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Opus 190:
Opus 190 (August 30, 2006). Our featured stories this time
include a lengthy review of a new book on famed illustrator-cartooner Russell Patterson, coupled to a
biography and appreciation just posted to Harv’s Hindsights, a discussion of
sex and faith in America as prompted by the latest issues of American Virgin, and a short history of
the Middle East with an emphasis on the hostilities between Jews and Arabs.
Here’s what’s here, in order:
NOUS R US
The
real life origin of the Golden Age Green Lantern
9/11 Commission Report transformed into comic book format
Civil
War delayed
Ralph Steadman’s memoir about S.
Hunter Thompson
Destinations
for the traveling Peanuts exhibit
New Cracked without many comics
25
Most Controversial Movies of All Time
COMIC STRIP WATCH
A
wildly hysterical letter protesting a Zits strip
BOOK MARQUEE
Russell
Patterson
Alex
Toth Doodle Book
Alex
Toth Reader, Vol. 2
Buz
Sawyer volume reprinting the first 14 months of the strip
Civilization’s Last Outpost
Origin
of “hot dog”
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE
First
issues of—
Casandra
Sidekick
Umbra
Jack of Fables
The Next
and
reviews of—
American Virgin
Jonah Hex
Marvel Westerns are back
Bomb Queen
Ant
Danish Dozen Again
Anti-Semitic
cartoons exhibited in Tehran and a short history of the Israeli-Arab animosity
And
our usual reminder: when you get to the $ubscriber/Associate Section (perusal
of which is restricted to paid subscribers, as if you can’t tell for the
initial cap in $ubscriber), don’t forget to activate the “Bathroom Button” by
clicking on the “print friendly version” so you can print off a copy of just
this lengthy installment for reading later, at your leisure while enthroned.
Without further adieu—
NOUS R US
All the news that gives us fits.
Recently
discovered original preliminary art for the Golden Age Green Lantern
establishes, without doubt, Marty Nodell as the creator of the character and reveals the kind of tinkering with the
concept subsequently done by Bill
Finger, sometimes credited with a large share of the character’s creation.
As reported in the online Scoop, the
artwork, a mostly inked single page—the first page in the origin story—was
discovered at Nodell’s home in West Palm Beach, Florida, by Nodell’s son
Spence, who was packing up his father’s files for a move to Milwaukee. A
widower, Nodell is in his eighties and has been ill recently, and it had been
decided to move him to Milwaukee where Spence lives. Originally, as recorded on
the six-panel page, the Green Lantern was named Willard Mason, a professor at
Pueblo University, not Alan Scott, as he was christened in his first published
appearance in All American Comics No.
16, July 1940. The preliminary version of GL’s origin features a mysterious
antique lamp made by an old Indian in Singapore; in the published version, the
lamp was fashioned in China from a fallen meteor. “This shows that my dad was
the sole creator of the Green Lantern,” said Spence, adding that the
differences between the preliminary art and the published story reveals the
“significant contribution” made by Bill Finger, an often overlooked creator in
the dawning years of the comic book. You can see the Nodell page at http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=12899&si=121
Veteran comic book creators Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon have produced what they refrain from calling a comic
book version of the official 9/11 Commission Report. Entitled The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, the book reduces the original text report of nearly 600 pages to a much more
digestible 130 pages. Artist Colon tried to read the original report but gave
up after 50 pages, he told Bob Minzesheimer at USA Today. “For a government report,” he admitted, “it was well
written, but it was still hard to follow—lots of Arabic names, and a lot of
things going on at the same time in different places.” When he heard about a
possible tv adaptation, Colon started thinking about adapting it to comic book
format, and he phoned Jacobson, a friend and colleague; the two worked on various
Harvey titles together, notably Richie
Rich, which Jacobson wrote and Colon drew. The result of their
collaboration this time is what Jacobson calls “graphic journalism.” Said he:
“It’s the story of an investigation, not a dramatization” of the horrific events
of 9/11. The co-chairs of the Commission, while at first dubious about how
their painstakingly assembled document would be treated in panels and speech
balloons, eventually applauded the effort, writing a foreword for the book,
praising the creators “for their close adherence to the findings,
recommendations, spirit and tone of the original report.” Ethan Heitner at
TomPaine.com isn’t quite so sure. He sees both good and bad in the adaptation.
“The comic format uniquely allows the reader to follow the multiple events of
9/11 in parallel without confusion. That’s pretty cool to see. But the dueling
timelines, action-packed story of dastardly hijackers and heroic passengers
only makes up the first 20 pages or so of the comic, the first chapter of the report.”
For the rest of it, the part dealing with the Commission’s investigation and
its findings, the captions drone on, pretty much telling us what the pictures
are depicting, Heitner says. Still, he complains mostly about the attempts to
enliven the proceedings with pictures or vignettes that are “quite frankly
ludicrous depictions that can’t help but color our perceptions of what’s being
described,” which, he notes, gives the book an impact precisely the opposite of
what the Commission intended when it “deliberately stripped out any adjectives
to make sure it read as factually and unbiased as possible.” But, he concludes,
“I do kinda agree with the way Colon draws Dick Cheney in his single
appearance—a snarling little man shying away from others. Anyways, the moral of
the story? Nothing with a crying fireman on the cover can be good.” On the plus
side, an illustrated adaptation is sure to find more readers than the
bureaucratic prose, and if you believe in an informed electorate, you can’t
knock this effort.
Frank
Cho of Liberty Meadows fame and
the designated artist on Brian Michael Bendis’ new Avengers series next winter
is auctioning off a page of original art featuring Spider-Woman to benefit the
Harvey Awards, which, this year, will be held at the Baltimore Comic-Con,
September 9-10. To bid on the artwork, visit cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160019313492 ... NBM is
re-issuing Peter Kuper’s The Jungle, the First/Classics
Illustrated 1991 adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s provocative 1906 novel about
the unsanitary meat packing industry, just in time to celebrate the muckraking
book’s centennial. And later this year, the third volume of the complete comics
adaptation of Proust’s Remembrance of
Things Past will appear. ... The Cartoon Network renewed “The Boondocks”
for next year, but the new season won’t begin as scheduled. The Network bumped
up the contracted number of episodes from 15 to 25, and that seems to have
caused a delay. Aaron McGruder,
creator of the comic strip and its animated version, told Michael Giltz at the New York Post that it’s likely to be
March 2007 before the new material gets on the air. ... Robert K. Hoffman, founder of the National Lampoon magazine, died August 20 in Dallas. He was 59; the
cause of death, leukemia. Although Hoffman’s involvement with the magazine
lasted only about a year, as managing editor he supervised several of the
notorious early issues—the cover with Minnie Mouse as a stripper, the photo
essay purporting to show that President Nixon, then in his first term, was
actually dead, and the spoof advertisement for Volkswagen that depicted a
floating Beetle (the car was renown for being virtually air-tight with its
windows and doors closed), captioned: “If Ted Kennedy had been driving this
car, he would be President today.”
Issue Nos. 4 and 5 of Marvel’s Civil War title will be delayed until September and November and
will cause comic book shops to lose money. Joe Field of Flying Colors Comics in
Concord, California, estimates the delay “will wind up costing my store sales
in the five figures.” Because the Civil War series is keyed into more than a
dozen other Marvel titles, each linked to the over-all storyline, the release
of the other Marvel books will also lag behind. The furor over the delay
reveals, once again, the soft underbelly of the comic store industry, the
financial vitality of which depends upon comic books arriving on their
announced release dates. Simply put, dealers who order books pay for them in
advance; and if the books don’t show up on time, the dealers don’t recoup their
investment and haven’t enough ready cash to order other books from other
companies. A snowball effect soon develops: as their inventory diminishes,
their income does, too. The difficulty at Marvel appears to be that the chief
artist on the main series, Steve McNiven, isn’t producing fast enough reported
Chris Arrant at PW Comics Week online. That’s complicated by other factors,
such as writer Mark Millar’s health, but since Marvel aims to compile the
series in a trade paperback, the artist is an important factor in giving the
compilation a consistent look. DC Comics is also involved in a long cross-over
series, “52,” with a new book to be released every week. So far, it’s on time.
And DC designed the series to be drawn by several artists, so one creator’s
delay may not upset the series schedule. Field, who applauds the Marvel series
as a fast-selling title, thanks to great promotion from Marvel, also adds:
“There’s an old saying, ‘Don’t start vast projects with half-vast ideas.’ I
think the plan was solid, but Marvel’s execution was lacking.”
Marvel’s deal with video game
developer Bungie Studios has struck pay dirt with The Halo Graphic Novel, an anthology of stories based upon the
game; it’s the second best-selling graphic novel on the BookScan list. ... Also
at Marvel, editor-in-chief Joe Quesada explained on newsrama.com that the company’s erstwhile policy to publish solo
series featuring gay or lesbian characters only in the MAX (adult) line is no
longer operative. Quesada noted that the homosexual character Freedom Ring is
the current star of the Marvel Team Up. Said Quesada: “Our responsibility is to
entertain and to reflect the world around us as best we can while keeping in
mind that our readers come in many shapes and sizes and beliefs. ... Diversity
happens as a natural byproduct of our creative process and we have never done
anything during my tenure to prevent or discourage that.”
Ralph
Steadman has written a memoir “as a form of therapy” after his long-time
writing associate, Gonzo journalist S.
