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fpbSo what is Kirby saying? That the mere fact of giving life and taking care of it, however the life may be given, is enough to establish the kind of positive parental relationship he shows with Packard and Arin? Obviously not, since in their own perverted way, "giving life and taking care of it" is also what the horrible couple of Apokolipsian scientists, Simyan and Mokkari, have been doing in their rival project. But Simyan and Mokkari are exactly the anti-types of any kind of caring and positive figure; Kirby has designed them to represent every vicious influence that can be brought to bear on the young. Bestial, "simian" violence, and sterile, cruel "mockery" are the two things that blight life, as too many abused children will tell you. If they are completely in control, Kirby seems to say, the only possible products are two: the slavish "beasts of burden" that swarm around the Evil Factory (as compared with the intelligent collaboration of such Project products as Dubbilex and the Hairies in the work of the Project itself) and the radically violent and destructive DNAliens sent by Simyan and Mokkari to raze the Project. And it is to be noticed that the only reason why the gruesome twosome complain about the prevalence of "beasts of burden" among their creations/victims, is that they have not managed to develop anything violent enough to take care of Superman and the Project (#136, p.14). They do not want collaborators; they want slaves, or kamikaze warriors.
As compared with Simyan and Mokkari, then, the Project represents that middle ground of sanity and common cause on which society rests. There are no big personalities in it, no Napoleons in or out of uniform (the importance of this will become clear as we discuss Morgan Edge and Billion-Dollar Bates), only people who do a job and take care of their children. That is their purpose. Finding themselves caught in a war they have not started, an aggression from outside whose very causes and authors they do not know, they – the adult Newsboy Legion – take up weapons and, like the minute-men of old, rush in with the army to fight for their children. But the Project is not, except because of the emergency conditions under which it operates, a military venture: it is a scientific enterprise aiming to direct and control the results of an epoch-making discovery.
The Project stands for honest work; it stands for accepting the challenges that life throws at us and working together to turn them into something positive, not into domination and destruction. It does not presume to have a clear and perfect blueprint for what will happen; research into the effect of what is being done goes on at the same time as the work itself, and it is clear that aliens such as Dubbilex are as much a surprise to the learned men in white coats as to Jimmy Olsen. But it is willing and - as far as it is possible - ready to deal with surprises and unexpected developments. And, as I said, its ultimate purpose is to breed and raise children. It is for this reason, and because of this attitude, that the Hairies are born from it. The Evil Factory had the same genetic material available to them: and all they made from it was murderous monsters and mindless slaves.
The ideas this expresses are as distant as possible from any recent writing you care to mention, the bad and the good, Gerry Conway and Alan Moore. The Project, a government program – and a secret government program at that! – wears the white hat; allied with the benevolent Hairies, themselves its creation, it is opposed by a coalition of private business (Morgan Edge), destructive science, and Apokolipsian fanaticism. And it is worth noting that Fourth World, and especially New Gods, gives a closely parallel idea of another public body, the police. The police are scarcely all-knowing or even very intelligent: the idea that Kalibak might make a possible ambassador does not depose in favour of Chief Kiernan's intelligence (New Gods 11), even though he cannot be aware of the full extent of the war. But they try: they are soon aware of the conflict, and do their best to understand and master it – a brave effort that costs casualties (such as agent Nolan, who got too close to Darkseid: NG 5 p.14-15) but that is not given up. And in all this, what they are doing is working for the community, to protect it from the effects of an undeclared war; like the Project's workers and army men, they are busy defending their own at the risk of their lives.
One thing urgently needs saying: Kirby did not "trust" the police – or the Project – in the sense of taking them as bodies of unreal heroes concerned exclusively with the public good. His cops and his scientists are not "splendid men", but ordinary human beings, and we assume that their motivations are the ordinary human ones: doing their nine to five, earning a paycheck, and making it home in the evening. The difference with absolutely every contemporary mainstream writer is that he is not intent on presenting every aspect of State power as a demonic conspiracy, treating the State as far worse than any villain. That a government operation might be treated without absolute paranoia is not exactly easy to our age, and as for it having the secret of genetics...! Give any other comics writer whatsoever the concept of a secret State department busy with what the Project does; and watch the Nazis being trotted out. Secret government conspiracies have become a stifling cliche, making it literally impossible to write a sane story, I will not say about the good, but about the bad sides of Government.
But it is not Government that Kirby regards with a cold and jaundiced eye: it is big business - the wonderful, efficient world of private enterprise that we have been taught to love (by big-business media empires) for the last two decades, while the public sector was universally decried as the mother and grandfather of all evil. There are no good corporations in Fourth World, nor even a decent businessman; decent blokes may work for corporations (Perry White, for instance), but their bosses and their companies are of the damned. In every way, either by direct description or by the use of frightening symbolism, Kirby puts big business in the bad guys' corner. For instance, it may not be significant that Desaad's city-wide fear-inducer is hidden in a gaudy advertising billboard (New Gods 2, p.19); even though it seems somehow right that a device meant to modify mass behaviour (to make people buy something they might not otherwise buy) should be used to modify it in another way (throw the whole city into a state of panic). But it cannot possibly be coincidence that the prisoners of Desaad and Glorious Godfrey are held in a vicious variation of Disneyland; not when we think what Disneyland actually meant to its creator. For Walt Disney did not only see it as an amusement park. He came to see its successful solution of difficult crowd-handling and public order problems as a trial run for an attempt to – and I quote – "solve the problems of American cities". He really believed that with the right amount of planning and regimentation, he could find a way to design cities that did not suffer from crime, poverty and violence. Add to this that Disney was a hard-right businessman who was disposed to make excuses for the Nazis until 1939 (and shocked all Hollywood in 1938 by welcoming the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl two weeks after the Night of Broken Glass) and you get the picture.
I am certainly not saying that Disney was a Nazi or a Fascist; rather, he was the kind of rancorous anti-union conservative who was quite happy to align himself with anyone who opposed unions, Socialism, and Communism. After the war he led the McCarthyite witch-hunt in Hollywood. (By the way, I am certainly not saying that there were no Communists or traitors in Hollywood and surrounding areas: there were quite a few, Lilian Hellman being a particularly despicable instance. But you do not fight the Devil by his own means.) And at the same time, he was a strong believer in social control and planning. In this, Disney, as a right-winger, was part of the past, not of the future. Even in his lifetime, the "conservative" forces were being taken over by the semi-anarchist "libertarians" whose successors have made so much of our lives a misery. (I say this to explain matters to those of us who, having grown under Thugcherism and its allied superstitions, automatically associate planning and social control with Socialism. They may find Disney's views bewildering, but, in his youth, they were not.)
Disney's combination of views, with the power of a huge private corporation behind them, could not but be frightening and worrying to someone like Kirby; and his naturally serious mind may have found something very unsettling, as many of us would, about the combination of leisure activities and social control, of the utterly frivolous and the socially and politically very serious. Kirby would be apt to feel that social order should not be imposed by stealth under the guise of amusement, but rather be openly arrived at by the common resolution of responsible citizens, aware of what they are doing and of what is done to them. The Hairies elect their own leaders and organize their own society; normal American citizens, on the other hand, troop through Happiland, quite unaware of what they are paying to be a part of. The mirth of Happiland is false even for its customers, because it is a parade of masks, of dummies smiling plastic smiles with no soul behind them: a constructed facade of happiness designed to make money - and, on a deeper level, to control and be controlled. The sinister quality of Happiland lies in the constant exhibition of a manipulated, external appearance, which is meant to affect people's souls without having any itself. As Kirby says elsewhere, you could hide a battalion of assassins in a complex deal; and you could hide a troop of tortured prisoners among the frivolous detail, the towers and dummies of an amusement park - who would know?
There can be no doubt that this is a caricature, and Kirby - who does not disguise his intentions when he wants to make a point - has deliberately made Happiland unlike Disneyland to a considerable degree. He is not personally attacking the recently-dead Disney or his successors, but rather giving vent to some bad thoughts raised by some of their views and activities. As Kirby is concerned with lasting truth, he rarely indulges in this kind of direct attack; even Funky Flashman is as much a caricature of a generalized type, the chancer, the Big Man on his way up, as a specific - if withering - attack on a person who had angered him. I think that, even if Kirby had not happened to start one day angry at Stan Lee, some sort of character like Funky Flashman would have appeared, because he fits in so well with the moral and political ideas of Fourth World. He is smooth, like Morgan Edge; he has the glib patter, the ready grin, the greed to be in a position where others work for him. And, like Billion-Dollar Bates, he is a deal-maker, a wheeler-dealer, a man who does not actually make or produce anything, but places himself in the position to control and profit from those who do.
