A spy in the Beehive part II: further dodgyness from Jin Yang

Christmas came slightly early this week when further revelations about National MP Jin Yang surfaced in the media.

And wouldn't you know it but Yang deliberately tried to subvert a SIS security vetting in an attempt to get an individual with a Chinese background into the NZDF.

Matt Nippert's article in the NZ Herald has the better depth on things and from that its clear that Yang sought to overturn the vetting outcome so that the individual could get a job in the NZDF in a position requiring a Secret level security clearance.

Yang, of course has claimed that he was merely "seeking answers" for his constituent but Nippert's article goes on to note that the letter of response to the constituent by the then minister for defense Jonathan Coleman noted that Yang "approached the office" on his constituents behalf.

And while we can get hung up on the definitions of what "forwarding correspondence" vs "approaching the office" means the real issue is that Yang sought to question a failed security vetting and get it overturned because that's what people go to their MP for.

People don't go to their MP to just find out whats going on, both the SIS and the NZDF are very clear about the minimum requirements for a security vetting and general queries about such matters can be made via the Inspector general of Security and Intelligence, so Yang going into bat on this individuals behalf means that the individual was seeking to use Yang's influence as a MP to overturn the findings of the vet.

Add to the issue is that Yang has further sought to obscure his background with the Chinese Military and Spying establishments (as the article notes) and you have an individual with a highly questionable background and blurry backstory seeking to subvert a security vet so another individual, who would not normally get into the NZDF, in a high security role, could bypass those checks and get in.

So at what point do we say that Yang is a spy and be done with it because as I said in my last post on the issue I would not be surprised if he was found to be a spy and none of those actions make Yang, or his behaviors, look credible, believable or trustworthy and in fact make Yang look dodgy, dubious and traitors in regards to that charge.

If Yang was just another MP without all the other issues then we could probably put those actions in context of a MP acting on the behalf of a constituent (even if challenging a security vet is a rather unusual action for a MP) but with all the extra information about Yang and little or no info to mitigate things its harder and harder to believe that this is just another unrelated action.

And with questions about Chinese influence abounding at the moment Yang is probably hoping that all of this will just go away but I don't think kit will as if previous Chinese National MP scandal of Pansy Wong was enough to get her removed I fail to see why Yang gets to stay in his job when issues of trust are one of the foremost things about being a MP or member of government.

So far Yang has tried to play the race card (which failed) and has now sought to issue a single statement on the matter and say nothing more, in the hope that this will all go away but my guess is Nippert has the scent of a story in his nostrils and wont be giving up on things that easy when who knows what further OIA's might bring to light.

Post election fallout contaminates TOP, the Maori Party and National

File this under “what were they thinking!?”

The last few weeks has seen a number of activities which could be accurately described as “post-election fallout” as the particular “coalition oriented reality” that the 2017 September general election has imposed on the denizens of New Zealand’s political ecosystem (that of Labour, NZ First and the Greens as government) makes itself felt.

And in this case the fallout is coming from what could be politely termed as the three “losers” of the election, that being TOP, The Maori Party and National*. Further two of these cases can be seen as the direct result of bad decision making regarding a parties particular electoral strategy prior to the election while the third (in this case National) can be seen as laying the foundation for a similar type of catastrophe if ever implemented.

And as I am back from my blogging sabbatical lets indulge in a jolly game of seeing which of these three dumpster fire, train wrecks stacks up as the worse and how it came about.

TOP tops itself

First up is the Gareth Morgan vanity project more commonly known as The Opportunity Party (TOP).

 In the two months prior to the election I researched and wrote a whole 2000 word post on TOP which went in the dead end file because no matter how I spun it, the phrase “rich man playing at politics” kept repeating itself and there was really little else to say about Morgan treading down the same path as Kim Dotcom and “Creepy” Colin Craig, all of who did little more than spray round blobs of their wealth to purchase political media which had little more content on it than their respectively gormless faces.

Therefore it was not surprising to read last week that Morgan pulled the plug on TOP by resigning from the party, along with other senior members, as the odds of Morgan hauling his political carcass over the 5% threshold became starkly clear round about June when TOP had been in operation for six months and had little to show for it except Morgan looking down on people from billboards (and that metaphor can’t be labored enough) like a baby-boomer version of Big Brother from 1984.

And I will happily go on record in saying that my prediction that TOP would bring some “excitement” to the election campaign was way off the mark as in making said prediction I had anticipated that Morgan would not fall into the same trap as Craig and Dotcom had and actually run a political campaign seeking to worm his way into the voters’ minds with some clever and relevant means to tap into the fumes of discord that were rising from the political morass that FukYoo politics had created in NZ.

But I was wrong and to save space in this post I will sum up Moragn, and the approximately two million dollars he spent on the party and campaigning, as coming up with little more than his face on billboards, one failed legal challenge and the lingering stench in the publics mind that if elected his first act in parliament would be to enact some sort of rabid PC jihad on all felines in Aotearoa**.

