Dave Sim rants at The Onion

DS: I'm not sure that I would advise a general readership like yours to read Cerebus.

haha, okaaaay

(I've never read Cerberus btw, but I'm fascinated by reading what's been written about it)

The bits where he goes on a massive rant about feminism to find that the interviewer wasn't talking about that are classic, though.

very much so. it is funny the way the interviewer doesn't really ask him about his politics but Sim keeps doing a "You liberal scum are all the same" kind of thing at him.

Once he got into the "Church and State", the story line got really convoluted. The last graphic novel I read was "Jaka's Story", I just wasn't interested anymore.

Sim can talk all he wants about 'Russian novelists', Cerebus isn't Dostoyevski and it isn't even Will Eisner. I did always think the actual artwork was unique and very good. It wouldn't look as good in color.

JAKAS STPORY ROXOR UR HOMOSEXUALST

Sim writes like a jerk in a lot of his essays, but supposedly he can be very nice in person, depending on his audience, I guess.

Re: interviews, trust me, it's not a gender thing. He's just difficult full stop -- he says he was burned by a National Post feature that was fairly snarky, and now only accepts interviews via now. Friendly on the phone, though, when he was telling me why he wouldn't speak to me.

does something in around issues 150-200 explicitly contradict the version of the comic's cosmology cerebus gets on the moon at the end of church and state? because this sequence seems quite hard to reconcile with the gender politics of the second half, and isn't (i think) written about quite as much as those in general

did cerebus ever get good again? (2003)

Has Cerebus Finished Yet? (2003-04)

Well, I'm just transcribing the interview, it's finally being published prior to the Toronto Comic Con. Here's an interesting clip (the question, I believe, was "Do you think there's a difference between anti-feminism and misogyny"?):
Dave: "In my opinion, no, misogyny is not the same thing as anti-feminism. I've never thought of Cerebus as "hate literature against women". I'm not sure anyone besides a woman--that is, anyone who defines themselves outside of their own emotions--could even define what hate literature is. That's why I think it's a peverse concept. What it, in effect, opens the foor to is censorship of creative work and the prosecution of creative talents. It seems to me that it would be very diffciult--and probably impossible--to discuss anything in a meaningful way if you were limited only to those subjects which made women feel good. I think that's why movies and TV suck so badly these days. They self-censor themselves so that nothing on them would make a woman feel bad about herself and consequently leech out all possible content in the name of Marxist-feminist propaganda. The Oprah-ization of society."

And so on...

also i think the second half of cerebus is exactly as good as the first, really

Take, for example, The McEwen Report on the Political Science Department at UBC. I'm sorry for the long quotation, but it's necessary (part of Good's argument is that the short "sound byte" style of quoting now in fashion is partly responsible for the success of contemporary identity politics, since they tend to focus on issues of representation rather than on the underlying social problems that are actually "represented", no matter how inaccurately).

He begins by describing the report, which details apparent sexually/racially/etc. related misconduct. So here goes:

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Clearly, then, there are problems with some individuals, and some reprehensible incidents have occurred. But the Report allows nothing to emerge distinctly from the general aura of blame. In fact, it does not reperesent a genuine inquiry because it uses the UBC case imply to illustrate a prior thesis--that "racism and sexism are normal parts of the history and traditions of the dominant (white male Anglo/European) social group" (McEwan 1995: 77). This general thesis is applied to the case at hand: "The culture of the Department is the product of a cohort of faculty who, for the most part, are older, white, male, heterosexual, middle class, of Anglo/European cultural heritage ... who have been educated in the patriarchal and authoritarian traditions of Western society" (21-22). This thesis creates a presumption of the guilt of white males, since racism and sexism are a "normal" part of their culture. (Curiously, though, this contention could also diminish their responsibility, since persumably they can't help acting in accordance to their racist-sexist upbringing.) Their denials of the charges are treated as further confirmation. McEwan cites approvingly the proposition that "the first symptom of racism is to deny that it exists" (85). By this logic, all assertions of racism are necessarily valid. For example, if I were to claim that the Reporst shows a racist and sexist attitude to white males, any denial of my claim would be a symptom of its truth.

Evidence supporting the assumption of white male racism and sexism is accorded very different treatment from evidence against it. The Report should have made a careful comparison of different versions of each incident, with a careful assessment of how serious each was. Instead, the allegations are simply collected and framed in a generally supportive context to imply (rather than demonstrate) that they are all justified. This context is partly created by the citation of secondary sources that have no direct bearing on the matter at hand; references to articles on the psychology of racism are used to create a framework in which the allegations become illustrations of the general thesis.

Evidence against the Report's thesis of white male racism and sexism is invariably framed negatively. One crucial strategy is to disparage most of the faculty members' responses to the allegations by relegating them to an appendix, under negative titles such as "Individual Challenges to the Credibillity and/or Objectivity of the Student" (the only time the concept of objectivity is invoked). Obviously, the responses should have been presented alongside the corresponding allegations; listing them all together in an appendix gives the impression that they are worthless excuses. Further, McEwan states, "In some cases, while admitting that the alleged incident took place, faculty members sought to place it in an exculpatory context" (108), implying that self-defence is a further offence and that nothing short of full confession is acceptable. (The Report itself, of course, consistently places faculty responses in an inculpatory context.)

