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X-Force and the Refugee

A comic with political content runs certain risks. It may endanger someone through speaking truth to power; or it may annoy readers by speaking stupidity to reason. More subtly, though, it can raise issues perhaps best left dormant not for the lack of moral substance to the positions involved, but because the points of contention have no immediate (and possibly no long-term) remedy. In such cases, such material invites renewal of a conflict that had somewhat died down before anyone has time to heal the bruises left by the last bout, and all to no particular purpose.

By my reckoning, the latter case seems to apply to the semi-farcical events of a recent run of X-Force, by writer Peter Milligan and artist Michael Allred, a story arc centered around the unhappy story of Elian Gonzales, told through a proxy with the cheesy-sounding name of Paco Perez.

Comics with political content can also provide certain services, especially when they manage to force upon the reader self-analysis that sloth, disinterest, or otherwise-directed attention might have avoided. In this case, we have here a piece that doesn't necessarily reveal the substantialness or emptiness of certain common political positions as point out that the condition of a target audience matters a great deal with political material. Insight properly applied can penetrate self-congratulation, dubious premises, and thought patterns that occur as a path of least resistance rather than real analysis; but ideas have a much harder time contending with simple exhaustion of the observer, and in this piece Milligan and Allred will very likely fail to get any point, however meaningful, across to readers due to the consequences of previous, relentless media bombardment that, for many, burned out the ability to care any more about the situations they describe.

One Last Blow to the Dead Horse

On the odd chance - and I mean very odd - that some reader has managed to escape the media phenomena surrounding Elian Gonzales, the following paragraphs summarize a few salient points, hopefully without too much of my own personal slant intruding. Yes, the term "flogging a dead horse" fairly applies to such repetition, ad infinitum et nauseam; however, courtesy requires me to consider that someone may have failed to see the horse flogged in the first place.

As recorded in uncountable newspaper column inches and magazine and television stories, Elian Gonzales came to America as one of a set of Cuban refugees who put to the water to escape that troubled island, surviving where the others had not, including his mother.

Fidel Castro demanded the child returned. People sent the boy huge piles of overpriced status toys; other people told stories about the role of sharks and dolphins in Elian's return to dry land. Elian Gonzales' relatives in Cuba preferred to keep him, and legal wrangles ensued. Protesters waved signs. Celebrities made statements on television, consistent with the latter-day delusion that develops in an entertainment culture that people who appear on television somehow thereby acquire an otherwise unattainable expertise in public affairs.

Finally, INS goons wearing body armor and carrying machine guns stormed the house where the boy temporarily resided, seized him, and handed him over to a Cuban delegation in Washington, D.C., from which location he returned to Cuba, to enjoy such benefits as may accrue from growing up there.

A Far Cry from Our Finest Moment

From the outset, so no one need suspect me of some disingenuous attempt to cloak a position behind a discussion of some comic books, I freely admit I favored letting Gonzales remain in the United States. I have a godfather who became my godfather as an illegal alien from Mexico, later to receive one of the amnesties of the mid-eighties; another man, who could have become my brother-in-law, sought citizenship through an attempt to marry one of my stepsisters in order to avoid having the INS to send him back to Iran for probable imprisonment; more recently, a close friend of mine and the father of a five-year-old girl here in Texas ended up deported back to India for having (rather foolishly) failed to maintain the appropriate paperwork; in the eighties, I attempted to help a Jordanian escape deportation via signing an affidavit pointing out he had worked for years at a job with me and had an American wife; and, finally, my own family came to America - several generations before the creation of the United States - more as refugees than as colonists, with the hope that coming here would mean that Cromwell and his goons would not kill us for having practiced some wrong flavor of Protestantism not to his liking. All this said, one might suspect I incline to give certain kinds of refugee the benefit of a doubt.

In general, however, we Americans did not really distinguish ourselves as truly living in a Shining City on a Hill. Beginning from day one, we created an enormous media carnival that drummed the story into so many heads for so many days that a great many otherwise sober Americans seem to have altogether lost their ability to care about the single life most impacted nor about the larger issues implied by the situation. Those who did retain an interest in the outcome of the situation broke into two principal factions that managed to distinguish themselves mainly for a new, unselfconscious kind of self-serving inconsistency. The term hypocrisy, though overused in contemporary discourse almost unto the point of meaningless, seems apt here where so many chose to apply moral standards that otherwise yielded to convenience or whim.

