The Return of Cartoon Morality

A promotional still from Netflix’s Masters of the Universe relaunch

Masters of the Universe wasn’t really my thing in the 1980’s. I watched it occasionally when it aired, but it mostly ran when my parents expected me to do homework, so I never followed story arcs (such as they existed in Reagan-era animation) or savvied the characters. So when Nexflix proudly announced their intent to resume the show where it ended, my first reaction was to shrug.

I realize I’m at the age when the popular culture of my childhood has become mythologized. I grew up watching the Eisenhower Era and its hangover treated as somehow sacred. Nick at Nite reran Mister Ed, The Donna Reed Show, and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In with reverence once designated for Bach chorales and High Church Mass. The Wonder Years was one of network TV’s biggest hits, and Classic Rock Radio first became a thing.

So maybe I should’ve been better prepared, thirty years later, when the mass media icons of my childhood became similarly fetishized. From Michael Bay’s Transformers movies to Masters of the Universe, I’ve watched the chintzy animation of my childhood, little better than commercials when they first aired, turn into half-serious mass-market art. The result has left me curious and dumbfounded.

He-Man and Optimus Prime began life, of course, as toys. With media largely deregulated during the Reagan Administration, the strict boundary between TV content creators and the advertisers who subsidized them melted away. The syndicated weekday cartoons, few of which lasted beyond a single season, mostly existed to sell toys. And I, desperate to fit in, purchased some of them, particularly Transformers.

Looking back, these shows’ storylines had messages I didn’t necessarily catch as a child. He-Man and Optimus Prime both had American accents, with greater or lesser degrees of slow Southern drawls; Prime practically sounded like a stand-up comedian doing a John Wayne impression. By contrast, Skeletor, Megatron, and Cobra Commander all had British RPs, offset by their raspy voices. Villains were easy to spot: they spoke like aristocracy with laryngitis.

The morality of these shows had the complexity of comic strips in Boy Scouts magazines. Heroes and villains were unambiguous, and heroism or villainy was simply the characters’ respective natures. Villains lived sumptuously, ate caviar, and shat upon their sidekicks, while heroes ate red meat, slept rough, and had tight friend networks. It’s tough to avoid correlating these stories’ simple morality with Late Cold War propaganda.

Michael Bay with Bumblebee, perennially the most popular Transformer

Therefore, though it’s tempting to treat recent reboots of She-Ra and Voltron as mere nostalgia, the moral complexity these characters introduced strikes me. The revamped Voltron Force’s attempts to maintain enthusiasm for their mission, faced against an empire driven by strange and often poorly defined motivations, seems intended more for adults than children. Are we as Americans, the story seemingly asks, the plucky adolescent heroes, or are we the empire?

I have avoided watching Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, not out of love for cinematic grandeur and distaste for Bay’s notoriously excessive spectacle, but because the Transformers represent a piece of my childhood I’m not proud of. I purchased Transformers toys, not because I wanted to participate in their story, but because I thought I might fit in with other boys. I thought I could purchase my way into normalcy, a late-capitalist attitude that’s hard to shake in adulthood.

Therefore, when I see these artifacts of my childhood revamped for adults, with the complex morality that grown-ups know and fear, I’m left puzzled. We adults know that reality doesn’t break down neatly into good and evil, that villainy is contextual rather than innate, and that carefully placed violence doesn’t really make social problems go away. Yet exactly that attitude is being marketed back to us.

Netflix’s decision, with their Masters of the Universe relaunch, to resume the existing story rather than reboot it as they did with She-Ra, makes me wonder who these products are for. Despite attempts to popularize binary morality with stunts like the War on Terror, we just don’t live in the Cold War anymore; pitting bare-chested American virility against the skeletal Red Menace surrogate makes little sense. Who asked for this?

Then I realize: maybe we did. As the oldest Millenials have already turned 40, and Generation X has rollover IRAs, maybe we wish we really had the moral clarity we imagined in childhood. In a world where our greatest enemy is a virus, and where our fellow citizens are the greatest threat to democracy, maybe we want a bad guy we can punch. Maybe we just miss morality.

What Would Father Damien Do?

