Going where no ordinary rabbit would dare [RI3]
Conflict in the popular culture of the long ‘90s
(What is this? I explain here. You’re reading Chapter 3 in a whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture. You can go back to Chapter 2 here, or go on to Chapter 4 here)
Bucky O’Hare was originally an obscure 1984 comic strip of quite startling incoherence. The co-creators, Larry Hama and Michael Golden, were both quite a big deal at Marvel: Hama had written that most route one cultural artefact of American militarism: GI Joe (1982) and was a prolific editor[1], and Golden had found fame as the creator of the X-Men character Rogue. But Bucky was a side project, done for love and fun and taken off the reservation to the smaller, grittier, and weirder Continuity Comics. The strip served as a homage to Hama’s mentor Wallace Allan Wood, combining his two favourite genres of fluffy animals and stuff in space.
The strip was turned into a much more successful cartoon in 1992 with the help of Marvel, Hasbro and the French company IDDH[2]. The primary screenwriter was Christy Marx, a stalwart of Marvel TV adaptations. Apparently, there were only ever 13 episodes which I find incredible since I honestly remember this show playing a major role in my childhood. Raymond Williams once said “a memory of childhood can be said persuasively to have some permanent significance”, presumably he was talking about Bucky.
A 1992 cartoon of a 1984 comic book; Bucky is very much a child of the cold war, and brings with it the Manichean conception of good and evil, the muscular American militarism, and the notion of the other as scary and bad. But it brings those ideas into the totally new context (“another dimension, another time and space” in the words of the title song), at a time when Fukuyama was (incorrectly) declaring history to be over, and where only our bravery and our willpower appeared to place any limitations at all on unbridled western hegemony to be used — we did not question — in the cause of emancipation.
Watching again nearly thirty years after having first seen it, Bucky actually stands up quite well.
It’s a very competently made cartoon, which moves at a brisk pace and avoids further complicating its outlandish premise with any fiddlyness in the storytelling or characterisation. It is also, even now and especially then, a breath of fresh air placed alongside the saccharine and conflict free fare of most cartoons for eight-year-olds: It has guns and shooting! Ships explode! Toads are squished! Our protagonists quite clearly kill[3] lots and lots of baddies! One of the main characters gets sucked into a parallel dimension in the very first episode and is quite literally never seen again[4]! Even the art is refreshing: far more lurid and angular than anything similar except He-Man (1983) but without He Man’s ’80s camp. Unsurprisingly just a year later everything else looked like it: Biker Mice from Mars, Mighty Max, Marsupilami, and Avenger Penguins all came out in 1993.[5]
Anyway if you haven’t seen it what happens is that in another dimension, another time and space, a parallel universe was falling on its face. Specifically, some evil toads (who had a really really cool spaceship that made a great toy) were attempting to enslave all mammals for … reasons (it involves a robot and is really stupid). The mammals want to fight back but are prevented by the slow and bureaucratic Security Council who demand “documented evidence of the atrocity” before they will act, the Secretary-General unmoved even in the face of a four armed duck threatening him with a lethal weapon[6]. And so it’s up to a maverick no nonsense green rabbit with a terrifying permanent scowl and a ship that is literally called the “Righteous Indignation” to fight back against the evil toad empire and liberate the cute little animals even though he doesn’t have a Security Council mandate to do so.
I’m not going to ask you to watch the whole series but I would encourage you to listen to the theme tune. Firstly because it is brilliant (and not just as a result of the nostalgia caused by the fact it was one of the first things that — if we’re being generous — we could call a rock song that I had ever heard). Secondly because it’s by far the most memorable thing about the show. Thirdly because it provides a useful guide to the setting and concept. And finally because I think its lyrics provide a real window into the psyche of the west at a particular moment when history was supposed to be ending. Here’s the song. I’ll go over the lyrics afterwards because I have notes:
In another dimension, another time and space, a parallel universe is falling on its face.
It’s very important that Bucky not take place in our universe otherwise its politics might seem a bit too — you know — horrifically fascist. Also because this is very much a story about things that happen somewhere Other, where consequences matter less.
The premise is that a rift opened between universes (the result of a school science project gone wrong — how often that happens) which allows our Audience Surrogate Willy DuWitt to freely travel between universes. Willy is a ten-ish year old boy genius from San Francisco who ends up taking a job as the ship’s engineer but still pops back to Earth every now and then to hand in his homework[7].
