Animated Americans

The other day we guys were watching X-men the final stand and suddenly the topic shifted to animation and comics. This is kind of surreal discussion two under utilized MBA’s have just on the eve of New Year. After a few shots of vodka we realized that most comics are from the United States and the reason for that was that the Americans did not have their own mythology.

After all who is Batman? A dark troubled New Yorker. Similar analogies can be found for most superheros in American publications, Spiderman is the boy next door turned avenger, and Wolverine is an army experiment gone wrong.

Americans just don’t have any mythology of their own!

The villains and dark guys portrayed in these comics are as superficial as they don’t even have any deep philosophy. No real motive to be the villain, except some form of material greed or redemption. So what we have in animation is a weak storyline with quirky instances of good vs. evil without any logical reasoning as why the two sides are hell bent upon finishing each other. The good vs. evil concept may have been borrowed from the bible as one finds an immature portrayal of darkness as stark and not grey.

This is unlike Europe and Asia where characters like Beowulf, Siegfried or legendary Samurais dominated.

The White Man’s Burden (read violence). Very few Asians or Europeans outside the Muslim world would believe in defending their dogmatic positions like the American does. Very few fundamentalists per se exist outside America some exceptions can be the right wing in Germany and the VHP in India.

But to their credit the Americans are not fatalistic. Even when the comic villain is threatening with the end of the world the superhero looks at it as a problem and would definitely try to find the solution. This is something the Americans have adopted from their European colonial past. The ability to solve problems like the problem of preserving meat led them to Asia particularly India.

We always travel under constraints like from point A to point B, we are not very comfortable travelling seeking a solution to a given set of problems and even if we travel it would be within a well defined space within our comfort zone. Americans on the contrary feel that there is a solution to every problem and they spend their fruitfully seeking the solution rather than lamenting their fate.

Politically speaking other nation has aggressed as much as the Americans. Coming half way across the world just to protect and project their dogma as they did in Korea and Vietnam is just an example of their resolve, to protect their thinking or as they call it the American way of life (mostly the liberties and excesses of CAPITALISM as their religion).

One good point to note is also the usage of a 20 word vocabulary (could start with F***), key words/terms these days: terror/threat, sex-tape, corporations, CIA……, And of course Oil and GAS(as it comes out). One does need to add a few things here that in spite of the liberal democratic standards in the country the state and the citizens act to the contrary so arguments in civil liberty lag the electoral dominance, I guess its one query for the readership to deliberate on.

By
Parinay Pokhriyal
Senior Business Consultant
Covansys-A CSC Company

Dr Vikram Venkateswaran
Senior Business Consultant
Covansys-A CSC Company