DROWNING

People need Ordering Principles, 

and Chaos otherwise beckons.

- Peterson

I hate it when They drown me....

— Buffy, The Vampire Slayer

LUTHOR :

Krrrrrryptonite..!!

You're asking yourself, "How?"

Didn't your dad ever teach you to look before you leap?

Crystals. They're amazing, aren't they?

They inherit The Traits of The Minerals around them... 

kind of like — A Son 

inheriting The Traits 

of His FATHER !

Look buddy, we sent you there 

to die, but ya' had to come back . . . 

Oh yeah. All those photos? 

Those stories about 

Krypton still existing? 

It was me. 

And him.

Lex looks toward Stanford. 

Thankfully, 

The Press doesn't check Facts like they used to.

 

Hey,  you took away five years of my life. 

I just returned the favor.

SUPERMAN :

I'm still Superman!

SUPERMAN REVENGE SQUAD :

Get up! Come on!

Now, fly.

•STABS HIM WITH A KRYPTONITE SHIV AND SNAPS OFF THE BLADE•

LUTHOR:

So long, Superman.

“We require RULES, STANDARDS, VALUES 

— alone AND together. 

We’re pack animals, 

Beasts of burden. 

We must Bear a Load, 

to justify our miserable existence. 

We require Routine and Tradition. 

That’s Order. 

Order can become excessive, 

and that’s Not Good, 

But Chaos can swamp us, so we drown — 

and that is also Not Good. 

We need to stay on 

The Straight and Narrow path. 

[I seek,] Therefore [to] 

Provide A Guide to Being There. 

“There” is The Dividing Line 

between Order and Chaos. 

That’s where we are simultaneously 
Stable ENOUGH, 

Exploring ENOUGH, 

Transforming ENOUGH, 

Repairing ENOUGH, 

and 

Cooperating ENOUGH. 

It’s there we find The Meaning that justifies 
Life and its inevitable Suffering. 

Perhaps, if we lived •properly•, we would be able to tolerate the weight of our own self-consciousness. 

Perhaps, if we lived •properly•, we could withstand the knowledge of our own fragility and mortality, without the sense of aggrieved victimhood that produces, first, 

Resentment, then Envy, 

and then 

The Desire for 

Vengeance and Destruction. 

Perhaps, if we lived •properly•, we wouldn’t have to turn to totalitarian certainty to shield ourselves from the knowledge of our own Insufficiency and Ignorance. 

Perhaps we could come to avoid those pathways to Hell — 

and we have seen in the terrible Twentieth Century 

just how real Hell can be.

Humanity, in toto, 

and those who compose it 

as identifiable people 

deserve some sympathy 

for the appalling burden 

under which 

The Human Individual 

genuinely staggers; 

Some sympathy for subjugation to 

Mortal Vulnerability, 

Tyranny of The State, and 

The Depredations of Nature. 

It is an Existential Situation that 

no mere animal encounters or endures, 

and one of severity such 

that it would take a God to fully bear it. 

It is this sympathy 

that should be the proper medicament 

for self-conscious self-contempt, 

which has its justification, 

but is only half The Full and Proper story. 

Hatred for Self and Mankind 

must be balanced with 

Gratefulness for Tradition and The State and 

Astonishment at what Normal, 

Everyday People accomplish —

to say nothing of 

The Staggering Achievements 

of the Truly Remarkable. 

We Deserve some respect. 

You Deserve some respect. 

You are important to Other People, 

as much as to yourself. 

You have some vital role to play in 
The Unfolding Destiny of The World. 

You are, therefore, morally obliged 

to take care of yourself. 

You should take care of, 

help and be good to yourself 

the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. 

You may therefore 

have to conduct yourself habitually 

in a manner that allows you 

some respect for your own Being — 

and fair enough. 

But every person is deeply flawed. 
Everyone falls short of the glory of God. 

If that stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care, for ourselves as much as others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. 

That would not be good. 

That would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. 

That simply cannot be the proper path forward. 

To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. 

THIS IS •NOT•  

“What You WANT.” 

It is also NOR “What Would Make You HAPPY.” 

Every time you give a child something sweet, you make that child happy. 

That does NOT mean that you should do nothing for children except feed them candy. 

“Happy” is by no means synonymous with “Good.” 


You must get children to brush their teeth.

They must put on their snowsuits when they go outside in the cold, even though they might object strenuously. 

You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—
Able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. 

Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself? 

You need to consider The Future and think, 

“What might my life look like if I were caring for myself •properly•?"

"What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, 
so that I could shoulder my share of the load, 
and enjoy the consequences?"

