In recent years, a lot of people have been surprised at huge revenues drawn by film adaptations of comic books with age restriction that requires being at least 18 years old. Audiences love ultra-violent productions like Joker, which has surpassed the $1 billion line in sales, so it is natural that comic book concepts are affected as well. I understood this better on my last visit to New York.

In New York, you will find Midtown Comics, the world’s biggest comic book store and a sort of shrine for comic book lovers, where, as always, old and new comics alike are presented for fans’ enjoyment. While browsing newly-released series, what surprised me most was seeing DC Comics’ dark stories for adults released one after another.

One of these series published under DC’s Black Label is Tales from the Dark Multiverse. These take DC’s most well-known stories and give them new endings. Each of the single-issue releases is reminiscent of The Twilight Zone.

In the series, a character named Tempus Fuginaut appears at the beginning of each issue to briefly explain the Dark Multiverse. For people who have a passing familiarity with multiverse theory, or at least for those who have watched the Arrowverse series on TV, the theory states that the universe in which we live is not the only one. Some of these multiple universes are completely different while others are almost the same, and our heroes sometimes travel among these different universes as they run from one adventure to another.

Fuginaut explains that the known universes all have dark counterparts, and the adventures of those who live there have very different endings. Following this are versions of DC’s most well-known series with endings transformed in ways people have never heard before, like The Death of Superman, Batman — Nightfall, and Teen Titans — The Judas Contract.

As with The Twilight Zone, readers of the Dark Multiverse stories witness how human frailties bring unexpected bad endings to just about everything.

After reading these stories with extremely frightening and dark endings, people may sit and wonder whether everything is this way, if the stories with happy endings we have been told dozens of times in fact end differently, if everything we know is different and our universe is actually a dark one.

Frankly, when I turn on the TV and look at the news after having these thoughts, I start thinking we do not live in a universe where stories have happy endings. It’s as though life splintered off at some point, and the universe in which we find ourselves has suddenly become part of a dark universe.

These thoughts do not just arise from the news out of Turkey. In fact, they are a product of developments around the world because, for much of the world, it’s almost impossible to see good news.

When we look at Turkish society, we see that most people are used to child abuse and women getting murdered, and how it’s normal for babies and children to grow up in prison. There are times it strikes us as unusual when people who murder women receive severe penalties because we are so used to courts awarding these murderers with lighter sentences for “good behaviour”.

It has become normal for duly elected local mayors to be removed from their posts before their terms are even finished, only to be replaced by government-appointed administrators and then arrested. The number of people who see this practice as fair just cannot be underestimated.

There is not even a way for people to react to these legal scandals. Some people say “That’s good” when Selahattin Demirtaş, held in prison illegally, is taken to hospital after falling ill. When writer Ahmet Altan is thrown back into prison a week after his release, there are people who say that’s where he belongs. They do not know what will result from abandoning the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution.

There are similar situations in the United States, where a lot of people see the evidence emerging during the impeachment process of President Donald Trump as fabrications of the Democrats. In fact, impeachment only seems to increase Trump’s chances of being re-elected. Even if they see that he acted illegally, these people will not care.

Trump’s detention centres holding Latin Americans attempting to cross the border are rarely seen in the news. The inhumane conditions and children dying in these places are starting to be seen as normal.

Syrian children drowning, Kurdish children getting killed by soldiers, and Latin American children dying from the terrible conditions in detention centres are all still newsworthy, but when developments like these are reported in the papers, they do not garner more reaction than any other news.

If you happen to look outside of Turkey and the United States, for example to China, you will see that the rest of the world is inured to what is happening to the Turkic Uighurs there. When the New York Times published documents showing evidence of China’s “brainwashing operations” against the Uighurs, there was hardly a ripple around the world. Most people reading this news for the first time perhaps were a bit surprised and angry but forgot about it in a day or two.

A good part of the world has become somehow accustomed to reading news about death and lawlessness. Most people simply feel thankful that it’s not happening to them and get on with their lives. Fortunately, there are a few people who are trying to speak out against all of this. Although their voices are often drowned out by the angry mutterings of the new normal, they do give some hope for humanity.

Like the frog in a pot of water slowly being brought to a boil who does not notice the heat increasing until he is about to die, people do not notice how nationalist thinking, in the name of national security, is slowly erasing the possibility of a better world.

If we ignore the lawlessness suffered by the minorities of the world, and if we do not raise our voices against the worrying developments in other countries, we will eventually end up as part of the dark multiverse. Then maybe Tempus Fuginaut will tell about how not one person but an entire world was brought to its knees by human frailty. And who knows — perhaps we have already become a part of that dark and hopeless universe and just have not found out yet.

Ali Abaday is a freelance journalist based in New York.

