Mu-wah-hah-ha…

And I don’t know of any connection between Slipknot and Warwhip. The whole “organic” rope thing is truly ridiculous. In order for it to be resistant to Firestorm’s powers, this “organic” rope would need to actually be alive. Not just made from hemp, or some other previously-living substance. Just my two cents. … and he’s fun to pick on.

Shag

Let’s move on.

Thanks,
Shag

So, by the same token, if it’s Rob and Shag’s podcast, it’s Rob and Shag’s podcast. You should be able to say what you want. If they don’t like it, tough. It’s just amazing how right-wing criers have gotten it in their heads that despite the oodles of money they have promoting their viewpoints in the mass media and how they’ve bought off about 7/8ths of the political machinery in Washington, *they’re* the persecuted ones.

If they listen to a comic book podcast and, god forbid, have to be reminded of the fact that their viewpoints are not actually unanimous, they throw a hissy fit.

If they aren’t allowed to shove religious holidays down everyone’s throats, they say *they’re* persecuted and call it a War on Christmas.

If someone passes a law that says you can’t discriminate against blacks, gays or whoever in the workplace they say *they’re* persecuted because they’re forced to work with people they don’t like.

They put bumper stickers on their cars decrying the existence of taxation as if they and they alone uniquely pay taxes.

For a political orientation that prides itself on its masculine self-image of rugged individualism, they sure are a bunch of crybabies.

As for Luke’s comment, he might have failed to notice that the writers on Firestorm in particular are *themselves* putting themes with political overtones into the book. Therefore, a certain amount of political discussion is *inevitable*.

I wonder if Luke has ever himself wondered why it seems like creative people— artists, composers, writers, dancers— tend to be so liberal. I wonder if thinking creatively rather than rigidly, being open-minded rather than needing absolute right answers in life, and wanting to celebrate the good in people rather than obsessing over people to demonize might have something to do with it.

When the right actually finds a creative person who leans their way like Frank Miller, they gleefully jump up and down pointing at him. See? See??!! There’s one! Ooh! Ooh! But it’s still a dog-bites-man story. The man-bites-dog story is that, like it or not, the people who tend to be attracted to creativity— you know, that ephemeral quality that keeps comics, for one medium, going— tend to lean more my way politically than Luke’s.

In wrestling, there is a term traditionally called a jobber (nowadays more often referred to by the euphamism “enhancement talent”), who’s job it is to lose. They are very low on the totem pole and they are usually either young guys who are paying their dues or guys who simply are never going to be the big time. The thing is you need jobbers. You need someone for the big monster heel to destroy in two minutes. You need someone for your young, fresh faced star to shine against. You can’t have top guys fighting in every match. (The modern product has gotten away from this somewhat but it still exists.)

I look at supervillains the same way. Sometimes they are there to annoy our hero more than anything else. Maybe (like Slipknot’s ropes being organic) they have some minor advantage over the hero which the hero has to overcome. Maybe they are just unpredictable or crazy or otherwise a pain. But the hero still has to deal with them, and this sort of obstacle allows the writer to show us some aspect of our hero; be it a new way to use their power, a secret fear, a nagging injury, or any of a million other possibilities. Jobber villains serve the same purpose as jobber wrestlers — to build up the star (in our case, the hero) so that when he does face that Big Bad we are all the more emotionally attached to them.

PS: Does Slipknot have any known connection to the minor Hawkfoe Warwhip? He also used “organic” weapons, in his case whips which he created out of his arms. Hawkgirl dealt with him pretty harshly early in Johns’s run on Hawkman, and he ended up being shot to death by the police. Just a thought!

I wanted to take a second to acknowledge the lively political discussion in the comments. First, as mentioned before, the feedback is great. We sincerely appreciate it. Second, Keith brought forward some constructive criticism, and indicated it was only a minor concern for him. This led to some healthy dialogue between Rob and Keith.

Now I’m worried an issue identified as “minor” will become the primary topic of discussion in these comments. Some folks are on different sides of the political fence and that’s okay. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

Therefore, I’d like to ask we discontinue the political discussions in this thread. Sorry to be the party-pooper. I just don’t want to risk this spiraling into a political slugfest. That wouldn’t be fun for anyone.

I hope you understand my concerns. Thanks for listening and being so passionate about the show!

Fan the flame and Ride the Wave!

Shag

But when I leave the theater, I return to reality. I don’t actually think that dressing up as a flying rodent is actually a sound crime-prevention policy. Poor Frank Miller may have fantasies about grim and gritty men in flying rodent suits obliterating people with middle-eastern surnames, but I happen to live on Earth-Prime, also variously known as the Real World.

Libertarian-leaning right-wingers are the political equivalent of this. They read Ayn Rand novels and confuse them with real life. They cheer for John Galt, but forget that, like Bruce Wayne, John Galt too is a fictional character. Their view that every person is an island, their petulant bumper stickers proclaiming “All Taxation Is Theft,” their laughable visions of utopia in which each person can miraculously maintain his or her own infrastructure, roads, bridges, libraries, schools, etc., and the articles of faith— devoid of *any* *evidence*— that privatization always outperforms governmental services, and tax breaks for the wealthy trickle down to ordinary masses in job creation (the latter of which, I might add, has been roundly debunked time and time again)—

—all these are the political equivalent of believing that Batman is real. They’re the views of the politically immature, who read Ayn Rand in high school, formed Objectivist Clubs and stayed there. Yes, in theory we could achieve utopia if only the lazy and shiftless would just die and the productive and prosperous, as libertarian-leaning right-wingers all imagine themselves to be, could just be left alone to create and produce free of any governmental intervention.

But here on Earth-Prime, things don’t really work that way. The poor don’t just conveniently die for us in the name of utopia. People who live lives of dependency on entitlement programs inconveniently have children who, themselves, did absolutely nothing to deserve starvation just because their parents are social leeches. That’s why here on Earth-Prime, things are a little more complicated. We don’t let blameless kids starve just because we don’t like their parents. We also don’t put them *in orphanages*, which was, in recent memory, a serious proposal by one of the Republican presidential candidates* as to what to do about the inconvenient children in poverty when we abolish, as we of course would like to abolish, all entitlement programs for their parents, as to rebuke socialism and achieve theoretical capitalist purity, which is the only way to build utopia.

I want a social safety net, thank you very much. Perhaps Mr. Baker is absolutely certain he will be gainfully employed and healthy all his life. I, however, am not too proud to admit that I do not have the ability to prognosticate, and that I might, god forbid, lose a limb, lose my mind, or, more likely than that, eventually, through no particular fault of my own other than the vagaries of the economy, lose my job, and have to avail upon the social safety net which is so blithely dismissed as “socialism” by so many people who think John Galt is real and who can’t tell the difference between a bona fide crime prevention program and a movie about a man in a flying bat suit.

You keep on truckin’, rob!. Mr. Baker, who cutely tosses off the name MSNBC as if they invented the concept of a politically leaning news channel, has Fox News and all of AM talk radio to listen to if he doesn’t like the podcast.

*Gingrich.