“It is always easy to find people who will pontificate about these matters and blow smoke in everyone’s ears … It’s a fancy idea lab, but the ideas are not that good.” — Me
“Electromagnetic pulse guns, genetically designed killer diseases and swarms of miniature self-guided missiles — if these sound like the products of a mad scientist, they should,” reports the Washington Times here. “They are among the threats predicted during the U.S. Army’s 11th annual Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar (no, really) in Newport News, Va.”
“It is only a matter of time before there is a significant high-tech surprise awaiting U.S. military forces” … is this bullshitters paradise’s motto, reads the newspaper.
Refreshingly, DD was asked to deliver a dash of ice-water to the face.
“The summary lists five ‘significant findings’ of the seminar, concluding that ’emerging biological technology … especially in the hands of non-state actors, has the greatest potential to catch the Army unprepared in the short term’ by allowing the creation and delivery of new diseases for which there is no cure,” continues the Times. “The summary states that this capability likely will be available to U.S. adversaries ‘as early as 2015.'”
“The seminar concluded that ‘EMP weapons will become available to potential adversaries in mortar and artillery rounds soon … blending technologies necessary to generate an EMP with advances in miniaturization could produce a hand-held EMP gun before 2020.”
EMP guns lagging behind custom-made plagues? You don’t say, Misters Science Fiction Men! How about turning people into living shrapnel bombs, like they did in an episode of Fringe last year?
George Smith, a defense technology analyst and a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, said in an interview that he was skeptical about the value of such exercises … They have been predicting some of these things for 20 years,” Mr. Smith said about some of the advanced threats discussed in the summary.
That’s just a fact. Electromagnetic ray guns have been promised for as long as DD has been in cyberspace. It’s the weapon that’s always coming but never quite arriving, despite much hoping and wishing.
And a few times a month DD gets querulous mail from people wishing to show me their EMP guns or impugn my character for writing stuff like this here.
What’s changed most, however, is the need for the Army’s ‘mad scientist’ picnic.
There isn’t any.
Anyone who follows national security affairs knows there’s no shortage of predictive analysis rank bullshitting about the many enemies the US is likely to face. Potential foes and their fancy weapons and plans lurk everywhere! MacGyver-like terrorists will make Facebook and bags of high-tech dirt into existential threats.
“[Adversaries] are likely to try to bypass the military, shifting ‘toward a focus on disrupting transportation, banking, and government infrastructure within the United States’ by exploiting malicious use of the Internet and other computer networks, ‘generating greater stress in an increasingly vulnerable U.S. homeland,” says some alleged director of Army intelligence analysis named Tom Pappas.
This week the Cult of Cyberwar was out in force at the RSA convention. At such a security con one expects a good deal of hot air meant to serve the corporate and government cybersecurity business infrastructure.
But even by the really lax Americans standard for cyberwar/cyberterror hype, this was an excessive exhibition.
“Every major company in the US and Europe has been penetrated — it’s industrial warfare … All the little cyber devices that the companies here sell have been unable to stop them. China and Russia are stealing petabytes of information … Nation states have created cyber-warfare units. They are preparing the battlefield … We have the governments of China and Russia engaging in daily activities successfully that the US government and private industry are not stopping and they are stealing anything worth stealing.” — Richard Clarke
Clarke was mentioned earlier in the week, here coincidentally, in a flog for his April-skedded book on the menace of cyberwar.
In that piece, it was said our most backward enemy, North Korea, is a deadly menace because the very nature of their backwardness renders them immune from our cyber-retaliations.
“White House Internet security coordinator Howard Schmidt on Tuesday at RSA released a declassified version of a Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative,” informed AP.
The Federation of American Scientists posted a copy of that here.
To call that an underwhelming contribution to public knowledge on the government’s cybersecurity strategy is to do a disservice to the definition of underwhelming. By reasonable standards, Schmidt and the White House could have done nothing at all and the end result would be indistinguishable.
DD blog posted on Howard Schmidt being dubbed a ‘rock star’ of cybersecurity on Monday here.
It was a ludicrous statement then. Now it’s even more so, if such a thing is possible.