"What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?”

You need to know where you are, so you can start to chart your course. 

You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. 

You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on The World. 

You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. 

You have to articulate your own principles, so that you can defend yourself against others’ taking inappropriate advantage of you, and so that you are secure and safe while you work and play. 

You must discipline yourself carefully. 

You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself, so that you can trust and motivate yourself. 

You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person. 
It would be good to make The World a better place. 

Heaven, after all, will not arrive of its own accord. 

We will have to work to bring it about, and strengthen ourselves, so that we can withstand the deadly angels and flaming sword of judgment that God used to bar its entrance. 

Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. 

These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. 

Strengthen the individual. 

Start with yourself. 

Take care with yourself. 

Define who you are. 

Refine your personality. 

Choose your destination and articulate your Being. 

As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted,

 “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.” 

You could help direct The World, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward Heaven and a bit more away from Hell. 

Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that. 

You could aim elsewhere. 

You could, in fact, devote your life to this. 

That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. 

That would justify your miserable existence. 

That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden. 

You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping.

After The Wars

On 9 November 1920, a few platoons of British soldiers set out once more for the front. Led by one officer apiece, they went to the still-churned, still-slimy ground where great slaughters, at Ypres, Cambrai, Arras and the Somme, had taken place. They marched to a place of rough wooden crosses without markings, where dead Britons too torn about to be identified had been buried. Just one body was dug up from each site, placed in a plain deal coffin and then brought back to a small chapel. Next, an officer was blindfolded and led into it. He reached out and touched one of the four coffins. The other three were returned to be reburied. The fourth was then taken by train to the Channel, where it was met by a warship and placed inside a larger casket of oak, specially made from a tree cut down in Hampton Court forest. With an escort of destroyers and given the admiral’s nineteen-gun salute as it passed, the dead man–a Scot or a Welshman, a Nottinghamshire miner or a Devon public schoolboy, a man who had died bravely or in terror–no one knew who he was–was then taken to London. Two days after being dug up in France, he was paraded through the streets, his pallbearers being field marshals and admirals, until he was buried deep in the sand below Westminster Abbey. 

On his coffin rested an antique sword from the King’s collection. In the next days and weeks, more than a million people came to say goodbye. Outside, in Whitehall, 100,000 wreaths had almost hidden the base of the brand new Cenotaph. 

Reclaiming, and giving a State Burial to, an unknown soldier had been the idea of a young army padre, later a vicar in Margate, called David Railton. He passed the idea to the Dean of Westminster, who wrote to the King. George was initially against the notion, worrying that it was too morbid, but he was won round. 

As the writer Ronald Blythe later said, ‘The affair was morbid, but grandly and supremely so.’ It proved hugely popular and cathartic, partly because it was in its way democratic. Millions of bereaved parents, brothers and sisters could half-believe that the recovered body was theirs, and certainly that it represented their dead boy. 

There had been much argument about the different treatment of aristocratic or upper-class corpses, which might be returned for burial at home, and the great mass of the dead who were left near to where they fell. Overall, the funerary democrats–led by the poet Kipling–won the argument for all to be treated alike in death, officers and men lying alongside one another with similar headstones. 

This was not trivial. 

At a time of revolution abroad, democracy needed to be symbolized. These were the years of the memorials: the vast Commonwealth memorials in France, requiring their own large bureaucracy and the factory-scale cutting of headstones; the thousands of granite crosses, sculpted Tommies and gold-painted wooden boards in villages, schools, train stations and city squares. In every style from the mimicry of ancient Greek and Egyptian funerary art to the latest in angular modernism, the British raised up AND THEN LIVED IN a Garden of Death. 

Though there was not, in statistical terms, a lost generation as is sometimes still claimed, the three-quarters of a million dead were a ghostly presence everywhere; faces staring out of school and sporting photographs, empty upstairs bedrooms in suburban houses, silent family meals, odd gaps in offices or village pubs between the old and the very young. 

In the ten years after The War 29,000 small country estates were sold off, often simply because there was no heir to inherit them. The wounded and maimed were also visible everywhere. They might be blind, gassed, distressingly unpredictable, hobbling with empty trouser-legs or pinned-up arms. 

The worst were still coping with open wounds which needed to be dressed daily to staunch infection. New plastic surgery techniques, still crude, could last until the late 1920s before patched-up faces were ready. Unsettling smells broke through the cigarette smoke. Park benches were sometimes painted blue to warn passers-by that they were reserved for badly wounded men from hospital, in their floppy serge uniforms and blue caps. 