God save me from ever being this kind of Christian.
via Twitter: Tim Meshginpoosh/@OldReepicheep

As Christian as I am, I deeply distrust public religiosity, like snake handling or praying in tongues. Rather than demonstrating a commitment to living the Gospel, depicted in Jesus’ life and teachings, people who participate in these displays prefer showing fellow Christians how profound their faith is. Like Jesus’ proverbial pharisee, praying on street corners, such Christians choose a vaudeville religion. Now let’s add vaccine denialists to that list.

Antivax Christianity, like snake-handling, is a heresy, because it privileges displays of human glory over quiet lives of faithfulness. Claims, like the one above, that Christians don’t need medicine because we have “the antibody of Jesus Christ,” aren’t meant for healing the sick or comforting the grieving. This form of showboating religion treats humans like God, and mistakes foolhardiness for faith. As I've written before, historically, these displays end tragically.

Watching grotesqueries like this unfold, my mind drifts to Father Damien of Moloka’i. Born Jozef De Veuster in Flemish Belgium, he felt his religious calling at the unusually senior age (by 19th Century Catholic standards) of eighteen. He took the religious name Damien during his novitiate, then traveled to Hawai’i as a missionary, and was formally ordained in Honolulu, then was briefly shuffled around several parishes throughout the Kingdom of Hawai’i.

In 1866, King Kamehameha V authorized creation of a leprosy (Hansen’s disease) colony on Moloka’i. Like syphilis, influenza, and whooping cough, leprosy was introduced to Hawai’i by outside traders; unlike those other diseases, leprosy could be contained. The Kingdom established its colony at Kalawao, a remote peninsula accessible only by sea. The patients confined to Kalawao immediately suffered spiritual dislocation, acedia, and great suffering.

Father Damien volunteered to plant a parish at Kalawao, which eventually became Saint Philomena’s. With 600 patients, the colony was fairly large, and Damien was the only pastor. The bishop intended to rotate several pastors through Saint Philomena’s every six months, to protect the priests’ health, but a paucity of volunteers meant Damien didn’t have any relief. That, my friends, is where Damien becomes relevant today.

The official state statue of Father Damien
at the Hawai’i Capitol in Honolulu

Given the opportunity to leave Saint Philomena’s empty, Damien elected to remain. The medical mission to Kalawao was financially well-supplied, but short-handed. Thus, besides his apostolic mission, Damien also became volunteer nurse, house carpenter, schoolteacher, and eventually, coffin builder and gravedigger. Can you imagine today’s megachurch pastors changing their parishioners’ suppurating lesions? Can you imagine Rick Warren or Joel Osteen digging their parishioners’ graves?

Though Father Damien worked with superintendents who were Hawai’ian or part-Hawai’ian, they rotated out for safety. Damien alone worked without relief. Under his watch, the lepers’ shacks were upgraded to painted houses, and many operated successful farms. Damien was only part of the lepers’ support network, but he was the only part which remained constant for several uninterrupted years. Reportedly, he even began preaching in the Hawai’ian language.

Most important, Father Damien had no magical illusions that Jesus provided him immunity from disease. When he’d ministered in Kalawao for eleven years, he realized he’d stopped feeling pain in his extremities, a diagnostic sign of Hansen’s disease. He’d become a leper. The disease became so advanced that he needed to wear a bamboo frame beneath his liturgical vestments to keep his clothing from blistering his skin.

And still he served his parish. He eventually served sixteen years among perhaps the most feared population in Hawai’i, then died among them, and was buried in their midst. Having the protections of a European in an essentially colonized nation, he could’ve received much better treatment, if he’d only left his parishioners behind. But he didn’t perceive Whiteness as gain; he served lepers, until he became a leper.

Witnessing today’s spoiled, White megachurch Christians claiming God will prevent them getting infected with a highly infectious disease, I can’t help comparing them to Father Damien. For him, Christianity meant getting his hands dirty, getting the castoffs from parishioners’ saturated bandages on his clothes. It meant loving them during their lives, and ensuring they had honorable burials when they died. Christianity meant walking into Kalawao, and never walking out.

I’m not always the best representative of Christianity. I get short-sighted, focused on my own comfort and ease. It’s easy to say “I’m only human,” but so were the Apostles. And so was Father Damien. In an era defined by colonial poverty, a rootless state, and widespread disease, I want to be more like Father Damien. I want to stop thinking about my glory, and instead serve the suffering, those Christ calls us to serve.

Yankees and Ayn Rand and Bears, Oh My!

