"We know things are bad. Worse than bad - they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'
Well I'm not gonna leave you alone! I want you to get MAD!"
- Howard Beale, The Network.
One of the most insidious trends in our modern Pop-Culture today, is the active drive towards depoliticization of our media and personal spaces. It might have started out as that pithy (if objectionable) maxim about refraining in polite company from discussing religion, sex or politics at the dinner table (which, as an associate pointed out, often leaves precious little of substance to actually converse about) ... but the creed has since taken on a life of its own, seemingly cropping up wherever mere mortals congregate to interact or to exchange ideas.
Perhaps we're afraid of having our own beliefs challenged. Or possibly, the sheer vast weight of the task at hand of changing our extant political status quo which strangles the polis and economy like a many-tentacled eldritch abomination, causes us to balk at discussing how we might accomplish a meaningful alteration to our circumstances. Maybe the constant and continual buffoonery of our political classes and erstwhile champions has caused a collective feeling of revulsion wherever and whenever their clammy, vote-grasping paws and faces turn up unexpected, unannounced and apparently unwanted.
However it's happened, and whyever this might have transpired ... the result is the same. People make active attempts to forcibly get the politics out of their pop-culture.
I first noticed this sad and sorry trend on one of those pages which agglomerates humorous images from Tumblr, and the like. Somebody had mashed up the images of widely reviled Harry Potter petty-tyrant Dolores Umbridge with a well-known political figure. I think it might have been Donald Trump (although I've also seen local renditions featuring Paula Bennett and Anne Tolley). People were going a bit nuts about this, claiming that the image represented something of a defilement. Not merely because an odious association with a real-life arguable villain apparently was viewed as unbearably tainting people's perceptions of a fantasy bete-noir ... but because the integration of politics and somebody's pet fantasy milieu represented a CONTAMINATION of that series' integrity, and ought to be put a stop to forthwith.
Now, a moment's consideration of this situation will reveal a number of obvious absurdities therewith.
First up, the Harry Potter series is eminently political. The characters encounter more Ministerial staff per novel than are habitually run into every episode of The Thick Of It. Aspects of civil society, the civil rights movement and civic organization are lovingly invoked and semi-satirized through features like Hermione's "Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare" (S.P.E.W.) Neoliberal educational "reform" by meddling bureaucrats is directly invoked with the aforementioned Umbridge. An active promulgation of the highly political values of egalitarianism and anti-racism to a generation of kids is what these books represent.
Ultimately, trying to claim that politics would 'contaminate' this milieu makes about as much sense as suggesting that the fresh water from a stream might mar the mighty salt-water ocean.
But it's not as if it's merely an issue confined to the Harry Potter fandom, or the insipid depths of Tumblr - and those who comment on same. Pretty much everywhere I've been, the same problem emerges.
To take a fictional universe with which I'm rather more directly familiar (never having finished the Harry Potter series myself), I encountered a similar phenomenon within the (much older, more beardy) 40k fandom. Because apparently, aficionados of a setting wherein one of the lead apocalyptic threats to the wellbeing of humanity is an explicit Margaret Thatcher expy - the Ork warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka - apparently heaven forbid someone attempt to make political jokes with the source-material.
Of course, the danger with this active-depoliticization/antipoliticization strain of thinking isn't merely to be found in attempting to create nonpolitical 'safe spaces' in our popular culture where people can be free to enjoy their apathy unmolested.
No, it's worse than that.
The next stage in this insidious agenda is the conscious depoliticization of works and spaces that were previously, eminently political. The best example for this that I can think of off-hand is probably the way John Constantine's stories are now written in the Hellblazer series of comics. If you're unacquainted, suffice to say that right throughout the series' late 80s and 90s run, Hellblazer basically ran on politics almost as much as it did magic, trenchcoats, cigarettes, and cynicism. As one reviewer put it: "There were bankers as literal demons, aristocrats hunting the poor on horseback [...] Ellis used his all too brief run no the comic to savage the crushing disappointment that was New Labour and it was glorious, if painful."
"Strip that element away and you're left with a vaguely interesting, sarcastic wizard who calls people "mate.""
And that's what happened, as an effective act of literary vandalism. The comic's latest incarnation (imaginatively titled "Constantine: The Hellblazer") eschews political content in favour of slumming it with the rest of the DC universe's stable of superheroes.
Clearly, there are artistic-aesthetic consequences and casualties to be had as a direct result of this quixotic drive for depoliticization. One could only imagine how much more pedestrian and two-dimensional (if creative and pretty in their linguistic artifice) the works of Shakespeare, say, might be if shorn of their political context and sensibilities.
So what does this lead to? What's the overall and all-up consequence of this relentlessly creeping paroxysm of confining and constraining political symbolism and dialogue to the darkest, most out-of-sight fringes?
Apathy. Enforced, inculcated apathy wherein taking a side or holding an opinion which might run the risk of playing your part in changing the world ... is drowned out by a stuttering, whispering susurrus of silence.
Works of literature and kernels of pop-culture help to inspire and to motivate "the masses" (and, for that matter, people who like to imagine themselves to be among "the elite", into the bargain). We help ourselves to feel different feelings, see different things, and examine the world differently when we take in the perspective of great authors (or illustrators) and their fictional character contrivances alike. Garbing important ideas - or sentiments worthy of transmission - in the clothing of our favourite figures and enmeshing them in the semi-whole cloth of fabricated universes where we like to play is thus less a 'defilement' than an 'apotheosis'. A recognition that the value and worthwhileness of these characters and settings is of such sufficient importance that they can and should impact our tangible, real world outside the confines of their pages or celluloid screen-frames.
In an age wherein the neoliberal assault on both democracy and our fundamental cultural cornerstone of caring about politics is more rampant than ever before ... it has never been more necessary than it is now to adopt and use symbols and narratives that people actually care about to try and influence them towards those things which they should have regard for.
Because I somehow severely doubt that the profoundly apathetic society will be any less inimical to the creation of great art and pop-culture than an archetypal totalitarian/money-driven one.
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