Absolutely No Argument. Apu Must Leave THE SIMPSONS. But How?

Posted on April 10th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

Thirty years late, this white guy comes to the belated recognition that the SIMPSONS character, Apu, has always been a hurtful force in our time.

I am human enough to confess that I always liked him. No, he wasn’t used much except for five minutes at a time, but there were a couple of stories, here and there, where he was at the center of the action, an actual driving character instead of a cameo-appearance font of jokes, and I liked those stories. I liked him, and I recognize this is damned easy for a white guy to say.

It is insufficient counter to the number of voices coming forward, people of similar ethnic background, who argue, persuasively, that Apu has always been a negative influence on their lives, an engine of abuse in schoolyards and workplaces.

And this is not because he was the only indian character on the show. The Simpsons had a handful of black neighbors, and in no case were those characters defined only by their blackness. Dr. Hibbert was black in large part because he was a riff on Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable, but the real joke as far as he was concerned was that he pushed the limits of medical avuncularity to a creepy extent. He could have been white and done the same thing. Krusty the Clown is Jewish. And he’s all the negative stereotypes of a borscht-belt Jewish comedian. But he’s a lot of things other than Jewish.

Apu is a negative force. He does have to go.

No argument. He has to go.

And the question becomes: how? What is the best way to perform this surgery after 30 seasons?

Assuming that he should not be cut out of every past episode where he appears, which would be a straight path to madness, the question becomes what to do with him NOW.

Do you simply ban him, have him disappear from all future episodes without comment, as sad real-world tragedy required the show to stop using all the characters once played by Phil Hartman?

I think that’s sweeping the problem under the rug.

Do you kill him off, as several characters have been killed off?

That’s grotesque.

No, here’s my suggestion.

Give us one final Apu episode. Make it the best Apu episode ever. Make it funny, make him funny in the same way that all SIMPSONS episodes are funny, make it at least in part about the racism that he faces, and have it end with him selling the Kwik-E-Mart and leaving Springfield for some kind of alternative destiny. You can both acknowledge his problematic nature and make us sad to see him go. Because THE SIMPSONS is nothing if not reflexive, have some dialogue explaining why he must go. But make us sad when he does.

That is the elegant solution, I think.

Having a shoulder-shrug from Lisa is…not.

Tags: Race, The Simpsons | Category Fantasy, TV

Your Semi-Literate Hate Mail Doesn’t Make My Grade

Posted on April 7th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 13 April 2013.

To all. Please don’t venture to guess who the following is addressed to. That individual will know, but the offense took place in e-mail, not on my wall.)

To Whom It May Concern:

When responding to an assault as base and moronic as yours, I usually don’t fall back on that reliable old standby, “Go Screw Yourself.”

I’m a wordsmith, you see, and where righteous abuse is concerned I learned from the best.

I can do much better than that, and indeed frequently have, both in print and in person.

For instance:

I could say that you should be chained to a truck bumper and driven fast over cobblestones.

I could say that when somebody has clearly eaten as much shit as you have, it is no longer a matter of taste but one of addiction, and that you should be subjected to an intervention from your loved ones, which I would then add would undoubtedly include four fingers and a thumb.

I could suggest that you return to the primordial sea that spawned the first organic molecules on Earth, and stew a little longer, because you’re clearly not done yet.

I could finally aver that when you finally do shuffle off this mortal coil, you should be buried face down with your posterior emerging from the grave, where you will meet your most useful destiny providing a parking space for bicycles.

See? “Fuck You” is too simple. It’s unworthy of my creativity and what you have demonstrated, an eminent level of douchebaggery that deserves the very best.

Still.

When I encounter a personality as utterly without worth as yours, I concede that in your case the act of reflexive coitus has a symbolic resonance difficult to beat. Specifically — once the most USEFUL part of yourself is inserted into the most REPRESENTATIVE part of yourself, and the auto-buggery begins in earnest, you will become a closed system, your worthlessness feeding back into your awfulness ad-infinitum, to the point where you might actually become the topological singularity you aspire to be and disappear from this suffering universe entirely, freeing the rest of us to usher in the golden age.

