Eugenics And Dysgenics
Pt. 2a
Actions And Reactions
by
R.E. Prindle
The fabulous
nineteenth century progressed from Enlightenment to sound scientific knowledge
with an accelerating pace that meant that what was learned in one’s youth was passé
in one’s maturity. Thus the knowledge of
a sixty year old was out of date for a thirty year old. The eternities were disturbed. Initially overwhelmed, by century’s end the forces of reaction had
had time to realign and offer challenges to the new world of knowledge even as their
reaction to the new knowledge had been surpassed by newer more current
knowledge.
It was in
this state of confusion that the world entered the new even more rapidly
evolving twentieth century that left the nineteenth century in the dust. And, this quick evolution was very unevenly
distributed. It was shared by no other
place on Earth than the US/Canada and Europe, that is the Aryan race. From those locations scientific knowledge
began to be distributed by the Aryans throughout the world. Assimilation to the scientific knowledge was
not easy and still has not been achieved.
As the
Western world entered the Post WWI years the glories of what was called the Victorian
Age, once revered, became despised. But
they would reemerge in the twenty-first century as Steampunk.
One of the
more interesting reactions came from the re-emergence of the Romantic era as
the neo-Romantic era that flowered from nineteen-nineties through the outbreak
of WWI and has persisted into the twenty-first century as science fiction,
horror and fantasy- three different expressions of the demolished fairy world.
To return to
the nineteenth century. The neo-Romantics
could not return to the Land of Faerie unaffected by scientific achievements. The literature of the neo-Romantics was as
beautiful as that of the Romantics.
Several seminal works were to persist in influence through the twentieth
century to the present. Of first
magnitude was Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Published in 1886 it incorporated elements of
the psychological unconscious that were then emerging. The story ranks among the most
influential. Naturally there was a great
difference in the dissemination of the story between the two centuries.
In the
twentieth movies had come into existence and by 1927 the talkies began to
replace silent films. This was revolutionary. With sound, movies came into their own. I’m sure a silent film of Jekyll and Hyde was
made but it was the first sound version that gave the story universal
distribution. Many versions and
variations were made of Stevenson’s story some of which distorted the original
story to the point of unrecognition. The
original sound version is the one most people know, or knew. As that version is now nearly a hundred years
old several generations may never have seen it except for film buffs. The novel version is quite different from all
film versions.
Looking back
toward the late Victorian Age the movie makers make Dr. Jekyll a rather stuffy
academic type who, as a chemist, or possibly an alchemist, while experimenting discovers
a drug that releases him from all inhibitions
letting the evil or mostly evil unconscious of Jekyll emerge as Mr. Hyde
This in
itself was an expression of the understanding of the unconscious. The discovery, or examination of the
unconscious began with Dr. Anton Mesmer in the eighteenth century and by
Stevenson’s time in 1886 when his story was published was a well-known phenomenon
among the cognoscenti. In Stevenson’s
story Jekyll had been a wild and rowdy lad in his youth and longed to relive
those golden days. Many drugs, including
absinthe, were in use already in those days thus their effect on personality
being noted so that Jekyll using some sort of concoction was able to remove his
inhibitions with disastrous consequences.
Literary
characters of dual personalities began to pop up everywhere. One duo, as influential as Stevenson’s was
Conan Doyle’s marvelous creation of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. It isn’t noted that the two were complementary
aspects of the same personality.
Perhaps the
writer most devoted to the Jekyll-Hyde problem was the fantastic American late
neo-Romantic writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
This
extraordinary writer was perhaps at one and the same time the most Romantic,
scientific, fantasy and horror or proto-sci-fi author of all time. He carried the Jekyll-Hyde story to new heights
and wide variations.
In his first
published novel, A Princess Of Mars, his chief character, John Carter, who had
survived the split personality of the US in the Civil War as a Confederate
officer, while running from an Indian war band of the post-civil war Western
era stumbles on a cave of strange provenance where he abandons his body to be,
one assumes, spiritually transmitted to Mars.
