortune into the potentially life-saving message of, “Heterosexual transmission of AIDS is a real threat.” Hopefully that will pierce through the notion of “Yeah, but it couldn’t happen to me” that pervades our population.
Then there’s Mike Tyson. Here is a man who beats people up for a living. Who has a history of violence in and out of the ring. Who raped a young woman that the defense was so desperate to discredit, that they put forward the notion that she was sexually hyped up from listening to rap music. (Thank God I wasn’t on the jury, because my doubtlessly audible “Aw, come on” would not have endeared me to the judge.)
But each day, when he was escorted to and from the court house, the path would be lined with well-wishers and supporters. Even after the conviction, his old neighborhood of Brownsville clung to Tyson as a hero through and through. Jesse Gibson, 38, told one reporter, “He’s a great guy who got a bum deal… Anytime somebody looks up to somebody, they want to break him down.” Other residents echoed the sentiments. “He was made an example of,” said Lyman May. “Now they can show you another black man who has failed,” who pointed out that Tyson failed where the white William Kennedy Smith succeeded.
(To my mild surprise, there hasn’t seemed to be all that much emphasis on the notion that Tyson was given unfair treatment because of skin color. Actually, you can look at the Tyson case from the other angle: Tyson’s accuser, a black woman, succeeded in making herself a credible witness, whereas by all accounts, Smith’s accuser, a white woman, did not. So what does that say about race relations?)
So to some Tyson remains a hero, while to Judge Patricia Gifford he is simply another criminal for sentencing. Again, I’m no lawyer, but I’ve been wondering…maybe they should have tried an insanity defense. My (limited) understanding of the law is that it has to be proven that you understood you were committing a crime. I’m convinced Tyson did not, and still does not, understand.
Let’s face it, the guy’s not a rocket scientist. For the past ten years he’s been consistently told that sometimes it’s okay to beat people up, and sometimes it’s not (as opposed to the average child, who is told it’s never okay.) Not only that, but his own testimony makes it clear that he doesn’t think of women as people, but rather sacks of meat to be grabbed and used. Hitler thought of Jews not as people, but as subhumans, and nobody thinks Hitler was a candidate for the mental health poster boy. Tyson is hardly Hitler, but his grasp of male/female interaction is certainly not societal norm.
Or maybe it is. Maybe he just personifies what all men secretly think, especially when hormones first kick in… but whereas other men clean up their act, Tyson never did. Never had to. And now he’ll probably he slapped away somewhere, which is good, because he’s a rapist and dangerous. But it’s sad, too. Especially to those people who held him to be a hero because he was black and uneducated, but still successful. Because they could aspire to that, too. But who wants to aspire to being a jailed rapist?
More heroes. Look around. Who are the traditional heroes?
Policemen? By and large hardworking and dedicated. But look at the travesties over the years. The police corruption in New York and Philadelphia. The brutality of some LA cops immortalized on videotape. Who can overlook the notion that the Milwaukee police stumbled over a blood-covered boy who had escaped the horrors of Jeffrey Dahmer…and when Dahmer told the cops that it was just “a lover’s quarrel,” gave the hysterical boy back to Dahmer who killed the kid in short order.
Astronauts? Anybody heard from the space program lately? No one notices astronauts anymore. Most kids don’t know the significance of the names Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. And NASA is the outfit that blew up the Challenger.
Doctors? Once they were almost Godlike beings, typified by the fatherly, all-knowing Marcus Welby. Nowadays, though, doctors have to be just as worried about malpractice as they do about their patients. House calls are a thing of the past. We desperately want to trust our medical practitioners–but everything you read and hear makes you afraid to do so.
Soldiers? Absolutely heroic–and yet look what this country did to the returning Vietnam soldiers. Indeed, they might have been the very first of the heroes to be pilloried by changing societal mores. Like Rip Van Winkle, they returned to a country that was not what they left behind. The lionizing of Desert Storm participants, while a tribute to people who did their duty, comes across like a nation trying to assuage its guilty conscience over the lousy treatment of the Vietnam vets.
Our nation’s leaders? Living or dead, they’re objects of attack. George Bush, without the winds of war puffing his sails, finds himself becalmed on the seas of America’s financial frustration and despair.
And whether you’re John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton, your sexual exploits–in the eyes of the media–take on far more import than your political agenda or the desire to do right by your constituents. I wonder why Clinton hasn’t tried to attack the focus on the Gennifer Flowers business by claiming that it’s a conspiracy to bring down the uppity white man. After all, Clarence Thomas pushed his way past sexual harrassment charges by claiming it was a plot to bring down the uppity black man.
The Supreme Court? Now there’s a group of people who used to be my personal heroes… until the make-up of the court changed, and it went from being a body of justices out to protect free expression for the people, to being a group out to protect people from free expression.
Firemen? Well… uhm… hm. Okay. Firemen. Nobody badmouths firemen. Ultimately no one cares what firemen do in their private lives, or what their motivations are in their chosen line of work. You’re just so dámņëd glad to see them if your house is burning down that, unlike the Bridge over San Luis Rey, what brought them to this moment in time is of no consequence. Thank heavens they’re there. Firemen, America’s last undisputed heroes.
