IMMIGRATION ENABLERS

I may or may not find time in near future to discuss the many current problems of illegal and quasi-legal US immigration. However, I did find this interesting nugget from May 2023, supporting claims that some very interesting people are allied to the plots to increase America's immigrant ranks by hook or by crook. The article comes courtesy of Patch Media, a newsorg which coordinates news items from various venues across the country. At this point I have not seen evidence that the org is politically aligned though the article itself is highly critical of George Soros.

A portion of the report:

As troubling as Biden’s and Mayorkas’ contempt for immigration law is, a recent news story may be more worrisome. The story revealed that a nongovernmental organization (NGO), Welcome.US, is expanding its scope. Originally created in partnership with American Express Global Business Travel (AEGBT), the NGO helped relocate Afghans to the U.S. during 2021 and 2022. Now working in tandem with Miles4Migrants while retaining its association with AEGBT, the NGO is committed to funding flights into the U.S. interior for migrants, likely unvetted, from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Ukraine and Nicaragua.

The Afghan endeavor, with ties to billionaire George Soros, also had corporate backing from Walmart, Airbnb, The New York Times, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Starbucks, The Washington Post, Goldman Sachs, Goodwill Industries, Microsoft and Chobani. Soros’ Open Society Foundations has placed several of its members on the Welcome.US “National Welcome Council.”

The Welcome.US website identifies as Honorary Co-Chairs Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Laura and George Bush, and Michelle and Barack Obama. These influential first families are the most elite among the elite. They have the power of persuasion and vast wealth. The Carters, net worth about $10 million, are the group’s paupers. Then come the Bushes – Laura and George W., with a net worth of $120 million; the Obamas, $135 million; and the Clintons, $250 million. During their terms, the four ex-presidents encouraged, with some success, more immigration.

Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980. Bush pushed hard for amnesty from Day One of his administration, and two years ago, he wrote a book extolling the benefits of immigration. In 1998, Clinton signed the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act that increased the cap on H-1B visas from the then-current 65,000 level to 115,000 for FY 1999, 115,000 in FY 2000 and 107,500 in FY 2001. Obama issued several pro-immigration executive orders.

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What I find interesting is that Obama, Bush Jr and Clinton all claimed to be tough on open borders when they were in office, but now that they're out of office, they believe it ethical to encourage illegal and quasi-legal immigration when it's a problem for a Republican government.    

Note: one source used by the reporter is Breitbart, which is conservative in alignment. 

MYTHCOMICS: ["KIKYO'S LIGHTS"] INU-YASHA (200?)

 This analysis of this long arc (18 chapters) is thematically tied to the one I arbitrarily titled KAGOME'S HEART, so reading that essay before this one is recommended. Chapter 17 of this arc is entitled "The Lights," and since none of the individual titles summed up what I wanted for an umbrella-designation, I'm using the overall title, KIKYO'S LIGHTS. Although the manga ran for roughly another two years, it's in this arc that Rumiko Takahashi brought to a close the romantic triangle between the undead priestess Kikyo, the living mortal girl Kagome, and the half-demon who loves them both.

In HEART, Naraku the demon-human hybrid launches a complicated plan to both eliminate his own human side's reluctance to kill Kikyo-- whom he once loved, and who has the power to exorcise him-- and to utilize Kagome's hostility to the priestess as a psychic (and psychological) weapon. Naraku's failure to do so in HEART merely moves him to a new elaboration of the same gambit. Takahashi also introduces, previous to LIGHTS, a subplot in which the heroic monk Miroku is poisoned in such a way that, though his life is saved (by Kikyo), he's in danger of imminent death whenever he utilizes his wind-tunnel power-- so naturally, throughout the arc he keeps being put in a corner, usually in defense of his beloved fighting-mate Sango. Also, the wolf-demon Koga, Inu-Yasha's rival for Kagome's affections, joins the demon-fighting team.

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As the arc begins, Naraku possesses most of the shard of the Shikon Jewel. However, Kikyo has the power to banish the evil influence of the jewel, which would exorcise Naraku's evil as well. To compromise the undead priestess' power, he entraps her in near-invisible webs of mystic silk, webs that will also reach out to enfold Kagome and Inu-Yasha.

