No, Don't Give Captain America a Boyfriend

Okay, I'll concede: the phallic symbols are already there

This week, the #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend hashtag achieved sufficient mass on social media that even a square like me noticed. I don’t frequent fan boards, visit comic cons, or otherwise participate in fan culture. I largely stopped following comic books in the late 1990s, when time constraints forced me to choose between keeping backstories straight, and my college education. Yet this week, this fan-driven fringe movement crossed into the mainstream.

The logic goes, Marvel Comics’ Captain America and his longtime sidekick, Bucky Barnes, show such chemistry together (far more than Cap and obligatory love interest Sharon Carter) that they should have a romantic relationship. Besides contradicting longstanding comics canon, this logic has drawn much-needed criticism. It basically asserts that the boys in eighth-grade Phys Ed were right, and two men cannot be emotionally open to one another without being “gay.”

Which is a huge step backward for everybody, of course. While some might applaud the essential mainstream arrival of “the love that dare not speak its name,” the reasoning is basically restrictive, declaring male emotions are the exclusive province of gay men. Smarter critics than I have observed this. My complaint is even more fundamental than that: it asserts that all emotional openness is romantic, or rather, sexual.

Fans have tried to manufacture romantic undertones for other same-sex pairings, including Finn and Poe in Star Wars, and Doctors House and Wilson on House. But fans love pairing off beloved characters—“shipping,” in fan parlance.They’ve tried hooking up Elsa and Anna from Frozen, Alex and Justin Russo from The Wizards of Waverly Place, Sam and Dean Winchester from Supernatural, Dipper and Mabel from Gravity Falls, and others.

For those playing the home game, those last four fan ships are all siblings. Admittedly, the creative teams behind them have given fans the cues they’ve become accustomed to seeing as precursors to romantic relationships; but that’s the problem. We’ve reached sufficient sexual saturation in popular culture that we cannot imagine fictional siblings getting along without reading love-story subtext into their relationships. We look for sex where there’s none.

Thus, the fan push to drive Cap and Bucky together, at least on-screen, doesn’t represent a triumph for LGBT liberty. It represents a failure of our baseline for human interaction. It isn’t that it makes emotions “gay,” though it does that too; rather, the most important point is that it makes emotions sexual. All psychological closeness between two people, regardless of genital orientation, thus becomes a nascent sexual encounter.

Years ago, my prim mother complained about the trend toward sexual “liberation.” When we don’t govern our sexual impulses, she warned, we risk them governing us. And if we don’t place limitations upon our sexual desires, then we start seeing sex everywhere, unmoored from the basics of creating human communities. As youths do, I laughed my mother’s concerns off. How Victorian an attitude, seeing threats in unashamed expressions of sexuality!

Now I’m witnessing my mother’s predictions coming true. The cues we’ve grown to associate with sexual desire include emotional openness, trust, comfort in one another’s presence, and no fear of casual physical contact. If Anna and Elsa fight for one another’s bodily and psychological freedom, then they must want to sleep together, the logic goes. But these aren’t sexual traits, they’re the group underpinnings that bind human societies together.

This is how they originally drew Bucky: as a kid.
For those not offended enough by the fan ship

This isn’t hay. Cultures where people don’t feel free to communicate across racial, gender, or family lines, like Iran and Russia, are economically stagnant. If we create a culture where two women cannot trust one another without outsiders thrusting them into bed together, we undercut the systems that make American society vibrant. If we make people fearful to communicate, and feel, openly, society risks going backward, not forward.

This controversy somewhat represents the medium. The hashtag has emphasized the cinematic Captain America, and movies elicit reactions from the gut, or lower. In seventy-five years, there’s been no meaningful push to give Cap a boyfriend in the comics. Perhaps this reflects that the comics’ Bucky, unlike the movies’, was originally a kid sidekick. (Until recently, he also had that rarest of superpowers: he actually stayed dead for decades.)

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t recommend actual gay people repress themselves; research demonstrates how harmful that is. Healthy openness to natural sexuality benefits us individually, which strengthens our culture. But we all, individually and collectively, need healthy non-sexual relationships, unconstrained by gender. We’d resent strangers throwing us into bed with our best friends. Fictional characters should receive the same basic dignity.

The Problem With Business Books

David Thomas Roberts, UnEmployable!: How To Be Successfully Unemployed Your Entire Life

Near the beginning of this book, Texas entrepreneur David Thomas Roberts includes this spurious rhetorical question:

What is the Gig Economy?
Essentially, it’s the proliferation of a new generation of Micro Businesses.