The exuberance of blood–the erect spirit–of Edwardian times had been drained. 

Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost the only one they loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed. The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives–albeit quite cheerful ones–focused on fruit cake and friendship. 

Eventually, of course, the sadness was too much, the weight of public stoicism too heavy for living, breathing humans to bear. Those who had survived wanted some fun again. The brittle urban gaiety for which the twenties are known was an essential response to the muffled drums and the silences and the hat-doffing to piles of brick and bronze. Ponderous hymn tunes consoled many. Jazz replied. The war had dulled and shabbied the country, so there followed a time of paint and silliness. Upper-crust girls could shock their parents by aping the masses and using rouge and mascara and lipstick. Women began smoking in public. The Great War, like littler wars, had been an overwhelmingly masculine affair. Boys grew into men very fast, and died as men. Men dressed as modern warriors in thick polished belts, heavy boots, rough, bronze-decorated overcoats and peaked caps. In wartime, beards and long hair were symbols of dissidence which drew angry looks and loud comments. So after it was over the younger men who had just missed the war responded with colourful and, to their elders’ eyes, effeminate clothing. Women, in turn, looked a little more like boys. Tubular dresses, bindings round the chest to disguise the bust and short haircuts, the bob and then the shingle, made girls seem unsettlingly androgynous. When the insolent-puppy writer Evelyn Waugh married a woman also called Evelyn, they were called He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn, and they gaze back from photos in identical trousers and shirts with similarly camp expressions. The upper classes and their arty hangers-on led the way, but thanks to the mass newspapers people across the country watched and in some ways mimicked them. Though we think of the most riotous scenes of misbehaviour coming in the twenties, the years of the Bright Young Things, the pattern had been set during the war. A good case-study can be found in the diaries of Duff Cooper, for most of the war working at the Foreign Office and in love with Lady Diana Manners, who had been a great and well-connected Edwardian beauty. His diaries recount an astonishing amount of casual love-making and hard drinking. The affairs are probably mostly not fully physical, because of the dangers of pregnancy, but in variety and number his circle rivalled or outpaced the behaviour of people in supposedly laxer, later days. The fine wines and champagnes gurgled away through the war, as did the old brandies and whisky, and a fair amount of drug taking–morphia, mainly, injected. You could buy what was, in effect, cocaine and heroin quite legally–people sent it to the troops. At one level, it is a record of hedonism and self-indulgence on a scale that would have shattered the constitutions of most rock musicians sixty years later. Yet it is only when set together with the equally astonishing death-rate of their friends that it makes full sense. After yet another friend, an in-law of the Asquiths, has been killed, Cooper recalls Edwardian parties of which he was now the only male survivor and records a day of helpless crying. It ends with him dining in his club: ‘I drank the best champagne–Pommery 1906–because I felt that Edward would have wished it and would have done so had I been killed first.’ He refuses to go out to eat ‘simply because I was afraid that I might cry in the middle of dinner’. Cooper went on to serve towards the end of the war, with spectacular bravery. This determination to drink deep and party while there was still time flowed unchecked into the post-war world. The nearest recent equivalent might be the drug-taking hedonism that flooded American youth during and after Vietnam. As then, in twenties Britain it pitted young and old against each other in an epic generational battle. The jittery, shallow, fancy-dressing army of upper-class children who smashed up bars, invented new cocktails, danced along the counters of department stores, learned to dance the camel-walk, the shimmy, the black-bottom and the notorious Charleston and stole policemen’s hats contained plenty of ex-officers from the front, and many whose brothers, cousins and lovers had been killed. Among those who arrived in London and changed the city’s taste were the first Harlem hot jazzmen, black musicians bringing the allure of early Hollywood pictures and stories of gangsters. Elders and betters looked on aghast; and, as ever, the media, in this case the fashionable new trade of newspaper gossip columnists, stoked up the story. Noe¨l Coward, whose play The Vortex dealt with drugs, was able to pose to a popular newspaper in a silk dressing gown with an expression, it reported, of advanced degeneracy. He promised the London Evening Standard that ‘I am never out of opium dens, cocaine dens, and other evil places. My mind is a mess of corruption.’ Gangs like the Sabinis and the Titanics (the latter apparently so named because they dressed up poshly, like passengers on the liner) fought across Soho, across the racetracks and for control of the new centres of vice in twenties Britain–the nightclubs. 

There you could find ex-officers, Sinn Fein men, gangsters, prostitutes, dancers and drug dealers like the famous opium supplier ‘Brilliant’ Chang. 