Morgan talked big when he launched TOP in November 2016 and had some nice policy ideas buried away in the background but for all his comparison to Donald Trump, Morgan failed to live up to his hype, as at least Trump got elected, and all Morgan could do was flail around and squabble with party members, politicians and the public via twitter.

The key failing of this absurdly quixotic*** quest were simply Morgan deciding that he was to be the face of the party (which was the most obvious flag that this was little more than a vanity project for Morgan’s brittle ego) and not spending enough money to get ones political brand out in an already saturated marketplace (because two million dollars does not buy as much brand awareness as one might expect when you’re spending it all on creepy billboards and torpedoing your own polling by acting like a douche).

If I had the money to enter politics I might consider a run at parliament but the simple fact is I do not have the doubloons to buy myself a political party or indulge in the clearly obvious fantasy that Morgan was labouring under; that he was some sort of kiwi philosopher king writ large and come to save NZ with his unique brand of straight talking, common sense that only he could dispense.

The 2.4% TOP got in the polls is impressive per se for a first time out political party but when compared to what the Internet and Conservative parties polled in previous elections*4 it’s no big deal and clearly not any more resonant with the average voter than what Kim Dotcom or Colin Craig was peddling.

Going down with the waka

And from one wally called Morgan and a failed political party to another (albeit one that previously made it into parliament); this time Tuku Morgan, who recently quit his role as president of the Maori Party and was the architect of the parties disastrous campaign strategy in the recent election.

What was so disastrous about this strategy you ask?

Well for starters, it appeared to be completely divorced from the political reality of the Maori Party in 2017, polling well below the 5% threshold (often so close to zero as to be irrelevant) and being totally reliant on a single seat (all the others being won back by Labour in previous elections since 2005 when the party held all seven).

The kernel of Tuku's strategy was simple: get the Maori King (of who Morgan was an advisor to) to bad mouth the Labour Party in the run up to the election as a means to drum up support and arrest the hideous fall in seats and vote share*5 from their peak in 2005 when they swept all Maori seats in the wake of the foreshore & seabed issue.

So the Kings message was “screw Labour…” and nothing more which really was not the best way to endorse your own party and certainly not from an individual who, while royalty, seemed to have no real relevance to Maori in general and at best seemed to be an easily manipulated figurehead. And as I noted at the time royalty taking sides in politics is a dicey issue because if your side does not get in your out in the cold and that’s exactly what happened.

Labour now has all the Maori seats, Maori candidates and MPs and in the simple move of raising the minimum wage shortly after taking power did more for Maori, who are more affected by having to work in low paid occupations than others, in that single act than anything the Maori Party did in its nine years in the government.

Tuku Morgan should have known that the key to success in Maori politics was getting and retaining those seven Maori seats, as they conferred the political weight in parliament to make them an attractive coalition partner, and that what gave the party those seats in the first place was the wellspring of discontent that the foreshore & seabed issue had tapped into in 2005 and not the petty backbiting of a mostly irrelevant individual towards the one party which was the traditional resting place of the Maori voter.

And he should have known that if the party was to retain those seats it had to deliver meaningful change to Maori and not just political spin and empty promises which is why by the time 2017 rolled around the party had lost all but one seat and polled so low as to not count at all.

To be fair to Morgan though, by the time he came up with this bat-brained idea the party was already in dire straits under the leadership of Te Ururoa Flavell and Marama Fox and was fatally weakened from the get go when Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia made the fateful choice to go with National in 2008.

But the party could have gone out in a better fashion than it did or even made a fighting stand if there had been an idea better suited than the extremely low budget wrestling smack talk employed by Morgan, via the Maori King, to try and make Maori care about the Maori party.

And if vanity was the downfall of Gareth Morgan and TOP it’s not too difficult to see that Tuku Morgan may not have been the best choice for the role of party president or campaign strategist as Morgan political credentials remain solely an $89 pair of boxer shorts and rhorting the public weal so it’s hard to imagine what else other than his own vanity was prompting him to think that his plan was going to work when every shred of reality would have been saying “Kahore, kahore, kahore!”

National’s imaginary friend

And last but not least in this caravan of, what my staff-sergeant would have politely referred to as, “s**t rushing to the brain” ideas, is the recent news that the National Party is looking to form a new conservative party.

Of course they denied it but after I ran this past my well placed National party contact, T, the response I got was more than enough for me to believe this rumour has some truth to it.

I do acknowledge the sheer science fiction scale to the idea that National clone itself as a means to pad out the illusion that it’s the only party of any substance on the right side of the political line after the coalition of NZ First, Labour and the Greens has made living under a coalition seem like a harmonious possibility and thereby politically and ideologically isolating National.

However what I did get from T was more than enough to indicate that while saner minds might have prevailed at obvious lunacy of the mainline suggestion, one particular comment from him (which I shan’t repeat here) was more than enough to make me think that National is no longer keen on supporting political misanthrope ACT and, with its previous “coalition partners” (Peter Dunne and the Maori Party) out of parliament, it may be feeling a bit lonesome out there in right (wing) field.