No. The Gig Economy describes economic transactions based on short-term or one-off engagements with independent contractors. Über drivers and AirBnB hosts are the most visible examples. Some people enjoy the relative independence such jobs provide, but critics deride how gig economics shifts overhead costs onto workers, while profits drift upward to service aggregators. As in other parts of life, truth probably resides somewhere between the extremes.

This symbolizes my problem with Roberts’ business guidebook. When he discusses broad entrepreneurial theory, I keep thinking he knows his business (pun intended). But whenever he gets down to brass tacks, he shows himself elementally misinformed, blinded by hindsight bias, confused between anecdote and fact, or flat damn wrong. His words became difficult to read without lapsing into outright anger, because he never realizes his own inherited preconceptions.

Like, for instance, his claim that people are poor because they choose poverty. Because they’d rather work for somebody else than go guerilla; because they’d rather finance a car than have money; because they’re “financially illiterate.” Maybe some actively choose this. But he’s describing the situation of poor people everywhere, who need money first, live further from their jobs, and have fewer opportunities to learn fiscal skills.

David Thomas Roberts

Or Roberts’ claim that “most young Americans believe they deserve the same lifestyles that may have taken their parents twenty or thirty years to achieve.” They said the same about my generation. But in 1992, it took a new, white, male entrant into the workplace seventeen years to achieve the level of financial independence workers achieved in four years in 1972, because of weakened labor laws, stagnant wages, and the end of post-war exuberance. It probably takes longer now.

Or his claim that college education is riddled with “leftist propaganda” that churns out “little Communists.” Roberts is right that MBA programs produce good corporate suits, not entrepreneurs; aspiring start-up operators should probably study math anyway. But Roberts’ understanding of educational culture hasn’t advanced since 1977. As rhetorician Gerald Graff reports, English was once the go-to major of future independent businessmen.

It’s very difficult to stick with Roberts, because he mistakes subjective impressions for objective facts. Besides the above examples, he also disparages his stepfather for toiling in a corporate superstructure for trivial rewards. But I’d bet my paycheck, if we unpacked Roberts’ financial history, we’d find his stepfather’s labors gave Roberts enough financial footing to venture out fearlessly. Like Donald Trump, few “self-made men” grew up really, really hungry.

Even his claim that entrepreneurial failure is a mere launchpad toward future success bespeaks well-connected urban preconceptions. (Roberts’ professional life has centered on Houston, where simply being white confers certain advantages.) Business failures are badges of honor in Manhattan, East Texas, and Silicon Valley. Not so much for poor people. When farmers, inner-city storefront operators, and rural dwellers experience business failure, it’s usually permanent. That’s where WalMart greeters come from.

Roberts situates this book as an entrepreneurial how-to. But chapter after chapter, he writes an autobiography. Finally, I realized: he thinks his success is portable, and we should simply imitate him. But the old saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data. There’s no longitudinal analysis of business trends, or comparisons between successes and similar failures, or even any understanding how America’s economy has changed since Roberts was twenty-one.

Evidence suggests Roberts doesn’t even understand his own situation. Early on, he claims: “For years now, my wife and I have been in the top 1/10th of 1 percent of incomes in America. We have reached a seven-figure net worth.” Except, according to Bloomberg, reaching the top point-one percent requires a minimum net worth around $20 million—eight figures. Like many Americans, Roberts believes himself richer than he actually is.

Sociologist Duncan J. Watts of Microsoft Research describes what he calls “creeping determinism”: the tendency to assume what happened was inevitable, because it happened. That’s my problem with Roberts, and business books like his. He presents his career as a progress from success to success; even failures are successes in fetal form. It’s not analysis, and therefore not useful to aspiring entrepreneurs like me.

I’ve given warm reviews to business books on this blog before. But the longer I review, the harder that becomes. I’ve grown aware of the problem with business books, that they avoid analyzing their own accumulated preconceptions.

Harry Potter and the Absence of God

Dan Vyleta, Smoke: a Novel

This novel commences with a late-night kangaroo trial in the toilets of an elite British boys’ school. Combining the worst of church confessional with Maoist self-critique, it pits vice-ridden youth against a completely virtuous head boy. We know his complete virtue because his wholly white clothing lacks stain. He asks pointed questions, many frequently hurtful, to expose any concealed sins, which lesser boys reveal when their bodies emit visible Smoke.

