Frank Miller completely loses the plot

[Sci]

Thats not going to happen. The Congress is pretty much the personal courtesan of the big banks.

Which is why the Occupy movement is so important. If more and more people take to the streets and more and more people start changing the national conversation, that puts pressure on politicians to change their policies. That leads to new people running. If the national conversation changes, then Members of Congress will eventually find that the costs of being Wall Street's whores will exceed the benefits.

I can't see it, even if you hate the tea-party movement, at least you know what they where asking for. The OWS movement is too disjointed (at least right now) and lacks leadership to be able to clearly state what they want have happen.

Again, they don't have to clearly state any one agenda. By simply changing the moral framework by which we talk about and understand how an economy ought to function, they're changing people's expectations, people's ideas about what the government ought to do.

And that's already happening. Wealth disparity in America has become a much bigger topic of conversation in the national media in the two months since OWS happened.

And, frankly, the Occupy movement is much bigger than the Tea Party. I'm sorry, but the Tea Party never had thousands of people demonstrating in 18 major cities simultaneously. This movement is already huge, and it's only going to get bigger the more local governments try to shut it down.

Even if the tea party folks make you want to move to Canada, at least they have some sort of focus on what they want to get done.

Sorta-kinda. The Tea Party began as something similar to Occupy -- leaderless, without a common agenda. A lot of Tea Party groups got co-opted by establishment right-wing figures -- e.g., Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks group, the Koch brothers and their Americans for Prosperity group -- but the Tea Party still doesn't have any one single "agenda." Less government spending is very common, but we've already seen a lot of initial Tea Party supporters back away upon realizing how extreme the candidates they elected were. Witness the backlash against Ohio Governor John Kasich and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

But you don't have to have a clearly-defined policy agenda to affect change. Change can be the natural result of just working to change people's concepts and expectations of what government and economy ought to do for us. You don't have to demand a higher tax rate on the rich if you convince millions of people that there's something wrong with a scenario where millions of Americans are kicked out of their homes while Wall Street fat cats who scammed the rest of the country are high on the hog.

ETA:

The Guardian takes an interesting look at the politics of Frank Miller's comic book work, and at other artists' reactions to his statements.

At first glance, Miller's rant comes as something of a surprise. Is this really the same Frank Miller speaking who, in his 1987 comic Batman: Year One, had his fledgling superhero visit a gathering of Gotham's wealthy and inform them: "You've eaten Gotham's wealth. Its spirit. Your feast is nearly over. From this moment on, none of you are safe"?

Later, in his graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (which reinvented the comics scene in the 1980s along with Alan Moore's Watchmen) Miller portrayed an aged Batman gone deep underground, disgusted with the fat cats in society and their super-powered poodle Superman, and in 1990's Give Me Liberty, his heroine, Martha Washington, fights her way out of the ghetto to take on the corrupt corporations who rule a future America. His characters seem, on the surface, to share many of the aims and ambitions of the members of the movement he's slamming.

But unlike his contemporary Alan Moore, Miller has always been more two-fisted in his deconstruction of the superhero. Whereas Moore's representations of his flawed heroes were always about the people behind the masks, Miller's broad brushstrokes seem to me to be more about the ideology of the all-American hero – and the freedoms of the individual weighed against those of the many.

Revisiting The Dark Knight Returns, it's altogether possible to conclude that Miller's super-gritty, ultra-violent Batman isn't fighting for social justice at all. He's been forcibly retired and doesn't like it. His world has problems of street violence and out-of-control youths, and he himself has no confidence that society can fix itself. So he turns vigilante, taking matters into his own hands: instead of fighting gaudy villains, he takes on the government, and ultimately assembles his own private army of disenfranchised youths to ensure his dreamed-of Bat-Law is enforced upon Gotham's streets. It makes you wonder what the idealistic young Batman of Miller's work almost a quarter of a century ago would make of it all.

Meanwhile, author David Brin has responded by writing a critique of what he views as Miller's anti-democratic messages, as exemplified in his graphic novel 300.

Well, well. I’ve been fuming silently at Frank Miller for a years. The time’s come, so get ready for steam! Because the screech that you just read – Miller’s attack on young citizens, clumsily feeling their way ahead toward saving their country – is only the latest example of Frank’s astonishing agenda. One that really needs exposure to light....

For one thing, “300″ gave all credit to the Spartans, extolling them as role models and peerless examples of manhood. Adorably macho defenders of freedom.

Uh, right. Freedom. Sorry, but the word bears a heavy burden of irony when shouted by Spartans, who maintained one of the worst slave-states ever, treating the vast majority of their people as cattle, routinely quenching their swords in the bodies of poor, brutalized helots… who are never mentioned, even glimpsed, in the romanticized book or movie. Indeed, the very same queen who Frank Miller portrayed as so-earthy, so-kind, was said to be quite brutal with a whip, in real life.

Miller’s Spartan warriors honestly and openly conveyed the contempt for civilians that was felt across the ages by all feudal warrior castes. An attitude in sharp contrast to American sympathies, which always used to be about Minuteman farmers and shopkeepers – citizen soldiers – the kind who bravely pick up arms to aid their country, adapting and training under fire. Alas, Frank Miller’s book and movie “300″ ridiculed that kind of soldier...

... even though the first invasion by Persia, ten years earlier – under Xerxes’s father – had been defeated by just such a militia army... from Athens... made up of farmers, clerks, tradesmen, artists and mathematicians. A rabble of ill-disciplined "brawlers" who, after waiting in vain for promised help from Sparta, finally decided to handle the problem alone. On that fateful day that citizen militia leveled their spears and their thin blue line attacked a professional Persian force many times their number, slaughtering them to the last man on the legendary beach of Marathon....

