When news broke July 26, 2023, that the gifted Irish singer Sinead O’Connor had died, stories of her most famous performance circulated amid the grief and shock.

Thirty-one years ago, after a haunting rendition of Bob Marley’s song “War,” O’Connor ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on live television. “Fight the real enemy,” she said – a reference to clerical sex abuse. For months afterward, she was banned, booed and mocked, dismissed as a crazy rebel beyond the pale.

Commemorations following her death, however, cast the protest in a very different light. Her “Saturday Night Live” performance is now seen as “invigorating,” the New York Times’ pop critic wrote, and “a call to arms for the dispossessed.”

Attitudes toward Catholicism, sex and power are far different today than in 1992, whether in New York or O’Connor’s native Dublin. In many people’s eyes, the moral credibility of the Catholic Church around the world has crumbled, and trust in faith institutions of any sort is at an all-time low. Sexual abuse, once discussed only in whispers, is now beginning to be talked about openly.

I join the chorus of voices today who say O’Connor was decades ahead of her time. But leaving it just at that, we miss something profound about the complexity and depth of her religious imagination. Sinead O’Connor was arguably one of the most spiritually sensitive artists of our time.

I am a scholar of Catholicism in the modern era and have long been interested in those figures – the poets, artists, seekers – who wander the margins of their religious tradition. These men and women are dissatisfied with the mainstream centers of religious power but nonetheless compelled by something indelibly religious that feeds the wellsprings of their artistic imagination.

Throughout her life, O’Connor defied religious labels, exploring multiple faiths. The exquisite freedom in her music cannot be disentangled from that something transcendent that she was always after.

‘Rescuing God from religion’

Religion is often thought about as discreet traditions: institutions that someone is either inside or outside. But on the ground, it is rarely that simple.

The Catholic Church had a strong hold on Irish society as O’Connor was growing up – a “theocracy,” she called it in interviews and her memoir, “Rememberings” – and for many years she called for more accountability for the clerical abuse crisis. But she was also open in her love of other aspects of the faith, albeit often in unorthodox ways. She had a tattoo of Jesus on her chest and continued to critique the church while appearing on television with a priest’s collar.

Ten years after her SNL performance, O’Connor took courses at a seminary in Dublin with a Catholic Dominican priest, Rev. Wilfred Harrington. Together, they read the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the Psalms: sacred scriptures in which God’s voice comes through in darker, moodier, more human forms.

Inspired by her teacher, she made the gorgeous album “Theology,” dedicated to him. The album is a mix of some of her own songs inspired by the Hebrew Bible – like “If You Had a Vineyard,” inspired by the Book of Isaiah; and “Watcher of Men,” which draws from the biblical story of Job – and other tracks that essentially are sung versions of her favorite Psalms.

In a 2007 interview with Fordham University’s WFUV radio station, O’Connor said that she was hoping the album could show God to people when religion itself had blocked their access to God. It was a kind of “rescuing God from religion,” to “lift God out of religion.” Rather than preaching or writing, “music is the little way that I do that,” she said, adding, “I say that as someone who has a lot of love for religion.”

Reading the prophets

In doing so, she stood in the long line of the prophetic tradition itself.

The great Jewish thinker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book “The Prophets” begins with this sentence: “This book is about some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived.” Over and over, the Bible shows the prophets – the prophets who inspired “Theology” – mounting bracing assaults on hypocrisies and insincerities in their own religious communities, and not politely or calmly.

To many horrified Catholics, O’Connor’s SNL appearance and her many other criticisms of the church were blasphemous – or, at best, just throwing stones from outside the church for attention. Other fans, however, saw it as prophetic condemnation. It was not just a critique of child abuse but of church officials’ professed compassion for children – sanctimonious pieties as they covered up the abuse.

In calling this out and so much more, O’Connor was often seen as disturbing: not just the photo-of-the-pope incident, but her androgyny, her shaved head, her openness around her own struggles with mental illness. But for many admirers, as the documentary “Nothing Compares” makes clear, all this showed that she was free, and like the prophets of old, unashamed and unafraid to provoke.

Rasta to Islam

At the same time, O’Connor’s religious imagination was so much more than a complex relationship with Catholicism. Religion around O’Connor was eclectic and intense.

She was deeply influenced by Rastafarian traditions of Jamaica, which she described as “an anti-religious but massively pro-God spiritual movement.” She considered Sam Cooke’s early album with the Soul Stirrers the best gospel album ever made. She counted among her spiritual heroes Muhammad Ali – and converted to Islam in 2018, changing her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat.