Kikyo attempts to get Kagome to purify her of Naraku's corruption by shooting the priestess with her own magic bow. Unfortunately, Kagome still holds a deep resentment of Kikyo's involvement with Inu-Yasha, and the mortal girl's divided heart causes the bow to break, so that it's useless. Kagome, Koga, Shippo, Sango and Miroku travel to a shrine atop Mount Azusa, where they can seek a new bow for the purification ritual. Inu-Yasha guards Kikyo, and in a separate subplot, Kohaku, brother of Sango, flees the agents of Naraku, seeking to capture him for the Shikon shards in his body.

     

  However, Kagome is separated from her freinds and taken into the shrine, which tests her to see if she's truly capable of the ritual. An illusion of Kikyo appears to Kagome while she hangs off a cliff, bearing the magic bow, though it seems incredibly heavy in her hand. The spirit taunts Kagome for her human failings. However, Kagome defeats the spirit's logic with her own: asserting her absolute conviction in the reality of the love between her and Inu-Yasha, which even his old love for Kikyo cannot sunder. As a result of Kagome's defiance, she gains control of the bow and is expelled from the shrine. Significantly, Inu-Yasha arrives on the scene in time to succor her.

 

 However, Kikyo is present at Azusa as well, and Naraku appears to sweep her up, taunting her with the nearness of her extirpation. Koga, who like Kohaku possesses Shikon shards in his body, assails Naraku, and Kikyo hopes she can use Koga's shards to purify the evildoer. Inu-Yasha and Kagome arrive, and while the half-demon battles Naraku, Kagome starts to purify Kikyo's wounds. But Kikyo tells her to hold off, and Kagome sees a vision of the Jewel inside Naraku's body. however, the Jewel then disappears, so that when Koga assaults Naraku again, he has no hope of exorcising the demon. 

   Kagome then realizes that Naraku transported the Jewel into Kikyo's body. The intrepid girl is able to shoot Kikyo and give her enough power to exorcise the Jewel, but Naraku withdraws the gem before the ritual can be completed, and he flies off, the Jewel still partly corrupted.

 

But Kikyo, who already died once before, has reached the end of her second life. She and Inu-Yasha say their farewells to one another, while the other heroes think about what she's meant to them. Her artificial body dissolves into a congeries of lights. allowing her the ability to say farewell to all of her noble allies.

In the final chapter of the arc, Koga has been stripped of the shards that gave him special powers, so he resolves to leave the group and return to his people. He shows his respect for his rival by irritating the hell out of the mourning Inu-Yasha, the better to snap him out of his funk, and he even loosely approves of Kagome's romantic choice. The chapter then winds up with the beginning of a new arc concerning Inu-Yasha's half-brother Sesshomaru. He, like Kohaku, has been kept out of the main action, and he accidentally-on-purpose becomes Kohaku's new protector in the wake of Kikyo's passing. I have not yet finished the entirety of the opus. Still, I'm guessing from this narrative's tone that for Takahashi this was the definitive end of Kikyo's story, which should make for a more complete arc for both Kagome and Inu-Yasha at the epic's final conclusion.   

        

ACTIVITY REPORT PT 2

 In Part 1, I advanced my new concept that iconicity, the nature of fictional icons, stemmed from two factors: activity, what the icons do, and resonance, what the icons represent. By extension this means that whatever icon or icons are superordinate to the other icons are so judged in terms of "eminent activity," "eminent resonance," or a combination of the two. In Part 1, I gave the example of Melville's short story BARTLEBY, whose eminent icon is defined only by the quality he represents-- that of an inexplicable inertia that prevents Bartleby from taking any action whatever, even to maintain his own life.

In order to describe "eminent activity," I've chosen to survey a subgenre within various media rather than just one literary work: the subgenre called "the old dark house" story. The subgenre has its roots in what some critics have called the "rational Gothic" of the 18th and 19th centuries, but I'll stick to the 20th century manifestations since (a) that's when the "old dark house" expression started, and (b) I've already written various essays on the cinema's versions of the subgenre.

The earliest prose manifestation that comes to mind is Mary Roberts Rinehart's THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE (1908), which I have not read except in summary. The story takes place at a country house and includes someone posing as a ghost who commits one or more murders, and it received a 1915 film adaptation. Two years later, Rinehart began working on a theatrical version of STAIRCASE, which became the popular play THE BAT in 1920. This iteration may have jumpstarted many of the later suspense-plays of the decade, as well as spawning two silent film versions, both of which are still well-remembered today by enthusiasts. The costumed villain "The Bat" evidently takes the place of the criminal pretending to be a ghost in STAIRCASE, though any claims the master-thief might have to being the first costumed villain, even in cinema, are pre-empted by The Clutching Hand in the 1914 EXPLOITS OF ELAINE serial. Of passing interest too is Gaston Leroux's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, which was first serialized in a 1909 magazine, though I for one consider his persona to be that of a "monster" rather than that of a "villain."  

