Back in March of this year, it became glaringly apparent that Marvel Studios‘ best course of action would have been to give the creative keys to one Beau DeMayo, and allow him to cook up all the mutant-centric films and television shows going forward. Disney, of course, tend to have an allergy towards challenging media, but we were nevertheless given the first season of X-Men ’97, and nowadays, that counts for even more than it once did.
And no one knows this better than DeMayo, who promptly took to X in the wake of Donald Trump‘s election as the next president of the United States, and shared a pair of sobering snippets from his animated masterclass. The first is a pair of screenshots involving one of the hardest lines delivered by Magneto in the entire show (namely, answering the statement “Most other nations don’t allow a terrorist to be their leader” with “Yet so many allow their leaders to be terrorists”).
But it’s the second one — a video capture of the monologue delivered by the character Valerie Cooper in the show’s eighth episode, “Tolerance Is Extinction: Part 1” — that helps communicate the weight of a thousand Asteroid M’s that so many people have felt upon their shoulders since yesterday.
“You know, in Genosha, I felt a lot of things. Pain, grief, admiration for those who fought, despite the odds. But you know what the oddest thing was? No one seemed shocked or surprised. Not even me. Yes, I was scared, but really, I just had the most profound sense of déjà vu. As if past, present, and future didn’t matter and never had. Because we always end up in the same ugly place. Thing is, Magneto knows us better than Charles ever did. Knows we know better. That most of us experience tragedies like Genosha as a bit of déjà vu before getting on with our day. But the scariest thing about Genosha wasn’t the death or the chaos. It was a thought. The only sane thought you can have when being chased by giant robots that were built to crush you: Magneto was right.”
Dr. Valerie Cooper, X-Men ’97
There will be those who look out at the horrified responses to Donald Trump’s re-election, and write them off as overreactions. Let’s assume, just for one moment, that they’re correct, and Trump ultimately doesn’t introduce legislation that targets women, immigrants, queer people, or any of the demographics that he has made no secret about haphazardly targeting.
The thing is, that legislation — which is a very real threat that should absolutely be worried about — is only one part of the equation. Look around you; there are teenage boys and grown adults venomously laughing in the face of women who are fearing for their lives and bodies right now. Nick Fuentes is mirthfully encouraging the phrase “your bodies, our choice.” Black people are getting anonymous text messages about getting “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation” and that they’ll be “picked up by executive slaves for work.”
By electing Donald Trump — a convicted felon and rapist who has eaten, slept, and breathed hatred on every level of his campaign — as president, America has subsequently communicated that it’s okay with centering this kind of behavior as the dominant culture. And that’s what the Trump camp is and always has been about; domination. It’s not about improving their own lives, it’s not about upholding any kind of moral code, and it’s not about the pseudo-protection of certain groups other than the staunchly privileged; it’s about laying a beatdown on the lives of others because they are presently incapable of operating out of anything but fear.
When progress is made for minority groups, those minority groups cheer joyously. When that progress is rolled back, sadness and understandable anger is on the table. But whenever the Trump camp wins, the response is never inner joy. Instead, it is always, always to dangle it over the heads of minority groups and exert their sense of real and imagined power upon us. As for what happens when the Trump camp doesn’t get what it wants, well, we all saw what happened on Jan. 6.
This hatred and need to dominate has always been apparent to anyone on the outside looking into the Trump camp, just as the singular, seething contempt for mutants was always apparent to Magneto. And now, that culture of hatred has been given the green light to run rampant, and unfortunately, the X-Men aren’t here to protect us real-life folk.
So no, maybe Donald Trump isn’t going to build a giant killer robot to eviscerate every abortion clinic, queer bar, and historically Black college in the nation, but that was never the core problem. The core problem is that, even if he did, few would be surprised, and fewer still would even care. That is the millennia-old evil that will be — and is currently being — reaped from Trump’s sowing.
Published: Nov 7, 2024 04:00 pm