But they’re outweighed by the battlefield of destroyed individuals that, back in the Element Age, were held up to the heroic ideal. We’ve become a country that knows entirely too much about entirely everything, and as a result we’re basically cynical and disbelieving. Perhaps that’s why we love the Olympics so much… once every four years, we get a set of pristine heroes to enjoy and take pride in. Guys like Team USA, or the intrepid Paul Wylie. And the beauty of those heroes is that they’ll fade into obscurity, or go on nice tours, or become announcers… stuff that will do nothing to diminish their places in our hearts and minds so that we can continue to treasure those fond memories without the heartbreak of subsequent disclosures (Film at 11).
So why are so many heroes cynical, nasty, angry… even unheroic?
Look around, babe. Look at the newspapers. Look at the mirror. Just… look.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can now be written to directly c/o To Be Continued, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, New York, 11705-0239.
• 
True. Very true.
Hmm. I feel like I’ve read this before…..
Journalists were always my favorite heroes growing, up always looking for the truth and putting their lives in harm, but with the creation of the 24/7 news channels, I find it hard to find those real heroes anymore.
I wonder how the emergence of Denis Leary’s TV series Rescue Me factors into a modern reading of this fondly remembered column…
It’s all true still but I must say that I like the mess age. I could do without so much of the violence and the cheaper aspects but I like having heroes who aren’t perfect and who, at times, are completely wrong. This, I suppose, comes from having grown up with the mess age as the dominant force in comics. Whatever comes next, and I do feel it coming soon if it hasn’t already, will probably turn me off since I’m used to pages full of nasty dark avengers.
But I should also mention that nasty dark avengers are getting pretty boring too. I think the next popular heroes will probably be defined by not being easily identifiable superheroes at all with the influence of anime and manga coming in as well as a general resistance to superheroes now that they’re becoming so trendy.
I’m looking forward to the end of this phase. The next crop of heroes should be very interesting. And possibly more controversial.
Call them the Platonic heroes and the Aristotelian heroes. The ideal world and the real world. People are drawn to the ideal world because that’s what they want, and the real world because that’s what they see. Both are good, both are relevant.
What I dislike is the disdain that seems to be dished out to the idealistic heroes: Superman and Captain America are called boy scouts, while anti-heroes are held up as “real heroes” because they have problems. Idealism is there for a reason – it’s what everyone SHOULD strive for. We shouldn’t put them down for being “too perfect”, but hold them up as a standard.
I suppose that most comic book fans are more comfortable with the kind of heroes that were around when they first became fans.
As for me, it was the early-to-mid 80s Marvel Comics. So I personally prefer my heroes to be basically decent, but still troubled and complete with personal problems and insecurities.
There was a certain balancing act going on, I guess. Make them too light or make them too dark, and I can’t empathize with them as well. On principle, I’m fond of most Marvel heroes since I think they best embody the kind of hero I enjoy. Even the more idealistic Marvel heroes, like Cap and Mr. Fantastic are somewhat “troubled”.
This don’t mean I always enjoy everything Marvel does with the characters, though…
And I always was more comfortable with the Punisher as a adversary and supporting character for Daredevil and Spider-Man, instead of a “hero” in his own right (and his own monthly).
And Wolverine used to be kind of cool when he only appeared in Uncanny X-Men, and though he was different from his teammates, he seemed to learn from them and they seemed to learn from him, and he seemed to be mellowing a bit.
I didn’t suspected these two would become the industry’s new paradigm. I would personally prefer if they were still restricted to their little corners of the MU. Well, at least the Punisher has only one comic per month now, he used to have 3 or 4?
But it’s also true that a story’s quality isn’t necessarily tied with the morals of the protagonist. I can very well enjoy stories with heroes out of the moral “range” I prefer. It’s only that I don’t think these protagonists should be considered heroes to be emulated and admired.
Another BID that cries out for updated commentary by PAD.
Olympic Heroes haven’t been unsoiled for almost a decade now..from Tanya Harding and the fat henchmen guy, to Nancy Kerrigan cursing about Mikey Mouse, to the new paradigm that if you don’t like your score at the Olympics, you just sue…I guess we have Lance Armstrong, though…
The only hero i can think of is PAD himself…well he’s my hero. He made the Hulk readable again!
…unless you believe the Europeans that Lance Armstrong just has been using the best steroids on the market – the undetectable stuff. And, Dennis Leary – on his new tv show – seems to be bringing the “human” side of firemen out to the public, which is never really a good thing.
Eh. Give me the good, old fashioned Fantastic Four – the family who ragged on each other & fought cosmic menaces.
PAD is definately a hero. Hes a great writer, a multiple father (if that statement makes sense), and an all around good guy. Furthermore he has super powers. You may not have noticed, but look at his posting times, and the amount he writes. The man never freakin’ sleeps!!!! Thats a super power right there. Either that or he’s an undead lich. whichever it is more power to him!
Jeff Coney
Technically, isn’t “undead lich” sorta redundant?
Ok, I’ll go sit in my “gaming nerd” corner now….
Hmm… would “mindless zombie” also be redundant?
