Santorum's Rise

As I watch the unexpected success of Santorum in the primaries, I'm struck by how many of his supporters are the working poor (or below), the dispossessed, the needy…the people, in short, who have been left-behind, alienated, or terrified by our postindustrial age. To them, it offers little but poverty, indignity, and a loss of self-worth as wounding as annihilation. They are looking for someone to blame, and pretty much anyone will do.

It is the great fault of Liberalism that it did not recognize those individuals nor seek them out as allies. (Let us face it, the Conservatives had a point. The Left of the last few decades has sympathized far more with spotted owls than unemployed men.) It is the great power, and shame, of the Right that it recognized those people before anyone else, and was eager and willing to exploit them.

Yet, in this the Right invited its own enslavement if not destruction…as I think, now, it begins to realize. With Santorum's rise, the Right of the Elite finds itself confronting another, very different Right, one that has very little sympathy with its libertarianism and secularism.

Already, the Elite has reason regret the forces it has unleashed. In time, I suspect, it will learn to fear them.

Life Everlasting...

I have friends who are inspired by the idea of not dying. I mean that literally. They hold that technological advancement will someday…someday reasonably soon… give us the power to banish death. Or, at least, to extend human life into the realm of centuries or even millennium.

I suppose that's a good thing and a worthy end. I support it. Yet, I do not think I'd care for it myself.

I mean, I've have not been particularly competent in managing the 50-something years I've already got. One shudders to think what I'd do with 500 more.

Dare not speak its name...

I have been following with interest the spate of stories about the sudden emergence of the "N-word" in connection with President Obama. A sticker reading "Don't Re-Nig: 2012" has appeared on car bumpers and on the web. A nationally read blogger posts a cartoon of the president as a chicken-eating spook. And on and on.

So, finally, it is all beginning to break, isn't it? The fog lifts. The concrete appears behind the vast abstraction. The reality: the virulence of the Right, of its hatred of Obama, has nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with being a "socialist," or a liberal, nothing to do with foreign policy or the support of Israel or energy…

It is about Race. It has always been about Race. It always will be about Race.

But, then, we knew that already, didn't we?

We just didn't dare say it.

where you can find the Konas

I realized I ought to say where on Ebay my surrealistic Kona comics are. They are here.

Kona The Caveman and Me

I think I may have discovered why I'm such a strange little duck. I mean, truly bizarre. And proud of it, I might add. I've seen normality. It wasn't pretty.

But, also (and in this I'm serious) I worry a bit about the state of comic books. Or graphic novels. Or sequential art. Or call them what you will. They are, or were, the popular art and so important.

To explain…as you know, I'm moving. And, because I'm moving, I'm emptying out my house. Just about four times a week, now, I take another truckload of stuff to the dump. What I'm not throwing away, I'm donating to this or that charity. A still smaller percentage of my possessions I'm trying to sell on Ebay.

And among the things I'm trying to sell are scores and scores…hundreds!…of comic books, all that I bought or received in my misspent youth. My parents mailed them to me some years ago. I think for the amusement of watching me try to find a place to store them.

Anyway, as I go through the comics, almost all of which date from the early 1960s, I'm struck by how really weird they are.You'll recall I mentioned the series that had Mickey Mouse as a spy—a five-foot rodent who talks, somehow inserted into our world of humans, utterly out of place and yet no one seems to notice anything odd.

Well, as I've delved deeper into the piles, I've found more and more like that. More and more that's downright loopy.

For example, I've just put on Ebay three issues of "Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle," one from 1963 and two from 1964. (They are here)

Who's Kona? you ask. He is, I answer, a cave man. Specifically, Kona is a caveman who happens to look a lot like a movie star with long blond-white hair and who lives on an island that time forgot. It's the sort a spot where Neanderthals, dinosaurs, and giant apes live cheek by jowl.

Kona is the king of all this. Then, one day, a family of modern humans, the Dodds, crash their blimp on the island. That's right, a blimp. Long story as to what they were doing in a blimp and where they were going before they crashed. Suffice to say they do crash, Kona saves them, and thus begins a beautiful friendship. Kona abandons his island and he and the Dodds roam the world and have marvelous adventures.