Let us begin with the "let-him-stay" crowd, my own faction. Ignoring, for the moment, Gonzales' family in Cuba (who acted as I would hope my own might, had I found myself in similar circumstances to Elian's), we encountered a great many folks who mainly favored keeping the boy here as a kind of indicator of their disapproval of Castro. The boy thus became a trophy to wave under Castro's nose, a tool to rankle him. While one can make an excellent case for justifying political asylum on the basis that Gonzales came from a country whose soldiers will shoot those who try to leave, we seem to have dwelled on the specific flavor of tyranny, as though fatigues, beards, cigars, and selected quotations from Engels and Marx make murder, assault, slavery, rape and robbery somehow unpalatable in a way the deeds do not do themselves. Furthermore, the sympathy for this unfortunate refugee seemed rather precise, almost surgical; refugees from brutal, though non-Marxist, regimes often find themselves treated as invaders as they try to escape to America. And, most damningly, much of the crowd that sought to keep Gonzales here had little sympathy in general for Spanish-speakers entering the country, should they fail to demonstrate the necessary youth and cuteness to justify residence here. Some of Elian's advocates here would suffer little moral distress over a policy of deportation of every other Gonzales in America.

On the "send-him-away" side, absurd and inconsistent thought also marred the explicit claims of their position and threw light on the actual, implicit, but generally unstated bases of their posture. In some cases, a simple dread of one more resident of this country who spoke Spanish as his first language inclined American citizens to wish to drive this boy back into the sea or beyond to Cuba.In other cases, the notion that someone such as Elian's mother might want to live in America more than some other place deeply, deeply offended people who had already voted with their feet and come to the same decision, despite vociferous arguments to the contrary. Some folks recognized the controversy as a kind of referendum on the morality of the Cuban communist state and reflexively took a position that (if Castro wants the boy) Castro should have the boy. Others proclaimed that the concerned Americans who sent him stuff - clothes, food, but especially decadent heaps of toys - sought to corrupt him away from his Cuban tropical paradise by bald faced bribery. Filmmaker and papparazzi Michael Moore, who does not and will not live in Cuba, for his part, publically derided Elian's mother for having the ill judgment to wish to escape from free health care in Cuba. Let us consider, for a moment, the circumstances that do and do not inspire mothers to risk the lives of themselves and their children before we decide whether Mister Moore here sought to feed us fertilizer with a steam shovel. Carrying a racist kind of demonization to a new level of chicness, some excoriated the Florida Cuban community for daring to support the cause of the family attempting to take the child in; the term "fascist" frequently flew through the air even as many people blithely ignored the history that drove so many Cubans to Florida in the first place. We must, evidently, understand "fascist" to mean "desiring to avoid execution or imprisonment," a definition which implicates most of rational humanity. Furthermore, some strange bedfellows chimed in, including the men's rights movement, some of whom argued for the repatriation of the refugee based on a fathers' rights claim, without really considering that in such totalitarian regimes, the state plays the role of father, mother, jailer, work gang foreman, torturer, executioner, and undertaker. And the INS, through heavy-handed methods used to execute a function more appropriate to one or two beat cops, showed their worst side in gloating about their methods afterwards, including issuing a commemorative coffee mug to celebrate how quickly an army of pseudo-soldiers in body armor and machine guns could overcome a house full of terrified and unarmed civilians.

I recall about this episode of our history that seldom had I seen so many pontificate about principles applied selectively and specifically that they withheld in general. By the end of the matter, a number of people wanted the kid returned to wards (or, really, wardens) in Cuba just to get the situation off their television screens. The prospect of changing the channel or turning off the cathode-ray hypnotist seems to have eluded them.

All of this leaves us with a moment in history that generally made us, as a people, display no particular virtues in the collective, in spite of some individual heroism cropping up in the sea of blunt and unconsidered invective. This, perhaps, makes the events apt material for a farce, though perhaps the time has not come when we care to see it.

