BLACK LIVES MATTER

I've been wondering whether or not to write anything about the current horrific state of affair in the US following the murder of George Floyd. I'm not there, I'm not directly affected, I've already lost friends who are directly affected by the riots and who disagree with my stance.

But I feel it's important to make my stance clear. I've posted about it plenty on social media and I think anyone who follows my blog will know where I stand. I stand with those protesting against the oppression of black people in America.

Am I happy that there are riots? That it's come to violence? Of course not. But every form of peaceful protest has fallen on deaf ears. The system of justice and government in the US is intrinsically against anyone who isn't white, straight, rich and male, but black people are treated the worst. When society is systemically so against you, the only way to fight is to fight.

Still, the vast majority of protests have been peaceful, even in spite of this. Most of the property damage has been by white supremacists or undercover police intending to incite anger against the protesters. There are reams of footage, easy to see online and being reported around the world showing the brutality of the police. Against protesters, against medics, against reporters, against bystanders, against people in their own homes surrounding the conflict. Yes, there are some good cops standing with the protesters and engaging with them, which is wonderful. Yes, there are bound to be some violent thugs and opportunistic looters amongst the protesters. They are the minority. If the violent protesters give the rest a bad name, what do the violent police do to the force? What do the ones who have murdered black people with impunity done to the force?

Now, with Trump ordering the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters in Washington, DC, in order to co-opt a church for a press op, then ordering police and the military to retaliate against the protesters, his presidency has finally tipped completely into a dictatorship. He has declared Antifa - not an organisation, merely a like-minded cloud of people who are opposed to fascism -as terrorists. You are supposed to be against fascism.

A lot of us in the UK have been saying the US is heading towards a civil war, and I'm of the opinion the nation won't exist by 2040. This would seem to be the start of it. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and I am very, very worried about my friends in the States.

And no, I still don't blame the protesters.


REMEMBER: Riots and protests got your your rights. Stonewall was a riot started by a black woman of colour, without which queer people would have few of the rights they have today.

REMEMBER: Just because you don't have it easy, doesn't mean you are not privileged. I've dealt with some difficult things, but my skin colour and racial background has never been the source of that. It is always going to be easier for me in western society than it would be if I were black.

REMEMBER: Yes, Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American, Hispanic and other minority ethnic groups suffer from systemic racism as well, but not to the terrifying degree that black people do.

REMEMBER: Trans women of colour are the single most mistreated group of people in the US, suffering a hugely disproportionate  number of murders and miscarriages of justice.

REMEMBER: We are not innocent in the UK. Our police force is less dangerous and less racist than in the US, but unpunished murders of black people in custody still happens far, far too often.

REMEMBER: It's not about black vs. white, it's about good people vs. racists and brutes.

REMEMBER: There are violent people of all colours and backgrounds. There are good people of all colours and backgrounds. Anyone can do something wrong, but the police should be, must be, held to a higher standard. They should be the best of us, not the worst.

Immigration: Hatred vs. Compassion

This isn't going to be a well-thought out essay or anything. It's just a collection of things that I've been fuming about on Facebook over the last few days after some time at least trying to keep my feed positive but finally giving in to the nightmare future we're careening towards.

Quick bit of background: I'm British, I live in the UK. I'm not an immigrant. A quick look at my name will tell you, though, that my ancestors were. As it happens, my genes are a mix of English, Welsh, French and traveller. I don't even know if they were Roma or Irish travellers or a mix of the two, and frankly there's bound to be other elements in my ancestry I'm not aware of. A fair number of my friends, including some of my closest, are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from all the continents of the world. (Well, the inhabited ones. I don't know any Antarcticans.) Brighton and Mid-Sussex are pretty white, British areas, and even here there are quite a few immigrants living amongst us. And this is a good thing, in spite of the standing alone rhetoric the Brexiteers and assorted far-right parties are spouting.

Yet none of this compares to the bile that's being peddled in the United States lately. The most openly racist president in modern history is leaning heavily into outright xenophobia and race-hate, not in spite of his supporters, but because of them, because the people who support him are largely the sort of people who hate anyone brown or with a funny accent and have been dying to say it outside their homes for years. (The few non-white people who support Trump have achieved a level of cognitive dissonance I truly can't fathom, like a working-class gay man who wants Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.)