Not really Jason because some Zombies have some form of basic mind or hive mind and others are mindless. Logically to be a lich you have to be undead according to the mythology.
Kath
While I will probably elaborate on this longer, I don’t think people have to look that far to find heroes. Despite all the fictional heroes and real-life people I admire, my #1 hero is my father.
While I will probably elaborate on this longer, I don’t think people have to look that far to find hero As familiarity, sadly, breed contempt?
Courage is defined by Heminway as “grace under pressure.” From what I have seen of comics lately, that is in short supply among superheros, and, if they are not courageous, then can they be heros?
Also, I don’t think that the original superheros were so much the ideal, as they were (as has already been said) reactions to Nazism. Also, it took a while for the idea of supervillians to get introduced, and even LONGER for semi-heros, like Hulk and the Punisher to come along. When they began, they were fighting common criminals, and the public ar large was never being hurt. It wasn’t really until Vietnam that comics got all serious. As PAD has said before, Vietnam just sucked the fun out of everything (including Star Trek.) It was then that you got the more conflicted superheros, and the first anti-heros. What the original heros were is our idea of heros before Vietnam and Watergate. On the other hand, the newer comics are an amalgamation of how we see our heros, and what we want them to be(Like in The Dark Knight.) We see our heros as flawed, but deep down, we want them to soldier on, against all odds, and even against our emnity. I really think that this is a product of Vietnam, Watergate, and assorted scadals that have totally destroyed our faith in, but not our hope in our heros. And, Mark, why shouldn’t we strive for idealism? It is, after all, ideal. The Ideal heros are there as an example to everyone else, and it is when we realize that we have fallen short of an ideal that we begin to taunt it. We don’t make fun of Supes and Cappy because they are to good, we do it ’cause we realize we are not good enough.
“Technically, isn’t “undead lich” sorta redundant?”
You got me there, of course for us gamer geeks, there is another kind of lich, The dead lich which we just defeated and recieved mondo XP for. Only to find later that our DM screwed us and he conme back for vengance!!!!!
“Ok, I’ll go sit in my “gaming nerd” corner now….”
That having been said bobb, move out I believe I just conqured the corner.
Jeff Coney
Robert Heinlein once defined courage as “going onward when you’re so scared you could wet your pants.” The only people who are never afraid of anything – especially themselves – are idiots. A hero should be concerned not only about what the bad guy could do to innocents, but what he could do – to both innocents, and the bad guy. Frank Castle aside, the Good Guys are Good at least in part because they *don’t* slaughter their opponents indiscriminately. (Hey, at least when the Big Blue had to off hte Kryptonian criminals, it bothered him for a long time afterward. Did the Punisher ever stop for a moment to consider that the mob goons he shot up by the dozen might well have families themselves? Hmmm… wouldn’t it be interesting if the Punisher wound up being pursued by the vengeance-obsessed child of one of his own victims? 🙂 )
Oh, and Jeff, didn’t you catch on? After you “kill” the lich, you disassemble it, then bury the parts in spaces as widely varied as you can manage. Teleport without error comes in handy for this. Oh, sure, the lich is still only dead in a certain sense, but let’s see the bášŧárd reassemble enough of himself to threaten anyone anytime soon!
And with that, I build my addition to the Gamer Nerd Corner – it’s going to need to be big, ’cause I think there’s going to be a lot of us winding up in here…
Couldn’t the analysis have been written almost word-for-word a decade ago? I mean, you’re talking about ‘Dark Knight Returns’ as an indicator of contemporary comics, rather than the emblem of the Dark Age, circa 1985-1995. It’s a twenty year old title, it’s almost old enough to drink. Tyson and Johnson also both peaked two decades back.
I wouldn’t be so harsh on it, but I think this is pretty much exactly what Waid was writing about in ‘Kingdom Come’ and the rest of his early-mid 90s work. I suspect that a more contemporary analysis would show a lot of nostalgic backward looking, either towards pulp, or with neo-silver-agism. We can’t accept cardboard-cutout heroes again, but in searching for what we have lost, we grope blindly for their props and tropes.
As an aside, I’m not sure I understand the term ‘silver age’ as you’re using it– I sense you’re trying to encompass the period from roughtly Barry Allen as flash (1955?) to the launch of the FF, but I’d always seen it used to describe the period you label the ‘Marvel Age’, essentially 1963 to some point in the mid 70s. Am I right in how you’re using it?
—
A thought on heroes: Achilles or Heracles hardly fits the idealized definition of ‘hero’ as embodied by Cap or Superman. The classical hero, tragically flawed, is actually more similar to the the modern anti-hero. Any making fun of Captain America or Superman is because we realize that they’re just not plausible human beings. They’re certainly be admirable, but we have trouble taking anyone seriously when their defining characteristic is a lack of flaws. So we laugh, occasionally.
Johnathan: good plan. But c’mon. What self respecting Lich doeesn’t have a Contingency spell set up in case someone tries that? 🙂
Oh, wait. THis IS dated a decade ago. D’oh. I am a fool, a lamentable fool!
OK, so how does this essay apply to the state of comics 13 years after it was written, after the collapse of the industry and years of efforts at some sort of inverted deconstructionism (reconstructionism?) ?