There were also homosexual clubs, crowded with men who had failed to heed their monarch: George V, told that an acquaintance was a ‘bugger’, replied with consternation: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves.’

The Old Maid of Anchorhead

“The exuberance of blood –the erect spirit – of Edwardian times had been drained. 

“Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost The Only One They Ever Loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed. 

The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives – albeit quite cheerful ones – focused on fruit cake and friendship. 

THE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS WE AVOID 

Just one of the negatives of portraying life as this endless zero-sum game, between different groups vying for oppressed status, is that it robs us of time and energy for the conversations and thinking that we do need to do. 

For example, why is it, after all these decades, that feminists and others have been unable to more fully address the role of Motherhood in Feminism? 

As the feminist author Camille Paglia has been typically honest enough to admit, motherhood remains one of the big unresolved questions for feminists. 

And that isn’t a small subject to miss or gloss over. 

As Paglia herself has written, 

‘Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of The Mother in Human Life. 

Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.’

If asked to name her three great heroes of twentieth-century womanhood, Paglia says that she would select Amelia Earhart, Katharine Hepburn and Germaine Greer : three women who Paglia says ‘would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman’. 

Yet as she points out, ‘All these women were childless. 

Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century. 

Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy” . . . 

The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. 

It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature – that is, with procreation.’ 

Or why, ‘in this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration, or devaluing of the role of motherhood.’  

The ongoing dishonesty about this leads to presumption being piled on dishonesty, and ugly, misanthropic notions of the purpose of women becoming embedded in the culture. In January 2019 CNBC ran a piece flagged with the heading, ‘You can save half a million dollars if you don’t have kids’.

As the piece went on: ‘Your friends may tell you having kids made them happier. They’re probably lying.’ 

It then referenced all the outweighing problems of ‘extra responsibilities, housework and, of course, the costs’.

Or here is how The Economist recently chose to write about what it called ‘the roots of the gender pay gap’, a gap which the magazine claimed has its roots in childhood. 

One of the main factors which is responsible for women on average earning less than men during the course of their working life is the fact that women are the ones who bear children. As The Economist put it, 

‘Having children lowers women’s lifetime earnings, an outcome known as the “child penalty”.’ 

It is hard to imagine who could read that phrase, let alone write it, without a shudder. 

If it is assumed that the primary purpose in Life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies. 

On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have. There is in that Economist viewpoint something which is widely shared and which has been spreading for decades. On the one hand women have–largely– been relieved of the need to have children if they do not want them, the better to pursue other forms of meaning and purpose in their lives. 

But it is not hard for this reorientation of purpose to make it look as though that original, defining human purpose is no purpose at all.

The American agrarian writer Wendell Berry put his finger on this almost 40 years ago when there were already, as he put it, ‘bad times for motherhood’. 

The whole concept of motherhood had come to be viewed in a negative way: ‘A kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things.’ 

But then Berry hit on the central truth: 

“We all have to be used up by something. 

And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as–most of the time–I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. 

What better way to be used up?”

Is this not a better way to think about motherhood and life? 

In a spirit of love and forgiveness rather than the endless register of resentment and greed?

“Superhero stories were written to be universal and inclusive, but often they’ve been aimed, it must be said, at boys and young men. Perhaps that’s why a mainstream myth has developed in which comic-book superheroines are all big-breasted Playboy girls with impossibly nipped waists and legs like jointed stilts in six-inch heels. But while it’s true that superhero costumes allow artists to draw what is effectively the nude figure in motion, there have in fact been more female superhero body types than male. 

The first superheroine, you may be surprised to learn, was not a voluptuous cutie in thigh boots but a raw-faced middle-aged housewife called Ma Hunkel, who wore a blanket cape and a pan on her head in her debut appearance, All-American no. 20, 1940. A harridan with the build of a brick shithouse she was the first “real-world” superhero—with no powers, a DIY outfit, and a strictly local beat—and the first parody of the superhero genre all in one. Ma Hunkel, aka the Red Tornado, was a Lower East Side lampoon of Siegel and Shuster’s lofty idealism. 

The mainstream has forgotten Ma Hunkel, although, like all the rest, she’s still a part of the DC universe and now has a granddaughter named Maxine Hunkel, a talkative, realistically proportioned, and likeable teenage girl who also challenges the superbimbo stereotype. But, of course, the comic-book industry in the throes of the war machine did churn out its fair share of pinup bombshells and no-nonsense dames with names like Spitfire and Miss Victory, or the strangely comforting Pat Parker, War Nurse. 

