Across The Pond: K'ung L'ung meets Post-Modernism and One Must Die!!

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This year was the tenth anniversary of the Howard Liberal government in Australia. For my imaginary vast horde of American readers, I should explain that Australian Liberals aren’t the wishy-washy lefties of the U.S, but are in fact, reactionary swine, usually only liberal about the rights of large corporations and the rich. To put it less emotionally, they’re where Republicans would be if they were in Australia (and will go up against the same wall when I’m Lord and Master of the universe).


Iron Fist gives the Australian Government the finger in a number of inscrutable ways

Unless you live here in Australia, you’re doubtless thinking that the tenth anniversary of John Howard’s becoming our worst PM ever is as relevant and exciting as the thirty-third anniversary of the Milton Keynes men’s lacrosse association. There is a relevance to comics which I will explain. After a decade of power, Mr H is looking around for new enemies to thwart. Whilst keeping an eye on traditional thwartees such as asylum seekers and people who work for a living, he’s put his sights on post-modernism in the classroom. It has come our leader’s attention that there are trendy post-modernists teaching our kids and that those kids are not learning Shakespeare and Proper Literature, but are watching movies, writing blogs and being told that everything is a ‘text’ and that all ‘texts’ are equally valid. All texts are not equally valid and it’s time some common sense came back to our classrooms. Besides teachers never vote Liberal so he’s got nothing to lose by getting up their noses.

I’m in a position to help Mr Howard here, because I’m training to be a teacher and am at the cutting edge of the ‘all texts are valid’ vs ‘just teach them that Shakespeare is terrific’ debate.

So this seems like an auspicious occasion to compare some widely differing texts and let our worst ever PM know how the relative validities worked out. It would be nice to say that I was doing this in the name of science but the sad fact is I read about six different things at a time and just can’t concentrate for a moment (I’m chatting as I write this and will put on the radio any moment now).
First up is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, which is so canonical that it was featured in ‘the Western Canon’ by terribly smart lit critic Harold Bloom and had Audrey Hepburn in the movie.

I’m also reading ‘The Essential Iron Fist’ by Roy Thomas and a bunch of fairly undistinguished artists. This is not in the Western Canon and is just the sort of thing that would lead to excitable articles about ‘what rubbish they learn in our schools’ were it to be taught there. I don’t think this will make it to Australian schools because it is Not Relevant to Australian kids lives. We leftie post-modern teachers like our relevance earnest and evenly balanced. Iron Fist is probably too much fun to make the grade, being full of uncomplicated fun for boys.

Last, but not least, I’m reading ‘The Consolation of Joe Cinque’ by Helen Garner. This is more canonical than Iron Fist, because it only has words, which is how literature should be. Nor does it contain any pulse pounding kung-fu action, the omission of which has always been a problem with Garner’s work.


Helen Garner looks thoughtful in monochrome, whilst secretly wishing she was funky black detective Misty Knight

I will assess each book against three criteria; pulse-pounding kung-fu action, Canonical capacity to Improve young Minds and Evil Post-Modern Trendiness.

Let’s take them from the top. War and Peace comes highly recommended. It’s a by-word for long books (people say things like ‘this book is long, but it’s not War and Peace y’know’). The dust jacket is full of comments about this being not a book read, but a book you live. How I’m supposed to live War and Peace, I don’t know. Perhaps I could buy an enormous Russian country estate and patronise some serfs. Then again, the introduction mentions someone who read the thing ten times and then thought he’d understood his life, so maybe I should give it ten more times. I worry that I’d only understand that I’d wasted almost a decade of my time. The book has moments of good observation; battles that are a mess, hypocritical commanders and so on, but there is a lot of waffly mysticism that seems to amount to Russia being the best country in the world, particularly if one is on the top of the heap. Peasants have a mystical understanding of What Life is Really All About, but this understanding seems to depend on them staying somewhere between dirt and farmyard animals in the social hierarchy. Those passages make me wish Napoleon would hurry up and conquer Russia and put Tolstoy and his mates somewhere non-mystical. I can’t say I’m a better person for reading War and Peace, but the fact that I’m reading it may have something to do with my having gone to a private school. These schools are subsidised by people who can’t afford to send their kids there, so Mr H would be happy that I’m fulfilling the promise by reading non-popular literature.


Leo Tolstoy counfounds expectations by not having a huge beard.

Pulse Pounding Kung-Fu Action: None, although the fighting scenes are alright. People get blown up. There is a duel, although at no stage do the duelists put all of their chi into one fist for an almighty punch.
Canonical Capacity to Improve Young Minds: Well, the ruminations about the meaning of life would be meaningful to people who are already thinking about such things and who have very long attention spans. So none.

Evil Post-Modern Trendiness: None, although particularly trendy teachers could chop the book up into its component chapters and throw them around the class at random. Or just study the film – that would be a post modern thing to do, although the film is so long it feels like an old fashioned teaching chore.

Essential Iron Fist has several advantages over War and Peace. Although this is one of Marvel’s bulky, small-phone book sized efforts, it clocks in at a lot less than one thousand pages. (SPOILERS WARNING – mind you, nobody complains about War and Peace spoilers)…

Daniel Rand loses his mother and father on the way to a mystical city a lot like Shangri-la somewhere in the Himalayas. He is taken in by a group of martial-arts oriented monks whose hobbies are meditation, cultivating spiritual strength, kicking the tripes out of each other and wearing goofy masked robes.