Hunter Thompson, killed himself a year ago. Steadman told Martin Hodgson
and Katy Guest at the London Independent: “When he died, it was as though a piece of shoreline and split off and
fallen into the sea. I had to write myself out of the emptiness.” The two met
in 1970 at the Kentucky Derby while on assignment for Scanlan’s magazine. “It was chalk and cheese,” Steadman said: “we
were so different, but I intrigued him because I did such vicious drawings.”
Their working relationship, “bonded over a mutual enthusiasm for alcohol,”
developed into friendship. According to Steadman, Thompson killed himself out
of political despondency. Hodgson and Guest write: “Confined to a wheelchair by
a spinal operation and hip replacement, Thompson had often spoken of suicide,
but, Steadman reveals, what pushed him over the edge was the U.S. Presidential
election in November 2004. A maverick who spent much of his life railing
against the corruption of mainstream politics, Thompson had once run
unsuccessfully for office as the leader of the Freak Party. But in the last
months of his life he had thrown his support behind John Kerry’s campaign.
‘When George W. Bush got back in,’ Steadman said, “I think that was the straw
that broke the camel’s back.’” Steadman’s book, out this fall, is entitled The Joke Is Over.
A traveling exhibit of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts strips and “images” begins
September 5 in Shreveport, La., according to Editor & Publisher. Entitled “Snoopy as the World War I Flying
Ace,” the show will move in October to Great Bend, Kan.; then on to West
Memphis, Ark., Bedford, Tex., Arlington Heights, Ill., Allen, Tex., Montezuma,
Kan., College Park, Md., Texarkana, Tex., and Boulder, Colo. before ending on
the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier in New York City, December 15, 2009 to April
30, 2010. ... Also from E&P: the 75th anniversary of Dick Tracy
will be marked with an October 25 party at the Opera House in Woodstock, Ill.,
sponsored by the Chester Gould-Dick
Tracy Museum. The Museum was founded in 1991; Gould lived near Woodstock
for most of his working life. ... The first issue of the “new” Cracked is out. Calling itself “The Comedy Magazine,” it is no longer a venue for
cartoonists: the hilarities being committed within are achieved with
photographs accompanied by irreverent juvenile captions and with short articles
that are little more than lists of would-be witticisms. One such, headlined
“Are You Naked?” treats nakedness as a mental disorder in which “having no
pants” is the leading cause. It concludes: “Remember—nakedness doesn’t have to
come between you and the happiness you deserve. Life is an adventure, an
exhilarating journey that usually has some kind of minimal dress code, and it’s
time to take that first step. No shirt, no shoes—no way!” Well, “ha.” So there.
A couple of page-long strips lurk within, but otherwise, Cracked is a different animal altogether from the magazine once
graced with the drawings of John Severin and others of his distinguished ilk.
Editor
& Publisher says the DVD of “Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties” will be
released October 10, soon enough after the theatrical release to suggest the
latter was not a rousing success. The DVD includes “Drawing with Jim Davis” footage not seen in
theaters. ... Also from E&P: Cartoonist Doug Marlette’s second
novel, Magic Time, hits bookstores
September 19. It focuses on a newspaper columnist who returns home to
Mississippi after suffering an emotional breakdown. Back home, he confronts a
past that includes a Civil Rights-era murder of four activists, one of whom he
was in love with. Marlette does political cartoons for the Tulsa (Oklahoma) World and the comic strip Kudzu; both are
syndicated by Tribune Media Services. ... You may, if you wish, begin
acquainting yourself with the history of comics in our northern neighborhood,
Canada, by clicking http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-68-2352/arts_entertainment/canadian_comics/
At the top of Entertainment Weekly’s recent list of “The 25 Most Controversial
Movies of All Time” is Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ” because of its
seeming anti-Semitism. “A Clockwork Orange” is second for its alleged
pornography and its incitation to violence among youthful street gangs.
“Fahrenheit 9/11" is next because of its political bias against the Bush
League; then, in order, “Deep Throat,” for popularizing porn; “JFK,” for
lending nutso conspiracy theories “a certain patina of truth”; “The Last
Temptation of Christ,” for suggesting, albeit in a Satan-induced hallucination,
that Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene; and “The Birth of a Nation,” for its
depiction of African Americans as either childlike or sex fiends and for its
treatment of the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of civilization. Disney’s
“Aladdin” made the list at the very end: the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee didn’t like the song lyric describing Arabia as a land “where they
cut off your ear if they don’t like your face.” Disney dubbed out the lyric in
subsequent releases. That was in 1992.
Fascinating
Footnote. Much of the news
retailed in this segment is culled from articles eventually indexed at http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael Rhode and John
Bullough, which covers comic books, comic strips, animation, caricature,
cartoons, bandes dessinees and
related topics. It also provides links to numerous other sites that delve
deeply into cartooning topics.
SECOND THOUGHTS AND OTHER CASCADING
FOOTWEAR
Remember,
in Opus 189, that Non Sequitur strip
that the International Herald Tribune didn’t want to run? The IHT asked for and received a substitute strip but,
according to Dave Astor at Editor &
Publisher, someone in the production department goofed and used the
original Ann Coulter defamation strip instead of the non-political substitute.
And, as one editoonist wag commented, “the world as we know it did not come to
an end.”
When I mentioned AK Comics last time, my source got the
dimensions of the books wrong: the first issues were shorter, not taller, than
their homegrown American counterparts. With the second issues, however, that
difference disappears. And if the pages go in reverse, as alleged in my source,
they do so in Egypt, not here, where the pages run from front to back, just
like any other comic book. As for the Arab readers contention that the heroes’
costumes were “too tight,” that, of course, is a euphemism for “too sexy.” The
costume of Jalila, for instance, does what all superheroine costumes do: it
emphasizes her figure, mostly bosom and behind.
And I should have mentioned, when
discussing Mickey Spillane’s recent death, that he began his writing career in
comics. But I suppose everyone knows that. Tony Spinelli at the Connecticut Post remembered and when
Spillane’s death was reported, Spinelli interviewed 87-year-old Joe Gill, who
once shared an “office” with Spillane—a converted bakery, actually. Gill worked
as a lifeguard with Spillane, and they both chased after pretty girls and wrote
comic book stories. Spillane, hoping to expand his field of opportunity, taught
a morning exercise class for women, Gill said—“he used to charge them a dollar
a piece.” Gill recalled the summer of 1941 when Spillane, hoping to make a
quick buck, banged out his first mystery novel sitting at a typewriter across
from Gill in their office. He called it I,
the Jury. “I hold him, Mick—it’ll never sell,” Gill recalled with a laugh
about how wrong he was. Spillane’s books have sold more than 100 million
copies, worldwide. “I will always remember his wit, his sense of humor,” Gill
said, thumbing a couple of Spillane comic books. Gill continued writing comic
books for the rest of his life, becoming a mainstay at Charlton in the 1970s.
Spillane went on to write more hard-boiled detective novels and, oddly, to become
a devout Jehovah’s Witness. After his conversion, he toned down the language of
his characters, Gill said: “Instead of damn, they said darn.” Gill pondered how
the friend of his youth could juggle his religious convictions and his passion
for the fair sex, particularly when he went to Hollywood to write for movies.
“They plied him with starlets,” Gill said. Gill joked about how since the 1940s
he saved every comic book and magazine he ever wrote something in, but he kept
them all in his basement. “They got damp,” he said, “and one day my wife said,
‘Throw that stuff out—it’s moldy.’” And so he did. But he salvaged some of
them, and he still keeps them around. His buddies down the hall, elder citizens
like Gill, come around and read them, too.
COMIC STRIP WATCH
This may be the strangest protest letter yet. Maybe not: it shares with many the revealing chink in the complainer’s pose: defiant illogic. Here’s the whole thing unedited, including the screaming headline and the Zits strip that inspired it.
OUTRAGED! NOT A FAN ANYMORE!
August
16, 2006 7:30 AM
I
used to think Zits was clever
and funny—one of the better panels in
the deluge of mediocre, boring and unfunny panels that litter the comic’s [sic] page. But this morning’s panel of Zits has just put an end to my enjoyment and continued reading and purchasing
of any material produced by Scott and Borgman. The character, Jeremy’s, sicko
comment: “My favorite cut is ‘KITTEN IN THE WOODCHIPPER,’” makes me want to
vomit. Is it really, “just a cartoon panel” and that I should just “get over
it”? I think not. Hey, Scott and
Borgman—why don’t you just experiment with your fan base and have other “funny”
stuff coming out of the character’s mouths? How about allusions to child
molestation, incest, Jews, Islamics, grannys? Imagine the extreme outrage if
Jeremy had said, “My favorite cut is: JEWS IN THE WOODCHIPPER”. Would it be
“just a silly cartoon” then? What would some of your fans who were Jewish think
about your real feelings? Some fans would think it was clever and funny (not
me) wouldn’t they? I think you’d lose a raft of other ones in the fray. Imagine
the label of ANTI-SEMITISM hurled at you and your panel smeared and run off
every newspaper in the country. So if the creators of Zits are labeled ANIMAL
CRUELTY ADVOCATES, then they deserve that title just as much as if they had
substituted some other controversial noun for “kitten.” Suppose Jeremy’s mother is portrayed in the future as a “mommy with a fetish for her son” trying to
catch him disrobed—all of course, “done tastefully” with subtlety. HEE, HEE,
HAW, HAW, SNIGGER, WINK, WINK. Not. So
you see, it really isn’t “just a cartoon,” is it? Zits is appropriately named—a pus-filled, red, painful sore on the
face of newspaper comic pages. It needs to be removed. The comments on this
page will be circulated widely. Robin Bailey
RCH: Robin gets from animal abuse to
anti-Semitism with a gravity-defying leap in logic. Yes, there is a connection
embedded there, somewhere, but it’s pretty vague and not helped at all by the
hysteria of the complaint. Sigh.