The most discreditable part of the Report is the attempt to undermine the evidence of "white female students and students of colour" who stated that they had not experienced discrimination in the department. Their testimony, which is not directly quoted as the complaints are, is immediately followed by a quotation from a 1992 report of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which reads in part: "Aside from a genuine belief that there has been no discrimination, minority employees may not be prepared to support a complaint of race discrimination for fear of losing their jobs, of retaliation and harrassment from employer or employee, of not fitting in, etc." (McEwan 1995: 109). The phrase "aside from" marginalizes the possibility that they are right and implies that they should only be taken seriously when confirming the racism and sexism the investigator assumes to be present. This argument, of course, could be applied in reverse, to suggest that people who gave evidence that there was racism and sexism did so only because they felt pressured by the investigator to express such views.

Since the Report does not distinguish any degrees of seriousness or validity among the allegations, it leaves the impression of a blanket endorsement of them. The range and variety of the allegations means that it would be impossible to teach at UBC without giving cause for complaint. For instance, "failing to make eye contact" (85) with female and minority students is wrong, but staring at female students if "visual harassment" (92). Students complained of being "silenced" in class, yet when another student made a comment which *they* deemed to be racist or sexist, they demanded that the instructor intervene--rebuke and "silence" that student. Other assorted offences brought up by the Report's driftnet fishing include believing that Ivy League universities are better than others, inviting a male student to dessert to meet a visiting speaker, reacting with irritation to a student's late arrival in class, commenting on the clothing of a female student, and failing to show empathy when a female student cries. (Showing too much empathy would presumably also be wrong.) Female students felt that their exclusion from socializing with male faculty disadvantaged them, yet when they were included, they found their interactions too personal. Creating a course in "Women and Politics" was "ghettoizig" feminism, but not doing so would be "exclusionary." Omitting women from departmental committees would be wrong, but including them to obtain a better "gender balance" overburdened them with administrative duties and was thus discriminatory. In other words, the complaints are so far-ranging and mutually inconsistent that it would be impossible to avoid them all.

- Graham Good, Humanism Betrayed, pp 11-13

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That is a dissection of the intellectual climate in Canada in the mid-1990s, and it is a climate that continues to exist today.

Dave Sim goes to extremes, but he is not totally without a point.

Sim's 'political' arguments are crazy bullshit, and while I'm totally unfamiliar with the Canadian higher ed system discussed in the quote above, my experiences in the U.S. higher ed system during that time frame lead me to believe that for the most part 'political correctness' is as much a crock of shit as Reads.

Sim takes it too far, but the shift from a humanist intellectual climate to one dominated by feminist/marxist discourse is very much real.

I live in this world, and I see no evidence that statement is even remotely accurate. Please identify some examples of this "shift" (i.e. before-and-after) from "beyond the boundaries of higher education." And if you have to go back to 1776 to find your "before," you forfeit the argument.

1) The popular acceptance (or at least tolerance) of pornography is partly the result of 1960s Liberal Feminist attacks on censorship.

2) The concept of a beaurocracy separate from a single controlling mind (ie. beaurocrats acting on 'policy' rather than from centralized directives) comes from Marxist philosphy. Not that they didn't exist, rather that we didn't have terms to describe them or deal with them.

3) The concept of "connectedness" that fueled much of the so-called digital revolution and current ecological thinking was made popular by second-wave feminism.

4) The idea that 'ideology' is something that cannot be escaped, and helps form us as people (if you watch Law & Order you find the "he/she was underprivelidged and couldn't help it" defence used a lot), though not stemming from them exclusively, was popularized in the 1960s by Marxists and feminists.

Now, I didn't say these thing were bad, I just said they were real. Things just sort of reached an extremist head in the 1990s.

More when I have more time.

Issues of commodification drive many social programs in many Western nations.

Canadian Living also published a report a few years ago saying that recent studies had determined that compensations for female learning styles had placed male students well behind their female counterparts, and that no readjustments for male learning styles were planned.

Again, not all of this is bad, but it's mostly a perceptual shift.

You can easily trace the popular acceptance of pornography in the U.S. to censorship battles that took place nearly fifty years before the advent of 1960s liberal feminism, if not earlier (cf. Lawrence, Joyce, etc). Moreover, modern mainstream pop pornography predates second-wave feminism by a decade at least--Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953, and there were 'men's magazines' for several decades before that. Really, pop porn has been around for most of recorded history and possibly earlier -- the Kama Sutra is only the most (in)famous example. I can't see how either feminism or Marxism have anything to do with it.

2) The concept of a beaurocracy separate from a single controlling mind (ie. beaurocrats acting on 'policy' rather than from centralized directives) comes from Marxist philosphy. Not that they didn't exist, rather that we didn't have terms to describe them or deal with them.