To me the addition of some humanity, even to the idealistic heroes, is a good thing. And I think the extremes are just that; there are a few heroes (Supes, Cap) that retain that ideal hero mythology, while their opposites (The Authority, Punisher) are also relatively few in number. The rest of the heroes have some varying degree of humanity, and that’s ok. Like politics, the extremes make the most noise, but the vast middle ground is where the struggle is waged and progress is made.
Oh, and as for the mindless zombie thing, I see your point, Kathy. I hadn’t considered the wide world of zombie biology and how various mythologies classify them.
And yes, I was this close to posting some long thing about various zombies and the relativity of the term “redundancy” when used in a multiuniversal context, but I’m at work and can’t afford to go sit in the corner with everyone else.
I gladly cede my position in the gaming nerd corner.
Oh, wait, I failed my save…guess I’m stuck here…
MarkL: What I dislike is the disdain that seems to be dished out to the idealistic heroes: Superman and Captain America are called boy scouts, while anti-heroes are held up as “real heroes” because they have problems.
Luigi Novi: I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t think anyone has ever stated that “anti-heroes” are real heroes because of their problems. I believe the aesthetic is that the Marvel angst-ridden heroes like Spider-Man or the issue-allegorical heroes like the X-Men are somewhat more relatable because of their problems. I don’t think anyone has ever said this about anti-heroes specifically, although that brand of hero has its own appeal for different reasons.
MarkL: Idealism is there for a reason – it’s what everyone SHOULD strive for. We shouldn’t put them down for being “too perfect”, but hold them up as a standard.
Luigi Novi: I personally think that that’s one type of approach, which works in its own way for heroes like Captain America. Further along the spectrum are heroes like Daredevil or Batman Spider-Man, who, like Cap, adhere to a strict moral code, but aren’t boy scouts like Cap, and further along still, characters like Wolverine who eschew a bit more of the morals that those characters espouse, and further along still are less noble characters like Punisher who seem more of an embodiment of an absolute part of the human psyche or emotion (namely rage and vengeance). I think these all represent different sensibilities and approaches to fiction, each with its own advantages and disadvantages (in terms of realism and relatability) and not that one is necessarily better than the other.
Peter David: Not only that, but his own testimony makes it clear that he doesn’t think of women as people, but rather sacks of meat to be grabbed and used.
Luigi Novi: What exactly did Tyson say to that effect?
Bwahahahahah! While the PAD is away the gamers will play!
Anthony…it doesn’t necessarily apply to today…it’s just a reprint of PAD’s But I Digress Column from CBG.
Now obviously with characters like the Ultimates, who can’t even spell heroism, much less aspire to it, it’s certainly still applicable.
Tyson? A Heroe.
You know what, I’m going to say this frankly.
In this country there is a well documented history of how the justice system tends to treat Black as opposed to treating whites. The point is not how they treat the ones who are not guilty or really guilty, because they both get treated the same.
When the kids shot up Colonbine, for example, there was pundant after pundant talking about the greater psychological reasons, what can they do to correct the behavior of chidlren. Now, these are a group that murdered people, and there was even a movie with seemed to point to the gun culture as having equal responsibility.
But when it Black people, they just guilty, Period. And when other Black people say, “Hey something is wrong with the way things are going.” we are accused of “Making criminals our heroes.”
So it’s okay that the story Deseray Washington told did not add up to a hill of beans. It’s okay that she wait 6 month after the rape to report it. It’s okay that they shot most of the Beauty Pagent AFTER the rape occured, and Mike Tyson who beats people up for a living, who could bruise you with a pinky, and who didn’t have a single measure of grace or style rape this girl and didn’t leave a bruise of any kind on her. She was so RAPED she was able to do a swimsuit shoot on video grinning right next to the guy who raped her days afterwards.
But when it comes to Black there is not shade of grey. OJ is just GUILTY, dispite the weirdness of the evidence. The one cop who found the most of the evidence get caught right on the stand saying “I set Black people up, I’ll plant evidence, especially if it one of those famous N’s.” But that’s not important. The video searched that in one moment showed socks, gets turned off and the timeline shows a gap of at least ten minute, and LOW AND BEHOLD, bloody socks magically appear. Yet Black people are just a bunch of stupid idiots because they are ONLY supporting a murderer and a rapist.
Just like the Michael Jackson trial. It didn’t matter that the cops knew of these charges for eight months before they did anything. It didn’t matter that the once claiming to be victims had a history of extorting money. It didn’t matter that every single witness for the prosecution were people who all tried to get money out of Mike but ended up having to pay because their cases were weak. AND (my personal favorite) it didn’t matter that parents claiming their child was molested took millions of dollars and dropped the whole thing. Mike is weird, the child molestation thing is easy (which I admit Mike made easy all by himself) therefore he must be guilty.
Yet Woody Allen is an ARTIST. He he waited until she was eighteen. Hey, it’s just a fight between a father an mother. He can still make movies unmolested. Let’s let our kids watch ANTS and laugh and how cute and funny his voice is.