Yet O’Connor’s vision was not fragmented, as if she were constantly chasing after bits and pieces. The miracle of Sinead O’Connor is that it all coheres, somehow, in the words of an artist who refuses to lie, to hide or not say what she thinks.

When asked about spirituality, O’Connor once said that she preferred to sing about it, not talk about it – as she does in so many songs, from her luminous singing of the antiphon, a Marian hymn sung at Easter services, to her Rasta-inspired album, “Throw Down Your Arms.”

In “Something Beautiful,” a track from the “Theology” album, O’Connor speaks both to God and the listener: “I wanna make/ Something beautiful/ For you and from you/ To show you/ I adore you.”

Indeed she did. To be moved by her art is to sense a transcendence, a peek into radiance.

Brenna Moore, Professor of Theology, Fordham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

December 28 2022 marks 100 years since the birth of the world’s most famous comic book writer: the late Stan Lee.

The 1960s were Stan Lee’s most astonishing decade, during which he came up with ideas and scripts for the first appearances of such heroes as the original X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Black Panther, Daredevil and Doctor Strange.

This extraordinary purple patch elevates Lee as one of the architects of modern pop culture. The Marvel method of writing comics (where artists plot the story of a comic and the layout of the pages based on a collaborative approach between artist and scriptwriter) enabled him to script several hundred comics in the 1960s.

He wrote the dialogue for the first decade of titles featuring Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men and many others.

Stanley Martin Lieber (who later changed his name to Stan Lee) was born to Jewish-Romanian immigrants in Manhattan. His father was a dress cutter and Lee had teenage jobs delivering sandwiches, as a theatre usher and an office boy, before his first writing jobs. These included advance obituaries for a news service and publicity material for the National Tuberculosis Centre.

In 1939, he found work at Timely – later renamed Atlas Comics, and eventually Marvel – as an editorial assistant, with his first writing credit on an early issue of Captain America in 1941. This issue saw the writer adopt his pen name and saw Cap throw his shield as a weapon for the first time – now a signature move for the hero.

Superheroes had been around since the 1930s, with DC Comics finding an early lead publishing Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. But by the early 1960s the genre had stagnated.

At this time, sci-fi and horror anthologies were Marvel’s staples. For the final issue of one floundering Marvel anthology, Amazing (Adult) Fantasy, Lee and artist Steve Ditko invented a new character – Spider-Man. The character was “an instant success”, helping revive the superhero genre.

Superheroes in the 1960s

In 1960, DC hit on the idea of gathering their most popular heroes together to create the Justice League of America, following their earlier Justice Society. At Marvel, Lee had only just co-created such characters as the Hulk, Iron Man and Ant Man but within a year of their first appearances brought them together to form The Avengers.

These initiatives show that Lee was not only good at creating concepts that others could build on. He also had a savvy nose for marvellous ideas, copying what rival companies were doing and looking to new readerships.

He also remembered the company’s back catalogue. First he brought back Namor in 1962, then revived Captain America in 1964. He also reimagined 1930s characters Angel and Human Torch as members of the X-Men and Fantastic Four respectively.

Lee rose quickly from fill-in writer to editor-in-chief at Marvel, partially due to the exodus of Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to DC due to lack of profit sharing and, perhaps, being a cousin of the owner’s wife.

Lee enjoyed being the public face of Marvel, conducting Q&As about comics at colleges in the 1960s. He also added “Stan’s Soapbox” to hundreds of titles, a column which allowed to not only respond to reader letters, but also pursue an anti-racist agenda.

Marvel Hub: “Every Stan Lee Cameo Ever (1989-2019) *Including Avengers Endgame* All Stan Lee Cameos Marvel Movies”

The public associated him with many of the characters he co-created because he also narrated Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk cartoons in the 1980s, as well as the Spider-Man video games in the 2000s.

More recently, cameos in nearly every Marvel adaptation between 2000 and 2018 made Lee the face of the film franchises.

Lee’s faith and multiculturalism

Despite being of Jewish descent, Lee showed little interest in faith but saw “world religion as a way into the storytelling process”.

While the Fantastic Four’s Thing was eventually revealed to be Jewish, it took four decades for this to be worked into storylines.

Lee’s fellow Jewish collaborator Jack Kirby, however, may have included iconography of the Golem (a mythical humanoid made of earth brought to life in Jewish folklore) into the character’s design and gave him a fictional Jewish neighbourhood as a home.

Although Lee didn’t bring his own background to his comics, he and Kirby wished to create the “first black superhero”, leading to the co-creation of Black Panther in 1966.

Interested in minority representation in the genre, Lee was also working on a TV adaptation of an LGBTQ+ superhero novel Hero in the 2000s, before that project was stymied by its gay writer’s passing in 2011.

