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Opus 194:
Opus 194 (October 31, 2006). By way of celebrating the scary
season, we take a long lingering look at a brand new biography of Mr. Macabre
in Cartooning, The New Yorker’s Chas
Addams. And we have a long critique of The
Jungle, Peter Kuper’s graphic novel adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel,
now concluding its centennial year. We also review the second volume of the Buz Sawyer reprinting project, Osamu
Tezuka’s favorite graphic novel, and a collection of rejected New Yorker cartoons. And we list the
Twenty-five Top Under-reported Newsstories of the last year and predict the
results of the forthcoming mid-term election. Here’s what’s here, in order:
Prediction
of Election Outcome
BIOGRAPHY OF CHAS ADDAMS
NOUS
R US
Robinson
Invents the Joker
Scott
Adams Gets His Voice Back
BOOK MARQUEE
Buz
Sawyer Reprint, Vol. 2
Osamu
Tezuka’s graphic novel
The
Rejection Collection of New Yorker Cartoons
Civilization’s
Last Outpost
More
History of the Middle East Animosities
What
Lawrence of Arabia Learned about Tribes
GRAFIC NOVIL: The Jungle
Twenty-five Under-reported Newsstories in
2005-2006
Onward, the Spreading Punditry
How
Can You Fence an Ocean? And Should We?
Pols
Try To Out-jesus Each Other
The
National Religion
And
our customary reminder: 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—
HOPPY
HALLOWE’EN
Hallowe’en
is the scariest night of the year; and a week later, on November 7, we have,
this year, the scariest day of the year.
But I have little doubt about the
outcome of the election. Despite all the wishful thinking being bandied about
these days, the Republicans will retain control of both the House and the
Senate. Yes, significant majorities of polled citizens want to try a new
direction under Democrats, but those numbers reflect a sort of general
dissatisfaction with Congress and the way the Invasion in Iraq is going. When
it comes to voting in that little booth, most voters will retain the services
of their current congressmen. Those guys, they think—we all think—are okay:
it’s the other guys, the ones from other states, who are corrupt or stupid. Let
the other voters, the ones in the other states, vote those scoundrels out of
office. We’ll keep our nice guys on the job.
There. I’ve made a political
prediction. Now let’s see how it turns out. Don’t forget to vote.
CHAS ADDAMS WITH MACABRE
And a Dash of the Diabolical
Charles
Addams—who signed his cartoons of incongruous comedy “Chas Addams” and whose
friends called him Charlie—would be pleased at the treatment he receives in
Linda H. Davis’ Chas Addams: A
Cartoonist’s Life (196 6x9-inch pages; Random House hardback, $29.95). She
begins: “They say that Charles Addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with
eyeballs in them.” She continues with a litany of aberrant evidences of Addams’
peculiarity, citing the guillotine he was supposed to keep in his house, the chopped
off fingers that fans sent him, and the monogrammed straitjacket he once
received as a birthday gift, and then she describes the classic Addams cartoon,
in which a ghoulish man shows up at the maternity ward to claim his offspring,
telling the nurse, “Don’t bother to wrap it; I’ll eat it here.”
From the opening pages on, Davis
perpetuates the legend of the macabre persona that Addams had created and
assiduously cultivated for most of his life, earning him, as she says, “such
sobriquets as ‘the Van Gogh of the Ghouls,’ ‘the Bella Lugosi of the
cartoonists,’ ‘the graveyard guru,’ a purveyor of ‘American Gothic.’” Davis is
Addams’ willing collaborator in this fond fraud, but she also points out,
almost immediately, that the cartoonist never drew a cartoon with a ghoulish
father contemplating his newborn offspring for dinner. “People swore that they
had actually seen the maternity room cartoon,” Davis says, “but Addams had
never drawn it.”
Much of Addams work was “funny
without being dark,” she continues, “and marked by great sweetness,” but it was
“the sinister stuff that had made him famous.”