And here’s the kicker. It doesn’t come from the Republicans, you pretty much know waat the KKK is going to say so that doesn’t count. It comes from the so-called “liberal thinking” people. The ones who claim to be open minded. The artists, the comedians, the fanboys.
If someone is guilty, fine, put them in jail. No problem. But don’t play games, don’t hand us the same stuff we’ve get since the 1600’s. After all, this is supposed to be a new day, right. Things have changed. We are more open and free. Blacks are millionaires and own their own homes.
Once upon a time the Scottborough boys were COMPETELY GUILTY, no matter how shakey the entire trial was. Today they write apologetic books. Yesterday it was absolute that four Black boys raped a woman in Central Park dispite no evidence except conflicting and highly suspicious so-called confessions. Yesterday a woman murdered her children and blame Black people and the police picked up any and all Blacks in the surrounding areas, in Hip Hop gear or in suits and ties. Yesterday a man killed his pregnat wife in Boston and they proudly paraded a Black man who had just signed a 20 page confession while it was learned the white guy made the whole thing up. And guilty or not guilty these people were treated the same as Mike, the same as OJ the same as Jackson. I thought this was suppose to be that new day.
Isn’t that the very example of “The more things change. . .”
Tyson? A Heroe.
You know what, I’m going to say this frankly.
In this country there is a well documented history of how the justice system tends to treat Black as opposed to treating whites. The point is not how they treat the ones who are not guilty or really guilty, because they both get treated the same.
When the kids shot up Colonbine, for example, there was pundant after pundant talking about the greater psychological reasons, what can they do to correct the behavior of chidlren. Now, these are a group that murdered people, and there was even a movie with seemed to point to the gun culture as having equal responsibility.
But when it Black people, they just guilty, Period. And when other Black people say, “Hey something is wrong with the way things are going.” we are accused of “Making criminals our heroes.”
So it’s okay that the story Deseray Washington told did not add up to a hill of beans. It’s okay that she wait 6 month after the rape to report it. It’s okay that they shot most of the Beauty Pagent AFTER the rape occured, and Mike Tyson who beats people up for a living, who could bruise you with a pinky, and who didn’t have a single measure of grace or style rape this girl and didn’t leave a bruise of any kind on her. She was so RAPED she was able to do a swimsuit shoot on video grinning right next to the guy who raped her days afterwards.
But when it comes to Black there is not shade of grey. OJ is just GUILTY, dispite the weirdness of the evidence. The one cop who found the most of the evidence get caught right on the stand saying “I set Black people up, I’ll plant evidence, especially if it one of those famous N’s.” But that’s not important. The video searched that in one moment showed socks, gets turned off and the timeline shows a gap of at least ten minute, and LOW AND BEHOLD, bloody socks magically appear. Yet Black people are just a bunch of stupid idiots because they are ONLY supporting a murderer and a rapist.
Just like the Michael Jackson trial. It didn’t matter that the cops knew of these charges for eight months before they did anything. It didn’t matter that the once claiming to be victims had a history of extorting money. It didn’t matter that every single witness for the prosecution were people who all tried to get money out of Mike but ended up having to pay because their cases were weak. AND (my personal favorite) it didn’t matter that parents claiming their child was molested took millions of dollars and dropped the whole thing. Mike is weird, the child molestation thing is easy (which I admit Mike made easy all by himself) therefore he must be guilty.
Yet Woody Allen is an ARTIST. He he waited until she was eighteen. Hey, it’s just a fight between a father an mother. He can still make movies unmolested. Let’s let our kids watch ANTS and laugh and how cute and funny his voice is.
And here’s the kicker. It doesn’t come from the Republicans, you pretty much know waat the KKK is going to say so that doesn’t count. It comes from the so-called “liberal thinking” people. The ones who claim to be open minded. The artists, the comedians, the fanboys.
If someone is guilty, fine, put them in jail. No problem. But don’t play games, don’t hand us the same stuff we’ve get since the 1600’s. After all, this is supposed to be a new day, right. Things have changed. We are more open and free. Blacks are millionaires and own their own homes.
Once upon a time the Scottborough boys were COMPETELY GUILTY, no matter how shakey the entire trial was. Today they write apologetic books. Yesterday it was absolute that four Black boys raped a woman in Central Park dispite no evidence except conflicting and highly suspicious so-called confessions. Yesterday a woman murdered her children and blame Black people and the police picked up any and all Blacks in the surrounding areas, in Hip Hop gear or in suits and ties. Yesterday a man killed his pregnat wife in Boston and they proudly paraded a Black man who had just signed a 20 page confession while it was learned the white guy made the whole thing up. And guilty or not guilty these people were treated the same as Mike, the same as OJ the same as Jackson. I thought this was suppose to be that new day.
Isn’t that the very example of “The more things change. . .”
Tyson? A Heroe.
You know what, I’m going to say this frankly.
In this country there is a well documented history of how the justice system tends to treat Black as opposed to treating whites. The point is not how they treat the ones who are not guilty or really guilty, because they both get treated the same.
When the kids shot up Colonbine, for example, there was pundant after pundant talking about the greater psychological reasons, what can they do to correct the behavior of chidlren. Now, these are a group that murdered people, and there was even a movie with seemed to point to the gun culture as having equal responsibility.
