Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Bernie Sanders, cnn, Comics, donald trump, entertainment, marvel, Sebastian Shaw, Van Jones

How Comics Have Influence Politics With Van Jones Part 2

Yesterday we ran the first part of an interview with Van Jones, a former Green Jobs adviser to President Barack Obama, a current CNN Political Analyst and a life long comic book fan. Jones made new in comic circles when he compared Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to the Marvel Comic's super-villain Sebastian Shaw of the Hellfire Club. Today we continue the conversation about how comic books have effected society and politics as well as diving into the current presidential election.

DW: What first made me contact you about an interview was your use of comic references on CNN. You compared Donald Trump to Sebastian Shaw from the Hellfire Club (which sounds like a place Trump would own) and the Spider-Man Great Power/Great Responsibility line. You joked about it after on Twitter, but was it a conscious thing to work comic references into your commentary or was it just anecdotal at the time?

VJ: It's who I am. It's how I think. I realized as I was listening to the conversation about Donald Trump that these poor people who have never contemplated super-villains were at a loss for how to think about it. Now obviously as a Democrat I see Trump as something at least like The Joker, possibly Galactus. I have a whole repertoire of super-villains that come to mind when I'm listening to this guy. One of them is of course Sebastian Shaw because the harder you hit him the stronger he gets and that seemed, for a while at least, to be exactly what was going on with Trump. Or at least that was what the establishment feared. And as a comic book reader that is an idea that can be expressed in very few syllables… Sebastian Shaw. You don't have to spend a half hour walking around the barn trying to come up with the right explanation. Now I know you have to be a pretty strong X-Men fan to remember Shaw, because even in the movie he appeared he didn't really make a big dip into the popular culture.

I think if you spend your childhood, or even your adulthood, engaged in comics you have an advantage over pretty much everyone in every circumstance. What comics do is the distill conflict down into the bare elements, good and evil, courage and cowardice, team work versus individualism, greed versus generosity. It is very elemental stuff and from that they pull these archetypes. And when you have your action figures, comic books and costumes and you're acting these things out… well that's what happens in life. Those very things play out in families, in the work place and in politics. And if you've wrestled with where you come down with all of that stuff growing in life and it's foundational to who you are then you have a bunch of neurological shortcuts when conflicts arise.

DW: Since we talked about a comic equivalent for Donald Trump, do you have any character comparisons for the other candidates like Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, Etc?

VJ: None of the others are really colorful enough to have gotten my attention in that way. I have to think about that. And I will think about that, but nothing leaps to mind.

DW: I want to drift now a little into politics and start with the Senate Republicans refusal to even sit down and talk with the supreme court nominee, Merrick Garland. On the surface it seems to be part of the 'stop Obama at all costs' plan that Mitch McConnell started as soon as Obama set foot into the White House. I'm curious if you think there may be an underlining fear motivating them that a more liberal court would take away some of the things that help keep conservatives in power like Citizens United, gerrymandering and voter suppression laws?

VJ: I think it's three things. Stop Obama no matter what has just become their reflective move. Number two, they really do fear what a liberal court might allow or stop. You've got a good list there. But those are political self-preservation, but there is also tribal self-preservation. American politics is no longer just partisan but it's also tribal, there is a fusion between political ideas and personal identity. It's beyond the normal hyper-partisan behavior. Things like Roe v Wade becomes irrationally important. They would have to deal with the referee no longer being on your side.

But the other thing is that you have a whole bunch of very active and mobilized grass roots conservatives just off stage who are prepared to primary people. These kamikaze primary challenges in a very volatile environment can really scare a senator who says "I'm going to have a lot more grief from holding the hearings than any gain I might get." So I think it's the reflective knee-jerk anti-Obama things, with some self-preservation and ideological fears about what a third Obama appointee might mean. Plus, you have the folks standing just off stage with the political equivalent of baseball bats and switchblades. So you can see why these guys are saying, "I think I'll pass."