BOOK MARQUEE
Foremost among the delights to cross my desk this month is the Fantagraphics tome, Tophats and Flappers: The Art of Russell Patterson (184 giant 9x12-inch pages; hardcover, $19.95). One of the two cartoonists whose work defined the Roaring Twenties as they delineated it, Russell Patterson, like the other limner of the age, John Held Jr., drew with a fine line that he contrasted against huge blocks of solid black, brilliantly spotted throughout. His specialty was the curvaceous gender, which he rendered as glacial, svelte beauties: more manikin than embonpoint, they lacked sensual warmth, but Patterson’s graceful line made them works of feminine art. Patterson deployed dramatically different patterns and textures—chunky blacks, crisp crinolines, flowing drapery, frilly explosions of lace-like framing fabrics, and rows of pleated folds. His work is purely stunning in black and white, and this book includes a generous sampling of his sumptuous watercolors, too—covers for Ballyhoo and College Humor and the old Life humor magazine. All these visual delights make me wish the book had been twice as long, encyclopedic enough to include more than a peek at his work in the thirties and forties, when he splashed brush strokes into his drawings. His women then were more zaftig, too: Patterson kept up with the changing fads in the female form and abandoned the 1920s flat-chested look for somewhat greater development, just as the American woman did as she moved into the 1930s. But the absence of that material herein inspires a hope that another Patterson volume may be forthcoming, one that includes samples from Patterson’s fifties comic strip, Mamie. But you, as a dedicated $ubscriber/Associate of Rants & Raves, can see Mamie and other samples of Patterson’s work, as well as a biography and appreciation of his art, by visiting Harv’s Hindsights with a simple click here. For the moment, however, perhaps you can content yourself with a couple glimpses in this vicinity—a page from the book at hand and a couple 1950s cartoons that didn’t see print until Dave Breger published them in his book about taboos in cartooning, But That’s Unprintable (Bantam, 1955).
The Fantagraphics book’s only flaw,
and it is a minor matter, arises from the design decision of the art director,
Jacob Covey, to blow up some of the artwork to fit a larger space than the
drawing filled when initially published. Enlarging drawings photographically
like this almost always degrades the quality of the art: lines get fatter and
sometimes fuzzy, ragged-edged, particularly when the original publication of
the art was on newsprint, a porous paper that invariably spreads inked lines
slightly, giving them a raggedy edge. Most of the drawings in this book are, I
suspect, taken from previous publication, and when that was on newsprint, the
linework reveals a ragged edge whenever the drawing is blown up—the greater the
enlargement, the more noticeable the raggedness. (In a few cases, I wonder if
the raggedy line isn’t a consequence of scanning the artwork rather than
photographing it; the lines look pixilated.) This is a tiny quibble, I hasten
to say, because only a few of the drawings herein are enlarged enough to make
the fuzzy lines very visible, but in a few of those cases, the fat and fuzzy
lines do severe damage to the elegance of Patterson’s art. In one peculiar
instance, the drawing disappears off the edge of a right-hand page to resume on
the next page. Why, in a book of artwork, the designer decided to cut a picture
in half in this particularly destructive way is beyond me.
In another case, a drawing is blown up enough to elbow the caption off the page, destroying the satire. A man of the theater as much as the drawing board, Patterson did a couple of drawings comparing the ways that different producers might stage a simple joke. In the joke, a black man is in a henhouse and, when discovered by the owner of the flock, he crouches among the birds and says, “Nobody here, boss, but us chickens.” A feeble thing, but that passed for humor back in those somewhat more racist times. Patterson draws the cartoon, then shows how the Theatre Guild would stage the action—with a stage full of a chorus of costumed African Americans singing. Then Patterson shows how Flo Ziegfeld, renown for his chorus girl extravaganzas, would do it.
In the book, the caption, “As Flo Ziegfeld Would Do It,” is
missing, and, likewise, the joke—and the satire, comparing the emphasis on
African Americans by the Theatre Guild to Ziegfeld’s legendary emphasis on
extravagantly undressed chorines. But these are, as I say, mere quibbles in the
face of the many excellences of the book.
Among the latter is Armando Mendez’s
very satisfying introductory essay, “Nymph Errant: The Life and Legacy of
Russell Patterson,” amply illustrated with both drawings and photographs of the
artist at various stages in his long career. Patterson began the work he is
remembered for in about 1923-244, and he drew until the early 1960s when
arthritis in both hands forced him to give up. Mendez makes the fascinating
observation that a visual device of Patterson’s may have christened the wild
young women of the 1920s: when Patterson began making illustrations, “he
introduced the raccoon coat and the floppy galoshes that gave flappers their
name, styles he remembered as popular during his college days in Canada.” This
seems an original thought. The etymology of flapper is somewhat cloudy: although the word was applied in the late 19th century
to a very young prostitute, by the 1920s, it had migrated to denominate merely
flighty young girls lacking in decorum. That connection seems reasonable, but
the origins of the word remain dim. Some say it started as a term for a young
duck, as yet unable to fly, which therefore flapped around as it tried its
wings. But how that gets transmuted to a young prostitute, I can’t say. Floppy
unfastened galoshes to flappers seems at least as logical.
Elsewhere, Mendez relates one of
Patterson’s favorite anecdotes (which I tell, too, in Harv’s Hindsights) that
suggests Walt Disney had been one of the students of Patterson’s correspondence
course in cartooning, which Patterson and his brother ran for a couple years
beginning in about 1923. Mendez, momentarily flustered by a confusion of dates
and the knowledge that Disney didn’t do much drawing once his studio got going
in California, doesn’t think it likely that Disney ever took the course. But if
Patterson launched the course in early 1923, Disney could have enrolled in it:
he was still in Kansas City, operating a one-horse animation agency. He didn’t
leave for Hollywood until the summer of that year, so he could well have
enrolled in Patterson’s correspondence school, albeit perhaps for only one or
two lessons. Mostly, however, Mendez is dead-on. He uncovers Patterson’s
Parisian influences, which I’d never come across before; and he quite acutely
sees Patterson’s kindred spirit in the musicals of 1925-1933, “the Great
American Songbook” which “had the same sort of joie de vivre Patterson brought to his work—bright and witty
surfaces, the optimism tinged by flattened notes of loss and memory, the joy
and pain of being young and alive in an exciting city.” Don’t miss this one,
the latest, and best, of the series Fantagraphics is producing on the great
cartoonists of the feminine form, which, so far, includes Jack Cole, Bill Ward, Dan DeCarlo, Bill Wenzel, and Don Flowers, all cleverly mentioned in
the inside of the dust jacket cloaking the Patterson book. Look for it. And them. I’ll
have more to say about them all later.
Oh—one more thing: I wish Mendez
could tell me the whereabouts of a Patterson painting I chanced upon during one
of my sojourns in New York City. I was walking downtown from the White Horse in
the Village—meandering, really, just gawking at the flora and fauna along the
lower West Side—when, prompted by a parched throat, I stopped in a restaurant
for a liquid refreshment. In the entryway, I saw the painting—full color, oil I
think—of the face of a beautiful woman, which, upon closer inspection, was an
ingenious collage of tiny nudes that, in their contortions, formed the face of
the woman. I didn’t make note of the name of the place, and on subsequent
visits to New York over the next 40 years, I never ran across it, or the
painting, again. Where is it?
Before we depart from the venue of
Fine Art, let me mention another book of another of cartooning’s finest
artists—namely, The Alex Toth Doodle Book (256 6x9-inch pages in paperback, b/w; $19.95), in which John Hitchcock has
compiled 25 years of postcards and sketches from Alex Toth, a testament to their friendship and Toth’s artistry.
Hitchcock includes fragments from many of Toth’s published works as well as
numerous sketches that have never seen print before. But the real treat is the
postcards, all lettered in Toth’s distinctive manner. His handwriting is as
much an artistic doodle as his sketches. And the postcards And, from Pure Imagination
Publishing, The Alex Toth Reader, Vol. 2 (160 9x11-inch pages in paperback, b/w; $25), reproducing, in mostly quite
satisfactory reconstructed art, Toth comic book stories from 1954 to 1961,
including 3 from Crime and Punishment, a
few Westerns, and some adventure tales from Dell’s Four Color line. Toth had
not, by this time, distilled his style to the minimalist elegance he later
achieved, but you can see it sticking its head up from time-to-time, and Toth’s
staging and storytelling is, already, masterful.
Finally, from Rick Norwood’s
Manuscript Press (P.O. Box 336, Mountain Home, TN 37684), here’s the first 14
months of Roy Crane’s second
masterpiece comic strip, Buz Sawyer: The
War in the Pacific (192 8x10-inch pages in paperback, b/w; $25). Crane, as
every schoolboy knows, had set the pace for adventure strips with his seminal Wash Tubbs. With the U.S. entry into
World War II, Crane had eased the strip, in the person of Captain Easy, into
the military. At the outbreak of hostilities, Easy was in the midst of one of
his ongoing soldier of fortune escapades, which, very soon, developed attendant
symptoms of the actual war going on nearby. Before long, Easy finds himself in
army intelligence and, soon, formally in uniform. By the spring of 1943, the
strip is unabashedly a military adventure with Easy on special assignment,
first in the Far East, then in Europe. Just about then, Crane, like Milton Caniff, left his popular feature
to create a new one, namely, Buz Sawyer, which debuted November 1 that year. Taking advantage of the opportunities for
action and adventure afforded by the War, Crane put Buz in the U.S. Navy as a
pilot, gave him a picturesque partner in Roscoe Sweeney, and continued telling
stories in much the same lively vein as before. And in this volume, we have the
first year of it.
