Evil Firefly Haters

I think we can all agree that our good pal Evil Willie is not stupid and not a vicious troll. I take responsibility for inviting him here. We're beyond rude insults and calling him a moron. I'm pretty sure his day job isn't working at McDonalds. (Sorry to all you burger flippers)

His opinion is very unpopular but I must admit I am learning a lot about the Civil War and Firefly and Browncoats.

Deep down I just know Willie will see the Firefly movie and secretly be excited for it, and the movie will be so good he'll have a lot more to write about.

I don't agree with Willie Zaza in any way and I wish he'd write a positive review of Firefly.

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Zampano,

Thanks for your thoughtful and intelligent reply. You make a good point about violence and racism in Europe (and you make it much better than saintproverbius did, too). I would think that someone from Germany could certainly appreciate the danger of romanticizing a violent past. I can certainly see a marked similarity between Confederate apologists and Holocaust deniers, can't you? There are still people in this country who seriously put forward the idea that African people were happier as slaves much as there are people in Germany (and the US and elsewhere) who claim the Holocaust never happened. Considering this I think you can see why I have such a violent reaction to Confederate nostalgia.

You wrote:

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Right now, we are starting an "americanization" of our society, as unemployed people are required from now on to take on any job, no matter how low the wages. Even if it's $2,50 an hour.

Surely, this will make our society more competitive.
It will definitely make some people richer

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Frankly, that doesn't sound like "Americanization." True "Americanization" would not involve getting anyone a job (low-paid or otherwise), it would involve firing a lot of people from their jobs, shipping those jobs overseas (to hideous sweat-shops reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch's depiction of Hell) and then denying the Americans their unemployment benefits because "Americans should be independent and self-reliant!" What you call "Americanization" would be considered socialism by most Americans. Remember, this is the country that elected George W. Bush president (sort of).

Thanks also for encouraging me to keep writing.

-Willie Zaza

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To Succatash:

Perhaps I will take up your challenge and write an article on "What I like about Firefly." I didn't actually hate it that much (other than the Confederacy thing). It was much better than "Fastlane" for instance, but nowhere near as good as "Homicide: Life on the Street." http://members.aol.com/hlotslinks/ It was somewhere in there in terms of quality. I'm sure it was also much better than "Tru Calling," though I haven't actually seen that show.

No my job isn't working at McDonald's. It's much more lame than that - sitting around waiting to see if I got into grad school (which I'm sure I didn't), so I have plenty of time to rent the DVD's and take another look.

This is becoming entirely too cozy. Perhaps we should return to calling each other morons.

By the way, thanks for telling everyone you invited me here. I'm not so much of a dickhead that I would just come to this site out of sheer boredom and crap all over your favorite show - it's Succatash's fault, Firefly fans.

-Willie Zaza

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Originally posted by wz:
I don't know if the detail you're referring to was in my original essay or the second one. In the first it was there to explain my dislike of Confederate nostalgia (and why I think it is based on faulty history), in the second it was there to answer cloth-eared criticism from the posts on this website. In neither case was it meant to warn the nation of the rise of the Old South thanks to Firefly.

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Yet there's actually very little direct parallel between the U.S. Civil War and the War of Unification in Firefly, as I've pointed out. In fact, many of your objections about the happenstances about the Civil War in your first article simply aren't analogous to what is in the presentation of the background of Firefly.

You can't even really compare the crew of Firefly to Jessie James, even though you did, because most of the crimes they commit really aren't that bad of crimes - or he refuses to do them if they think there will be someone unjustly harmed by their actions. Examples would include:

Stealing food from a derelict Alliance transport. The Alliance considers this illegal, but that food is probably better spent having people eat it than it is just wasting away on that dead transport, don't you think? No one is really harmed by this theft.

The Train Job, where he steals some Alliance medicine headed to Paradiso, a mining town. They didn't know it was medicine when they stole it, and they didn't know what the circumstances were of the people there. Once he finds out, he returns the medicine to the people and returns the money for the job to the person that hired him. Of course, the person who hired him considered this a double cross, and captured, tortured, even killed Mal and revived him to torture him some more.

In Ariel, they steal medicine from an Alliance hospital. Before deciding to do this, they wanted to know for sure whether or not this would harm anyone. It was established before this episode that the Alliance also did refuse treatment to certain people. Later on, in an episode after they steal the medicine, there was some concern as to whether or not the medicine would make it to the right hands.

Of course, there are cases where the crew steals something of value, like the Lassiter Laser Pistol, and keeps it. I'm sure this hurt the owner, but this is a far cry from Jessie James' bank/train robberies where loss of life was acceptable.

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What is a plantation if not a factory? An agrarian one yes, but nothing like Jefferson's idea of a yeoman farmer's homestead and quite a lot like a any New England sweatshop. If you want to get into the Haymarket Riots, the Pullman Strike and the Molly Maguires, I can do that too.

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I think the main difference would be the word wage in the term wage slaves.

Even if you want to say that there's a bit of cross over there, plantations are factories and what not, I think it's unfair to say that the modern day corporations where the CEOs make billions off the work of the minimum wage hourlies is only due to the Southern plantation owners and not the descendents of the Northern Factory owners who paid little to nothing and disposed of workers when they weren't useful anymore. After all, there were a lot more factories in the industrial booming North than there were plantations in the South.

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You make a good point about violence and racism in Europe (and you make it much better than saintproverbius did, too).

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He made his point before I asked the rhetorical question about racism in Europe. Europe has a long history of anti-semitism going back through the Crusades, as well as more modern examples of Nazi and Neonazi movements in many nations. And yes, many of those movements also claim the holocost is a piece of fictional work.

To say that racism is only an American problem because of one event that occured over five years ago done by three ex-convicts is ludicrious.

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According to some interviews with Joss, he was trying to separate from Confederate nostalgia and from the myth of the lone Western hero the racism that's so deeply intertwined in them. For the part of the American population that immigrated here voluntarily, the appeal of the "rebel" figure is understandable. All of them had an ancestor or ancestors who got fed up with how things were being run at home and came here looking to get out from under. When you combine that with the nation's political origin in seceding from its colonial overlords, it's not hard to see the attraction to some aspects of the Confederate rebellion from people who don't buy the racist aspects.

On the other hand, Africans were forcibly brought here and enslaved, and Native Americans displaced so all these immigrant Americans could prosper. There's no way of thinking about the South or the West without these uncomfortable facts coming up. So Joss did a test: what if the rebelliion against the central government really was about the issues of individual sovereignty vs. central authority, unmarked by race? what if the colonized "frontier" were empty of indigenous inhabitants?

I can still see the argument that this is just a dodge to enable those nostalgic for the Confederacy or for the extermination and displacement of the Indians to glory in a restaging of their core myths under cover of the racism having been sanitized out of them. I think it rather lets us look at those myths more dispassionately and to examine the individualism, rebelliousness, and wanderlust that are so much a part of the American character. I do wish we had a better idea of the specific issues that arose between the Alliance and the Independents. It's all too conveniently vague at this juncture. Clarification would probably have been forthcoming.

Good luck on the grad school applications, wz. Academic careers are great; I've had one for 30 years now. Instead of just posting on the web, you can happily hypothesize and speculate about your chosen field in print and to eager students--and get paid for it.

Cardie

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To Cardie,

Thanks for the good wishes.

I already posted this link, so you may have already read it, but since it touches on some of the same subjects you brought up, I thought I'd post it again:


http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-03/no-02/talk/

You might find it interesting.

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