Whatever characters would have been eminent icons of Rinehart's novel, there can be no doubt that in the BAT play and its movie versions, the Bat became eminent due to his peerless activities as a master thief, with little if any specific resonance otherwise. The same is true of Paul Leni's 1927 THE CAT AND THE CANARY, where "the Cat" is the menace that unites all the nugatory subordinate characters. However, the same story was reworked for a 1939 iteration, and then the eminence shifted from activity to resonance, for the 1939 CANARY had been retooled to focus upon Bob Hope's persona of the "scaredycat-ladies' man."

Less well known is the 1956 Mexican horror-comedy, PHANTOM OF THE RED HOUSE. This is another ODH movie in which one of the "good guys" (who are often little more than clay pigeons) is more resonant than either the mystery killer or a detective stalking the malefactor. In HOUSE I judged that the narrative was built around the comedic persona of "Mercedes Benz de Carrera," as essayed by the actress Alma Rosa Aguirre.

The very simplicity of the ODH subgenre makes it fairly easy to isolate whether the superordinate icons are eminent only through their activity or only through their emotional resonance. I haven't come across a PURE example of an ODH work in which I thought both activity and resonance were eminent. Still, I have mentioned Leroux's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA as being "subgenre-adjacent," even though it takes place not in a standard "house" but in a "haunted opera house." But in my view, there's no question that Leroux's prose Phantom is eminent in terms of both his activity, that of being a "demon music teacher" to the ingenue Christine, and in terms of his fascinating character as a deformed man seeking some surcease from sorrow. I can't say that such combinatory types are always the most popular eminent icons, but I tend to think that most authors strive to create characters who are resonant in terms of both their personalities and the actions they take in the narrative.           

ACTIVITY REPORT PT 1

 In this essay from last May, I preserved this nugget from Whitehead's book SYMBOLISM:

Here [Whitehead] states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A." 

For whatever reason I reread that section recently and later found myself comparing it to what I remembered writing about my definition of icons in the first essay where I coined the term, I THINK ICON I THINK ICON. Had I said something about defining icons in terms of action? Turns out the answer is, "a little bit yes, a little bit no."

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named.  

I also noted that while one could formally term any entity within a fictional story to be an icon, in practice we only pay attention to the icons that either perform some action or represent some principle within the narrative, while those entities that don't meet those criteria (as I'm now refining things) 'don't merit iconic titles, so that no one bothered to label "that cop who shot at Spider-Man in that one Romita story" or "the 553rd lion killed by Tarzan."'

Whitehead, of course, is speaking of entities within the real world, so his baseline of "activity" is logical. In fictional narratives, all of the icons exist as propositions, so they are not always defined by "kinetic activity," by actually doing things in the story, but also by representing an abstract quality, or qualities-- which is what I take from my words "some characteristic"-- that are important to the story. A pertinent example of an inactive character whose significance stems wholly of his enigmatic characteristics is the title character of Herman Melville's BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER. As the Wiki summary indicates, the title character is a young 19th-century clerk who goes to work for a legal firm, and then, for no evident reason, simply ceases to work, yet will not actually leave the premises of the firm. Even when taken to prison for his intransigence, Bartleby simply declines to take any action at all, even that of eating, and so expires. In my 2013 essay THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT, I said that Ray Bradbury's story "The Last Night of the World" might possess the absolute least amount of conflict that I'd ever encountered. But BARTLEBY is at least the equal of "Last Night" in that respect.

So fictional icons are not definable only by what Whitehead calls "activity." What should one call the form of authorial will that manifests not in actions, but in simply "embodying" what I called a "characteristic?" I think I finally found a use for my earlier term "resonance," which back in May 2023 I considered as a metaphor for centricity, only to discard that theory in favor of eminence last July. It now seems to me that those icons that are not active, like Bartleby, still impinge upon readers because whatever abstractions they embody have a resonance between the universality of fictional depictions and the particularity of actual reader-experience. 

More to come.

HORMONE TROUBLE

 I'm trying to frame this as a response to a post claiming that in the 1980s "comics became a medium for young guys who didn't want to grow up, and who wanted the signifiers of adult themes without the complexity and ambiguity that could be found in novels and cinema." _________________

C.S. Lewis once said something along the lines of, "It's unfair to assume that fairy tales are for children, for many adults like them, and many children do not."   