And while ACT is nothing more than a political welfare scheme for Seymour, National has to take the blame for creating the god-forsaken, Ann-Randian, one man sewer that ACT has become by their continual gifting of Epsom to ACT as the means to foster the illusion that there is something more right-wing (and all that such a term entails) than National out there in New Zealand.

So while national cloning itself is off the cards I would not be surprised if national sought to clone ACT, which could then be gifted Epsom and thus maintain the illusion that there is something further right of National in NZ politics while simultaneously getting risk of pesky (and uncontrollable) ACT.

However given the obvious rifts that do exists within the party (think: whoever keeps leaking documents and information to Nicky Hagar or to the media (ie the Todd Barclay scandal) and the fact that there is nothing inherently monolithic about right wing politics and it would be prudent for the party to figure out how to keep those issues contained rather than have them spill out in public.

The problem is that splitting the vote base is not the way to do this as creating a satellite party has all sorts of risks. The first (as noted in the media) is that the public may see it as nothing more than a front for National and as such have no faith in its independence while the second is that there is no guarantee that once you spilt the vote base that the other party will remain controllable (think how the Tea-Party antics in the US have hurt the Republicans).

So what to do?

My guess is this issue will simmer away in National until someone feels strong enough to challenge Bill English for the leadership and what will predicate that will be any significant drop in Nationals polling, which at this time, is not an issue but those numbers can’t hold forever given the fickle nature of the average NZ voter and with national in opposition it is only a matter of time before something gives.

So until that time I give Bill & the B Team a pass on this one but the fact that somewhere in National this idea got floated is enough to put them in the same category as TOP and the Maori party in this post under the “what were they thinking!?” moniker.

So who is the most contaminated?

The easy answer to that question is the Maori party, who pissed away the opportunity given to them by the seven seats they once had in parliament and who as per my old KP post Many waka, one star to guide them shows that the biggest problem in Maori politics is the Maori politicians themselves.

TOPs abysmal outcome in the election really only hurt Gareth Morgan and with the party now all but dead expect the 2.4% that voted for TOP to head back to Labour (based on all TOP voters I have met, all seem to be disgruntled Labour) while National can be forgiven for indulging in some off-the-wall thinking, post-election, but the real test for them is that they still need a solution to their obvious problems, that of needing to rejuvenate the party (but more on that in another post soon).

For all three parties, the brave, post election face they had been putting on has finally melted away in the extreme left/center radiation being given off by the coalition government and exposed what lies beneath.

*-No, ACT does not count in this sense as; a) they held onto their seat but more importantly b) they were losers to begin with in the more realistic sense of being purely in parliament at the behest of National.

**-something he doubled down on post-election when the PMs cat died and he decided that it would be the right time to make further comment on it.

***-yes I know it’s probably redundant using absurd as an adjective to quixotic but if the shoes fits…

*4-The Internet Party polled 1.42% in the 2014 election while the Conservatives polled 2.65% and 3.97% in 2011 and 2014 respectively

*5-In 2005 2.12% and 7 seats; 2008 2.39 and 4 seats; 2011 1.43% and 3 seats; 2014 1.32% and 1 seat and 2017 1.2% and zero seats!

Sympathy for Amerika: The fall of the US and the rise of Trump explained through superhero comic books

Fiction is like a spiders web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible - Virginia Woolf


Its a tough time being Amerika these days, its no longer as popular abroad as it once was and it cant seem to get its act together at home either, what with all those mass shootings, sexual scandals and racial tension.

It seems like every time I call my brother and friends in Amerika or read the news the sureality of the situation just vomits in my lap as I try to compare what I hear and read about there with what I take for a relatively sane and stable life here in New Zealand.

And the figurehead for all of this Brand-X crazy is President Donald Trump.

However for those readers who are expecting me to now spazm out into some frothing liberal beat-up of Trump and the situation are going to be sorely disappointed as I am in fact going to revisit some of the sentiments from my now infamous rant from my Kiwipolitco days titled Watching it Bern: Why its OK to vote for Donald Trump* and specifically the linkage of ideas that I set down in the final paragraphs to describe the rise of then candidate Trump before his eventual election to El Presidente.

In short it’s the Arab Spring, US style, writ large across Western Democracies as average citizens come to realize that those who are supposed to represent them are not fulfilling the task they were elected to do and are now expressing extreme discontent by delivering spoiler candidates into the fold, not as a genuine alternate (although I think Sanders could have pulled that off until he turned Judas) but as a resoundingly Joker like solution to the failure of the system. As Alfred says in the Dark Knight, “Some people just want to watch the world burn”

And its that weird intersection of comic books and the decline of US democracy that I want to explore a bit further in this post.

So as I sit here sipping a cold Speights to help ward off the residual heat of the day and with the Doobie Brothers and Herbie Mann on the turntable let us go deeper into the initially bizarre idea that the US now has a comic book villain for president but that no hero or heroine in tights and a cape is coming to save them.

Our guide for this acceptably twisted excursion into the tenuous is the idea that fact and fiction has blurred and in the paraphrased words of Marshal Mcluhan the medium has become the message as democracy in the Home of Brave has withered to such a point that a hyper-real media being (that being Senor Trump of the reality TV show The Apprentice fame) has ascended to the top job of president in a such an appropriately bizarre set of circumstances as to be worthy of the plot of a comic book.