For it is not being rich as such that Kirby abhors. The memorable figure of Eve Donner in New Gods #9 is certainly not poor, living the life of a successful playwright in a New York penthouse; but there are fundamental differences between her and the super-rich villains of the story. Her use of her wealth is probably questionable: Orion chides her for paying to breathe New York's pollution, and it is clear that her comfortable penthouse is part of the wasteful consumer society that forms the welter of problems described in 2001 #1-7. But it is a warm, simple, human kind of waste, a house a bit more comfortable, perhaps, a bit more expensive, perhaps, a bit more luxurious, perhaps, than most - but a house, a place to live in, not an ego-boosting monstrosity. She has not, like Billion-Dollar Bates, driven out a whole village of people on a whim; she does not, like Funky Flashman, live on the remains of a fortune wrought from slave labour. And this is the second point: she has earned her wealth. She has worked at being a playwright, and her perceptive sympathy strongly suggests that she is good at it; but, good or bad, she lives on the results of her own work, not from exploiting the work of others. Not one of Fourth World's villains can say the same.
Morgan Edge's introduction is the biggest single change Kirby made in the Superman continuity, and it seems to have been his own initiative. We are suddenly informed that a ruthless media magnate called Morgan Edge, owner of a TV network, has taken over Clark Kent's employers. While we do not know how he made his money, he has the smell of a corporate creature all over him. It seems certain that he has got to where he is, either by inheriting money, or by climbing his way through a corporate structure. We do know – because Don Rickles, of all people, tells us - that he made his career by knifing people; to which he answers by suggesting to the funny-man that his sole motivation is money (JO 141): "Be yourself, lad! Say something filthy!" "Money! Lots of it!" But even in front of this apparent sincerity, we must be on our guard; he is actually on public behaviour, putting up an act for the benefit of the comedian - whom he wants to sign up for his TV stations - and all the while, in the same story, we are finding out that he is a specialist in evasion and doubletalk.
When we see him alone, the violence and vulgarity of his language are quite startling. He drops into stereotyped bad-guy slang: "Kent is too nosey – and an old friend of Superman as well! He could blow our whole plan". He uses abuse even when strictly unnecessary: a high-tech helicopter is a "heap", Clark Kent is an "oaf" and a "fool". Even his smoothness does not really disguise his basic brutality. He makes a lecherous remark, disguised as a compliment, to his secretary Laura Conway and briefly considers sacking her when she sends back a negative signal. And if we find that, the next time we see him, he has forgotten about it, this does not mean he thought better of it; rather, he does not even care enough about Miss Conway as a person to stay angry. He has no consideration for people at all. It may mean nothing, but I cannot help noticing that, when Laura Conway is victimized by Count Dragorin, Morgan Edge seems to notice nothing wrong, and it is Olsen and Kent – who, as, bolshy employees, should be the boss' secretary's natural enemies – who realize that the girl is in serious trouble and try their best to help her.
Revealingly, Morgan Edge uses the expression "little people" to flatter his employees. Funky Flashman does the same in MM 6 for his (Stan Lee's) customers; and this is actually their view of people in general, especially of Funky's customers and of Edge's employees. To Edge, the workers in his company are dwarves scurrying around to "make Galaxy Broadcasting what it is" – in his service. His praise is, in fact, more insulting than his blame; especially since it is worth remembering that, as CEO, Edge himself is as much an employee as Bernard the lift attendant, and should regard himself as such. Instead, he is Napoleon, benevolently gazing down at his little servants hurrying on their tasks about his feet. Kirby must have heard that expression "you little people make this company what it is" from some big businessman, and it must have been burned in his memory.
At the back of Edge there is a lot of moral cowardice. He leaves the hapless (if unruffled) Laura Conway to fob off angry employees, and snakes his way around hard questions when he cannot avoid them altogether. He is the public face incarnate and personified.
And he has an attitude problem. He despises people by a sort of reflexaction. He calls Clark Kent a fool and an oaf when he knows - he doesn't suspect, he knows - that it's Kent's intelligence he should worry about. He maliciously grins at the thought that Bernard, his loyal lift attendant, is about to be murdered by a nuclear explosion. Bernard could do him no harm, had shown nothing but proper manners and respect, and had given him no reason at all, so far as we can see, even to be bored; yet Morgan Edge takes fierce pleasure in the thought (however mistaken) that in a few minutes this "little man" will be horribly dead, along with millions of his likes.
This malice towards a harmless (and enthusiastic) underling takes us, at last, to the truth of Morgan Edge. He hates people, not for any reason at all, but simply for being there. And I suggest that his public face is part of the problem: his mask chafes. He has to be smooth and grin all the time to maintain his control over his subordinates, and it irks him. And his mean, paltry, hateful soul fits his environment and his role like a glove. His everlasting public face, and Rickles' reference to the people he had knifed on his way up, strongly suggest that he is not a self-made man, but a greasy-pole-climbing corporate stooge; and while it is impossible to say whether he has become the twisted thing he is because of the crawling and rear-end-kissing he has had to do, or whether he has been successful in this demeaning career because he was from the beginning a twisted thing, it is clear that he has learned early to grin and hate while he grins. He resents everyone he has to grin to.
(This lethal dissection of Homo Corporatus was instinctively resented by the corporate stooges in New York. Independently from Kirby, and without his approval, they created a lame and wholly unnecessary tale in Lois Lane 118, in which it was revealed that there was a good Morgan Edge, who had been kidnapped and cloned by Darkseid, who had then unleashed Bad Morgan Edge upon the world. The reason for this whitewash of a superb villain is unclear on the face of it, but I think we can all draw our own conclusions. Shortly after, Kirby left Jimmy Olsen.)
Not that Kirby has any greater sympathy for self-made Big Bosses as against pole-climbing ones: having burned the corporate pole-climber at the stake in the person of Morgan Edge, he did not allow his readers to think that being self-made and independent had any necessary tang of nobility - a superstition that needed knocking especially hard in our time and in America, where there are people who are quite ready to justify the tactics of, say, Bill Gates, on the grounds that he built his own business! The detestable and entirely credible figure of Billion-Dollar Bates, brutally exposing all the nasty little passions that make a man want to be rich, seems constructed on purpose to avoid any such suggestion.
There is nothing special about Bates. He is not a clever man. He is not interesting. He is vulgar and stupid. One cannot imagine him doing anything positive or significant. He tells us himself that he is a wheeler-dealer, a man who went around making deals and buying things; not, in other words, a man who actually built anything new or added anything to the world.
He is a mixture of brutal bonhomie and menace. Like Morgan Edge, he has a chip on his shoulder, but his is not kept out of sight while he does his deals. He likes to humiliate those he suspects are looking down on him: he forces an academic lawyer to choke himself on a cheap cigar, a publisher to risk suicide, and he paws an elegant blonde socialite (here Kirby manages to virtually condense rape in a single panel with no graphic suggestion at all) with the graceless heat of a born rapist. All these gestures have an evident message of getting back at the world, of getting revenge on anyone who is smarter, better educated or better looking than himself.
He can do this because he has, by an absolute random chance, the Power; that is, the anti-life equation, the thing that Darkseid is searching for so eagerly. He can literally make anyone do anything he wants. He has done nothing to deserve it; it just fell out that way. The Power is given absolutely at random. Its other holder that we know of, Sonny Sumo, is a sort of warrior saint. Like Billion-Dollar Bates' wealth, the Power has nothing whatsoever to do with any merit or quality he may have. From an allegorical point of view, Kirby has given here his view of financial success: it is an all but random chance. The basest individual may achieve it.
But there is another point worth observing: that Bates is not merely a thug with delusions of grandeur. He is a tyrant with delusions of grandeur. From his resentment at people better than him, he has grown into totalitarian dreams. He has come to resent liberty itself, and wants to cancel it all over the world. The connection Kirby makes between fundamental inferiority feelings, resentment, and totalitarian dreams, is audacious, and though I cannot think he has managed it perfectly in Bates' case - the doublethink in his speech is rather too mechanical, perhaps because Kirby found it hard to think like a tyrant - its depth is confirmed by the fact that it can be punctually found in the personalities of Hitler, of Stalin, of Mussolini. All these men suffered from growling, gnawing inferiority complexes, spending a good deal of time snarling inwardly at their betters, feeling despised and sneered at, and taking pleasure in every misfortune that happened to "the gentlemen", the bourgeois and aristocrats, the educated, the old money, all those intolerably smug, relaxed, secure people.