Case in point. Now, in this latest semi-coherent address, Trump was talking about immigrant gang members, who I'm sure in many cases are exactly the sort of people who should be deported. It's illustrative though, and it's a very short hop from this to calling the criminals families animals, or anyone else from their country, legally migrated or not. This, in the same week that Trump told four US congresswomen to "go home" to their "shithole countries," to crowing applause from his supporters. This, in spite of the fact that three of them - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley - were born in the US, and the fourth, Ilhan Omar, is a naturalised citizen of the country.

Omar's treatment is perhaps the most heinous, since she came to the US as a refugee from Somalia when she was twelve. The first non-white woman elected in her state of Minnesota, and one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, the other being the aforementioned Ms. Tlaib. Crowds at yet another rally of Trumpites shouting "Send her home!" is positively disgusting. Yet it's exactly the sort of thing we should expect from the sort of people who gleefully voted him in. And all the while, this more sellable crime against humanity is diverting attention from his treasonous collusion with Russia and the latest evidence that he's a serial rapist.

Why so much focus on America? After all, it's not the only place where this shit is happening. The UK treats refugees like shit as well, with the notorious Yarl's Wood detainment centre being described as "hell" by the people held there. Given that the population there is overwhelmingly made of women and children, and the guards overwhelmingly male, it's depressingly unsurprising the number of accusations of sexual assault coming from there. All over the world, richer nations are dealing with refugees from poorer or more dangerous ones, and most are responding by treating them as criminals or worse. Anyone who wonders why the many people fleeing African states don't stop at Libya should how appallingly they're being treated when they make it there.

I think the reason that what's happening in the US is so intensely rage-inducing is that every single person in that country is an immigrant or from recent immigrant stock. Except for the descendants of the handful of survivors they left when they'd finished with the native population. (Ditto for Australia, who've had a real head start with this shit but have fallen out of the news lately.) The USA is, in spite of what the Republicans think, a secular nation that allows freedom of religion, which doesn't mean the freedom to discriminate against those you don't like but the freedom to worship as you wish. However, the supposedly Christian elite have somehow managed to skip the parts of the Bible where they were instructed to take in foreigners and treat them as their own. It's almost as if they don't actually care about their religion's teachings at all, just the parts that can be twisted to say they should hate those different to them. It's the shameless, screaming hypocrisy of it all.

Right now, calling immigrants "animals" isn't the biggest issue. They are being treated as worse than animals by the American and British governments. You couldn't legally keep cattle in those conditions in most developed countries. While Mike Pence calmly stands in front of cages crammed full of men, dispassionately calling the facilities a success, remember this has to be the least bad of the lot for them to have publicised it. Meanwhile, children are living and dying in squalid conditions where disease runs rampant. If you're debating whether or not something constitutes a concentration camp, you've already gone too far. The video at the top should not have become a reality between recording and broadcast.

WHO REVIEW: 11-3 - "Rosa"

Some supposed fans are decrying this episode, calling it "deliberately PC," among less polite terms. Talk about missing the point. Yes, it's deliberately PC. That's the idea. The fact that some angry viewers (every single one I have seen being a white male, of course) are upset that Doctor Who would take a political stance and use one episode's worth of runtime to look at the horrors of racism and the legacy of a black activist demonstrates exactly why episodes like this are important.

While Doctor Who has dealt with racism, and its cousins xenophobia and ethnic cleansing, before, it has generally done so in allegorical fashion, with the Daleks more often than not. While the expanded media have occasionally tackled the issue head-on, on television it's been like that with some fleeting exceptions. When the topic of racism has been explicitly remarked upon, it hasn't always been handled well: the twelfth Doctor punched a racist Victorian last year, and sheepishly accepted that he wasn't the person to ask when it came to allaying Bill's fears of being in that environment, but a few years earlier, the tenth Doctor advised Martha to "just act like (she) own(s) the place, it always works for (him)," in a spectacular moment of tone-deafness. And that's without delving into some very dodgy choices in the classic series that wouldn't have been so noticeable against the background of the time, but stick out when viewed now.