The idea here is that Willy can show how the lessons he learns in bravery and companionship in the “aniverse” apply to his school life and thus to the lives of the audience. But what the show inadvertently does is provide a clearcut example of colonial thinking. In the aniverse Willy uses his guns and his friends and his friends with guns to blast all his problems to smithereens. Then back on earth he is cornered by the school bullies and, in a rather sweet sequence, tricks them into coming to the workshop with him. Here he shows them his plan to build a skateboard monitoring chip which can produce stats (stats!) and so wows them with the coolness of that idea that they end up collaborating on a science project.
So why is creative peacebuilding and mediation the order of the day in San Francisco but in the land of the Other we believe that the only language those savages understand is hot lazer blasts? Because of the two elements of colonialist thinking: a violent power dynamic (in the aniverse Willy has a bunch of guns) and racism (the people he is shooting look different which makes it ok to kill them).
From out of the chaos, who else would it be, but the animal adventurers of S.P.A.C.E.
S.P.A.C.E. is the name of the army to which Bucky and his crew belong. It sounds like I am making this up but S.P.A.C.E. stands for Sentient Protoplasm Against Colonial Encroachment. This is one of the most brass necked pieces of lampshading I have ever seen: the military force of one of the most neocolonialist cartoons ever inked declare themselves to be “Against Colonial Encroachment”.
I don’t know why they called themselves Sentient Protoplasm; that basically means cogent puss. I think they were just really keen that the acronym spell out “space”.
Bucky! Captain Bucky ‘O Hare. Mutants and aliens and toads beware.
Let’s break down that second sentence term by term:
“Mutants”. What mutants? Bucky is a five foot tall anthropomorphic green rabbit. What are the rules of mutation in this universe? In one episode you meet some of Bucky’s fellow species (the show is frustratingly inconsistent on if they are rabbits or hares) and they look kind of the same as Bucky but are all different colours. I don’t think Bucky is in any position to throw around the M word.
“Aliens”. They’re all aliens! We’re in another dimension, another time and space, as the song has literally just said. Who could “alien” possibly refer to in this context?
“… and Toads beware”. It’s basically just toads isn’t it? Bucky is a show that is racist about toads. The toads in Bucky are bad because of their race. Croaking them is ok because of how they look.[8]
And actually, the racial politics of Bucky gets even more explicit and problematic from there on in. In episode two they meet a “Sleazasaur” (a giant purple crocodile, a suspiciously toad adjacent species) called Al Negator. Bucky’s crewmembers warn him against trusting Al “because he’s a Sleazasaur, and I ain’t ever heard of no good said about a Sleazasaur.” Bucky decides to trust him anyway. He is immediately betrayed. He adjusts quickly, and decides the situation isn’t as bad as it might seem because they can buy him off: “Al’s a Sleazasaur and money means everything to his ilk”.
Once you get past the more straightforward racism of this position, and the manner in which this racism is used to grant legitimacy to the crew’s actions, what we find underneath is a version of the theories in Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996).
Clash is one of those books that’s more spoken about than read, and it doesn’t actually say many of the things it is accused of saying. It’s still terrible though. Huntington, a former Carter administration official and a grandee of a former generation of American foreign policy academics, largely wrote it as a rebuke to his student Fukuyama’s idea that the triumph of the west was inevitable. It mostly talks about how the clash of civilizations can be avoided, and how different political, economic, and value systems could live alongside each other if they learn to tolerate each other’s ideologies.
However, what it accepts unquestioningly, and indeed categorises, ingrains and proselytises, is the idea that the world is divided up between different value systems and these value systems can never be integrated. The Other are so other that they will be other forever. We are mammals, they are toads. We can learn to get along, but we are fundamentally different and so are our societies. From there it’s just a short distance for some of Huntington’s acolytes (like the odious Niall Ferguson) to suggest that since these civilizations exist, and may clash, we should make sure our civilization comes out on top by croaking toads.[9]
Anyway back to the song:
If you’re looking for adventure, well, this is it. With Jenny, Dead-Eye, Binky and Willy DuWitt
… and Bruce and Bruiser who apparently don’t make the cut for this, the “let me introduce the band”, line of the song. I want to talk about each of these people but it’s not really relevant so I’ve stuck it at the end in the bibliography.