Crane is celebrated for getting
nearly photographic effects with his adroit use of Craftint Doubletone, a
chemically treated drawing paper that can produce gray shades, light and dark.
While the reproduction here is not perfect, it’s pretty good—in fact, about as
good as we’re likely to get. Better reproduction of the diagonal and crosshatch
lines of Doubletone would would require resorting to original art, methinks,
and since the chemically-developed lines fade with age, even original art would
fail to give us better pictures. Norwood is using newspaper clippings or, more
likely, syndicate proofs, and the strips are printed large, only two to a page,
so the tiny lines of the Doubletone don’t mush up too much, and some of the
effects are spectacular. All things considered, this is a wholly satisfying
reprint.
Buz’s adventures alternate between
realistic sea and air battles that depict machinery in motion and aren’t,
therefore, very interesting visually, and episodes in which he finds himself alone
among the Japanese enemy and, hence, forced into lively, human action. He and
Sweeney are shot down in early 1944 and find themselves on a desert island (a
patented Crane device) with Japanese soldiers and a toothsome damsel. Before
the end of the volume, Buz is shot down a second time and falls into the
clutches of a guerrilla leader named The Cobra, actually a beauteous femme
fatale, who falls for Buz. In an oddly reciprocal turn of events, she is nearly
a clone of Caniff’s Dragon Lady. Crane was once Caniff’s inspiration: aspects
of Caniff’s adventure strip were inspired by Crane’s work—Pat Ryan and Terry
are re-enactments of Dynamite Dan Flynn and Dickie Dare of Caniff’s earlier
strip, and Dan and Dickie have the same plot relationship as Captain Easy and
Wash; and now, Caniff having achieved success and critical distinction with Terry, inspiration is on the other foot.
Crane is clearly taking a page from his apprentice’s fakebook. Later on, a
Burma doppelganger shows up in Buz.
Crane pursued his character’s military career with the same passion for
authenticity as Caniff had, and these tales reek of realism. Buz shoots and
kills a Japanese soldier on camera; and later, we witness, on camera, the
torture of a captive. But Crane’s sense of humor is active, too. Buz is ribbed
by his shipmates for always landing in the arms of a beautiful woman, and
Sweeney is good for a laugh whenever he shows up. A second volume in the series
is due soon.
Crane and Caniff’s careers are
linked in a remarkable way. Both left popular strips to create new,
creator-owned strips. And neither of the second creations, Buz Sawyer and Steve Canyon,
competent as they were—expert, polished performances—seem as inspired as their
predecessors. Wash Tubbs (and Captain
Easy) were products of a young creative intelligence, flush with the excitement
of doing something new and different in an infant medium; ditto Terry and the Pirates. Crane and Caniff
were doubtless caught up in the excitement of the novelty of what they were
doing—and in the accumulating fame and fortune. One served to bank the creative
fires of the other, and together, they sparked the creative juices of the
cartoonists. Both Wash Tubbs and Terry were distinctive departures from
everything that had gone before. Their creators must’ve felt the excitement of
what they were doing, and their work showed it. Neither Buz Sawyer or Steve Canyon came about in that same intoxicating way, and both were, in consequence, lesser
achievements. Expert, competent—polished achievements both; but not inspired.
Norwood has been running Buz Sawyer in his Comics Revue, a monthly comic strip reprint magazine. Currently,
the strips are from the mid-1950s, after Buz gets married; he’s one of the few
adventuring heroes who is married for almost all of his career. The magazine
also regularly publishes numerous other vintage strips: Russ Manning’s Tarzan, Warren Tufts’ Casey Ruggles (and sometimes Lance), Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (now in the late 1930s), Flash Gordon (1960s), Dick
Moores’ Gasoline Alley (late
1970s), Caniff’s Steve Canyon (late 1960s), a couple
pages of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat dailies (early 1930s), The Phantom and V.T. Hamlin’s Alley Oop (both, late 1930s, but Oop is not yet in the Time Machine
period), Stan Lynde’s Rick O’Shay (late 1960s), and the Comics Revue is the only place you can
find Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise (the present run rendered
by Neville Colvin, but Romero’s work is more often on display). Subscriptions
are $45 for 12 issues; address above (or try www.io.com/~birwiidr or f.norwood@att.net
Fantagraphics Books, longtime
publisher of Joe Sacco’s graphic
novels, has just released another of his books, But I Like It, a collection of his music-oriented comics from the
late eighties and early nineties. “Many things interest me beyond conflict,”
said Sacco, whose speciality in recent years has been covering the unrest in
Bosnia and the Middle East. “Music is one of the great things in life,” he
concludes.
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind beats everything. —Dennis
Miller adv.
I
think there was a long discursive thread in the ether a few years ago
concerning the supposed origin of “hot dogs,” the foodstuff. The great sports
cartoonist TAD (Thomas Aloysis Dorgan) has been credited with its coinage. And
it is said that hot dogs were first served or invented at the St. Louis World's
Fair in 1904. But here, from a book entitled Zounds by Mark Dunn (with occasional illustrations by Sergio Aragones), is this, er,
doggerel:
“Echoes
From the Lunch Wagon”
'Tis
dogs’ delight to bark and bite,
Thus
does the adage run.
But
I delight to bite the dog
When
placed inside a bun.
It
was printed in the Yale Record of
October 1895, “written in affectionate reference to the school’s ‘Kennel’
Club—a lunch wagon that sold sausages that may or may not have included a bit
of canine filler. The word ‘hot’ got added that same month, and so an American
institution was born.”
If true, and I have no reason to
doubt the accuracy of this citation, the “hot dog” was born long before the St.
Louis World's Fair—and long before TAD used the expression, too. He started
cartooning in San Francisco probably about the mid-1890s, but he never went to
Yale and probably never read much about it. Nor was he famous enough to spread
abroad a linguistic invention like “hot dog” until sometime after he left the
City by the Bay and went to work in New York. That was in 1904.
Elsewhere: we have long been a
consumer civilization that proudly albeit inanely sports the logos of the
products we buy on the clothing we wear. In the latest progression of this
tendency—coupled to the growing popularity of tattooing—some enthusiasts have
started getting the logos of their favorite products tattooed on their bodies.
Polo shirt ponies, Chanel, Gucci, Windows, PlayStation. What next?
Time for August 28 reports that only 24 % of Americans polled could name two U.S.
Supreme Court justices, but 77% could name two of the seven dwarfs in the 1937
Disney animated film, “Snow White.”
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE
You’d
think, what with all liquids and nail clippers being confiscated at airports
worldwide, that we’d have enough to do, as a civilization, without producing
more comic book titles. And yet, invention has never faltered. And it’s a good
thing, too: divertissements such as these keep us from being entirely
overwhelmed with grief and horror at the inhumanities being perpetrated hither
and yon—in Iraq, surely, but also in Lebanon recently and in Afghanistan and
Darfur and a host of other African nations where human life seems to command
little respect. Civilization, such as it is in these Unitey States, must go on,
after all, and so we get a new television season every fall and, month after
month, new comic book titles. And it’s a good thing, as I said—for me in
particular. The number of comic books being published every month astounds me:
I can scarcely keep current on what’s happening in these four-color fantasies.
Used to be, in days of fond yore, that one could stay abreast of what was going
on in most Marvel and DC titles. Then along came Dark Horse and Image and—well,
a flock of other publishers, some of whom alight for only a few moments before
flitting off into obscure yonders never to appear again. I gave up trying to
keep up long ago. I buy a few titles regularly—100 Bullets, Loveless, American Virgin, Next Wave; and I sample a
few others—Y: The Last Man, Savage
Dragon, Fables, some Disney titles—dipping in and out of continuities. And
I follow some mini-series, Joe Kubert’s Sgt.
Rock: The Prophecy, f’instance. Almost no superheroes though. Oh, Batman
occasionally. Spider-Man. But mostly, it’s all too much to keep up with. There
are fanatics who do it—who keep track of every snarled thread of storyline in
Marvel’s Civil War and in DC’s OYL and 52 and so on. I cannot. And so I resort to first issues. Not too many of
those, but enough to foster my delusion that I’m somehow staying up-to-date.
Amid the constant deluge of dross, I
find more than one glimmering gem. Casanova, for instance, by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba. Drawn in a manner that
creates an idiosyncratic style out of Risso and Mignola but without the black
solids of deep shadow, the book is crisply black and white with a single second
color, a sort of mustard olive drab. Fraction carried Spector with him as
he wrote the book, a brief foray into the standard sixteen pages: “sixteen
pages means none of that languid manga pacing—no seven pages of a sword coming
out of a sheath—and no ‘writing for the trade’ stuff that’s turned today’s
comics into watered down sketches. It meant little symphonies. What would a
comic read like if you were going to produce it ‘wall of sound’ style, if you
were going to try and translate one technique from one medium into another
technique in another medium? I don’t mean just overwriting, cramming every page
and panel full of words—I want to write like a DJ and collage little bits of
everything, repurposing it all to suit Casanova. Song lyrics turn into lines of
dialogue, plot points. Shots from films translated into whole-page stanzas.”
And he mostly does what he says he wants to do.