One comic he co-created – X-Men – has resonated with LGBTQ+ readers. In an article for Syfy, author Sara Century wrote that with its 1980s run X-Men “implied queerness … and an analog to AIDS”.

Pop culture expert Anna Peppard notes Marvel comics in the 1960s and beyond took in themes from “the Civil Rights movement, second-wave feminism … and liberal multiculturalism”.

One of the last characters Lee created for Marvel was She-Hulk, whose 2022 TV series challenged toxic masculinity in superhero fandom. Stan Lee died, aged 96, in 2018.

By accident or design, Lee’s comics and the characters he helped create have not only had a huge influence on pop culture but also reflect an increasingly liberal world.

For these reasons and many more, his impact on the world is well worth celebrating.

Alex Fitch, Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Comics and Architecture, University of Brighton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It is not a new controversy. Television journalist Megyn Kelly when she was at Fox insisted that Santa Claus is “white.” I’m not sure why that was important to her (or more likely the bosses who were constantly hitting on her), but it is not true.

Then there were the white nationalist Thor fans who did not want Idris Elba to play Heimdall, the mythic guardian of the Bifrost bridge to Asgard. I pointed out that the far-flung Viking conquests certainly made them a multi-cultural society, and that there were likely Muslim converts among them, as well as intermarriages with Africans and Mediterranean peoples.

As for Middle Earth, it is of course a fictional place with lots of types of creatures in it. It is a little mysterious how people can suspend disbelief enough to accept a story about elves and dwarves and orcs but not enough to accept a story about Black elves. Elves were a step too far for some of Tolkien’s friends. He used to read out The Lord of the Rings to his “Inklings” group at Oxford, and at one point fellow academic Hugo Dyson, lying on the couch, needled him: “Oh God, not another fucking elf!”

Speculative fiction is all about world building. Some literary theorists have noted that story is character, plot and setting, and that in speculative fiction “setting” takes center stage. So let us consider Middle Earth as a world. Black skin is an adaptive mechanism in parts of the earth with high ultraviolet rays It helps prevent embryos from being damaged by those UV rays. If Middle Earth was a whole world, then it had a tropics where there would have been black-skinned creatures, and those would have circulated. It is only the novice speculative fiction writers who speak of an “ice world” or a “wet world.” Planets are large and have many climes. Tolkien was no novice.

Then there was the character of the man. Despite living in a world of white male privilege at Oxford, a world he no doubt could not entirely escape, in some respects Tolkien was what white racialists would now call “woke.” He had been born to an English family in South Africa, and once said publicly that “I have the hatred of Apartheid in my bones.”

In 1938 when a German publisher wary of the Nazis’ racist policies wrote Tolkien to ask whether he could prove his Aryan descent, the author wrote out a couple replies, one of which said,

“Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.”

As an expert in historical linguistics, Tolkien obviously took some pleasure in pointing out to the Nazis that their ideal of racial purity, Aryanism, encompassed Iranians and Indians, and included brown-skinned and Black people along with whites. Sir William Jones in the late 18th century had been flabbergasted to discover that Sanskrit and Persian were clearly related to Greek and Latin.

In the early 1940s, Tolkien wrote to his son, “I have in this war a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler.” Tolkien admired what he called “the northern spirit,” but he thought of it as broadminded and Hitler was ruining it for him.

I think we know exactly what Tolkien would have thought of Trump’s blatant racism and of the values of the American white nationalists who secretly idolize Hitler.

Tolkien’s high fantasy owes some important debts to the pre-Raphaelite William Morris. The pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and poets in mid-nineteenth-century Britain was in important ways a rebellion against Establishment whiteness, privileging Dante over Hobbes, Giotti over Raphael, and brunettes over blondes. Morris did go to Iceland and was influenced by the Elder Edda, but he was also deeply influenced by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Persian poetry from Iran, from the FitzGerald translation of which he created four illustrated and calligraphed manuscripts.

By the way, Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian, was also in love with the Rubaiyat, and he made Conan an Iranian.

As for medieval Britain, it was also multicultural. My late colleague Sylvia Thrupp was one of the first historians to look at London demographic data in the medieval period, and discovered large numbers of foreigners living there.

British historian Onyeka Nubia writes for the BBC:

“The medieval English writer Richard Devizes describes London as being populated by ‘Garamantes’ (Moorish Africans), and ‘men from all nations’ that ‘fill all the houses.’ These Africans were described by various terms such as: ‘Black’, ‘Ethiopian’ (a word used at the time to describe all Africans), ‘Moor,’ and ‘Blackamoore.’ Other terms such as ‘Saracen’ were also used to refer to Africans, as well as people from elsewhere, such as Western Asia. Some of these terms are now considered derogatory.