More quote, from FBI head Robert Mueller:
“As you well know, a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a well-placed bomb … In the past 10 years, Al-Qaeda’s online presence has become as potent as its in-world presence … Al-Qaeda uses for the Internet range from recruiting members and inciting violence to posting ways to make bio-weapons and forming social-networks for aspiring terrorists, according to Mueller,” informed the AP.
This material has been debunked so often it’s not worth going into detail over why it’s so pandering. Suffice to say, DD has looked at virtually all al Qaeda recipes for bioweapons.
They can’t make them from their Internet-distributed recipes. Period.
Mueller knows this, or some certainly do at the FBI, very probably those who just closed the case on a real bioterrorist, Bruce Ivins, the anthraxer.
Bruce Ivins did not use Internet recipes to make anthrax mail that killed five and terrorized the country. He used a gold standard flask of anthrax spores accumulated in his laboratory at Fort Detrick. Plus his lab skills as one of the foremost experts on anthrax in the country.
All this does is point out the obvious: That you can say anything you want in the US, no matter how devoid of content, substance or full of stuff handcrafted for an audience of unquestioning fools and get away with it all the time. As long as you’re vetted as an allegedly sane authority figure.
And that goes double and triple for the Cult of Cyberwar.
There is one thing the Cult of Cyberwar and its fuglemen never allow in stories.
That would be comparisons from the real world. That’s because incoveniently bringing up Bruce Ivins when someone is babbling about al Qaeda passing around bioweapon recipes on the Internet is a real show-stopper.
Another such show-stopper was posted by Paul Krugman earlier this week. Krugman is a Nobel laureate. Richard Clarke, Howard Schmidt and Robert Mueller are not Nobel laureates.
Krugman knows how to use data and statistics graphically to make a point.
In his “Great Failure” blog post, Krugman put up a plot showing a projected one trillion dollar loss in real goods and services in the US as the a result of the economic collapse brought about by Wall Street.
Not hackers and nation-states prepping the battlefield against us for cyberwar.
“It’s crucial to realize that the trillion dollars’ worth of goods and services we could have produced this year, but won’t, is a loss we’ll never make up,” wrote Krugman on Monday. “And that doesn’t count the suffering and damage to our future inflicted by the non-monetary costs of mass long-term unemployment.”
It certainly puts the Cult of Cyberwar in perspective.
Alert readers will have noticed that recently DD began throwing Cult of Cyberwar stories into the ‘extremism’ category. That’s because that’s what the public message on the subject now amounts to.
If someone had asked me in 1985, the year I earned my Ph.D. in chemistry, if I thought the US would be a profoundly more backward country in 2010 I’d have likely thought they were nuts.
The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.
A better editor or journalist might have written the second sentence this way:
By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution absurdly argue they are championing academic freedom in general.
Another way to put it is that they are ‘bundling their flat-earther disbeliefs.’ And as usual, it’s solely the property of the current Republican party and Evangelical Christian religion, the American Taliban.
The Discovery Institute makes an appearance in the Times story, a fringe agency that has continuously fought to have creationism taught in biology class. Quite naturally, it has also latched onto global warming denial as a convenience.
It again reminds me of Lehigh University’s predicament: Professor Michael Behe, advertised as a senior fellow at Discovery.
Behe arrived at Lehigh through vetting by its Department of Chemistry as I was leaving. The search committee, of which my advisor was a member, thought he was grand.
At the time, Behe was either keeping his opinions about evolution to himself or perhaps no one was really paying attention.
In the mide-Nineties, DD even recalls a hastily put together alumni letter issued by the same department lauding Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, for landing on bestseller lists. This only demonstrated that someone rather benighted in the place had not actually read it.
By the time Lehigh — a school that prided itself on its science and engineering curricula — got its act together with regards to Behe, he’d done all the damage he could.
Writing editorial features for the New York Times and other places on intelligent design — evolution deniers code for creationism — he had generally contributed to the casting of the impression in the lay public that there was significant scientific doubt about evolution.
Behe also had tenure at Lehigh.
And the only thing the school’s biology department could do was post a really late-to-the-party disclaimer on him.