What Philip Pullman did for Narnia, Dan Vyleta here does for Harry Potter, essentially reconstructing the story without the original’s moral certitude and Christian backbone. Though this story lacks out-and-out wizardry—Vyleta’s worldview forbids characters to impose their will on reality—the parallels are undeniable, and profound. Though Vyleta won’t displace J.K. Rowling’s cultural primacy, he crafts an engaging, smart counter-narrative, and a fun, thoughtful fantasy besides.

Young Thomas Argyle, orphaned scion of a disgraced minor aristocrat, Smokes like nobody before him. In this world, every sin creates Smoke from human flesh, a malodorous vapour making secret vices visible to everyone. But where others have wispy Smoke, color-coded according to their sins, Thomas’ sin is thick, black, and undifferentiated. He’s something new, something unprecedented. And that scares the squeaky-clean, self-contained nobles of Smoke-drenched England.

Vyleta’s trio of protagonists are almost-perfect mirrors of the Potterverse trio. Where prophecy heralds Harry Potter’s heroic triumph over certain evil, science predicts Thomas’ slide into irrevocable vice. His sidekick, Charlie Cooper, is intellectual but lacking direction; he takes orders from Thomas because he needs purpose that Thomas’ passion provides. They’re joined by Livia Naylor, not book-learned, but blessed with acquired rectitude and bloodless adherence to rules.

All three must unlearn years of adherence to England’s moral strictures. This isn’t easy. They venture outside England’s well-manicured gardens in pursuit of truth, a journey that leaves them trapped in a coal mine, wandering London streets, and finally traversing that triumph of early-industrial England, the London sewer grid. No mystic caves or enchanted castles for these heroes. They must traverse the soot-stained infrastructure that British aristocracy seeks to hide.

Dan Vyleta

The dust-flap copy implies our protagonists encounter a Matrix-like conspiracy that everything they think they know is lies. That proves an ultimate subplot, one never really resolved (perhaps Vyleta’s saving something for the sequel). Rather, the story pits three intrepid heroes, blessed with more grit than information, against a massive bureaucratic machine that performs backflips to keep sin from England’s doorsteps. The result is altogether darker, and more morally ambiguous.

Issues of trust arise: who can our youthful protagonists trust when power is distributed unjustly? Schoolmasters have unvoiced personal agendas. Churchmen have no particular theology, mainly worshiping the forms of order. Even Lady Naylor, Livia’s mother, a mentor to young Thomas, keeps secrets with especial aplomb. She has knowledge our heroes need, and dominates them by withholding it strategically. Is she Dumbledore or Voldemort? We never can really tell.

Our heroes have entered a domain which Anglo-American anthropologist David Graeber calls “total bureaucratization,” that state where instruments of control are so comprehensive, they become invisible, and thus unquestionable. Science, religion, education, government, and industry all maintain cantilevered secrets. In Rowling, we generally know characters’ motivation from their actions. Vyleta assumes powerful people lie to disguise their intentions, clothing themselves in false righteousness, a painful lesson for our high-minded students.

If anything, this novel’s greatest enemy is absolute thinking. At various points, the young heroes attack various enemies, an ever-shifting pinwheel of antagonism, never fully grasping the bureaucracy that actually threatens them. In Rowling’s world Voldemort’s evil is never questioned; only how to defeat him is. Vyleta suggests “evil” is a useless umbrella term. The youths never doubt their own rightness, and adult wrongness, even as their mission wildly vacillates.

It isn’t accurate to call Vyleta’s world atheistic. This story isn’t Godless, just lacking in certitude. God joins countless other institutions in becoming a pervasive “maybe,” less important to England’s self-proclaimed holy than rectitude. These characters never abandon the language of religion, accurate for Victorian England, but gradually outgrow the illusion of certainty. Burgeoning surety of purpose prompts the characters to abandon reliance on transcendent verities.

This novel isn’t fast beach reading. It requires an investment of time and mental energy. Despite its young heroes, it isn’t YA fiction; it appears targeted, rather, at adults who previously embraced Rowling’s Joseph Campbell-ish “hero’s journey.” It makes an interesting companion volume, a friendly but uncompromising debate partner challenging Rowling’s staunchly conservative moralism. Vyleta here becomes one of fantasy’s truly good new voices.

