Artes Liberales

 There are definitely points where I detach myself from the progressive community--or at least a certain portion of it. I am after, a comic book writer (again) and was mainlining pure Marvel 4-color since there was a Marvel, and rushed home to see whatever Republic Serial Officer Joe Bolton was running on Channel 9. I grew up reading and collecting comics and eventually realized the dream of writing them. And I was a hippie and a war protestor and one of those people Richard Nixon was trying to save America from.

And through the 80's I watched and listen to supposed progressives say how awful what I was doing was, how terrible the stuff I grew up with was for the children, and found myself angrily shouting at Al Gore's wife on the teevee. 

Especially over the last eight years, with the American Polity in flames and American Honor bleeding in the ditch--and surrounding myself with more like-minded people, I bitched about it less and less, and found compensatory characteristics in Al Gore to tip the balance in his favor. 

But something of that old alienation cropped up when, in the context of Mark Evanier's splendid new book on Jack Kirby, Novelist Glen David Gold characterized Kirby's imagery as 'angry,' It wasn't an indictment, but it seemed to me such a wrong-headed analysis that seemed to confuse background with foreground that I realized that I was still on a different side of the ditch from a lot of other people whom I was allied with in important ways.

And today I read two articles. One talking about Rep. Sally Kern and The American Family Association putting out a video on the Evil Gay agenda entitled "They're Coming To Your Town". Another article on a California Schools' ban on candy in vending machines creating a student black market that had commenters (more than a couple) thumping about high-fructose corn syrup, the fast food industry's agenda and the link between junk food and learning disabilities that will, no doubt, come to light one day.

Now hands up, everybody who immediately thought 'but that's different!" There's the ditch, and me on the other side. Now I believe in biochemistry more than in the Evil Gay Alliance, but there's something else I believe in that's consonant with both the awfulness of war and the glory that is comical books, with humane social policies and guys in rocket suits, and that's this: that the mind is not a machine.

You heard me.

A mind, properly developed and trained, is not limited by the present quality of its inputs. It can see injustice and learn justice, see crowded dirty streets and learn the geometries of nature, be exposed to vulgarity and banality and learn music and poetry. The process by which all this happens is called thinking, and it is the first and last of the artes liberales, the arts necessary for free men and women. It's important to teach children this task, because it's going to be required of them to be free even when in the presence of a transgendered person, and expected to think even when they're feeling a bit logy from too many doughnuts. 

And just in case you're about to object that one is nutrition, and the other is bigotry, I will tell you that the principle is the same: 1) indoctrination and 2) calling something poison which isn't. And blaming insidious conspiracies in order to boost indignation is the same bad mojo.

Intelligence is a powerful thin. It enables you to walk through the valley of the shadow  of bullshit, distortion, and fair and not succumb. It enables you to adjust your behavir where will and habit will not help. (especially when it's somebody else's will and habit imposed from outside. Intelligence will not necessarily make you happy or successful or attractive--it will allow to understand something of what happiness, and success, and attraction are--and that may be the problem.

What it may tend to make you is free. And that is something that no training, no nutrition, no purity of environment or adherence to doctrine will get you. 

I know many people who would be really indignant that I; a fat old white guy, would equate them with fundamentalist homophobes. And they're not. I would associate with progressives every single time, and  massive doses of gay people will not do to you what massive doses of corn syrup will. They're not the same.

But they're doing thee same thing. That's the crux. That's the chain in their hand.