So, yes, please do go screw yourself, with my blessings…and be sure to wear protection; there’s no telling what vile diseases you might have picked up from the sheep.

Sincerely,

Tags: Assholes | Category True Stories

Writing the Genres With Or Without Humanity

Posted on March 26th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 27 March 2017.

I value great horror fiction as much as I value great science fiction, and in some ways even more, in large part because it functions as science fiction’s reciprocal complement. The subject, at core, is humanity. Horror diagnoses the problem. At its best, science fiction provides the prescription.

This is a very simplistic way of looking at it, because a lot of great science fiction is also diagnosis. Frederik Pohl, for one, in novels like JEM and stories like “A Day At the Lottery Fair,” is also addressing just what the hell’s fundamentally wrong with us. That’s the nature of literary categories: they’re ameobic, they flow into each other’s territories. However, in the broadest outline, my generalization is an accurate one.

You can also say that science fiction is a literature of ideas and that horror is a literature of dreads, and that is why it is possible to be a damn fine horror writer while working with ideas that were moldy before you were born. Really: people are still writing great, great, vampire and zombie novels, because the uniqueness they provide is not in the trope but in the human take. Stephen King hasn’t had many original ideas in his life, and he’d be the first to say so. ‘SALEM’S LOT hid that its subject was vampires for almost two hundred pages, and if you were lucky enough to read that novel when it was new and the secret was not public knowledge, you got to that revelation with a little delight and wonder that he had demonstrated what then manifested as significant balls, to tackle a premise so hackneyed and make it so fresh. But it was the humanity, his particular humanity, that was fresh. And this still goes on. I think his recent REVIVAL builds to one of the most horrifying reveals in the past decade, but honestly: I need say only one word, Lovecraft, to establish that the general idea is nothing new. The humanity, King’s specific humanity, was what was important to its impact. It is POSSIBLE to write great horror if you possess no human understanding but a first-rate thesaurus, but the odds are against you, just as it’s honestly possible to write a great murder mystery if you have no living comprehension of the reasons why human beings murder. (All you really have to possess is the wit to engineer a great locked room; see Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE.) But again, the odds are against you, and you won’t achieve that great gasp of recognition that comes when the reader sees that you have nailed a true whiff of human corruption.

Reciprocally, it is possible to be a great science fiction writer, based only on the power of your ideas, and not really have all that much brilliant to say about actual human behavior. Asimov, for instance, was aces when it came to ideas, but for the most part — and yes, I can name exceptions — his human beings were not all that much more human than his robots. I would pretty much the same thing, sans robots, about James Blish. Many engineering-driven science fiction stories are about folks who, really, seem to be about a micron deep. And I can name a few other writers of grandmaster-level who have similar shallowness, on the page, when it comes to human emotion, though I’d prefer to name those who can clearly excel on both sides of the equation. Theodore Sturgeon, for instance (one reason he was also an excellent horror writer); the aforementioned Pohl; Silverberg; Le Guin; and certainly, by God, Octavia Butler.

Categories can be blurry, and one reason this happens is that every writer of worth is a subgenre of one. I, for instance, write science fiction and horror and middle-grade adventure, but what I am really writing is a sub-sub-sub-subgenre called “Stuff That Came out Of Adam-Troy Castro’s head.” The same can be said of everybody who writes, and so we all bring different strengths and perspectives to the table. Science fiction writers can be great humanists. Certainly, when somebody writes a great Human science fiction story, it is a thing of beauty. But these generalizations have validity. This is why I am confident in saying that the very best horror writers are “better” than all but the very best science fiction writers — but then, I am talking about rarefied air in both cases, am I not?

Tags: Agatha Christie, Frederik Pohl, H.P. Lovecraft, horror, Mystery, Robert Silverberg, Science Fiction, Stephen King, writing | Category Books, Fantasy, Life Wisdom, Science Fiction, Writing