Superheroes and the Meaning of the City

Comic books have a long history of pitting superheroes against one another

Superhero fatigue hit me slightly sooner than most movie audiences. When fans on social media began bewailing the excessively long fight scenes, bleak post-nuclear cityscapes, and nihilistic resignation of Zach Snyder’s Batman Vs. Superman, I remember thinking: I said almost exactly the same after the denouement of the first Avengers movie. After the Chitauri ravaged Manhattan, the smoking holes looked identical to those from Man of Steel, and I quit.

What motivates moviemakers to blow up entire cities? I ask rhetorically, knowing that throughout the late 1980s and most of the 1990s, comic book writers loved battles that ravaged entire city blocks and neighborhoods. Following the runaway success of Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, which culminates with half of Manhattan dead, the comics industry widely misinterpreted why readers found that climax effective, spotlighting the shock value of massive destruction and death.

I stopped reading comics, partially, because mainline publishers fell into a rut of using casual slaughter to attract audiences. It looked slovenly, and worse, it created a world bereft of consequences when superheroes would go unquestioned after creating untold suffering. Though I lacked the vocabulary to express it then, I grew disillusioned because comics increasingly relied upon a fundamental Nietzschean misunderstanding of human nature to get cheap jolts from readers.

But American culture has changed since then. The violence of 9/11, and the alarmist rhetoric of Homeland Security, created an atmosphere of paranoia unseen since the duck-and-cover drills surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis, and fears of massive death caused by self-described übermenschen, once the exclusive domain of nerds, have become mainstream. Cities as smoking craters were once the stuff of science fiction. Now they’re America’s mainstream cultural mythology.

Do heroic poses amid a ruined city move audiences? Only you can decide

Citizens once migrated to cities in pursuit of careers, prestige, and security. That last seems especially important. Early European walled cities provided such security that farmers lived in town, commuting daily to their fields, rather than risk barbarian invasions (or, later, feuding lords). American cities provided stability against angry dispossessed natives and roaming outlaws. That’s saying nothing about economic and artistic opportunities that only happen amid large populations.

But the Cold War changed things. Cities, which once provided (some) protection against destruction, became targets of nuclear onslaught. Especially as crime rates became truly terrifying during the 1970s, American attitudes toward cities changed. This especially reflected changing transportation technology: as people could afford to live further from work, they did. “White Flight” drove the wealthy from cities, which made predictions of urban decay self-fulfilling.

This peaked during the 1990s Militia Movement. Self-proclaimed survivalists holed up in mountaintop cabins and prairie ranches, believing isolation gave them added security. As sociologist Barry Glassner notes, runaway fears often strike after the actual threat has passed; the Militia types (who have seen a recent, but smaller, resurgence) were essentially reacting to threats that were, by that time, twenty years old. Conveniently, they also separated themselves from law-abiding neighbors.

Cities have the illusion of target-rich environments. 9/11 created the impression that terrorists would seek major urban centers for mass destruction, particularly since the attackers chose a target they’d attempted to demolish eight years earlier. Fearmongers claimed that terrorists, or inside agents claiming to be terrorists, would turn American cities into images of Beirut’s legendary Green Zone. The fact that this kept not happening never discouraged the professional soapboxers.

This picture doesn't serve my theme; I just really like that it exists (source)

Comic books, and the movies they’ve inspired, have always leaned somewhat conservative. With their heroes’ interest in order, usually disguised as “justice,” the medium has always defended the status quo against anybody forcing too-rapid change. In the Depression, when the medium originated, this made sense, because those forcing change were frequently mobsters—or their bought-and-paid-for elected officials. Cities, with their radical revolutionary tendencies, needed controlled.

Alan Moore emphasized this in Watchmen, when one of the enemies the “heroes” targeted was black revolutionaries. That world had become so immune to change that it featured President Nixon’s sixth term in office. That world needed some destruction, some anarchy. Moore’s thesis, that a world dominated by comic book superheroes would probably be pretty awful, shouldn’t have inspired much imitation among the longstanding titles. But it did.

Now the movies are dominated by primal fears of massive destruction in the places citizens move seeking work. Filmmakers will destroy New York, Manhattan, or anywhere else, because they don’t realize how terrible their world has become. They tacitly market defenseless timidity. Comic books, and comic book movies, supposedly foreground their wonderful, heroic characters. But their real theme is more subtle: you are completely helpless.

Can the Environmental Debate Be Saved?

