I kept copies of almost every magazine I ever worked for. They filled up boxes and boxes in the basement. Now I'm getting rid of them. I'm even selling some of them on ebay.

Oddly, I find this harder than throwing away my personal notes. These, you see, have been seen by other people. They are thus, somehow, more concrete. More real.

What is purely private is like a fantasy. It may dismissed, dissolved, murdered...and no one is the wiser. There are no witnesses to threaten retribution.

Datamation at eBay.

I haven't been ignoring you.

Discovered to my considerable distress that people had been commenting on my blog postings but, for some reason, I've haven't been seeing the aforesaid comments.

So, I haven't been ignoring you. I've just been, as is (alas) too often the case, stupid.

If want to reach me, please feel free to do so at MichaelJayTucker@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers
mjt

Ted Nugent

I have been watching the Ted Nugent affair with interest. His more or less open threats of violence against the Obama family are, indeed, distressing. Yet, on some level, I am not disturbed by the predictably inane statements of a celebrity who appears both daft and decadent. What is, however, genuinely terrifying is something else. To wit, that when he spoke, his audience applauded.

Once again, I repeat my plaintive question: how have we come to this?

moving

Spent another day packing and sorting and throwing away. We've also now got a big U-Haul container out in the driveway. Periodically, I go dump another load of stuff in it.

I've got almost all of my own personal papers and such packed up and in the U-Haul container. On one level, that's very good news indeed. On another, well, there is something disconcerting about knowing that most of one's personal and professional life can get squeezed down to a dozen 12x10x15 banker's boxes.

Sort of humbling when you think about it.

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.

deadly passions

I was reading the news on the web the other day and came across an article about Congresswoman Giffords. The piece reported that she had asked one of her longtime associates to run for her vacant seat.

It was innocuous enough story. But, then, for reasons that I can only describe as masochistic, I scrolled down to read the commentary left by other visitors to the site There were a few remarks left by well-wishers, and then scores of vituperative attacks…on her, on her husband, on President Obama, on Democrats, on liberals and moderates in general.

I'll spare you the details of what was specifically said. Suffice that they were quite awful. The least offense of them referred to Giffords herself as "mush head." Other posts from other readers announced that of course all politicians were parasites and would be duly removed in the coming libertarian revolution. Still others repeated the Birther fantasy which, for reasons I will never understand, remains alive and kicking.

I knew, of course, that these incredible remarks were the work of a few sad, sick bastards who otherwise would be scrawling four letter words in their own excrement on the walls of public rest rooms. The only difference is that now the Web, and its anonymity, allows them to smear their feces across the globe.

I knew that. Yet, I found myself depressed. Consider the recent GOP debates with all their venom. What if this is the new norm for political discourse? What if this…the verbal abuse, the bald-faced lies, the utter lack of empathy, the demonization of others, the thinly veiled calls for violence…is the rhetoric of our age?

What then? Where do we go? In the grip of such deadly passions?

Return to New Mexico

It is a little after seven in the morning. I'm in New Mexico, now. I'm here to visit my parents, and also to open up our new apartment. It's a bit early for me to do so. We won't be out here full time until July. But, it makes some sense to have a place to stay when we (or, rather, I) visit …as I will do increasingly between now and the final move.

I'm in the apartment at the moment. It is quite nice, though a little empty. I have no furnishings except a futon bed borrowed from my father. And I'm alone, of course.

There is an oddly familiar feeling to all this. Not quite thirty years ago, I started my professional life sitting in exactly such an apartment, this one in New Hampshire. I'd gotten my first real job in the trade press at a magazine there. Martha was to join me in a few months. And so, I was alone in a set of rooms that were either starkly and chillingly empty, or utterly alive with promise and potential. Take your pick.

Today, as then, I shall of course select the latter, the promise and potential. It is far healthier to do so.