With no particular ax to grind against the Axis forces, Pat Parker was driven only by her desire to dress up like a showgirl and take to the battlefields of Western Europe on life-threatening missions of mercy. 

She was prepared to take on entire tank divisions with a refugee quivering under each arm. What made her tank-battling activities especially brave was the fact that this war nurse had no special powers and wore a costume so insubstantial, there could be nothing secret about her lunch, let alone her identity. But, absurd as she may seem, she did her best to exemplify the can-do, Rosie the Riveter spirit of those women who were “manning” the home front. 

And then there was the most famous superheroine of them all. Wonder Woman was the creation of William Moulton Marston, the man who, not incidentally, invented the controversial polygraph test apparatus, or lie detector, that is still in use today. 

Marston was a professor at Columbia and Tufts universities, and Radcliffe College —and a good one, according to accounts of the time— and the author of several respected works of popular psychology. Like other forward thinkers, Marston saw in comics the potential to convey complex ideas in the form of exciting and violent symbolic dramas. He described the great educational potential of the comics in an article titled “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” which appeared in the popular women’s magazine Family Circle in 1940 and led to his getting hired as an educational consultant at DC-National. 

Marston coupled his ideas with an unorthodox lifestyle: his wife, Elizabeth, was also a psychologist, and is credited with having suggested a superheroine character. 

Both were enthusiastic proponents of a progressive attitude toward sex and relationships. They shared a mutual lover, a student of Marston’s named Olive Byrne, said to be the physical model for the original Harry Peter drawings of Wonder Woman. Together, Marston and Peter (with indispensable input from Elizabeth and Olive) developed a fantasy world of staggering richness. 

For sheer invention, for relentless dedication to the core concept, the Wonder Woman strip far surpassed its competitors. But unlike traditional pinups, the girls of Wonder Woman were athletic and forceful. 

They wore tiaras and togas while they engaged in violent gladiatorial contests on the backs of giant, genetically engineered monster kangaroos. 

Wonder Woman was traditionally sexy—there were pinup shots—but in most panels, she yomped and stomped like some martial arts majorette, outracing automobiles for fun. 

1941’s “Introducing Wonder Woman” began when an air force plane crashed on an uncharted island inhabited exclusively by beautiful scantily clad women capable of carrying the full-grown air force pilot “as if he were a child.” 

The man, Captain Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence, was the first to ever set foot on Paradise Island, and within moments, the queen’s daughter, Princess Diana, had fallen in love. 

A two-page illustrated-text section revealed the history of the Amazons since their slavery at the hands of Hercules. Encouraged by their patron goddess Aphrodite, they liberated themselves and set sail for a magical island where they could establish a new civilization of women, far from the cruelty, greed, and violence that typified “Man’s World.” 

On Paradise Island, the immortal women set about fashioning their fabulous alternative to patriarchal, heliocentric society. 

In this first issue, Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, consulted apparitions of Aphrodite and Athena, who clarified that Trevor had been sent deliberately by the gods. 

It was time, apparently, for the Amazons to emerge from seclusion and join the worldwide struggle against Axis tyranny. 

Trevor had to be sent home to complete his mission against the enemy—but he was not to return alone. 

“YOU MUST SEND WITH HIM THE STRONGEST OF YOUR WONDER WOMEN!—FOR AMERICA, THE LAST CITADEL OF DEMOCRACY, AND OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN, NEEDS YOUR HELP!” 

A contest was declared to identify the most appropriate candidate. 

Tests included outrunning a deer and culminated in the favorite sport of these immortal ladettes: bullets and bracelets. A kind of Russian roulette, the game saw the final contenders facing one another with loaded revolvers (where the staunchly antiwar Amazons managed to get hold of working firearms remains a mystery). Bullets were fired at the opponent, who was obliged to deflect them with her bracelets in order to win the game. The loser took a flesh wound to the shoulder. 

In the end one champion remained: a masked brunette, revealed in a not entirely unexpected twist to be Princess Diana herself. 

“AND SO DIANA, THE WONDER WOMAN, GIVING UP HER HERITAGE AND HER RIGHT TO ETERNAL LIFE, LEAVES PARADISE ISLAND TO TAKE THE MAN SHE LOVES BACK TO AMERICA—THE LAND SHE LEARNS TO LOVE AND PROTECT, AND ADOPTS AS HER OWN!” 

However, within this world—and supplying it with depth and enticing richness—lurked barely hidden libidinal elements. 

To begin with, it has to be said that these Amazons were drawn to be sexy. 