The books come with handy plot
summaries on the inside front covers so you never have to start cold (a device
every comic book should embrace). And so by No. 2, we know that Cass’s twin
sister, a star agent of his father’s E.M.P.I.R.E. (Extra-Military Police,
Intelligence, Rescue, and Espionage), has died mysteriously and Cass has
quarreled with his father at the funeral, after which he is abducted “into
another timeline by Newman Xeno, his father’s arch-rival and the ruler of
W.A.S.T.E., an ambiguously-named Pynchon reference.” The story, lurching from
side to side as it ambles around, is awash in sf jargon that gleefully
obliterates meaning while the mindless momentum of the plot rushes on, willy
nilly. When he falls into the clutches of Xeno, Cass asks what W.A.S.T.E.
stands for, prompting this effusion in captions: “The W.A.S.T.E.
continuuminium! [sic] birthplace to warped perversions of science as conjured
by Newman Xeno and his be-jumpsuited horde of techno-flunkies! Where W.A.S.T.E.
rapes and debases Our Lady of Space-Time, turning her into but a painted
harlot!” Xeno continues in the same vein: “Only I, Newman Xeno, possess the
power untold within the legendary fakebook of the cosmos. Only I, and my
kingdom of W.A.S.T.E., would dare violate the laws of man and physics to spite
E.M.P.I.R.E.—.” To which Cass says: “You talk like a comic book, man.” “And I
live like one,” Xeno says.
Throughout, Fraction’s personages
know—or strenuously suspect—that they are characters in a comic book, which
gives many of their utterances a satiric thrust. “What makes you think I’m here
to kill you?” Cass asks Winston Heath, manufacturer of orgone. “Because,” says Heath, “that’s what happens in comics.
Because that’s what we do to our characters.” Then they
fight, both in the dangly nude, making explicit “the homoerotic cliches” of
superhero comic books, Fraction tells us at the end of No. 2. While all this
pseudo-meaning transpires in caption blocks and speech balloons, Ba’s layer of
pictures carries the plot forward in a manner nearly tangential but highly
visible (as is the wont of pictures, after all). In the second issue, the plot
thickens like pudding over a flame (without quite achieving meaning) as Cass
discovers in his pocket “the mysterious Doohickey of Destiny,” and we learn
about orgone, “a kind of
free-floating sex energy, a kind of life force.” By now, it’s pretty clear that
Fraction is making this up as he goes along, steeping in a simmering stew of sf
argot and operatic whimsey a barely discernible storyline, which he maintains
solely to get to the next page where he can leaven in more linguistic flights.
And when one character mistakes “Beatles” for “beetles,” you know Fraction is
completely at sea in a verbal universe: the pun is apparent only in print, but
the conventional illusion in comics is that characters are talking aloud. The
hyper-leap comes when another character says, “Say that again, say that
a-fucking-gain,” going the legendary publisher Joseph Pulitzer one better.
(Pulitzer was a champion swearer, often injecting a curse into the middle of
words, as, for example, his famous “inde-goddamn-pendent,” a wondrously melodic
infraction of decorum).
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Fraction
writes, “—I was just grabbing a snippet of something out of the air as it
floated by. This whole book is becoming that. Fusing all these little things
together to see what the new shapes look like on the other side. The references
don’t lead to anywhere, the same way that using, like, a Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
sample in a beat doesn’t mean anything other than—hey, cool sound.” But you
have to be there. A trip worth the trip. If this title is just a mini-series, I
can’t find a reference to how many issues may transpire. But this much is true:
this is too good to last. So get your copies as they come out: you may never
see the like again.
In somewhat the same antic spirit is Paul Jenkins’ Sidekick, a hilarious slapstick send-up of the role of second
banana in superheroic fictions. Here, we have Eddie Edison, pizza delivery boy
by day, Superior Boy by night, sidekick to Mister Excellent. Mister Excellent
is a muscular moron operating entirely on comic book superhero logic. Danger
lurks everywhere in Mister’s imagination. “I sense a maelstrom of violence
about to strike,” he murmurs on his rooftop perch overlooking the city’s
troubled streets. And when he springs into action, he invariably wreaks more
damage through misconception and misapprehension than evils he corrects. Eddie
then cleans up the mess Mister leaves. Oh, and Eddie is also regularly boffing
Mister’s wife, Beverly Boulevard. Eddie also gets cuffed around a good bit,
usually by his girlfriend, Stormy, an extremely buxom stripper whose sexual
proclivities embrace SM with enthusiasm, leaving poor Eddie a gasping remnant
of his former self at every encounter. Eddie is paid a mere one hundred bucks a
week, not enough, he tells Mister. And when he discovers that Mister is raking
in millions on Superior Boy action figures, Eddie demands a percentage of the
royalties. Mister would be happy to oblige, he says, “—of course, you’d have to
register your I.D. with the tax office. Then there’s social Umbra,
our third Image title this week, is CSI in Iceland. The writer, who goes by the
name of Murphy, embarks on a 3-issue
mini-series with a 40-page introductory chapter in which our heroine, Askja
Thoraspottir (Icelandic, I assume), finds a neanderthal skeleton in a glacial
cave, shot, inexplicably, by a modern Soviet-manufacture gun and wrapped in a
modern blanket. Askja’s boss is another female cop, and the two soon develop a
lesbian relationship while skinny dipping. Mike
Hawthorne’s brisk black-and-white art is pure line without much feathering
or modelling, and its languid angularity creates a sense of restraint
throughout, as if everything were poised, arrested, intensely awaiting the
disaster that’s just around the corner. He spots solid blacks nicely without
bathing everything in impenetrable shadow; the shadows he deploys serve to etch
shapes with sharp-edged clarity. The story is expertly told, and the McGuffin,
the mysterious corpse, is a tantalizing proposition waiting to be consummated
in the next two issues.
In Jack of Fables No. 1, Bill
Willingham and Matthew Sturges take Jack Horner from Willingham’s Fables series and get the fabled giant-killer kidnapped and then forced to “retire.” Tony Akins and his inker, Andrew Pepoy, handle the visuals with
modestly inventive grace, turning in perfectly competent storytelling with an
occasional flash of dramatic inspiration. And on the last page, we get
Goldilocks naked on a bed. Who could ask for more?
In The Next No. 1, a teenager named Monikka Wong gets hit and killed
by a passing school bus, and she is brought back to life by four personages who
have entered this “reality cluster” through a rip in the continuum
membrane—“actual damage to dimensional cohesion,” one of them explains. “It’s
small now, but it’ll spread. There will be concatenating disruptions, rippling
outward, causing temporal displacement and eventually total membrane rupture.”
I can’t believe Tad Williams is
being entirely serious as he ladles gobbledegook like this into the tale, but
it matters not: his lingo and the fantasy it embodies make this tale the highly
amusing jaunt that it is. In fact, without this kind of confection, the story
so far is fairly flat. Each of the four personages has given up a portion of
his/her “life force” in order to give life back to Monikka, and now, says one,
“we can’t leave without killing you again. Which is inconvenient for
everybody.” As all of this is being discussed and explained, one of the quartet
is “trying to see what kind of damage we did when our singularity harpoon disconnected.”
See what I mean? Singularity harpoon? This and leaks in the dimensional breach
kept me slapping my thigh in high glee at Williams’ inventive prowess. By
issue’s end, Superman has flown into view. Bent on fixing the temporal breach,
he flies over California as the captions drone on: “Poor California.
Eathquakes, wildfires, and now, the compete breakdown of the fabric of time
and, just possibly, the end of Superman. At least, the Africanized killer bees
never showed up. And aren’t they glad.” Drawn in clear-line by Dietrich Smith with inks in the art
nouveau manner of Winsor McCay by Walden
Wong, the book is a giddy read, the shenanigans multiplying as the four
personages try out different appearances for their new
reality-cluster—appearing first as animated versions of the American Presidents
on Mount Rushmore (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt), then
assuming more playful personality-shapes. Where this will go, only Williams
knows (and maybe not even him). On the
last page, we see another new character, namely John Henry Milligan, who is
shown riding his cycle through the streets of Ipswich, England, on a spring
evening in 1882.
Moving on, beyond first issues, in American Virgin, Nos. 4 and 5, we follow
Adam Chamberlain, the charismatic
Christian youth minister who advocates virginity until marriage, when he goes
to Africa, where he seeks to avenge the murder of his fiancee, Cassie, whose
body he has recovered, but whose head is missing. Since Adam intends to take
Cassie’s remains back to Florida for burial, he wants to find the missing part,
which leads to the joke that opens No. 4 with questionable taste: “Sure, I get
it,” says his sister, who’s accompanying him. “Like all guys, you’re looking
for a little head ...” Adam, grieving and frustrated, is emotionally
distraught, his state signaled by his fervent swearing and border-line
blasphemy. His virginity, much touted in the first issue of this series, is now
the subject of bad jokes, and even Biblical references that refute the religious
necessity of remaining “pure”: First Corinthians, Chapter 7, Verse 25, for
example, quite explicitly says, “Now, concerning virgins, I have no commandment
of the Lord.” And that, I have it on pretty good authority, is about all the
Bible has to say about what the Lord had to say about virginity. Adam is also
searching for the person who murdered Cassie, vowing to kill him, which prompts his sister when he accuses her of
being vulgar to observe sarcastically that “driving halfway across the
godforsaken desert to murder a guy is the Biblical definition of vulgar.” Adam
eventually recovers Cassie’s head and, in No. 5, he returns to Florida, where,
at the funeral, he breaks down altogether while delivering his eulogy and talks
about his desire to have “Cassie’s body all around me—my—my cock, you know?”