Things change, though, usually, but not always, for the better. This is exactly the sort of thing that Doctor Who should be doing. Chris Chibnall has stated that he wants to take the series back to its roots in some respects, engaging in more educational material than it has done since the earliest series. This is certainly light years away from the celebrity historicals of the Russell T. Davies or Stephen Moffat eras. The Doctor gets the odd name drop, but this is far from being a glamorisation of an historical event, or a sci-fi adventure set against the backdrop of one. Rosa Parks isn't so much a character here, but a portrayal of a real person. Necessarily dramatised, of course, by two writers who almost certainly never met the woman, but working from historical materials and real footage of interviews.

It could have horrendously wrong, of course. The finished episode isn't perfect, by any means, but it's a fine hour of television and for the most part is pitched just right. I had my concerns before watching it, though. I mean, it's co-written by Chris Chibnall, who's just about the whitest guy ever. There was a definite risk of a well-intentioned embarrassment. Thankfully, he writes this with Malorie Blackman, former Children's Laureate, who is one of the most celebrated writers of children's and young adults' literature today, and who has previously explored racism through science fiction in her acclaimed Noughts and Crosses series (one of those book series on my list of "things I really, really ought to have read by now"). As a black woman, Blackman is clearly going to have a different and more immediate perspective than Chibnall. Even watching and reviewing this, as a white man, is going to be different to how a black viewer would experience it. Of course it is, because I've simply never experienced the sort of treatment that is portrayed here.

There are certain moments when it's clear that the reception of the episode has been considered very carefully. The Doctor very sensibly asks Ryan and Yaz to stay in the TARDIS, knowing full well the danger they're in just by being out in public in 1955 Alabama. It's different for her, she admits that, and to attempt to ignore that or even leave it unsaid would have been catastrophic. A scene that worked particularly well sees the young companions hiding behind some bins, in fear of being found by a police officer. They note how much better it is in 2018, but how it's very, very far from perfect. Ryan, in particular, has dealt with the kind of discrimination commonplace in this era, being a young black man and being viewed as a criminal by dint of his appearance. He notes that he's stopped far more often by the police than his white mates. Yaz, on the other hand, is a police officer, and being of Pakistani descent experiences her own share of racist abuse, usually from people she's trying to help. It's an even-handed conversation that shows that this kind of thing can hit people in any position. Yaz talks about how in fifty-three years there'll be a black President of America, but the unspoken follow-up is just look at the shit that followed. Things are better in the US than they were in 1955, but they're worse than they were even in 2005, and there's the ever-present risk that things will slide backwards. After all, it's already started.

This is the closest Doctor Who has come to a purely historical story - where only the Doctor and co. provide any kind of sci-fi element - since Black Orchid in 1982, and that was an outlier. It's a brave move, and allows much more focus on the events and issues than bringing in an alien threat would ever have allowed. The inclusion of the villainous Krasko (Joshua Bowman) almost seems like a misstep. It would have been just as workable for the mere presence of the Doctor and her friends, bumping into Rosa Parks, to have derailed history by interrupting such delicate events. I think, though, that the inclusion of a racist villain, whose motive is to "put your kind back in their place," is actually a necessary inclusion. While it's a deeply depressing idea that we'll still be dealing with white supremacists in the 79th century, it's also a very important reminder that this is a problem that will not go away without a fight, and that the fight has to continue any time it rears its ugly head. Krasko's insistence that "this is where it all started to go wrong," and that things would just be better if there weren't black people around causing problems, is a familiar rhetoric. It's not unlike the (more common in Britain lately, but these things come in waves) tactic of lazily blaming immigrants for somehow causing all the problems in a society. Some commentators have pointed out that Krasko, artificially made incapable of violence like Spike from Buffy, is a weak villain and is dispatched too easily. Again, though, isn't that the point? He's pathetic, but sometimes pathetic men can do a lot of damage.

