The Black Santa Chronicles (or, Why Size Really Matters)
This is the story of Black Santa and his wife, Black Santa’s Wife. They also go by Black Father Christmas and Black Father Christmas’ Wife (I assume the missus has a proper name or title of her own, but I can’t find it). Don’t they look like a happy couple? Well, perhaps not, but that may have more to do with my brother’s photography skills and subject placement than anything else. Still, with that bushy beard and the beautiful purples and pinks and those adorable gold wings, you’d think they’d be a happy couple (unless, of course, that additional statue in the background is there to imply that Black Santa is, in fact, an unfaithful jerk; but that would be too easy a stereotype, now wouldn’t it?). Now let’s bring White Santa into the picture, shall we? Wait a tick…is White Santa really that much taller and larger than Black Santa? Yes, he is. And while I would love to think this is all an unfortunate misunderstanding — that, in fact, there is a small version of White Santa too, and vice versa for Black Santa. But no such figure was available in the Michael’s we visited that day. Rather, there were one or two giant White Santas and a whole bunch of tiny Black Santas, implying more that Black Santa is akin to a helper elf than a proper Santa for anybody who likes to think that the race of Santa really doesn’t matter. (Of course, White Santa’s Wife was not in large form either, though I have no picture to prove that.) If I were a betting man, I’d gather most people would see a problem with the size differential. Has anyone seen anything like this before?
Fantasy and Moral Ambiguity: Repetition Rears Its Ugly Head
Author Bryan Thomas Schmidt has taken a stab at author/editor James L. Sutter’s Suvudu post on why moral ambiguity in fantasy is a good thing. In said stabbing, Schmidt makes some well-worn arguments about why moral ambiguous fantasy presents problems for society, but the bulk of his argument — in my mind — rests on a bed of false assumptions. For example, Schmidt argues that our world is one beset with nihilism and moral ambiguities fermented by the entertainment industry. He suggests that We are bombarded with images of violence, sex, language, etc. which of things, people, places being torn apart. We are shown these as motivated by impurities and negative motives more often than pure motives. And we are told that’s because human beings will always go that way by nature. While I do believe in the depravity of man, I also believe man has the capacity to grow and reach beyond natural tendencies and become so much better than that. And that’s what I want from my heroes. While I don’t want unflawed, perfect heroes—who can relate to those either—at the same time, I do want to know who should win; who is on the right side. Underlying this argument are two problems: 1) the assumption that the media overwhelming fails to provide us with morally ambiguous or questionable heroes who we can root for, and 2) the absolutist logic the continues to dominate colonial and imperial ideology to this day — namely, the idea that we can easily determine who is right in a given situation based solely on their apparently moral behavior. The first assumption is false the second you look at what gets put on our screens and on our shelves. Most of what we view/read for pleasure contains flawed, realistic characters who are still our heroes. Is it not possible, for example, that a semi-violent police detective can still be someone we root for even if we disagree with the occasional abuse he launches at his wife? True, we would mostly all agree he must get help, and perhaps end up in jail, but we can also agree that his pursuit of the bad guy (who may have very difference motivations of his own) is right. Or perhaps a better example is a police detective who drinks too much, sometimes putting himself and others at risk with his drunken behavior. Flawed? Yes. Needs help? Yes. But can we still root for him? Sure. Just as we often root for the detectives on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, some of which have roughed up suspects and so on in the pursuit of justice which is never pure and almost always slightly disappointing. It doesn’t matter that Stabler is kind of a douchebag; we still want him to get the criminals. Most of the right/wrong elements in the above positions are only absolute if one holds to a puritanical view of the human species, one which cannot take into account the variations of human believe, the variations of human psychology, and the variations of human biology. Schmidt brings up genocide and rape as specific examples of pure morality. While genocide and rape are certainly detrimental to society, their activity is shaped by ideologies that are absolutist in themselves. Those who freely commit genocide believe fervently that they are doing a service to society. We can only say they are wrong because we come from a different moral framework, one which has done little to stifle murder and rape within itself. But none of this means that those positions are right, nor does it mean that adding moral ambiguity to fantasy means that anti-murder and anti-rape are questionable positions. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. What moral ambiguity tells us is this: things are far more complicated than it is easy to admit. Murderers may need to be punished, but every murder is not committed for the same reason. The same is true of genocide and rape. We punish these people not because they break moral codes (recall, for example, that it wasn’t all that long ago that there were no legal rules to prosecute rapes as rapes), but because they do things detrimental to society or other people. But their motivations cannot be discounted. To do that is to shut ourselves away from the variations of selfhood that make up the human species. We’re a complicated bunch. The second piece to the above puzzle is a slightly more problematic assumption. What we’ve learned in the last 50 years is that #2 is always already false so long as there are at least two sides to an issue. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with the other side, whatever that may be, but it does mean that there are always two sides to a given coin. We might, for example, argue that Al Qaeda is purely evil based solely on what they say and what they do, but to do so would mean ignoring historical precedence, religious tutelage, and a host of other factors which paint a different picture. In the end, most of us would agree that Al Qaeda deserves to be stopped, but we might also agree that some of the people who are a part of that organization may not be there for reasons we would consider morally questionable if the roles were reversed. It is, however, false to argue that America is purely right and Al Qaeda is purely wrong in a moral sense. To do so would require one of two things: 1) a head-in-the-sand view of reality, or 2) an open acknowledgement that every action made by the “right” party must be questioned unless or until a pure moral position can be found. Neither of these are particularly good options. Yet if we take Schmidt’s moral positioning seriously, it’s perhaps his first volley of questions that exposes the fundamentally flawed assumption trapped beneath his entire post: [How] can it be wrong to write stories which show a clearer sense