Copyright ©2019 Ahval News — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 December 2019
Word Count: 1,079
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As long as I can remember, I’ve been a sports fan. As long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in the military. Until recently, I experienced those as two separate and distinct worlds. While I was in the military — I served for 20 years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force — I did, of course, play sports. As a young lieutenant, I was in a racquetball tournament at my base in Colorado. At Squadron Officer School in Alabama, I took part in volleyball and flickerball (a bizarre Air Force sport). At the Air Force Academy, I was on a softball team and when we finally won a game, all of us signed the ball. I also enjoyed being in a military bowling league. I even had my own ball with my name engraved on it.

Don’t misunderstand me. I was never particularly skilled at any sport, but I did thoroughly enjoy playing partly because it was such a welcome break from work — a reprieve from wearing a uniform, saluting, following orders, and all the rest. Sports were sports. Military service was military service. And never the twain shall meet.

Since 9/11, however, sports and the military have become increasingly fused in this country. Professional athletes now consider it perfectly natural to don uniforms that feature camouflage patterns. (They do this, teams say, as a form of “military appreciation.”) Indeed, for only $39.99 you, too, can buy your own Major League Baseball-sanctioned camo cap at MLB’s official site. And then, of course, you can use that cap in any stadium to shade your eyes as you watch flyovers, parades, reunions of service members returning from our country’s war zones and their families, and a multitude of other increasingly militarized ceremonies that celebrate both veterans and troops in uniform at sports stadiums across what, in the post-9/11 years, has come to be known as “the homeland.”

These days, you can hardly miss moments when, for instance, playing fields are covered with gigantic American flags, often unfurled and held either by scores of military personnel or civilian defense contractors. Such ceremonies are invariably touted as natural expressions of patriotism, part of a continual public expression of gratitude for America’s “warfighters” and “heroes.” These are, in other words, uncontroversial displays of pride, even though a study ordered by Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake revealed that the U.S. taxpayer, via the Pentagon, has regularly forked over tens of millions of dollars ($53 million between 2012 and 2015 alone) to corporate-owned teams to put on just such displays.

Paid patriotism should, of course, be an oxymoron. These days, however, it’s anything but and even when the American taxpayer isn’t covering displays like these, the melding of sports and the military should be seen as inappropriate, if not insidious. And I say that as both a lover of sports and a veteran.

I went to a military parade and a tennis match broke out Maybe you’ve heard the joke: I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out. It was meant to poke fun at the fisticuffs in National Hockey League games, though these days there are fewer of them than in the “glory days” of the 1970s. An updated version would, however, fit today’s increasingly militarized sports events to a T: I went to a military parade and a baseball (football, hockey) game broke out.

Nowadays, it seems as if professional sports simply couldn’t occur without some notice of and celebration of the U.S. military, each game being transformed in some way into yet another Memorial Day or Veterans Day lite.

Consider the pro-military hype that surrounded this year’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Not so very long ago, when I watched such games I would be transported to my childhood and my fantasies of becoming the next Nolan Ryan or Carl Yastrzemski.

When I watched this year’s version of the game, however, I didn’t relive my youth; I relived my military career. As a start, the previous night featured a televised home-run derby. Before it even began, about 50 airmen paraded out in camouflage uniforms, setting the stage for everything that would follow. (As they weren’t on duty, I couldn’t help wondering why they found it appropriate to don such outfits.) Part of T-Mobile’s “HatsOff4Heroes” campaign, this mini-parade was justified in the name of raising money to support veterans, but T-Mobile could have simply given the money to charity without any of the militarized hoopla that this involved.

Highlighting the other pre-game ceremonies the next night was a celebration of Medal of Honor recipients. I have deep respect for such heroes, but what were they doing on a baseball diamond? The ceremony would have been appropriate on, say, Veterans Day in November.

Those same pre-game festivities included a militaristic montage narrated by Bradley Cooper (star of “American Sniper”), featuring war scenes and war monuments while highlighting the popular catchphrase “freedom isn’t free.” Martial music accompanied the montage along with a bevy of flag-waving images. It felt like watching a twisted version of the film Field of Dreams reshot so that soldiers, not baseball players, emerged early on from those rows of Iowa corn stalks and stepped onto the playing field.

What followed was a “surprise” reunion of an airman, Staff Sergeant Cole Condiff, and his wife and family. Such staged reunions have become a regular aspect of major sporting events — consider this “heart-melting” example from a Milwaukee Brewers game — and are obviously meant to tug at the heartstrings. They are, as retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich wrote at TomDispatch back in 2011, propagandistic versions of “cheap grace.”

In addition, Budweiser used this year’s game to promote “freedom” beer, again to raise money for veterans and, of course, to burnish its own rep. (Last year, the company was hyping “America” beer.)

And the All-Star game is hardly alone in its militarized celebrations and hoopla. Take the 2017 U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York City, which I happened to watch. With John McEnroe in retirement, tennis is, generally speaking, a quieter sport. Yet before the men’s final, a Marine Corps color guard joined a contingent of West Point cadets in a ceremony to remember the victims of 9/11. Naturally, a by-now-obligatory oversized American flag set the scene — here’s a comparable ceremony from 2016 — capped by a performance of “God Bless America” and a loud flyover by four combat jets. Admittedly, it was a dramatic way to begin anything, but why exactly an international tennis match that happened to feature finalists from Spain and South Africa?