Then, weeping copiously, he climbs up on the coffin and, imagining Cassie there
underneath him, naked and urging him on, he ejaculates in front of the entire
congregation. I don’t know where Steven
Seagle is going with this title, but so far, it’s a provocative, fairly
unflinching examination of faith and sex and whether the two can be reconciled
without demeaning either.
Although one may be tempted to
condemn the American Virgin as an
attack on faith, Seagle scarcely intends that. Interviewed by Andrew Smith in
the Comics Buyer’s Guide No. 1622
(November 2006), Seagle maintains that faith is the central issue. “Faith is
best measured by a person’s ability to maintain it in crisis situations,” he
said. “That’s what this book is about. Adam is in a major crisis with seemingly
no end other than his own death. Will he be able to retain his faith in the
face of that?” These ingredients make for “a good story,” he said, admitting,
however, that “it’s tricky subject matter to pull off.” DC Comics, the
publisher, seems, so far, willing to go along with him. “From Day One,” he
said, “I told everyone at DC that I want the truth about the sexual content and
the violence to be the focus, not the titillation factor. My esteemed editor
Shelly Bond trusted that, and we’re putting out a book that I think is its own
kind of beast and goes pretty far, all things considered.” The pervasive
presence of the Christian Right in today’s politics had nothing to do with
Seagle’s conception of the series. The conflicts he deals with have been around
for a long time. “The only bandwagon I intentionally rode with American Virgin was people’s desire to
have sex and the related feelings of shame associated with some of those
desires. The creepy political climate is just happy coincidence. We’re
definitely dealing with American norms about sex and morals in a world where
these norms are not the norm,” he continued. “I think we often forget in this
country that there are other opinions and belief systems in the world, and
they’re not all the construction of diseased minds. I love that kind of
conflict in characters: where people who are hell-bent that they’re right run
into someone just like them—but with a completely contrary idea of ‘right.’”
A recent phenomenon on the Righteous
Right, incidentally, has been the emergence of various websites promoting sex
as a good thing, including some fairly smarmy justifications for somewhat
adventurous sex. One such site, www.themarriagebed.com, established by the Reverends Paul and Lori Byerly, provides a list of “What’s
Okay, What’s Not” for the Faithful. JoAnn Wypijewski in Mother Jones (July/August 2006) supplies a brief run-down of the
things a married couple can do sexually without sinning: “They may enjoy oral
and anal sex, toys and fantasies, ‘mild pain’ through spanking, biting (so long
as nothing becomes a fetish or substitutes for intercourse) ... They may study
the numerous guides to intimacy and multiple orgasms by the Byerlys and other
Christian authors, explore exotic positions, talk dirty, use condoms and other
forms of birth control. They may slather their skin with chocolate body butter
and Happy Penis Massage Cream, restrain each other with silken bonds, use
blindfolds and swings, vibrators and pierced-tongue stimulators, penis
extenders and dildoes (though not those molded after real flesh). All this may
be theirs if they are straight and married.” Even masturbation is permitted:
“You may glorify Him with your sexuality by pure masturbation”—which, for the
sake of purity, “must be practiced for relief or biological clarity, not
pleasure, and must be unaccompanied by lustful thoughts.” Biological clarity?
In encouraging straight women’s
sexual vitality, the Byerlys “project a familiar duo, the Virgin and the Whore,
the latter sanctified as Wife, skilled in the use of a vibrating Jelly Finger,
and urged in an essay by the Reverend Paul titled ‘How to Strip for Your
Husband’ to ‘finish your performance by letting him watch you enjoy a
self-induced orgasm. To drive him over the top, put a chair in front of him,
sit down, put your feet on his knees, spread wide and masturbate. Bonus point
for self-penetration.” We may applaud such open-mindedness, particularly among
the traditionally closed-minded, but “in aiming to banish fear and guilt among
the faithful, [the Byerlys] merely displace those emotions,” creating a new
fear, the fear of being single. And so even as religion seems to take
cognizance of human nature, it persists in comforting only the elect, the
married, by damning all others.
When Bill Clinton signed the welfare
reform act in 1996, Wypijewski notes, “a subsection narrowed the range of
discussable sexual subjects in federally funded schools to the propositions
that ‘a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is
the expected standard of sexual activity,’ that ‘sexual activity outside the
context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical side
effects,’ that the only thing students need know about condoms and birth
control is their failure rate. ... Ten years and $1 billion later, this is the
only national sex education policy in America.” And research on its
effectiveness is scant. Abstinence-only training has no discernible effect in
postponing the age at which teenagers renounce their virginity. The “virginity
pledge” advocated by Adam Chamberlain has been taken by 2.5 million teens, but
apparently 88 percent have sex before marriage anyway: on average, they have it
18 months later than non-pledgers “but are more likely to have unprotected sex
and less likely to seek treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. ...
Compared with teenagers in almost every other developed country, American teens
have more religion, more partners, shorter relationships, less contraceptive
use, more infections, more abortions, more babies.”
And the music favored by teenagers
doesn’t, apparently, help. The Week magazine
for August 25 carries a report about a Rand Corporation study that shows teenagers
“steeped in raunchy pop songs with explicit sexual lyrics lose their virginity
earlier” than those who listened to less provocative music. Hip-hop and modern
pop “portray boys as shallow and sexually insatiable and girls as willing sex
objects. ‘We think that really lowers kids’ inhibitions, and makes them less
thoughtful’ about their sexual decisions.” How Seagle’s American Virgin will fit into this mosaic remains to be seen.
And, while we’re considering the politics of sex, here’s the lead paragraph,
slightly edited, from a Slate.com article by Amanda Schaffer last May: “The
upcoming National Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention Conference, sponsored
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other groups, has just
been given an unhealthy shot of ideology. The conference was supposed to
include a symposium designed to explore how abstinence-only sex education may
undermine other efforts to reduce STDs. The papers and panelists had gone
through the customary vetting of peer review. But the symposium was abruptly
retooled to include two proponents of abstinence programs—and to exclude a
well-respected detractor. This is bad news, not only because abstinence-only
work is scientifically unfounded but also because the switch represents a new
level of government intrusion into the peer-review process of a major
scientific meeting.” One of the opponents of abstinence programs maintains that
they are “medically unethical because they misrepresent and withhold basic
health information.” One of the proponents of abstinence is explicitly
ideological, seeking “to serve the Lord through medical missions and the
preaching of the Gospel in all the world.” Another of the same ilk advocates an
abstinence program “noteworthy for its negative messages about condoms and
stereotypical statements about girls and boys,” writes Schaffer. The
last-minute changes in the symposium line-up were instigated by Representative
Mark Souder, R-Ind., a long-time antagonist of comprehensive sexual education
who “leaned on the CDC to add more ‘balance’ to the abstinence discussion,”
which could be achieved by adding proponent views and by removing one of the
proposed (and approved) panelists, namely, the aforementioned detractor. In
fact, CDC was told if that personage were not removed, the symposium would be
cancelled. You can read the whole article at http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2141183 For my pupose here, what I’ve quoted is
enough to demonstrate just how into-the-thick-of-it the Seagle’s American
Virgin is getting.
I picked up a copy of the revived Jonah Hex title, No. 9, mostly in a fit
of nostalgia for the series and respect for writer Jimmy Palmiotti’s work. Tony
DeZuniga, who depicted Hex’s adventures for much of the earlier run of the
book, is back, and his cover for this issue is spectacular—all black-and-white
except for the blood Hex is spattering. Still out West, here’s Marvel’s
Milestone of Two-Gun Kid, plus two
other Western titles that, one way or another, revive titles from the
publisher’s vintage horse opera line. Only two of the seven stories in the
Milestone book are Two-Gun Kid tales; three of the remaining stories feature
the Rawhide Kid (before he was gay), and two stories are generic Westerns
without continuing characters. You’d think in a commemorative edition like this
that credits would be copious, but not here: nothing in the Table of Contents.
You can find the names “Kirby” and “Ayers” writ small on the title pages of the
Two-Gun Kid and the Rawhide Kid yarns, from which we can deduce that Jack Kirby
penciled and Dick Ayers inked. The other two stories carry no identifying
information. Both of the Kids’ origins are related, and in the Two-Gun Kid’s
version, we find tell-tale signs of another time: he meets the town’s school
ma’arm, a sexist convention of the Western that would no longer be happily
tolerated, and he calls her a “girl.” The reason the Kid wears a mask is given
meaningful context. The Kid, aka Matt Hawk, is taught to shoot by a famed old
gunslinger whom he rescued when some rampscallions came into town to earn reputations
by killing him. So when Hawk takes up guns for the cause of law and order, the
old gunslinger warns him that “there’ll always be some jasper who tries to gun
yuh down to cash in on yore rep.” So he suggests that Hawk wear a mask: “As far
as anyone knows, you’ll always be a harmless dude lawyer. But when yuh need
those colts, son, yuh’ll use ’em without anyone known’ who yuh are.” In
another, newer, Western title, Western
Legends, the Rawhide Kid origin is told again—and while the captions and speech
balloons are exactly the same in the two stories, the Legends origin tale has
been complete re-drawn (or vice versa). Fascinating to compare the two
versions: the opening sequence is more dramatically staged in the Legends
version by varying camera angles and distance; but the last half of the story
is better told in the Milestone edition. Another of the Rawhide Kid tales from
the Milestone edition is reprinted exactly in The Might Marvel Western featuring Kid Colt and the Arizona Girl, but this time, credits are given in type at the bottom of the opening splash
page. Makes you wonder who’s awake and who’s asleep at the House of Ideas.