And if you think that I am the only one making this connection then guess again, as even if you exclude the obvious form of political cartoonists who must be thanking their lucky stars for being sent such an obvious muse in the form of Trump, there is a whole other range of people who are either noting the repeated appearances of Trump in comic books or using old comic book covers in juxtaposition with actual Trump quotes to highlight how much he actually sounds like a stock comic book villain.

So just as the superbly surreal use of stock cartoon images in David Rees's Get Your War On was used in the 2000s to pick apart and mock then President Dubya Bush and all of US foreign policy in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (hence the cartoons title) so too are the paradoxically subtle, yet obvious, links between Trump and comic books, and specifically those featuring super heroes and villains, are being used to highlight the dark state of the Land of Free in a way that simply speaking truth to power could never achieve.

And it seems highly appropriate that the Fugs Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon Oct. 21, 1967 has just kicked in on the stereo as its exactly that kind of comedic and satirical tone, which has become the tone for the Trump Presidency (as well as its commentators), and the now assured decline of Amerika, that should be kept in mind when trying to fathom who or what Trump is.

Because as much as people like to blame Trump for all the evil in the US today the brutal truth is that Trump is not the cause but the symptom of the disease (as I noted in my KP post) that has consumed The City on the Hill and left it hollow.

And through the medium of superhero comics we can chart the rise and fall of Amerika, Donald Trump and the super-hero comic medium itself by examining the genre, its history and those that were involved in it.

And for me personally, comics, both super-hero and otherwise, were a major part of my youth, teens and early 20s, as they, along with books, music and video games, were the staple diet of my mental life at that time and continue to exert an influence on me (as anyone who has ever visited my house can attest) so to help illustrate my point I will be drawing on four comic book writers/artists who not only had a major influence on me but also the genre.

Jack Kirby

First up is Jack Kirby (1917 – 1994) who is one of the true creators of the medium. And while you may not know who Kirby is its more than likely that you know of the characters that he created, or co-created, such as The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Ironman, Doctor Doom and many many more from watching their exploits on the big screen via the movies of the Marvel universe.

Kirby worked through the gold, silver, bronze and modern ages of comics and was one of the defining creators and shapers of the medium who not only drew his characters but also wrote many of the stories to go with them (my favorite being The Eternals). Kirby was also part of the generation that served in World War Two and helped to draw the famous comic cover of Captain America (another character who Kirby also helped create) punching Hitler.

The impact and importance of Jack Kirby on the medium of comics and super-heroes cannot be overstated and even today in movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor:Ragnarok his influence can be seen in both the bold use of colors and visual style (a Kirby trademark) as well as many of the ideas and aspects of the stories.

However, at the time Kirby was helping to create the Pantheon of the super-hero universe, comic books in general were not seen as a respectable medium to work in, or read, and were in fact viewed by 1940s and 1950s Amerika as a dangerous and corrupting influence on youth, as detailed in Fredrick Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent.

Comics as a threat to youth

At that time super hero comics were not the dominant part of the comic book medium (that would come later) and characters like the newly created Superman (the first American Jesus) and Batman had to compete with a variety of other characters and comics which covered genres like crime, horror, romance, science fiction, war and westerns and which often included rather dark and adult subject matter in their art and writing.

And in early 1950s Amerika, with McCarthyism, the second Red Scare and the rising specter of the Cold War, its seemed only appropriate to the authorities to clamp down on what seemed like a dangerous threat to the nation’s youth with the introduction of the Comics Code, an ostensibly voluntary code for publishers to adhere to but in reality, for nearly 30 years, a de-facto censor of almost all comic content in the US.

The Comics Code toned down, or removed, all content which was deemed sexual, violent, portrayed drug and alcohol or any issue not deemed wholesome to 1950s Amerikan morals and was used to both suppress and homogenize super-hero comics into a format which often could lapse into stale and generic formulas/plots with cookie cutter villains, and a somewhat boring succession of costumed hero's, each with some gimmick or power but otherwise little else to distinguish them.

An example of this is how Batman was reduced from the hyper violent, ultra-rich, playboy vigilante that he started out as (including using guns), who was himself a toned down copy of another comic book and radio serial character called The Shadow, into the safe, trad and non-threatening character which was portrayed by Adam West in the campy 1960s TV show Batman**. 

The shift from darker and edgier to safe, clean and neat was seen across the comics format at the time and it took over 20 years for the first real breaks with the code to occur which happened in parallel with the social and sexual revolutions that were taking place in the US at that time and while comic creators were always able to find ways to sneak in supposedly subversive content, it was not until the 1970s that the code was first challenged in the mainstream.

Yong Donald

It was about this time that a young man named Donald J Trump was making his first steps into the world. Born in 1946 Trumps formative years were during the 1950s and early 60s and while there is no evidence I can find to show that he read comics what is clear though, from his twitter and TV statements, is that Donald is a creature of media (remember Marshal McLuhan) and not only the medium but also the message with a near 24/7 twitter stream, claims of fake news and a galaxy of statements which bear little connection to reality.