*

My son says that our moving West is a wonderful thing for us in that it will give us a fresh start. He is right. He is wise. And yet, let us confess, there is something melancholy in acknowledging that one's life's does need a fresh start, does require a new beginning…

*

The problem with such moments of reflection is that they lead to uncomfortable places. If it had not been for this crisis, would it have been possible for us (for me) to change? Or had the inertia become so great, the detritus so deep, that only the most fearsome events could force a return to motion and mobility?

In which case my mother's stroke was more than a medical emergency. It was her gift. Her sacrifice.

Let us hope that I am worthy of it.

Santorum's America

The idea that Santorum is now neck and neck with Romney is disturbing to say the least. That he might be the Republican nominee is appalling. That he might be president of the United States is horrific. The man has no more business running a nation than he does operating a nuclear reactor in his basement.

Though I do wonder. If the unthinkable should happen, and he gets the nod, what will the young libertarians of Mr. Paul think of the Santorum vision of an America governed like a giant parochial school? With condoms forbidden by law, uniforms required, and serious discussion of whether patent leather shoes really reflect up?


(news story here)

and 2000 and 2001

Tonight I finished posting Xcargo for 2000 and 2001. I think I've got most of it on the site, now.

I still have some odds and ends to add. I've left out material that's gone into various books and I have to think about whether I should add it or not. And I've got quite a bit to do in terms of adding notes, directions, and other such.

But, most of its online now. Rather a lot of work.

It's here.

vintage Xcargo 1999 -- posted

Got all of Xcargo for 1999 posted to my website.

Lord! but I wrote a lot of stuff. Kinda embarrassing.

https://sites.google.com/site/explosivecargo/home

politics and passive aggression

Years ago, I "monetized" my blog, explosive-cargo. That means that Google puts ads on it and, if those ads should ever do something interesting like earn money, I'll get a cut.

To date, I've not received a penny. But that doesn't concern me at the moment. What is amusing is the ads that show up on my blog. They appear automatically, you see, I presume in response to certain key words. (As you'd expect with a blog called "explosive-cargo," I get a lot of inserts from companies that do haz-mat stuff. Terribly disappointing for everyone, I'm sure.)

A while back I did a piece that basically compared the GOP primary challengers of 2012 to a pack of braying idiots. When I checked in on the blog a while later, I was startled to find a huge ad under my piece from some extremely right-wing organization. It more or less openly called Obama a Communist and hinted at the birther fantasy. I'm guessing that some bit of software on some server saw the names of Republican candidates in my post and assumed that I favored them.

For a moment, I was furious. I was going to contact Google and demand that the ad be removed. But, then, I had an odd thought. The right wing organization in question paid good money to make that advertisement. If it appears on my site, with my more or less left of center readers, then it will do its makers no good at all. It will be a waste of their time, their effort, and their money.

There is something satisfying in that. It is a kind of negative power. The ultimate in passive aggression…

Santorum, The Bad, The Mad, and The Passive

The fact that Rick Santorum took not one but three states in yesterday's primary is most unsettling to me (particularly as I'd just written on Monday that Romney's lead was large and comforting). I'm not at all certain how to interpret it.

Two possible explanations, both troubling, occur to me. First is that there are far more lunatics in the world (or at least in the GOP) than I'd believed possible. Second is that the average Republican voter has become so disgusted with the extended Freak Show that has been the GOP primary season so far that he/she has simply withdrawn from the affair, leaving the field to the mad and the bad.

I'm not quite sure which would be the more distressing—the number of the lunatics, or the passivity of the sane.

Clowns...

I have been watching the GOP primaries. It's been interesting to see Mitt Romney move into the lead.

As a good Democrat, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I hate to see a solid Republican candidate come to the fore. Romney will be formidable rival for Obama. He is a strong campaigner and has a lot of money behind him.

On the other, there is something reassuring in the fact that the Republicans aren't completely out to lunch. Say what you like about Mitt, at least he isn't a clown, which is not something you can say about some of his rivals.

I mean, let's face it. The Newt is just one elephant short of a circus.