I feel the same way about the general assertion that adventure stories, in the comics or anywhere else, were aimed at kids and/teens. Don't some adults like the genre all their lives, while some children turn their nose up at superheroes and barbarians when very young?

It's true that adolescents may pursue a genre or form of storytelling avidly for some years and then lose interest. Getting older MAY be a factor why those persons move on to other things. However, the best seller lists suggest that the greater numbers move on not to Nabokov but to "beach books."

Other adolescents, like the majority of comics nerds under discussion, can't be said to simply "not want to grow up." If they like a genre deeply enough, they'll pursue it. Maybe they'll embrace trash as readily as diamonds; maybe they won't. But since the "adult world" supports quite a lot of trash too, getting older doesn't seem to have anything to do with one's tastes.  

   

TAKING STOCK OF 2025

 While this blog is never at the best of times a hub of excitement, for me the most compelling event was my identification of the first post-Renaissance exemplars of the superhero idiom: the two Scottish knights of Sir Walter Scott's 1805 THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. I confess that in my original analysis of the poem, and of Scott's relevance to the idiom (a three-part essay-series starting here), I thought that one of the knights, William of Deloraine, was the eminent icon. But on reconsideration, I decided that the heroic action of the narrative was split between Deloraine and his "friendly enemy" Henry of Cranston, and I recently amended the essay to that effect. My increased interest in Scott also led me to read and review his BRIDE OF LAMMEMOOR, with less than positive results.

I reviewed all of the Burroughs "Earth's Core" books, though the only ones I really liked were the last two: LAND OF TERROR and SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR.  

In this post I firmed up the connection between tropes and icons.

I framed an aesthetic of nonsense, which came in handy for an analysis of a Bob Burden FLAMING CARROT story.

I trifled with sexual dimorphism and told a tale of two cosms.  

I attempted a definition of literary modes (using only magical-era fantasies as one example) according to the scale of the pivotal characters involved. 

Both Peter David and Jim Shooter passed this year, and I gave them props for standout stories. 

I defined the new term "eminence," which at least sounds better than "centric." 

I reworked my concept of "magical-era stories," and formulated the terms "thymotic" and "epithymotic." 

I completed a five-part review of Von Harbou's METROPOLIS and a three-part essay on the ethics of "keeping and giving," which ran in altered form on BLEEDING FOOL.

And for my year-end finisher, I got two posts out of the SPIRIT story "Li' l Adam" and one in which I FINALLY found an "Archie-Typal Mythcomic."

Favorite reviews on THE NUM BLOG: 

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 

ASTRO BOY

THE TITANS

JUSTICE LEAGUE Seasons One and Two

THE INVINCIBLE BROTHERS MACISTE

All the episodes of BUFFY and ANGEL.

THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK

OLIVIA

"THE NIGHT OF THE UNDEAD," WILD WILD WEST

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT

TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE 

BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER (in memoriam Claudia Cardinale)

SWEET SWEET RACHEL

BEETLEJUICE

THE HYPNOTIC EYE

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN

A KNIFE FOR THE LADIES

CHAMBER OF HORRORS 

THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING (in memoriam Brigitte Bardot)

ORPHEUS

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Thanks to all who checked in or even lurked!

ORDERLY DRAFTSMEN, CHAOTIC CARICATURISTS

 Let's see if I can get in one last barnstorming essay for the last day of 2025, building on what I wrote in this essay:

when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

I'm going to relate twin concepts of "artistic insanity" and "artistic sanity" to a couple of other paired concepts, both alluded to in the title. One of those pairs, "draftsmen and caricaturists," I may have made up out of whole cloth. However, in general "draftsmen" are praised because of their fidelity to visual imagery as normally experienced, and thus they're dominantly associated with representational art. In contrast, it's a given that "caricaturists" deliberately distort commonplace visual reality for the sake of expression, so they can be dominantly associated with non-representational art. I place both Chester Gould and Al Capp in the caricaturist camp, in large part because of their comparable facility with bizarre looking characters.

Now, the second concept-pairing comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, but I'm going to lead off with Camille Paglia's evocative interpretation of Nietzsche:

The Apollonian and the Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism — frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. … The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.

It's also worth noting that in the philosopher's original text, he also aligns the Apollonian with the art of "the dream" and the Dionysian with the art of "intoxication."

To reach a closer understanding of both these tendencies, let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollinian and Dionysian.