But when it Black people, they just guilty, Period. And when other Black people say, “Hey something is wrong with the way things are going.” we are accused of “Making criminals our heroes.”
So it’s okay that the story Deseray Washington told did not add up to a hill of beans. It’s okay that she wait 6 month after the rape to report it. It’s okay that they shot most of the Beauty Pagent AFTER the rape occured, and Mike Tyson who beats people up for a living, who could bruise you with a pinky, and who didn’t have a single measure of grace or style rape this girl and didn’t leave a bruise of any kind on her. She was so RAPED she was able to do a swimsuit shoot on video grinning right next to the guy who raped her days afterwards.
But when it comes to Black there is not shade of grey. OJ is just GUILTY, dispite the weirdness of the evidence. The one cop who found the most of the evidence get caught right on the stand saying “I set Black people up, I’ll plant evidence, especially if it one of those famous N’s.” But that’s not important. The video searched that in one moment showed socks, gets turned off and the timeline shows a gap of at least ten minute, and LOW AND BEHOLD, bloody socks magically appear. Yet Black people are just a bunch of stupid idiots because they are ONLY supporting a murderer and a rapist.
Just like the Michael Jackson trial. It didn’t matter that the cops knew of these charges for eight months before they did anything. It didn’t matter that the once claiming to be victims had a history of extorting money. It didn’t matter that every single witness for the prosecution were people who all tried to get money out of Mike but ended up having to pay because their cases were weak. AND (my personal favorite) it didn’t matter that parents claiming their child was molested took millions of dollars and dropped the whole thing. Mike is weird, the child molestation thing is easy (which I admit Mike made easy all by himself) therefore he must be guilty.
Yet Woody Allen is an ARTIST. He he waited until she was eighteen. Hey, it’s just a fight between a father an mother. He can still make movies unmolested. Let’s let our kids watch ANTS and laugh and how cute and funny his voice is.
And here’s the kicker. It doesn’t come from the Republicans, you pretty much know waat the KKK is going to say so that doesn’t count. It comes from the so-called “liberal thinking” people. The ones who claim to be open minded. The artists, the comedians, the fanboys.
If someone is guilty, fine, put them in jail. No problem. But don’t play games, don’t hand us the same stuff we’ve get since the 1600’s. After all, this is supposed to be a new day, right. Things have changed. We are more open and free. Blacks are millionaires and own their own homes.
Once upon a time the Scottborough boys were COMPETELY GUILTY, no matter how shakey the entire trial was. Today they write apologetic books. Yesterday it was absolute that four Black boys raped a woman in Central Park dispite no evidence except conflicting and highly suspicious so-called confessions. Yesterday a woman murdered her children and blame Black people and the police picked up any and all Blacks in the surrounding areas, in Hip Hop gear or in suits and ties. Yesterday a man killed his pregnat wife in Boston and they proudly paraded a Black man who had just signed a 20 page confession while it was learned the white guy made the whole thing up. And guilty or not guilty these people were treated the same as Mike, the same as OJ the same as Jackson. I thought this was suppose to be that new day.
And it never occurs to anyone that maybe people are not celebrating these people as “heroes” but fighting against the injustice of how they are being treated, because that’s the part we can understand. I think there’s a countdown on the site. Not because there’s a simple hatred of Republicans, but because of the unfair processes this particular group is handling the direction of the country. Is it fair then to dismiss it as just a “Liberal” who just hates the God fearing citizens of America.
Tyson? A schmuck.
Don’t have the specs on the Desiree Washington thing, but he did resort to cheating whenever he was losing a boxing match – culminating in the infamous incident in which he bit a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear.
Look, being accused of something, falsely or not, is not “heroic”. Often, as in this instance, it’s merely stupid – a moment’s thought could have helped him avoid this situation.
And if you want to discuss the justice system, Umar, you might want to remember that Jackson, Simpson, and Kobe Bryant were all acquitted. As for whites getting some sort of automatic pass in the public eye, well, maybe you just weren’t paying attention to the buzz about the Robert Blake affair…
Mike Tyson? Hero?
““I want to throw down your kid and stomp on his testicles, and then you will know what it is like to experience waking up everyday as me. And only then will you feel my pain.”
You can blather away at how the republicans are like the KKK but ole Mike is a KKK dream, a perfect example of what they would like us to believe all Blacks are like.
On the other hand…you have to love a guy who says “I really dig Hannibal. Hannibal had real guts. He rode elephants into Cartilage.” If they ever remake Amos N Andy he’s a shoo-in.
“Yet Woody Allen is an ARTIST. He he waited until she was eighteen.”
Maybe you and I live on different worlds. I seem to remember most of the same people who jumped down Tyson’s throat stating what a sicko Woddy was when the news broke about his affair. I also saw how much his box office dropped after that (not that he was really huge before then) VS how fast boxing fans ran up to Tyson to embrace his return.
Besides, the thing with Tyson was more then just that one rape charge. From his pre-boxing years as a petty thug mugging old people to his thug like ear biting matches and everythung inbetween and since he showed that he never stopped being a worthless little thug at heart. Does make a dif.