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate and American Town (And Some Bears)

Tiny Grafton, New Hampshire, was carved from New England’s forested wilderness before the Revolution, by a cadre of committed tax-dodgers. Its character has changed little in the intervening 260 years. When a committee of Libertarians, jazzed on Internet forums and ideological fervor, went looking for an existing small town to colonize for their values, Grafton looked amenable. But the Libertarians failed to plan for Grafton’s encroaching wilderness.

Advance PR for Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s first book is somewhat misleading. It implies that Libertarians, unified by an ethic of complete hands-off government, remade Grafton in their image, then bungled it when New Hampshire’s swelling bear population invaded. This isn’t what happened in Hongoltz-Hetling’s actual telling. If you’re seeking ammunition to deploy against Libertarianism in online arguments, this book isn’t it. No, Hongoltz-Hetling has written something different altogether.

To start, the bears, mostly American black bears, didn’t follow the Libertarians into town. Hongoltz-Hetling describes the first attack, when a previously unexpected bear swooped into Jessica Soule’s lawn and gobbled two of her kittens, happening five years before the Libertarians arrived. New Hampshire’s dark, moody wilderness, once nearly obliterated, has been gradually returning for about seventy years, bringing bears, coyotes, and bobcats with it.

Second, the Libertarians less remade Grafton, which already was chronically tax-averse and had few public services, than exaggerated its already lawless tendencies. The Libertarians took a community, which had never been particularly large or prosperous, and colonized it with anti-government values, though they frequently didn’t agree what that meant. The result was chaotic, and for many, ended in tears.

Despite this, Hongoltz-Hetling, a Polk Award-winning freelance journalist, tells a remarkably complex and humane story of people whose ethics worked well on paper, but faced unanticipated obstacles in real life. He anchors most of his story on two transplants who experience Grafton through unique lenses. John Barbiarz basically invited the Libertarians into Grafton, then couldn’t control them. Jessica Soule and her cats lived in fortress-like solitude as bear encroachments increased.

Libertarians are a big-tent philosophy. Grafton attracted survivalists, revivalists, conservative anarcho-capitalists, centrist Christian utopians, and progressive hippies. They agree that government should generally leave individuals alone, but beyond that, they agree upon little. While some Libertarians attempted to create businesses, churches, and other community amenities for Grafton, others clung to the town’s margins, prepping for the Apocalypse, and foraging like… well, like bears.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Stoked with ethical fervor, Grafton’s Libertarians disrupted town business, did dangerous things intended to provoke confrontations with bureaucrats, and drained town coffers. As John Barbiarz describes it, they wanted the freedom of Libertarianism, without the concomitant responsibility. Though Libertarians believe the Free Market will fix everything, without repaired roads and basic public services, Grafton’s economy collapsed. The general store, Grafton’s last business, shuttered in 2018.

Meanwhile, the bears became increasingly fearless. Once edging toward extinction, New Hampshire’s forests, and the bears that occupy them, have resurged. But these aren’t like the bears Grafton’s colonists terrorized. Once afraid of humans, these bears have become brazen, wandering into town, preying on domesticated animals. Bears have adapted to human environments. They’ve apparently developed a taste for cats, not normally part of bears’ diets.

Though the Libertarians and bears apparently colonized Grafton separately, they formed a mutually reinforcing loop. Libertarians’ disdain for regulations caused them to sloppily handle trash, which bears loved to raid for cast-off food. Bears’ fearlessness around humans provided Libertarians justification for one of their favorite causes, open-carrying firearms for personal defense. The situation was compounded because some Libertarians shot bears, while others fed them.

Hongoltz-Hetling describes a community fraught with bitter competition: bears versus humans, old Graftonites versus colonists, and sectarian feuds among the Libertarians. Without a guiding philosophy, civic life in Grafton begins drifting. The town becomes too cash-strapped to fight fires, while New Hampshire becomes too broke to manage its spreading wilderness. Soon Grafton becomes the site of something nobody expected: New England’s first unprovoked bear attack in a century.

Though a journalist, Hongoltz-Hetling tells the story with a novelist’s aplomb. His descriptions of bear depredations have an almost Stephen King-like atmosphere, while his descriptions of political wrangling resemble John Grisham dramas. He cites statistics and creates a historical context where necessary, but throughout, the human narrative of Grafton’s unwinding takes center stage. We feel like we’re watching our hometown’s final days.