I know that our government just wants to be able to say that kids have at least looked at King Lear and are unlikely to see comics as an acceptable alternative. However the Liberal Junta is also very big on values. They don’t practice any themselves but would like kids to be taught some so that we’ll have a more ethical government when they grow up.
Iron Fist is chock full of the sort of values the tory swine profess to like. For one, there’s effort. Trying very hard is something Danny does, so he can eventually get out of the mystical city and kill the man who killed his Dad (so there’s your family values). Along the way, he tries so hard that he gets ‘the Iron fist’, meaning that he can put all his ‘chi’ in one fist and punch through brick walls and giant robots. He never uses this power at the beginning of fights, as I’d be tempted to do (which would make for very short comics), but waits until the baddie is just about to deliver the death-blow. When Danny gets back to New York, he discovers that he’s fantastically rich, which is always nice. Being rich and feeling good about it is a major Howard government priority, so much so that they gave a state funeral to Australia’s single richest man so that his family wouldn’t have to pick up the tab.

There’s a nostalgic thrill with Iron Fist for me. I read it in between study sessions in 1979 and I wanted to see if the story I remembered was still cool. It’s a fundamental rule of living in The Future as we do, that any childish pleasure can be experienced as often as you like (well, apart from puberty). Here’s one that worked perfectly both in 79 and in 06: Danny is having one of his first civilian moments, wandering around New York looking normal but with no idea how to be normal. A baseball from a nearby social game flies over his head and without thinking he catches it. We see a picture of the young Danny doing likewise and are told that Danny’s teacher ‘The Thunderer’ said that what the mind forgets, the body remembers. It’s an affecting moment, so much so I forgot the silliness of having a teacher called ‘The Thunderer’ (mine was called Mr Adlum). He then proceeds to punch his iron fist through the head of an attacking robot and rescue a hot-looking Asiatic princess which was and is more exciting than most of my Saturday afternoons.

The rest of the book, the bits I didn’t read when I was sixteen, build up a back story and various rules. Danny can use the Iron Fist to cure himself of disease, he can’t use it too often or he feels all weak and drained. He gains an afro-wearing black girlfriend called Misty Knight and gets some very 1970s-style talkings to about women being just as good as men. Our most evil of Prime Ministers would not appreciate this undermining of traditional gender roles. ‘honest John’ (as we call him to show our sense of humour) is too canny to ever say that women should be back in the kitchen, but complains about ‘political correctness’ a lot and tries to encourage women to exercise their choice by staying home. In teaching kids about Misty Knight and her equally bolshie friend the ‘lady Samurai’ Colleen, I’d have to make it clear that being a samurai or funky kung-fu private eye are only some of the choices young women can make and that there is NOTHING wrong with staying home and making children for the Reich, sorry Commonwealth of Australia.

Pulse Pounding Kung-Fu Action: Scads! From the very first page, where young Daniel is fighting a bunch of monks with serpent masks on. Not an issue passes without at least one flying monkey roundhouse chop. No complaints here.

Canonical Capacity to Improve Young Minds: Like most of the 70s kung-fu boom, Iron Fist has a lot of wise-ish sayings about stillness, eternity and so on. And there are identity crises aplenty, which is something teachers always like when teaching adolescents.

Evil Post-Modern Trendiness: It’s a comic. There are pictures in it! Take that, establishment, ‘King Lear’ teaching powers that be! Sadly, the traditional gender roles conventional story line mean that Iron Fist is not post-modern enough for our schools.

‘The Consolation of Joe Cinque’ is about a young man who was murdered by his girlfriend in Canberra in 1996. The girlfriend drugged him with Rohypnol and finished him off with an overdose of heroin. She wound up doing only four years in prison, in a large part due to her being pretty bonkers. I don’t feel obliged to do a spoiler warning here, due to the fact that Helen Garner fans are far too literary to get upset by spoilers. Besides the back cover of the book spoilers it for you anyway.

Pulse-pounding kung-fu action: Nil, although there is murder and craziness aplenty. There are also drugs – I had no idea Canberra was so awash with heroin. Most of the excitement comes from joining Garner in disapproving of the lawyers involved.

Canonical Capacity to Improve Young Minds: well the book isn’t in the Western Canon yet and may well be forgotten in ten years time. I wouldn’t see it outliving Lord of the Flies. Mr Howard might like it for being more difficult than a comic, but on the other hand this book is written by an old style 70s feminist leftie and the PM never forgets a grudge.


John Howard watches a post-modernist being torn on the rack.

Evil Post modernTrendiness: Not much. Garner rambles on a bit about how we define innocence and hurt, the meaning of ‘guilt’, the feelings of the family and so on. At about the half-way mark, I realised that Garner was just doing a more drawn out version of the tabloids ‘This Killing Scum Walks Free’ stuff. The difference is that ‘The Consolation of Joe Cinque’ has a profoundish picture of an apple on the front and Garner’s mug on the back and the book isn’t available at supermarket checkouts, so middle class readers can enjoy the same emotions as people who read The Sun, whilst feeling superior to them.
The bad guys are the murderer and her family, who don’t show any remorse, various lawyers who try to get her off. The good guys are the victim, his very nice family and one of the prison guards. Oh and of course Helen Garner, who is nosing about and being earnest about it all.

Conclusions: Young people in Australia should know how to read. The Melbourne Central Library should buy all of the Marvel Essential Collections. Marvel should put out the rest of Iron Fist in a single collection. Tolstoy should have used more flying dragon kicks and Helen Garner should un-purse her lips for a bit and go write a musical comedy. Oh and John Howard should be strapped to the front of a humvee and used as a bull-bar in Iraq somewhere.

Too tough? Maybe, but I won’t bow to political correctness in pursuit of educational excellence.

Floyd Kermode is as sick as a dog right now and feeling quite cranky. He will be back to his normal sunny self next week. Probably.