THE Excuse

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Sometimes, geek world can be quite instructive.  I recently ran into a discussion of the new Spidey Flick, Spider-Man: Brand New Day that is chock full of spoilers, a full reading of which requires a very broad knowledge of both the movie based MCU and countless comic book series and loses itself in all this nerdy minutiae – hiding what is the very serious point.  The point is a moral one and it is vitally important.

I have long considered the superhero comics as our national epic – filling a role similar to The Odyssey for the Greeks and the Aeneid for the Romans – a grand tale that encapsulates, preserves and passes on the values that made the nation great.  And I think that was true when I was young and comics were created by WWII veterans – from Superman’s farm boy wholesomeness to Captain America’s deeply rooted patriotism to Batman’s work ethic and Iron Man’s industriousness, they were the things that made this nation great in the post-war era.  But they are also pop-culture and so they have morphed as our culture has morphed.

OK – back to the piece on Spidey’s new movie.  Do not follow the link if you are at all spoiler sensitive.  The pull quote I will present here will contain a spoiler, but out-of-context it will be difficult to sniff out for any but the most comic book astute, and the secret is pretty well out on this one anyway.

Jean has been given the Wanda Maximoff treatment of “I can do it, so I will, and I am justified because I am hurt.”

How has Jean been hurt? Well, in this film, her older sister Sara is also [redacted to avoid spoilers]. The two were also abandoned by their parents when their powers manifested… [redacted]… experimented on Sara and murdered her in the process. Jean spends the whole movie manipulating, murdering, and threatening to murder people in an effort to find her sister,…

This type of “poison pill” in Brand New Day, which Jester rightly describes as a character being absolved because he or she is a victim of some evil, is extremely hard to counter intellectually

The author of these comments focuses on storytelling and writing technique which is horribly distracting when such a pointed and accurate moral point has been made.  The current culture operates on a basis that victimhood imparts impunity.

This explains things political, like serious candidate proposing doing away with the Constitution.  I quoted Geraghty the other day:

…what the Democrats are offering is not a course correction to the pre-Trump status quo. They want to toss out and replace large swaths of the U.S. Constitution, because in their minds, any constitution that allows the election of Donald Trump twice must be a failure.

So many that hate Trump so viscerally feel victimized by him by virtue of his actually occupying the office – further justification.  The whole subject, currently off the discussion table but certain to return soon, of reparations is nonsensical but seemingly justified by victimhood generations ago.  The entire WNBA kerfuffle these days is trying to decide who is a victim and therefore justified in their various and sundry misdeeds and unreasonable demands.

This friends, is the end result of moral relativism.  Morality, once based on Judeo-Christian thought even for nonadherents to those religions, now is without any roots and we as a culture are trying to set those roots in victimization.  But it doesn’t work, because everyone is a victim to some extent and the battle over who is a bigger victim eventually descends into a conflict all its own; a conflict without the boundaries of moral consideration.

The Vice President’s new book, Communion, is more than merely spiritually autobiographical.  He makes the point, quite convincingly, that a Christian ethos has been the cultural glue that has held this nation together for centuries, when nation’s like the Soviet Union, supposedly our equal, have come and gone rather rapidly.

And now we find the same point in a silly little post about a silly little superhero movie.  You know, there just might be something to that point.