This inferiority complex is also the mainspring of the crowd that follows Glorious Godfrey. Godfrey is not completely like Hitler, but he is like Hitler at his most cynical and rabble-rousing: he is completely without shame. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler set out with indecent sincerity his selling and lying techniques; he sold it by the million; he as good as told his followers that he was lying to them; and still he managed to wow them in, speech after windy hatred-filled speech. So is Godfrey. He is not subtle; and neither is Kirby. The very first page of Forever People 3 gives a simple, brutal and desperate diagnosis of the sickness of soul behind every totalitarian cult. Godfrey's words are felt as truth not because they are true, but because they resonate with the rancorous feelings of humiliation in his hearers. What he does has a sort of horrible echo of the Hairies' "musical solar-phone"; as that brings together all the individual songs of the people taking part and turns them into a collective, yet individually enriching music, so Godfrey's demon organ brings together all the individual grudges and sense of humiliation of the various members of the crowd, and makes one terrible music out of it, taking away their individuality to mold them into one mask of hatred (it is not exactly casual that the most notable and important part of a Justifier uniform is the mask).
They want to be told that the humiliations they feel they have suffered are the fault of the "others", and that they have licence to take revenge on these supposed "others". The vagueness is important. We are to understand that any group whatever will do, so long as they can be painted with the red "S" for "scapegoats". Even more importantly, Kirby refuses to shine the light on any objective loss or damage suffered by any member of Godfrey's crowd. What motivates them is not economic loss: it is the sense of having had their pride trampled in the dust. And Kirby's diagnosis is frighteningly right. What such movements live on is not primarily economic grudges: a real racist would gladly see his country remain poor and backwards, indeed grow even poorer and more backward, so long as he could be guaranteed a sense of superiority over fellow-citizens of another race. He would rather live in a shack and drive a 1920s flivver, if he could be sure that his neighbour had to live in a lean-to and walk; especially if he felt sure of an ego-boosting grovel every time they met. What really would trample his sense of pride into the dust would be to not be allowed that sense of superiority; and then it would make no difference if both he and his despised neighbour could afford a Mercedes. This is the need that Godfrey addresses. Other complaints are purely incidental to it.
Unlike the Justifiers, however, Bates is a loose cannon, in the service of nothing but himself. While the Justifiers have vested their need to justify their hatred into Godfrey, who offered himself to them as the external "justifier" of their crimes, Bates has vested it into himself: by a twisted, indeed diseased, psychological process, he has raised his inferiority complex into a vision of himself as a Titan, a new Napoleon straddled over the world. And the Power gives him the means to do it. Even Darkseid must approach him carefully and with a full dose of flattery, getting at him through his self-image, pretending to be part of a sect which Bates has taken over.
He needs no such subtlety with Edge. As early as JO 2, Edge declares himself the servant of Darkseid, and there is no reason to think him insincere. He is never completely sincere (even with himself; if he were to admit his own foul motives to himself, he would probably be forced to change them), but he probably comes closest to being sincere when he hugs himself at the thought that "Darkseid looks after his own". He is grossly wrong, too: Darkseid is quite capable of killing "his own" on a whim, even servants as important as Desaad and Kalibak. But Morgan Edge has spent his whole life licking boots and kissing rear ends in pursuit of power and more power; it should go without saying that Darkseid, the pure pursuit of power for its own sake, would become the very centre and motivation of his spiritual life, as soon as he met him.
Edge and Intergang are more like each other than any other of Darkseid's numerous servants. Unlike the Justifiers, they follow Darkseid purely because of the fascination of power and organization. On the face of it, few things would seem more incongruous in Kirby's great fantasy with its mythological and science-fiction aspects, than the intrusion of a Mafia outfit; that aliens (or indeed gods) from another world would start their activities on Earth, however hostile, by taking over the mobs, can't help but come across as out of place, a hangover, perhaps, from Kirby's terrible early experiences of gangsterism. Yet, once one of the hoods is briefly allowed to speak for himself, everything falls into place as a part of Kirby's whole view of the world, to the point that we can say that if Inter-gang were eliminated from the picture, something would be missing.
When "O'Ryan's mob" storms the Intergang outpost in search of the "jammer", a youngish hood imprudently shows off the Apokolipsian machinery to "Lanza, who makes O'Ryan's deals". Lanza and O'Ryan are unknown quantities, and even with his small amount of brains, he should know better than to show the secret he has been commissioned to keep hidden to an unknown enemy. Why does he do it? Because he has a need to show off how powerful he is, what big friends he has.
Here, Kirby has hit the spiritual heart of organized crime. I have met and talked with obvious Mafiosi; I know – and Kirby knew far more than I. This is the truth: that whatever gaudy and even religious trappings organized crime may like to put on, there is no deep meaning in it, no mystique, no positive value whatsoever. They have no dignity; when they cannot bully, they crawl. The whole world must have been astonished, after hearing for years of the powerful and cruel "boss of all bosses" Toto Riina, a murderer a hundred times over, impossible to arrest and as hard to photograph as Dracula – to see a shuffling, hesitant, whining, inarticulate, podgy figure, barely five feet tall, trying to ingratiate himself with the president of the court, when he was finally arrested and committed for trial. This is the Mafia. It is neither intelligent nor (whatever Quentin Tarantino may like to think) stylish; and it is the worst, not the best, who join it. All it wants is power, that is the ability to interfere with other people to as far and as hard as it likes. And as such, it will go along with anyone who has power. This can be verified from history over and over again: the Mafia, as a Sicilian cop said who knew them very well, is a whore who'll rub herself on anyone who can pay - meaning not just in money, but in favours, in protection, in political support. It follows that organized crime would follow Darkseid as naturally as a magnet follows iron; and for the very same reason why Morgan Edge follows him. The Intergang hood rejoices quite simply in being part of a mighty organization, of a great power; that his powerful friends may be the enemies of freedom, of his country, of humanity itself - as Darkseid indubitably is - means nothing to him. All he boasts of is the power and the organization of his little playmates. He has not even the allegiance to an evil principle that marks a Justifier; so long as his pals are powerful, he could not care less what they stand for.
From a political point of view, this means that Kirby aligns organized crime and big business as fundamentally anti-social forces. He sees them as having essentially the same purpose, and that purpose as being negative and destructive - in the words of the memorable slogan he wrote for Godcorp Inc. in Destroyer Duck: "Grab it all - Own it all - Drain it all". And to Kirby, there was no more loathsome idea than being out to "grab it all". He repeatedly said that his ideal was simply to be left alone, not to be interfered with, but that a gangster would never leave you alone - "he wants everything you've got". Power, the ability to affect people and things, is purely incidental to the activities of the Project, whose purpose is life, or of the police, whose purpose is protection and order: but it is the first and only purpose of gangsters. All they want to do is be able to mess you about. The same is clearly true of the sort of corporate person he describes in Morgan Edge, or of the likes of Billion-Dollar Bates; and therefore Kirby sees no moral, no social, and no political difference between them.
But there is a deeper truth, which has to do with the fundamental misanthropy, hatred of people, to be found in different ways in Edge, in Bates, in the Justifiers and in Simyan and Mokkari. Whatever political and financial projects they may have, the truth is that they are to a very large extent excuses to cause grief and disorder. While the Project is busy working on the children of today and tomorrow, and while nice harmless people like Terry Dean are going about their business, hurting nobody and pleasing many people, everything we see Edge, Intergang and the Evil Factory do is aimed at destruction and - above all - at social disruption. Darkseid's servants want to break the bonds that hold society together so that, in the ensuing chaos, their force should triumph; and, much more profoundly, because they simply like chaos, violence, disorder, destruction. So the Inter-gang hoods of New Gods 3 take into the city a mechanism (which Kirby oddly calls a bomb) to destroy communication metal within thousands of miles, crippling much of the American continent; so, in the previous issue, Desaad causes city-wide chaos with a fear ray; so, in Mr.Miracle 4-5, Doctor Bedlam destroys the sanity and communal cohesion of a whole skyscraper full of thousands of people. Darkseid's war aim is not the destruction, but the disruption of humanity, as he tells us himself (Forever People 3, final page). And therefore the Project cannot but be his enemy, not only because it generates power - it could create thousands of super-powered mutants in a relatively short space of time, to judge by the results so far - but above all because it represents the coherent, communitarian approach to the problems of social life and the future.
The whole series can only be described as left-wing. The state promotes useful activities like the Project and is trusted rather than feared; youth is the bearer of a new, better society with strong collectivist leanings; private capital (Morgan Edge) is very much in the baddies' corner, and while Kirby is not against private prosperity per se, he is profoundly suspicious and sceptical of corporate power and, above all, of the sort of people who aspire to it and who acquire it. As ever with Kirby, issues tend to be seen on a personal, individual level: what makes him more unhappy than anything else is the kind of person who are driven to gain power in the world of corporate power, and he looks at the effect of corporate power largely in that light. If an institution exists which either draws to itself all the nasty, stunted people, or else that demeans and stunts all the people who take part in it, then that institution is a blot on the landscape. Kirby had plenty of bad experiences with corporate power, beginning with the Kirby-Schiff lawsuit, and he saw corporate power - unlike public power - as essentially irresponsible: bosses could and did do what they like within their corporations. In a vivid image from the Groth interview, they were "out there enjoying godhood".