According to Don Markstein's Toonpedia, Kona appeared when Dell publishing was in desperate need of new material when its former partner, Western Printing, set up its own line of comics, the famed Gold Key. In the process, it took with it all the titles and characters that had formerly been in Dell's stable. Kona was one of several characters to dash to Dell's rescue.

But I mention Kona because of the comics' art. It is surreal. I mean that it's surreal in the sense that the surrealists meant. The books are a succession of images…startling, alien, even hallucinogenic! It is hard to put into words just how alien they are, or how much they challenge one's normal perceptions of things.)

Thus, on Monster Isle, we have Neanderthals mounted on dinosaurs and firing rifles and Tommy guns. In the 1963 issue, Kona and friends discover the Pacificans, once humanoid but now equipped with the heads of fish or lizards—and with these strange creatures they do epic battle.

It is …it really is…a little like an acid trip. And not necessarily a good one—as demonstrated by the Pacificans, with their heads of beasts and their high-tech weapons.

And all this was my early reading matter. Is it any wonder I am myself so peculiar? The amazing thing is that I'm not even stranger than I am—maybe sprouting an animal head while riding on a dinosaur.

Okay…

Now comes the serious part. These comics date from the period when comic books were considered complete and total trash. There were no such things as well-respected "graphic novels." There were no professors using them in classes on postmodern literary theory. They were wholly without value…or so said the dominant culture.

Now, of course, all that's changed. Comics, or comix, have been legitimized. They have been integrated into haut culture. Works like Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, are quite rightly regarded as important pieces of art.

Which is all good.

And yet...

Sometimes I worry.

I am not sure you could do something like Kona, these days. Even if you could somehow scrape away the unconscious racism and sexism in the work, you might not be able to reproduce its vigor, its energy, its dream-like intensity. Those characteristics may not be valued any longer.

As I look at graphic novels (things Maus and Persepolis excepted) I'm troubled by how alike many of them are. They have a hero who faces some great challenge (Vampires, Zombies, whatever) but who spends more time wrestling with his or her own angst than with the villain. And it is angst of a very special sort—adolescent angst, or, at most, twenty-something malaise. Oh, now and then, the artist throws in Meaningful Social Issues…Feminism, gun control, Race-Class-Gender...but those are in the script as a backdrop. They are the setting before which the main character performs his or her endless soliloquy.

Which is, I think, a problem. I'm not sure how long an art form can last given so limited a repertoire. (Surely it is no surprise that comic book sales are down.)

But even if comics/comix survive, there is a deeper, more fundamental concern. I'm troubled by yet another thought.

What if the price of acceptance into haut culture is the loss of creativity?

Mickey Mouse, Secret Agent...

I'm still putting stuff on eBay. Comic books from my lost youth, chiefly. Recently, I stumbled across a set of comics that were genuinely bizarre—"Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent."

In 1966, Walt Disney and Gold Key comics decided to get into the booming spy-story market (this was when James Bond and the Man From Uncle were at their peak). And so, Mickey Mouse was promptly retooled as a kind of furry, big-eared 007.

The comics produced on this theme are almost surreal. In them, Mickey and Goofy (as the only anthropomorphic animals in a world inhabited otherwise entirely by humans) engage in 007-style adventures, complete with Bond-type villains and beautiful heroines.

I've got two that I'm offering for sale. The first is the premier issue of the series, "Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent in Assignment Time-Lock," which is dated June of 1966 and recounts Mickey and Goofy's unwilling recruitment into "PI, police international." The second is "The Mystery at Misty Gorge," in which our heroes venture into "Africa's Taboo Territory," to rescue Mara Doorna, a brilliant scientist who just happens to also be a willowy blonde. It seems she's been kidnapped by bad guys who want her to use solar power to make artificial diamonds. (No. Really. Could I make that up?)

On one level, these stories are merely bizarre. But, on another, there is something wonderfully subversive about them…an excursion into a parallel universe where the conventions and pretensions of the Spy Flick, the Comic Strip, and the Real World come together disastrously in a sort of three-way car crash of the intellect.

Which brings up an interesting question. To wit: I'm trying to market these to comic book collectors. But, I wonder if I'm not barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps I ought to be selling them to tenured professors of postmodernism and gifted directors of Absurdist Theater.

All a question of market niche, as it were.




Ebay

Liberals, Horror

So the other day I was researching some statements made by high-ranking Nazis before World War II. (Why? Long story. I am using the quotes in a play, believe it or not.)