Thus, this photo-copy of himself takes up a career on Mars while his
body remains in the cave on Earth.
Another
novel, one that made Burroughs’ life, Tarzan of the Apes, followed a year
later. In this story Tarzan, or John Clayton,
to give his civilized name, was born on the coast of Gabon in Africa to noble
English parents who were killed by the ‘Great Apes’. These Apes are of no known species, perhaps they
were meant as the Missing Link, a great evolutionary trope of the day when it
was thought there was a single link between apes and humans that was missing.
Rescued from
death by the ape Kala, who had lost her own ‘balu’ or baby, the baby Tarzan was
reared as an ape. His ape name Tarzan
thus means ‘white skin’ as opposed to the hairy black apes. While not exactly having super powers, yet
Tarzan as a boy discovers his parents tree house containing a primer or two
intended for John Clayton’s future education, he teaches himself through
pictures and texts how to read and thus discovers he is not an ape at all but a
human being. Thus in Jekyll and Hyde
terms he becomes the Man-Beast. Stevenson’s
novelette had been read by Burroughs who entered into the notion of dual
personality whole heartedly. Thus, when
wearing civilized clothing Tarzam is a cultured English lord but when he strips
to the loin cloth he becomes an actual beast.
Still intelligent but a sort of noble savage. Tarzan had other dual personalities. At one time a look alike named Esteban
Miranda challenges him for the love of his wife while Tarzan is repeatedly
bashed in the head at which he becomes a different amnesiac personality. Dual personality was a real fixation of
Burroughs. He himself was cracked on the
head at the age of twenty-two which definitely changed his own personality.
Burroughs
was sort of an odd duck. He was a wide
reader and the stories he read seemed to take on an independent existence in
his head so that he apparently couldn’t differentiate his original story from a
variation on someone else’s story so that in the sequel to Tarzan of the Apes,
The Return of Tarzan, he retells Edgar Allan Poe’s story, The Murders In The
Rue Morgue as his own. I’m not sure how
his career survived that unless a very few of his readers had ever read
Poe. Poe wasn’t especially well thought
of at this time. However his editor
Metcalf surely had. Metcalf rejected the
novel but Return was later picked up by another magazine desperate for a Tarzan
story.
Burroughs
even titles his story ‘What Happened In The Rue Maule. Even though the source of Burroughs story is
easily recognized in Poe’s story today still Burroughs manages his details in
such a way that it seems a new and almost original story.
In Poe’s
story the split personality is the lead character C. Auguste Dupin, the is CAD
and the unnamed narrator. It should also
be mentioned that Poe explored the dual personality in several of his stories of
the 1830s-1840s including the remarkable William Wilson. Poe obviously suffered from a split
personality.
In Burroughs’
story the suave cultured Tarzan now living in Paris, at the sight of blood
reverts back to this savage upbringing among the apes, becoming a ravening
beast. In Poe’s story an escaped Orang outang
commits the murders, in what is essentially a locked room story and escapes.
In Burroughs
story a hereditary enemy by the name of Rokoff sets up a situation to lure
Tarzan into a building and apartment where there are a half dozen villains
waiting to kill him. How Rokoff would know
that Tarzan would be walking down the most villainess street in Paris, ask any
policeman as Burroughs writes, isn’t adequately explained.