Americans are nothing if not the foremost braggarts in the world. It’s embedded in the national DNA.
There isn’t a day that goes by without someone being proclaimed a rockstar, a wizard, a true star. Usually in complete absence of any proof why this should be so except that lickspittling in corporate America.
Today’s headline at the always exciting read: Government Information Security.
Some blogger, writing with no discernible sense of humor:
Howard Schmidt doesn’t look like one, but he’s a rock star in the cybersecurity universe. As proof: the White House cybersecurity coordinator will headline the biggest IT security show of them all, the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week.
Schmidt will give not one, but two performances Tuesday: The keynote address at midday and an early evening town-hall-style meeting, where he’ll field questions from adoring fans and, no doubt, some critics of administration cybersecurity policy.
This in a column entitled “Howard Schmidt Achieves Rock-Star Status.”
I’d recommend reading the rest but it’s devoid of folksy jokes for the sake of boilerplate and name-checking.
Schmidt, since being named the Obama administration’s cyberczar, has been absent from the ongoing chronicles of the Cult of Cyberwar.
The top voices running the show are Alan Paller — of the vaunted Paller-Scope, Mike McConnell/Booz Allen, Jim “Wild West” Lewis and the McAfee business.
Not a trace of Howard Schmidt to be seen in these critical times.
But way back in 2002, DD wrote this about Schmidt and his aptitude for security conferencing, at Securityfocus:
This month’s dose of demented prediction comes to you courtesy of Howard Schmidt, chairman vice of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.
Alleged “zero-day viruses and affinity worms” will sunder business records, as reported in Network World Fusion and credited to a Schmidt speech at an Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) conference. Brokerage house trading records will be scrambled, corporate networks rendered molten, CEOs humiliated.
This is not the worst. Traffic lights, pacemakers, appliances — all subject to outages and interruptions because in the future they’re controlled via Internet, declares Schmidt. The power grid could fail catastrophically by 2005! [That was certainly prescient. — DD, 2010.] Cats and dogs fornicate in the street as the sky turns black as sackcloth.
If it’s the first time for you at one of these [security] cons, where your employer coughs up anywhere from $500 – $1900 for the price of admission, Schmidt’s virus alarums might seem quite remarkable, even prescient. The remora-like journalists who get in gratis will assuage any lingering doubts you have as to the value of his lecture by emphasizing the most fantastic elements of it in the trades. If your boss reads the published result, it’s all good. You were educated at the feet of the guru.
In simplest terms, Schmidt is a computer security celebrity junketeer, a highly specialized occupation somewhat obscured by an official biography bulging with professional-strength acronyms. Much of his time is spent as a featured speaker jetting around corporate America. Search engines return Schmidt lectures everywhere in 2002: Atlantic City/HTCIA 2002 con, Cybercrime 2002, IT Business Forum, RIMS.ORG, New York State’s “Cyberstrategies,” the Chicago National Cybercrime Conference, South Sound (Washington), the National State Association of Chief Information Officer’s midyear confab, High-End Computing in an Insecure World, WSATA 2002 (the Western States Association of Tax Administrators), Trust & Security in Cyberspace at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Defending Against Information Warfare, the Secure e-Business Executive Summit, Winning the War on Cyberterrorism at Washington University of St. Louis, Microsoft’s Government Leaders 2002…
Ouch, I feel an airline coach-class thrombosis coming on just browsing the list!
As a deliverer of keynote addresses, Schmidt has created a powerful image of furious action in the name of national security. Indeed, he has become an invaluable mover in the computer-trouble industry economy.
Not for everyday public idlers are these affairs, oh no!
From an old Ted Nugent column on healthcare reform, at Human Events, the extreme right website/magazine for assorted lunatics:
Let’s get one thing straight about health care. The biggest problem with health care is not the assured escalating costs, but rather that too few Americans actually care about their health. Look around you if you doubt me. We are the most blubber-infested, obese nation in the history of the world. Not only do many Americans eat far too much, others still suck on cancer sticks, others drink too much, and yet others fail to do anything to improve their health.
