safe from harm
Ok. I get the fact that we need to protect kids from some influences. That’s the whole point of having authority figures. I get that. I really do. But sometimes you have to wonder …
Borders asked to ban “racist” Tintin book. Tintin? Seriously? Apparently so. Yet another facet of my childhood (who didn’t read Tintin when they were growing up?) has now been swamped by the PC brigade. Sickening.
Actually, I have read Tintin in the Congo, the comic in question. Does it have dodgy cultural references? Yep, I’m pretty darn sure it does. It fits perfectly with the other national and racially stereotypical names that Herge adopted for the other characters in the series. Try Chang, the obscurely named Chinese companion of Tintin. Or Rastapopulous, the big nosed arch villian of the piece. Or Abdullah, the mischievous Mid-eastern kid with the megarich father. Or my personal favourites; Generals Alcazar and Tapioca from San Theodoros. Stereotyped? Yup. Funny? Yes, I think so.
That’s actually not all.
The PC brigade have also had a go at Noddy and Tinky Winky of the Teletubbies. Right. So, there’s really no excuse to be watching the Teletubbies at any age. I send the nieces Disney DVDs just to get them to watch something else. I’m doing my bit to rid the world of the menace. I still think I made my point about political correctness gone mad.
Eejits. My lawn. Get off it.
On 13-Jul-07 at 1:07 pm,
Tez wrote:
I don’t think Abdullah, Rastapopulous et al really compare even vaguely to the monstrosity that is Congo. It’s not about individual characters being stereotypical or one-dimensional or whatever, which is normal in the Tintin-verse. Congo is just really fucking ugly and disturbing. I read it a very long time ago, back when I used to regularly re-read Tintin books, and I remember being seriously put off by the outright racism. The “natives” in Congo are literally subhuman. I particularly remember being shocked that my beloved Hergé could produce something quite so… vile. Ah, youth.
The banning of books is more problematic. On the one hand, banning books is bad. (I’m not sure what kind of “banning”, exactly, is being advocated in this case, but regardless.) People should be able to read and judge for themselves what is good and what isn’t. On the other hand, kids don’t come pre-installed with basic critical filters. So was moving it to the adult section a good idea, or not? Should we encounter these things as children and learn from them, or should we be kept away from them until we’re older? I like the idea of having a publisher’s warning, though perhaps a slightly less wishy-washy one (replace “may be offensive” with “should be offensive”, heh) might be a better idea. Would the warning have been enough (without moving it to the adult section)? Maybe. Is even the warning unnecessary hand-holding? I dunno. It’s at least a sign that the publisher recognizes that the jokes in Congo may not be very funny any more, but here’s the book, it’s a historical artefact, just like Tarzan or any of the other “Dark Continent”-era texts. Africa the exotic, full of savage beasts and equally savage savages. I’m not agreeing with the CRE that it should be put in a museum, but maybe that’s because I’m not African, eh? It’s easy for me to not feel strongly on the issue. I think the CRE’s point is (or should have been?) that there should be some recognition that Congo is not interchangeable with Red Rackham’s Treasure. There should be some way of saying, at least, that even though the book’s continued to be published, the attitudes portrayed in it explicitly and implicitly are no longer seen as healthy or wholesome or normal. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Also, dude. The “PC Gone MADDE” argument is not cool. There’s a reason it’s too easy -it’s because “PC” as a actual, singular entity or movement doesn’t even exist except as a pejorative. If being anti-racist/anti-sexist/whatever is all just “PC gone mad” then what, if anything, is “PC done right”? That would have to be nothing: because “PC” is just a generic putdown for any kind of attempt to redress or expose inequalities. It doesn’t actually say anything. It’s worth having a look at who benefits from the “PC gone mad” meme, and what kind of people keep pulling it out, and for what purpose.
On 13-Jul-07 at 1:08 pm,
Tez wrote:
*gets off soapbox*
On 13-Jul-07 at 3:45 pm,
drac wrote:
I take your point about the “PC gone madde” pejorative. *looks suitably abashed*
On reflection, my position essentially is one of annoyance for some monolithic entity (be it the CRE or the gubmint) being able to tell anyone that the concepts contained herein are not wholesome or suitable for public consumption. Down that road lies the banning of porn, dissident political speech and other nasties. Perhaps it’s an altogether too easy jump for argument’s sake to go from Tintin in the Congo to Fahrenheit-451. Nonetheless, start down the path of banning something for vague and ephmereal reasons like “unwholesome”, and there is the risk of opening up a can of worms regarding how precisely some monolithic entity arrived at that judgement – and for which reasons.
Could some kid read about Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Huck Finn and think “hey, cool. I totally want to be that guy wielding the whip”? Could they (to take another popular source of literary fiction) want to make like Sodom and Gomorrah?
Aren’t those equally likely (or unlikely) outcomes of reading other literature which is seen as innocuous, or worse – child friendly?
Actually, I didn’t much like Tintin in Soviet Russia much either. I’m considerably more annoyed at the fact that Enid Blyton gets such a bad rap in these parts. Noddy has been sanitized to within an inch of its life and most of the other books have sunk into obscurity.
Soapboxes are good.