On the other hand, Kirby draws no essential dividing line between the State and the community. The Project is both an authority and a community, and the police do what they do to stop a destructive conflict that has involved their town: "this town", mutters the beaten Turpin, "belongs to us" - "us", here, meaning not the police, but all the people who live in it, as opposed to the "super-muk-muks" who are using it "as a fight arena". Kirby hardly ever thinks of the State in an us-and-them light; it is significant that not a single time does he use that terrible Thugcherite idea, "taxpayers' money", routinely trotted out when the speaker - generally a right-wing politician or hack journalist - disapproves of some public initiative that has to be paid from taxes that would fit so much more nicely into his own back pocket. To Kirby, the scale of values is exactly opposite: it is private expense that is suspect and wasteful. Even the lovely Eve Donner is chided for misusing her wealth. It is public money that has created the Hairies, as in fact there is a direct historical connection between "taxpayers' money" and the counter-culture; as the Project created the Hairies, so widespread public education and state universities were, throughout the Western world, the homes of the counterculture.
Had anybody rumbled the politics of Jimmy Olsen, half of American fandom, even in those liberal days, would have risen up in wrath. Today, the whole notion is unimaginable. The notion of having any confidence in government has quite died; even Kirby never again dared to put forwards any such subversive, Socialistic, revolutionary suggestion.
There are several points on which I would disagree with these political views myself. It hardly needs saying that the hopes placed in the counter-culture have proved at least premature; though the environmental message of the story remains valuable. But a certain amount of excess may be found even in more durable areas. Kirby does not seem to recognize that pole-climbing polecats such as Morgan Edge may be found as much in the public sector as in big business; as a bureaucracy and field for empire-building and ego-boosting, ministries and public services have little to envy the most callous corporation. And there is something of an unconscious rhetorical trick in the way in which our attention is constantly focused, on the one hand on the Edges and Bateses - the money men of big business - and, on the other, on the lower echelons of the public sector, the working scientists, soldiers and personnel of the Project, the cops on the street, down to a prize specimen of working-class hero such as Terrible Turpin, of whom you can tell, just by looking at him, that he never got to high school. And finally, Kirby does not seem to accept - certainly not in this series - that people may approach the money markets in the spirit in which, for instance, Sonny Sumo approaches fighting - not as a way to destroy enemies and dominate people, but as a fascinating and dangerous game with its own rules. There is no place in Kirby's system for an attractive money-maker such as the universally-liked American investor Warren Buffet, who likes the work for its own sake and seems never to have lusted either to subdue enemies or to boost his ego - and yet is the most successful money manager alive.
But having said all that, the fact remains that I think Kirby's viewpoint saner and safer than the opposite attitude that rules today, in no two countries more than in Britain and America. Corporate power is, in my view, the most irresponsible and dangerous factor in modern politics, corrupting the political process in many different ways, of which Rupert Murdoch's activities are only a fraction. Environmental concerns remain urgent and demanding. And certainly the current paranoia about the State is not a healthy or a sensible attitude in a time when the greatest threat to individual freedom comes from boardrooms: we have been coaxed into forgetting that the State arises from society at large, and led to expect nothing except tyranny and abuse.
I end with a thought that must have already occurred to every reader: that is, that nothing is more typical of Kirby's frequent and disconcerting streak of naivety than the fact that he originally intended to hand over one of his four Fourth World series to Steve Ditko. Did he know Ditko's politics? He cannot have failed to, since Ditko is notorious for starting a political argument with every person he meets; and yet he wanted Ditko to take up a project which Ditko, who is always super-careful about the ideological conformity of the projects he joins - he left Jim Shooter high and dry after that worthy had designed Dark Dominion especially for him, since he had "philosophical doubts" about it - could not but have regarded as a welter of crypto-Communistic collectivist nastiness and lachrymose special pleading!
As compared with Simyan and Mokkari, then, the Project represents that middle ground of sanity and common cause on which society rests. There are no big personalities in it, no Napoleons in or out of uniform (the importance of this will become clear as we discuss Morgan Edge and Billion-Dollar Bates), only people who do a job and take care of their children. That is their purpose. Finding themselves caught in a war they have not started, an aggression from outside whose very causes and authors they do not know, they – the adult Newsboy Legion – take up weapons and, like the minute-men of old, rush in with the army to fight for their children. But the Project is not, except because of the emergency conditions under which it operates, a military venture: it is a scientific enterprise aiming to direct and control the results of an epoch-making discovery.
The Project stands for honest work; it stands for accepting the challenges that life throws at us and working together to turn them into something positive, not into domination and destruction. It does not presume to have a clear and perfect blueprint for what will happen; research into the effect of what is being done goes on at the same time as the work itself, and it is clear that aliens such as Dubbilex are as much a surprise to the learned men in white coats as to Jimmy Olsen. But it is willing and - as far as it is possible - ready to deal with surprises and unexpected developments. And, as I said, its ultimate purpose is to breed and raise children. It is for this reason, and because of this attitude, that the Hairies are born from it. The Evil Factory had the same genetic material available to them: and all they made from it was murderous monsters and mindless slaves.
The ideas this expresses are as distant as possible from any recent writing you care to mention, the bad and the good, Gerry Conway and Alan Moore. The Project, a government program – and a secret government program at that! – wears the white hat; allied with the benevolent Hairies, themselves its creation, it is opposed by a coalition of private business (Morgan Edge), destructive science, and Apokolipsian fanaticism. And it is worth noting that Fourth World, and especially New Gods, gives a closely parallel idea of another public body, the police. The police are scarcely all-knowing or even very intelligent: the idea that Kalibak might make a possible ambassador does not depose in favour of Chief Kiernan's intelligence (New Gods 11), even though he cannot be aware of the full extent of the war. But they try: they are soon aware of the conflict, and do their best to understand and master it – a brave effort that costs casualties (such as agent Nolan, who got too close to Darkseid: NG 5 p.14-15) but that is not given up. And in all this, what they are doing is working for the community, to protect it from the effects of an undeclared war; like the Project's workers and army men, they are busy defending their own at the risk of their lives.
One thing urgently needs saying: Kirby did not "trust" the police – or the Project – in the sense of taking them as bodies of unreal heroes concerned exclusively with the public good. His cops and his scientists are not "splendid men", but ordinary human beings, and we assume that their motivations are the ordinary human ones: doing their nine to five, earning a paycheck, and making it home in the evening. The difference with absolutely every contemporary mainstream writer is that he is not intent on presenting every aspect of State power as a demonic conspiracy, treating the State as far worse than any villain. That a government operation might be treated without absolute paranoia is not exactly easy to our age, and as for it having the secret of genetics...! Give any other comics writer whatsoever the concept of a secret State department busy with what the Project does; and watch the Nazis being trotted out. Secret government conspiracies have become a stifling cliche, making it literally impossible to write a sane story, I will not say about the good, but about the bad sides of Government.
But it is not Government that Kirby regards with a cold and jaundiced eye: it is big business - the wonderful, efficient world of private enterprise that we have been taught to love (by big-business media empires) for the last two decades, while the public sector was universally decried as the mother and grandfather of all evil. There are no good corporations in Fourth World, nor even a decent businessman; decent blokes may work for corporations (Perry White, for instance), but their bosses and their companies are of the damned. In every way, either by direct description or by the use of frightening symbolism, Kirby puts big business in the bad guys' corner. For instance, it may not be significant that Desaad's city-wide fear-inducer is hidden in a gaudy advertising billboard (New Gods 2, p.19); even though it seems somehow right that a device meant to modify mass behaviour (to make people buy something they might not otherwise buy) should be used to modify it in another way (throw the whole city into a state of panic). But it cannot possibly be coincidence that the prisoners of Desaad and Glorious Godfrey are held in a vicious variation of Disneyland; not when we think what Disneyland actually meant to its creator. For Walt Disney did not only see it as an amusement park. He came to see its successful solution of difficult crowd-handling and public order problems as a trial run for an attempt to – and I quote – "solve the problems of American cities". He really believed that with the right amount of planning and regimentation, he could find a way to design cities that did not suffer from crime, poverty and violence. Add to this that Disney was a hard-right businessman who was disposed to make excuses for the Nazis until 1939 (and shocked all Hollywood in 1938 by welcoming the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl two weeks after the Night of Broken Glass) and you get the picture.