Yet still some of these bloodsuckers have the audacity to believe someone else should pay for their health care when they obviously do not care about their health. Is this the Planet of the Fat Apes or America?
A dose of truth: health care is not a right. It is a personal responsibility. If you don’t give a damn about your health care, how dare you demand another free man to pay for it. Only the bloodsuckers need feel guilty.
Here’s the short version: Sick people are bloodsuckers. They wouldn’t be sick if they didn’t eat too much, drink alcohol, or spend what little money they have on drug habits.
It’s stupid, heartless and blunt. But it’s what the GOP believes. Health care is only for people who deserve it, like Ted Nugent.
Krugman, today, in a column entitled Afflicting the Afflicted:
The states with the weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the nation as a whole. The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.
While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is.
There’s another line from Ted Nugent’s explication of what health care ought to be.
It concerns how businesses and the government are run and it’s a real rib-tickler:
If a business was run the way our bandit politicians have run our government, the owners of the business would be charged with any number of crimes.
“Bank of America Corp’s (BAC.N) investment banking chief Thomas Montag received $30 million in total pay in 2009, driven by the company’s buyout of Merrill Lynch, according to the company’s proxy filing on Friday,” it is read here today.
“The compensation for the senior executive team of the largest U.S. bank by assets highlighted the pay curbs tied to the $45 billion in U.S. government aid the bank repaid in December 2009.”
“Vulnerable enough, according to Richard Clarke, former anti-terrorism czar under Presidents Bush and Clinton, that he rates our odds behind even those of our most Luddite adversary: North Korea.”
For the Cult of Cyberwar, even the most backward country becomes a deadly menace to the United States. Simply because it is such a backward country! Brilliantly nefarious!
Plus — Richard Clarke has a new book to sell. So it’s a good hook.
“That’s because, as Clarke writes in a new book, Cyberwar: The Next National Security Threat And What To Do About It, cyberwarfare preparedness isn’t just a matter of training a crack team of superhackers. It’s also a matter of how porous a nation’s cyberborders are. American corporations and government agencies are more integrated into the Internet than their counterparts in North Korea, where most of the country has access to only a tightly controlled Intranet known as Kwangmyong.”
A tidbit is then sampled from the Clarke book. Here is a sentence of it:
Moreover, North Korea has so few systems dependent upon cyberspace that a major cyber war attack on North Korea would cause almost no damage.
Clarke’s book is said to offer a “handy chart” on national cyberwar capabilities across the globe. How one determines such a thing is presumably beyond dispute.
“Earlier this week, former NSA director Mike McConnell told a congressional hearing that the U.S. would likely lose a cyberwar and followed up with a lengthy editorial in the Washington Post,” in case you missed it everyplace else.
As SANS research director Alan Paller told us at the time, we shouldn’t underestimate the cyber capabilities of countries with undeveloped or even stone-age economies: “We have this view of our enemies as being unsophisticated cave dwellers, and we’re dead wrong. It’s an idea that could get us into very deep trouble over the next few years.”
“Richard Clarke, the world’s most famous security expert, has a new book entitled Breakpoint, wrote DD back in 2007.
“A techno-thriller, it takes its place among its equivalents, romance fictions for American men, a genre for combining combat action porn with loving trademarked descriptions of weapons. The men in this story get hard over firearms, scotch and a chardonnay named Kistler … Clarke [was] the last cyberczar among cyberczars, the only TV-genic one, ever.
“For Breakpoint, Clarke [returned] to his cyberczar roots. But in this story, someone gets to do something about the digital mayhem, not just scream ‘electronic Pearl Harbor,’ make policy recommendations no one listens to and be keynote speaker at security conventions.
“Clarke supplies a team of outside-the-bureaucracy do-gooders: a dauntless central heroine, one NYPD cop for muscle and one hacker, a nebbish named Soxster. Soxter’s purpose is to be the magic wand, no more and no less. Whenever there are villains to be traced, or information needed when the group is against the wall in the race against the terror clock, Soxter furnishes both so the story may proceed.”
Richard Clarke is among the best DD has ever seen at flogging it.
