John C. Wright's Journal

A news story on BBC Canada:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13237795

Editorial on the same topic, Breitbart’s Big Hollywood website:

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jhudnall/2011/04/29/disgrace-of-dc-comics-superman-renounces-his-american-citizenship/

In which Supes announces that the America Way is too small an ideal for him, the world being so modern and interconnected, donchyano.

While I am all in favor of elliptical interpretations of the First Amendment which allow protesters to trample the cross and burn the flag, my dislike of censorship has a limit. I, for one, would welcome an intrusive, nay, Cesarean law that ordained Superman, Captain America, and other beloved and iconic exemplars of the American Dream to be immune from casual Leftwing desecration.

Of course, since desecration is the prime, at times the sole, entertainment and pasttime of these poor and limited souls, perhaps it would be cruel to remove their sadistic hobby from them, merely for the peace, safety, comfort, mental and moral healthy, joy and wellbeing of the immense majority of the rest of us.

Moreover, from a legal point of view, Superman and Captain America are private property and taking it for public use without due compensation would be problematical. Unlike condemning private property and selling it to put up a privately owned mall on the grounds that the construction may increase tax revenue, which is Constitutional in our postmodern, postlegal, leftomaniacal society.

No, to avoid the legal implications, I suggest we, the comicbook-loving community, merely appear at the offices of DC comics, and stage a riot, have the level of violence spiral out of control, drag the editors and owners bodily out of the building, and hang them from lampposts, and laugh and tell Monty Python jokes while their legs kick, dancing with spasms, in the air, inches from the ground. Then we can scratch their car paint with keys.

I agree, this might cast a pall over the comicbook-loving community, and folk may look down upon us as barbaric—which is why we should all dress in headscarves and Bedouin robes for the bloody event, whereupon the news media and all righthinking people will take great care to present our side of the story in the most sympathetic possible light, and any one who points out, truthfully, that our barbaric act of vigilante multiple murder over an issue of trivial comicbook geekdom nerdification was, well, barbaric, any such feckless abecedarian naif can be silenced and ostracized by being called a racist.

And if famed science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon criticizes our actions in the most mild and indirect terms, the bold yet anonymous souls of the WisCon steering committee can decree with Olympian fortitude that they fear for their lives and safety, and ban her from appearing as guest of honor there.

And if anyone raises the objection that, no, being a fan of Superman, or of any comic book, does not constitute a “race” in any way, shape or form, any more than Cassius Clay and Cat Stevens are members of the same “race” we can always say —

ah, foolish of me.  No need to ponder how to answer. No one will raise that objection, will he?

• Nate Winchester posted on May 4, 2011
  Speaking of which...
• deiseach posted on May 1, 2011
  I stand corrected, Dan. But you know, why *shouldn't* "American" mean "North American" mean "Canadian"? Superman as a Canadian -…
• Dan posted on May 1, 2011
  If the Fortress of Solitude is in the Arctic, set into the side of a mountain or glacier as it…

I have already driven away one Objectivist, a man whose opinion and principles I somewhat admired, because he was offended that I listed her along with Robert Heinlein and John Norman as persons devoted to the Sexual Revolution and hence to the overthrow of normal, sane, civilized, and Christian sexual morality or, to use the technical term, the truth about sex.

So it is with some trepidation that I reveal that the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the truths of the Christian religion are incompatible: I trust no one is so shocked by the news that he too will depart in anger. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is an atheist creed that follows Epicurean moral reasoning, holding that man’s good and goal in life (this life only) is the pursuit of self interest rightly understood.

Admirer as I may be of her work, where Rand disagrees with the truth of things, there she and I part ways. Not to put too coy a face on the matter, the lady is a heretic, that is, someone who took some small part of the Jewish and Christian religion, our concern for the individual soul, and inflated it to become a monstrous idol bent on overwhelming the other parts of the religion, such as, for example, love of charity.

Her vinegar is useful enough to wipe away the sickening stains of that other heretic, Marx, and his many collectivist and relativist and Politically Correct epigones, and so wins my salute; but she also supports adultery and aborticide and other abominations and gross lapses of logic.

Also, she does not like Tolstoy. Unforgivable!

Hence it is with some pleasure that I read this from the Christian theologian whose work I most admire, Mr. David Bentley Hart:

I like the Sermon on the Mount. She [Ayn Rand] regarded its prescriptions as among the vilest ever uttered. I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation. And, simply said, I cannot find much common ground with someone who believed that the principal source of human woe over the last twenty centuries has been a tragic shortage of selfishness.

This is part of his review of the new Atlas Shrugged film, which he regards, perhaps rightly, as a sign of the Ragnarok. Read here for an amusing degree of Ayn Randian vitriol, employed denouncing Rand, but with considerably more humor and lightness than she was wont to employ:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-trouble-with-ayn-rand

And while we are admiring movie reviews, check out this from Bill Whittle, where he discusses the Cthulhu-level shocking and blasphemous insanity known as the flick version of STARSHIP TROOPERS, and the beloved Woody Woodpecker vehicle, DESTINATION MOON :

http://declarationentertainment.com/take-movie-work-starship-troopers-and-destination-moon

• fabulous_mrs_f posted on May 10, 2011
  In a different district in a different part of the country, I think there would have been more dissent among…