Frank Miller on the Occupy Movement

Comics over the last thirty or so years have produced quite a few superstars. Okay, maybe they’re not particularly well known outside the industry, with the exception of Neil Gaiman and possibly a couple of others, but if you’re a fan of comic books then chances are you have something by Grant Morrison on your shelves. Or Alan Moore. Or Frank Miller.

Frank Miller is probably the most influential Batman writer of recent decades, mainly down to two works – Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns. If you’re not a comic fan, then you may have seen the movies 300 or Sin City – same guy. Well, Frank kicked up a bit of a stir over the weekend with his blog post on the Occupy movement.

Now, it’s pretty clear that Frank doesn’t altogether have the strongest grasp on current affairs – heck, he gets World of Warcraft’s name wrong, and that’s before conflating Occupy’s protests against corporate corruption with, I guess, the anti-war movement (I’d imagine there’s a reasonable crossover, but they’re hardly the same thing).

It’d be easy to take the blog post apart, especially when he gets on to suggesting that the protestors join the military so they can fight ‘Islamicism’ (which is interesting because Miller has never been in the armed forces while injured Occupy protestor Scott Olsen served with the Marines in Iraq before getting his skull fractured by police in Oakland, California). There’s really no point, because it’s an uninformed screed. However, it comes on the back of recent attention given to the abuse suffered by female bloggers, as well as racist comments relating to the news that the new Spider-Man would be half-black, half-hispanic. The question somehow becomes why, in a medium where most of the characters would probably support Occupy, or at the very least respect their right to protest, and where treating people with respect and compassion is a pretty standard subject for speeches from the likes of Superman and Captain America, does the audience reaction get so ugly sometimes?

(Of course, the flipside of that question is why wouldn’t it – after all, comics are still pretty white, pretty violent and female characters are more sexualised than the men… Just playing devil’s advocate…!)

I guess it’s an issue all of us who engage in online community have to face – the internet can be a harsh, nasty and unforgiving place at times. Miller’s blog post proves that, so do countless comments threatening to rape female writers, and while the majority of us no doubt find this abhorrent, the fact is those attitudes vocally exist. And while maybe the question should be “How can we bring civility back to the internet?”, the darker question is why does such behaviour happen in the first place?

PS. 3.12.2011 – And now Alan Moore has responded to Frank’s comments. Needless to say, he disagrees.

Welcome to the Occupation 3: What the protest movements might mean for *me*

I was going to make my ‘Welcome to the Occupation’ posts a trilogy, but sometimes people come along and say things better than I ever could. Here then are two great blog posts on how we respond to injustice:

Praying With St. Francis by Shane Claiborne

Yom Kippur and Sins of Silence by Deborah Bryan

Please check them out; they’re worth a read, and wise.

Welcome to the Occupation 2: Some more thoughts on what protest movements might mean for Christianity

A few days ago I blogged about how the recent waves of protest sweeping the Middle East, Europe and the States could have interesting implications for Christianity. However, that post made a pretty major assumption – that Christianity should be concerned with the protests in the first place. After all, while the Church has been involved in some of the major protest movements of the last few hundred years – the abolition of slavery, the Civil Rights movements – it hasn’t always been on the right side, with plenty of Christians at the time believing that slavery was an integral part of society, or that black people should sit at the back of buses. It’s not really news to point out that religion gets corrupted when it gets too close to politics, to the social status quo – it’s a form of blasphemy to suggest that Jesus would have been an ardent supporter of Jim Crow.

The fact is, protest against social injustice runs through the Bible. The prophets, men and women inspired by God to act as His mouthpiece, to interpret the signs of the times, to receive visions and proclaim the will of the divine, spoke not only of abstract religious matters but also of social justice – in many ways the two were inseperable. Take Isaiah, who insisted that true religion, true worship, should be a blessing to oppressed communities: “If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” We’re supposed to look out for each other.

Then you’ve got John the Baptist, who was arrested and executed for speaking out against the crimes of authority figures, not a million miles away from the story of Jesus, who really got himself on the political radar when he took pretty direct action against corrupt commercialism alienating people from the Temple and ultimately God. It’s unavoidable – anger at injustice, especially when that injustice hurts the poor and needy – is part of the Bible’s DNA. You’d think we’d be out protesting every day.

It’s not always that simple though. For at start, a lot of protests, even those with good and noble aims, end up degenerating into violence. Sure, this may often be down to those on the fringes of a movement, or agent provacoteurs, but the fact is that it happens more often than we’d like to admit. Now, the most famous Christian response to this is Martin Luther King championing non-violent resistance in the sixties; inspiring, yes, but not something I’d like to be in the middle of – not sure how much self-control I’d have in certain circumstances. How we react to something, especially when we’re under pressure, is a mark of our faith, not least because of the impact it has, not on our friends but on our enemies.