Bucky! Captain Bucky O’Hare (reprise)
Verse 2:
In the Battle for the Aniverse, you don’t know what’s next. You only know amphibians have made it Komplex.
If you check out your scanner and the evil that it bodes, there’s only one course of action: Let’s croak us some toads.
This is one of Bucky’s key messages. There is only one course of action. TINA. The show insists that we disregard the fact that our protagonists do not make even the faintest attempt to solve the problem in any other way than by croaking toads. That is supposed to be self-evidently impossible, despite the show depicting several instances of the toads being willing to negotiate and actually multiple examples of conflict being solved non-violently. There’s even an episode where they establish that this universe contains the potential architecture for meaningful peace talks such as the ones that take place with the Corsair Canards. Regardless, it is taken as read that we have no choice but to genocide our way to peace. Conflict is invariably presented like this: with great regret and yet also with scarcely concealed glee we note that there is only one course of action. Now let’s croak us some toads!
Bucky! Captain Bucky O’Hare. He goes where no ordinary rabbit would dare.
If the Righteous Indignation has suffered a hit and the photon accelerator is broken a bit, and you’re losing and mind and you’re having a fit, get the funky fresh rabbit who can take care of it.
Bucky! Captain Bucky O’Hare ...[10]
… and so on.
As you can see, Bucky neatly encompasses a number of largely subconscious biases in western foreign policy thinking, particularly as they manifested in the even more shame free than usual 1990s. But I’d also like to specifically revisit that scene where the Security Council denies them a mandate (I mentioned it above and expand upon in footnote 6).
What I find fascinating about this scene is its “glitch in the matrix” nature. Because it feels like a very pointed and specific piece of satire, but it’s a satire of something that had at that point not yet happened. The Security Council was paralysed for much of the cold war, granted, but it was paralysed by superpower impasse and East-West realpolitik. This notion of a hegemonic Security Council of allies who have the interest and ability to act decisively, but are prevented from doing so by due process and bureaucracy belongs much later, most notably over Bosnia (1992–1995) and Rwanda (1994). In 1991–2 when Bucky was written, this was still in the future. The authors were writing during the brief moment of hope for those that wished for a liberal interventionist UN: after the fall of the USSR removed any barrier to US hegemony in the Security Council, and before the defeats of the mid 1990s demonstrated that having no one to stop them wasn’t necessarily what held America back.[11]
It seems unlikely that the first order of business of any time traveller would be to write a satirical cartoon about United Nations proceduralism, so what explains this satire out of time? I feel it illustrates the preconceived biases the interventionist right have against the very notion and principles of diplomacy and the search for peaceful solutions. These biases would be retroactively validated in tragic manner by the genocides of the mid ’90s, but they existed as unsubstantiated prejudices beforehand.
Obviously Bucky doesn’t have an overarching ideology, but in those biases we see something of the attitude which would shortly cohere into the Neoconservative agenda. Indeed the 1990s were the decade that saw Neoconservatism move from being a fringe ideology to a mainstream force, aided and abetted by the way its Manichean protagonist-centric anti-diplomatic world view (the Bucky view) received no pushback from a liberal centre understandably appalled by the consequences of inaction in Bosnia and Rwanda. If Bucky felt like consequence-free escapism in 1992, by 1995 it felt like moral imperative.
And it is a moral imperative. Both Bucky and Neoconservatism, as we will go onto discuss, contain within them a profoundly moral idea: the right, indeed the duty, of humans to help humans without regard for those irrelevant constructs of false consciousness that some call borders. The problem with Bucky is that it wraps that up in a cartoonish logic and world view replete with enormous blind spots. The problem with Neoconservatism is it takes that cartoonish conception of foreign policy and turns it into something deeply insidious and somewhat ridiculous.
What is Neoconservatism? It has its roots in the work of Jeane Kirkpatrick, and in its early years was synonymous with what was referred to as the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine”. Kirkpatrick was a fringe figure on the far right of US Democratic Party policy circles (the right of the left, if you will — odd what a fertile breeding ground for the ideology of interventionism that segment of the political compass is) until Ronald Regan read her 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards”, bought her over to the Republicans and made her the first ever female ambassador to the UN.