His peddling of the coming of cyberwar is years long, stubbornly dogged and personally eminently successful.
From 1999, back when DD began noticing, this in Signal magazine on the coming of ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ (note — this was eleven, that’s eleven, years ago):
In the August ’99 issue of Signal magazine, Richard Clarke said there was “a very real possibility of an electronic Pearl Harbor.”
“Without computer-controlled networks, there is no water coming out of your tap; there is no electricity lighting your room; there is no food being transported to your grocery store; there is no money coming out of your bank; there is no 911 system responding to emergencies; and there is no Army, Navy and Air Force defending the country . . . All of these functions, and many more, now can only happen if networks are secure and functional.”
It’s a handy citation and was last used in one of the always popular Cult of Cyberwar pieces last year here.
Richard Clarke is so great, he even made me famous for a day! That’s hard to do! And that even got my picture on the frontpage of the Village Voice!
That story, also vaguely connected to the Cult of Cyberwar and US politics, is here in “I, Vermin from Under Rock.”
Excerpt:
[Clarke] bequeathed the nation a haystack of quotes leading idiots to believe terrorists were going to devastate us through computer networks.
That was by 2006. It’s probably up to about six haystacks worth now.
It is fashionable amongst the commentariat to ignore any information larger than a tweet, but this should frighten you out of your wits: a major, very recent report on the very high probability of total economic destruction of any (yes, any) advanced country by a single nuke-tipped SCUD from a lightly modified freighter offshore.
It’s a big report, but you can just read the preface and crap your pants. 7 mb pdf
(Link to report read thousands of times deleted.)
To respond to your dismissal with any more science that is already placed in front of your unseeing and apparently evidence-canceling eyes is a waste of time. You don’t believe in Compton electrons, SCUDs, or nanosecond pulses. I guess I wasted my time at Florida State working on the linear accelerator, and at Navy A school in electronics.
You know it all. Every opinion is biased, anything scary is just someone working for a lobby.
Like peroxide bombs, whenever the oafish failed al Qaeda man, Najibullah Zazi is in the news, hits at DD blog go up.
And he’s been in the news this week. Because he’s admitted guilt and is telling it all, and probably making some up, to authorities — perhaps so he doesn’t spend ALL of the rest of his life in some dungeon.
The government is naturally interested in tracking down confederates and finding out the precise nature of his doings in Pakistan.
“A man who admitted plotting to bomb the city’s subway system wanted to do so with the help of at least two other bombers during rush hour, when the most people could be killed, police said Tuesday,” according to news wires.
” ‘This was particularly disturbing,’ ” police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. “It was [Najibullah Zazi’s] intention to be on trains during rush hour period and to kill New Yorkers. No question about it.”
Whether Zazi could have actually done so remains an open question as he has told authorities he flushed his explosive ingredients down the toilet when the noose began tightening upon him.
Zazi’s news history indicated he was fairly clueless, casting about on the Internet for methods on how to make explosive from beauty parlor supply store chemicals. DD would estimate that barring evidence showing the actual existence of it actually being in his hands, rather than just a collection of necessary materials, there was a better than even chance he was going to fail.
If so, he would still have been a really big nuisance, much like the underpants bomber.
But being a nuisance and the wrong religion today are the only ingredients needed to tip the US into frenzies of counterproductive action.
DD wrote about this extensively last year.
Excerpted:
One country stands alone in DD blog web statistics: Pakistan. The only thing net surfers from Pakistan land on at dickdestiny dot com are posts which reference peroxide bomb plots, jihadist recipes and documents for making poisons like cyanide or ricin, dirty bomb schemes, and other cases involving incarcerated members of al Qaeda.
The interest is invariant and monochromatic. Because it is this way, from the viewpoint of DD blog, Pakistan always look like it has a subset of young men interested in nothing but jihad and terrorism — a close fit with the real world. And because there are no other colorations in this interest, it can be observed for a trend.
It’s a bleak picture, considering the figures represent people only interested in terrorism and reading of it.
While the numbers are small, they are regular and constant.
