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This post is to register my disgust with the political direction 2000 AD has taken over recent months. After 25 years I will cease to be a reader in November 2003. The latest farrago of feminist drivel choking the pages (especially Synnamon) has partly occasioned this decision: utter, utter crap. Diggle is clearly a Blairite, totalitarian elitist who wants to turn the comic into a bastion of liberal Stalinism like the BBC. I wonder if his next ?epic? will feature SWAT teams replete with disabled Rastafarians?
When my letter attacking the PC trend he has initiated appeared, he gave no platform to those who support my position (I know there are many of these). He allowed only Guardian readers with the crudest understanding of right wing politics (or anything else) any platform to express themselves. The letter conflating my views with the Daily Mail was particularly absurd (and intestine splittingly funny), mainly since the Daily Mail is probably the major liberal, multi-cultural rag out there at the moment (witness its deification of ?Saint? Stephen Lawrence).
For those who might argue with my claims of increasing left-liberalism, consider that I was allowed no platform whatever to defend my opinions in print. Diggle is clearly a spineless half-wit who can talk a good intellectual fight but shrinks like a chastened snail when forced to confront any serious opposition. I found it particularly amusing that he sought (wrongly), to correct my English, especially as one of his recent editorials contained a flagrant grammatical error (?You can?t be too soft on these writers and artists? ? not even the correct word (Nerve Centre, Prog 1360)). But then, as his favourite book is probably the Communist Manifesto, replete with 200 referencing errors, we can?t expect much better.
Interestingly, for all the pop-brained, crusty-haired bile he has importunately vomited in my direction, Diggle has clearly (rhetorically, at least) responded to my critique. Check out the Prog 1363 Nerve Centre:
The Galaxy?s Greatest Comic is, of course, also a product of the ?70s and I like to think it is equally uncompromising and treats its loyal readership with the necessary smarts. Independent to the last, you won?t find its stories written by committee or aimed at a certain demographic ? there can be no concessions on thrill-power!
Great sentiments: a great pity he does not act on them. These lines betray a man quite unsure of himself, striving desperately to evade PC charges. Diggle clearly loathes and fears rational opposition (like all liberals) and for this reason I include my riposte to him and my other over-represented liberal detractors (which he declined to print), below:
Asylum attacks a straw man (the real opponents of Asylum are not the religious establishment but the disenfranchised). Excoriating organised religion is so Sixties and pass? ? fewer than 1 in 20 people attend Church in the UK and its claims ridiculed outside a small section of the middle class.
The key point is that what left-liberals think is ?cutting edge? is typically dated and tedious.
If it wanted to be really controversial, why didn?t Asylum satirise cynical lawyers on the pro side of the Asylum debate (currently collecting 2/3 of a billion in fees p.a.)?
But no, Asylum assails the barn-door target of absurdly marginalised Church leaders? Such inane mis-targetting occurs because liberal villainy is untouchable in the present media climate. This is why anti-white crime or the wasteful scandal of 'foreign aid' go unchallenged.
In contrast to Asylum or Snow/Tiger, ?Button Man 3? astutely showed Western societies are run by plutocratic power elites who do pretty much as they please. Vicars, 'Nazis' or Mary Poppins were nowhere in evidence. Button Man 3 never lapsed into blunderbuss critiques and still scored profound socio-political points.
Thus from the all-important aesthetic standpoint, the presence of liberal agendas generates stories that are dated and lacklustre. A good example would be Devlin Waugh. This nod to the homosexual Mafia is one of the most unconvincing characters ever to appear in these pages.
Finally, a word on ?meaning? (yes, I?m sure we were all sporting copies of Barthes and Derrida when we first read Dredd, aged 9). The whole idea that ?right wing? stories (Dredd, Slaine) should not be read ?straight? presupposes left-liberalism is ?true? and conservative ideas are not. In fact, studies like the Bell Curve or the Blank Slate have trashed left-liberalism so completely that assuming its validity is no longer tenable. Hence the contemporary intellectual consensus could support a literalist interpretation of Dredd more readily than a liberal, ?ironic? one.
And when, exactly, did the transformation of this organ into post-structuralist eidolon occur? The presence of Darkie?s Mob in the Megazine has been lamely justified using the same ?postmodern? arguments. Darkie?s Mob appeared when racist stereotypes in comics (and everywhere else) were ?normal?. It wasn?t ?ironic? or ?knowing? ? it was racism for racists. Must the darker history of UK comics be whitewashed like this?
I wrote in the hope of checking an inexorable slide into PC mediocrity. That so many liberal pinheads have rushed to its defence is both predictable and depressing. In true liberal fashion, Sam Granatt conflates all views to the right of Marx with lowbrow racist populism. Would that dismissal include such luminaries as Heidegger, Hayek or Pinker? And how many weeks has he been mistaking the UK?s premier comic for The Guardian?
As for Keris McDonald and Alex Frith, Snow/Tiger was not science fiction in the popular sense. It was set in contemporary reality and should be judged ? like Button Man ? as a ?realist? story. The female agent?s absurd presence is, in this context, the usual ?diversity at any price? distortion characteristic of patronising media liberalism. Both Snow/Tiger and Asylum dealt with topical issues: fine. But both stories reached conclusions broadly congruent with left-liberal paternalism. If that isn't promoting a liberal agenda, what is?
