Manifesto again

I often grouse around with colleagues that students have no knowledge of the Cold War, and that we need to teach courses specifically on the period 1945-1989. They have no sense of the polarization of everything and what it was like to think that the entire world could really be completely destroyed anytime, as in now or tomorrow, --not by climactic change, but by an instantaneous white flash of overwhelming heat that melted your body along with everyone else you knew.

Of course there’s a fascinating turn to forgetfulness, --after ten years of students professing no interest in Marx and Engels, I had the first lively discussion in class of the Communist Manifesto. All the comments were about contemporary economics, lots of references to globalization, a few students were clearly completely conversant in the lingo. This was quite a shift from the sullen refusal to consider the existence of class conflict that predominated a few years ago. Now the Manifesto seems to speak on its own about globalization’s inequalities.

I teach the pamphlet in the context of nineteenth-century industrialization and the 1848 revolution, all very historical, all very ancient. So it is quite the delight when the dead rise from the text –yet another day for the Gespenst.

The Loss of Strangeness

What's missing from the current American assumption about the global and its Englishness, is the wonder at difference, at the strange ways of another civilization, that there could be some completely different manner for people to treat each other and distinctly different values about books, marriage, religion, war, health than our single universally applied assumptions. I miss the care one needs to take while entering a new culture.

Now, there may be moments when caution is required, but behind any quiet first steps into a strange city, there lies implicit a fundamental sense that back home is superior.

Only the most stubborn fanaticism is treated as outside the global, and while it needs to be treated cautiously, it is never seen as a respectful alternative, never the sense that in this other society things are done differently for good reasons.

Whereas in the nineteenth century for an American to visit France or Russia, it meant to enter into a "new world" that one could not dismiss as backward. They were parallel societies.

The out-dated notion of civilizations, in the plural, meant that there were a goodly number, not a very many but more than a handful, of different ways to organize life.

Now the assumption is that one global norms exists which has many variations, most of which are measured in relation to some imagined standard of advanced modernity.

Even up until the end of the Cold War, there was the cautious respect for the limit of Western civilization. Now there are just pockets of intransigence.

French cartoons in America

Why have Asterix and Obelix not found a huge audience in the United States?

Cartoon fans have asked this question for decades. How many conferences have we sat through listening to number crunchers dissect audience surveys?

How many times has it been suggested that deep down inside American kids don’t t trust French cartoons? How many mothers have worried about the exact contents of the magic potion that gives the protagonists the prodigious strength to defeat an endless array of Roman legions? Who has not wished for a little magic potion just to get through a long day? Don’t Americans want the small Gallic village to survive? Are they not impressed with Obelix’ capacity to eat? Who does not want to try the ancient French recipe for wild boar on a spit? All these questions have buzzed around campus seminars and studio lots for decades.

Now a new essay just published in the Annals of Alternative Media History by Buster Hinds, a young assistant professor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, Mendocino County, has put forward a sharply defined historical thesis: Americans have really always sided with the Romans against the hard-to-capture Gallic warriors.

In the Cold War environment that produced Asterix and Obelix, American audiences clearly preferred for the Roman legions to subdue that one last French village holding out against the Empire. Rather than identifying with the plucky Frenchmen who repeatedly foiled the Roman attempts at conquering the last independent village in what was then called Gaul, Americans could not help but side with Caesar in his unrelenting determination to mop-up France.

Who could not see the analogy between the Viet Cong and Asterix, the fiery little warrior who ran circles around the better trained and better armed Romans. Who did not detect the resemblance between Getafix, the village druid, and Ho Chi Min?

Was it not more than a coincidence that the first Asterix and Obelix film was released in 1967, just as the Vietnam offensive was building up to its greatest strength?

Was it no coincidence that the first comic book was released in 1959 the year Charles de Gaulle became President of France?

Yes, the American viewer, even those of the tenderest age, and certainly those discerning parents ever on the look-out for subversive political messages, recognized implicitly that Asterix and Obelix was more than a celebration of Gallic pride, it was a covert jab at Roman, i.e. American hegemony.