Bartholomew was an African on the run in Nottingham in the 13th century. He is mentioned in the Pipe Roll (21 June, 1259), where he was called an ‘Ethiopian’ and a ‘Saracen.’ The Pipe Roll says, Bartholomew was brought to England by ‘Roger de Lyntin.’ The roll also gives ‘a mandate to arrest’ Bartholomew, for ‘running away from his said lord Roger de Lyntin.’ Bartholomew may have been on his way to the city of Nottingham to escape his lord’s authority.”

I think it is highly likely that some among this gaggle of brown and black-skinned people in medieval London were Muslims, though likely they kept that to themselves given the Inquisition.

So, no, the actual medieval world on which the high fantasy is often based wasn’t mono-cultural or mono-racial. So why should the fictional knock-offs be? And, no, Tolkien was not a racist and indeed he hated anti-Black racial segregation projects like Apartheid and the racial hierarchies erected by the Nazis. He said he only wished he had some Jewish ancestry, and used “ruddy,” which is associated with whiteness, as a negative epithet for Hitler.

In ancient times, in days leading up to August 1, the “Aenach Tailltean” (Taillten Fair) was held at a location near Tara. Competitions were held, music was played, poets read their poems accompanied by a harp; peace was observed, clan battles were prohibited; the 1st fruits of the harvest were eaten; a dance ritual against blight and famine was enacted; a sacred bull was sacrificed. In Scotland, a special cake called “Lunastain” was baked, the piece handed to a man was “luinean” and to a woman “luineag”; In addition, trial marriages were permitted for a year and a day (also known as “handfasting”).

Climbing Croagh Patrick (a mountain in Mayo), on the weekend leading up to August 1, was a traditional annual ritual that has taken place for many hundreds of years. Tens of thousands participate in this arduous pilgrimage to the top of the mountain. More recently “neo-pagans” observe Lughnasadh (Lammas) by celebrating the “first fruits” of harvest, while Wiccans considered this day one of the eight Sabbats.

Lyons in France was named after Lugh. When the Romans invaded Gaul (France) they equated the god Mercury with Lugh, who was considered the “inventor of all the arts” and was one of the most revered deities in Gaul.

Lugh was known as the Samildanach (skilled in all arts) and Lamfada (wide armed). He had a Welsh counterpart in Llew Llaw Gyffes (swift, strong arm). According to Celtic mythology, Lugh’s mother was also known as Eithniu (Enya), daughter of Balor, the one-eyed demonic giant, who lived on an island off the Donegal coast. Lugh had to do battle with Balor, whose one eye, when uncovered, could incinerate a thousand opponents. Lugh defeated him and his demon warriors using a magnificent slingshot.

Lugh, as a great mythic hero, was originally the young god who supplanted the king of the Tuatha De Danann (people of the goddess D’ana), the magical people of Ireland and Scotland. They were eventually defeated by the Milesians who were led by the poet, Amergin. The Tuatha De Danann were given a choice to live in towns, fortresses, farms and settled areas, or they could choose the hills, mountains and glens. Their response was: “What you consider the least, we consider the best”, and, as a result, they chose to make their homes in caves, glens, mountains and islands, and became the deities of nature in the Celtic pantheon.

Lugh’s spear, one of the four treasures of the Tuatha De Danann, was adopted into the Legends of the Grail, as was Lugh himself, who became the inspiration for Sir Lancelot. Lugh’s spear had to be leashed and was like a lightning bolt, while his sling became the Rainbow and the Milky Way became known as “Lugh’s Chain”.

In Scotland, the Gaelic festival of Lammas (Lughnasadh) marks the beginning of harvest times. Celebrated since ancient days as the ‘Gule of August’ it was customary to bring a loaf made from the new crop to a community gathering or church, Being one of the four fire festivals of the year participants gave vociferous thanks for the fruits of the first harvest. In the Scottish outer Isles Lammas festivals took place after fishing boats returned. Lammas Day is also a legal term to end a pre-arranged contract period where workers could be hired or depart of their own free will.

In Shakespeare’s play: “Romeo & Juliet”, Lammas Eve, 31 July, was the day of Juliet’s birth. In the play: “The Tempest” reapers gathered in the harvest: “You sunburn sickle men of August weary/Come hither from the furrow and be merry, Make Holiday! “

In Shakespeare’s play: “Romeo & Juliet”, Lammas Eve, 31 July, was the day of Juliet’s birth. In the play: “The Tempest” reapers gathered in the harvest: “You sunburn sickle men of August weary/Come hither from the furrow and be merry, Make Holiday! “

Although sometimes the British appropriated the Lammas fair in a way that severed it from its roots, at the end of the 20th century, only two true Lammas Fairs in the sense of the Lughnasadh remain–-at St Andrews and Inverkeithing, both including market stalls, food and drinks. One of the biggest Lammas fairs was held at Kirkwall in Orkney, also known for “handfasting”, which, (as noted earlier) was a trial marriage for a year and a day.