Dictatorships and Double Standards is an incredibly stupid article which rather tells on itself in the title. Kirkpatrick divides dictatorships into two absolutely categorically different and distinct groups: authoritarian regimes and autocratic regimes. Authoritarian regimes may become democracies in time and can, and should, be reformed through a gentle process of encouragement and support for gradual liberalisation. Autocratic regimes will never ever become democracies and must be fully opposed with all the west’s might, and if necessary brought down by force of arms and democracy imposed upon it.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell autocratic and authoritarian regimes apart: autocratic regimes oppose US interests and authoritarian regimes don’t. How convenient. Is this correlation cause, consequence, or merely happy coincidence? Kirkpatrick is frustratingly vague and at times downright contradictory on that subject[12]. The only way one can make it make sense is to think yourself into Kirkpatrick’s place: to have an utterly devout belief in American exceptionalism, to adopt a paternalistically orientalist tolerance of “traditional authoritarianism”, and to be entirely blinded by a visceral hatred of Marxism, insurgency, Marxist insurgency, and anything that might lead to “revolutionary autocracy”.
The Kirkpatrick Doctrine might seem ridiculous, but it perfectly explains a lot of the more ridiculous elements of US/western foreign policy. For example it explains why the US loathes Iran and yet is incredibly comfortable cosying up to Saudi Arabia. For all that the question of Iran’s politics is nuanced and dynamic[13], and for all that Iran — as a Shia nation — has highly limited regional ambitions, Iran is an autocracy and so must be opposed with maximum pressure at all costs. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia may be one of the most absolutist, oppressive, and tyrannical regimes and the largest exporter of ideological extremism the world has ever seen, but it’s an authoritarian regime and so one should just keep selling them bombs and tear gas until they modernise.
Neoconservatism had it’s grandest moment after 9/11 of course: a point of crisis which allowed Neocon old hands like Rumsfeld and Cheney to drop all pretence or embarrassment. In the contested aftermath of the war on terror it mostly disappeared back underground, but the sentiments are still there, lurking behind many foreign policy debates.
Approach Neoconservatism from any remotely sane perspective and the bit about shoring up authoritarian regimes is pretty easy to attack. But the other half, the Bucky half, the bit about opposing autocracy, would appear to have stronger legs. It was this half that the centre gravitated towards in the aftermath of the 1990s genocides, and it was on the basis of this half that a new doctrine was established. This new doctrine would likewise take a battering in the aftermath of the failures of the war on terror, but it nevertheless remains — broadly — the predominant foreign policy ideology of the United Kingdom, United States and France, while also enjoying some support across the wider west. This is the doctrine of Humanitarian Interventionism.
I have many opinions about Humanitarian Interventionism, and the podcast should explore them, but the gist is I don’t think one can easily categorise it as an idea that is always right or always wrong — it is more complicated than that. But if one does not consider that complexity then the doctrine that remains is simply insufficient to provide a useful guide to what foreign policy actors can do in atrocity situations. That’s my issue with Humanitarian Interventionism: it’s not that it’s wrong, but that it’s simplistic, cartoonish.
What do I mean by that? And what is Humanitarian Interventionism? Let’s watch some films about it to find out:
Notes
Because I could rant about Bucky O’Hare for days I’ve moved a bunch of my more discursive Bucky digressions into the bibliography under the entries for the comic book and the cartoon.
[1] Hama had influential spells at both DC and Marvel during the Bronze age of comic books, but perhaps his most lasting legacy, Bucky aside, might be that he created the character Spider Ham. He likes animals.
[2] The French connection here is interesting for a number of reasons. On the political front it brings in the specific French attitude towards race, empire and humanitarian intervention, core themes in both Bucky and this discussion. Despite — or perhaps because — of their spectacularly bloody history of empire, France has never been nearly as apologetic about its colonialism as the UK, and even less so about its modern neo-colonialism (obvious exceptions such as Sartre aside). As for humanitarian intervention: in the philosopher Bernard Henri-Levi they gave the movement its high priest, and in sometime politician sometime humanitarian Bernard Kouchner its ambassador. Meanwhile one needs the French notion of official coloublindness to explain the total obliviousness to the racial elements of the Bucky story that its enjoyment requires. And there’s an aesthetic element too: there is a French tradition of the grotesque, particularly in cartoons (see: Charlie Hebdo), which explains something of Bucky’s spiky aesthetic.