Growing up in 1950s Amerika as the scion of the privileged elite means that Trump not only has those aspects of the baby-boomers which saw them called the "Me Generation" but also was insulated from almost all of the upheaval of the 50s, 60s and 70s by his families wealth, which enabled him to do things like avoid the draft and get the kind of head start in life (a million dollar loan from his father) that only those born with a silver spoon in their mouth can have.

Steve Ditko

While it’s not known if Trump read comics as a child, if he did it is more than likely that he would have been read one of the most famous comics of all time, that of the teenage superhero Spiderman which was created by Steve Ditko (born 1927) and Stan Lee.

Spiderman was a hero unlike many of his contemporaries, who were obvious alpha males, as his secret identity, Peter Parker, was a shy, bookish high school student who would be considered a nerd by any standards and Spiderman himself was often mocked by his foes as weak and hounded by the press as a menace to society.

For readers, the teenage challenges of high school, social pressures and romance were often mixed in with normal super-hero fare where the greatest threat to Spiderman was not always some new villain but whether Peter would be able to take his date to the high school dance.

This youthful focus helped readers identify with Spiderman in a way that they never could with Ubermench characters like Superman or Batman who were clear specimens of peak masculinity, seemingly unbeatable and also untroubled by any morally ambiguous thoughts regarding the worthiness of their cause (as happened more than once with Spiderman).

This combination of teenage struggle and the more normal superhero antics gave Spiderman a depth which was often much greater than characters like Superman or Batman where the action was almost relentlessly on their hero antics with only a bare nod to their characters “normal” lives. Peter had to worry about getting good grades, looking after his aging aunt and later paying the bills as he went to university and worked as a freelance photographer.

And Ditko, like Kirby, worked through the various comic book ages and also like Kirby served his country in the Army before going into comics and while Kirby's visual style was bold with strong colours and simple lines Ditko had a surreal style which often placed the characters he created deep into the uncanny valley but could also burn those images into ones memory, especially in his work in the areas of horror and suspense.

Finally, like Kirby, Ditko had a hand in shaping not only many of the characters of the Marvel universe but also that of Marvels rival DC as well as many smaller comic publishers and helped to make the comic book super-hero genre what it was.

Comic book Super-heroes as Amerikan Gods

Super-hero comics are a uniquely Amerikan art form, similar to Jazz and mass shootings, which are not only a reflection of the culture which created them but also of the time and circumstances in which they were created.

And with the turn of the 20^th century and the monstrous catastrophes of the First World War, the Wall Street Crash and the great Depression, traditional American religious figures such as Jesus and God seemed no longer sufficient avatars to the younger generations and so the time was right for new gods to rise and take their place.

Early super hero comics were almost exclusively devoted to fighting crime and the fact that they wore masks and costume, had miraculous powers and acted outside of the law clearly made them vigilantes in an intoxicating image of an individual taking (back) power into their own hands when the situation demanded it.

But just as in science every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction so to for all the costumed do-gooders out there with each hero or heroine having an equally powered nemesis’s in the form of super-villains. Batman has the Joker, Superman has Lex Luthor, Spiderman has the Hobgoblin and every other cape wearing character worth their salt had someone who acted as their moral opposite and in doing so filled out the pantheon of gods and demons that super hero comics had become.

The decline, fall and rebirth of superheroes

By the 1970s superhero comics were on the wane from their heyday in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The dynamic of men and women in tights and capes fighting the same endless roster of criminals was stale and comic writers were starting to introduce topics such as drug use, sexuality and racism; issues which the US was then facing, but which were all flying in the face of the comic’s code restrictive dictates.

In 1983, Superman was now 45 years old, so to speak, having first been published in 1938, and the intervening 45 years had seen Amerika shift from Franklin Delano Roosevelt leading the US out of the Great Depression and into World War Two to 1980s Corporate Amerika, the lingering stench of failure in Vietnam, Watergate and the Cold War antics of Ronald Regan yet Superman was still battling Lex, dating Lois as he always had despite the massive cultural and social shifts that Amerika had been through in those 45 years.

The result was the Bronze Age of comics (the period roughly form 1970 to 1985) saw declines in sales and interest as other media, like video games, captured the imaginations of youth while comics and their often staid stories and formats seemed boring as at the end of each story (or story arc) nothing had changed and the comic book dynamic seemed trapped in a limbo of endless repetition.

By the early 1980s comics superhero comics and comics in general seemed to have become mired in a time and space which, while looking modern, seemed to come from the 1930s; with the two big publishers Marvel and DC Comics now corporate entities in themselves and seemingly more worried about the bottom line than their characters or their stories and with the genre, now firmly established and having no new stories to tell, was thusly sliding into boring cliché.

And there is a reason why 1985 is considered the year in which the Bronze age of comics ended and the Modern or Dark age of comics began, and continues to this day as it was around this time that two writers took it upon themselves to revolutionise comics as we know it by not only killing dead some of the core, but restrictive, mechanics of the super hero genre but also by revolutionising super hero comics and pave the way for the current climate where comic book sales can still be dicey but where superhero movies are a worldwide phenomenon.