Plus, you seem so focused on looking at the injustice cast upon one skin color that you over look how many white people out there get the same treatment in the press and public as the people you pointed out. Maybe you should open your eyes a bit more often when the news is on and not just when the news is covering something you want to read/see/hear about.
Umar,
“Tyson? A heroe.”
Wow. You hold up someone who was convicted of rape, who even said that although he was innocent of said rape he deserved the prison time for the crimes he got away with, someone who has been in more bizarre incidents in the past 15 years than anyone I can think of and most importantly SOMEONE WHO WASTED HIS POTENTIAL, BOTH AS SOMEONE WHO POSSIBLY COULD HAVE BEEN THE BEST BOXER EVER and as AN AMBASSADOR FOR HIS SPORT AND BEEN AN INSPIRATION TO PEOPLE FROM SIMILAR BACKGROUNDS and..
he blew it, all of it, inluding over $200 million in the last decade alone. He’s broke and is now every bit the thug he was carciatured as.
This is a hero?
As for the rest of your rant, it’s just more of your usual “blacks are always victims” nonsense.
I mean, you REALLY don’t want me to go into detail about the Central park jogger. No evidence? On what planet?
Honestly, Umar, Al Sharpton would distance himself from remarks as racist,illogical, non-factual and inflammatory as yours.
Mike Tyson is not a hero by any means. He is simply a professional athlete with a thuggish out-of-the-ring violence. A hero is someone you look up to who accomplishes something unique, courageous, and/or beneficial for others, for which they can look up to him. There are many boxers this could arguably describe, but Tyson is not one of them.
Umar: When the kids shot up Colonbine, for example, there was pundant after pundant talking about the greater psychological reasons, what can they do to correct the behavior of chidlren. Now, these are a group that murdered people, and there was even a movie with seemed to point to the gun culture as having equal responsibility. But when it Black people, they just guilty, Period.
Luigi Novi: Putting aside the fact that this is not true, as O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, and Reginald Denny’s attackers during the L.A. Riots were not found guilty, the two have nothing to do with one another. For one thing, each individual case is unique, and it’s fallacious to argue that because some try explain inexplicable crimes like Columbine, that this is somehow inconsistent with thinking that a black defendant is guilty based on the evidence. Besides, just because some people try to explain Columbine by blaming everything from guns to comics to cliques to violent movies and video games doesn’t mean that everyone subscribes to those theories. Columbine elicits such attempts at explanation because it was such an inexplicable act. Rape is typically less explicable.
Umar: And when other Black people say, “Hey something is wrong with the way things are going.” we are accused of “Making criminals our heroes.”
Luigi Novi: What does one have to do with the other? And who has said this?
Umar: So it’s okay that the story Deseray Washington told did not add up to a hill of beans. It’s okay that she wait 6 month after the rape to report it. It’s okay that they shot most of the Beauty Pagent AFTER the rape occured, and Mike Tyson who beats people up for a living, who could bruise you with a pinky, and who didn’t have a single measure of grace or style rape this girl and didn’t leave a bruise of any kind on her. She was so RAPED she was able to do a swimsuit shoot on video grinning right next to the guy who raped her days afterwards.
Luigi Novi: First of all, she did not wait six months to report the crime. She reported it immediately.
Second, what does the subsequent shooting of the beauty pageant have to do with anything? So she found the inner strength to go on with her life, and didn’t want the rape to negatively impact the goings-on in her life. Why is this a bad thing? The fact that she was not a hysterical dysfunctional wreck is evidence that she wasn’t raped? How do you figure this? And where did you get the idea that she stood next to Tyson grinning during the swimsuit video shoot?
The fact that a boxer did not leave any bruises on her is also irrelevant, since rapists do not “box” their victims. They sexually violate them. Even Robin Givens alleged that Tyson knew how to hit people without leaving bruises.
Tyson’s history of violence towards others, including threatening to kill Lennox Lewis and his children during a press conference, mutilating Holyfield’s ear (and then telling Mills Lane that it was not a bite but a punch), the sexual assault charges he was facing as recently as 2002, and the August 31, 1998 assault on two people after a car accident (for which he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, fined $5,000, ordered to serve 2 years probation and perform 200 hours of community service) corroborate the fact that he’s just a thug. He is only a hero if you change the meaning of the word. Bitterness of the history of blacks’ treatment in America doesn’t change this.
Umar: But when it comes to Black there is not shade of grey. OJ is just GUILTY, dispite the weirdness of the evidence. The one cop who found the most of the evidence get caught right on the stand saying “I set Black people up, I’ll plant evidence, especially if it one of those famous N’s.” But that’s not important.
Luigi Novi: No, it’s just not true. Fuhrman did not collect most of the evidence. The evidence was collected by the uniformed police officers, Phillip Vanatter, and other members of the police force. Twenty to twenty-one uniformed police officers, for example, of various ethnicities, all arrived at the crime scene before Fuhrman was awakened at home with the news of the crime, and all reported seeing one glove at the scene. Simpson admitted in his videotaped interview with police that the blood on and around his car and home came from a deep cut the middle finger of his hand that he sustained on the night of the murders, and could not account for how it got there. That alone shows he is guilty, regardless of the distorted myths about timelines and socks to which you subscribe. Nothing “weird” about it.