Finally, we have two of the most
ludicrous (or “lewdicrous”) titles yet. The first, The Bomb Queen from Image, stars a shapely lass with an overflowing
bodice and a nicely rounded derriere. I like contemplating both as well as the
next dirty old man, but this lady’s costume is beyond belief. No costume for a
superheroine is ever believable: who, in their right minds, would go into
physical combat wearing such scanty attire, so skimpy that it affords no
protection whatsoever. Modesty Blaise in
extremis used to strip to go into battle in Peter O’Donnell’s novels, but
it was a ploy: she did it when she was confronted by a group of male opponents,
and she would surprise them, coming suddenly, unannounced, upon them, in her
naked magnificence, and the men, dumbfounded by this apparition of embonpoint,
simply stared, motionless. That moment of their immobility gives Modesty enough
time to attack them individually, rendering the group unconscious in a matter
of minutes. Modesty called the maneuver “the Nailer,” and the name was apt. But
Our Bomb Queen isn’t using her costume to “nail” anyone. It’s just her costume.
She wears what appears to be a spandex t-shirt, The other equally laughable title is Ant, also from Image. Well, not
equally laughable: more laughable, hysterically so, I’d say. Here there is no
costume at all. What we have is an obvious female of the human species wearing
red skin-tight sheath from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. It is
so tight that it is virtually a second skin, colored red in the hopeless
expectation that viewers will think it is a costume. It isn’t. A female
character with this bursting voluptuous figure—
Quips & Crotchets
“The
problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.”
—John Collins
“Getting divorced just because you
don’t love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.”
—Zsa Zsa Gabor
“Good judgment comes from
experience, and experience—well, that comes from poor judgment.” —A.A. Milne
The Danish Dozen Again
An
exhibition of cartoons mocking the Holocaust opened in Iran the week of August
14 at the Caricature House in Tehran. According to an Associated Press report,
the show is a reflection of Iran’s reaction to the Danish Dozen, those cartoons
depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were published in Denmark last winter.
Since Islam forbids images of the Prophet, Muslims everywhere were insulted,
and their fury erupted in street demonstrations throughout the Middle East,
where buildings were destroyed and people killed. Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that printed the cartoons,
said it did so to press the issue of freedom of expression in Europe, where it
has become increasingly problematic to say or print anything that might offend
the Muslim population. In the Netherlands, a movie producer was murdered a year
or so ago because he was making a movie critical of Islamic attitudes about
women. The Danish cartoonists who drew the cartoons for Jyllands-Posten had to go into hiding when, following publication
of their cartoons, Muslim leaders put a price on their heads, thereby
demonstrating exactly the kind of intimidating intolerance that the cartoons
were intended to reveal. And the anger still simmers in the Muslim world: the
AP reported on August 18 that Egypt’s top Islamic leader, Mohammed Sayed
Tantawi, the grand sheik of Al-Azhar, believes the Jyllands-Posten editor should be jailed and his newspaper banned.
Last February in Tehran, the newspaper Hamshahri launched a cartoon contest intended, the editors said, “to expose what some in
the Middle East see as Western hypocrisy for invoking freedom of expression
regarding the publication of cartoons that lampooned the Prophet while condemning
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran for questioning the Holocaust” (New York Times). Many Middle Eastern
Muslims, it seems, believe that to Westerners the Holocaust is as sacred as
Muhammad is in Islam. Masoud Shojai, director of the Caricature House, said a
jury considered 1,200 entries that came from countries all around the world,
including the U.S., Turkey, and Indonesia; they picked 204 for display in the
exhibition.
Some of the cartoons were described
by Michael Slackman in the New York
Times: “... a drawing of a Jew with a very large nose, a nose so large it
obscures his entire head. Across his chest is the word Holocaust. Another
drawing shows a vampire wearing a big Star of David drinking the blood of
Palestinians. A third shows Airel Sharon dressed in a Nazi uniform, emblazoned
not with swastikas but with the Star of David.” Many of the cartoons, in other
words, are simply, unabashedly, anti-Semitic rather than Holocaust denying.
Others, however, make the kind of political statement editorial cartoons
usually make. “An Israeli soldier, holding a gasoline can that says ‘Holocaust’
on the side, pouring the fuel into a military tank. A razor blade in the
ground, like the wall Israel is building along the West Bank, with the word
Holocaust along the side. Two firefighters, each with a Star of David on his
chest, using Palestinian blood to extinguish the word ‘Holocaust,’ which is
ablaze.” The exhibit will close September 13, and the cartoonist whose work is
judged the best will receive $12,000.
About 50 people attended the opening
on August 14, and attendance has not picked up since, Slackman said. “Over a
three-day period, the gallery was virtually empty. A few visitors stopped by,
mostly art students who said they had visited to examine artistic techniques.”
Slackman quotes Ali Eezadi, a 70-year-old retired industrial engineer: “Look,
these cartoons are the reflections of U.S. and Israelis’ deeds, so wouldn’t it
have been better if they were put on display in the U.S. or even in Israel?
That would supply a rationale for [the exhibit]. But having this kind of
exhibition in Iran does not draw much attention. I mean, these things are said,
written and expressed in lots of ways,” so many that it “makes people
apathetic,” he said.
The exhibit has probably attracted
more attention in the West than in Iran and the Middle East. Understandably,
the West is no more tolerant of having one of its sacred cows mocked than
Islamic populations are of having its Prophet ridiculed. The difference,
apparently, is that in the West, street demonstrations that result in death and
destruction are not common; the protest is mostly verbal. Jewish groups, in
particular, objected and warned that the exhibition implies a threat.
According to Julie Stahl at
crosswalk.com, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Jerusalem was not amused. “It would be too easy to dismiss this as a prank of
Ahmadinejad, but the West would do well to take this seriously,” he said,
referring to Iran’s President, who attracted considerable criticism in the West
last year when he called the Holocaust a myth and advocated wiping Israel off
the map of the Middle East. (It would be all right if Israel moved to Europe,
he said later.) At the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Avner Shalev, chair of
the directorate, said that the exhibition in a country that has nuclear
aspirations and whose president has made genocidal declarations against Israel
should be a “flashing red light signaling danger” to the world’s enlightened
nations. “The alarming silence of the world indicates that the West has not yet
understood that what is taking place is an attack on Western values and
civilization,” he said. “History has demonstrated that silence in the face of
evil statements begets evil actions. Iran has said the cartoon exhibit is a
‘test of Western tolerance.’ The West must stand up and say clearly: ‘This we
will not tolerate.’”
Another member of the memorial board
and a Holocaust survivor, Joseph Lapid, said: “The exhibit not only is horrific
propaganda that supports Holocaust denial, it also paves the road to justifying
genocide of the Jews in Israel.” And Arieh O’Sullivan, spokesman for the
Anti-Defamation League in Israel, said: “While the ADL is in favor of freedom
of expression, it is not a license to foster hatred, and that’s what these
cartoons are doing”—which is almost exactly what some of the more moderate
Muslim spokesmen said about the Danish Dozen. The Holocaust cartoons are
“blatantly anti-Semitic,” O’Sullivan said. “Saying that the show is a test of
freedom of expression is a farce,” he continued, again echoing Muslim
sentiments about the Danish cartoons. “They are the number one violators when
it comes to incitement against Jews,” O’Sullivan finished. I don’t think we can
turn that around and make the Danes the number one violators in inciting hatred
of Muslims, but the Iranian contest has undoubtedly made the point it intended
to make—just as the Danish Dozen did. But there is a difference. I doubt that
the Danes began their project with hatred for Muslims in their hearts, and I
don’t think we can say the same thing about the Iranians and Israelis.
The unpleasant fact is that the
Middle East has been a hotbed of racial hatred for decades, perhaps centuries.
Anti-Semitism has been particularly virulent among the Arab population since
the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948, but Arabs (who, oddly,
are also a Semitic people) have been wary of the Jews since at least the 1880s,
when thousands of Jews began immigrating to Palestine to create a homeland
where they would be free from persecution. (I realize that I’ve shifted from
“Muslims” to “Arabs” as thought they were interchangeable, but the shift is all
but immaterial for my argument: while not all Arabs are Muslims and most
Muslims are not Arabs, the Muslim antipathy to Jews undoubtedly has its origins
in the relationship that emerged between Arabs and Jews in the years that
followed the first immigration into Palestine.) Arabs expressed opposition to
the Jewish settlements almost immediately, fearing that the growing Jewish
population would eventually result in displacing them from Palestine. The Jews,
unhappily, were for the next several decades more concerned with currying
international support for the establishing their own state in Palestine than
they were about their relationship with the local Arab population. They
virtually ignored the Arab protests. But during the British Mandate (roughly
1920 to 1948), the governing British listened sympathetically: with an eye on their
Empire and its interests, the British had been allied with the Arabs of the
Middle East during World War I and continued to cultivate that population.
Various policies instituted during the Mandate years restricted the Jewish
immigration and ownership of land while favoring the Arabs. Animosity festered
on both the Jewish side and the Arab side, and the Jewish population in
Palestine continued to grow.
In the wake of World War II and the
revelation of the Holocaust’s terrible toll, Jewish survivors flocked to
Palestine, seeking a security they feared they could never find elsewhere. The
British tried to keep them out, and Jewish underground militia in the country
retaliated by attacking various British installations. The British, enraged by
these actions, called the Jewish undergrounders terrorists. The underground groups had been formed over the years
since the inauguration of the Mandate in order to protect the Jewish settlers
from hostile Arabs, a protection the British weren’t providing.
