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Back in the day, Kevin (Kenn?) McCracken had a column on either Zealot or here at RevSF called "I Can See Your House from Here." It was essentially a series of political and religious opinion pieces, and I loved every single one of them. My young mind was of molten clay back then, or something equally malleable and squishy, and I used to take his words very seriously. But something struck me after his 9/11 column, wherein he urged the country to step back, take a breath, and be more Richard Gere like. He said something to the tune of, just because we have a couple ruined buildings, doesn’t give us license to barge into other people’s countries and tell them how to live.

That’s where he lost me.

Back in 1999, I had an uber feminist world geography teacher. I did okay in her class, but it did not help me that she was extremely hot and always came in to class sweaty from basketball practice. But that’s not what I’m outraged about – focus, Jackie boy! No hot teacher rant, we’ve got important things to say! Here we go:

One of the last things we learned about in her class, before Summer, was about the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and analogues of it that had established themselves throughout the middle east. We read testimonies of several women who had illegally emigrated to other countries to escape those that they had the misfortune of being born in. A group of them had gotten as far as Great Britain, having been denied asylum in America. There were stories about how degrading polygamy was, how they were treated like animals, pulverized into bloody pulps per their arranged husband’s whim. The one that really made me tear up at my cheap little plastic desk was a woman talking about witnessing her mother being beaten to death by a swarm of men with stones and clubs. Her crime was not that she had stolen anything or hurt someone or even said something impolite. Her crime was that she had been raped, which made her impure and unworthy of God, which tarnished the family’s honor. Among the people that were beating this woman to death were her own brother, father, and right next to them, the three men who raped her. One of them became the owner of a taxi company in New York a few months later.

I bring this up because we’ve been talking about 300 and Captain America’s death a little on the message boards, and I have something to say. No, I didn’t kill a baby today, that doesn’t matter much to me, as long as its dead. Let’s start with 300 and I’ll get to Cap after.

A state sponsored Iranian television station has reviewed 300, so that the Iranian people would know what to be outraged about. See, there’s no cartoon depictions of Mohammed this time around, or false Newsweek stories about copies of the huge ass Qur’an being flushed down tiny ass toilets, so they might be confused as to why they’re burning effigies of George W. Bush and throwing fire bombs at embassies.

Quote:

"Warner brothers, which belongs to the famous and rich American Jews, is the company which made the movie. This movie, which is totally against Persian culture and civilization, could be considered a production by Zionists and American extremists."

That’s pretty much the theme of the entire clip. You can watch the whole review here, at the Zionist and American extremist website memri.tv. Hang on for a second, I suddenly had a death wish.

If I go down, I’m taking all of you with me.

In all seriousness, this isn’t an issue that popped up all of a sudden last Friday, and its not exclusive to the country of Iran.

There is a line of thought throughout the Middle East, introduced in Mosques and Madrassas, that Jews and westerners are the cause of all suffering in Islamic lands. After all, they live by the only true God’s last true prophet’s only true laws, speak the only Godly language, and live in the only holy lands – although all land belonging to Allah, its only common sense that they should be expanding. Given all that, naturally, all suffering from unemployment, lack of education, starvation, poverty, lack of resources, etc. in their own nations must be the fault of someone else, and not their own corrupt governments and medieval lifestyles. Something is really wrong with societies that publicly lynch gays, rape victims and apostates, and then turn around to accuse far more liberal countries of horribly violating human rights. I believe the phrase is, "Orwellian double-speak."

In short, the reason we lost two buildings, a chunk of the Pentagon, a perfectly good patch of Pennsylvanian farmland, and four planes full of average men, women and children heading for Disneyland, is because we do let other nations live like animals. I hate to be so cliché as to actually quote Ayn Rand, but I agree with her that "Evil exists where good men do nothing." Every nightmare of Alan Moore, George Orwell and their alarmist contemporaries are real – in the middle east. Their worst fears of what decadent western society could become have been alive from Turkey to Yemen to Kosovo to Darfur for the past seven hundred years.