Anyway, a couple of such remarks I ran across were particularly intriguing. In one, for instance, a statement from a speech made in the early '30s, a Party spokesman triumphantly noted that a certain other party had recently been forced out of politics entirely. National Socialism had, he noted, swept the scum's "black, red, and gold banners" out of the nation.

Who was this? Who was it that the Nazis hated so much? Whose banners were black, red and gold? Not the people you might think. He didn't mean Communists, he didn't mean some rival fascism…he didn't even mean Zionists or politically active Jews.

He meant liberals.

The Nazi's reference was to something known as the "Iron Front." Despite the rather ominous name, the Front was a union of center and mildly left of center organizations more or less allied with the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Some, like the SDP, were mild socialists. Others were surprisingly conservative. All, however, valued civil liberties, the democratic process, and (for lack of a better term) basic decency in politics. Their common flag was a Red, Gold, and Black tricolor—the traditional colors of German liberalism—and their common image was three arrows or spears in a row, one arrow in opposition to each threat to German democracy: the Nazis, the Communists, and the Traditional Right.

And the Front was the group the Nazis detested. Its leaders were arrested and sent to concentration camps even before the Communists. Even before the Jews.

And it makes sense. The Front, not the Communists, not the Stalinists, was the true antithesis of the Nazis. The Stalinists they might hate, the Communists they might try to destroy, but ultimately Radical Right and Revolutionary Left understood the other. Each admired the other. Each regarded the other as a fertile recruiting ground. (As one Nazi famously said, a good Communist could always become a good Nazi. But a Liberal? A Socialist? A Democrat? Never. That was impossible.)

And I think the Front is important to us. Not just because of its role in history, but because of what it tells us about how fanatics regard reasonable men and women. For them, compromise, negotiation, moderation, the golden mean…these things are not just distasteful. They are the Wholly Other. As terrifying as the Kraken. As alien as life from Mars.

And it explains too, I think, why the Right hates us so thoroughly today, here in America. Why it is that the Tea Party insists President Obama is a Moslem and traitor, in spite of every evidence to the contrary. Why it is that the GOP proclaims us Leninists in spite of all we do or say. Why certain churches announce that we are in league with Satan.

You see, we are terrifying to them. We are terrifying beyond measure. We are terrifying because we attempt to be otherwise. Because we attempt not to frighten.

For them, for whom only the bully and the thug are comprehendible, we are thus inexplicable, and therefore horrible.

Saddam Hussein, ebay, and me

As you know, I'm moving. As you also know, I'm either throwing away or trying to sell tons of stuff I've gathered over the last 30 years or so.

Well, if you check my ebay page today (see here), you'll find something rather amusing. Or, if not amusing, then weird as h*ll. Specifically, you'll find I'm selling a batch of English-language propaganda from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

How did that happen? Well, in 1984, I was a very young trade press journalist writing about computers. I was a bit bored and dreamed of doing something that would have "real significance." One day, while on the bus to work, I had a brain flash. I could do a book about the Iran-Iraq War, which was going on at the time. I figured it had to be important since, after all, the world was trembling at the idea of oil cutoffs from the region. And, besides, Iraq was using chemical weapons in a big way. The unspoken prohibition against them that had endured, more or less, since 1918 had vanished almost overnight.

So, I started contacting various potential sources. One of these was the Iraqi Embassy, or more precisely, the Iraqi Interests Section in Washington. (It was kind of an un-Embassy that Iraq maintained while Hussein and the Reagan White House worked out their complicated relationship.)

I called up a press officer at the Embassy and asked a few stupid questions. A few days later, I was startled to find a large package in my mailbox. It contained all of this material.

Truth be told, it was kind of creepy. Even then, everyone knew that Saddam Hussein was a major despot. I kept wondering what would happen now that my home address was in a file, somewhere, at the Iraqi Interests Section.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, nothing much did happen. I never heard from the Iraqi Embassy again. And, when I took my book proposal to various American publishers, all I got was rejection slips and a few impolite chortles.

My favorite comment came from an editor who said, in more or less these exact words, "It sounds like a good book, but no one will care about these little p*ssant countries a year from now." The scary thing was that she was probably right. Americans would only really recall the two nations after our own people started dying in the one and because of the other.

Such, alas, is human nature.