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Foxy 🦊 Business
Happy 🐪 Hump 🐫 Day! We’re sneaking through the end of summer like a fox stalking a varmint…
🦊 Resides In The Wood 🦊
I tread in the steps of the fox… with such a tiptoe of expectation, as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood. ~Henry David Thoreau, Natural History of Massachusetts (collected in Excursions, 1863)
Living out in the middle of nowhere, as I do, gives us access to a lot of lovely woodland creatures.
Driving here and there, I occasionally spy one of these dog-cousins on the prowl.
So much the better.
The more predators there are running around eating mice and the like, the fewer intruders I get into my humble little abode.
Of course, there’s one fox who’s around here almost all the time.
💙 Awesome Wife | Awesome Life 🤍
My lovely wife is quite foxy indeed and she’s already bundled up for cozy season because I still need the AC running.
She bundles up on her couch like a vixen in her den.
It’s so freaking cute…
Fox 🦊 Facts
20 Surprising Fox Facts That Break All The Rules
These doglike critters are cute, too.
It’s important to keep a healthy distance since they’re not tame, but foxes are a marvel to watch.
The video shows how finely attuned they are to seeking their prey.
What’s as amazing as it is comical is the sight of a fox plunging through feet of snow like a harpoon in search of creatures scurrying around underneath.
It’s genuinely astounding all the activity that goes on in the deep woods around my house while I sit here typing.
🦊 Jury At A Goose’s Trial🦊
A fox should not be on the jury at a goose’s trial. ~Thomas Fuller
That’s a truism I’ll have to remember to seed into my Golden Age Arc’s corruption storylines.
The first three years of the Sentinels Chronicle are set up to echo aspects of the Golden Age of Comic Books.
The story so far has established a contingent of focus characters and shows their impact in their world.
Like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond, this impact spreads outwards in all directions.
Unlike ripples on water, the effects of impact from choices or even quintessential existence can have right and wrong directions.
When a character does a thing, it may benefit someone and may also harm someone.
Depending on what those benefits or harms may be, other characters will take actions related to how they were affected.
If the original action or the secondary reaction is something that becomes subject to institutional or social judgment, we circle back to the 🦊 in the 🪿‘s jury.
This is such rich storytelling territory.
It’s why Spider-Man doing something objectively good, such as stopping a robbery, is something we celebrate as readers in the moment.
It is also the absolute cognitive dissonance we experience when J. Jonah Jameson turns the objectively good act of stopping a robbery into a screed against vigilantism.
Technically, he’s not entirely wrong. People should not take the law into their own hands as a hobby.
If you’re in the moment and you can stop a crime in progress or even cause it to be stopped by calling 911, great. Perfectly legitimate reaction in the moment.
If this inspires you to run around trying to thwart crime, it’s perfectly reasonable for a public figure like Jameson to condemn that extralegal behavior.
If you want to fight crime, join the police or the FBI or whichever agency most closely addresses the kind of crime you’re fighting.
For a random guy or gal, the concern would be that you might not qualify. Maybe you won’t get hired or you won’t be able to complete the academy if you are hired.
The superhero proposal is that if you can do something to stop crime or prevent harm of some kind, you have a moral duty to try.
The assumption is that doing things the “right way” can become bogged down in institutional inertia.
Cops have their hands tied by policy.
Lawyers are hamstrung by technicalities.
Caregivers are constrained by resource availability.
For a random guy or gal, that’s an invitation to try to find workable alternatives.
Can’t get Al Capone for murder, racketeering and general thuggery? Get him for unpaid taxes. Gotcha!
For a superhero, police inertia, arcane legal constraints or financial limitations become matchstick barriers.
A superhero can tear into a villain’s lair, stop their insidious world-ending scheme and throw them into their own horrendous device so that they’re trapped into a prison of their own making.
In a comic book, this is perfectly justifiable.
Only Superman can throw Zod back into the Phantom Zone or keep Brainiac from gobbling up the world.
But you still have Jameson with the moral argument that someone using loopholes to do presumably needful things is someone who will continue deriving loopholes to excuse their unconstitutional or illegal behavior.
Forgiving good intentions and good results that fly in the face of institutionally agreed protective frameworks is inherently corrosive of those frameworks.
The very inertia the superhero is attempting to gloss over due to pure capability is actually considered a desirable end.
This is what gives the fiction its teeth.
You can critique the propositions of either side, or preferably both.
Pure procedural law and order allows bad guys the ability to slip through loopholes to continue doing bad things.
Pure vigilantism stamps on the rights of people whose crimes may require the very nuance that the system is designed to address.
How that all shakes out in your story is worth its weight in books sold.
And, if you give serious consideration to both sides of that institutional divide, it’s worth its weight in philosophical contribution.
That is the genuine heart of comic books and has been since the 1930s when the medium first took its recognizable shape.
That’s all for today. See you back on Saturday for 🚪🌞