( Human Rights Watch) – In three weeks, Saudi Arabia will host the Formula One Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in Jeddah and a slew of global superstars – including Justin Bieber, Jason Derulo, A$AP Rocky, and David Guetta – are scheduled to perform on the weekend after the first checkered flag falls on December 4.

On the surface, the festivities are meant to show race attendees an amazing time. But a look beneath the hood makes clear the Saudi government’s intent is to use these celebrities to whitewash its abysmal human rights record.

Saudi Arabia has a history of using celebrities and major international events to deflect scrutiny from its pervasive abuses. Some celebrities, including Emily Ratajkowski and John Cena, have declined gigs in Saudi Arabia, citing a concern for human rights.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations have long documented ongoing abusive practices by Saudi authorities against peaceful dissidents and activists. Despite recent social reforms, including lifting travel restrictions for women and conditionally releasing some women who campaigned for the right to drive, many peaceful activists remain jailed or are under travel bans. Some face torture in detention while their families may be subjected to collective punishment. Criminal justice and labor rights reforms also fall woefully short of international standards and lack respect for basic rights.

Human Rights Watch’s #SaudiRegrets campaign urges those who are courted for events sponsored by the Saudi government to speak out publicly on rights issues or, when reputation laundering is the primary purpose, not participate.

Bieber and his peer headliners have a prime opportunity to follow through on their public commitments to human rights and social justice. Click here to join Human Rights Watch in calling for Bieber, Derulo, A$AP Rocky, and Guetta to lead by example and speak up against Saudi rights abuses.

Arwa Youssef is a pseudonym used to protect the identity of a Human Rights Watch staff member.

Via Human Rights Watch

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Justin Bieber Asked To Cancel His Upcoming Performance In Saudi Arabia | Billboard News

Director Denis Villeneuve’s most recent sci-fi epic is the latest attempt to tell the story of Frank Herbert’s acclaimed 1965 novel, Dune. The film is set millennia in the future when the galaxy is ruled by a class of family Houses. Each house battles for control over the most valuable resource in the galaxy, “spice” – a powerful hallucinogen that also happens to power interstellar travel.

Spice is mined on only one inhospitable desert planet – Arrakis, also known as Dune. Arrakis is populated by the Fremen, a group of warriors and desert dwellers who have to fight against a series of imperial colonisers, each one using different methods of control to mine and sell spice.

Dune offers a useful allegorical narrative of the “scramble for Africa”, which saw European empires carve up the continent into colonised powers based purely in the pursuit of trade advantages.

Violent extraction of resources

The “scramble” officially began in 1884 with the Berlin Conference. Here major European and other imperial powers – Germany, Britain, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, France, Spain, the US, the Ottoman Empire and others – colluded in violently delineating the continent’s varied tribal geographies into colonial nation states.

The colonial and aristocratic European motifs in Villeneuve’s Dune are not hard to spot: sealing decrees with signet rings on wax, overtly westernised regal dress and military uniforms.

Based on specific trade specialities and existing knowledge of resources, by 1914, Africa was a colonised continent. Like Arrakis, its valuable natural resources (both human and nonhuman) were being mined to service western colonial markets.

In Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium undertook one of the most notorious resource plunders in the Congo, which is known for its abundance of rubber. Leopold was far more brutal in his land grab than other colonisers, committing mass genocide in the process.

Seeing the Congolese people as inferior, Leopold forced them to labour for the valued resources and murdered those who refused. The exact figures are hard to discern, but it is thought that his armies murdered over half of the population.

In the film, audiences are introduced to Vladimir, leader of House Harkonnen, which has enacted a brutal and violent colonisation of Arrakis for years. His corpulence, greed and brutality bear a striking resemblance to the actions of Leopold. There is even a scene where he bathes in molten rubber.

The lasting impact of colonisation

As Villeneuve himself has pointed out, the themes of his version of Dune speak to how fragile a planet’s ecosystem can be. It also highlights how we must change our dependence on extracting resources to start a planetary healing process.

As climate catastrophe continues to unfold around the world, many commentators (myself included) point to the extractive nature of fossil fuel companies, deforestation practices and ocean-polluting industries as the prime culprits. These practices have a legacy in the colonial plunder of Africa, with several chartered companies set up to marshal the global trade of the resources gained from colonial invasions.