Yet Woody Allen is an ARTIST. He he waited until she was eighteen. Hey, it’s just a fight between a father an mother. He can still make movies unmolested. Let’s let our kids watch ANTS and laugh and how cute and funny his voice is.
Luigi Novi: Some people use this rationalization, but not all. Rosie O’Donnell and Howard Stern, to name two examples, ripped into Allen for this. I myself do not. I think Allen is a sick loser who can’t even buy bedsheets without consulting his therapist, and a moral relativist who selfishly and arrogantly acts as if he can do anything he wants because he’s a famous filmmaker with his “the heat wants what it wants” rationalization, a notion supported by the áššhølëš who trample all over one another in an effort to work with him. Roman Polanski is yet another.
Jonathan: Jackson, Simpson, and Kobe Bryant were all acquitted.
Luigi Novi: No, Kobe Bryant was never tried. They dropped the charges.
Jonathan: As for whites getting some sort of automatic pass in the public eye, well, maybe you just weren’t paying attention to the buzz about the Robert Blake affair…
Luigi Novi: Well, that’s a poor example, since it would only serve to illustrate Umar’s point. Blake was acquitted himself, after all.
Actually, Luigi, the Blake example was referenced in terms of the public eye, not the legal system. From where I was sitting, there’s a good share of the public that thinks Blake is guilty, maybe not of the act, but a part of the conspiracy to the act. So, while the point would be better made if Blake had been acquitted, it’s still valid because Blake has not received a “free pass” from the public. We’ll just have to see how well a future season of the Surreal Life does with him to determine if the public can forgive him.
As for OJ, at the time, the public didn’t give him a “free pass” because they saw the a good portion of the evidence…and made a decision based on that evidence that he was guilty. It wasn’t his skin color that did him in…it was that blood soaked glove that did him in. Although they jury acquitted him. And MJ.
And speaking of MJ, talk about getting a free pass….go ask 14 White Dove Lady if she thinks MJ is guilty. From the coverege outside the courtroom, MJ had throngs of fans willing to disbelieve the piles of evidence and declare him innocent, in addition to the jury finding him not guilty.
I’m not saying the racism, and insitutional racism in particular, doesn’t still exist. We see too many examples each year where it does. But it’s not this rampant issue that some claim it is…and doing so is making a “sky is falling” argument, which only ever serves to give your opponents an ample and proven counter to your call for social change.
If Tyson is going to be the poster child for the trod-upon black man, then the interests behind that movement are only ever going to amount to being the butt of late-night comedy jokes.
“If there was any initial flaws in their characters (Batman originally killed people and was hunted by the police, notions that were clearly ahead of his time; relatively quickly he stopped packing guns and became an extension of the Gotham police force) they were done away with.”
How was Batman killing people something that made him ahead of his time? If anything it made him a touch behind the times and made him resemble his pulp hero inspirations all the more. Batman wielded guns like the Phantom, the Shadow, and the Man in Black, among other characters.
Then he put them away as was the custom for the new present and for the future forty years.
Batman killing made him closer to being obsolete; Batman not killing made him a modern hero until more Punisher-Cable-Lobo-killer-hero archetypes come along.
That, of course, gets disabled once we realize that niether Cable nor Lobo nor Punisher are super-heroes.
The funny part is, for all the complaining about “The Man” coming down on blacks, how many people lined up in support of Tyson, Michael Jackson, OJ, and Kobe Bryant?
How many lined up for Robert Blake?
I rest my case.
I think Peter meant that killing people was ahead of his time only in the sense that by the 80’s and 90’s, with characters like the Punisher, Wolverine and Cable, killing one’s opponents was no longer considered unacceptable for a comic book “hero”.
Well, considering the recidivism rate of criminal in both comics and real life, obviously the “Justice System” (Can anyone call what we have “justice” with a straight face?) doesn’t work, so rather than letting the Joker live to break out and kill more innocents and commit more crimes, it’s makes alot more sense to permanently remove the habitual offender. Makes it safer….”for the children”… and everyone else as well…
“Luigi Novi: I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t think anyone has ever stated that “anti-heroes” are real heroes because of their problems. I believe the aesthetic is that the Marvel angst-ridden heroes like Spider-Man or the issue-allegorical heroes like the X-Men are somewhat more relatable because of their problems.”
I suppose there are two Captain Americas. The one in the Avengers and guest-starring in other characters’ comics has mostly been a hero’s hero, kinda like Superman.
But the Captain America in his own comic has had angst, trauma, indecision, and insecurity to rival Spider-Man (and perhaps surpass Spider-Man, in several runs).
Most of the favored Cap runs in the past have been incredibly angsty. Stan Lee, Steve Englehart, J.M. de Matteis, and Mark Gruenwald come to mind.
I suppose Mark Waid, with his more upbeat take on the character, would be the exception, but I didn’t read most of his run, nor Dan Jurgens’s. So maybe that is why some modern readers aren’t aware that Cap has traditionaly been a very angsty hero in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.