Give me a dirty look so I know you still love me

As the writer of a blog dedicated mostly to Robocop, I have begun to wonder if art is morally neutral.  Specifically, I was thinking about the ethics of consuming art created by bad people after watching the film Bohemian Rhapsody, and I was helped along by a combination of factors such as the still-fresh-in-my-mind recent viewing of the always-watchable Lindsey Ellis' visual essay,  Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire About Nazis  and the sight of Alistair Campbell yet again trending on Twitter because his moral authority in true Hitler Loved His Dogs And Was A Vegetarian fashion* has been reasserted thanks to his opposition to Brexit and the fact that One Million Dead Iraqis would be harder to interview on The Last Leg - I mean, One Million Dead Iraqis would certainly be funnier than the Last Leg, but having them on would present people in the UK with the difficult mental hurdle of actually acknowledging One Million Dead Iraqis and how they might have become dead in the first place and who might be responsible, so I can understand Channel 4's preference to platform a myopic war criminal instead - Alistair can play the bagpipes, don'tchewknow.  What a delight.
Anyway, the Last Leg, in helping Campbell's rehabilitation, and in satirising people with no platform of their own, and in - I poop you not - causing one of their own fans to have a nervous breakdown after ridiculing her on the show for ascribing the wrong peace award to Jeremy Corbyn**, continue a trend I've been noticing more and more in the media of satire switching its target from the powerful to the powerless.
I suppose I really first dedicated some of my typically Robocop-filled mental real estate to this matter when someone put forward the notion of Black Mirror as the new Twilight Zone and I thought "No, Black Mirror is too dark for that", as Twilight Zone's creator and primary writer, Rod Serling - a fascinating character once lambasted by a  superior officer while on active duty in the Pacific Theater for wandering around daydreaming on an island that was literally half occupied by Japanese soldiers - was an optimist and his darkest tales are cautionary, while Black Mirror's creator, Charlie Brooker, is... well, let's say he is not noted for upbeat delivery or heartwarming moral fables, preferring to make tv shows about how technology and social media in particular is ruining lives and causing the destruction of society, a surprisingly conservative outlook from someone held in quite high esteem by leftists.  Yes, I know, I shouldn't ramble on so much and instead get to the point otherwise it'll just be the Robocop post all over again, but this time it's different because I have clearly written "ethics of consuming art created by bad people" and "modern satire targets the powerless" on a notepad.  I've learned my lesson.  Not enough to write down why these two things are linked, I grant you, so let's hope this post comes together in the end.
Black Mirror is not the new Twilight Zone, because Black Mirror punches down.  The Last Leg also punches down*** (and, y'know, reinforces dominant media narratives even when they are provably false and/or directly harmful to the programme's viewers).  Bohemian Rhapsody is an enjoyable film, but its consumption aids the financial viability of its director, Bryan Singer, whose issues I shall not go into here since they require trigger warnings, and it also glosses over the issue of Queen breaking the cultural embargo on apartheid-era South Africa.
Is it ethical to watch Black Mirror, The Last Leg, or the films of Bryan Singer?  I don't really think I am equipped to answer this in a satisfying way as the solution likely does not involve Robocop, and before you ask: no, my referencing Robocop does not represent an attempt by me to introduce a touchstone element of moral or legal absolutism through which I might unravel this ethical tangle by retreating at the last to the rule of law or societal consensus as the future basis of my actions, I just really like Robocop.




* Hitler wasn't that keen on dogs and wasn't a vegetarian, this was image management - and given people are still banging on about it nearly 74 years later, Hitler clearly had a great PR team and centrists needn't work as hard on his behalf as they currently do.

** But the presenter later apologised... for not getting permission to broadcast the video footage.

*** If I was a better writer, I could figure a way to work into the post how the satire in Robocop targets the excesses of corporatism and consumer culture rather than the populace, but here I am writing this observation in the footnotes like a total chump.

Give me two shots of something easy on the environment but hard on the liver

The British welfare state has the same moral operating system as the prison industry wherein punishment rather than correction is its aim, even though punishment costs more to implement.  Thanks to Yvette Cooper and the lovely New Labour government of the time - can't blame the Tories entirely for this one - the British welfare system shifted from a safety net designed to prevent poverty to being a means to punish it because like the prison system, its motivating impulse is not safety and the wider good of society but sadism.
Putting people in a small cage to be brutalised into submission is so barbaric we don't even do it to animals anymore, and the prison system is nothing more than a sap to society's need for revenge upon a class of people against whom hate is not just acceptable but institutionalised.  Prison is a product of sadism and its proponents are sadists.  It took me a while to get to this because I'm a Catholic and we are a very judgmental people, but I'm better now.
Likewise, you would not starve an animal and leave it loose on the street to fend for itself.  Our welfare system is just as sadistic and broken and what has this to do with me reading a bunch of Robocop comics?  I honestly forget.
This is the problem when you invest heavily in an elaborate metaphor but don't write anything down before you start and then if you step away from the pc for a bit for some reason and then come back later, you don't really know why you have a bit about why your society is still stuck in the morality and social politics of the middle ages and now here we are - all of the above was my intro to sharing my thoughts on Alan Grant and Simon Furman's Robocop comics for Marvel from the early 1990s, in which Robo fights a robot gorilla that turns out to be his brother, wrestles some dinosaurs, and - for some reason - invades Africa.  That is not a colorful exaggeration, either, he is literally armed with military weapons and dropped into Africa and told to subjugate an entire country.
Yeah, these comics are pretty stupid, but what struck me is that they are no more so than more recent Robocop comics that weren't handcuffed by the demands of the copyright owners at the time because they were trying to make Robocop a kiddy-friendly property.  Alan Grant makes no bones about being able to do pretty much naff all with the book and how he ended up walking after 11 issues, but recent Robocop comics I've come across have been ultra-gory and without restrictions on subject matter and man have they been bo-RING.  There's one where Robo has to drag an injured officer through a gauntlet of thugs to get them to a doctor and my first thought was "yeah the injured character is dead already" and I was not wrong, but in the 1990s Robocop comics there's a character whose identity isn't revealed until late in the issue and instead of being a character we've previously seen whose identity the reader had to guess, it turns out his identity has been kept in the shadows because he's had his head replaced with a television that shows 24 hour footage of a crying clown. Daft as heck compared to "I am sorry Mr Robocop but she has been dead all this time and you have been narrating to a ghost!" but I can safely say it was at least not what I was expecting.  I guess this my grumpy old man way of saying these new Robocop comics are such a darned buzzkill.

I still can't figure out where I was going with that stuff about the welfare state and the prison system.  This is totally going to bug me until I figure this out.