Nevertheless,
hearing a woman’s screams of distress Tarzan rushed into the building, Rue
Maule #27, third floor, Burroughs was always great at details, where in a sort
of Badger game he discovers the woman and a roomful of villains. ‘Yoicks’ or something similar, he says, and
the melee begins as Tarzan begins to demolish the mini mob out to injure
him. Rokoff waiting outside quickly
finds a phone, cell phones were not yet invented, while one is surprised to
find one so easily available in Paris at this time. The point is that Rokoff calls the police to
tell them there is a riot going on at #27, third floor. Still a savage beast although dressed in the
height of fashion Tarzan flattens the cops, blows out the candle, phones being
available in #27 but not electricity, and leaps out the window onto an
adjoining telephone pole not unlike Poe’s Orang, scampers across the rooftops
of Paris, as the telephone pole is taller than the third floor, similar to swinging
through the jungle trees, drops to the ground, steps into a corner drug store
to use the toilet to tidy up and wash his hands then, this is the word
Burroughs uses, saunters, down the block just like any bored boulevardier.
There you have Poe rewritten into a story only slightly inferior to the
original.
Amazingly
Poe’s story served as a basis for Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes
and Watson replacing Poe’s Dupin and narrator.
In this tremendously
creative period another of the great genres persisting down till today was Bram
Stoker’s incredible version of the vampire Dracula on which today’s versions of
vampires are based. Stoker did not create
the vampire character, there are earlier examples including Polidori’s short
story that set the rage off. Among other
versions Varney The Vampire a long novel by Rymer in mid-century really
developed the theme and from blood sucking vampires, the psychic vampire also
emerged. Our times’ Anne Rice had made a
career out of vampire stories.
A creation
of the first Romantic period, Mary Shelley’s man created life, Frankenstein and
his monster, evolved into a whole genre of androids, robots and various forms
of artificial humanity. Interestingly
the ubiquitous Edgar Rice Burroughs offered his contribution of The Monster Men,
as he covered almost all the modern genres adding The Mastermind Of Mars to the
catalog of artificial life in the 1930s.
He even managed to attach Henry Ford’s mass production methods to the
process.
The reaction
against the nineteenth century scientific revolution was epitomized by the Pre-Raphaelites
of England. They were called Pre-Raphaelites
because they rejected all society after the artist Raphael. Following in their tradition William Morris
wrote a number of haunting nostalgia novels that are quite charming but overly
sentimental.
Perhaps my
favorite of the neo-Romantics is the English writer George Du Maurier and his
three novels, Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian. Du Maurier himself was a Frenchman who was
removed to England in youth causing a sort of split personality in
himself. For a couple decades he made a name
for himself writing and drawing for the great humor magazine of the period
Punch. Then he was passed over when the
editorship opened up; that was more than he could he bear. He quit and began writing his novels. Apparently his talents had been under appreciated
at Punch as his great success took the magazines contributors by surprise.
The first
novel, Peter Ibbetson was well thought of but didn’t establish him. His second, Trilby, was a smash mega seller
influencing the Mauve Decade of the Nineties to its roots. His villain Svengali is still widely used to
describe a person who seems to control another under the influence of hypnotism. Du Maurier died as his last novel, The
Martian, was published. It is a lovely book. I like it, but it does not have the concentration
of the first two. However it’s
proto-sci-fi fantasy theme is very interesting for the right minds, overall the
three are a great trilogy. A fourth was
projected dealing with politics but the Grim Reaper came between it and Du
Maurier.
George might
be considered the arch-typical neo-Romantic.
His influence is probably greater than realized. His themes have been reopened by writers like
the great American novelist, Richard Matheson.
For Du
Maurier memory was everything, and in his mind, that necessitated life after death
or as he thought, what good was having accumulated them. His novels are monuments to memory. Born in 1834 he spent his childhood in France
a childhood he turned into a fairyland; he was removed to England as a youth and
the two national characters lived side by side in him as two almost distinct
personalities. The writers of the first
Romantic period fueled his memories, most notably the English poet, George Gordon,
Lord Byron and the Frenchman Charles Nodier.
Nodier was
the composer of the interesting short novel Trilby. In the 1890s Du Maurier would rewrite the
story in his novel of the same name. In Nodier’s
novel Trilby was male fairy who visited the girl Jeannie in Scotland. As Nodier was writing in the Romantic period
that was a revival, a last gasp itself, as fairies had been disproven by
science. So Jeannie having revealed the
visits of the fairy Trilby to her, she was treated as deluded and compelled to
give up her friend Trilby. Then she
sickened and died.
