Vacation II: Day 3 – The secrets of dilettantism revealed!

One of the perks to having a Special Forces vet as a father is that one has the opportunity to pick up a set of skills atypical of the usual pieces of parental wisdom the majority of children receive. Granted, there isn’t a great likelihood I’ll ever have to put most of that knowledge to use. Knowing the most efficient method for scoring a silent kill or what weapons are best suited for guerilla warfare in tropical conditions isn’t going to help me with my everyday responsibilities on the job or at home. The old man’s MOS, however, happened to be psychological warfare and my apprenticeship (in the purest medieval sense of the term) under him has proven to be profitable in many ways.

The ground rule of PSYOPS is to gear the message to the audience. This sounds like a no-brainer – if one was selling the virtues of the Democratic Party to a group of evangelicals, for example, one ought to steer clear of the subject of abortion and focus on the social Gospel – but there are important subtleties to the process. The skilled propagandist should endeavor to work from a position of strength; “strength” measured in relative terms vis a vis the intended audience, where their ignorance is just as important as the propagandist’s knowledge. Someone possessing a superficial awareness of the topic can appear positively sage-like providing the listener or reader possesses zero familiarity of -- or known and easily manipulated biases regarding -- the same.

I got a lot of mileage out of these axioms during my undergraduate career. Providing I was able to get a measure of a given professor, it was astonishingly easy to tailor my work to fit their expectations, drawing in references from outside their areas of knowledge as a method of outflanking and/or bedazzling them with the definitively stated unfamiliar. This is not to say my work wasn’t solid; by and large, my arguments were sound, but the use of obscure references to comics, film, or other popcult material provided an effective, individually-tailored means of packaging core theses while deflecting close scrutiny. I employed the tactic conservatively, and never where I felt it really mattered, saving it for cases of last resort…like when I forgot a deadline or remembered it but felt like playing Chrono Trigger all weekend instead.

I bring this up because it’s the first thing that came into my mind while reading this, the first of a series of comics-themed blog posts Ned Beauman is threatening to write for the Guardian’s online edition. Despite all the talk about comics’ growing appeal, mainstream journalism about comics remains a hotbed of “write what they don’t know” thinking, where facile generalizations and half-assed namedropping are considered “good enough” for a mostly oblivious target readership.

Beauman kicks things off with a discussion of sexism in superhero comics, which is enough in itself to send up red flags. It’s a subject that has confounded far too many comics sites that ostensibly focus on gender roles in the genre, so an MSM take on it will most likely be problematic out of the gate, and Beauman doesn’t disappoint on this score. While it was great to see shout-outs for Ragnell and Kalinara’s When Fangirls Attack and Dave Campbell’s site, the essay itself feels like author made too many trips to Procrustes’s linen cabinet in search of suitable bedclothes.

Granted, some nuance is going to fade in the wash of writing for a wider audience. I wouldn’t necessarily expect the same treatment of the subject from the Guardian that I would expect from, say, Tom Spurgeon, but the scattershot, load-it-all-and-fire-it-out approach employed seems rather weak. The most discordant note comes when Beauman singles out three male writers – Brian K. Vaughn, Joss Whedon, and Brian Bendis – as ones who have written “believable” female characters. I’m not a fan of Gail Simone’s work, but she certainly deserved a mention, while the three writers cited all have certain incongruities in how they’ve approached female characterization (or in Whedon’s case, the feminist theory).

The issue of sexism in comics is well worth addressing, but a lazy, hot-button-pushing, link-heavy post doesn’t strike me as the vehicle by which to do so, and it comes off as an attempt to placate the 800 pound gorilla before moving onto sexier topics.

As for music portion of today's program, here's a two-stage communication breakdown from 1985. Where suavity does not succeed, noise is certainly doomed to fail:

Tuxedomoon - In a Manner of Speaking (from Holy Wars, 1985)

Jesus and Mary Chain - Never Understand (from Psychocandy, 1985)