I might have just sat and glowered, if they simply omitted the Athenians. But to sneer at them and call them effeminate cowards? After Athens’ citizen soldiers accomplished epic triumphs the Spartans never imagined and that they would never, ever come remotely close to equaling? At battles whose names still roll off our tongues today? Achieved by the same kind of “cincinnatus” militias that propelled both Republican Rome and the United States to unparalleled heights, during their time of vigor?

The kind of soldiers who make up our U.S. military today! Citizens-first, despite their vaunted professionalism....

No, this is not just artistic license. Expressed repeatedly – with the relentlessness of deliberate, moralizing indoctrination – “300″ idolizes the same arrogant contempt for citizenship that eventually ruined classical Greece and Republican Rome, and that might bring the same fate to America.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The part that bugs me is that he seems to think the worst part of the Occupy movement is that it's taking away focus from the wars.

Well, of course. Frank Miller's number one concern is killing them scary Muslims.

 

[Distorted Humor]

I always enjoyed David Brin's comments on the morality of some popular Science Fiction or fantasy. He also wrote a great bit on Star Wars.

Funny enough, I enjoy Orson Scott Card's writing a lot, but always shake my head on his political stuff. (Comon Card, as a fellow North Carolinian and Mormon, you can do better then that.) I have never been able to finish a Brin Novel, but love his essays.

As for the OWS folks, I am glad they care, even if I want to throw shoes at them for some things. (For example, some want to forgive student loans, but it not anyone fault but your own that you went to a expensive, private college and didn't get a degree that paid well. I for example went to a "lesser" public university so I would have debts in the 20k-30k range, and not the 100k-150k range that I would of been dealing with if I went to the private colleges I was accepted to. But I will stop my rant.)

 

[ColeMercury]

Needless to say, there have been many unhappy responses, but the following strikes me as one of the best:

http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/HeroKiller/news/?a=49815

Wow. That was an... evisceration. That was just nasty.

... I love it.


ADDENDUM: Hmm. I just looked up Miller's Wikipedia page and I notice he has never been in the military. What a pathetic chickenhawk.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Needless to say, there have been many unhappy responses, but the following strikes me as one of the best:

http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/HeroKiller/news/?a=49815

Wow. That was an... evisceration. That was just nasty.

... I love it.


ADDENDUM: Hmm. I just looked up Miller's Wikipedia page and I notice he has never been in the military. What a pathetic chickenhawk.

It's not surprising. Active duty military who have been deployed overseas often have a broader perspective and exhibit far less xenophobia, by virtue of having been exposed to other cultures much more extensively.

Some twit who thinks all the land outside the borders of the US is dominated by lawless barbarism is usually too dim, too unstable, and too cowardly to ever sign up.

 

[siskokid888]

What is it with guys name Miller? First Dennis Miller, then this knucklehead. I guess if your name is Miller you get real fraidy scared of the big bad muslim menace.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I don't think two guys really makes a trend.

 

[siskokid888]

I don't think two guys really makes a trend.

Sarcasm, sir, pointed at the 2 individuals named. No generalization intended.

 

[xortex]

I guess one of the dangers of being a sci-fi writer like Brin is that you can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy. Something obviously neccesary to sell your books while also ensuring that they're any good.

 

[Sci]

I guess one of the dangers of being a sci-fi writer like Brin is that you can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy.

In what way?

 

[xortex]

He's equating the 300 with an historical documentary when it is a work of fiction. Hence believing things like Salieri killed Mozart and things like that when they're not true.

 

[Sci]

He's equating the 300 with an historical documentary when it is a work of fiction.

No he is not. He is criticizing it for being a historically inaccurate work of fiction that selectively uses its inaccuracies in order to advocate a philosophy that is anti-democratic.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Re: The "Occupy" fad: They don't make Hippies like they used to.

Re: Frank Miller: Poor sap went batshit crazy a long time ago.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: Frank Miller: Poor sap went batshit crazy a long time ago.

:snerk:

 

[xortex]

He's equating the 300 with an historical documentary when it is a work of fiction.

No he is not. He is criticizing it for being a historically inaccurate work of fiction that selectively uses its inaccuracies in order to advocate a philosophy that is anti-democratic.

The man is being delusional. Noone should equate or confuse a work of fiction with reality and real history.
The violence didn't bother him at all though.

 

[Sci]

He's equating the 300 with an historical documentary when it is a work of fiction.

No he is not. He is criticizing it for being a historically inaccurate work of fiction that selectively uses its inaccuracies in order to advocate a philosophy that is anti-democratic.

The man is being delusional. Noone should equate or confuse a work of fiction with reality and real history.

He is not confusing or equating a work of fiction with reality and real history. He is criticizing a work of historical fiction for both being inaccurate and for using specific inaccuracies to advance an anti-democratic philosopy.

 

[xortex]

Art transcends political inclinations. Well maybe not his, but I thought the 300 was good art and didn't care if Unitus was a republican or not along with 99.99 percent of other people too. It's just insane to think otherwise.

 

[Hound of UIster]

300 was an interesting comic in how it used two page spreads exclusively to tell the story.

But it certainly isn't art in any ways.

And I thought Batman and the Outsiders Special did a much more effective job with the use of two page spreads and integrating writing with art.

 

[Sci]

Art transcends political inclinations. Well maybe not his, but I thought the 300 was good art and didn't care if Unitus was a republican or not along with 99.99 percent of other people too. It's just insane to think otherwise.

None of that is relevant to the argument that a work of historic fiction should not portray history dishonestly in order to advance an anti-democratic philosophy.

300 was an interesting comic in how it used two page spreads exclusively to tell the story.

But it certainly isn't art in any ways.

Of course it was art. It just wasn't good art.

 

[xortex]

Did you see the part where the guy got his head choped off? That guy must have been a democrate.