In Du
Maurier’s novel, Trilby, his middle or second novel, he reverses the sexes of
the duo making Trilby a young woman and turning Trilby into the evil hypnotist,
the Jewish Svengali.
The story is
placed in Paris in the 1850s where Du Maurier was an artist living the Bohemian
life in the classic age of Bohemianism.
Du Maurier portrays an ideal beautiful fantasy life with boon companions
and a carefree Bohemian existence.
Trilby is a grisette or what might have been called a ‘hippie chick’ in
our own 1960s, an artist’s model or whatever but virtuous unlike the other
grisettes.
She and the
Little Billee character of Du Maurier fall in love. Little Billee is modeled after his namesake
in Thackeray’s poem of the same name.
The romance is scotched when Little Billee’s aristocratic mother visits
him and rejects Trilby as a daughter-in-law.
Another regular
visitor to the atelier was a beteljew named Svengali. He was also a musician and musical theorist
who played piano well. He noted that Trilby’s oral cavity was perfect for a
great singer however Trilby couldn’t carry a tune and could scarcely hit a note. After her rejection by Billee’s mother, the
gang breaks up with Billee and his friends returning to England.
A few vicissitudes
find Trilby at the hypnotist Svengali’s door.
Her oral cavity now belongs to him.
Returning to his native precincts in Poland Svengali after hypnotizing
Trilby makes her sing like a bird. To
shorten the story, in a Jenny Lind like career, Trilby and Svengali take Europe
by storm.
While visiting
Paris Billee and friends reuniting for the moment, watch Trilby and Svengali’s
triumphant entry into Paris. Svengali
spots them watching and gives Little Billee a hard look. The shows were sold out so the trio missed
them but were first in line for the London shows in the first box. Trilby could only sing while making eye
contact with Svengali. He made the
mistake of looking up to see Billee. A
jealous rage overcame him, his eyes popped, he went apoplectic, croaking on the
spot. Without eye contact Trilby
returned to herself and could only croak off key and out of tune. The audience was merciless.
Trilby
became sick and withered away. Her dying
words were Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.
Thus, Nodier’s
story was reversed and told in the most charming manner, neo-Romantically.
In the
telling Du Maurier wove a lifetime of memories, musical and literary,
reincorporated Bohemian Paris at its peak, a Jenny Lind type story at the end
and the then current fascination with hypnotism. A thoroughly pleasing mix. He transfigures his life into a fairy tale.
Nearly the
same fairy tale he used in his first book, Peter Ibbetson. I’m not sure I could call Ibbetson a great
book but the three novels together are a sui generis. Events fit into a sci-fi context but yet are more
ethereal, other worldly. Du Maurier’s
inventions are really quite daring as he seeks to relate to reality yet evades
it as much as he can, blending the inner with outer world in a tantalizing manner. Memory, always memory but a memory made
immediate.
E.T.A.
Hoffman’s introduction to his tale ‘A New Year’s Adventure’ explains the
feeling better than I can:
Quote:
The
Travelling Enthusiast from whole journals we are presenting another “fancy
flight in the manner of Jacques Callot ,” apparently not separated the events
of his inner life from those of the outside world; in fact we cannot tell where
one ends and the other begins. But even
if you cannot see the boundary very clearly, dear reader, the Geisterseher may
beckon you to his side, and before you are even aware of it, you will be in a strange
magical realm where figures of fantasy step right into your own life, and are
as cordial with you as your oldest friends.
Unquote.
Du Maurier
captures that feeling perfectly and if you enter into his fabulous story of
memory and reality co-existing together seamlessly you will be carried along to
a supreme adventure. E.T.A. Hoffman
himself was from the first Romantic era, one of its stellar authors. The divine muses, Calliope and Clio, not only
sat on his shoulders whispering, but entered his head and dictated his stories. I have no idea whether Du Maurier read Hoffman
but Hoffmann was in the same time frame as Charles Nodier who wrote the first
version of Trilby.