Killing what you love

First up is Alan Moore and his seminal work Watchmen which is both a deconstruction of the whole super hero narrative as well as a warts and all celebration of what made them so exciting to read in the first place.

In short Moore torn down the very ideals on which superheroes had been built by showing how clichéd the idea of an individual dressed in a costume fighting crime had become and then gave it life again by creating his own superhero characters based of the now familiar archetypes of Jesus-hero (superman), detective-hero (batman), sexy-hero (wonder woman***), the Anti-hero and vigilante-hero; setting them in their own universe (as oppose to the standard practice of placing them in either the DC or the Marvel continuum) and then exploring the logical conclusions of each archetypes and by highlighting the thoughts and motivations of each archetype (for example, think of how young Bruce Wayne witnessing the murder of his parents would have shaped him into batman and what effect that had on his psyche).

By the end of its 12 issue run Watchmen had destroyed the status quo, even if the status quo did not know it, and heralded the end of the Bronze Age of comics. Also, for the record, Watchmen is possibly the first ever graphic novel and even made it onto the Times list of 100 best novels of the modern age. Its effect has lessened somewhat in this day and age by the Zac Synder’s unwatchable move based on the comic and the fact that the legions of comics that came in its wake have obscured that which blazed the trail.

Bringing back the Bat

However it was not Moore that delivered the killing blow to the medium but another writer, Frank Miller, with his explosive four issue series of Batman comics called The Dark Knight Returns.

In DKR Miller did something that was almost unheard of, by letting his character age, and portraying Batman as a 55 year old coming out of 10 years retirement to battle his equally aged foes before finally engaging in a showdown with Superman. In the story Batman is shown suffering the effects of his advanced age on his crime fighting abilities along with the kind of doubts and worries that any person dealing with the generation gap would have.

But Miller did not stop there, as he broke the long established comic book convention of heroes not killing their nemeses (one of the cardinal rules of superhero comics as in doing so it destroys the balance of the supposedly immortal pantheon) by having Batman kill the Joker before donning a robotic Batsuit to beat superman to a pulp (with the help of some green kryptonite) and thus symbolicly destroying another (that of the invincibility of such a character) unspoken rule of the medium as well.

Done in Millers signature style and overlaid with images of a world awash in hyper-media and uncontrolled violence (both crime and war) The Dark Knight Returns was highly influential and single-handeledly brought back Batman as the dark, brooding psychopath that he originally was and served as the inspiration for Tim Burton,s Batman blockbuster film that kick started the modern age of super hero movies.

A new/old model

By the mid-1980s the situation with comics had gotten so bad that many of the artists and writers who had helped create many of the most popular comics and characters of the medium had realized they were being ripped off and moved to form their own companies where they retained creative control and were aptly compensated for their work.

This led to companies like Image and Valiant entering the market and for the first half of the 90s challenging Marvel and DC for dominance before eventually falling back as the speculative comics boom of the 90s proved to be the death knell of super-hero comics until their partial revival in the 2010s with the explosion, and success, of the Marvel Universe movies.

And the 90s comics speculation boom is emblematic of the very worst practices of late stage capitalism which would be late seen in the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. 

In essence the creator owned studios had, for a time, “a license to print money” and did so by flooding the market with a horde of generic characters and stories which were often written and draw by those that had worked at Marvel of DC but were now simply using their creative freedom to churn out bland knock-offs of the characters they were working on when employed by the Big Two.

Making this worse was the fact that speculators were buying up first editions of these new comics thinking that they would turn out to be as valuable as first editions of Superman, Spiderman and Batman were, while missing the fact that it was often the rarity of said editions which made them valuable and rendered the value of the hundreds of newly printed comics and characters to less than the pulp they were printed on and a practice which remains to this day.

By the end of the 90s Marvel and DC had survived but more as copyright holders than producers of comics and upstarts like Valiant and Image had either broken up or been reduced to churning out the same old generic superhero crap that had proliferated in the 1970s with the big two and thus come complete full circle but with characters no one cared about and no Miller or Moore et al to save them as the public's taste for comics shifted to things other than people running round in their underwear to fantasy, horror and crime (as seen in popular comic lines such as The Sandman, Hellblazer and  the superbly excellent 100 Bullets) and away from the comic book format to graphic novels.

This economic dynamic, that of hype and marketing mixed with market saturation and lack of innovation, led to comics crash and the dotcom bubble at about the same time and were engineered by individuals and companies that might have been in different markets but marching to the beat of the same retarded drum.

So how do we explain the link between superhero comics and Donald Trump?

The answer to this question can be found in the economic dynamics that helped give rise to the artistic restrictions that Moore and Miller were destroying in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, and which were the same waters from what would emerge the Donald Trump we all know and loath, which is, for want of a better word, neo-liberalism.