[3] There is the most superficial of nods to the suggestion that Bucky might not have killed several thousand of his adversaries. Sometimes, although ominously far from every time, when a spaceship is destroyed a small cloud of toad “escape pods” is left in its wake, as if to suggest that maybe getting blown up is fine and free from consequence. Likewise on several occasions our protagonists beat toads to what looks a lot like a lifeless pulp, but then sometimes — again ominously not every time — a later scene is inserted to show the toad groggily and improbably regaining consciousness. Even as an eight-year-old this seemed overly sanitary and tokenistic. Face it Bucky: not all the toads made it onto those lifeboats. There were more crew than that on those ships Bucky weren’t there? Weren’t there?
[4] In the graphic novel it’s made very clear that he’s dead. In the cartoon they go to great lengths to say that he isn’t dead, but how on earth could they possibly know? And where is he? You never see him again, you are just left with Bucky’s unfulfilled promise that he’ll make his way back somehow.
[5] Granted this was also the height of Turtlemania and many of these shows were mostly just trying to cash in on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans. But TMNT has much cuddlier art. I’d say the same thing about another obvious point of comparison, particularly in terms of the crucial toy market element: Transformers. Bucky was wildly less successful than either, and was cancelled after a single series largely due to being crowded out by TMNT, but in terms of aesthetics at least I do think it did a lot to shape what came after.
[6] The heavily armed fanatic menacing the portly bureaucrat insisting on due process is one of our heroes — naturally. That whole scene is amazing, it starts here:
Similarly dismissive depictions of the UN can be found in almost any cartoon you care to mention from the Danger Mouse reboot (2015) to Yogi Bear visits the UN (1962).
[7] Note the subtle Orientalism here: a ten-year-old from our universe is cleverer than any of the Other.
By the way the flitting back and forth only happens in the cartoon: in the decidedly bleaker original comic strip his parents accidentally strand him in the aniverse for all eternity when they disrupt the space time continuum by tidying his room.
[8] It’s slightly unfair to single Bucky out here. All fiction containing multiple sentient races, particularly fantasy, has this problem in that they’ve created a universe in which racial differences are real. That is never not going to cause problems. Even if you try to do progressive racial politics on top of this idea you cannot but create problematic art because you’re building it on those fundamentally unsound foundations. And usually (to quote a friend paraphrasing Vajra Chandrasekera) what you get is “a formalisation of the racial theories of the enlightenment”.
[9] David Graeber’s essay There Never was a West has a good section on the Clash of Civilizations, pointing out that Huntington’s “notion of cultural humility” was welcome and novel from a western international relations scholar, particularly at the time. He then goes on to point out that be that as it may Huntington’s argument is arbitrary nonsense.
[10] To be fair Bucky is a very brave rabbit. Indeed the entire crew are, improbably so. And this bravery, and total lack of interest in even paying lip service to the notion of peril, is actually genuinely quite refreshing, if absurd. That’s the thing about Bucky, for all it’s problems it is a great show. It’s still a bit too on the nose that the ship is called the Righteous Indignation though.
[11] The US was given pretty much free rein in Somalia in 1992–1993, and messed up so badly that even the appallingly ahistorical hagiography Black Hawk Down (2001) could not exonerate them.
The wariness this caused was certainly one of the reasons for their subsequent caution in Bosnia and Rwanda, but there were others. Put simply: they screwed it up pretty much every way one can.
[12] In a piece of handwaving so brass-necked you almost have to admire it, Kirkpatrick’s most clear statement of this thesis is followed not by any supporting evidence but simply by the line: “the evidence on all these points is clear enough”, and then a break to a new section!
[13] One must be careful when talking about Iran in a nuanced manner not to allow an understandable desire to counter some of the nuance free anti-Iran propaganda to slip over into excusing the multiple and appalling atrocities committed by their government. I used to run training sessions for Iranian Human Rights Defenders so I know just how cruel that regime can be. But understanding is not the same as excusing and the situation in Iran is multifaceted and fluid. It is nether fully a democracy nor fully a dictatorship. Instead power is contested between the three separate poles: 1) the authoritarian clerical theocracy, 2) the at-least partly democratic civilian regime, and 3) the military and economic behemoth that is the Revolutionary Guards — a paramilitary state-within-a-state. I think the New York Times got it right when they called it a regime of “weak democracy but strong politics.”