Blending sports with the military weakens democracy I’m hardly the first to warn about the dangers of mixing sports with the military, especially in corporate-controlled blenders. Early in 2003, prior to the kick off for the Iraq War (sports metaphor intended), the writer Norman Mailer issued this warning:

“The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans’ lives… [D]emocracy is the special condition — a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military, and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already.”

More than 14 years later, that combination — corporations, the military, and mass spectator sports, all wrapped in a gigantic version of the stars and stripes — has increasingly come to define what it means to be an American. Now that the country also has its own self-styled strongman president, enabled by a spineless Congress and an increasingly reactionary judiciary, Mailer’s mention of a “pre-fascistic atmosphere” seems prescient.

What started as a post-9/11 drive to get an American public to “thank” the troops endlessly for their service in distant conflicts — stifling criticism of those wars by linking it to ingratitude — has morphed into a new form of national reverence. And much credit goes to professional sports for that transformation. In conjunction with the military and marketed by corporations, they have reshaped the very practice of patriotism in America.

Today, thanks in part to taxpayer funding, Americans regularly salute grossly oversized flags, celebrate or otherwise “appreciate” the troops (without making the slightest meaningful sacrifice themselves), and applaud the corporate sponsors that pull it all together (and profit from it). Meanwhile, taking a stand (or a knee), being an agent of dissent, protesting against injustice, is increasingly seen as the very definition of what it means to be unpatriotic. Indeed, players with the guts to protest American life as it is are regularly castigated as SOBs by our sports- and military-loving president.

Professional sports owners certainly know that this militarized brand of patriotism sells, while the version embodied in the kinds of controversial stances taken by athletes like former National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick (cashiered by his own league) angers and alienates many fans, ultimately threatening profits.

Meanwhile, the military’s bottom line is recruiting new bodies for that all-volunteer force while keeping those taxpayer dollars flowing into the Pentagon at increasingly staggering levels. For corporations, you won’t be surprised to learn, it’s all about profits and reputation.

In the end, it comes down to one thing: who controls the national narrative.

Think about it. A set of corporate-military partnerships or, if you prefer, some version of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s old military-industrial complex has enlisted sports to make militarism look good and normal and even cool. In other words, sports teams now have a powerful set of incentives to appear patriotic, which increasingly means slavishly pro-military. It’s getting hard to remember that this country ever had a citizen-soldier tradition as well as sports teams whose athletes actually went almost en masse to serve in war. Consider it paradoxical that militarism is today becoming as American as baseball and apple pie, even as, like so many other citizens, today’s athletes vote with their feet to stay out of the military. (The NFL’s Pat Tillman was a noble post-9/11 exception.) Indeed, the widespread (if shallow) support of the military by so many athletes may, in some cases, be driven by a kind of guilt.

“Collusion” is a key word in this Trumpian moment. Even though Robert Mueller isn’t investigating them, corporate-owned sports teams are now actively colluding with the military to redefine patriotism in ways that work to their mutual advantage. They are complicit in taking a select, jingoistic form of patriotism and weaponizing it to suppress dissent, including against the military-industrial complex and America’s never-ending wars.

Driven by corporate agendas and featuring exaggerated military displays, mass-spectator sports are helping to shape what Americans perceive and believe. In stadiums across the nation, on screens held in our hands or dominating our living rooms, we witness fine young men and women in uniform unfurling massive flags on football fields and baseball diamonds, even on tennis courts, as combat jets scream overhead. What we don’t see — what is largely kept from us — are the murderous costs of empire: the dead and maimed soldiers, the innocents slaughtered by those same combat jets.

The images we do absorb and the narrative we’re encouraged to embrace, immersed as we are in an endless round of militarized sporting events, support the idea that massive “national security” investments (to the tune of roughly a trillion dollars annually) are good and right and patriotic. Questioning the same — indeed, questioning authority in any form — is, of course, bad and wrong and unpatriotic.

For all the appreciation of the military at sporting events, here’s what you’re not supposed to appreciate: why we’re in our forever wars; the extent to which they’ve been mismanaged for the last 17 years; how much people, especially in distant lands, have suffered thanks to them; and who’s really profiting from them.

Sports should be about having fun; about joy, passion, and sharing; about the thrill of competition, the splendor of the human condition; and so much more. I still remember the few home runs I hit in softball. I still remember breaking 200 for the first time in bowling. I still remember the faces of my teammates in softball and the fun times I had with good people.

But let’s be clear: This is not what war is all about. War is horrific. War features the worst of the human condition. When we blur sports and the military, adding corporate agendas into the mix, we’re not just doing a disservice to our troops and our athletes; we’re doing a disservice to ourselves. We’re weakening the integrity of democracy in America.

We can afford to lose a ballgame. We can’t afford to lose our country.

William Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and history professor who blogs at Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2018 William Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 August 2018
Word Count: 2,117
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