They show DD that various things — the escalation of Predator drone bombings/assassinations in 2009, the expansion of the US embassy, more CIA operation in the country and greater treasure thrown at the Pakistani government — are not making Pakistan nicer or less filled with potential trouble. The level of animosity as shown by local interest has only increased, sometimes surprisingly so. If this is the US government’s ongoing strategy for Pakistan, there is polling proof here that it is not working. In fact, it is having the opposite effect: More really angry young Muslim men.
The only good news here is a point DD has made previously.
Since the beginning of the war on terror, the US mainstream media has created an artificial reality concerning it, one in which terrorists are assumed to be MacGyver-like characters, capable of making WMDs from just about anything — very easily.
All they need is to access the Internet, to download information which will make the manufacture of poisons and explosives only a little harder than adding tequila and crushed ice to margerita mix.
And because the media and our government and private sector experts have propagated this meme on a regular basis, “Peroxide Bombs, Easy to Make!” and other texts like it have serendipitously floated to the top tier in search requests on the subject, making them virtual tools with which to gauge interest.
Fortunately for us, we live in world constrained by physical reality, not by what others wish it to be or think it is in the press. If we did not, reason stands to tell us bomb and poisoning plots would be commonplace in the west, not the recent historical pattern in which a handful of failed and aspirational plots are uncovered, marked by rare but globally well-known success.
Zazi, having allegedly been ‘trained’ Pakistan and motivated by the US war in Afghanistan, is a ringing example of the phenomenon described above.
“Trends in Terror Prep Net-surfing,” the story with Google metrics outlining the nature of it is here and also mirrored here at GlobalSecurity.
With lots of graphs and stuff.
Google Analytics statistics on hits for peroxide bomb and related searches from Colorado to this domain before and during the unraveling of the Zazi plot in the news last year. Aurora cluster driven by news that this was where Zazi was attempting his machinations.
The CEO of one company that sells electromagnetic pulse doom protection, Emprimus, goes on Michael Savage to tell listeners EMP bombs and ray guns are everywhere. You only have to listen to the first minute or so to get the gist.
And everything you need to know about Michael Savage is here and here.
The link here takes you to YouTube (embedding disabled) for a Coast to Coast interview with William Forschten.
Coast to Coast is the most famous, perhaps only radio station to corner the market in the US on the great conspiracy to hide the truth about “UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death and other unexplained phenomena.”
After 90 percent of the electronics are knocked out in the US, what about the 2 million people in (or around) prisons, Forstchen asks.
It’s something few have considered. Especially if the attack comes during winter.
“In the end, advocates for EMP preparation could end up being their own worst enemy,” Sharon Weinberger, writing for Foreign Policy this week, so wisely said.
Many just can’t come to grips with the actual ‘cult-like’ behavior of various parts of the Cult of EMP Crazy.
Like Foreign Policy magazine.
To point it out is just … too … well, disrespectful by dint of being true.
Others are not always so inhibited.
“At least one speaker [at the 2009 EMP conference] acknowledged that people who are passionate about the EMP issue are sometimes viewed as being a little off-kilter, but he said the good turnout at the conference shows that they are not alone,” one local newspaper commented.
Another culty element of the GOP Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — uh — cult, is the involvement of the Christian far right, those who believe in and welcome the end of all things for us while they go to heaven.
And some electromagnetic pulse doom-related video from them is here.
Good news, lads! Good news! The Teabaggers are offended by Captain America and his sidekick.
In response to Marvel’s explanation and apology, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips told Yahoo! News that it “sounds less like a genuine ‘we’re sorry’ than it does a ‘we’re sorry we got caught’ statement.”
“When I was a child in the ’60s Captain America was my favorite superhero,” he said. “It’s really sad to see what has traditionally been a pro-America figure being used to advance a political agenda.”
Hey, there are plenty of right-wing extremist Marvel characters theoretically great for the Tea Party’s big tent.
Nick Fury, The Punisher, Hawkeye, maybe Thor.
Wouldn’t you rather be on the side of The Leader, the Super Adaptoid or Count Nefaria, anyway?
I would.
The best Captain America comics were always those featuring the Red Skull.
Everyone knows that.
