#Gates of Hell

As your faithful Condiment King correspondent, I'm obligated to supply you with an update on his delicious trail of crime. The Prince of Pickles was spotted at the Baltimore Comic-Con on Sept. 29--cavorting with comics creators, perusing some substantially but not excessively over-priced vintage comics, and generally having a blast despite some very sore ankles.

In fact, I had such a generally pleasant and enjoyable time that I almost forgot that the comics industry is supposedly at the center of a firestorm right now--the fearsome #comicsgate. I follow enough people in the comics field on Twitter to know that they've all been affected by this "gate," either being forced to deal with it head-on or take steps to actively avoid the onslaught. I'm sure it came up at some of the panels I missed. But on the convention floor--where the real comic-conning happens--you'd never imagine it existed. No angry protests or counter-protests, just goofy cosplaying.

It's the weird nature of the Internet today that controversies can somehow be gale-force and non-existent at the same time.

What is #comicsgate? I actually have no idea. It involves a lot of vitriol and apparent sexism and transphobia, provoking comics creator to condemn it as a kind of manifesto. It's yet another culture war with vaguely familiar fault lines--Social Justice Warriors on one side, Men's Rights Activists on the other--but the particulars are as confusing as they are uninteresting. It started with a milkshake selfie (I kid you not), interpreted in some corners as a Girl Power declaration within Marvel Comics. It's been percolating for a year since then, ping-ponging off of various sociocultural pressure points, and it has something else to do with authors feeling excluded from the industry. But it's not really about any of that, the same way #GamerGate was never really about whether some software designer boinked a game critic for favorable reviews. In broad terms it's about some impulse to contract as the industry tries to broaden and diversify its readership. The particulars are basically impossible to follow and barely seems worth trying. Why would I care about all of this stupid bullshit when I could just read great Batman comics?

But as hard as it is to understand, it's also getting increasingly hard to ignore. (And don't misunderstand me--despite its transparent ridiculousness, #comicsgate has appeared to cause people real harm.)

#Comicsgate is yet another bitter, histrionic battle in an endless culture war, that to outsiders feels like it's being fought in some alternate dimension which occasionally rips a portal into ours.

You get the basics--some folks feel their most beloved characters are being yanked from their hands by left-wing ideological zealots, who repurpose them for propaganda. It's the same note, played with a million different instruments. Yet another example is the furor over "The Last Jedi," still somehow going strong nearly a year after it was released, which I touched on in July. At the time I said I had "nothing of particular insight" to say about this turbulent cultural phenomenon, and that's still probably true--but I'm going to weigh in on it because I'm convinced this all is important. In ways that aren't obvious.

It's not that I don't get where these guys--and it's always guys--are coming from. I'm an Oberlin grad and I ought to have impeccable PC credentials. But I was never your typical Obie and as a 37-year-old white man, I'm as cranky as anyone about perennial outrage-fests over perceived racism or sexism. I think college campuses have all lost their minds. I know the frustration that every white man knows, when he hears criticisms he thinks aren't in good faith, but feels there isn't even a language to object that won't somehow reinforce the criticism. To hone in on comics, I think it's a damn shame that reflexive, nuance-free condemnations over comic book covers has likely caused artists to shy away from creative provocation.

So it's not that I don't get it--even when I don't agree with it. I'm not even going to get into comparing whether these potential complaints compare to the goal of diversifying comics. To me, the purported outrage and vitriol here far outweighs such considerations. Or the other way around, that this is clearly a primal yelp from a generation of young men raised to believe they'd control the world, and slowly learning they won't. You can grant all of that and the sustained, targeted vitriol still doesn't seem right.

Any which way, I can't imagine any framework that would make the duration and intensity of these outbursts feel at all appropriate. Let's posit that they're right about everything, just for the sake of argument. And let's agree that it must feel cathartic to flip the script on outrage-mongers by putting them on the defensive. Let's even stipulate that anger over these injustices might drive one to say vitriolic, inappropriate things. It still doesn't make any damn sense. How could people get so angry, for so long, about stuff so stupid?

If Batman were giving up crime-fighting to lecture Robin on microaggressions it might make sense. But he's not. He's currently Batmanning bad guys like he always has been. (Written, like he always has been, by a white man.) Even in the harshest light possible, Batman's just updating himself for the times, which is nothing new--like everyone else in the late 60s he boogied and tried to figure out if Paul was really dead.