This is incoherent. Please explain it a bit better, because the way you're describing it, it's impossible to support or refute. It seems like you might be talking about the welfare state here, but the "them's the rules" aspect belies that interpretation, since there are references to that type of stuff even in the Bible.

3) The concept of "connectedness" that fueled much of the so-called digital revolution and current ecological thinking was made popular by second-wave feminism.

Transcendentalist thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau explored these concepts fully fifty years before women could even vote.

4) The idea that 'ideology' is something that cannot be escaped, and helps form us as people (if you watch Law & Order you find the "he/she was underprivelidged and couldn't help it" defence used a lot), though not stemming from them exclusively, was popularized in the 1960s by Marxists and feminists.

This is partly correct, but a massive oversimplification of both the concepts involved and how they entered and influence mainstream thought (your L&O example isn't helpful, either, since poverty isn't an ideology).

I don't claim to be very knowledgable in Marxist thought, but I fail to see how commodification, as a concept, originates from it. While it is true that Marx described in detail certain aspects of how commodities function within a capitalist economy (use-value & exchange-value), I don't think that has anything really to do with humans as commodities, which have been around for a long time -- I assume you're familiar with the slave trade?

I don't understand your sitcom example at all.

(p.s. maybe this discussion should go to ILE, since it has fuck-all to do with comics)

2) I'm not saying buearocracies didn't exist, I'm saying the way we think of them now did not exist. Beaurocracies (I have no idea how to spell this word for some reason) were always felt to be tools of a higher power, ie. the head of state, whereas now they are widely percieved to be institutions that exist to perpetuate themselves, which is a perception that started in Marxism.

3) Connectedness is not trancendentalism, because connectedness, while indeed linking humans to nature in a similar way, prefers to focus on social groupings and subjective identity formation.

4) I think you totally misunderstood. I didn't say poverty was an ideology, but things like the belief that joining a gang etc. is the only way out of poverty *is*, and that was the sort of thing that I was talking about, being trapped in a mindset because of poverty and similar things. And of course it's a massive simplification. I'm not going to write a thesis for a message board. You could argue that it started with Thomas Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, or you could say it started w/ the Tel Quel group.

5) My sitcom example is an indication of who it is fashionable and acceptable to ridicule in popular culture. I'm sorry if perhaps it was too subtle for you.

6) Marxist (Marxism begins w/ Marx, it doesn't end with him) didn't invent commodification, and he didn't invent the commodification of people, and the commodification I'm talking about isn't slavery, it's ideological commodification. It's the notion of the wage-slave, the idea of a person as a "consumer" instead of an individual (another Marxist deliniation, actually). Ideological commodification, not literal commodification. I thought that was fairly clear

These are fairly common terms in discourse about social/media issues. I really didn't expect to have to define them.

What this has to do w/ comics is that Dave Sim sees these shifts as being negative things, and his critics like to say that these things don't exist. I think a lot of these shifts are positive, but I think calling him a crackpot is one thing, but denying that they're happening at all is a bit much.

Sim is like Ignatious P. Reilly, trying to pretend that the only thoughts that matter are ones that his and Boethius'.

Your distinctions in #1 are unpersuasive. First of all, I'd like you to draw me the line between pornography and art (if Justice Stewart couldn't do it, I really doubt that you can), and dismissing the Kama Sutra as a "religious" text is not only irrelevant, it's inaccurate. The Kama Sutra is a set of conduct rules which are related to religion, but it is not primarily religious as you and I use that term. Your interpretation of transcendentalism is cramped, and your use of "connectedness" appears to be mutating rapidly.

These are fairly common terms in discourse about social/media issues. I really didn't expect to have to define them.

You may want to climb down off your horse a little bit there, guy. I spent a little time in cultural studies classes as well--just because some postmodernists can get away with using language sloppily doesn't mean everybody can.

Humanism has an enormous number of schools, but the commonality they all share is the dominance of individual identity over group identify. Marxist/feminism favours group identity over visual identity. And I'd be interested to know how you think I view religous texts.

But you're right about drawing the line between art and pornography. I suppose I should have said "high art". And my use of connectedness didn't change a bit, only your understanding of my use of connectedness.

But seeing as I have offered some basic interpretations, I'd like to hear yours, since all you have done so far is critique mine.

I don't know who you're talking about when you refer to Sim's critics. In the U.S., only people who read comics even know who he is, and most of them just think he's nuts. Is there anyone who has bothered to respond to him on the terms that you describe? Is Sim is a more venerated public figure in Canada?

Anyway, I'm generally not in the business of making grandiose arguments about the nature of social discourse, but I will say this: I am deeply suspicious of *anyone* who thinks that they understand how theory and culture have shaped the progress of human thought. IMHO, all we can do is argue about it.

Why doesn't somebody write a comic about evil killer salmon?

Or: THE GOON TO THREAD STAT!

And there's even a bear to go with the fish in the latest ish!