Some histories of the region claim
that the first terrorist acts were committed by Arab groups that hoped to drive
Jews from the country—or, at least, to discourage further immigration. But any
history of this much abused region is suspect, liable to reflect one bias or
the other. Regardless, by the end of World War II, both Arabs and Jews had
formed militant armed groups that wreaked havoc on their foes in the fashion of
terrorists—that is, by attacking militias and intimidating civilians. The
British seemed unable to stem the rising tide of violence, and when the Jewish
underground group the Irgun hanged two British officers in response to the
British hanging of three Irgunists, the public back home in England was
outraged and began agitating for the British to give up the Mandate and
withdraw from the country, leaving the Jews and the Arabs to fight it out among
themselves. (If this sounds eerily familiar, it should.)
The British went to the newly formed
United Nations and asked for help. Whatever solution the UN proposed, however,
it must, said the British, be agreeable to both Jews and Arabs. The UN solution
arrived at in November 1947 was to partition Palestine, creating two states,
one Jewish, the other Palestinian. The Jews were allotted about 60 percent of
the land of Palestine, but more than half of that was the arid Negev Desert.
The Jews accepted the solution; the Arabs did not. Neither did the British.
Because both groups didn’t agree to accept partition, the British, in effect,
refused to implement the partition and announced that they would leave the
country, terminating the Mandate, in May. As for the Arab’s rejection of the
partition plan, in their view, to accept the partition would be to validate
their worst expectation—that the Jewish immigration displace the Arab
population, driving them from lands they regarded as theirs, effectively
denying them the right to self-determination (a value only recently proclaimed
to the world by Woodrow Wilson) and to their own homeland. Arab militia
immediately instigated riots against the Jews, and in Cairo, jurists of the
Al-Ashar University called on the Muslim world to proclaim a jihad against the Jews. The Israelis
counter-attacked on December 11, 1947, and by the end of the month had
committed the first wanton act against civilians, exploding a bomb at the
Damascus Gate in Jerusalem that killed 15 Arabs and wounded more than 50. A few
days later, Irgunists rolled a barrel filled with scrap metal and explosives
into a crowd at a bus stop, killing 17 Arabs and wounding another 50 or so.
Naturally, the Arabs stuck back.
As hostilities escalated, the Jews
found themselves struggling against two foes: the Arabs, eager to drive them
out of the country, and the British, who, attempting to uphold the laws they’d
instituted under the Mandate, refused to permit the Jews to form militias for
defense or to obtain arms. At the same time, the British surrendered military
bases and arms to Arab groups, perhaps hoping to persuade them, at last, to
accept the partition. Not only did the British prevent the Jews from arming
themselves, they systematically took away what arms they found in their
possession. Early in February 1948, the British arrested four resisting members
of the Haganah, the oldest Jewish underground group, and, astonishingly, turned
them over to an Arab mob in Jerusalem, which shot one and castrated the others
before hacking them to death. Thereafter, the Haganah refused to disarm itself.
And so the stage was set for the 1948 war.
The British withdrew from Palestine
on May 14, and Israel was, ipso facto—by reason of the UN partition—an
independent state. The next day, the armies of the five adjacent nations—Egypt,
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq—invaded Israel. At least, the Israelis no
longer had to fight the British. That Israel, underequipped and, in terms of
armed soldiers, outnumbered at first, survived at all is testament to their
remarkable dedication and tenacity, not to mention ingenuity and skill. But the
Israelis didn’t just survive: they won. And as they have done several times
since then, they earned American admiration with their military daring and
success. But theirs is no more an unblemished record than ours in, say, Vietnam
or Iraq. Or in Korea or in post-war Japan, where we were the occupying power.
In the course of battles of the 1948 war, the Israeli forces, like the Arab
forces, committed atrocities, killing civilians, women, children, and the
elderly, often brutally, cruelly. The Arabs did the same whenever they had the
chance. No one came out of this war with reputations unsullied. But they all
came out hating their enemies.
The foregoing history lesson is
undoubtedly flawed and incomplete: no history of that region can, any longer,
be free of blame-seeking and finger-pointing and other varieties of bias. And
it is difficult in this country to arrive at anything approaching an objective
history of the Middle East. The U.S. is home to the largest Jewish population
in the world, and the future of Israel is of great concern to American Jews. The
so-called “Jewish lobby” is real but scarcely sinister, the diatribes of raving
bigots to the contrary notwithstanding. Still, U.S. media coverage of the
Middle East has almost always presented Israelis in a more favorable light than
Arabs. In the August 28/September 4 issue of The Nation appears a letter signed by eighteen writers, including
Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, and Toni Morrison. The letter draws
attention to biased media coverage at the beginning of the current round of
violence: “The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine
began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother,
from Gaza—an incident scarcely reported anywhere except in the Turkish press.
The following day, the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner [which was
widely reported in the Western press, as a seemingly an unprovoked action]—and
proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis—there
are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails. This ‘kidnapping’ was considered an
outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the
systematic appropriation of its natural resources—most particularly that of
water—by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but
realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed
by the West.”
The American public as a whole is
more disposed to accepting the Israeli version of the truth than the Arab
version. The Judeo-Christian tradition unites us in this country, and so does
our history: America was settled by various groups of persecuted people, and
our national tradition is therefore predisposed to be sympathetic to any
persecuted peoples. And the Jews, driven from Palestine by a succession of
conquerors in successive centuries, have been, as a people, more persecuted
than most. But the conduct of the Israeli forces during the 1948 war was no
more blameless than the Arabs. And doubtless continues, on both sides.
I realize all this has very little
to do with cartooning; I launched into this apostrophe to Middle Eastern
hatreds largely because I was curious about its origins. And having done the
research, I didn’t want to leave it under-utilized. Call it a sin of
conservation. One of the books I consulted included these remarks by Mark
Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867 and described it as “a desolate country
whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds. ... A desolation
is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. ...
There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus,
those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”
The same book retailed this story
about two denizens of the region. A scorpion came out of the desert to the bank
of the Nile where he encountered a crocodile. “My dear chap,” said the
scropion, “could we form an alliance to get to the other side of the
river?” The croc said: “Do you think
I’m a fool? I would be at your complete mercy: you could sting me and kill me
at any time during the crossing.”
“Ahh,” said the scorpion, “but I
promise not to sting you because if I did and you died, as you would, I would
drown.”
The crocodile pondered and finally
grasped the logic in what the insect said and let the scorpion onto its back
and began swimming across the river. About halfway across, the scorpion became
agitated and stung the crocodile.
“Now we’ll both die,” said the croc.
“What possible explanation or logic is there for such an act as yours?
“There is none,” said the scorpion,
“—this is the Middle East.”
That’s from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East Conflict, one of my
sources. The others: standard encyclopedias, a smattering of general histories,
the current news reports, and Beyond
Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History by Norman
G. Finkelstein, who also wrote The
Holocaust Industry, both of which reach unfamiliar destinations in
examining the history of the Middle East.
Thank You, William Falk
Falk, the ed-in-chief of The Week magazine, wrote the following in the issue for April 7, and it seems, now, a
good time to repeat it:
Nearly
every religion on Earth claims sole ownership of the path to salvation. Simple
logic would dictate that they can’t all be right, and that a very large
percentage of humanity holds beliefs that are flawed, if not wholly in error.
But should you be allowed to say so—to question religious faiths that you deem
delusional, or even dangerous? One camp of True Believers says hell, no.
“Religious beliefs are sacred to people,” says Scientology follower Isaac
Hayes, “and at all times should be respected and honored.” Assorted cynics and
infidels dare to disagree. Among them are the European political cartoonists
who mocked Islamic radicals, the caustic creators of “South Park,” and
columnist John Leo, who argues that religions must earn respect rather than
demand it. ... It is not purely a rhetorical issue. As you may have noticed, a
large percentage of the news each week arises from bitter—and often
violent—differences of opinion about religious belief. Even in this country,
many religious groups feel deeply aggrieved, and insist that they are being
oppressed. (A group of evangelicals [recently] held a conference in Washington
entitled “The War on Christians.”) Much of the anguish created by religion, it
seems to me, arises from a basic confusion. Some fervent folk think the right
to practice their beliefs includes a right to demand that other people conform.
Not so. In fact, the more a religion insists that it has a monopoly on
truth—the more disdainful and intolerant its followers are of non-believers—the
less respect it seems to get. Now why, I wonder, would that be?
Under the Spreading Punditry
In
his syndicated column on August 15, my favorite gadfly, Ted Rall, quoted the New York
Times report on activities in Southern Lebanon just hours after the
cease-fire halted the hostilities: “Hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over
dozens of villages” and began cleaning up the battlefield debris and organizing
and surveying the damage. “Men on bulldozers were busy cutting lanes through
giant piles of rubble. Roads blocked with the remnants of buildings are now,
just a day after a cease-fire began, fully passable.” Rall continues: “Who
cares if Hezbollah is a State Department designated terrorist organization?
Unlike our worthless government, it gets things done!” Quoting Jed Horne in The New Republic, who called New Orleans
“a disaster zone, an area five times the size of Manhattan,” Rall observes,
quite appropriately I think, that “the citizens of New Orleans desperately need
Hezbollah’s can-do terrorist spirit” to restore civilization to their city.
“With terrorists like that, who needs FEMA?” Rall asks. It’s a stunning
comparison and wholly, tragically, apt: the Bush League’s response to Katrina
is a national disgrace. Congress as well as the White House has tragically
failed conspicuously. If their colossal ineptitude at occupying Iraq can’t
convince us that we are being governed by incompetents, their miserable
performance in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina
surely must.
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