I am certainly not saying that Disney was a Nazi or a Fascist; rather, he was the kind of rancorous anti-union conservative who was quite happy to align himself with anyone who opposed unions, Socialism, and Communism. After the war he led the McCarthyite witch-hunt in Hollywood. (By the way, I am certainly not saying that there were no Communists or traitors in Hollywood and surrounding areas: there were quite a few, Lilian Hellman being a particularly despicable instance. But you do not fight the Devil by his own means.) And at the same time, he was a strong believer in social control and planning. In this, Disney, as a right-winger, was part of the past, not of the future. Even in his lifetime, the "conservative" forces were being taken over by the semi-anarchist "libertarians" whose successors have made so much of our lives a misery. (I say this to explain matters to those of us who, having grown under Thugcherism and its allied superstitions, automatically associate planning and social control with Socialism. They may find Disney's views bewildering, but, in his youth, they were not.)
Disney's combination of views, with the power of a huge private corporation behind them, could not but be frightening and worrying to someone like Kirby; and his naturally serious mind may have found something very unsettling, as many of us would, about the combination of leisure activities and social control, of the utterly frivolous and the socially and politically very serious. Kirby would be apt to feel that social order should not be imposed by stealth under the guise of amusement, but rather be openly arrived at by the common resolution of responsible citizens, aware of what they are doing and of what is done to them. The Hairies elect their own leaders and organize their own society; normal American citizens, on the other hand, troop through Happiland, quite unaware of what they are paying to be a part of. The mirth of Happiland is false even for its customers, because it is a parade of masks, of dummies smiling plastic smiles with no soul behind them: a constructed facade of happiness designed to make money - and, on a deeper level, to control and be controlled. The sinister quality of Happiland lies in the constant exhibition of a manipulated, external appearance, which is meant to affect people's souls without having any itself. As Kirby says elsewhere, you could hide a battalion of assassins in a complex deal; and you could hide a troop of tortured prisoners among the frivolous detail, the towers and dummies of an amusement park - who would know?
There can be no doubt that this is a caricature, and Kirby - who does not disguise his intentions when he wants to make a point - has deliberately made Happiland unlike Disneyland to a considerable degree. He is not personally attacking the recently-dead Disney or his successors, but rather giving vent to some bad thoughts raised by some of their views and activities. As Kirby is concerned with lasting truth, he rarely indulges in this kind of direct attack; even Funky Flashman is as much a caricature of a generalized type, the chancer, the Big Man on his way up, as a specific - if withering - attack on a person who had angered him. I think that, even if Kirby had not happened to start one day angry at Stan Lee, some sort of character like Funky Flashman would have appeared, because he fits in so well with the moral and political ideas of Fourth World. He is smooth, like Morgan Edge; he has the glib patter, the ready grin, the greed to be in a position where others work for him. And, like Billion-Dollar Bates, he is a deal-maker, a wheeler-dealer, a man who does not actually make or produce anything, but places himself in the position to control and profit from those who do.
For it is not being rich as such that Kirby abhors. The memorable figure of Eve Donner in New Gods #9 is certainly not poor, living the life of a successful playwright in a New York penthouse; but there are fundamental differences between her and the super-rich villains of the story. Her use of her wealth is probably questionable: Orion chides her for paying to breathe New York's pollution, and it is clear that her comfortable penthouse is part of the wasteful consumer society that forms the welter of problems described in 2001 #1-7. But it is a warm, simple, human kind of waste, a house a bit more comfortable, perhaps, a bit more expensive, perhaps, a bit more luxurious, perhaps, than most - but a house, a place to live in, not an ego-boosting monstrosity. She has not, like Billion-Dollar Bates, driven out a whole village of people on a whim; she does not, like Funky Flashman, live on the remains of a fortune wrought from slave labour. And this is the second point: she has earned her wealth. She has worked at being a playwright, and her perceptive sympathy strongly suggests that she is good at it; but, good or bad, she lives on the results of her own work, not from exploiting the work of others. Not one of Fourth World's villains can say the same.
Morgan Edge's introduction is the biggest single change Kirby made in the Superman continuity, and it seems to have been his own initiative. We are suddenly informed that a ruthless media magnate called Morgan Edge, owner of a TV network, has taken over Clark Kent's employers. While we do not know how he made his money, he has the smell of a corporate creature all over him. It seems certain that he has got to where he is, either by inheriting money, or by climbing his way through a corporate structure. We do know – because Don Rickles, of all people, tells us - that he made his career by knifing people; to which he answers by suggesting to the funny-man that his sole motivation is money (JO 141): "Be yourself, lad! Say something filthy!" "Money! Lots of it!" But even in front of this apparent sincerity, we must be on our guard; he is actually on public behaviour, putting up an act for the benefit of the comedian - whom he wants to sign up for his TV stations - and all the while, in the same story, we are finding out that he is a specialist in evasion and doubletalk.
When we see him alone, the violence and vulgarity of his language are quite startling. He drops into stereotyped bad-guy slang: "Kent is too nosey – and an old friend of Superman as well! He could blow our whole plan". He uses abuse even when strictly unnecessary: a high-tech helicopter is a "heap", Clark Kent is an "oaf" and a "fool". Even his smoothness does not really disguise his basic brutality. He makes a lecherous remark, disguised as a compliment, to his secretary Laura Conway and briefly considers sacking her when she sends back a negative signal. And if we find that, the next time we see him, he has forgotten about it, this does not mean he thought better of it; rather, he does not even care enough about Miss Conway as a person to stay angry. He has no consideration for people at all. It may mean nothing, but I cannot help noticing that, when Laura Conway is victimized by Count Dragorin, Morgan Edge seems to notice nothing wrong, and it is Olsen and Kent – who, as, bolshy employees, should be the boss' secretary's natural enemies – who realize that the girl is in serious trouble and try their best to help her.
Revealingly, Morgan Edge uses the expression "little people" to flatter his employees. Funky Flashman does the same in MM 6 for his (Stan Lee's) customers; and this is actually their view of people in general, especially of Funky's customers and of Edge's employees. To Edge, the workers in his company are dwarves scurrying around to "make Galaxy Broadcasting what it is" – in his service. His praise is, in fact, more insulting than his blame; especially since it is worth remembering that, as CEO, Edge himself is as much an employee as Bernard the lift attendant, and should regard himself as such. Instead, he is Napoleon, benevolently gazing down at his little servants hurrying on their tasks about his feet. Kirby must have heard that expression "you little people make this company what it is" from some big businessman, and it must have been burned in his memory.
At the back of Edge there is a lot of moral cowardice. He leaves the hapless (if unruffled) Laura Conway to fob off angry employees, and snakes his way around hard questions when he cannot avoid them altogether. He is the public face incarnate and personified.
And he has an attitude problem. He despises people by a sort of reflexaction. He calls Clark Kent a fool and an oaf when he knows - he doesn't suspect, he knows - that it's Kent's intelligence he should worry about. He maliciously grins at the thought that Bernard, his loyal lift attendant, is about to be murdered by a nuclear explosion. Bernard could do him no harm, had shown nothing but proper manners and respect, and had given him no reason at all, so far as we can see, even to be bored; yet Morgan Edge takes fierce pleasure in the thought (however mistaken) that in a few minutes this "little man" will be horribly dead, along with millions of his likes.
This malice towards a harmless (and enthusiastic) underling takes us, at last, to the truth of Morgan Edge. He hates people, not for any reason at all, but simply for being there. And I suggest that his public face is part of the problem: his mask chafes. He has to be smooth and grin all the time to maintain his control over his subordinates, and it irks him. And his mean, paltry, hateful soul fits his environment and his role like a glove. His everlasting public face, and Rickles' reference to the people he had knifed on his way up, strongly suggest that he is not a self-made man, but a greasy-pole-climbing corporate stooge; and while it is impossible to say whether he has become the twisted thing he is because of the crawling and rear-end-kissing he has had to do, or whether he has been successful in this demeaning career because he was from the beginning a twisted thing, it is clear that he has learned early to grin and hate while he grins. He resents everyone he has to grin to.
(This lethal dissection of Homo Corporatus was instinctively resented by the corporate stooges in New York. Independently from Kirby, and without his approval, they created a lame and wholly unnecessary tale in Lois Lane 118, in which it was revealed that there was a good Morgan Edge, who had been kidnapped and cloned by Darkseid, who had then unleashed Bad Morgan Edge upon the world. The reason for this whitewash of a superb villain is unclear on the face of it, but I think we can all draw our own conclusions. Shortly after, Kirby left Jimmy Olsen.)