Any other superhero is the same. There are debates about some new faces in the old costumes--with the occasional new skin tone--and writers are looking to capture some notes about current society, and tell powerful stories that are meaningful to the times. But I promise you, that's all it is.

No fair eye could read mainstream comics today and seriously think the industry is being taken over by the Vassar College Department of Gender Studies. Yet legions of people seem to think that it has.

But this is about so much more than whatever #comicsgate is supposedly about. Debates about comic book movies seem like they're taking place in the Bizarro World too.

Take the supposed controversy over the mythical Snyder Cut, an almost certainly non-existent version of 2017's "Justice League" which allegedly reflects the true vision of its director, Zack Snyder. He left production in May 2017 after the suicide of his daughter, and Warner Brothers hired "The Avengers" director Joss Whedon for extensive re-shoots and re-writes as their release date approached. There's some rumors, never quite substantiated by anyone, that Snyder was actually fired. Allegedly disappointed in early footage, WB started to frantically throw good money after bad, making it one of the most expensive productions in Hollywood history--and if they succeeded in making a watchable film, it's only barely. They have no hopes of ever making their money back.

There's no disagreement that "Justice League" is an ungodly mess. But there's a bitter debate--or at least, the appearance of one--over who is to blame, Snyder or Whedon. Hence the demands for this Snyder Cut, which many seem to be convinced Warner Brothers is hiding in some vault.

Again, there's a kernel here that I can get. As I noted at the time, "Batman v. Superman" does have a distinct visual flair and style, and isn't quite as bad as everyone said. I can sort of understand how people could believe he's a misunderstood artist, and his vision for the DC Universe was unfairly corrupted by Hollywood suits. I think those people ought to get out more, but I at least understand it.

But take a step back and consider the weirdness of this whole Snyder Cut business. In a world where there exists approximately 500,000 actual movies, this group has decided it's worth their time and effort to demand that Warner Brothers edit them another one. And to the extent this movie currently exists, then by their own version of the history, it was so bad it horrified studio executives and provoked them to fire its director mid-production. Yet online activists are demanding that Warner Brothers produce this almost certainly excretable entertainment for them as if it's their birthright.

It's kind of baffling.

Famed comic book writer Gail Simone backed into this controversy, completely unaware, on August 15--and I found myself taking flack in a peripheral way as well.

It's not the biggest surprise in the world that Simone--one of the comic book world's biggest stars, a middle-aged former hairdresser, constant Twitter presence and gleefully proud feminist--would set some of these guys off. (There's a lot of gender politics lurking underneath the Snyder Cut fracas.) But that doesn't even begin to explain how some casual travel complaint tweeting from an exhausted Simone doing the comics circuit put herself on the radar screen. Passing along a tweet from a fan--a fan, mind you, not Simone herself--mocking Snyder's well-known penchant for dark lighting and themes set off hordes of raging Snyder fans.

To her utter astonishment, Simone found herself battling them for days, and her repeated insistence that she's actually a fan of Snyder's movies did no help at all.

I too got embroiled in this too, by sending Simone a doctored Batman panel, shown on the left, to help in her fight. I thought it was funny, and plenty of others did too, apparently, after she retweeted it. But soon I was confronted, day after day, with angry Snyder fans who seemed intent on disabusing me of a notion--that Whedon's "Justice League" cut was the superior one--that I neither had nor gave two shits about.

It was weird.

One last example--"The Last Jedi," which I mentioned before. This one I still can't seem to wrap my head around. I get that some fans found it sub-optimal--I did too. But the constantly boiling anger? That forced one of its stars off Instagram? That provoked an online campaign for a remake? About a friggin movie? What the holy hell is this about?

I suppose it's that the franchise is, by necessity, slowly killing off its original white cast and replacing it with a new group of heroes which does not, as of yet, include a non-Hispanic white man. But no sentence with so much explanation and caveats could possibly be a source of outrage.

It obviously has a lot to do with Admiral Holdo, the purple-haired, possibly gay Rebel Alliance leader who smacks down the hot-headed Poe Dameron during a major plot arc of the movie. In a reversal of genre expectations, she turns out to be proven right about the course of action at issue. Again, nothing gets a young man's blood boiling quite like being put in his place by a woman over 40. But--seriously? This is it? After his armed mutiny against her leadership, Holdo punishes Dameron by affectionately cradling his head after he's stunned unconscious, and she then saves his life through valiant self-sacrifice. And notice I said she was only possibly gay, the big sci-fi franchises are only barely inching towards clear representation of LGBT characters. In 2018. Three damn years after gay marriage was legalized nationwide.

