Buck Rogers, Joe Biden And the Indispensability Of The American Race

"Lucky Buck is back!"

--Gil Gerard,

“Buck Rogers

 In the 25 Century”

(NBC, 1979-1981)

"America is back--we are

the head of the table, once

again."

--Joe Biden, "With Biden

America is Back, But Not

At the Head of the Table",

NPR, 12/2/20

It was hard to suppress a chuckle when Joe Biden's 2020 presidential win came on the heels of Legendary Pictures' announced television/cinematic revival of the 88-year-old American space hero, Buck Rogers (1).

The timing couldn't have been more darkly appropriate as the forgotten origins of the pulp-era character makes for an uncomfortable reminder of how, across so many decades, the celebrated benignity of U.S. global primacy and its concomitant racism, embraced by the incoming president, continues to shape domestic consciousness.

The World As a Jumbled Filing Cabinet

Employing a smug potpourri of select historical oversights, vague euphemisms for state aggression/criminality and oxymoronic expressions like "tactical cooperation" (not to mention the occasional outright lie) in its advocacy of continued dominance of the geopolitical scene against China, Russia, among other nations, Biden's Foreign Affairs essay (September/October, 2016) "Building On Success: Opportunities For the Next Administration" is a strong indicator of what we can expect post-Trump--and as political commentator/cartoonist Ted Rall warns, it will likely be even worse (2).

Since then, Biden's claim "the world needs steady American leadership more than ever" being complemented by "The world does not organize itself" (3), among other self-important zingers, is not simply insufferable, but mundicidal, given that the Union Of Concerned Scientists' Doomsday Clock, which tracks the likelihood of nuclear war, is currently little over one minute from midnight (4).

From Anthony To Buck

This messianic strain of national exceptionalism found expression in the original role of Rogers, as conceived by William Francis Nowlan in his novellas, "Armageddon 2419 A.D." and "The Airlords of Han" (which formed the basis for the more widely-known comic strip and movie serial version of "Buck Rogers" in the 1930s). The first adventure running in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories introduced Anthony Rogers, whom, like Richard Seaton, the inventor/hero of E.E. Smith's equally influential Skylark of Space of the same issue, projected a self-assured, technically enterprising determination when confronting profound challenges in a quintessentially American mode.

"Armageddon" and the sequel from the March 1929 Amazing detailed a 20th century engineer who falls victim to mysterious gases in a mine to awaken in a 25th century U.S. overrun by Chinese invaders. Once getting the lay of this new land, he quickly recharges the East coast descendants of "Bos-Tan" and "Nu-Yok" with the lost can-do spirit and know-how that turns the tide against the occupiers with an aplomb that brooks no doubt that under his guidance, not only will Wilma Deering and his other new friends defeat the enemy of the "American race" (sic) at home, but across the globe--indeed, they are fated to do so.

Sir Boss' Ignored Legacy

Despite the contrasting satirical foresight of his controversial A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, where Hank Morgan, a disentimed Hartford arms factory manager, who naively sows socio/political chaos when he introduces what he considers panaceic technology to the ignorant denizens of 13th century England, Mark Twain (an avow-ed anti-imperialist) would probably have been less than amused to consider his 1889 novel as immediate forebear to the many techno-evangelistic speculative adventures to come.

Probably starting with Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars novels featuring

John Carter, such a cosmic savior complex permeated the genre across a variety of tropes (from interplanetary and microscopic, to cybernetic settings) into the 1940s, like The Prisoner of Mars by the prolific Edmond Hamilton, whose novel from the May 1939 Startling Stories combined elements of Welles' recent panic broadcast with Twain's "Prince and the Pauper" in a tale of Martian tyranny, overcome by an heir to the throne raised on Earth as human.

The Spring issue of Planet Stories the following year featured two novelettes of similarly super-competent contemporary outlander heroes, one miniaturized to defeat a subatomic-scale despot in Ray Cummings' "The Girl From Infinite Smallness", the other, thawed out from a 20th century climbing accident in Carl Selwyn's proto-Terminator "Revolt On the Earth-Star", to end the mass brain-harvesting by robots of his oddly complacent descendants.