Not that Kirby has any greater sympathy for self-made Big Bosses as against pole-climbing ones: having burned the corporate pole-climber at the stake in the person of Morgan Edge, he did not allow his readers to think that being self-made and independent had any necessary tang of nobility - a superstition that needed knocking especially hard in our time and in America, where there are people who are quite ready to justify the tactics of, say, Bill Gates, on the grounds that he built his own business! The detestable and entirely credible figure of Billion-Dollar Bates, brutally exposing all the nasty little passions that make a man want to be rich, seems constructed on purpose to avoid any such suggestion.
There is nothing special about Bates. He is not a clever man. He is not interesting. He is vulgar and stupid. One cannot imagine him doing anything positive or significant. He tells us himself that he is a wheeler-dealer, a man who went around making deals and buying things; not, in other words, a man who actually built anything new or added anything to the world.
He is a mixture of brutal bonhomie and menace. Like Morgan Edge, he has a chip on his shoulder, but his is not kept out of sight while he does his deals. He likes to humiliate those he suspects are looking down on him: he forces an academic lawyer to choke himself on a cheap cigar, a publisher to risk suicide, and he paws an elegant blonde socialite (here Kirby manages to virtually condense rape in a single panel with no graphic suggestion at all) with the graceless heat of a born rapist. All these gestures have an evident message of getting back at the world, of getting revenge on anyone who is smarter, better educated or better looking than himself.
He can do this because he has, by an absolute random chance, the Power; that is, the anti-life equation, the thing that Darkseid is searching for so eagerly. He can literally make anyone do anything he wants. He has done nothing to deserve it; it just fell out that way. The Power is given absolutely at random. Its other holder that we know of, Sonny Sumo, is a sort of warrior saint. Like Billion-Dollar Bates' wealth, the Power has nothing whatsoever to do with any merit or quality he may have. From an allegorical point of view, Kirby has given here his view of financial success: it is an all but random chance. The basest individual may achieve it.
But there is another point worth observing: that Bates is not merely a thug with delusions of grandeur. He is a tyrant with delusions of grandeur. From his resentment at people better than him, he has grown into totalitarian dreams. He has come to resent liberty itself, and wants to cancel it all over the world. The connection Kirby makes between fundamental inferiority feelings, resentment, and totalitarian dreams, is audacious, and though I cannot think he has managed it perfectly in Bates' case - the doublethink in his speech is rather too mechanical, perhaps because Kirby found it hard to think like a tyrant - its depth is confirmed by the fact that it can be punctually found in the personalities of Hitler, of Stalin, of Mussolini. All these men suffered from growling, gnawing inferiority complexes, spending a good deal of time snarling inwardly at their betters, feeling despised and sneered at, and taking pleasure in every misfortune that happened to "the gentlemen", the bourgeois and aristocrats, the educated, the old money, all those intolerably smug, relaxed, secure people.
This inferiority complex is also the mainspring of the crowd that follows Glorious Godfrey. Godfrey is not completely like Hitler, but he is like Hitler at his most cynical and rabble-rousing: he is completely without shame. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler set out with indecent sincerity his selling and lying techniques; he sold it by the million; he as good as told his followers that he was lying to them; and still he managed to wow them in, speech after windy hatred-filled speech. So is Godfrey. He is not subtle; and neither is Kirby. The very first page of Forever People 3 gives a simple, brutal and desperate diagnosis of the sickness of soul behind every totalitarian cult. Godfrey's words are felt as truth not because they are true, but because they resonate with the rancorous feelings of humiliation in his hearers. What he does has a sort of horrible echo of the Hairies' "musical solar-phone"; as that brings together all the individual songs of the people taking part and turns them into a collective, yet individually enriching music, so Godfrey's demon organ brings together all the individual grudges and sense of humiliation of the various members of the crowd, and makes one terrible music out of it, taking away their individuality to mold them into one mask of hatred (it is not exactly casual that the most notable and important part of a Justifier uniform is the mask).
They want to be told that the humiliations they feel they have suffered are the fault of the "others", and that they have licence to take revenge on these supposed "others". The vagueness is important. We are to understand that any group whatever will do, so long as they can be painted with the red "S" for "scapegoats". Even more importantly, Kirby refuses to shine the light on any objective loss or damage suffered by any member of Godfrey's crowd. What motivates them is not economic loss: it is the sense of having had their pride trampled in the dust. And Kirby's diagnosis is frighteningly right. What such movements live on is not primarily economic grudges: a real racist would gladly see his country remain poor and backwards, indeed grow even poorer and more backward, so long as he could be guaranteed a sense of superiority over fellow-citizens of another race. He would rather live in a shack and drive a 1920s flivver, if he could be sure that his neighbour had to live in a lean-to and walk; especially if he felt sure of an ego-boosting grovel every time they met. What really would trample his sense of pride into the dust would be to not be allowed that sense of superiority; and then it would make no difference if both he and his despised neighbour could afford a Mercedes. This is the need that Godfrey addresses. Other complaints are purely incidental to it.
Unlike the Justifiers, however, Bates is a loose cannon, in the service of nothing but himself. While the Justifiers have vested their need to justify their hatred into Godfrey, who offered himself to them as the external "justifier" of their crimes, Bates has vested it into himself: by a twisted, indeed diseased, psychological process, he has raised his inferiority complex into a vision of himself as a Titan, a new Napoleon straddled over the world. And the Power gives him the means to do it. Even Darkseid must approach him carefully and with a full dose of flattery, getting at him through his self-image, pretending to be part of a sect which Bates has taken over.
He needs no such subtlety with Edge. As early as JO 2, Edge declares himself the servant of Darkseid, and there is no reason to think him insincere. He is never completely sincere (even with himself; if he were to admit his own foul motives to himself, he would probably be forced to change them), but he probably comes closest to being sincere when he hugs himself at the thought that "Darkseid looks after his own". He is grossly wrong, too: Darkseid is quite capable of killing "his own" on a whim, even servants as important as Desaad and Kalibak. But Morgan Edge has spent his whole life licking boots and kissing rear ends in pursuit of power and more power; it should go without saying that Darkseid, the pure pursuit of power for its own sake, would become the very centre and motivation of his spiritual life, as soon as he met him.
Edge and Intergang are more like each other than any other of Darkseid's numerous servants. Unlike the Justifiers, they follow Darkseid purely because of the fascination of power and organization. On the face of it, few things would seem more incongruous in Kirby's great fantasy with its mythological and science-fiction aspects, than the intrusion of a Mafia outfit; that aliens (or indeed gods) from another world would start their activities on Earth, however hostile, by taking over the mobs, can't help but come across as out of place, a hangover, perhaps, from Kirby's terrible early experiences of gangsterism. Yet, once one of the hoods is briefly allowed to speak for himself, everything falls into place as a part of Kirby's whole view of the world, to the point that we can say that if Inter-gang were eliminated from the picture, something would be missing.
When "O'Ryan's mob" storms the Intergang outpost in search of the "jammer", a youngish hood imprudently shows off the Apokolipsian machinery to "Lanza, who makes O'Ryan's deals". Lanza and O'Ryan are unknown quantities, and even with his small amount of brains, he should know better than to show the secret he has been commissioned to keep hidden to an unknown enemy. Why does he do it? Because he has a need to show off how powerful he is, what big friends he has.
Here, Kirby has hit the spiritual heart of organized crime. I have met and talked with obvious Mafiosi; I know – and Kirby knew far more than I. This is the truth: that whatever gaudy and even religious trappings organized crime may like to put on, there is no deep meaning in it, no mystique, no positive value whatsoever. They have no dignity; when they cannot bully, they crawl. The whole world must have been astonished, after hearing for years of the powerful and cruel "boss of all bosses" Toto Riina, a murderer a hundred times over, impossible to arrest and as hard to photograph as Dracula – to see a shuffling, hesitant, whining, inarticulate, podgy figure, barely five feet tall, trying to ingratiate himself with the president of the court, when he was finally arrested and committed for trial. This is the Mafia. It is neither intelligent nor (whatever Quentin Tarantino may like to think) stylish; and it is the worst, not the best, who join it. All it wants is power, that is the ability to interfere with other people to as far and as hard as it likes. And as such, it will go along with anyone who has power. This can be verified from history over and over again: the Mafia, as a Sicilian cop said who knew them very well, is a whore who'll rub herself on anyone who can pay - meaning not just in money, but in favours, in protection, in political support. It follows that organized crime would follow Darkseid as naturally as a magnet follows iron; and for the very same reason why Morgan Edge follows him. The Intergang hood rejoices quite simply in being part of a mighty organization, of a great power; that his powerful friends may be the enemies of freedom, of his country, of humanity itself - as Darkseid indubitably is - means nothing to him. All he boasts of is the power and the organization of his little playmates. He has not even the allegiance to an evil principle that marks a Justifier; so long as his pals are powerful, he could not care less what they stand for.