And the best comic of all time, Watchmen, is loaded with heroes all Tea Partiers can love. The Comedian — basically Marvel’s Nick Fury, only better and the Nite Owl — who voted for Richard Nixon five times (‘It was him or the Communists!’).
Plus DD’s favorite — Rorschach, who despises the prison shrink for his liberal sensibilities, dislikes homosexuals and utters one of the comic and movie’s most famous lines:
All those liberals, and intellectuals, and smooth-talkers; and all of a sudden no one can think of anything to say.
The Cap and Tea Party news also affords me an opportunity to reprint an old appreciation of Marvel Comics from the archives.
So for your repeat enjoyment:
SHAMED BY YOUR ENGLISH? 40 Years of X-Men will fix that; thigh-rubbing optional
Cyclops is in no position to give an opinion.The
Locust, one in a very long list of silly X-Men villains,
backhands him.
For a couple decades DD was an avid reader of Marvel Comics. Then grad school and the Eighties ended.
In the mid-Sixties, I thought the X-Men were thrilling. In retrospect, I was a pretty gullible kid. Although the X-Men movies have made the group seem hip to a mass audience, truth be told, much of the comic book run is dominated by long stretches of patience-exhausting and/or intelligence-insulting trash. (How ’bout the seemingly endless war against the Brood, interstellar aliens … copied almost directly from the “Alien” movies, right down to poor man’s H. R. Giger conceptions and eggs put in the bodies of characters? Or, Lockheed, Kitty Pryde’s pet fire-breathing dragon from the same stretch?)
If your impression of Marvel is dictated by what’s been recently made in Hollywood, the occasional glimpse of Stan Lee on the SciFi channel (“Who Wants to Be a Superhero,” more accurately entitled “Look At The Neurotic Egomaniacs!”) or articles in entertainment sections about the marvelous goings-on at comic book conventions, you’ve had no glimpse of this sad history.
Your host will dive into the barrel of X-Men fail for the best apples bobbing around in the bunch.
1. Pathetic and silly villains. See The Locust above, anile human! The Locust was one of many in the rotten swarm. (My opinion is that he was a feeble attempt by Marvel to duplicate the Beetle, an early arch-enemy of Spider-Man. The Beetle, however, was only barely worth more than the paper he was printed on, falling somewhere in weakness between the Vulture and Mysterio. In truth, one can really get going and rip a new hole in Marvel for use of excessively shabby villains in any decade. Do you remember Stilt Man from Daredevil, the Man Without Fear?)
Showing up in Uncanny X-Man #24 in 1966, the dialog in this issue is often WORSE than “Away clod! You shall be the first to feel the bite of the Locust!”
On page 4, the Locust is introduced, overseeing his pet giant grasshoppers eating through a corn field. Spell-binding!
“Eat heartily my six-legged subjects!” exclaims the villain. “Too long have lesser mortals lorded it over the abundant planet! It is not the weak who must inherit the earth … but the strong! And we are the strong!”
Stan Lee, in a separate explanatory box, adds: “If, as you read on, it seems to you that our orthopterous antagonist has a distinct fascist fixation, please forward all analyses to mighty Marvel…”
Uh, no, I won’t do it.
Second place for wretched villain from the Sixties mag was Count Nefaria. The Count was a prop across a number of Marvel publications. With no obvious powers — a good beating by any strong man could have taken him out — for X-Men 22, the Count assembles a team of even more unmenacing villains than himself: the Unicorn (a refugee from Iron Man), the Scarecrow (another Iron Man castoff), Plantman, the Eel and the Porcupine.
Nefaria would show up again in 1975 with a crew of flunkies called the Ani-men. One of these was a man-frog, reinforcing Marvel’s early yen for pulling villains from the ranks of the most unthreatening specimens of the animal world.
The bronze medal for worst villains goes to … Frankenstein. Marvel editors were apparently desparate for filler in 1968. It’s a mistake they wouldn’t repeat for more than a decade. Until pulling Dracula from the mothballs for one issue in 1982.
2. Dialog. Closely related to silly villains, it’s consistantly dreadful, even by the hokey corn pone standards of comic books.
