Philosophy

This is what I believe.

No one wants to be good. Everybody wants to take whatever they want, eat whatever they want, have sex with whatever they want. They want to hurt people who disagree with them or who they don't like. They want to do whatever they want without consequences. They want to do everything purely for the benefit it will give to themselves. Nobody wants to give to charity. Nobody wants to wait their turn.

Love is selfish. Everyone has a mother and father. Everyone has someone they care about. Many people have loved and been loved far greater than you have. Your friends and family aren't more deserving than anyone else's, no matter how important they are to you. Helping your loved ones is not bad, but it's not any more righteous than helping yourself. Humanity is not good just because lovers give each other dopey looks or parents die to protect their children.

The only reason people act good is because they want to think of themselves as good people. The only morality that humans adhere to is the guilt imposed by society for violating social mores. There may be an absolute system of ethics beyond ourselves, but each person only feels guilty for doing what they've been taught is bad.

Therefore, the only thing necessary to get people to commit the most horrendous crimes is to convince them that they don't need to feel guilty about it. That's not a human, it's a Jew. It's a fag. It's a nigger. It's a Tutsi. It's a witch. It's a criminal, a monster, a fucking animal. Torture them, rape them, shoot them, round them up for the gas chambers. You don't have to feel guilty. You're following orders. Society made you do it. You were driven to it by the circumstances. You're not a man, you're a machine, a soldier, a cog in the great machine.

It's so pathetically easy to convince people that they're not doing anything wrong. All it takes is an excuse, a rationalization, a reason why the normal rules don't apply to you or the people you're hurting. And when justice is demanded, it's so easy to explain why the killers were just bad people deep down and the genocidal maniac was not a man but a monster.

It's not true and it'll never be true. It needs to stop. Every homeless person, king, priest, investment banker, school kid, humanitarian, and murderer is just like you. You must judge them as you judge yourself and judge yourself as you would judge them.

At the end of things, at the end of all things, humankind is indivisible. There's no us and them. There's just us. We're so alone. All we have is each other.

Satan Aborts Spider-Man's Baby

Those of you who are comics-savvy will recognize the title as a reference to One More Day, a completely awful Spider-Man story, which I hope will be forever remembered as Satan aborting Spider-Man’s baby. If you don't recognize it, open a Wikipedia tab.

There’s already been reams of analysis of how absolutely terrible and ill-planned this story was by people much more talented and articulate than I, so I’ll just boil down a few of my objections to it:

• Peter is portrayed as an immature character, but from the very first comics he was thinking of marriage, money and taking care of his aunt. He now lives with his aunt and has no job to speak of. He couldn't have known that this would happen, but he knew he was giving up a wife, a future and potential children.
• This is a trend with Marvel. Look at Johnny Storm. Almost every new author gives him a “coming of age” story or just treats him like a playboy from beginning to end, completely forgetting that he was married and expecting a child at one point. Guess what happened? Lyja the Skrull conveniently disappeared (yes, she was a Skrull, but he loved her even after that revelation) and their child was retconned out of existence. Johnny was a grownup. Now his own sister calls him Paris Hilton.
• THIS IS WHY PEOPLE DON’T TAKE COMICS SERIOUSLY. Every time you spit on characterization, TWENTY YEARS of continuity and any conventions of good storytelling in favor of the almighty status quo, you demean all comics. I know comics fans. We’re prone to a bit of exaggeration. But Joe Quesada is literally and without hyperbole dragging the dignity of the superhero genre down to the level of children’s stories solely to pursue an irrational personal agenda.
• My father and mother are middle-aged comics fans. Comics are a constant presence in my life. I don’t even know what it’s like to not read comics. Whenever I talk about them with a non-fan, I have to stop for a moment to try and figure out if they’d recognize a certain character or plot. I buy issues and then I buy trades. I easily become obsessed with characters, authors (ask me about Brian K. Vaughan!) and artists (I would probably buy a Wolverine comic with a Jo Chen cover JO CHEN I LOVE YOU). One More Day (and Civil War and Secret Invasion and almost all post-Alias Bendis… I could go on) makes me want to give up superheroes forever.

One More Day is just plain dumb.