It would have been so easy to fall into the trap of having the Doctor and/or her companions be the saviours here, and that would have been terrible. Instead, they do little things to keep pushing events back on track, but do not actually cause any of the vital events. Rosa still makes her stand herself, triggering a series of events that have lasting impact on the Civil Rights movement and the rights of non-whites in the US. It was essential that this be maintained, or the point and purpose of the episode would be lost. Equally, though, the time travellers had to be affected by the environment. Most obviously, this is evident in the treatment of Ryan, forced to sit at the back of the bus and almost attacked for innocently trying to speak to a white woman. The most frustrating moment is watching him, trying desperately to get people to wait for the bus and just being dismissed, before aggressively chastised. Yaz's experiences in the episode are illustrative as well, being essentially uncategorised in the segregation system, uncertain just as to what she is allowed to do, which is potentially even more dangerous than for someone who has clear-cut rules to live by. I particularly liked how the locals called her Mexican, lumping her under the general category of "not black, not white, but brown and foreign-looking" that sees almost any other background as interchangeable.

With all the necessary attention on Ryan and Yaz, it would be easy for the Doctor and Graham to be given little to work with. However, both characters fare very well, with the Doctor balancing flippancy with deadly seriousness when required. Again, it could have been very easy for her character to be overbearing here, but instead, there's the sense that she's dragged down by her responsibility to history. It's handled better than the "fixed points in time" approach though, more an understanding of the delicate nature of important events, and how history could have proceeded very differently if circumstances and choices had been slightly different. Graham also fares extremely well, with another excellent performance from Bradley Walsh, portraying incredible discomfort as the scenes of history unfold around him. As a white man, Graham is of course the safest and least constrained in the setting, but is still affected. Indeed, he doubtless received his share of abuse due to his mixed marriage, even in 2018.

All the good work of the episode would have been wasted if it weren't for the right casting of Rosa Parks. Thankfully, Vinette Robinson is more than capable of giving the role the dignity and power it deserves. It's a very respectful, understated performance that underpins the episode. There's some question as to whether Parks's story is the one to tell in a British series. After all, we never had official segregation in the UK, and the very idea of it seems bizarre to us now. However, the themes resonate throughout our culture and the problems we have and have had in the UK are not divorced from the Jim Crow Laws and the oppression in the US. As Yaz says, it was Rosa Parks and "people like her" who made a measurable difference to people's lives today. While there were other people who could have been the focus of the episode, Parks is an emblem of the Civil Rights movement and as such deserves this episode (not forgetting the huge following the series now has in the States). On a related note, I applaud the decision to include Martin Luther King, Jr. (Ray Sesay), but not make the episode about him. He was, after all, the figurehead of the Civil Rights Movement and led the Montgomery bus boycott that followed Parks's protest, but to give him more than a short part of the story would have drawn attention away from her character. Again, it's a tough balance, and it's possibly a mistake to suggest that Parks was so important to the Civil Rights Movement that it would never have happened without her specific actions on that night; however, the event was a catalyst for change and Parks was hugely important to the ongoing struggle; and it's probably wise not to overcomplicate a 50-minute family drama too much.

Some have said that this is too political for children, which is of course rubbish, and frankly, the treatment of black people in this episode is significantly less horrific than a more adult-intended production might. The little we do have is limited to mention of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder (and the subsequent acquittal of his killers) also contributed to the anger of black Americans. And please, let's not forget that this is an episode that was broadcast on the same day footage was released of a British flight where a white man verbally abused a black woman and refused to let her sit next to him, while the white staff failed to effectively intervene. While reports from the southern states of America see local government changing voter registration laws to disenfranchise black citizens and make it impossible for them to vote. And filmed in South Africa, which had its own segregation laws until 1991, and is still one of the most racially divided countries in the developed world.

Hopefully, there will be a time when this sort of behaviour is just history, but for now, we truly need television like this.

Title-Tattle: The episode title is, of course, only one letter away from the first episode of the revived series, "Rose."

Continuity points: This is the fourteenth attempt by the Doctor to reach Sheffield after leaving Desolation, so there's a nice big gap for future novels, fanfic and Big Finish audios to slot in.

Space and Time: To that idiot on Facebook in the Geek Asylum, asteroid 284996 is indeed named Rosa Parks, an honour that bestowed four years ago, and the idea that it was a step too fair in making her "seem important" is spectacularly ignorant. Admittedly, a lot of people have asteroids named after them; it might have been better to show more of Rosa's life, such as her receiving the Congressional Gold Medal, to represent how she was honoured.