 

Back in the pages of the first issue of Startling (January 1939), apparently even felony could not stain the nobility of such scientific Prometheans: the subject of Stanley Weinbaum's The Blake Flame was preserved for a distant future in need via electric chair execution for murdering his wife in the present.

Regardless of how exotic the situations the protagonists might face, the through-line of these adventures upheld a disturbing insistence that, as the ideal of Western civilization, the American character and priorities could not help be of universal value because of the presumption that, to elaborate on Dick Cheney's quote from 2000, "The American way of life is not (only) non-negotiable"(5), but also the apex of everyone else's aspirations, for all time an space.

Master Races & Imperial Stars

In his author biography E.E. "Doc" Smith (Starmont House, 1986), Joseph Sanders views the space opera hero as a logical heir to the romanticized explorers and conquerors of the country's Western expansion, transposed to the anticipated frontier of the heavens.

As with the eliminationist ravages visited upon native nations standing in the way of white settlers, railroad barons and mining magnates, the Blavatskyesque racial overtones of Smith's point-based ranking system for the various alien species of the Lensman saga,  based on how much they diverge from a human "standard", cannot be denied.

Nowlan's contributions are more blunt, as Rogers' foes, the Han, are revealed to be the progeny of centuries-past forced extraterrestrial/human interbreeding, relegating the majority of Earth's population to non-human status--hardly a welcome foundation for a character that is to be the centerpiece of a renewed multi-media franchise simultaneous with the long standing bigotry of the new president (all multicultural pretensions aside). As a "trans-Atlanticist", Biden functions as point-man for a new wave of U.S-led global imperialism, according to Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace (click on his name to listen to interview) (6).

2016 Green VP candidate Ajamu Baraka

In the wake of his notorious predecessor, Biden's own racism seems to have evaporated from memory even faster than that of Nowlan's novellas, which were penned against the intellectualized xenophobia of the 1920s, significantly fomented by eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. whose writings were skewered by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. From his early opposition to school integration (7), support for the unconscionable destruction of Iraq and Libya (among innumerable other invasions/coups) (8), to his helping to draft the 1994 racially-targeting Federal Crime Bill (9), not to mention his bizarre praise of presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean..." (10)--a comment in keeping with Rogers' own backhanded admiration for the "simple, spiritual Blacks of Africa"* in "Airlords", cultural zeitgeist offers Joe Biden little defense.

Conclusion

Happily, while the last televised version of Buck Rogers In the 25th Century, starring the amiable Gil Gerard, was influenced more by the giddiness of the Disco era than the "Yellow Peril" of both the fiction and the early comic strips, it makes sense, when responding to what domestic and foreign policies to emerge from the Oval Office, to not lose sight of what convictions the new president will be drawing from in formulating them. 

*The text of Armageddon 2419 A.D--The Seminal "Buck Rogers" Novel, a 1978 Ace unitary edition of both stories, re-edited by Spider Robinson, reads the "wise, spiritual Blacks..."

____

References:

1. www.cbr.com/buck-rogers-legendary-pictures-film-franchise/

2. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_ted_rall/on_foreign_policy_biden_is_worse_than_trump

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/biden-knows-that-the-world-wont-organize-itself/616953/

4. https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/

5. https://www.mail-archive.com/usma@colostate.edu/msg21850.html

6. https://blackagendareport.com/black-agenda-radio-week-february-15-2021

7.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/joe-biden-didn-t-just-compromise-segregationists-he-fought-their-n1021626

8.https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/bidens--shameful-foreign-policy-record-extends-well-beyond-iraq/

9. https://www.theroot.com/biden-to-sign-executive-orders-for-his-racial-equity-ag-1846133093

10. https://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama

The original texts of "Armageddon: 2419 A.D." and "The Airlords of Han" can be found on Project Gutenberg at:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32530; http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25438