On 14-Jul-07 at 1:03 am,
N wrote:
Man…I hope those people never hear me crack jokes…might get a tazer gun to the head! I’ve read Tintin in the Congo but can’t remember it making an impression on me like it did for Tez…maybe I was too depraved by then:)
btw isn’t “”bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period – an interpretation some readers may find offensive” the best disclaimer you have ever heard? especially on a Tintin book!
On 14-Jul-07 at 3:05 pm,
drac wrote:
And entirely predictably, sales of the Congo comic increase. It’s like the Pratchettian door labelled “do not open” for wizards, I guess.
On 14-Jul-07 at 7:13 pm,
Tez wrote:
A hilariously inevitable turn of events. I might buy a copy myself at some point, if I ever stumble onto it here. It’s one of the few Tintins I don’t actually own. (Along with… er… Blue Oranges, which I’ve never read, Land of the Soviets and Destination Moon, which some bastard stole.)
Drac: of course I agree that banning books is teh bad. As a matter of principle, etc. I was just talking about other things that could be done to point out to Ze Impressionable Childernz that the book that they’re reading should be read with some care. And whether this should be done at all. I don’t know, is that patronizing to kids? I don’t know how I would have reacted to warning labels on books when I was a kid, but then again, a warning label or explanatory foreword or something on those lines doesn’t infringe on your freedom to read: it’s just a way for a publisher to provide context.
However, to see the CRE as humourless PC book-banning censors, or whatever, needs to be balanced against something like this (Wikipedia):
I don’t know, I just feel really bad for that family. It’s difficult to imagine oneself in that position, but it sounds fucking uncomfortable and infuriating at the very least. For me, the question is: who exactly is the underdog here? (Because I automatically root for the underdog, dontcherknow.) And most of the articles on this whole shebang seem to suggest implicitly (and absurdly) that Borders or the publisher or the Tintin brand is the underdog, bravely defending free speech against the depradations of the PC zealots who just can’t take a joke. I would cautiously suggest that in fact it’s the other way around: that a part-black family walked into a bookstore to find them selling a book that’s been recognized as being severely racist for decades, as a children’s book, as if the aegis of the Tintin brand, or its quaint twentieth-century antiquity somehow made it okay, ahistorical, same as Harry Potter or whatever the flavour of the day is. It just so happened that this family did complain (I’m sure they weren’t the first people to notice the wrongness of this), and the complaint snowballed into a demand that the book be pulled. You’d think Borders and the publisher would have seen this coming and come up with some way to market it in such a way that circumvented both unacceptable extremes (banning the book entirely or selling it as a regular comic for kids).
On 14-Jul-07 at 7:13 pm,
Tez wrote:
Damn, I’m still on the soapbox, aren’t I?
On 15-Jul-07 at 11:39 am,
chickenbutt wrote:
Tez – ‘Totally dude..’
On 16-Jul-07 at 10:00 am,
drac wrote:
I would have reacted to a warning label on a book and it would have had precisely the opposite effect. Just sayin’
I know it’s a high-falutin’ (and probably insensitive) stance but I would suggest it isn’t the job of the retailer to act as parent/authority figure to those kids. The problem is not in setting context – which I agree would be a good thing on general principle. The problem is that the job of setting context gets taken to the absurd extreme by the CRE and other like minded puritanical entities. Slippery slopes and all that. There is a move afoot to ban fatty food advertisements to children. How about violence (even a superhero punchup?)
Is banning books on those grounds so far removed from this case? Also, is the Old Testament available in the kiddie’s section?
A case in point – remember how scenes were pixellated by TV authorities earlier? Is that still done? Social and societal mores and context-awareness evolves, does it not?
On 17-Jul-07 at 5:26 am,
Tez wrote:
I agree that the problem with “something should be done” is “who’s going to do it?” The CRE’s position on this is… difficult, and as you say, who can trust the gubmint to handle a situation like this? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that -not a new dilemma, but a dilemma nonetheless.
However, the slippery slope argument is just that: a slippery slope argument. Saying that a racist Tintin book should have a … I dunno, an explanatory foreword or whatever, is not the same thing as saying “violence in video games is bad for ze childernz”, or any variants thereupon. Providing context and history is not the same thing as banning something. And providing context is something the retailer does anyway (which can’t be conflated with being a “parent/authority figure”, which connotes a great deal more) by simply, e.g., putting a book in the children’s section. I’m just saying that the bookseller has a responsibility to be aware of this. Selling books is not like selling potatoes. Not to diss the many fine people who sell potatoes.
Basically, despite the custodes dilemma, I’m saying the issue is real and should be dealt with by all parties concerned, whether parent, child, retailer, publisher or concerned bystander. It’s not a non-issue that can be dismissed as heavy-handed meddling by the state. (And mind you, I despise the state as much as the next guy.)
Also -violence (in comic books or in fairy tales, for example) is a very different issue from racism. Racism, especially in the case of Congo, is about power structures, the unthinking privilege of the colonizer and the dehumanization of the colonized “savages”. You can see parallels in current nationalist or ethnic-supremacist thinking. It’s altogether too easy, too comfortable a pattern of thought that anybody can fall into and which takes work to escape. Which is why I object to people treating something like Congo as if it was acceptable children’s literature. My analogy would not be the Old Testament or violent comic books, but say, something like war propaganda. You’ve seen those anti-Japanese pamphlets the Americans put out during WWII?
TV pixel-censorship: dude, I have no idea. I haven’t watched TV in years, apart from the World Cup and they didn’t censor that.