Du Maurier was
familiar with the Romantic oeuvre. As with many nineteenth century writers Du
Maurier was fascinated with the poems of Byron.
He makes frequent references to the Giaour, one of Byron’s tales. The poem seems to be a central fixation
guiding Du Maurier’s pen.
Peter
Ibbetson tells the story of Ibbetson’s crime, his incarceration, his descent
into madness and removal from prison to the Colny Hatch, where he lives his life
out. In France Ibbetson grew up with a little
girl named Seraskier. He loved her
greatly and the separation from her when he was taken to England was quite
painful to him. And then, as if by
magic, as a grown man living with his cruel uncle he attends a ball to discover
Seraskier as a grown woman, the Duchess of Towers. Of course, a married woman, she is
unobtainable but they begin a platonic love affair.
But then,
Peter’s nasty uncle raises Peter’s ire and in a fit of anger Peter bludgeons
him to death. He himself is condemned to
be hanged but through the efforts of the Duchess of Towers and her powerful
friends his sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. It is in prison that he loses control being
transferred to the insane asylum.
It is while
there that he discovers that he can enter the Duchess’s dreams and she can
enter his, and this is done on real terms and not imagination. They actually physically interact. He now lives to sleep and enter the alternate
reality of his dreams shared with the Duchess.
In a carefully elaborated system the two can travel anywhere they know
having been there or do anything they have done in the outside world in the
past. Thus memory is everything. The inner and outer worlds become one.
She is still
married so that the relationship is platonic until her husband dies, and Peter
and the Duchess can be lovers. Happy in
his insane asylum where his sanest dreams are realized. Peter is supremely happy but then one night
as he snuggles into bed drifting off to dreamland a terrible thing happens, as
he reaches the portal from his dream to hers he finds it blocked, boarded
up. With a cold shiver he realizes the
truth, the Duchess has died.
Having completely
entered this world of Du Maurier’s I broke down in tears along with Peter. Of course his sanity or insanity is jarred
and he collapses. But whatever gods may
be had pity on Peter. As in ancient days
they let the Duchess return to Peter’s dream to console him and promise him that
they would be together eternally. One
assumes then that in death Peter found the happiness that had eluded him in
life.
Today the
theme has been explored in many variations, notably in Richard Matheson’s
Somewhere In Time and also his What Dreams May Come. I have no idea whether Matheson read Du
Maurier but it is not improbable. Time has
passed now and Victorian literature no longer holds the place it then did but
Matheson was born well before me and for my age cohort there was no literature
taught written after 1914 so there’s no reason Matheson wouldn’t have been
familiar with a range of Victorian authors unread today.
Du Maurier’s
story at the time was as original as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written a few
years before. While The Martian, the last
of the trilogy, is perhaps the weakest of the three it too is very innovative
in a proto-sci-manner. It too is a
memory capsule centered around the loss of vision in one of George’s eyes. The loss seems to have been the result of a
torn retina. Given the knowledge of the
time there was no hope to save the eye but even then he fell in with a medical
quack.
But, just as
Ibbetson went to prison and the asylum and in the process discovered how to
meld dreams with the Duchess of Towers, in this story he is contacted by a
little fairy from Mars, the Martian of the story also named Martia. She attaches herself to the protagonist Barty
Josselin. She is sort of a female
Wandering Jew (another great European legend) who for centuries has been
attaching herself to men as a sort succubus.
Her term as
a Wandering Fairy is up. She is
intensely in love with Barty so she arranges to become his next child who is a
little girl he names Marty. At a young
age Marty dies and Barty dies both souls are released at the same time so that
together with Barty’s memories they continue the journey after death to the
heart of the sun.