Inescapable truth

Of late, the news has become an ongoing name-and-shame of predatory men in positions of power, and particularly in Hollywood. In the UK, we already had our watershed moment, when the not-remotely-surprising news that Jimmy Saville was a serial child sex offender began a rush of such revelations and accusations, and in time appeared that almost everyone who worked in entertainment in the UK in 1970s was involved in one way of another. In the Premier League, accusations, and occasionally convictions, of rape and sexual assault, are so commonplace that they barely make the news anymore. It's just taken time for the US media to react to their own series of top-level assault claims.

None of this is really a surprise. Power corrupts, yes, and more than that, power attracts deeply corrupted individuals. The sudden rise in accusations, and the rise in coverage and acceptance, is a consequences of Weinstein being big enough, important enough, and revolting enough that he has forced open the floodgates. It's not as if this hasn't been happening for as long as our civilisation can remember. It's that the world at large doesn't care about the victims of these crimes until the media decides they are reportable. Until a steady stream of headlines and clickbait can be generated, it's just more "unimportant" news.  Suddenly, we're allowed to care.

However, as the #metoo phenomenon has made very clear, this shit has been happening for a long time, to virtually every woman in every walk of life. The fact that it has become clear it's the norm in Hollywood (and television, and music, and theatre) doesn't mean that it's not the norm everywhere. It is endemic. Yes, men suffer from it too, and all sorts of men - Anthony Rapp and Matt Smith experiencing it as youngsters seems less surprising than Terry Crews dealing with it at a party a few years ago, which only goes to prove that it doesn't matter who it is, everyone is potentially at risk. Nonetheless, the fact remains that women suffer from this crap all through their lives, from the mildest verbal harassment to brutal rape, and disproportionately so.The backlash against powerful men in Hollywood may indicate that western society is finally starting to look at things differently.

The smallest, least relevant problem to come from this is how people like me can discuss films and television. It has now become impossible to separate art and entertainment from a criminal culture that has thrived for decades. And while Bryan Singer and Kevin Spacey get kicked off current projects, it can't erase the many, many productions of the past retroactively tainted.

I don't know what the solution to this is, other than to approach things individually and take the background of productions into account where I can.

How a white guy sitting behind his computer deals with this news is the least important thing about it, but I wanted to at least make it clear that I recognise the situation.

For now, I'll leave the commentary to people who actually have a real stake in the matter.

FILM REVIEW: Hidden Figures

It's hard, as a British person in the 21st century, to understand how many American states remained racially segregated until the latter half of the twentieth. That's not to say racism and illegal segregation don't exist today, or where I live, but the widespread and legally enforced separation of black and white populations has never existed here. The echoes of racial segregation can be seen throughout the United States today, and this is hardly surprising, considering that it was a simple matter of fact for so many people still alive today. While racial segregation is now illegal in the US, we can already see a modern form of segregation, against same-sex couples and transgender individuals, taking shape under the guise of "religious freedom laws." They're even trying to keep people from using public toilets again.

So Hidden Figures is a timely piece, both last year's bestseller by Margot Lee Shetterley and this new film adaptation. I confess to not having read the book (yet, it's now high on my too-read list), but the film was something I was eager to see as soon as I heard about it. Part of this was down to the excellent cast, but mostly it was a desire to see an underexplored side to the space race, a major part of 20th century history which has always held a fascination for me.

Hidden Figures centres around three African American women, working for NASA in 1961, on the eve of manned spaceflight. Katherine Goble (nee Coleman, later Johnson), played by Taraji P. Henson, was and is a remarkable woman who displayed one of the finest mathematical brains of the 20th century. (Katherine Johnson, now 98-years-old and described by all who meet her as "sharp as ever," received the Presidential Medal of Freedom two years ago and attended this year's tumultous Oscars with Henson.) Katherine is the central character of the film, but a great deal of focus is also given to her friends and colleagues, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan. Jackson, played by Janelle Monae, was one of the most notable engineers at NASA and a tireless advocate for equal workplace rights. Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, taught herself computer programming language and became a frontrunner in the field of computing. They were, respectively, the first black female engineer and supervisor at NASA. Of the three, I was previously aware of Vaughan and Goble/Johnson, but I hadn't heard of Mary Jackson until watching the film.