Leaving aside the cultural and artistic issues which have bedeviled comics since their inception the biggest problem which comics ever faced has been that of creators rights which do predate the rise of the cult of unrestrained capitalism but which came to the fore in that time, when dodgy business practices built up over the decades before saw publishers like Marvel and DC, as corporate entities, jealously guarding the rights to the characters, art and stories other individuals had created and actively screwing the writers and artists out of their fair share.

Or, in other words, not actually creating anything new but simply gaining rent off a property that they did not really own but had successfully stolen.

Both Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (along with many others) had to fight to get back art work they created and receive full and fair credit for characters and stories they had a hand in, with both men changing between the big two more than once in their careers before either working with independent publishers or having enough clout to be fully acknowledged for what they brought to the medium.

Trump as comic book villain and comics as cultural capital

And it’s finally here where we can start to look at the larger economic and political system in the US and see the rise of an individual like Trump to president and the shift from comics as things that you buy and read to heavily trademarked and copyrighted characters as having connections and correlations.

Are they hard core links, no they are not but I as I have said before Trump is not the cause but the symptom of the disease, or to use a another phrase, Trump is blowback, Trump is the consequence of the gutting of both the US economy and political system for vested interests that operated like that of a parasite or cancer on its host just as the state of super hero comics today is a product of the industries own crappy dealings and practices.

Comics in this context are billion dollar industry today in every area except the actual sales of comics. The movies and the licensing of long established characters to products and games is a highly lucrative area but comics themselves are now a niche medium. With no new super heroes, and not even existentially god awful shows like the Big Bang Theory can fix that.

Comics have become a billion dollar plank that is helping to prop up a failing Hollywood studio system and US economy but is no longer creating anything new or innovating.

Comics, and their characters are an image, not a thing, they are an intellectual property that has morphed from something real that is produced or made to a highly restrictive intellectual property that no longer lives and breathes but is instead being milked, like a Fonterra dairy cow, for all it is worth before being cast aside.

And in this sense Trump is exactly the same, the idea of the presidency has be successively undermined over the last 50 years by dodgy presidents, their creepy minions and illegal acts that ate away at the trust of the public while money infested the system and left it a hollow image with no substance and ripe for buyout by large corporations that create nothing but simply exploit their property for the rent it can generate.

Just as comics were bought out and exploited for their image so too has the office of the president been bought out and exploited and Trump is just the poster boy for that, the Gordon Gecko for politics if you will.

The fact that Trump behaves and acts like a comic book super villain only just adds to the turgid image that the presidency has become.

*-And for those with the stomach I recommend the comments section of that little saga to actual see the verbal play by play as I effectively cross swords with Pablo from KP and blog my self right of KP, which in retrospect turned out as a good thing as otherwise I would not have started this blog

**-That said I grew up watching Batman and still love West’s both comedic and subversive portrayal of Batman and the show which could appeal to both children and adults.

***-whose image as an empowering superhero for women was undermined by her BDSM origins.

Sharks in the goldfish bowl: Anatomy of the Golriz Ghahraman “Scandal”

Have a listen and lend and ear

Here’s a song now if you care

We can all just hum along

Words don’t matter anymore

Adhesive by Stone Temple Pilots

In the wake of the recent election I had been enjoying my sabbatical out of the piss filled paddling pool that is NZ politics until I was rudely disturbed by the growing cacophony that we can now title the Golriz Ghahraman “Scandal”.

And it’s important that readers note the quotation marks around the word scandal lest they think that this is actually a scandal and not just another hype fuelled week of media manipulation because the facts of this attention grabbing distraction are rather simple and can be summed up as follows.

Yes, Golriz did serve on the defense team for a Rwandan genocide criminal BUT the cornerstone of any rule-of-law based legal system is the right to a fair trial which includes defense counsel.

On the flipside however Ghahraman was definitely not clear in her previous statements about what she was doing in Rawanda and posing for smiling photos with a genocide war criminal is not a good look for any peace-loving Green MP (perhaps a National MP but not a Green one).

Also not good looking for a Green MP, is her involvement in defending another Rwandan war criminal, currently hiding in NZ (along with two other Rwandans, wanted for war crimes, in which has now become the worst kept secret in Wellington) and her actions in this area would be much more newsworthy that what she did at the Hague.

So there you have it, lawyer acts in the defense of war criminal at their trail BUT fails to clearly establish her exact role in that trial AND continues to have links with the war criminal community in NZ (of which there is more than you would suspect). 

So while it’s not a good look for her, it’s not exactly scandal material is it, and in fact, such hypocritical behavior is par for the course for politicians/lawyers/car-salespeople of any stripe (her and the Greens now included since their +5 magical cloak of morality has been removed thanks to the Greens pre-election failures and screw ups).

What might be more newsworthy, in this instance, is how and why former Labour staffer Phil Quinn decided here and now to fire off the fatal tweets that started this clickbait time waster as none of the information about Ghahraman was particular new so why did Quinn choose this time to take her to task for her pervious behaviour?

And while we are asking questions how exactly did his tweet come to the attention of the media (is his twitter feed the only one in Wellington worth reading?) and why did they run with this story, at this angle rather than any other (like the questions I have just asked) before deciding to make this a front page item and start the inevitable swarm that followed.