Whereas Siegel rendered Superman in dynamic futurist lines and Bob Kane gave Batman the look of a Prague potato print, Peter brought a flowing, scrolling quality to his drawings of superwomen in action and at play. Everything was curved and calligraphic. The lips of his women were modishly bee stung and glossy, as if to suggest that Hollywood-style glamour makeup never went out of vogue among the warrior women and philosopher princesses of Paradise Island. 

However, as you may expect in a society of immortal women cut off from the rest of the world since classical antiquity, the diversions of the Amazons turned out to be somewhat specialized, to say the least. 

As the strips developed, Marston’s prose swooned over detailed accounts of Amazonian chase and capture rituals in which some girls were “eaten” by others. 

Moreover thousands of years of sophisticated living without men had bled the phallic thrust out of sexuality, leaving the peculiar, ritualistic eroticism of leash and lock. 

Marston and Peter built slavery and shackles into “Meet Wonder Woman,” and as the strip progressed, the bondage elements became more overt, increasing sales. 

For instance, chief among Wonder Woman’s weapons of peace was a magic lasso, which compelled anyone bound in its coils to tell the absolute truth and only the truth—shades of Marston’s polygraph. 

Moreover, it wasn’t long before she was breathlessly demonstrating the joys of submission to “loving authority”: A Nazi villain’s slave girls were released in one story, with no idea what to do with their lives out of captivity. 

Wonder Woman’s solution was to allow them to continue to express their nature as born slaves by relocating to Paradise Island, where they could enjoy bondage under the loving gaze of a kind mistress instead of the crop-cracking Hitler-loving Paula von Gunther. 

The flipside of the Amazons’ essentially benign and formalized endorsement of healthy S/M was the dungeon world of sadistic bondage, humiliation, and mind control that existed in the world beyond Paradise Island. 

These were crystallized in the form of Doctor Poison, a twisted dwarf in a rubber coat. Wielding a dripping syringe, Poison hated women and loved to humiliate them. In a surprising twist, “he” was revealed to be a mentally ill woman acting out of her frustrations. 

The women of Paradise Island embodied an enticing blend of the politically right-on and the libidinous. As such, they were exemplars of a newfangled twentieth-century creed that was the same old bohemian “free love” with a new lexicon culled from psychoanalytical theory and the pink and squeezy world of dreams and desire. 

Theirs was a kind of radical Second Wave separatist feminism where men were forbidden and things could only get better as a result. 

Indeed, in Marston’s feminine paradise, happiness and security were in far greater supply than elsewhere in the superworld. 

In looking at other superhero comics he had noted, “it seemed from a psychological angle that the comics’ worst offence was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to the child as the breath of life.” 

And so, while Batman was a brooding orphan, and the destruction of Superman’s Krypton had robbed him of his birth parents, the magnificent scientists Jor-El and Lara, Wonder Woman could ride her invisible plane down the rainbow runway to Paradise Island and check in with Mom any time she wanted. 

Queen Hippolyta even had a magic mirror that allowed her to observe her daughter at any location on Earth. 

It was closed-circuit television by any other name, but in late 1941, Hippolyta’s magic mirror could only be a product of imaginary feminist superscience. 

There were some similarities with Wonder Woman’s male predecessors. Like Superman, in his way, Wonder Woman fearlessly championed alternative culture and a powerful vision of outsider politics. And, like Batman, she was thoroughly the progressive sort of aristocrat. 

She preached peace in a time of war, although she was as eager as any other superhero to tackle her fair share of Nazis. 

Unlike the essentially solitary Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman had a huge cast of friends. Her allies, the Holliday Girls of Beta Lamda, were a rambunctious group of sorority sisters fronted by the immense, freckled redhead Etta Candy. 

As the gorgeous Wonder Woman’s inevitable fat pal, Etta’s positive energy and physicality added an earthiness and humor that complemented Diana’s cool grace and perfect poise. 

When Marston died of cancer in 1947, the erotic charge left the Wonder Woman strip, and sales declined, never to recover. Without the originality and energy that Marston’s obsessions brought to the stories, Wonder Woman was an exotic bloom starved of rare nutrients. 

Once the lush, pervy undercurrents were purged, the character foundered. The island of Themiscyra was scraped clean of any hint of impropriety, and all girl-chasing rituals ceased, along with reader commitment to the character. 

It wasn’t long before Wonder Woman was coming across as an odd maiden aunt—a disturbing cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore; but Elizabeth and Olive, her inspirations, continued to live together. 

The unconventional, liberated Elizabeth was one hundred years old when she died in 1993, the true Wonder Woman of this story.”