“If only I could tell [Jean Grey] the words I really want to say,” thinks the teenage Scott Summers in 1964’s issue 8. “How gorgeous her lips are … how silken her hair is … how I love her! But I dare not!”
Equally horrible was everything that came out of the word balloons written for Hank McCoy, the Beast. The Beast had a double handicap: He not only talked too much, he also looked bad — a man with the physique of a disproportionately tubby gorilla thrust into an ill-fitting uniform. Had they never seen Mighty Joe Young!? Marvel saddled the Beast with the affected vocabulary of a supernerd, one who would never use one word where two with a total of six syllables would do. The only thing Marvel editors couldn’t deliver for him was head-turning bad breath.
“It’s a pleasure to be divested of the encumbrance of our X-Men uniforms,” McCoy says in issue #7. “I wish you would learn to speak English, Hank,” says Ice Man.
By this time, even the most devoted readers were thinking: “I wish Magneto would kill you in this ish, Hank!”
3. Dealing with female characters.
By the Eighties, X-Men was dressing most of its superheroines in variations of dominatrix gear. Marvel Girl had started the original Marvel tradition of women with pathetic powers. Making too much use of her telekinetic abilities often made her weak in the knees during a fight, just like the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Girl.
By the late Seventies, however, Marvel overreacted, turning her into the Dark Phoenix, a woman creature with the power to destroy worlds. But just before that (and killing her off as a menace to the galaxy), they put her into a black corset, G-string and spike-heeled boots. (Think of it as Marvel jerking Jean Grey between the two poles of stupid-looking nerdy girl and menacing sexual predator.)
The way DD figures it, this was catering to the growing X-Men fanbase of young white men, guys who secretly harbored desires their girlfriends — if they had them — would never consent to: The trampling of their johnsons under thigh-highs, smothering, face-sitting, things of this nature.
(See also “Two Girls Out to Have Fun” — issue 189 in 1985. Corsets, bondage collars, maid uniforms, fuck-me spike-heels and fishnets — it’s a thigh-rubbing fest of superhoines in soft pornographic jeopardy. The only thing missing is a frank girl-on-girl sado-masochistic erotic play scene, presumably ruled out by the comics code.)
Cat-fights were also big. Callisto, the leader of the Morlocks, who lived in the sewers under New York City, dressed in tight leather pants and boots. With eye-patch and a got-it-at-Heidelberg-style dueling scar on her face, she was always ready for a close-in knife-fight with Storm, who’d be wearing almost nothing.
Even characters not originally cast in their underwear were dragged into things. The handling of Kitty Pryde surprisingly encompassed both the icky and the prurient. For one adventure, she was left behind as a hostage in an alien spaceship — in her bikini swim suit. What, no other clothes or bedsheets on the Shi’ar spaceship?
In “What Happened to Kitty?” (Uncanny X-Men #179), the answer is given in the first full-page panel. Well, Kitty Pryde was knocked woozy in the previous issue, dragged into the sewers by Callisto’s crew, stripped and dressed in a torn wedding gown slit to show a garter belt and stockings. Two punkettes in similar wear restrain her, presumably to keep the girl from running to the sex crimes division.
Why is Kitty dressed like this? To marry some weird living-in-the-sewer asexual ogre (pulling back on the thigh-rub at the last minute) named Caliban — another famously pathetic X-Men character. Caliban has mercy at the last minute and says he still wants to be her friend. Kitty says OK, because putting her in a Hustler mag bridal gown while she was unconscious was just so much water … through the sewer.
Now all of this has probably given you the impression I don’t like X-Men.
Far from it! Electronically paging through the collection furnishes a touchstone to many things forgotten. If you collected these issues before a parent threw them out in a fit of pique, you’ll have a similar experience. Things long buried in the mind jump up in their musty old sockets as one revisits comics long vanished themselves from near memory. At the very least, it furnishes proof the brain is not yet crippled by dementia.
Indeed, there’s much to like about “40 Years of X-Men.” And, for the purposes of this post, I haven’t covered any of it.
Advertisement from your Marvel mags, ca. early Seventies.