It would be easy to waste a story like this assigning blame. Though Hongoltz-Hetling clearly has his sympathies, he’d rather emphasize the human aspects. His story is terrifying, complex, and frequently heartbreaking, much like life.

Justice or the Peace?

Carl Hulse, Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, from Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh

To those of us who followed Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, it looked like nothing we’d ever seen before. But this was an illusion, created by partisan blinders. Though it was more extreme, more fraught, and more acrimonious than any prior Supreme Court confirmation, it was consistent with court nominations since the turn of the millenium. It helps to have seasoned observers to contextualize these events for us.

Carl Hulse, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, has spent his career documenting partisan horse-trades, including federal court appointments. Once a rubber-stamp process with minimal impediments unless a nominee had serious problems (Hulse cites Robert Bork’s nomination), federal judgeships have become more contentious since the early 2000s. What happened, then, and why the abrupt change in practices? You may not like the answer.

Senate Democrats took deep exception to George W. Bush’s federal appointees. When Democrats controlled the Senate, they took unprecedented steps to obstruct appointments; when they lost the Senate, Democrats performed the first-ever filibuster against an Appeals Court appointee, Miguel Estrada. The fight over Estrada’s appointment became so bitter that it literally cost human lives: Estrada’s wife miscarried, then died, during the Senate fight.

Therefore, when Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died in 2008, creating a vacancy, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, vacationing in the Caribbean, made the hasty declaration that nobody would receive a hearing for Scalia’s seat. In McConnell’s mind, he was only doing what Democrats would’ve done, were they in power. This read wasn’t entirely unfair, since McConnel’s decision was a more extreme iteration of what Democrats had actually done.

In Hulse’s telling, this reflects the pattern in judicial nominations for over twenty years now. One party, formerly in the minority, gains the majority and changes the rules to limit minority power. Then that party returns to the minority, carried by ever-shifting political winds, and finds themselves constrained by the rules they previously wrote. The new majority, meanwhile, makes new, even more restrictive rules. And the circle of life continues.

Carl Hulse

Many of these rules changes apply to filibusters. Minority Democrats used filibuster rules to hinder Republican court appointees, sometimes literally for years. (The ghost of Miguel Estrada looms over court appointments in Hulse’s narrative.) Gaining the majority, Democrats changed Senate rules to stop filibusters of most federal court appointees, then quickly lost the majority. Now, holding a narrow majority, some want to kill the filibuster altogether. Some people never learn.

Because it isn’t just Supreme Court nominees who received this treatment, though only those nominees tend to command the 24-hour news cycle. Rules governing federal judge appointments throughout the system have been altered, granting judges lifetime appointments over the objections of home-state Senators and other traditional procedural hurdles. Some of these rules changes have probably remade American courts for the next full generation.

Hulse centers his narrative on three Supreme Court nominees: Merrick Garland, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. All three nominees were flawed, in some ways, from Garland’s centrist record and unexciting personal style, to serious criminal accusations against Kavanaugh. Yet what matters for Hulse is that, in all three cases, Senators changed the rules. All three nominations granted more power to the majority, and the effects cascaded throughout the federal courts.

Because of publishing’s long lead times, this book dropped before Amy Coney Barrett became a national phenomenon. But Hulse name-checks her twice, as someone considered an up-and-comer in the federal judiciary. Hulse also acknowledges that everyone knew the Merrick Garland trainwreck was explicitly partisan: he quotes several Senators admitting that, should another vacancy occur in President Trump’s final year, Republicans intended to fill it.

We who watched these nominations unfold on television and online, often got a heated, partisan, contradictory narrative. Monday’s journalism would often be superseded by Wednesday. Hulse retells the events in ways that exclude fleeting scuttlebutt and mass-media clutter, putting the story of these three tumultuous years into a context that makes sense. He also excludes the partisan lens-grinding that distorted unfolding events for many news junkies, including me.

Perhaps most importantly, though he denies both parties are equal, Hulse demonstrates with evidence that both parties are complicit in the current catastrophe. Partisan brawling in Congress has turned the federal judiciary into a political football, making justice harder to dispense. And when Democrats currently (as I write) suggest changing the rules to overcome inertia, they’re basically strategizing how to sneak up behind themselves and pick their own pockets.

