238 – Meet Them Where They Are

Scattered thoughts:

– OK, so you have an Irish character to whom you have basically given no character development for two years, aside from “She has an accent.” So finally, you get around to remembering that this Irish person is part of your cast, and you decide to give her a storyline.

So you make this Irish character an alcoholic.

Sigh.

I’m not going to pretend that this particular piece of offensive negative stereotyping is an enormous deal to me. Irishness is no longer a particularly marginalized or underprivileged category (although it was, not too long ago, and the stereotype of the “drunk Irishman” was central to that). But, look, this is an X-book: if it’s going to be praised for being sensitive about these things, it’s important to call it out when it trades in things like, well, this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nast#/media/File%3ATheUsualIrishWayofDoingThings.jpg.

Irish culture does have its problems with alcohol – this is not something that can be denied, although it’s a place that, bluntly, you shouldn’t go without familiarizing yourself with the history of economic deprivation and national trauma that’s responsible for it. (Prior to the Famine, Irish alcohol consumption was very high by modern standards, but comparable to that in Britain and the United States at the time. It’s in the decades following the Famine that Irish drinking culture took its modern shape. Oddly enough, having one-third of your population die of starvation and another third be forced to emigrate, while – except in Ulster – you miss out on the industrialization that transforms your neighbour to the east — this has effects.)

The country does have the highest per capita alcohol consumption in Europe; rates of depression and alcoholism are disproportionately high. But if your immediate default image of an Irish person is an out-of-control drunk like Theresa is portrayed as being here, you are doing something that is not as bad as if your immediate default image of an African-American is an ex-con, but is the same sort of bad thing: you are taking something that is indeed disproportionately true of the group in question compared to other groups, but is still only true of a minority. The alcoholism rate in Ireland is about 7% of the population: high, but still less than 9 in 10.

This would not bother me as much in an Irish cultural product for an Irish audience (which I suspect would be more sensitive to issues such as the way in which “stand your round” culture produces excessively heavy social drinking, which is a much more widespread problem in Ireland than the kind of solitary drinking depicted here). But it bothers me more in an American cultural product engaged in an exoticizing depiction of Irishness for an American audience.

Does it bother me as much as the more familiar stereotype of Irishness in Marvel comics from this period, that absolutely everyone is connected in some way with terrorism? Not as much in some ways (I mean, it’s not morally as bad). But in others more: I know that “All Irish people are somehow involved with the IRA” came out of an arrogant but well-meaning attempt to be sympathetic while not having a clue that, in fact, most Irish people didn’t support the IRA and that the Northern Irish conflict was not a conflict between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. (And to be fair, the complexities of Northern Ireland genuinely were and are very complex indeed.)

This, on the other hand, is rooted in 19th-century Know-Nothing [expletive deleted]. Nicieza should have known better, and it gives me very little hope for his handling of Siryn as a character going forward.

– On a brighter note (well, not much brighter, but dark in a good way), I do like that, if Lobdell is going to pursue his “Absolutely everything is about Charles [expletive deleted] Xavier” agenda, he is at least exploring how very, very creepy it would be to have anything to do with him. For the rest of your life, you could never know if anything you thought, felt, or decided was not something that he’d placed there. If you trusted that he wouldn’t do that — maybe he placed that trust in your head.

– On the other hand, the morality that Lobdell gives to Storm is completely messed-up. “I’ll kill for you, but I won’t steal for you.” In what world is killing people OK, but stealing from them isn’t? Especially since the particular act of stealing is a minor piece of industrial espionage in service of an altruistic end, and the harm that it would cause to any actual victims is very small and dispersed.

I can’t help but feel that Lobdell is insinuating a rather right-wing point of view here, that stealing is terribly, terribly wrong, and only Evil Commies would think otherwise, and that Storm’s background as a thief is something of which she should be profoundly ashamed and from which she desperately needs to be redeemed. (Which is not how Claremont saw it, I think.)

But come on: even by the rightiest of right-wing points of view, this is is taking the profound sanctity of property rights a bit far.

– Jean, if you’re shielding someone from a “tremendous” amount of pain, you don’t need the adjective when you’re telling them to do it. They already know how much pain they were feeling.