No it’s really the media, and their predictable seven day media scrummage around these things, which is what this post is about because in a week where the Police decided not to prosecute anyone for the 123 people dead in the CTV building collapse and things like the TPPA (and its noxious provisions) are still lurking around (followed by a cross party spat in select committee) what one Green MP did in the past pales by degree.

But, once the NZ political media engages its gears and focuses in on an issue the whole kit and caboodle starts churning and starts a cascading media avalanche which cannot be stopped and has predictable consequences and outcomes for those caught up in it.

Note: the following four paragraphs are best read while listing to or imaging the musical theme from Jaws playing (link provided for your entertainment).

First it’s the initial round of mainstream headlines that "frame" the scandal and put the scent of blood in the water. Then the issue is picked up and sent round the local internet via a torrent of quick links in emails and texts before the local blogs sink their teeth in and start laying out the range of acceptable opinions and positions for people to take and late spout to their friends and co-workers.

Next the media seize their prey and drag them down for interviews and opinion pieces (think the well paid talking heads that pollute your screens in the morning or near the letters page in the paper) while other lesser predators (think some of the more vitriolic and partisan blogs and talk back radio) move in to snatch at any scraps that remain.

Then the whole thing starts to get torn apart in a frenzy of media blurts, via Twitter and Facebook, as other parties are caught up in the feeding and dragged, kicking and screaming, into now swirling mass of thrashing, bubbling red water (think James Shaw deciding to take the blame for Golriz’s bio on the Green website and Quinn’s denial over his “genocide denier” claim).

Then the whole things catharticly peaks before people lose interest and begin to prepare for their weekends (as these stories have a habit of always kicking off at the start of the week and playing themselves out by the Friday) leaving behind nothing but a fading red stain in the water, some bits of flesh which rapidly sink out of sight and the fading strains of John Williams score.

Therefore the questions remain: why did an ex Labour staffer decide to take a Green MP to task over her previous career (and lets not get hung up on the "Phil Quinn was in Rwanda narrative" too much) and why did the NZ political media decide that this would be the “Big” story of the week and not focus on the larger issues (like the CTV building, TPPA or actual Rwandan war criminals hiding out in NZ)?

The answer to these questions can be found in the simple facts that, like any good tabloid, sensational headlines sell better than more mundane ones and that the 24/7 cycle of news demands an ongoing stream of push button journalism to keep the punters attention from flagging and Phil Quinn’s inflammatory comment that Ghahraman was a "genocide denier" was more than enough to set this thing off and push any other story back off center stage.

And the worst offender, in this instance, was Stuff which seemed to have devolved to verbatium “reporting” of the story rather than elevating its focus while the NZ Herald, in this instance, seemed to be able to have some perspective on things while the best of the lot was Duncan Garners interview of Ghahraman which did in fact touch on some of the larger issues here but still found time to sensationalize it for the stay home parent crowd.

However it’s also telling that the original “source” for this story (note those quotation marks again) is an "ex Labour staffer" (because almost every article on this led off with that very important qualifier) who just happened to be taking a shot at a member of the Green party in the wake of the same Green party saying they won’t be supporting the Labour government over the TPPA (and potentially forcing Labour to face up the highly unpalatable option of linking sweaty hands with National to pass any TTPA legislation) and thereby right out of the gate weakening the foundations of what labour had thought was a sown up coalition government.

In fact Quinn seemed to be taking his cues from the Media Whores handbook (ala Trump and much of the US political media) by first firing off inflammatory tweets labeling her a “genocide denier”, then later denying he had said such a thing (incredibly stupid in the age of internet) before later admitting that he had, which then sunk his credibility on the matter to zero.

But the NZ Political media circus is also very complicit (2017 word of the year) in this behavior by deciding that this week’s talking point was going to be a verbatim regurgitation of Quinn’s tweets, knowing full well (and with obviously endorsement from their editors) that this was going to play out as it did and suck up the public's limited attention for the five days while they were distracted from other, more important, matters.

Of course, by the end of the week, Quinn’s retraction of his genocide denier claim or revelations of Rwandan war criminals actually living in NZ has had no effect on the original style and substance of the story (or its smear effect on Ghahraman and the Greens) as it’s too late, the damage has been done. 

And the more I think about it the more this has all the hall marks of a carefully orchestrated political hit on the Greens to remind them of their place in the coalition pecking order (that being the bottom) but also to keep them on the back foot by slinging more post-election mud onto their already fragile political reputation when the Shaw is desperately trying to keep his head down and rebuild the party.

Again, I wish to say that the real story regarding Ghahraman is her defending of a Rwandan war criminal hiding out in NZ (and the how and why said war criminal even got here) and not what she did at the Hague while the larger issues of Rwandan war criminals hiding out in NZ or the Police not prosecuting over the CTV building should have been what stirred the media pot this week.

So in the end the NZ media (and their respective news cycle) are likes sharks packed into a goldfish bowl, a media frenzy over some tiny goldfish while the real catch gets way, again.