From a political point of view, this means that Kirby aligns organized crime and big business as fundamentally anti-social forces. He sees them as having essentially the same purpose, and that purpose as being negative and destructive - in the words of the memorable slogan he wrote for Godcorp Inc. in Destroyer Duck: "Grab it all - Own it all - Drain it all". And to Kirby, there was no more loathsome idea than being out to "grab it all". He repeatedly said that his ideal was simply to be left alone, not to be interfered with, but that a gangster would never leave you alone - "he wants everything you've got". Power, the ability to affect people and things, is purely incidental to the activities of the Project, whose purpose is life, or of the police, whose purpose is protection and order: but it is the first and only purpose of gangsters. All they want to do is be able to mess you about. The same is clearly true of the sort of corporate person he describes in Morgan Edge, or of the likes of Billion-Dollar Bates; and therefore Kirby sees no moral, no social, and no political difference between them.
But there is a deeper truth, which has to do with the fundamental misanthropy, hatred of people, to be found in different ways in Edge, in Bates, in the Justifiers and in Simyan and Mokkari. Whatever political and financial projects they may have, the truth is that they are to a very large extent excuses to cause grief and disorder. While the Project is busy working on the children of today and tomorrow, and while nice harmless people like Terry Dean are going about their business, hurting nobody and pleasing many people, everything we see Edge, Intergang and the Evil Factory do is aimed at destruction and - above all - at social disruption. Darkseid's servants want to break the bonds that hold society together so that, in the ensuing chaos, their force should triumph; and, much more profoundly, because they simply like chaos, violence, disorder, destruction. So the Inter-gang hoods of New Gods 3 take into the city a mechanism (which Kirby oddly calls a bomb) to destroy communication metal within thousands of miles, crippling much of the American continent; so, in the previous issue, Desaad causes city-wide chaos with a fear ray; so, in Mr.Miracle 4-5, Doctor Bedlam destroys the sanity and communal cohesion of a whole skyscraper full of thousands of people. Darkseid's war aim is not the destruction, but the disruption of humanity, as he tells us himself (Forever People 3, final page). And therefore the Project cannot but be his enemy, not only because it generates power - it could create thousands of super-powered mutants in a relatively short space of time, to judge by the results so far - but above all because it represents the coherent, communitarian approach to the problems of social life and the future.
The whole series can only be described as left-wing. The state promotes useful activities like the Project and is trusted rather than feared; youth is the bearer of a new, better society with strong collectivist leanings; private capital (Morgan Edge) is very much in the baddies' corner, and while Kirby is not against private prosperity per se, he is profoundly suspicious and sceptical of corporate power and, above all, of the sort of people who aspire to it and who acquire it. As ever with Kirby, issues tend to be seen on a personal, individual level: what makes him more unhappy than anything else is the kind of person who are driven to gain power in the world of corporate power, and he looks at the effect of corporate power largely in that light. If an institution exists which either draws to itself all the nasty, stunted people, or else that demeans and stunts all the people who take part in it, then that institution is a blot on the landscape. Kirby had plenty of bad experiences with corporate power, beginning with the Kirby-Schiff lawsuit, and he saw corporate power - unlike public power - as essentially irresponsible: bosses could and did do what they like within their corporations. In a vivid image from the Groth interview, they were "out there enjoying godhood".
On the other hand, Kirby draws no essential dividing line between the State and the community. The Project is both an authority and a community, and the police do what they do to stop a destructive conflict that has involved their town: "this town", mutters the beaten Turpin, "belongs to us" - "us", here, meaning not the police, but all the people who live in it, as opposed to the "super-muk-muks" who are using it "as a fight arena". Kirby hardly ever thinks of the State in an us-and-them light; it is significant that not a single time does he use that terrible Thugcherite idea, "taxpayers' money", routinely trotted out when the speaker - generally a right-wing politician or hack journalist - disapproves of some public initiative that has to be paid from taxes that would fit so much more nicely into his own back pocket. To Kirby, the scale of values is exactly opposite: it is private expense that is suspect and wasteful. Even the lovely Eve Donner is chided for misusing her wealth. It is public money that has created the Hairies, as in fact there is a direct historical connection between "taxpayers' money" and the counter-culture; as the Project created the Hairies, so widespread public education and state universities were, throughout the Western world, the homes of the counterculture.
Had anybody rumbled the politics of Jimmy Olsen, half of American fandom, even in those liberal days, would have risen up in wrath. Today, the whole notion is unimaginable. The notion of having any confidence in government has quite died; even Kirby never again dared to put forwards any such subversive, Socialistic, revolutionary suggestion.
There are several points on which I would disagree with these political views myself. It hardly needs saying that the hopes placed in the counter-culture have proved at least premature; though the environmental message of the story remains valuable. But a certain amount of excess may be found even in more durable areas. Kirby does not seem to recognize that pole-climbing polecats such as Morgan Edge may be found as much in the public sector as in big business; as a bureaucracy and field for empire-building and ego-boosting, ministries and public services have little to envy the most callous corporation. And there is something of an unconscious rhetorical trick in the way in which our attention is constantly focused, on the one hand on the Edges and Bateses - the money men of big business - and, on the other, on the lower echelons of the public sector, the working scientists, soldiers and personnel of the Project, the cops on the street, down to a prize specimen of working-class hero such as Terrible Turpin, of whom you can tell, just by looking at him, that he never got to high school. And finally, Kirby does not seem to accept - certainly not in this series - that people may approach the money markets in the spirit in which, for instance, Sonny Sumo approaches fighting - not as a way to destroy enemies and dominate people, but as a fascinating and dangerous game with its own rules. There is no place in Kirby's system for an attractive money-maker such as the universally-liked American investor Warren Buffet, who likes the work for its own sake and seems never to have lusted either to subdue enemies or to boost his ego - and yet is the most successful money manager alive.
But having said all that, the fact remains that I think Kirby's viewpoint saner and safer than the opposite attitude that rules today, in no two countries more than in Britain and America. Corporate power is, in my view, the most irresponsible and dangerous factor in modern politics, corrupting the political process in many different ways, of which Rupert Murdoch's activities are only a fraction. Environmental concerns remain urgent and demanding. And certainly the current paranoia about the State is not a healthy or a sensible attitude in a time when the greatest threat to individual freedom comes from boardrooms: we have been coaxed into forgetting that the State arises from society at large, and led to expect nothing except tyranny and abuse.
I end with a thought that must have already occurred to every reader: that is, that nothing is more typical of Kirby's frequent and disconcerting streak of naivety than the fact that he originally intended to hand over one of his four Fourth World series to Steve Ditko. Did he know Ditko's politics? He cannot have failed to, since Ditko is notorious for starting a political argument with every person he meets; and yet he wanted Ditko to take up a project which Ditko, who is always super-careful about the ideological conformity of the projects he joins - he left Jim Shooter high and dry after that worthy had designed Dark Dominion especially for him, since he had "philosophical doubts" about it - could not but have regarded as a welter of crypto-Communistic collectivist nastiness and lachrymose special pleading!
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Compliments
Date: 2008-06-09 11:29 am (UTC)I have been following Garth Ennis' brief Dan Dare reprise for Virgin Comics, and it led me to try to clarify the elements of its great original; which I'd summarize as Frank Hampton's conception of a future worth having. In the same vein, I'll say that the Fourth World is informed by the idea of an America worthy of its citizens' solidarity and self-sacrifice.
If I may, I'd like to link to these posts from time to time, on the comics blogs where I hang out.
Re: Compliments
Date: 2008-06-09 12:21 pm (UTC)Re: Compliments
Date: 2008-06-10 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-12 06:27 pm (UTC)I suggest you try a small Gendankenexperiment:
Imagine the same comic, but with a certain graphical change: all amoral, sterile, clever traders should wear sidelocks. Similarly all aliens, who "want to break the bonds that hold society together so that, in the ensuing chaos, their force should triumph; and, much more profoundly, because they simply like chaos, violence, disorder, destruction."
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/angrif10.htm
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/sturm28.htm
And the state-created Supermen should be blond and have blue-eyes. The Project could be renamed Lebensborn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
no subject
Date: 2008-06-12 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-13 06:34 am (UTC)As it happens, I did read (on the strength of your enthusiasm) Kirby's comic about the space gods. And the subterranean race of mutated gnomes who hate the clean-limbed humanity and want to pollute it - again, resembles something. It could be Picts, of course (quite seriously - see Machen or Howard). Or it could be "I remember Lemuria" of Richard Shaver. Or, perhaps, Nibelungs of Wagner.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/irl/index.htm
I suggested therefore a certain thought experiment to distinguish between surface appearances and real content. To explain, whether someone is ugly or blue-eyed, whether he has hook nose or blond hair is a surface appearance. If we can create a piece of perfect Nazi propaganda merely by substiting one for the other, it can suggest that there is some problem. And that problem is NOT antisemitism, of course. Neither fascism.
