Habemus Papem

I grew up a Roman Catholic, with my formative years spent in Vatican II, in the papacies of John XXIII and Paul VI.

It was not their reformative movements that drove me from the church; it was the opposition to further reform--the opposition to openness, to lay involvement, to sexual liberation. (For the record, I've been a practicing Episcopalian for nearly 20 years.)

This new Pope confirms all my worst fears for the future of the church I once counted as my own. You only need to read his words from the sermon he gave before the conclave opened--one his fellow cardinals must have heard and agreed with to elect this man--to know that any further reforms in the matter of celibacy and gender in the priesthood, in the matter of ecumenicalism, in the matter of tolerance for those of other faiths and other positions even within the church is doomed while this man rules the Vatican:

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.

This is an anti-modern speech; a speech that turns the church back more than 40 years.

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Jane Eisner takes up the issue of Congressional action to legalize the "sanitizing" of films and TV shows on DVD for family audiences. Eisner writes, in response to director Marshall Herskovitz's comment that such editing is "morally wrong":

But if that business is providing a sought-after service--one that is, arguably, a social good--is that still morally wrong? Film sanitizing wasn't available decades ago because the technology wasn't available. It wasn't necessary [emphasis in original] because television and films more accurately reflected community standards and values than they do today.

...it's hard to oppose giving parents the tools to exert some control in their own homes.

Those tools already exist--they are called the on/off switch and the channel selector. Furthermore, for any DVD that must be bought or rented, the answer is even simpler--do not buy or rent those that might contain material offensive to you. But do not insist that you be offered bowdlerized versions of those films so that you might enjoy them without the questionable (to some) contents.

Would you suggest that it is OK to offer a version of Huckleberry Finn in which Huck speaks perfect English and never refers to his companion Jim as a "nigger"? Or that we publish an edition of Shakespeare in which the bawdy comments of the gravedigger in Hamlet or the doorkeeper in MacBeth are eliminated?

Furthermore, if it is permissible to create altered versions of some mature-targeted films to make them more palatable to a "family" audience, is it not then equally permissible to create altered versions of family films that would be more attractive to older, more mature audiences? Why not a version of The Little Mermaid in which Ariel's strategically placed seashells are missing? I'll bet you there's a profitable audience for that.

[This post consists largely of a letter sent to the Inquirer and Eisner.]

I'm Back!

I didn't intend to take a two-month hiatus from posting here.

No, really, I didn't.

Life got away from me; nothing in comics or politics seemed like something I wanted to talk about around here (the Schiavo case merely frustrated me, both as a religious person and a political one); and some of the stuff I might have wanted to comment on were covered far better in other places, making whatever my own contributions might have been seem irrelevant.

But this week a trio of things (see below) came to my attention and so I'm here again.

Hopefully, stuff like this will continue to crop up and intrigue me enough to talk about here.

Comics and Academia

We all know that comics have been getting much more interest from the academic world in recent years. An example is this review of several books about comics--examined from varying viewpoints--published in the journal College Literature and available on line at 24-Hour Scholar.

It's quite lengthy and it's somewhat difficult to decide what's worth quoting from it to give a feel of its style and content. (Suffice to say if you find The Comics Journal's prose stuffy and less than lucid, you'll find this at least equally difficult.)

Intellectuals and Comics--a Discussion

“For a bulky segment of a century, I have been an avid follower of comic strips — all comic strips,” Parker wrote. “This is a statement made with approximately the same amount of pride with which one would say, ‘I’ve been shooting cocaine into my arm for the past 25 years.’”

Tracing the literati’s views on comics over the past century repeatedly reveals the same divisions that Parker located within her own soul: an avaricious appetite for them combined with a feeling that they’re wicked.

That quote from the female member of the famed Algonquin Roundtable of New Yorker contributors opens a discussion of comics and how they are viewed by the intelligensia that appeared originally in the Toronto Star and is available on line here.

Its authors, Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, maintain that this level of conflict has risen and fallen through comics' history, with the high points of appreciation for the form coming in the Jazz Age, the '60s and today, and the low point coming--as expected--during the post-war Wertham-driven years.

But, they conclude with the following:

Yet surveying the long history of intellectuals and comics, we shouldn’t assume that this current resurgence of praise will be permanent. As we’ve seen, intellectuals are fundamentally divided about the worth of comics, and there is always the possibility of a backlash.

Perhaps a backlash wouldn’t be such a bad thing. There is value in an art form being perceived as dangerous. After all, being compared to marijuana and cocaine has done comics no long-term harm.

Who's On First?

In the '80s, I came close to being a professional Doctor Who fan. I wrote many articles for Starlog about the series, interviewing cast members, writers and producers. I contributed the text articles for Marvel's American reprints of its British DW comics. I was very disappointed by the last seasons of the old series (never thought Sylvester McCoy was up to snuff as the Time Lord), but still unhappy when the BBC took it out of production.

Now, as many others have already reported, Doctor Who is back on the air, produced out of BBC Wales, with actor Christopher Eccleston in the lead as the tenth Doctor. Now, it appears Eccleston, afraid of typecasting, is bowing out after only one season of 13 episodes--details here, as well as speculation as to his successor.

With the exception of the one-shot American co-produced TV movie with the ninth actor in the role, no other "official" Doctor has had such a short lifespan. (There have been a number of "unofficial" Doctors, in radio plays, and in the two feature films with Peter Cushing.)

The new series is set to run on CBC, for those in that country and on the northern borders of the US; no word yet on whether it will show up on any US outlet--though, if the BBC is smart, it will get it on to the BBC America cable net forthwith.