A Princess of Mars and Victorian Anthropology

Note: The book is nearly 100 years old, but I'm still going to strive to remain spoiler-free here as much as possible, especially since I'm only halfway through.

When I was a kid, Speedy Gonzalez was still part of the Looney Tunes line-up and I found the earlier version of the Mary Poppins novel in which they go to Africa where American stereotypes of rural blacks lived.  Little House had its characters constantly worried about attacks by "savage Indians", much in accordance with my history texts and just about everyone in the fantasy books I tended to prefer were white and English.  Frances Hodgson Burnett's novels are pretty fucking condesending towards India.  Stephen King, while a good writer, is a font of Magical Negro characters and I was reading him from the age of 9 until I got really bored with Wizard and Glass.  I'm also really familiar with Lovecraft's work.  Works from the Victorian era and just afterward like to talk about the savage races and how uncivilized and lazy and strong they are.  So at this point, if it was written before the Civil Rights Movement and it's not King and there's casual racism peppered about, I simply sigh, think to myself, "What a damned asshole," and read on.

Let's not even pretend that A Princess of Mars isn't racist with it's depiction of Native Americans and when I started reading Burroughs/Carter's account of the Green Men of Mars (aka Barsoom) it was highly reflective of the usual Victorian Anthropology attitude of, "Yay the civilized white people, especially the English ones! (or in this case, Virginian)"  The Green Men are described as savage and brutish, without compassion, things are held in community, and the only laughter comes from witnessing death and violence.  I read it and I give my usual sigh.

I Swear Conspiracy Theorists Aren't Even Trying Anymore.

Yeah, Attorney General Holder totally met Judge Land in a coffee shop to conspire against Birthers (and by extension, the U.S.) even though he was across the country giving a speech.

Awesome, I Successfully Blogged for a Week

I kept getting distracted while writing my next X-Men post and it's just not coming out the way I want it.  I'd work on it today, but the comics are on a DVD, my screenshots for the panels are on the Macbook and I brought the netbook with me to jury duty.

The other problem is that I'm always composing posts when I'm not writing.  I'll be knitting or playing Dwarf Fortress or something else.  I've got this head full of things I'm thinking about and should make use of that to improve my writing skills and maybe take all my ideas and put them to use and I'm not doing it.

I'm out of school, out of work, I have the time, and I have no excuse for this.