Kirby was born in 1917, it seems. Those people who lived through the Great Depression had certain similarities in their worldview. As to Kirby, he was quite obviously influenced by the New Deal. The similarities between New Deal and corporationism popular in fascist and conservative countries are obvious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Reorganization_Bill_of_1937
Even before the Depression there was a lot of similar ideas in the air. I could suggest similarities between fascists and Tolkien, Howard, Machen, Lovecraft, C.A. Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc. That does not mean that any of them was fascist.
Of course, you can consider that the only important thing is whether the evil speculator is described as Jewish or not. I think that this is not only important thing.
Most importantly, it seems that the traders managed once again to create an immense bubble and bust. Historically, it always ended with the search for both guilty and for scapegoats. I am curious how it will end today.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-13 08:43 am (UTC)But what is most dangerous is simply the basic notion - you cannot think on this subject because racists have thought about it. Do not say that is not what you meant, because if that is not what you meant, what did you mean? What you said in so many words is that Kirby's basic concepts could be twisted into becoming Nazism. If you did not mean that, then one of us has a serious problem with communication. And to give you an idea of why I consider that kind of attitude dangerous and damaging: I am currently working to enlarge my knowledge of linguistics (I am the world's worst linguist, but my field of research demands it), and specifically of Indo-European languages. One of the towering figures in the field is the German Augustus Schlegel - a man whose theories were a compound of what is most objectionable to me: Hegelism with its denial of the law of non-contradiction, Darwinism in its most brutal and self-satisfied guise, mystical nationalism, and the organic idea of communities and languages (from which comes the talk of "youth" and "decay"). Nonetheless Schlegel is an absolutely central figure in the history of linguistics, and if you tried to delete his theories, odious though they are, from its history, you would make it all impossible and meaningless. You have to study his work; period.
This kind of thinking is the kind that drives American conservatives and scientists to each others' throats, and that makes so many scientists accept the trash of Richard Dawkins and the like. It is the same that says that because Darwin was a smug Victorian theorist of racism and cruelty, therefore his scientific discoveries must be ignored or rejected. It is, in the end, the long wave of a forgotten but still living Calvinist heritage that says that the saved must be separated from the sinful in everything, because any and every sin corrupts totally and to the depths of nature. It is a kind of thinking that needs to be avoided like the plague, because it stunts the mind and makes the soul vain of its very ignorance. It builds up whole categories of the damned and the reprobate, in which can be conveniently placed some of the greatest achievements of mankind; and which leads to an ever narrower circuit of the mind, in which fewer and fewer thoughts are admitted.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-13 10:18 am (UTC)You answer, quite rightly, that the fact that Hitler drank water is not a reason to stop drinking water, and that Picts and dwarves were smeared by Wagner in Ring der Niebelungen and John Buchan in No-man's land long before the Depression.
http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1159.pdf
All that is quite right. But I would like you to consider the whole problem disregarding the racism. We agree that Hitler did wrong by killing the Jews. The question is whether that was whole of the problem? Or, perhaps, some of his policies would be wrong even if not directed at Jews?
If you consider the German insistence on the German Kultur and Anglo-Saxon and French Zivilisation, on the Anglo-Saxons as the race of shopkeepers, on the immorality of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, pure speculation and trade etc, you will see some similarities, I hope.
Are those things bad or wrong? That is another question. Certainly. it should be considered on its own merits. Sticking you head in the sand, however, and refusing to consider where and in what situation those ideas originated, won't help in their honest appraisal.
You say: "what is most objectionable to me: Hegelism with its denial of the law of non-contradiction, Darwinism in its most brutal and self-satisfied guise, mystical nationalism, and the organic idea of communities and languages" and it seems that you don't notice that your opinions on capitalism are historically simply an outshoot exactly of those ideas. Certainly, if we accept the conclusions we don't have to accept the premises - but we will need to find some other premises at the least.
Remember, also, that the Great Depression in the Germany was not the first stock market crash there. In fact, popular antisemitism in Germany was started by the stockmarket crashes in 1870s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
no subject
Date: 2008-06-13 10:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-13 12:23 pm (UTC)http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-33367/Austria#409075.hook
http://www.wsws.org/history/1997/apr1997/fascism.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Marr
In fact, the very word was coined in 1879.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism
As to the attitude of Catholic Church towards Capitalism - it didn't came "down the centuries", since the Capitalism itself is rather younger. There were certainly opinion on some elements of capitalism - eg usury/banks - which were quietly modified to accomodate reality.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15235c.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_be14vp.htm
The modern social policy of the Church starts only with Rerum Novarum from 1899, which was quite obviously influenced by Lasalle and socialism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_Novarum
As you very well know, Rerum Novarum was one of the inspirations of the corporatism, and it seems to me that is nearest your position. Speaking about the centuries of the Catholic doctrine is misleading, since the applicable doctrine from that time is nothing more than a few general opinions about just price and dignity of work. If you want anything more, and in particular some ideas on the organisation of state and economy, you will have to look nearer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
no subject
Date: 2008-06-14 05:53 pm (UTC)The accumulation of capital and the professionalization of finance took place earlier in Italy than any other Western country. Have a look at Iris Origo's The Merchant of Prato, and at the history of the house of Medici. And that means that the Church had to do with these things earlier than is normally understood. The Church has always looked askance on the power of wealth or social status in any form ("harder than to pass a camel through the eye of a needle..") and approved of corporate activity and mutual succour; indeed, she has since the beginning managed them herself. The very order of Deacons was created to manage the relief activities of the Gentile Church in a time of hunger in Jerusalem, IIRC. IN other words, the learned Thomist Leo XIII invented very little in Rerum Novarum, which is sodden with history to the point of using the word "new" in the wholly Latin sense of "sinister, strange, dangerous". He merely adapted the teachings of centuries to new circumstances.
The connection of Jews with capitalism and of both with legends of ugly little people beneath the earth is at best casual. Both Jews and stunted subterranean races have been the subject of legend - usally negative - for as long as recorded history. The Books of Tobit and of Esther show that Jew-bashing and systematic persecution were part of the landscape for centuries before Christanity, let alone Capitalism, and dwarves and wood-creatures are features of folklore wherever humans live. The first modern author to write about dangerous subterranean races was the Englishman Bulwer-Lytton, in his The coming race which I own but regret to say have not yet read. One thing I can tell you, though: not only was Bulwer-Lytton the very incarnation of Victorian self-regard with all its mercantile aspects, he also made the protagonist of his story an American. I doubt I will find any allegory against capitalism here. You are postulating a regularity of correspondence between image and political significance which simply is not there.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-15 10:50 pm (UTC)The really interesting topic is the complex of anti-market (or better, anti-totally free market) ideas. They can surface in many different political options - conservative, Nazi, marxists, etc. See eg Bernard Shaw's commentary to the Ring :
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/sring11.txt
http://larryavisbrown.homestead.com/files/Ring/Wagner_Nietzsche_Shaw.htm
"In The Perfect Wagnerite Shaw made use of Ring mythology as allegory to catalog the socio-politica1 problems of his day. He saw three categories of men: the "moral dwarves" whose greed drives them to enslave others and whose craftiness allows them to get away with it; the industrious but stupid giants who supply the work force; and the administrative gods who because of the giants' deficient mentalities must rule by mechanical exercise of law and threat of punishment rather than by reason (189). Eventually Wotan realizes that, to create a better form of government, what the world needs are not new laws but new men, not one individual Siegfried but a race of heroes (215), or in the words of John Tanner's "Revolutionist's Handbook," a democracy of supermen (Man and Superman 755). The Shavian superman wants not to rule over others but to raise all humanity to his level. Only when all people are so evolved as to desire naturally to do what is rest for the entire race will Shaw have any confidence in man as a political being."
Everywhere we see that complex - rejection of the filthy lucre, the omnipotent and beneficient state, New Socialist Man or Uebermensch or Superman. Also worship of men of action, who are not afraid to break an egg to make an omelette. See also Shaw's adventures in USSR
http://artukraine.com/famineart/shaw.htm
http://www.faminegenocide.com/resources/unknown.html
The problem, of course, is the false dichotomy - either totally free market or omnipotent state; both can be made possible by creating a new man, homo economicus or the new socialist man. In reality, of course, both alternatives are equally untenable, and the new superman will remain in comic books.