For example, Cecil Rhodes, who is known widely for the decolonisation campaign #RhodesMustFall, made his fortune mining diamonds in South Africa. This industry
produces a lot of local pollution and is also highly energy intensive.

Many modern-day mining and oil companies have their roots in the colonial invasion of Africa, with damaging environmental costs both locally in African countries, but also globally as they belch carbon into the air.

Dune shines a harsh light on these processes.

We see how technologically superior invading “houses” are harvesting the raw materials, enslaving the population and using precious resources (such as water) to feed sacred trees rather than quench the thirst of indigenous workers. But these powers are ultimately humbled by Arrakis’ indigenous population who use spice as part of their sustainable relationship with the harsh environment of the planet – not for intergalactic trade or to generate vast profits.

In this, Dune critically explores the geopolitics behind resource extraction. It highlights the limitations of and the inevitable resistance to the powers that attempt to wield natural resources for domination. It also predicted that the colonisation of the past would lead to much of the destruction we are now seeing.

The next decade has to be the one in which we, as a planet, begin to work towards reducing the impact of climate catastrophe. Part of that process will involve understanding the past transgressions of European power on the Global South. Stories that have a message behind them, like Dune, show us how.

Oli Mould, Lecturer in Human Geography, Royal Holloway University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Warner Bros.: “Dune Official Trailer”

Here’s a portion of what CNBC printed in what they alleged was the complete transcript of Shatner’s remarks:

“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”

But here’s the crucial takeaway, the last phrase of which is omitted by CNBC:

“What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see how vuln– the vulnerability of everything. It so small. This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have it. It’s so thin. And to dirty it…”

“The jeopardy . . . And to dirty it!” To fill this precious atmosphere, unique in our solar system, with clouds of burned coal dust and with greenhouse gases, Shatner says, is . . . what? Despicable. Unthinkable.

Just when Shatner is getting on to the subject about how what he saw reinforced his horror at the way we are polluting the atmosphere and imperiling the earth with man-made global heating, Bezos interrupts him: “It goes so fast.” Bezos doesn’t want Captain Kirk expounding on the evils of climate change on his promotional clip. He gets him talking about the experience again. Not the conclusion he drew from that experience.

But we know what Shatner thinks. He thinks that the sunny optimism of the original 1960s Star Trek TV series, which reflected the view of the future held by its creator, Gene Rodenberry, was misplaced. Shatner as Capt. Kirk played a role in helping the world imagine a better future.

As Shatner lived through the succeeding decades, however, he discovered the reality of the climate emergency and was filled with alarm.

In a 2016 interview with Brian Fung at the Washington Post, Shatner said:

“The biggest threat to our world today is climate change. The future is exciting because the future is always hope … What seems to be happening is that the future is filled with dread.”

In the same interview, he said of the science fiction writers he worked with in the 1960s, “There was all kinds of interest in flying vehicles and health and the state of the world. That we wouldn’t be melting away, into the sixth extinction. It would be a much more pleasant. Peaceful. Humane world. Than it is.”

Fung asked Shatner if any technologies scared him. The actor replied,

“The technology that worries me is the old technologies. The technology of uses of energy and the spilling of toxins into Mother Earth, and we’re killing our Earth and nobody is irate about it enough. And not enough people are irate about it. People like yourself — young people like yourself should be screaming at the top of your lungs to the people who lead.”

That’s what Shatner wanted to say on his return to earth. He wanted to say that our thin, fragile, vulnerable, unique atmosphere is in danger from petroleum, gas and coal, that this mothering “blue blanket” of the earth is in danger of being enveloped by the grim blackness of galactic emptiness because of the way we are treating it.

That is what for-profit news did not report about Shatner’s profound experience and his articulation of it. He wants you screaming at the top of your lungs that our pale blue dot is in danger of being burned up and engulfed by an unfeeling, black cosmos. And that only we can stop it from getting worse, because we are the ones making it worse.

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Bonus Video:

CNN: “‘The most profound experience I can imagine’: Emotional William Shatner recounts space trip”

FLAGSTAFF – Asgard, Wakanda, Xandar and other intergalactic empires are well-known to comic book fans, but a new comic is hoping to bring readers back to Earth to learn about Indigenous heroes.

Penned by Native American artists and writers, “Marvel’s Voices: Indigenous Voices #1” was released Nov. 18, to the delight of Native Americans who feel underrepresented in the comic book universe.

The new release features several new Indigenous heroes and address their involvement in X-Men stories.

Keith Jim, a Navajo comic book artist who became interested in comics at an early age, is proud to see Native Americans breaking through into the superhero world.

“Sometimes I feel like we’re forgotten. We are still here, so it’s important to stand up,” said Jim, who drew the comic book episode “The Heroes” in 2018.