The cast are uniformly excellent. As well as the three leads, the cast includes Kevin Costner as the director of the Space Task Group, Kirsten Dunst as Vaughan's departmental supervisor, and Mahershala Ali as Jim Johnson, Katherine's suitor and then husband. Although given relatively little screentime, Ali is magnetic, and it's hardly a surprise to me that he was become the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar (for Moonlight, one of my must-sees for March). There's also a role for the now ubiquitous Jim Parsons's, as chief engineer Paul Stafford, who comes across as a straight version of his usual cerebral, socially inept characters. Glen Powell is suitably charismatic as the legendary astronaut John Glenn, albeit reduced in age somewhat for the film.

For all the support they have from the wider cast, though, the strength of the film lies with the leading actresses, in particular Taraji P. Henson. She grounds the film with a performance that paints Goble as both an exceptionally gifted woman and a very straightforward one, someone who is both down-to-earth and looking to the stars. Janelle Monae adds a sassier, sexier side as the highly intelligent engineer Jackson, displaying a refusal to ever submit to the unfair treatment of her state, while Octavia Spencer makes Vaughan the most fundamentally likeable of the trio, coming across as a quietly brilliant and highly compassionate woman. Both Jackson and Vaughan are portrayed as more ambitious than Goble, who is simply so remarkably intelligent that it is ludicrous that she shouldn't be included in the most important meetings of the Mercury programme, and proves herself indispensible.

This was a time when the word computer meant someone who sat and performed calculations with pencil and paper. In a time when we each carry a supercomputer in our pocket and there's serious talk about private leisure flights to the Moon, it's amazing to see the first men travel to space, and the very first, cutting-edge IBM systems installed at NASA (taking up a huge office space). But it's the attitudes that are the most alien. A big chunk of the film is taken up with Goble's treks across the NASA grounds to find a toilet she is allowed to use, a drawn out, repetitive sequence that hammers home both the tragedy and absurdity of the situation. Jackson has to petition to be allowed to attend an all-white college in order to gain the qualification necessary to apply to become an engineer. Black people live in fear of being stopped by a white policeman, unsure what will happen if they say the wrong thing... well. maybe some things haven't changed.

A film like this is bound to romanticise the facts somewhat. Even a little surface research shows that the screenwriters have altered the facts somewhat. The three women had already made significant strides in their careers by 1961, but aligning these events with the first manned spaceflights makes it all the more momentous. John Glenn really did insist that Goble check the calculations before he made his first orbital flight aboard Friendship 7, but it wasn't the breakneck, white knuckle rush that it's portrayed as here. Most notably, it was Mary Jackson who had to trek across campus to find a washroom, not Katherine Goble. She just used whichever lavatory she pleased. In reality, it seems that NASA, although far from perfect, was more equitable than is shown here. Nonetheless, the film works, because even if the facts don't quite align with what we see, it's making an important point. NASA may have been making strides forward, but America as a whole was lagging behind. The events play out against a background of civil rights protests and violent repurcussions. This was the society these women lived in.

While it tweaks events, the script doesn't play too loose with established facts. I was pleased to see that Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom got their dues as the first and second Americans in space, before the glamour of Glenn's 1962 orbital mission. (Legendary as he is, there are those who erroneously think Glenn was the first man in space; he was the fifth.) It's a pity we couldn't hang on a little longer for the flight of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, but that would stretch the narrative out to mid-1963. While dominated at points by these world-changing events, this is a very human story, and as much is made of Goble's personal life and her romance with Jim Johnson as the mathematics, space flights and social upheaval. Genuinely excellent, this is a must-see.

Moore to Say

As happens every few months or so, there has been a brief Alan Moore-related internet furore. An author of controversial works, with some strong and occasionally baffling opinions, Moore does engender a considerable amount of debate, into which he is generally eager to engage himself. I certainly disagree with some of his more aggressive criticisms of contemporary popular culture; while he has a point about the ongoing extension of earlier generations' characters that exist in place of modern creations, his attack on those who enjoy such retro-flavoured works grates. Especially considering that his most celebrated contributions to the comics industry, an industry that he is all to happy to attack, involve the appropriation of older characters. Of course, Moore does it rather better than most.


