Superhero Media: The Fall of Phoenix Jones

An interesting YouTube documentary that a friend put me onto, The Fall of Phoenix Jones covers the career of Seattle-based "Superhero" Ben Fodor, AKA Phoenix Jones, who operated between 2011 and 2014, before being arrested for dealing drugs. The hour-long video is an interesting look into the reality of people who choose to put on a costume and patrol their local neighborhood for real. Unlike many other self-styled "Real Life Superheroes", Phoenix Jones was not content to help people out, or deliver food to the hungry, he went out seeking trouble and ending it with a mix of pepper spray and his backgrounds in the military and mixed martial arts. The high profile that Jones enjoyed, along with the "team" he assembled, the "Rain City Superhero Movement", launched him to a reasonable level of fame, despite the divisive nature of vigilante violence, and the continuing controversy of his life. For a better look at the whole story, check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8CkDrhZw14&t=2111s  

Ok, now let's have a talk about vigilantism. It can be easy to forget, with our comics, film, television and games, that violence is a big factor of justice, be it perpetrated by Police or anyone else. As a society, we tend to forgive violence perpetrated by the Police, even when such violence is directed against the innocent; as an anarchist, I'm really against the idea of the Police having a monopoly on violence, however, I'm not a fan of vigilantes either. In the four-colour world of comics, Batman stopping a mugging with his martial skills is a good thing, but Batman is an impossibly-competent fictional character, not a real person, and it takes only a few minutes thought to realise that Bruce Wayne, with his extreme wealth, could do more to help Gotham in a day than Batman could in a lifetime. We know, though research and painful experience, that the cause of most petty and violent crime is poverty. Punching people is rarely the solution to poverty. 

There is even a section of the video where Jones recovers two containers of laundry detergent stolen by a homeless man. Evidently, there is a way to get high off the detergent, but even putting aside the failure of drug prohibition, how is the homeless man helped by being accosted for a few dollars worth of soap? Jones is to be commended for the times he de-escalated situations and prevented further violence, but the majority of his actions only served to perpetuate cycles of poverty and harm, when they weren't outright criminal. Jones disdainfully calls other "heroes" who help feed the needy and make the world a better place through kindness, "LARPers", but the truth is that helping those who need it despite societal condemnation is far braver and more radical than punching a mugger will ever be. Want to be a real hero? Challenge extreme wealth. Champion ideas like Universal Health Care and Universal Basic Income. Shelter refugees. Stop buying Nestle and Coca-Cola products. Save the punching for the comics.