A Familiar Conundrum

Familiar to me, at least. Maybe you’re more fortunate.

Here’s the set-up: Someone you know, and like, and perhaps are related to (maybe by marriage, maybe by blood) helpfully forwards to you yet another idiotic, had-you-taken-two-seconds-to-think-before-you-hit-send-you’d-have-realized-this-is-bullshit piece of...e-mail. And you are torn between setting the record straight and preserving the friendship.

Add into the mix that the e-mail in question is an ancient bit of balderdash that is endlessly recirculated as a slander against the current President of the United States, to wit, a baseless claim that “Obama made a policy that NO U.S. SERVICEMAN CAN SPEAK AT ANY FAITH-BASED PUBLIC EVENTS ANYMORE,” supposedly originating with one “Retired Vice Admiral Bob Scarborough, of Arlington , Va” (all punctuation oddities sic).

It is, of course, malarkey. As indicated above, anyone with a nickel’s worth of skepticism would catch the fragrance of horse crap, and either delete the thing immediately or take two and a half minutes to check it out. Snopes.com points out that the incident alluded to in the slanderous e-mail, in which an Army Green Beret was scheduled and then un-scheduled to speak at a Catch-A-Dream Foundation event, was in fact the result of an existing Department of Defense policy and “was NOT a function of any influence or directive from the President, nor was it a change in policy,” according to a statement from the Catch-a-Dream executive director, who added, “It is my understanding that the decision was based upon strict interpretation of an existing policy regarding involvement of military personnel in ‘fund-raising‘ activities.”

You can read the whole deal here. The message that was forwarded to me seems identical to the one quoted by snopes.com. Except mine came with a racist subject line—“FW: thats our boy”—so we should be under no illusions about the leanings of the message’s originator.

In most circumstances, I would be inclined to do one of two things, depending on the particulars of the case. I might send off a gently, even humorously corrective message. Or I might send off a more strongly worded corrective measure. The former is something I employ when someone sends something stupid but harmless, like hotel key cards contain your credit card account information and other vital statistics, or Al Gore is going to start charging you for every e-mail you send. (I’ve previously written about the nice old lady who was accustomed to sending such balderdash to a whole long list of recipients, including my previous workplace address. I would gently set her straight. She would send more balderdash. Repeat. Eventually she quit sending them, but I suspect that all she did was remove me from her list.)

The latter approach, which usually involved the phrase “anyone with half a brain” at some point, is what I use when there’s an actual slanderous lie in play, as is the case with the current e-mail.

But the problem is, the forwarder of the message, as indicated, is someone I like, and I’m having trouble coming up with a way to correct his stupidity without making him feel, you know, stupid, which, I find, is the sort of thing that strains friendships.

I suppose I could send an e-mail burst to everyone who received the message, which would include my friend as well as the jerk who first passed it along (from a business address, which, along with the inability to correctly render the contraction of “that is,” and the inability to put recipients’ addresses in the BCC field, shows us exactly how sharp a cookie we’re dealing with here). But it’s a tough call.

And in the end I am plagued also with the knowledge that people who share such slanders aren’t interested in the truth anyway. We see it all the time. Hell, a bunch of them are running after the GOP presidential nomination even as we speak, and a bunch more are cheering them on.

Meantime, I can’t pretend that I don’t feel less fond of my friend now. I’ve always known he tilts toward the right, but I always thought he was more fair-minded than appears to be the case. I’ll try to convince myself that he’s merely gullible and not the least bit mean-spirited, racist, or sladerous.

Yeah, that should work.

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They Do Understand it's Just a Comic Book, Right?

Although I read Marvel Comics’ Thor comic book back in the day—the heyday, I should say, the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was being rendered with a good deal of over-the-top pseudo-mythological seriousness by the great team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the often-maligned Vince Coletta—I wasn’t that big a fan. (Big enough to note that the actual title of the book was The Mighty Thor, since in those days nearly all Marvel heroes had an official adjective: The Amazing Spider-Man; The Incredible Hulk; The Invincible Iron Man. And a big enough fan to note that, early on, the book was titled Journey into Mystery, and so by the time I came along the cover line was, confusingly, Journey into Mystery with The Mighty Thor. So maybe I was a biggish fan.)

Anyhow, I have noted with some interest the development of a Major Motion Picture based on Marvel’s Thor...including this interesting tidbit from from Right Wing Watch:

Council of Conservative Citizens To Boycott "Thor" Over Casting of Black Actor

Well, of course. Who wouldn’t?

Naturally, having never heard of the Council of Conservative Citizens before, I hied on over to the right-wingnut organization’s website to see what it was that had them so worked up. And, well, who could blame them? It seems that Marvel Comics—my beloved Marvel Comics of old—has declared war on the gods of Asgard! By Odin’s beard!

From the Council’s website:

Marvel Studios declares war on Norse mythology

Norse mythology gets a multi-cultural remake in the upcoming movie titled “Thor,” by Marvel studios. It’s not enough that Marvel attacks conservative values and promotes the left-wing, now mythological Gods must be re-invented with black skin.

It seems that Marvel Studios believes that white people should have nothing that is unique to themselves. An upcoming movie, based on the comic book Thor, will give Norse mythology an insulting multi-cultural make-over. One of the Gods will be played by Hip Hop DJ Idris Elba.

Setting aside for the moment the interesting fact that the Council chooses to capitalize “God” in reference to mythological gods—a practice that I would expect Conservative Citizens to decry, leading me to conclude they must of course be anti-Christian Conservative Citizens, since they obviously uphold other gods besides the God of Abraham—I’m left with one single burning question:

Don’t they know that Thor is a movie based on a comic book?

Which is to say, it is not a movie about Norse mythology. The producers have not gone to ancient source materials for a rollicking retelling of the legends of Odin, Thor, Baldr, Heimdall, and the rest of that jolly crew. It’s a movie based on a comic book that pulls some characters, places, and themes from the mythos and recasts them in a superhero mold. (Indeed, in the early days Thor had a secret identity and everything—including an interesting slant on the old Clark Kent-Lois Lane-Superman triangle, in which Thor’s love interest thought that his human alter-ego, Donald Blake, was a dreamboat and didn’t really seem to give two hoots about Thor.)

Given that, the moronic objection to Heimdall being portrayed by a black actor obviously isn’t so much about protecting Norse mythology as it is complaining about the casting of an actor who is...well, not white.

Racist claptrap, in other words. These clowns are “insulted” because a movie studio cast a black man to play-act in a flick based on a comic book.

As my wife commented when I shared this, The Most Idiotic Thing I’ve Read all Week, with her: “Some people need to get jobs.”

Naturally, the wingnuts have begun a campaign to boycott the movie. I wasn’t too sure I’d bother to see Thor in a theatre—you know how it is: sometimes you just wait for the DVD to appear—but now I’m pretty sure I’ll spring for a ticket, just on principle.

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