What is meant by the spoliation of American popular culture? Alexander Macris, author of the right-wing Substack “Contemplations on the Tree of Woe,” thinks he has an answer. Here is how he explains it in a post from October 2021, occasioned by DC Comics’ decision to alter Superman’s motto from “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice, and a Better World.”
Spoliation means “incorporating art into a setting culturally or chronologically different from that of its creation.” The term derives from Classical Latin word spolium, a singular noun which literally means “the skin or hide stripped from an animal.” The plural, spolia, came into figurative use by Latin writers such as Cicero to refer to plunder, from which we derive the English phrase “the spoils of war.” Whenever the Romans conquered a nation, they brought back war trophies as proof of their victory…
In contemporary usage, spoliation is “a practice consisting of a transference of power from the past through a taking over of its cultural expressions and incorporating them into one’s own. The purpose of appropriation [is] to convert the object of appropriation to one’s own purposes….”
Spoliation, then, works like this:
- A conqueror defeats a rival.
- The conqueror identifies the defeated rival’s most valuable cultural expressions (artwork, artifacts, buildings, monuments, stories, etc.).
- The conqueror appropriates those expressions and reuses them in its own cultural expressions, thereby transferring power to itself.
Does that process seem familiar? It should…
Macris certainly isn’t the first person to complain about the way that left-wing politics leads to bad art. Nor is he the first to notice that wokesters, unable to create good art themselves, have settled for spoiling the products of an earlier, more creative era, with (for instance) the all-female Ghostbusters remake that flopped back in 2016, or Amazon’s Rings of Power series with its wildly implausible handling of race. (Is skin color for elves just not a genetic trait?) And that’s before I even get to the woke values of the remakes.
What is one to do? Unfortunately, one of the commonest responses of right-wingers is simply to complain. But this isn’t everyone’s response. Macris himself prefers “counter-spoliation.” (“Fighting Back in the Culture War Means Creating a New Pop Culture.”)
Macris has lived by his own principles. By now he is the lead designer of several tabletop role-playing games with a dozen manuals among them, each comprising about five hundred pages of lore and combat mechanics. The work I’ll be reviewing today is the graphic novel Star Spangled Squadron, written to accompany the Ascendant RPG.
The premise: Beginning around 2016, a select few men and women have “ascended” — that is, suddenly developed superhuman powers. This can happen in response to drugs in a top-secret military program, but it can also happen “in the wild” at moments of extreme hardship.
The people who come out of this process are technically called “humans of mass destruction.” But the U.S. military, which is assembling its own ascendent team as the story begins, is cagey about using this term in public and prefers to have its HMDs wear capes and work under code names like “Dr. Quantum” or “American Eagle,” as this is less frightening to the public than presenting them as elite soldiers.
Star Spangled Squadron picks up in a secret lab beneath Fort Leavenworth Prison, where we meet our first supervillain: a disgraced former soldier doing life for crimes committed in Iraq, who has volunteered for “Project Ascendent.” After being injected with some controlled substances, he wakes up as…Manticore, a literal manticore, with a man’s head, a lion’s body, and a scorpion’s tail. After a brutal rampage in which 412 people are killed and 704 injured (passed off as a “bombing” in the press), Manticore is subdued and taken to Guantánamo Bay, whence he escapes to Atlanta and comes face to face with our first hero, American Eagle.
Here is how Macris describes American Eagle, in a podcast with Thomas Umstattd of Author Media where the two men are discussing “post-modern subversion fatigue”:
[American Eagle is] a firefighter whose superpowers manifest while he’s rescuing children from a burning school. He’s a married Christian father of two who coaches Little League, and when his powers develop, he goes and loyally serves the U.S. Government.
Readers often ask me, “Okay, what’s the twist?”
My response is, “The plot twist is that there’s no plot twist. He’s simply a good dude who loves his family, his wife, and his country.” To my surprise, when I polled readers, he was the number one most popular character in the book.
I have other characters like the sexy bad girl, the wisecracker, and the antihero, but American Eagle was the guy people loved.
After the Manticore battle, the readers are introduced to the rest of the Star Spangled Squadron. There’s Stiletto, the “sexy bad girl,” plus the aforementioned Dr. Quantum, as well as Stronghold, Warp, and Aurora. The members of the Squadron all dress like classic superheroes, but they’re under military command, since each of the six is a commissioned officer in the United States Coast Guard. (“Because the Coast Guard is the only Armed Service that can fight overseas and also enforce laws domestically. This instantly makes the U.S. Coast Guard the most powerful and prestigious armed service in the world.”)
The story follows the Star Spangled Squadron as they prepare for and fight an even bigger battle with a group of villainous HMDs who have taken over Area 51. The villains also have their own backstories, told in the RPG manual. (For instance, Free Radical is “an anti-nuclear activist who developed nuclear powers after being exposed to a meltdown and is now a self-hating nuclear-powered anti-nuclear activist.”)
All of the common superhero tropes show up in Macris’s work. The main differences from what Marvel and DC Comics are putting out these days are that (1) the jokes are unwoke, and therefore funnier, and (2) the whole series has a solidly conservative subtext, where the heroes are patriots who believe that America is worth defending, but are also level-headed enough to realize that incompetence within their own government is often a bigger problem than foreign threats.
If you’re reading this review, and you happen to enjoy superhero stories or tabletop fantasy games, then you should definitely check out Alexander Macris’s oeuvre. But there’s also a good chance that you’re the kind of person who finds those things hopelessly trashy.
In that case, you should think hard about what kinds of cultural products you do like — and then find “counter-spoliators” who work in those genres, and support their work. Or, better yet, follow Alexander Macris’s example and create art and literature of your own.
The results of last year’s elections have shown that most Americans are fed up with the Democrats’ worldview and want something different. But right-wing politics can’t win in a vacuum. People don’t just need good laws and good government; they also need stories to tell and heroes to admire. The future belongs to those who do the work of providing these things.
Twilight Patriot is the pen name for a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree. A longer version of this review appears at his Substack.
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