Scavenger

scawager, from scawage "toll or duty on goods offered for sale in one's precinct" (c. 1400), from Old North French escauwage "inspection," from a Germanic source (compare Old High German scouwon, Old English sceawian "to look at, inspect;" see show (v.)).

Please Call Me Rey.

Her Power is to be found in 

Water and Darkness.

She Shouldn't Know What an Ocean is...




 " I was the separated wife of 
The Crown Prince of Earth and Heaven, 
The Heir to The Throne, 
The Next and Future King - 

I was a problem, fullstop. 

Never happened before, what do we do with Her?

She won't go quietly, that's The Problem. 

I'll fight to The End, because I believe that I have a role to fulfil.

And I've got two children to bring up. "

Members of The Divine Quaternity :
Isis (AIR) - 
The Queen of Heaven

Osiris (FIRE) - 
Heavenly Father 
Sleeps a Lot During The Day
Lord of The Underworld

Set (EARTH) - 
The Dark Brother, 
Prince of Darkness, 
Lord of All The Earth

Nepthys (WATER) - 
The Dark Sister, 
The Hidden Power, 
She Who Must Not Be Named

The Great Mother -
Intensely Black 
Bare Bosom
Super-Abundance of Darkness

Whoever Abandoned the Infant Princess-Goddess on a Desert Planet Knew Precisely What They Were Doing -

Like Aquaman in a dry room, She is stripped of her divinity and looses acces to all Her Supranatural Godly Powers.

As soon as She leaves The Desert and first comes into contact with large bodies of abundant water, she is first exposed to waves, tidal currents, 

[ which are a lunar-induced global superfluid dynamic system of chaotic energy flow and continuous movement ]

- Precipitation and a Deeper, Darker Species of Night, capable of swallowing The Sun completely, immediately does the auto-initiatory activation of Her Divine Feminine Christ Consciouness, 

awaken, and immediately finds itself to be in expression of it's full and whole potential power-potency, strength and level of ability and skill.

She was born and raised - much as you and I - with a baseline Power Level of around 1.0 -

Departing at last from Jakku dials Her all the way up to 11.99

She needs no period of training,  
or tutelage and apprenticeship, 
and has no need of a Master to teach Her.

Because She is Awake.

Rey/Nepthys/The UltraBlack Dark Princess' 

Centre of Power.

Please Call Me Rey —

REY: 

Hi, Billy.

BILLY: 

Oh, hi, Rachel. 

This is Murray and The Doctor.

REY: 

Please call me Rey. 

Oh, do you guys want a hand?

MURRAY: 

You haven't by chance got a one and five eights socket, have you?

(Murray laughs, but Rey gets one from her bag.)

Time's Champion : 

Do you always carry around a full set of tools with you?

REY: 

Oh, it's what Billy taught me — 

Always to be Prepared.

Time's Champion : 

A Stitch in Time... Fills up Space. 

" THE text which contains this legend is found cut in hieroglyphics upon a stele which is now preserved in Paris. Attention was first called to it by Chabas, who in 1857 gave a translation of it in the Revue Archéologique, p. 65 ff., and pointed out the importance of its contents with his characteristic ability. 

The hieroglyphic text was first published by Ledrain in his work on the monuments of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris,  and I gave a transcript of the text, with transliteration and translation, in 1895. 

The greater part of the text consists of a hymn to Osiris, which was probably composed under the XVIIIth Dynasty, when an extraordinary development of the cult of that god took place, and when he was placed by Egyptian theologians at the head of all the gods. Though unseen in the temples, his presence filled all Egypt, and his body formed the very substance of the country. 

He was the God of all gods and the Governor of the Two Companies of the gods, he formed the soul and body of Ra, he was the beneficent Spirit of all spirits, he was himself the celestial food on which the Doubles in the Other World lived. 

He was the greatest of the gods in On (Heliopolis), Memphis, Herakleopolis, Hermopolis, Abydos, and the region of the First Cataract, and so. 

He embodied in his own person the might of Ra-Tem, Apis and Ptah, the Horus-gods, Thoth and Khnemu, and his rule over Busiris and Abydos continued to be supreme, as it had been for many, many hundreds of years. 

He was the source of the Nile, the north wind sprang from him, his seats were the stars of heaven which never set, and the imperishable stars were his ministers. 

All heaven was his dominion, and the doors of the sky opened before him of their own accord when he appeared. 

He inherited the earth from his father Keb, and the sovereignty of heaven from his mother Nut. 

In his person he united endless time in the past and endless time in the future.

 Like Ra he had fought Seba, or Set, the monster of evil, and had defeated him, and his victory assured to him lasting authority over the gods and the dead. 