Beautiful
story, longingly told.
The
neo-Romantic period coincided with the apex of European power in history as
Europe had conquered the seas and continents of the entire world; all its
peoples were its subjects. But, as
always happens the moment of triumph begins the descent. Even in the first decade of the twentieth
century there were those who knew that European power was in decline and then
the Great War cut it short. The passing
was commemorated in the American Madison Grant’s great book: The Passing Of The
Great Race. Before it did a great
literature was written, written in the neo-Romantic style, in a sort of fair
land style. The scramble for Africa had
brought nearly the whole monstrously huge continent under European control, a
blessing and a curse. In European
writing it is depicted as a sort of wondrous fairyland.
Europe
produced three great epics over its two thousand year span, the sprawling epic
of which the Iliad and Odyssey are part, the huge Arthurian cycle and finally
the search for the source of the Nile that embraces the discovery of
Africa. Why the last should be true isn’t
clear.
The real
life adventure was looking back at it the incredible search for the source of
the Nile. England bent its energies on the
search for the exact spot from which the flow of the White Nile trickled. Huge sums were spent and men devoted their
very lives in the search and it produced a great literature. The solo adventures of Samuel Baker and his
slave, also his wife, purchased in Hungary.
The fabulous safaris of Henry Morton Stanley spanning tens of thousand
of miles, his books reading like improbable adventure novels even far
surpassing them while his own life was stranger than fiction. Perhaps his life is only believable as
fiction. Disparaged now because they
speak of a far gone time and even more ancient expectations and attitudes.
Kipling
wrote of the Indian Raj when a few thousand Englishmen controlled a
sub-continent. Joseph Conrad wrote his
tales of the daring adventurers who seized Asian kingdoms.
Perhaps the
greatest of all were the novels of the English writer H. Rider Haggard. He, the author of two of the greatest
neo-Romantic adventure novels, King Solomon’s Mines and single word title She.
The title in full:
She-who-must-be-obeyed.
The neo-Romantic
period also saw the re-emergence of esotericism. It burst into full bloom in Madame Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled and her creation of Theosophy.
It burst too late to be an influence on Haggard, at least his early
career but Haggard seems to be fully conversant with its ideas. The novel She itself is said to be a perfect
expression of Theosophy and that from Madame Blavatsky herself.
African
romance after African romance rolled out of his pen, all of very high
quality. Haggard commemorated the notion
of the Elephant’s Graveyard that fascinated generations up until perhaps the
1950s when the legend lapsed into infinity.
One doesn’t hear of it anymore.
The Imperial
novels of that time while still heard of are definitely out of favor. More people wish it had never existed than
care to remember it and explore its remains.
More people would rather visit holocaust museums and gaze at the ashes
of dead bodies.
However, Romanticism
has continued to evolve. Many of the
best stories of the pre-WWI era passed into the realm of boys’ stories laying their
riches at the feet of a couple three or four generations of lucky boys. Many also were preserved in the nascent
talkie film industry, versions preserved on reels of film.
And still
the need for the Land of Faerie persisted and Romanticism took a new turn
scarcely recognized for what it was.
Science had left that empty space that had to be filled. The Land of Faerie had to be
reorganized. At first Mars replaced the Land
of Faerie, seemingly safe at least 30 million miles distant from Earth and at
other time half across the solar system.
Martian stories began to make their appearance precisely during the neo-Romantic
period. There was still room to
speculate as high powered telescopes were still to be perfected. Camille Flammarion and Perceval Lowell could
still write of dead seas and canals on Mars.
The last of the neo-Romantics, Edgar Rice Burroughs, could still exploit
faerie kingdoms on Mars but that could only last until the killer telescopes
were developed.
The Universe
began to expand rapidly through the twenties and thirties.