If Last Jedi is political propaganda, it's about the most lame-ass propaganda in the history of politics and literature.

For those of us back on planet Earth, the easiest response is to either meet these arguments on their face and reply with anger in kind, or laugh them off as pure idiocy. Most of us choose the latter. How to even begin to take all of this seriously?

But I'm becoming more and more convinced that we should indeed take it seriously. Whatever else you want to say about the #comicsgaters, the #gamergaters, or the Last Jedi haters, they're not insincere. And they're not all idiots, either. Trust me, I've parried with them.

The only way to possibly understand this phenomenon is to imagine the all-consuming nature of media consumption that would lead one to this place. These are people who honestly, truly feel the world is attacking their identities--and they're only trying to fight back in a reasonable manner.

There so many new forms of communication out there transmitting thoughts, opinions, and purported news with an intimacy and intensity unheard of in past ages--it's all right there in your pocket whenever you need it. Keeping this in mind, these kinds of perceptual cognitive differences start to make more sense. Imagine the tiny, offending details--the new Asian-American character, the new plotline referencing #MeToo, the macho movie made slightly less macho--being bombarded to a young man already feeling apprehensive and defensive about his identity and unsure of his place in the world. Imagine the constant barrage--daily, hourly, always pegged in a way to trigger fear and anger--and you start to get it. It starts to make more sense how this environment could cause an otherwise non-insane person to rage against the machine.

Whenever I've tried to start an earnest dialogue with them on this--just for my own fact-finding--the world I always here is "relentless." The pace of the supposed takeover of their favorite characters and franchises by left-wing, anti-male radicals is just "relentless." Any attempt for me to try to question this notion just bounces off. They don't even try to argue with me on it. It just doesn't register because, to them, it's like questioning if the sky is blue.

The principle I'm outlining here works the other way, too. This probably only seems like a groundswell onslaught, it's probably a relatively tiny group of individuals behind it all. But this reassuring thought, so often used in these debates, doesn't cut it for me anymore. It's true, but that doesn't change that thousands, maybe millions of young men (and some women) feel this way.

But still, why should does it matter? Beyond whether any of their beefs have merits, or any discussion of the societal changes that are provoking their complaints? Why is it worth a long-winded blog post about?

Here's why: You're doing it too.

No, not the general audience you. I mean you. Reading this right now.

It's not just the idiot manbabies susceptible to what I'm talking about. Once you look for it you start to notice it everywhere, especially since 2016. We're all consuming news through rapid-fire social media. We're casually clicking on news stories that excite us or interest us, trusting our intuitions about which feeds and friends to receive news from and trusting our brains to sort it out and form a consistent worldview.

But our brains our exhausted. They're just barely managing and cutting corners to get the job done, filling in blanks with conjecture and bad logic in the backrooms of our noggins.

And I bet feeling well-informed is important to your identity--I bet you took offense at Batman's declaration just a few paragraphs up. This can make you more susceptible to the cognitive distortions, because defending your worldview--not just the facts of it but the idea that you arrived to it from fair-minded rationality--is an important, reflexive defense of your identity. You rabidly defend your notions, even your badly conceived, unconscious ones.

And it's not just you. It's probably me too.

That having a president who regularly tweets out obvious falsehoods and slanders media outlets as "Fake News" is a problem for rational discourse is sort of obvious. What I wasn't quite ready for on 11/8/16 was how much it'd affect people on all sides, even those I'd relied on for objective, rational analysis in the past.

The canary in the post-Trump BS mine was a Medium post from University of Michigan Professor Alex Halderman, purporting to show how counties with touchscreen voting machines in Wisconsin were wildly off from the hand-counted ones, implying the vote had been hacked. Halderman's expertise is computer, not politcal, science, which ought to have been a big red flag--but never mind, the "analysis" flew around the Twitter world before the truth even woke up, let alone thought about putting its pants on. It was even circulated by members of Clinton's circle. The tiniest hint that the baffling 11/8 result could have been faked was just too enticing.

They eventually met with Halderman and others urging a recount, but it all fizzled out--actual election experts soon tore the whole thing to shreds. But Team Clinton couldn't uncork the genie, millions of her supporters poured money to Jill Stein--a Clinton rival!--and her supposed recount campaign. Money she held onto despite performing no recount.