The recent publication of Alan Moore's biography, Magic Words by Lance Parkin, and an evening event with both men, has kicked off the latest whirl of Moore-bashing and defending. Never one to shy away from vehemently defending himself and expressing his own views, Moore responded to various attacks upon himself and his work in a long and fascinating interview with Padraig O Mealoid, which is available to read at his blog, Slovobooks. It's well worth reading, particularly Moore's thoughtful response to accusations that his work is racist or misogynist.


I'm no Moore scholar – for that level of analysis, you'll want to read the work of Parkin or Philip Sandifer – but I find myself agreeing on the major points Moore makes in terms of how I read his work. Having recently completed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in its entirety (thus far), I can see how someone might be put off by the seeming prevalence of rape in his work. While the rape scenes that occur in League and his other work can make me uncomfortable, I see that as rather the point. Moore's work isn't cosy reading, nor is it intended to be simple, straightforward adventure. I find his use of rape in his fiction is, as he says, a recognition of the fact that this most appalling of crimes occurs all too commonly in reality. It is uncomfortable to confront this, and that, of course, is the point. There is a world of difference between the presentation of rape in Moore's work, in which it is shown as the abhorrent act it is, its consequences explored, and the work of comics writers like Mark Millar, in whose work rape is consistently used as a form of ultra-violence, exaggerated titillation for the boys reading the books. In Millar's books, women are almost wholly portrayed as victims, there only for the benefit or use of men. Compare this to the rape of the younger Captain Nemo in League spin-off Nemo, in which the rape is shown wholly through the eyes of female character, the trauma leading to a horrific retribution at the Captain's hands.


The one instance of rape I find difficult to accept in The League is the rape of Griffin by Hyde in Volume Two. While I am gratified to see the existence of male rape addressed by an author who clearly feels strongly about the crime of the act against women, it is still played for laughs, albeit uneasy, sickly laughs. Male rape rarely appears in popular media except as a source of twisted humour, something I find utterly abhorrent. Even in real-life situations, it is dealt with as if it is somehow less serious than 'real' rape. (Take, for instance, the recent report throughout the news concerning a Russian woman who captured a man who tried to rob her shop and used him as a sex slave for several days. This was shared across social media with plenty of 'lols' and 'you go girl' comments, as if even a robbery somehow justified this kind of retributional abuse. Had the sexes been reversed, of course, the response would have been rather different.) While I recognise that women are raped far more commonly than men, male rape is a major issue with a serious social stigma attached, and using it as a grimly humorous comeuppance riles me, even if it for such an odious individual as Griffin, and perpetrated by a monster like Hyde.


Another controversial character in League is the Galley Wag, a version of the once-ubiquitous and now rarely seen Gollywog, a character consigned to the history books as an embarrassing racial caricature that today's enlightened folks would rather forget. Moore's argument is that it was never intended as a racially stereotyped character, but as an exaggerated barely-human sprite whose vague resemblance to black Africans caught on as racial tensions grew. It's convincing, but i'm not sure it really rings true; after all, whatever the origins of the Gollywog image, its contemporary reputation is well-known. Moore and his artist, O'Neill, made their Galley Wag an escaped slave from another cosmos, a clear allegory of the terrestrial slave trade, but at the same time, reconceptualised the character as an extremely powerful being from another order of creation altogether. To my mind, the Galley Wag, with his prodigious size, enormous strength and celebrated sexual prowess, represents the other side of the stereotypical black male, the aspects that repressed white men both feared in and envied their oppressed black populace. But that's my reading. Moore's intention no doubt differs, and I'm sure I'd see it differently if I, myself, were black.


A great deal of the latter half of the interview, however, sees more preoccupied with his ongoing feud with Grant Morrisson, rival magician and comic scribe. Frankly, for all the wit and eloquence with which Moore speaks on the subject, I frankly can't find it very interesting. I shall end with a searingly powerful quote from earlier in the dialogue, a point which I think is especially relevant in today's Britain:



"I understand that it may not be considered good form to suggest that class issues are as important as issues of race, gender or sexuality, despite the fact that from my own perspective they seem perhaps even more fundamental and crucially relevant. After all, while in the West after many years of arduous struggle we are now allowed to elect women, non-white people and even, surely at least in theory, people of openly alternative sexualities, I am relatively certain that we will never be allowed to elect a man or woman of any race or persuasion who is poor. "