Jim said Native American comic book characters usually are depicted in stereotypical ways, as they are reduced to complementary or side roles and are shown in feathers and loin cloths.

Anthony Thibodeau, a curator at the Museum of Northern Arizona who specializes in Indian arts and culture, said this misrepresentation of Native Americans is evident in mainstream popular culture.

“Any character that was a non-white character, they were usually represented in a very stereotypical way,” Thibodeau said. “Either through their clothing, a lot of times how they talk or through their accent.”

Keith Jim, who drew the comic book episode “The Heroes” in 2018, says he sometimes feels as if Native Americans are forgotten. “We are still here, so it’s important to stand up.” (Photo courtesy of Keith Jim/KTJ1 Comics & Arts)

To eliminate these stereotypes, he said, it’s important that the Marvel comics are created by Native Americans.

“I think it is a good step,” Thibodeau said. “Especially having these writers and artists interpret these characters to bring a better sense of representation into mainstream pop culture than there has been.”

Thibodeau and Jim hope that the new Marvel comic book heroes, including Echo, Mirage and Silver Fox, will help tear down the misrepresentation of Indigenous people.

“I can’t wait for it to come out just to see how it should’ve been from the start, how Native Americans should have been represented from the start,” Jim said.

Cory Bushnell owns Cab Comics, the closest comic book store to the Navajo Nation, where the new Marvel comic will be sold.

“It’s something that we’re excited to have in the store and excited to help encourage people to know about,” Bushnell said. “It’s encouraging people to learn more.”

Bushnell and Jim both said that these new heroes will help Native Americans feel inspired. Kyle Charles, an Indigenous illustrator for “Marvel’s Voices: Indigenous Voices,” already received support from Indigenous women for his depictions of the Marvel hero “Dani” Moonstar, a member of the Cheyenne Nation who was introduced in 1982.

“I hope they (women) get inspired or they feel empowered. I hope they get whatever they need out of it, even if it’s just to escape,” Charles said in an interview with the Canadian Press. “The most important thing to me is them seeing this and saying, ‘That’s me, I am that character.’”

Johnny Messiha is a Southern California native who expects to graduate in spring 2021 with his master’s degree in sports journalism. He has served as a commentator at the University of San Diego, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in communication studies.

McKenzie Allen-Charmley is originally from Alaska and expects to graduate in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a minor in business. Aside from reporting for Cronkite News, she works in event production for Arizona PBS and at the JET Lab at the Cronkite School.

Via Cronkite News

A saying is attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad in the “Path of Eloquence” that “You assert that you are a paltry thing, but within you is enfolded a universe.”

Of no one was that more true than Stan Lee, who died today, aged 95. Lee’s incredible imagination literally spawned universes, not to mention a galaxy of memorable characters– Peter Parker/ Spiderman, the orphan who attempted to redeem an act of callousness that led to the murder of his own uncle, the blind Matt Murdoch who overcame his challenge with other senses, the repulsive but resigned Ben Grimm (the Thing of the Fantastic Four), who bridged the age of the old horror comics of the 1950s and the new era of costumed heroes that Lee kicked off in the psychedelic ’60s.

Lee was born Stanley Lieber in 1922 in Manhattan to Romanian parents of Jewish faith. He served in the Signal Corps during WW II, having already gotten a start as a comic book writer. (His first story was about Captain America, then fighting the Nazis.) I think the best evocation of that era of the comic book in the 1940s is Michael Chabon’s wonderful novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

He had dreamed of being a novelist and reserved the name Stanley Lieber for serious writing, using “Stan Lee” as a pen name. But the comic book writing took over his life and it was Stan Lee who ultimately became the story teller who thrilled millions of fans.

Like many people who were teenagers in the 1960s, I became a big fan of Lee’s comic books. I started collecting comics (no easy task for an army brat always on the move). Lee’s writing excited my imagination and expanded my vocabulary and my horizons. His evident humanity and the high ethical values and tolerance he promoted made an impact on me. I started writing fan letters in the 1960s and was over the moon when some got published. One of the writers Lee hired, Roy Thomas, who had briefly been an English teacher in St. Louis, was so incredibly kind as to correspond with me. Maybe I read too much into his notes, but I felt he was encouraging me to try writing.

I went off to Northwestern University in 1971. I listened to the student radio station there, WNUR, and discovered that there was a Saturday morning show reviewing the comics that came out that week. One of the anchors was Wally Podrazik. I became a regular listener. Occasionally, I disagreed with a review, and I remember writing a letter to the hosts suggesting indelicately that they had misunderstood a plot line. They were very gracious, since they not only bothered to reply to my impertinent missive, but actually invited me to join the show and to do some reviews of my own. And so I did. (My first appearance was pretty painful since I unexpectedly had mic fright and my voice kept wavering; but Wally encouraged me and I improved and learned some tricks of the radio trade). I still met people years later who used to listen to the show.