Because believe it or not, our enemies are people too, and in the gospels, justice is often restorative – it heals the perpetrator as well as providing justice for the victim. “Turn the other cheek” isn’t a command to passively accept everything that’s thrown at you, it’s a way of reasserting your own humanity while forcing our enemy to confront their own. A protest rooted in Christianity should always be interested in finding ways to make enemies into friends, looking at how best to communicate the grace of God to the opposition, or to those spectating from the sidelines.

Then there’s the danger of factionalism. Most protest movements in the West seem to be left vs right, but Christianity should be beyond this. The minute faith becomes so tied up with politics that they become indistinguishable is the minute something’s gone wrong – do we really think Jesus would be making a fuss about Obama’s birth certificate?

As I said in my last post, these are only a few ideas, and the heavy thinking has to be – probably is being – done by people way smarter than me. But I’m interested in hearing your thoughts – what can Christianity bring to these protests, what does a protesting faith look like, and when should Christians think about backing away?

Welcome to the Occupation 1: What a wave of protest movements might mean for Christianity

Somewhere along the line, 2011 went crazy.

It began, paradoxically, in 2010, with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia. He set himself alight to protest his treatment by the authorities; within weeks the resulting public outrage had lead to Tunisia’s president resigning and fleeing the country. The dominoes began to fall across the Middle East, becoming known as the Arab Spring; the protests continue throughout the region and have become increasingly violent in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain.

Then there were protests across Europe, in Greece and Spain and elsewhere. The motivation behind these was more economic and financial, in the shadow of bankers’ bonuses and austerity for the rest of us.

Then there were riots in London. These seem to have been more apolitical and criminal, but it’s hard not to draw a connection between them and the social unrest spreading throughout the rest of the world. They stopped as suddenly as they started, but prompted a tremendous outpouring of community spirit in reaction against the violence and disorder.

The latest protest movement has sprung up in America, with the initial ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrations going viral across the States; we’ll see how this evolves over the next few days and weeks.

These events have been triggered by, and run parallel to, the failure of major institutions – politics, finance, media – to act with restraint, foresight or compassion, and while I don’t think the Church (with a capital C) is quite in that boat, it’s naive to think it doesn’t have something to learn from all this. I’m no expert on any of this (read the rest of my blog, it’s pretty Jack-Of-All-Trades-Master-Of-None), but I figure there are at least three points that the Church can learn from…

(Churches like information to be delivered in three points. Preferrably all starting with the same letter, but I couldn’t manage that, sorry!)

The first is the internet. While it’s not true to say that all this is a worldwide youth revolution, it’s accurate to say that social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have been the heartbeat of many of the movements that have erupted. Following the riots in London and the rest of the UK, there seemed to be a sense in which politicians were blaming the technology rather than the users, and this is key to understanding the internet’s role in all this – it’s an absolutely fantastic communication tool, but it’s value-neutral – how the technology is used is what matters, and effective use of social media depends on interactivity. This can be a bit hard for the Church to wrap its head around – after all, for years the primary formal method of Christian communication was through the sermon, which tends to pretty much be a one-way street. This is echoed by other examples of Old Media – newspapers, television, radio, books. The internet is interactive, and you can’t use it effectively without being adapting to this. Having 10,000 Twitter followers is great, but its not really a measure of success if all you do is make pronouncements to them every so often. All those followers are following a bunch of other people too, and your message will soon find itself at the bottom of a long list of other messages – many of which may be much more fun than yours.

The internet is a good metaphor for the next point – we’re living in a networked world. The protests exist within a context of crumbling authority, where many people feel disenfranchised and powerless in the shadow of faceless institutions. The protests are mostly self-organised, like-minded people getting together to do what needs to be done in spite of authority, not with its blessing – it’s the unexpected flipside of the UK Coalition Government’s ‘Big Society’. Now, some churches are better adapted to dealing with this sort of mindset than others – if you’re dependent on strong, centralised authority, then you may need to think carefully of where that’s going to take you over the next few years. On the other hand, I’m a Methodist, and we’ve always been big on the idea of ‘the priesthood of all believers’ – while ministers/presbyters are the professional end of our community, we’ve all got important roles and responsibilities. This would seem to lend itself well to more networked societies – heck, my church has been operating this model for years by accident – so it’s got to be worth thinking about. Yes, there are issues of accountability to consider, but isn’t that why they developed cell groups?

(Also, think about what Christ’s ‘network’ looked like – the working class, social outcasts, the radicalised. How would that be mirroed in 2011?)

