A Waste of Time

When I’ve been talking about the recent delusional babbling on Frank Miller’s website, I’ve been struggling to not use the word, “retarded.”  I don’t know another word that quite captures the tone of his blithering, though, that quite captures the way he goes past saying stupid things and ignorant things into actually coming off as somebody who’s brain damaged.  The problem with using that word is that there are perfectly nice mentally handicapped people out there who would be degraded by the comparison.

On every internet messgeboard that’s talking about it, and even on my own Facebook where I posted about it, you’ll always find a couple morons who say that Frank Miller was right.  The mind boggling thing about that is that he didn’t even make any points that you could agree with, even if you wanted to.  His ramblings kind of start out by calling the Occupy people spoiled and rapists and a few other random things that popped into Frank’s addled brain and all of which can be demonstrably disproved, and then he quickly veers into senile free association racist anger about terrorists.  Or something.  He can’t manage to hold a thought from one sentence to the next, he’s just kind of spouting off about things that he doesn’t like.

The thing is, that’s the mindset of people who think like that.  You can’t argue with them or reason with them because they don’t really have a point to begin with.  It’s just kinda stuff that makes them angry, and somehow it’s all tied together and they think it has something to do with iPhones.  This is the problem I have debating a lot of issues that should be fundamentally obvious to people.  There are not two sides of equal weight to the arguments over gay marriage, for example.  There’s really simple basic logic on one side, backed by every reputable piece of scientific information we have on human sexuality and which you can’t argue with if you have even a basic child’s knowledge of civil rights or the way our government works, and then on the other side you have blithering idiots babbling about things that they think are icky, and if you try to bring the conversation back to a rational place, their response to that is that whatever they’re saying they’re saying because God told them so.

The other thing I’ve seen a couple places now is people saying that whether you agree with him or not, Frank’s brave to speak his mind, and they admire people who say what they think and don’t mince words.  The problem with this argument is that what he’s saying is idiotic.  If people think idiotic things, why would you admire them for being an idiot, just because they talked about being an idiot?  The reason for Frank to keep his idiot thoughts to himself isn’t because of fear or because of pressure from some Liberal media insitution, the reason is because he’s an idiot.  I actually think the First Amendment is important, and unlike Frank Miller I’m actually familiar with what it means.  Nobody’s saying, or at least I’m not saying, that he shouldn’t have said these things, because now it’s better to know that he is, in fact, an idiot, rather than to have him present himself as a person that could pass basic literacy tests and then not know that he’s actually hiding the fact that he’s a seething moronic racist.  Is it somehow brave to be an idiot and a racist, just because you’re willing to project these things about yourself?

Then there’s the issue that people keep bringing up, that you should separate an artist from their work.  The artist’s personal life shouldn’t have any bearing on whether or not you enjoy their work.  I actually agree with this in some cases to an extent, but the problem with Frank Miller is that this idiot part of him does inform most of the work.  The thing I’ve seen a lot of people say in the last couple of days is that they’re embarrassed, because they used to like Frank Miller’s work.  That’s how I feel about it, too.

When I heard a while back that he was writing something called, Holy Terror, Batman! I thought, oh wow, this could be great.  It was so ridiculous, I thought, to be taking a play on Robin’s phrase from the campy Batman TV series and using it to apply to a piece written in response to 9/11, that I assumed Frank was making an epic statement about our reaction to 9/11.  What I took from it was him poking fun at the adolescent notion of how we think superheroics can solve our problem, how ridiculous it is that all the social issues that led to 9/11 could be resolved with a punch to the jaw.  I thought he was saying that this ridiculous cowboy attitude of how to respond to it was fundamentally childish, and I thought him evoking the capes and spandex and bright primary colors of the campy TV show to make that point might possibly be brilliant.

Then the book actually came out.  It wasn’t called Holy Terror, Batman, anymore, it was just called Holy Terror.  The Batman joke wasn’t there anymore, but the reference to the bizarre goofy TV show was.  The stupidness of the whole thing was there, only Frank wasn’t kidding.

I actually event defended Frank Miller’s All Star Batman and Robin when it came out, because I thought it was hilarious.  I thought the whole thing was a send-up.  I thought Sin City, too, was meant to take the broad archetypes of Noir and push them out to their logical extremes, and I thought by making something that highlighted and extreme and ridiculous you could get at the emotional truths that had spawned these sorts of revenge fantasies to begin with.  I said I liked these comics.  This is embarrassing now.

Marv and Dwight punching shit in Sin City is actually how Frank Miller views the world.  The terrifying part is when people take this sort of sad broken little boy view of the world and then try to apply it to politics and economics, without knowing anything about either.  In Frank Miller’s case, it’s a sad broken little boy view through the eyes of a crotchety old man, so he’s mad about hippies and other stuff too.  Oh, and he thinks the Occupy people are rapists.  For no clear reason other than the fact that Frank Miller isn’t capable of writing anything without talking about rape.

So this view of how Frank Miller thinks the world should be fixed brings me to what I think should be one of the most offensive things he says, but for some reason my favorite part of it hasn’t been mentioned quite as much as the rest:

“Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.

And this enemy of mine — not of yours, apparently – must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh – out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.”

“This enemy of mine.”  And then he goes on to tell the pond scum that they should join the military.  Frank’s never been in the military, as far as I know, but in his senile old man brain he thinks he’s fighting this war.  He thinks he’s some sort of beleaguered hero.  How is he fighting, exactly?  Maybe he’s actually planning to go out and kick some butt himself, since obviously he thinks the world is looking to him for solutions.

So watch out, Islamcites!  Frank Miller is coming for ya, and he’s gonna kick butt!  He’s gonna fly through a window with lots of shattered glass and he’s gonna be throwing ninja weapons he saw in a book somewhere but doesn’t know how to use.  And all enemies of Frank will be blinded and rendered helpless by large splashes of white gouache that Frank has figured out he can spackle over a black background to create blood or rain effects instead of, you know, actually drawing stuff!  And this being Frank Miller, when he comes crashing through that window he’ll doubtlessly have a very angry hooker in a corset with him, and her stilettos will be coming for your head.