Milligan's Farce

To begin with, I don't really know why the nickname "Paco" recurs as often as it does in comics when writers seek a Spanish name for a character. In a world with so many Gilbertos, Julio Cesars, Orlandos, and the occasional Hipolito and Ermilan, a richness of names of Greek, Latin, and Germanic origin make Hispanic nomenclature inherently variable enough that we could dispense with "Paco" for a while. However, on the other hand, as a diminutive of the more elegant and dignified Francisco, Paco perhaps need seem no less silly than, perhaps, our semantically similar "Frankie." To my own ear, writers who incline to pick Paco as one of a short list of overused names seem to want to recall Sancho Panza or Francisco "Pancho" Villa and therefore pick something that shares most of the phonemes of the one or two monikers they can recall.

That editorial paragraph about how writers should try harder when selecting names for Latin American characters having completed, next let us explore the actual concept Milligan explores with his own twist on the Elian Gonzales fiasco. Milligan begins more or less where the Gonzales story ended, with the boy in the hands of a communist power that some doubt intends very well for him.

Given the nature of X-books, however, the mutant angle has to come in somewhere, and not always through the principal characters themselves. Therefore, beginning with X-Force #117, we discover that some greater purpose underlay the vying of a superpower and a small dictator state over possession of a single child. This child, it seems, has the ability to secrete miraculous medicinal compounds into his bloodstream, making him a walking, living, breathing pharmacopeia, a human exemplar of the legendary healing powers of as-yet undiscovered medicinal plants in the vanishing rain forest.

With the boy's medicinal worth established, we have yet another series of angles from which to view the struggle. For America and the capitalist powers in general, Paco represents a dollar value to achieve through sale of the products of his metabolism, whether said metabolism continues into the future or not; for the communist power to which he plays hostage, he represents a source of hard-to-find medicines likely to remain in short supply, assuming his homeland labors like Cuba under the burden of blockades that could keep medicines from flowing into the country.

At some cost of loss of life, X-Force travels to the imaginary dictatorship to rescue the boy, some members thinking that "rescue" means what we expect it to in everyday parlance; i.e., release him from danger. Challenging a hail of bullets and an extraction from a mechanism that seemed to suck the medicines from Paco's form, the team brought the boy away from the Cuba-parody nation.

Orphan, however, dug further into the matter, and found that the goals that drove Coach to push for this mission did not include humanitarian ones. Instead, their conversation suggests that dollar signs flashing in front of the man's eyes inclined him to opt for selling the boy as medical supplies, and Orphan absconded with the lad to some unidentified location in Latin America, to place him with a guardian somewhere the X-Force and the powers pulling that team's purse strings could not find him. All in all, this tale seems to have found a happier ending than the real-world prototype that it imitated.

The Passing of the Moment

We have reached the moment of the dead horse and the implements used to flog it.

While many folks, not just Americans, may still entertain strong feelings about the entire Elian Gonzales debacle, we might observe - if so allowed by our own ability to view the matter with detachment - that this story appeared much too late to make any difference, either in shaping opinion or shaping policy. Combined with the degree of modifying the political context - after all, Elian's doppelganger here represented a prize because of his ability to generate sera and antitoxins from his blood, not because of the symbolic struggle between warring philosophies - the piece mainly seems most likely to reopen old wounds rather than incline readers from whatever folly they might, in their hearts, entertain about the matter.

One can find the symptoms of burnout in a number of places. First, that this story arc has a semi-humorous tone to it (consider the first scanned image on this page, for example). Second, do a web search on the name "Elian Gonzales" and see how long before you encounter the "Elian Picture Contest," where contributors submit doctored photographs of the INS goon pointing his machine gun at the boy so that the paramilitary types have the faces of various entertainers, politicians, or fictional creations of some kind of relevance or humorous import (Bert and Ernie, Michael Jackson, Clinton and Castro, or Darth Vader and the Emperor). Such pieces suggest that the fundamental points of contention, through repetition, moved beyond the point of annoying mantras and into the inherently satiric. After too much blather, the very mention of the subject becomes a joke itself, regardless of the ideas that made it important.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 276. Completed 23-SEP-2001.