Now, both Gould and Capp wrote story-strips, in contrast to the once-and-future dominant form of the gag-strip. But both of them designed their successful features in reaction to the rise of the adventure genre in comic strips of the late 1920s. Hal Foster's TARZAN began in 1929, while in the same year two older gag-strips, Elzie Segar's THIMBLE THEATER and Roy Crane's WASH TUBBS, were successfully reworked to feature tough-guy heroes, respectively Popeye and Captain Easy. While Segar was fundamentally a caricaturist, Crane and Foster were representational draftsmen, and Foster became one of the three most influential artists upon early comic books: Foster for both TARZAN and for his 1937 PRINCE VALIANT, and both Alex Raymond and Milt Caniff, respectively having breakout successes with FLASH GORDON and TERRY AND THE PIRATES. The latter two debuted in 1934, the same year as LI'L ABNER. By contrast, TRACY, debuting in 1931, predated the influence of Raymond and Caniff. However, many testimonies of artists from the time-- for instance, Joe Kubert in ALTER EGO #119 -- indicate that in the late 1930s, Foster, Raymond and Caniff were like master classes in draftmanship to such developing comics-artists as Sheldon Moldoff and the aforementioned Kubert.

What the great draftsmen had in common, despite all their different types of content, was what Nietzsche called "the art of the dream." One should probably specify that Apollonian art-talents guide their fantasies in what might be best termed "waking dreams," dreams guided to a semblance of representational reality. This aesthetic permeates Caniff's 20th-century Oriental adventure, Raymond's space opera, and both the jungle-adventure and Arthurian exploits of Foster.

Now, from the first of Capp's LI'L ABNER strips, comic caricature ruled all of the major characters: the Yokums, the aforeseen General Bullmoose, the jinx Joe Btfsplk, Lena the Hyena, Evil Eye Fleagle, and of course Capp's DICK TRACY spoof Fearless Fosdick. Even the one category of characters who are supposed to be physically desirable-- the many hot girls of ABNER-- tend to be pneumatically stupendous, even Amazonian, in nature.

Now, the earliest TRACY strips, while not as accomplished as the Big Three in terms of actual draftmanship, might be perceived as being fairly representational in nature. However, by the late thirties Gould was investing more energy in developing his rogue's gallery of freakish fiends, as well as upping the *intoxicating* effects of ultraviolence and emphasizing stark use of black and white in the non-Sunday strips. (For that matter the Sunday color strips favored simple, primary colors rather than a graduated color-palette.) Gould didn't share Capp's enthusiasm for busty women-- most of his good-looking women, like Tess Truehart above, are ordinary types-- but he does seem to use a fair number of female grotesques, just like Capp.  

Assuming I've made my case that Gould and Capp were dominantly caricaturists, does it follow that they were "Dionysians" as well? Not necessarily. But in practice, I believe that even though Gould was doing adventure (with barely any humor) while Capp was doing comedy, and usually spoofing adventure-tropes (like death-traps), both of them tapped into The Wellspring of what Paglia calls "energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice." Capp may seem to be mocking "emotionalism" while Gould is fully invested in his melodramatic tropes. But Capp was never a deep intellectual, or even a pseudo-intellectual. He clearly loved designing grotesques just as much as Gould did and found a way to exploit that penchant through comedy.

I have not read as many works by Foster, Raymond, and Caniff as I have of those by Gould and Capp. Still, from what I have read, I see hardly any grotesques in the Big Three Draftsmen. All three build up the glamorousness of the regular female characters-- with Caniff's "Dragon Lady" becoming a trope for "dangerous female" all by herself. But the glamour-girls of the Big Three were somewhere between Gould's mildly pretty women and Capp's anticipations of the Russ Meyer aesthetic. The draftsmen generally align with Paglia's description of Apollonian creativity harnessed for the delectations of the conscious dream: "Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought." 

Comic books, aimed at children, were not that invested in the distinctions of western personality, as embodied by chivalric knights or spacefaring crusaders. Many of the superhero artists of the early Golden Age emulated the draftmanship approach of the Big Three, though they frequently injected grotesques that were more typical of the caricaturists. In fact, the BATMAN strip began developing its cast of freak-villains a little before Chester Gould had fully committed to giving Dick Tracy more and more bizarre antagonists. 

I'm tempted to theorize that the Dionysian art-method allows creators to tap deeper creative energies than does the Apollonian method, while the reverse is true with respect to organizing material into coherent narratives. And that's a good place to leave this line of thought until next year.