DW: This may be a type of question you get a lot. We seem to be in a strange political environment. You look at Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and thet feel like protest candidates that in most elections they would've been around awhile, gotten their time to say their peace and then faded away. And the more mainstream candidates would have taken over. But we're not seeing that this time.

VJ: Nope.

DW: What is it about the particular cycle and is it in part because of things like social media and the 24-hour news networks that these types of candidates can access a bigger audience and get their message out to more people?

VJ: It's a couple things. On one hand, conditions are very very bad for people in the United States, especially compared to their expectations. And I think sometimes the people on the coasts who have the protection of good education and are doing reasonably well don't really get how much pain ordinary people are in and how much fear they have economically. The idea that your kids are going to be worse off than you are and you may be worse off than you ever thought you'd be. That's a real daily problem in the country and there hasn't been a lot of attention paid to that in terms of solving it. I think you have to start with that fact that people of all races, especially in the middle class, working class and poor, are really really hurting and scared. That's number one.

Number two is you've had eight years of the Republican party and a lot of right-wing conservative media just whipping people up in ways that just don't make sense. Mitt Romney said "Obama is terrible, elect me and I'll give you 6% unemployment by the end of my first term." We're at 4.5% unemployment now. Newt Gingrich said, "Obama is terrible, elect me and I'll give you $3.00 a gallon gas." We're at $2.00 a gallon now, at some place $1.50. They all said, "Elect me because immigration is out of control." We now have net negative immigration from Mexico as we speak. There have been more deportations under this president than any president prior. They all say Obama is horrible on national security, but 3,000 people died under George W. Bush on 9/11. On Obama's worst day when it came to Islamic Terrorism, it wasn't 3,000 people, or 2,000 people, or 1,000 people or 100 people… it was 14 people in San Bernardino.

If Romney had been elected in 2012 and had this record, Republicans would be saying, "thank God the genius Romney saved us from that socialist lunatic Obama." Obama has dramatically outperformed the promises their candidates made to their own voters. So there is nothing left for them do but go completely insane. All your legitimate criticisms are gone. Obama is going to be a disaster? Well, 20 million more people have health insurance. You go through the list, none of us are in FEMA camps, they said Obama was building FEMA camps. But none of it was true.

And then you get to the social media / reality TV nature of society. And Trump really understood that if you say something mean on Twitter you get more followers. If you are outrageous on a reality TV show, you don't get fewer viewers, you get more. And sometimes the villain is the key to the success of a reality TV show. We all thought Trump was climbing over the wall from entertainment to politics, in fact he pulled politics over the wall into the world of entertainment. And now we're in this 24-hour reality TV show where he's the star. Even with him playing the villain he's the star. And it's taking a while for the political system to adjust to that. FDR used radio in a brilliant way and changed the game. Kennedy and Reagan used television in a brilliant way and changed the game. Obama used the Internet with on-line fund raising and viral videos and changed the game. And now Trump is using the tactics of social media and reality TV to change the game.

And Bernie is a version of that in that he is able to keep going, even though the media has tried to black him out. He can stay alive with on-line fund raising, viral videos and rallies. So it is a very strange moment. In the Democratic party, the rebels are going to be defeated but the question is do they stay. While in the Republican party it looks like the rebels are going to win, whether that is Cruz or Trump, and the question is whether the establishment will stay. But all of this is driven by economic pain and social changes that are now expressing themselves in politics.

In terms of reality TV, in the 70s the shows were relatively responsible. Shows like Mary Tyler Moore, Good Times and All in The Family were wholesome and when they were edgy they were edgy towards more social responsibility not less. Reality TV is the opposite, it's just garbage. You have a society that is pre-adapted for this type of garbage from the Kardashians and all that. That then makes it more possible for a Trump to break through.

Tomorrow will be part 3 of the interview focusing on the effects comics has had on society and the political world. 

Photos take from www.vanjones.net

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