In the fall of 1973, I was awarded a Richter Traveling Fellowship for two quarters of honors research in Religion in Beirut, which I would take up the following year. I wrote on Christian-Muslim dialogue, a movement of sorts in Lebanon after Vatican II. (Some of the themes I first explored in 1974-75 as a senior stayed with me and I came back to them in my just-published book, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires.)

But there I was in autumn 1973, aware that in 11 months I would go off to Lebanon. And I knew it was just the beginning of a period of living abroad, since I wanted to stay in the region for an MA afterwards, and get fluent in Arabic. I had to do something with my comic books collection. And I felt as though it was one of those moments in life when I should let go of my earthly possessions and size down and travel light through that period of my life.

So I went to the university library and they referred me to the McCormick Library of Special Collections. I made an appointment to talk to a curator, Russell Maylone, and I made an outlandish proposal. I said that I wanted to donate my collection, which included Spiderman #1, to the library, and would they take the books. To my slight amazement, the library agreed, in part because they were establishing a center for the study of popular culture and thought my collection could be the core of holdings in this area.

I told Wally about this development, and he had the brilliant idea of writing Stan Lee and asking him to come dedicate the collection!

And Stan said yes! And he agreed to give Northwestern gratis a subscription to all the titles in my collection so that there would be no gaps.

On February 7, 1973, Stan Lee came to Evanston and dedicated the new collection.

Stan Lee holding forth. Daily Northwestern, Feb. 7, 1973

Lee said in part, “Comic book publishers used to publish comics as quickly and cheaply as possible, putting down any kind of junk hoping to appeal to young kids and to adults with less-than-exceptional intelligence. If somebody asked them what they did for a living, they’d say they were publishers and walk away before anyone asked them what they published . . . The success of the ‘Marvel Age’ is that we made our heroes real—-if you can imagine as real a guy with green skin and the strength of a hundred men,” he said. “I mean, when a guy in long underwear walks down the street, people don’t just walk past him. What would really happen in that situation?”

Chicago Tribune, Feb. 7, 1973.

I much later realized that our ceremony, and the placement of his books at a university library, meant something to Stan Lee, someone who had by his own admission once been sheepish about admitting at Manhattan cocktail parties what he did for a living. And now his works were no longer ephemera, the academy was taking an interest.

I also made some remarks, of which Benn Joseph in his article of today reminded me. I saw Lee’s moral vision as a key element in his writing–subtle, not preachy, but very much a part of it. I said I was donating the collection so that “this particular Sunday school, which perhaps has a truly beneficial effect on the characters of maturing people all over the world, might be available to the historian and the student interested in popular culture or in the comic book as an artistic medium.”

I also praised, as I remember, the nurturing of vision and imagination in which Lee was engaged.

We then all went out to lunch at a fancy restaurant in Evanston and Wally and I discussed Marvel’s new ventures with Stan, who was eager to get fan reaction. We liked Roy Thomas’s and John Buscema’s Conan the Barbarian books but thought the attempt occasionally to throw back to 1950s-style luridness looked a little campy in the 1970s. Stan, amazingly humble, took our criticisms with good humor.

Before the party broke up, I asked Stan if he would write out and sign a piece of dialogue I especially liked, between a bystander and the Watcher. He agreed, though half way through he asked irascibly if I didn’t have any shorter favorite quotes.

BYSTANDER: “How can anyone stop the rampaging Silver Surfer? He’s all-powerful.”

THE WATCHER: “There is only One in the universe who is All-Powerful, and his only weapon is . . . Love.”

(Watchers are sort of the librarians and ethnographers of the universe, recording everything.)

Stan Lee spoke to the divided American society of Tricky Dick Nixon at a time when the US was still in Vietnam and the politics of race were still roiling the country, and his message was the one God of love. He lived to preach that message to a divided society in the teens of the twenty-first century.

In the aftermath, I felt as though that slip of paper from Stan with the quote on it was also a possession, and I was trying to dispossess myself of possessions, so I gave it to the McCormick Library, as well.

Stan Lee was one of my heroes. I read thousands of the words he so generously shared with us, and my imagination was expanded by his incredible creativity, and I was instructed by his generous, humane, ethical vision. I was so lucky to have met him on that magical day. I wept today. We’ll miss him.

“You assert that you are a paltry thing, but within you is enfolded a universe.” – Ali.