The last point – humility. Yes, this is a strange one to end with, but stick with me. Look at the ways institutions have reacted to the protests – with violence in the worst cases, with disinterest in others, and with the protesters being dismissed as some sort of criminal sub-group. But the fact is, banks have played fast and loose with the global economy. The media have hacked phones and peddled fear. Politicians do seem more interested in protecting big business interests before grassroots communities. That’s not meant to dismiss the value of the institutions or the many good and decent individuals who work within them, but there needs to be a visible and genuine acknowledgement of the many flaws that have been exposed over recent months. We need to rediscover humility and repentance in the public sphere, and as those are meant to be key Christian virtues, the Church should be all over this. It starts with us though – we have to acknowledge the times that the Church has failed to follow Christ’s command to look out for the poor and needy, we have to admit we have too much money tied up in investments and not being released to where it could do the most good. Most damningly, the Vatican could more to address issues relating to child abuse. Confession, repentance, resolve to get it right in future with the help of God – these are engrained in Christianity’s DNA. We need to rediscover them.

Of course, these are only a few ideas, and the heavy thinking has to be – probably is being – done by people way smarter than me. But I’m interested in hearing your thoughts – in a year where everything is in upheaval, and where society is undergoing what could be a seismic shift, where does the Church go from here?

Gutenberg Burning: Information may want to be free, but that’s not the whole story

On Tuesday, Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, died at the age of 64. Project Gutenberg was my first exposure to ebooks, a fantastic resource making thousands of out-of-copyright texts freely available to anyone with internet access and a nice argument for the theory that information wants to be free.

However, just because all this information is out there, doesn’t mean we’re heading towards a techno-utopian society where the total knowledge of humanity is available on a smartphone and where we’re all enlightened and informed about, well, everything. Sure, we’ve got access to more information than ever before, but let’s be brutally honest – we don’t know what to do with it.

So yesterday the Republican presidential candidates held a debate where climate change sceptics get lionised as heirs to Galileo. A comic book espousing 9-11 conspiracy theories has been published by respected players in the medium. And, of course, there are the modern conspiracy classics achieving traction within the mainstream: Obama’s not really an American. We never went to the moon. Vaccines cause autism.

And I’m aware that, by dismissing these theories, I sound like a closed-minded reactionary. The evidence is stacked against those ideas, the data doesn’t support them, the information renders them urban myths and dogmatic paranoia, but none of that matters nowadays because, while information may or may not want to be free, stories, narratives and memes always have been; the wild is their natural home and we’ve just made it easier for them to spread.

Back in the day, storytellers used to control our narratives – bards, skalds, griots. Somewhere along the line, that control shifted from these outsiders towards power structures – governments, churches, institutions. They were all aware of the power of stories, the way in which information and data and history and people can be woven together to create narratives that inform and define our societies and communities.

The internet has changed all that, and that’s something to be grateful for – it’s great that bloggers, musicians and other creators can get their work out there without having to go through the byzantine structures of the publishing or music industries. At their best, Wikileaks are releasing some hugely important data that deserves to have consequences for those who’d rather keep it quiet.

But there’s a dark side to this. A public spat between Wikileaks and the Guardian has lead to the release of information that may threaten the safety of innocent people, activists and whistleblowers who should have had their names redacted but who may now be endangered because a small-p political narrative replaced a more moral storyline. Conspiracy theories take hold, demonising illegal immigrants, gay people, liberals, anyone existing outside the competing narratives warring for our attention. And we know this, we know these stories are often unsupported by evidence, but still they take hold – contradictory information exists, is freely available, but it doesn’t stick. Why would it? Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Anyone can write a blog. And who cares if something’s been peer reviewed, why should we trust the peers doing all that reviewing? Easier to assume the Enemy is wrong than go to the effort of reconstructing our narratives.

Of course, we did train and employ a whole bunch of professionals to help us find, sort and curate all this information we have at our fingertips. We called them librarians, but then we decided they were unnecessary and could be replaced by volunteers (if we were gracious enough to accept that we needed a library in the first place). And this is happening in the UK, in America, in Canada, in…

I don’t know where we go from here. I’d like to say we were heading for a more informed political discourse but it seems to be getting worse. Maybe the issue isn’t really about information wanting to be free anymore; after all, a lot of it already is. Maybe the real issue is the story we tell with that information, how we use it and communicate it. Like the people peddling lies and half-truths, it’s time to stop seeing information as the be all and end all; it’s the paintbrush, not the painting. And if we don’t grasp hold of that idea the pictures we paint may have disasterous consequences, for ourselves, our world and our communities.