As late as 1950 it was thought that the Universe was as small as 450,000
light years. But then it exploded
through millions and hundreds of millions of light years and on into the
billions. Mars was no longer tenable as
a Fairy refuge. Ray Bradury wrote his
Martian Chronicles and in the last chapter all the fairy tale characters were
driven from their last refuge into oblivion.
About this
time however Flying Saucers made their appearance. Is there anything more Fairy than Flying
Saucers? Think about it. The
alien abductions began; we discovered that we were being watched by little
green men from distant planets and galaxies.
Little green fairies? In the
wonderful sci -fi of the Fifties writers worked up incredible scenarios. It was imagined that aliens from perhaps
billions of light years away had exhausted their own mineral resources and
wished to remove ours to their planets.
The most imaginative of the sci-fi writers going by the name of William
Tenn even posited that the inhabitants of the star Betelgeuse were building a
bridge, a sort of conveyer belt from there to here to convey the resources. The logistics of that were too much for my
young mind.
At that time
also, the first few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki radio active fall out was
creating all kinds of monsters, human and otherwise, Giant Crabs came forth,
fifty foot men, even the greatest of them all, matching Frankenstein, The
Creature From The Black Lagoon. After
Bikini and Eniwetok anything was possible.
Aliens
landed, as in The Day The Earth Stood Still, to check out Earth’s suitability
to join the Intergalactic Peace League.
This was shortly after WWII and during the Korean War so naturally the
savage earth people were found wanting and not needed to disturb the peace
prevailing throughout the intergalactic League.
So, aliens, in this case Klaatu and Gort, hopped back in their Saucer
leaving us with the admonition that they would check back in a few thousands of
years to see if we had evolved.
Meanwhile,
perhaps hundreds of saucers hovered over Earth from near space carefully
observing us, occasionally crashing, once near Roswell, New Mexico where the
search for the wreckage still goes on.
Abductions continued.
A parallel
development that was as influential as the space operas was the development of
the super heroes. Perhaps the first of
the super heroes were creations of the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs with
his creations of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Carter coming from the heavier gravity and
atmosphere of Earth had actual super powers on Mars while if Tarzan didn’t
actually have super powers he could certainly do what no other human beings
could do.
But, Time
does not have a stop, or even stand still.
Science and technology were rapidly moving ahead, especially in the
print medium. Comic strips in the newspapers
had been around from the 1890s but in the early thirties some genius invented
what would become the graphic novel today, that is comic books. The comics were turned into illustrated four
color folders at a dime a piece. How the
comic book would have developed isn’t clear. Since super heroes such as the
Shadow and the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage had arisen to compete with the like of
John Carter and Tarzan something extra was needed for the comic books, fortunately for the idiom a man named Adolf
Hitler had assumed he governance of Germany.
Adolf Hitler was a bete noir of the Jews and he stimulated their
imagination in the US so that in 1938 the first issue of Superman (original
title Action Comics) was released and the super hero with truly upper human
powers and the very latest scientific gadgets came into existence. Batman, Capt. America and a host of others
followed on the heels of Superman while WWII which started supplied prime grist
for the comic book mill. The comics were
a Jewish enterprise and the super heroes were therefore Jewish. And under the care of the very Jewish Stan
Lee have remained so down to this day.
Aiding the
super hero phenomenon since translated to film was the emergence of more
science in the form of CGI (Computer Generated Images). With that addition the impossible could be
made visible so that the human mind no longer had to grapple with mere reality. It conquered reality. Neo-Reality had arrived. Perhaps Faerieland had won after all.
Put all the
above together and a new alternate reality or Land of Faerie had been created
to fill he void left when Science had destroyed the possibility of the old Land
of Faerie, even on Mars. The Universe
was huge and there was no way to either prove or disprove the universe of Star
Trek, a place where no man had gone before or was likely to go in the future. So, that fairyland is secure.
The Land of
Faerie was only one imagined realm that had to be dealt with, there was also
the imagined kingdom of God or the gods that was challenged out of existence. That in Part 2b to follow.