Partisan wrangling has essentially made America less free, because we have fewer rules.

Whose Alamo Should We Remember?

Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, Forget the Alamo: the Rise and Fall of an American Myth

The Alamo is a physical fact: a 300-year-old Spanish mission church near the heart of San Antonio, Texas. But what does that mean? The Alamo’s mythology has shaped how Texas has seen itself since the famous siege, nearly two centuries ago, and mythmakers have coached Americans to see ourselves through the Alamo lens. But new knowledge and controversial facts have forced a recent reevaluation. And that makes some people uncomfortable.

Texas history, including the Alamo, hasn’t always been a respected field; our authors note that historians often go to Texas to bury their careers. Folklore and tall tales often exceed available facts. And Texas, more than probably any other state, actively legislates how history gets taught. This means what actually happened at places like the Alamo and San Jacinto have become creation myths, Just-So Stories that serve a sociopolitical purpose.

Our authors dedicate approximately one-third of their book to uncovering the Alamo’s elusive facts. Yes, they agree, Jim Bowie, William Travis, and Davy Crockett were definitely there. But what were they fighting for? Subsequent folk history has turned the Alamo into a defense of liberty, justice, and democracy. But their contemporary rhetoric shows Texians (White settlers in east Texas) feared Mexico would come for their “property.”

“Property” could only mean two things. Texians treasured land first. The Liverpool textile boom of the 1830s made fertile Texas bottomland valuable, because it nurtured abundant cotton harvests. But Texas land wasn’t scarce, so Mexico City had little motivation to expropriate it. Mexico’s progressive mixed-race government, however, did want to seize the other resource that made cotton farming profitable: White Texians had imported thousands of Black slaves.

Our authors don’t spill copious ink explaining White Texians as slave traders. Once they’ve demonstrated it using Texians’ own words, they’d rather focus on what actually happened: the escalating rhetorical conflict between Texians and the distant Mexican government, as economic need increasingly clashed with social values. Each side projected their fears onto the other. Texians were drifting from Mexico long before troops began massing outside the Alamo.

I was surprised, though, by how quickly our authors moved on from the actual battle. They admit that, owing to longtime historical neglect, verifiable information about the Texas Revolt is pretty scarce. Our authors care more about what happened afterward. Texas began carefully managing Alamo mythology before the gunsmoke cleared; Bowie, Travis, and Crockett had already become martyrs for a democratic parable. The stories quickly outpaced the facts.

Alamo myths have been hotly contested from the beginning. Though Texas associated the Alamo with enlightened democratic values, the stories glossed over non-White allies, including the Tejano and Native American volunteers. (Even our authors briefly mention, then apparently forget, the Cherokee, Comanche, and Wichita nations.) Texas also revered the Alamo abstractly, while permitting the building to decay. Much of the original compound has been lost.

Our authors depict ongoing battles over how Texas should remember what happened in 1836, and to what degree the building deserves preservation. Ardently anti-tax Texans have frequently balked at maintaining or administering the building themselves, delegating responsibilities to clubby networks of San Antonio’s White elite. This has become especially pointed as San Antonio has become a majority non-White city, and Texas overall promises to follow suit.

Governing the Alamo mythology isn’t airy-fairy. The exclusion of Tejanos from Texas’ creation myth, and broad, sweeping stereotypes of Santa Anna’s army, have historically served to fuel anti-Mexican sentiment throughout Texas. Though official state history, including the darkly legendary 7th-Grade Texas History Class, showed signs of liberalizing in the 1990s, but in the early 2000s, conservatives with good PR skills began seizing control of the official narrative.

This battle over official historiography isn’t incidental. It describes in miniature the current battles over how Americans want to memorialize themselves for future generations. The past doesn’t objectively exist. Instead, Texans, and Americans generally, reinforce narratives that reflect values; some of those narratives include monuments, like the Alamo, which have been manipulated for centuries. Whoever controls the past controls the future, as someone once wrote.

Our authors bring the narrative current through summer of 2020, when nationwide protests over monuments and police violence descended into standoffs in Alamo Plaza. Political futures may fall according to how official memory recalls this moldering fortress. Powerful people have proven themselves willing to kill over how the state manages the mythology. But what matters is, the Alamo myth has come unmoored from the old Spanish mission church.

Maybe, our authors assert, it’s time to forget about the Alamo.