>The rhetoric I was seeing, pretty much all from White folks, ranged from ‘Frank Miller’s an old man. Is he really a danger? He’s not, like, gonna attack someone.’ to ‘Racist? I dunno. It’s complicated. It’s complex. It’s nuanced. It’s not that simple.’. Some even went further to suggest that Miller had ‘apologized’ for his vile hate-screeds, which he’s made plenty of money off of, simply because he’d said he no longer had that book in him at one point in 2018.
>Now, let’s be clear here:
>The first two takes on the situation are incredibly bad-faith, deluded garbage not even in touch with reality. But even beyond that, and this is important:
>Frank Miller never apologized. Frank Miller never took actual responsibility for his words, his imagery, his propaganda (which is, in his own words, how he described a work like Holy Terror), his art and work, which was harmful, hurtful, and deeply cruel. It was his violent, bizarrely horny fantasy of murdering a shitload of Brown people, and being proud about butchering Muslims. It was a hateful screed of The American Hero who stood up to these horrible ‘foreign’ monsters to save The American Empire. It’s not exclusive or alone in this sense, as the post-9/11 landscape of media was littered and covered with such narratives, these violent power fantasies, and the active normalization of bigotry and hatred towards Brown folks. But it is, however, in its own class of just how truly vile, how truly monstrous, how heartlessly cruel it is and reads and feels. It feels like the ultimate expression of Frank Miller, in that sense, it’s all of his worst excesses and tendencies brought to an extremity, untainted, laid bare. And what was laid bare so clearly was utterly horrific.
https://buttondown.email/riteshwriter/archive/3-the-terms-of-engagement/
Is Ritesh right?
>Now, let’s be clear here:
>The first two takes on the situation are incredibly bad-faith, deluded garbage not even in touch with reality. But even beyond that, and this is important:
>Frank Miller never apologized. Frank Miller never took actual responsibility for his words, his imagery, his propaganda (which is, in his own words, how he described a work like Holy Terror), his art and work, which was harmful, hurtful, and deeply cruel. It was his violent, bizarrely horny fantasy of murdering a shitload of Brown people, and being proud about butchering Muslims. It was a hateful screed of The American Hero who stood up to these horrible ‘foreign’ monsters to save The American Empire. It’s not exclusive or alone in this sense, as the post-9/11 landscape of media was littered and covered with such narratives, these violent power fantasies, and the active normalization of bigotry and hatred towards Brown folks. But it is, however, in its own class of just how truly vile, how truly monstrous, how heartlessly cruel it is and reads and feels. It feels like the ultimate expression of Frank Miller, in that sense, it’s all of his worst excesses and tendencies brought to an extremity, untainted, laid bare. And what was laid bare so clearly was utterly horrific.
https://buttondown.email/riteshwriter/archive/3-the-terms-of-engagement/
Is Ritesh right?