So, does 300 actually have an agenda? I have no idea. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not allowed to until tomorrow. The little woman’s orders. But I do know from an article I can’t find on hotair.com, that Frank Miller, 300’s creator, has very strong opinions. Speaking to National Public Radio a few weeks back, this is what he had to say:

Quote:

NPR: […] Frank, what’s the state of the union? FM: Well, I don’t really find myself worrying about the state of the union as I do the state of the home-front. It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants … and we’re behaving like a collapsing empire. Mighty cultures are almost never conquered, they crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats because of everything that isn’t working out perfectly every time. NPR: Um, and when you say we don’t know what we want, what’s the cause of that do you think? FM: Well, I think part of that is how we’re educated. We’re constantly told all cultures are equal, and every belief system is as good as the next. And generally that America was to be known for its flaws rather than its virtues. When you think about what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities, and all the good its done in the world, it’s kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally. NPR: A lot of people would say what America has done abroad has led to the doubts and even the hatred of its own citizens. FM: Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built. NPR: As you look at people around you, though, why do you think they’re so, as you would put it, self-absorbed, even whiny? FM: Well, I’d say it’s for the same reason the Athenians and Romans were. We’ve got it a little good right now. Where I would fault President Bush the most, was that in the wake of 9/11, he motivated our military, but he didn’t call the nation into a state of war. He didn’t explain that this would take a communal effort against a common foe. So we’ve been kind of fighting a war on the side, and sitting off like a bunch of Romans complaining about it. Also, I think that George Bush has an uncanny knack of being someone people hate. I thought Clinton inspired more hatred than any President I had ever seen, but I’ve never seen anything like Bush-hatred. It’s completely mad. NPR: And as you talk to people in the streets, the people you meet at work, socially, how do you explain this to them? FM: Mainly in historical terms, mainly saying that the country that fought Okinawa and Iwo Jima is now spilling precious blood, but so little by comparison, it’s almost ridiculous. And the stakes are as high as they were then. Mostly I hear people say, ‘Why did we attack Iraq?’ for instance. Well, we’re taking on an idea. Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we’re doing the same thing now. NPR: Well, they did declare war on us, but… FM: Well, so did Iraq.

We’re fighting an idea, religious fascism, which is and has been part of daily life in countries like Iran for centuries. That’s not an easy task, but I really am afraid of the day when America just buckles. Uncle Sam collapses to his knees, throws his hands over his face and says, "You were right, you were always right – I’m the bad guy and I’m sorry. Do with me what you will."

Cheese it, boys! They figured us out!

Now compare what Frank Miller said, again, who is the creator of 300, to what Mark Millar said, who was in charge of Captain America’s death in the Marvel Civil War storyline. To put this in the proper context, this was in regards to a fiercely anti-American Superman comic he was in charge of, wherein Kal-El crash landed in Soviet Russia rather than rural Kansas.

Quote:

I was fortunate enough to have pitched this idea in a period when America still believed in freedom of speech. This isn’t a slight at the publishers in any way because they gave me no resistance whatsoever, but it’s clear that something like this would be a harder sell in the perpetual state of war and fear that’s been engineered in the States by the un-elected junta sitting in the Oval Office… Like the Bush administration, Superman absolutely believes he’s doing the right thing when he steamrollers over all these weaker states and enforces a global ideology on the human population. However, we as the reader get nervous at the blurred lines between his utopia and the totalitarian state we see in the book, and which we seem to be heading for in real life as the US constitution is torn up before our eyes.

Oddly enough, President Chimpy McCokespoon has yet to have him hauled off to Gitmo and shot in the face for daring to question The Administration. Just thought I might point that out.

Now, I love the HZGs. All of them. I’ve been reading their stuff since I was twelve years old. I’m running up on almost a decade of somewhat distant internet fanboyism. I know most of the old crew, and most of the current crew, is probably more inclined to agree with Millar than Miller. I can respect that, differences of opinion are okay as long as the bastards don’t try to raise taxes on me. But this little throwaway line of Joe’s in his ongoing updated article on the death of Steve Rogers made me think.

[quote=Joe Crowe]Now, about this "representation of America" being killed and this being "relevant" to war and politics and stuff you see on editorial pages. That’s just silly.[/quote]

This is the part of the blog where I quote Millar saying that he didn’t intend Civil War to be political, but couldn’t resist. Or where I point out Joe Quesada saying that Civil War was an allegory to the Patriot Act. Or that Captain America has been a left wing mouth piece for forty years, and that his former sidekick, Winter Soldier, was actually named for a group of Vietnam veteran war protesters. Or that even my Punisher Max Barracuda spin off has a Dick Cheney joke in it. But I don’t feel like finding all those links and scanning the image.

So instead, I’ll end all this on one more quote from Frank Miller.

[quote=Frank Miller]“Patriotism, I now believe, isn’t some sentimental, old, conceit. It’s self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation’s survival.”[/quote]

With all that out of me, I’ll call off the outrage for another year. You hear that, Klaw, Ivey, Superdave, Bey, McCracken et alii? You have one year to write good come backs for Hillary Clinton jokes. Because I’ve already got that she’s old and fat, and that’s comedy gold right there.

Ahhhh. It’s going to be a fun four years to be outraged.