This will be a long one, so you may want to go to the bathroom now, or at least check that eBay auction you've been watching.
I've done my best to keep this a politically neutral spot on the internet. There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first is that all of us probably get enough politics from Foxnews, work and the everyday politics that infuse all of our interactions with each other.
The second is out of respect for the longest standing house rule in our gaming sessions.
Years ago, I saw an offhand political comment escalate into a multi-hour debate that very messily destroyed a group I was gaming with. As a result, I requested on the first night that our current group got together that we abide by the house rule that politics would never be discussed. And that the keen weapon property and the improved critical feat stack.
Eventually, we broke the first rule, but it still exists in theory.
Most of the geeks I know are either non-involved and purposely ignorant or so far in either the conservative or liberal camp as to make everyone around them pretty uncomfortable. And geeks love to argue and they hate to lose, so grudges are a real concern.
That is why I was surprised by a comic storyline in a book I picked up Saturday. On a whim, I picked up book one in the Marvel Civil War storyline.
~~~~SPOILER WARNING~~~~~~~~~~
Wash dies.
Ok.
Years ago, there was a Marvel storyline in (I believe) the Marvel Team-Ups comic featuring a character named "Speedball".
Now, Marvel Team-Ups was basically a place to try out new characters with Spider-Man as a safety net. If they got positive feedback, the new character would come back, get his own series, or return with a darker costume bent on revenge against Spider-Man. If there was negative feedback, the character would fade into oblivion. Or come back later with a dark costume bent on revenge against Spider-Man.
You know, maybe it was a Spider-Man Annual. Crap, I don't know.
Either way, comics with Spider-Man sell, so it was a safe bet for Marvel to make.
Speedball was very fast and he bounced around and sported a ball-themed costume. His secret identity, Robert Baldwin, had been exposed to kinetic energy from another dimension. Seriously.
So, in a feat even more unbelievable than gamma radiation not stunting growth but causing super strength and green skin, Speedball got his own series. Really.
Several issues worth.
I had assumed that Speedball eventually faded away, but apparently he has been bouncing around the Marvel Universe "D-List" for a couple of real-life decades.
The first issue of Civil War finds him and some other "D-List" superheroes starring in a soon-to-be-cancelled reality show. Group arguments and an altercation with a homeless graffiti artist have been the highlights and the team really needs to find some actual villains to fight to halt the flagging ratings.
Driving around in a van, they spot a known super bad guy, taking out the trash in front of a small house in a residential area. Unfortunately, she spots them as well.
The alarm raised, the reality TV stars leap into battle against a few "D-List" bad guys. They quip back and forth, discussing editing the fight to make it look better for them, when one of the bad guys chooses to completely use his power. And he explodes. A lot.
So on camera, an uncertain area (several dozen square blocks) is destroyed, along with the residents. And Speedball and the gang.
The next scene has several well known heroes (Reed Richards, Wolverine, Iron Man, etc.) all helping with recovery operations. A wary public watches them, having recently seen "their kind" recklessly cause loss of life for shallow purposes.
The following scenes take place in Congress, with political-types pushing for registration of all superheroes and training for them and, essentially, making them Federal employees.
Two camps form, Iron Man and Reed Richards lead a group in favor of the new laws, Captain America (ironically a Federal employee since World War II) is firmly against it. At what point does safety become more important than freedom? Should those that know how to use their abilities be given the power to use them outside the law? Are super villains all essentially powerful people in masks who haven't registered with the government? Would Peter Parker be better off working for Uncle Sam than J. Jonah Jameson?
So it is pretty blatantly ripped off the headlines now, with plot provided by the Sunday morning talking heads on AM radio. But it works.
And I'd like to know how people with super powers would settle it. If I were in their place, a super being caught in a world of turmoil, I'm pretty sure I'd exploit the chaos and use my powers for evil. Actually I'm very sure.
~~~~END SPOILER WARNING~~~~~~~~~~
But that is beside the point. The point is, whenever geeks tread into political discussions (or arguments, diatribes, sermons or profanity-laced hate festivals) I like to reflect on the one time I think it was done correctly. John Barlow and some co-conspirators put together a summary of the political stance of the internet community. I think it is an amazing document.
From here:
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
I'm looking forward to the rest of Marvel's Civil War. I'll try to keep this a politically neutral zone in the future.
1 comment:
Not abandoned ... just no time ...
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