He exercised his creative power in making land and water, trees and herbs, cattle and other four-footed beasts, birds of all kinds, and fish and creeping things; even the waste spaces of the desert owed allegiance to him as the creator. 

And he rolled out the sky, and set the light above the darkness.

The last paragraph of the text contains an allusion to Isis, the sister and wife of Osiris, and mentions the legend of the birth of Horus, which even under the XVIIIth Dynasty was very ancient, Isis, we are told, was the constant protectress of her brother, she drove away the fiends that wanted to attack him, and kept them out of his shrine and tomb, and she guarded him from all accidents. 

All these things she did by means of spells and incantations, large numbers of which were known to her, and by her power as the "witch-goddess." 

Her "mouth was trained to perfection, and she made no mistake in pronouncing her spells, and her tongue was skilled and halted not." 

At length came the unlucky day when Set succeeded in killing Osiris during the war which the "good god" was waging against him and his fiends. 

Details of the engagement are wanting, but the Pyramid Texts state that the body of Osiris was hurled to the ground by Set at a place called Netat, which seems to have been near Abydos.  

The news of the death of Osiris was brought to Isis, and she at once set out to find his body. 

All legends agree in saying that she took the form of a bird, and that she flew about unceasingly, going hither and thither, and uttering wailing cries of grief. 

At length she found the body, and with a piercing cry she alighted on the ground. 

The Pyramid Texts say that Nephthys was with her that 

"Isis came, Nephthys came, the one on the right side, the other on the left side, one in the form of a Hat bird, the other in the form of a Tchert bird, and they found Osiris thrown on the ground in Netat by
his brother Set." 

The late form of the legend goes on to say that Isis fanned the body with her feathers, and produced air, and that at length she caused the inert members of Osiris to move, and drew from him his essence, wherefrom she produced her child Horus.

This bare statement of the dogma of the conception of Horus does not represent all that is known about it, and it may well be supplemented by a passage from the Pyramid Texts, 1 which reads, 

"Adoration to thee, O Osiris. 

Rise thou up on thy left side, place thyself on thy right side. 

This water which I give unto thee is the water of youth (or rejuvenation). 

Adoration to thee, O Osiris! 

Rise thou up on thy left side, place thyself on thy right side. 

This bread which I have made for thee is warmth. 

Adoration to thee, O Osiris! 

The doors of Heaven are opened to thee, 

the doors of the streams are thrown wide open to thee. 

The gods in the city of Pe come [to thee], Osiris, at the sound (or voice) of the supplication of Isis and Nephthys. . . . . . . 

Thy elder sister took thy body in her arms, she chafed thy hands, she clasped thee to her breast [when] she found thee [lying] on thy side on the plain of Netat." 

And in another place we read :


"Thy two sisters, Isis and Nephthys, came to thee, 

Kam-urt, in thy name of Kam-ur, 

Uatchet-urt, in thy name of Uatch-ur" . . . . . . . "

Isis and Nephthys weave magical protection for thee in the city of Saut, 

for thee their lord, 

in thy name of 'Lord of Saut,' 

for their god, 

in thy name of 'God.' 

They praise thee; go not thou far from them in thy name of 'Tua.' 

They present offerings to thee; be not wroth in thy name of 'Tchentru.' 

Thy sister Isis cometh to thee rejoicing in her love for thee. 

Thou hast union with her, thy seed entereth her. 

She conceiveth in the form of the star Septet (Sothis). 

Horus-Sept issueth from thee in the form of Horus, 

dweller in the star Septet. 

Thou makest a spirit to be in him in his name 

'Spirit dwelling in the god Tchentru.' 

He avengeth thee in his name of 

'Horus, the son who avenged his father.' 

Hail, Osiris, Keb hath brought to thee Horus, 

he hath avenged thee, 

he hath brought to thee the hearts of the gods, 

Horus hath given thee his Eye, 

thou hast taken possession of the Urert Crown thereby at the head of the gods. 

Horus hath presented to thee thy members, he hath collected them completely, there is no disorder in thee. 

Thoth hath seized thy enemy 

and hath slain him 

and those who were with him." 

The above words are addressed to dead kings in the Pyramid

" They see me as a threat of some kind, and I'm here to do good: I'm not a destructive person.

I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path, and I think it's the strength that causes the confusion and the fear.

Why is she strong? 
Where does she get it from? 
Where is she taking it?

Where is she going to use it? 
Why do the public still support her? 
When I say public, you go and do an engagement and there's a great many people there. "