“Gone are the days of the overwaxed mustache and maniacal laugh and human-sized logger’s buzzsaw. No more does a villain raise his head from his sleep in the morning to consider what 'evil' he might to do that day.” -- DC Comics writer Jim Krueger
Maybe it’s time for our political ideologues to take lessons from our comic book writers.
Those on the right are certainly not above reducing their enemies to one-dimensional caricatures. “Islamofascism” is enough to establish this. However, it is the political left that has boiled this down to a science.
Regrettably, it isn’t just leftist politicians who resort to painting grossly over simplistic portraits of their opponents. Many academics have a proclivity for this also. To walk through the corridors of the liberal arts/humanities departments of any number of our institutions of higher learning is to walk through galleries of such “artwork.”
To many on the left, the opponents of such policies as “affirmative action,” “illegal immigration,” “school busing,” and “welfare,” regardless of the reasons they state for their opposition, can’t ultimately be motivated by anything other than racial animus. If they are white, they are “racist.” If they are black, they are “sell outs.” In fact, for a white person to so much as remotely suggest that the social pathology that characterizes so many black communities is not due to “institutional racism” is enough for that person to be branded and dismissed as “racist.”
Those who believe that men and women are innately different and desire to conserve certain traditional gender roles are “sexist.” If these same people oppose so-called “same-sex marriage,” they are “heterosexist” and “homophobic.” If their beliefs on these issues are informed by their Christian commitments, they are “narrow minded,” “intolerant,” and “bigoted.” In short, they constitute “the Religious Right.” For reasons that I haven’t the time to explore, Muslims and, to a lesser extent, Jews, who endorse these positions, are not so characterized.
People who want to keep the money they work long and hard to earn, rather than have it taken from them through ever higher taxes, are demonized as “greedy” by those on the left. The agents of corporations, especially oil and pharmaceutical companies, are shown no mercy on this score. “Corporate greed” sums up all that one needs to know about how the left conceives the world of corporate business.
There are villains in the world. But the villains that are the targets of the left are the makings of their own imagination, an imagination that, judging from the impoverished caricatures that spring from it, is in dire need of creative inspiration.
It is indeed time for leftwing ideologues to start reading comic books, because the villains developed by comic book writers are vastly more interesting and realistic than those dreamt up by the left.