Frederic C. Rich, Getting to Green: Saving Nature: a Bipartisan Solution

Environmental protection once enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt were ardent naturalists, preserving natural domains for hunting, camping, and general aesthetic pleasure. Richard Nixon and Congressional Democrats, offended by flaming rivers and chewy air, collaborated to pass sweeping environmental protection laws. Amid partisan rancor, environmentalism offered rare bipartisan goodwill. But America has passed no meaningful environmental laws since 1990. What changed?

Frederic C. Rich, Manhattan corporate attorney and sometime Green activist, calls the partisan split The Great Estrangement. He traces the history of how American conservatives, once nature-friendly and conservationist, became ardently anti-environmentalist, and the debate devolved into Left versus More-Left. He also postulates (awkwardly late) a solution to return conservatives to the discussion, opening the possibility of reversing a quarter-century stalemate. I just wish he weren’t demonstrably wrong.

Rich describes how tubthumping media spokespeople like Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich turned movement conservatism against environmental issues. The outcome baffles him: “It is not entirely clear,” Rich writes, “why these efforts succeeded in arousing in so many conservatives an active antipathy toward Greens.” But to us dedicated news-followers, it is clear: anti-environmentalism was part of a massive slate by which hyperpartisan leaders screened out “Republicans In Name Only.”

Like Rich, I’m a discouraged former Republican. I witnessed the Great Estrangement from both sides and finally concluded that the Global Warming evidence, though incomplete, was more complete than evidence that vaccines prevent disease, or that smoking causes cancer. The evidence maybe wasn’t airtight, but it was robust enough to justify action. My right-wing former fellows answered that charge by moving the goalposts, forcing me to abandon them.

This makes Rich’s sudden shifts onto excoriating environmentalists feel weird. He aggressively chastises environmentalists for harboring pinkos and partisans. The counterproductive environmental rabble-rousers he cites lack Glenn Beck’s media reach, or Newt Gingrich’s political might, but Rich believes that, if such people exist at all, they’re undermining the Green cause. Without stating it outright, Rich essentially demands environmentalists punish heretics and dissidents as avidly as movement conservatives have.

Frederic C. Rich

Statements that organized environmentalism has become “too leftist” make little sense, coming directly after describing how movement conservatives made anti-environmentalism a shibboleth of membership. If liberals kicked conservatives out of Greenpeace, that’d be one thing. But movement conservatives don’t believe the debate exists. Republicans have thrown their lot in with Young Earthers and seven-day creationists, yielding the Nixonian middle ground altogether. That’s not leftists’ fault.

Environmentalist circles remain fraught with debate. What needs fixing, and how? What constitutes reliable yardsticks for environmental health? If right-wing answers aren’t forthcoming, it isn’t because solutions are prescriptively partisan. We can’t say only one side dominates the debate, when the other side has walked away. If the Chiefs quit a half-finished game against the Broncos, we wouldn't say the game became “too Denver,” we’d say Kansas City forfeited.

Rich crossed my line when he pilloried Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate both broadly and incorrectly. Rich misrepresents Klein’s thesis so completely, I must conclude he never read beyond the title. I’m less familiar with Rich’s other cited sources, especially conservative sources post-2004 (when I left the movement), but if he’s warped one source, he’s probably skewed others. That includes sources I’d otherwise disagree with.

If I cannot trust Rich’s history, I have difficulty stomaching his future remedies—which he starts so late, I admit my mind had already wandered. His history, riddled with factual inaccuracies, hindsight bias, and “he-said-she-said” quibbles, doesn’t lend itself to reliable predictions. This book reeks of what sociologist Duncan J. Watts calls “creeping determinism.” I wanted to like Rich’s ideas; but sadly, early chapters write checks later chapters can’t cash.

Historians sometimes describe a certain kind of specious historiography, “Whig History,” where amateurs describe history as a progress toward liberal democracy, knowledge, and goodness. I’ll postulate an opposite, “Tory History,” which describes history as a decline from some putative peak of greatness, usually just before the historian got that first workaday job. Rich situates the pinnacle of environmental bipartisanship just before his adolescence. Everything afterward is a steady downhill slide.

Because book publishing has long lead times, Rich couldn’t have known this title would appear just as Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination. However, that makes this book entirely timely. Not only in Rich’s mostly unfulfilled premises, either; it’s timely to remind Americans that appeasing a factually wrong opponent makes you factually wrong, too. We need bipartisan solutions to nonpartisan problems. But not at the cost of objective reality.