(Hurricane Katrina,
I was seated at my computer, trying to convince myself that watching one of my favorite YouTuber’s “Top Ten Nude Lipsticks” videos was germane to my dissertation research (it was not), when the short audio tone from my “digital assistant” Alexa—yes, I caved and along with 100 million other folks am now dependent on my electronic “customizable living experience” (insert eye roll)—alerted me of a...
“First, let’s get one thing straight. I’ve never set foot in a war zone.” Those were the words that began my last post on this site, on May 23rd, two days before the cold-blooded killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police. At that time, I wanted to be explicit about the real limits of my knowledge in the area I have spent most of the past two decades researching, teaching, and writing about—the representation of war. Having spent a good deal of that same period in the former Yugoslavia, I have learned a little something about the lessons of lived experience—as opposed to the sort of...
(Demonstration in Rochester, New York, on May 30, 2020. Democrat and Chronicle.)
I sat in front of the television set three nights ago, watching replays of a video of the choking death of a hand-cuffed and pinned-down African American by a white policeman in Minneapolis earlier in the week. These were alternated with live pictures of a whole section of the city...
These uncertain, unprecedented times have given us all pause, so to speak. Even those of us who have the immense privilege of secure jobs, the relative safety of seclusion, and work that is, as we have recently learned to call it, non-essential, still have reason to wonder whether anything will ever again be like it was. As it always would be, we thought once, though we must now suspect that what was has become used to be. Everywhere we hear talk of lockdowns and opening up, of stopped clocks and new calendars, as if time and space really are one, with the needle spinning wildly.
Sometimes, though, we still get reminded of what hasn’t changed, what really matters. Funny, though, that losing a friend would be an occasion to recall...
(Action Comics. #363. DC Comics. May 1968.)
In the spring of 1968 Superman contracted “Virus X,” a disease cooked up by Lex Luthor in a prison laboratory. The #363 issue of DC’s Action Comics serial told a four-part story of a viral attack on the hero from planet Krypton. In the comic, the devious Luthor labels Superman as the “Leper from Krypton,” shaming him publicly and striking global fear of a “Virus X” pandemic. Were it not for the penetrating rays of white Kryptonite crystals, brought to him by unexpected allies, the disease might have taken Superman’s life. It nearly did. This Cold War superhero tale drew close parallels with an actual epidemic, in 1957 – the onset of the H2N2 viral infection, then...