This was perhaps the earliest, post-election example of how Trump had somehow hypnotized his enemies into losing all rational thought. Not long afterwards, purported consultant Eric Garland's infamous "It's time for some game theory" rambling 127-tweet rant claiming elaborate conspiracies and bizarre cause-and-effect chains somehow took Twitter by storm, earning plaudits from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists. The Trump era has been like an oil boom for the intellectually and actually dishonest, as they greedily dig into fields gushing with the black gold of bullshit. Not going to name many names here but you hopefully know of whom I speak--the Seth Abramsons, Louise Menschs, Sarah Kendziors, and a host of others who find there's no way to lose followers by overestimating how much Trump rage has flamed their rational senses. I'm not even sure if they're rationally aware of the con, but no matter--what matters is the con.

The nonsense seems so obvious, so transparent--yet I see people I know to be intelligent and discerning push it along with apparent enthusiasm. The tilled fields of horse manure are also fertile grounds for supposed #Resistance warriors like Michael Avenatti to gain legions of foot soldiers despite operating in transparent bad faith towards boundless political ambition.

Plenty of savvy news observers are calling out the nonsense--and doing so while still simultaneously condemning Pres. Trump. I'd say decrying Mensch and Garland is the fashionable, elite opinion. Yet this doesn't seem to do anything to stop it. We're all just kind of yelling past each other into the void.

Because our only frame of reference is that on November 8, 2016, one Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States. That single fact is our common ground, but the causes and implications of it are still completely unknown and baffling to all of us. It forms no foundation for a common understanding of the world because none of us truly understands it yet. We search for anything to give us grounding--Putin, "economic anxiety," QAnon--and our brains work overtime to form some kind of worldview. The slightest variations in news consumptions seem to create vast gulfs of understanding and enormously different senses of scale or proportion, to the point where I see curious, open-minded thinkers screaming at each other in total, furious amazement. We're doing our best to comprehend a world being delivered to us in an avalanche of confusing, enraging and contradictory its of info--and we're completely blind to the logical leaps and shortcuts our minds are doing on our behalf to somehow hold it all together.

We all kind of agree that social media is a horrible way to consume news, and we try other methods. (E-mailed newsletters seem to have risen and fallen as a viable option, and are barely a niche anyways.) It reminds me a bit of what Michael Crichton coined the Gell-Mann amnesia effect--when you read a completely wrong article about something you're familiar with in the New York Times, yet continue to read, unquestionably, the New York Times. We've all done this. Because scanning each story with that degree of skeptical scrutiny would be impossible, and being completely uninformed about the world would be unthinkable. Our minds resolve the logical contradiction by just forgetting it. Amnesia.

Likewise, we all know that Twitter is a dumpster fire. But what are we gonna do--log off? And not know what's going on? While the Republic falls apart? We can't, in good conscience, do that. So we just keep reading, and our brains do some undercover work to make it fit together and allow us to sleep at night.

I have no doubt my brain is doing this too. I just have no idea where.

ADDENDUM

Or, maybe....it's the Russians.

Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California, released a paper implying that bots, possibly from Russian troll farms, were likely contributing to the sustained campaign against "Last Jedi."

This makes brutal, unsettling sense. Around the world, people are fascinated with American ideals of democracy and power, but they're also obsessed with our culture. (China had to ban "The Big Bang Theory," it's so popular there--not even the show's writers and producers can explain that.) It makes sense that someone savvy enough to disrupt our democratic system would also want to drive a stake through the beating heart of our pop culture dominance as well.

The general nature of these explosions serves a draining and useful propagandic purpose as well. The notion that millions of young men appeared to be furious at the presence of a mildly important female character in a leadership role left everyone feeling wrung out and unhappy, as if here wasn't any point in trying to promote ideals like equality. That psychic toll adds up.

But, a bit of skepticism is in order. The paper itself documents the role that bots played in the Last Jedi firestorm, but only arrived at the conclusion that they were likely some of Russian origin and offered no evidence towards that conclusion. That bots and trolls are part of any online controversy is hardly news.

It's the cybernetic nature of the online universe, the ambiguity about what's machine and man, and the possibility that we've all eagerly reduced ourselves to cogs in something larger and mechanical that creates the unease of the modern age. Part of me kind of subconsciously built in the possibility of bots for my evaluation of #comicsgate--a depressing inevitability, not worth that more thought. I bet that's exactly what someone enjoying borscht right now wanted.