True; most of us remember Addams as
specializing in a bizarre brand of comedy founded upon the inexplicable in
nature and the anti-social in mankind. In one unsettling cartoon, a skin diver comes across a giant bathtub
plug (with chain) in the bottom of the ocean. In another cartoon, vultures
perch in a tree at the edge of a precipice atop which a sign reads,
"Lover's Leap." In yet
another, a couple strolling through the woods see a bird house the size of a
garage. And then, waiting outside the delivery room, a cloaked and beady-eyed
bald man with tiny fang-like teeth is told by the nurse,
"Congratulations—it's a baby."
Addams' cartoon children often
engage in fiendish amusements. In a
shop class where boys are making bird houses, one child is putting the
finishing touches on a small coffin. In
an art class where students are making clay figurines in the image of their
model, one boy is sticking pins in his figurine. The same boy is shown on
another occasion in a bathroom, reaching up to the medicine cabinet to dip an
arrow in a bottle marked "Poison."
Addams' drawing style is
individualistic but unassertive. His
people are all a little stout and dumpy-looking. Sometimes even strange, alien.
And a wash shrouds virtually every one of his pictures in somber hues of gray
that seemed vaguely menacing.
Disconcerting, yes; Addams’
“cartoons of diabolical mein,” as Brendan Gill called them, clearly display a
somewhat bent albeit engaging sense of humor. But as Davis’ book unfolds her
tale of his life, Addams emerges as more bon vivant than ghoul. He assuredly
fostered a reputation as the latter, but he lived the life of the former. And
Davis works diligently to keep the ghoul alive as a sort of puckish goblin
while introducing the affable and kindly man-about-town, sprinkling the book
generously, soaking it, with colorful anecdotes and Addams’ own quirky
comments.
Seated in a restaurant, Addams was
approached by an attractive young woman who asked: “Aren’t you Charles Addams?”
“Well, I guess so,” he conceded.
“Don’t you spell that with two d’s?”
she asked.
“Three d’s,” he told her.
Another time when he ran into
photographer Tony Hollyman after having not seen him for a long time, Addams
said: “Aren’t you still Hollyman?”
One of his numerous women friends
told him that when people asked her about him, she told them he was very nice.
Addams was appalled: “Lord, you’re going to ruin my reputation. Why don’t you describe
me as having a faint scent of formaldehyde?”
Over lunch one day, fellow
cartoonist Mort Gerberg asked Addams conversationally what he did over the
weekend.
“Well, it was really such a nice day
on Sunday,” Addams said, “I decided to take a friend for a drive—to Creedmore.”
Creedmore is a state psychiatric facility in Queens.
“Gerberg wasn’t sure whether he was
kidding,” Davis finished.
The book is rich with this sort of
anecdotal insight, gleaned mostly, as 42 pages of notes at the end tell us, from
the author’s interviews with Addams’ friends, scores of them.
Reporters frequently inquired into
the conditions of Addams’ childhood, seeking the origins there of his
fascination with the unusual. Addams admitted to a youthful interest in drawing
skeletons and in roaming cemeteries, but apart from playing an occasional
practical joke, his childhood, he insisted, was normal and healthy. Davis gives
us both, entitling her first chapter, “Arrested at the Age of Eight,” and then
explaining in the next, “A Normal American Boy,” how young Charlie with some of
his friends had broken into a deserted Victorian mansion in his neighborhood
and committed several acts of minor vandalism, which brought the law on him in
the person of a cop knocking at the front door of his home.
“I had never seen a policeman with
his hat off before,” Addams said, recalling that his mother had invited the
officer into the house. “They took me down to the local court with the other
children. My father paid the damages. It wasn’t really an arrest, but I like to
think of it as one,” he concluded, revealing, as he often did, the tireless
publicity campaign that he waged.
Addams was born Charles Samuel on
January 7, 1912, in Westfield, New Jersey, the son of Charles Huey Addams,
manager of a piano company, and Grace M. Spear. His father, who had studied to be an architect, encouraged young
Charles to draw, and he did cartoons for the student paper at Westfield High
School. He entered Colgate University
in 1929 but transferred after a year to the University of Pennsylvania, which
he left the following year to enroll in the Grand Central School of Art in New
York, where he spent the next year (most of it, he once confessed, just
"watching people" walk through Grand Central Terminal).
When his father died unexpectedly in
May 1932, Addams left school to help fill the family coffers. He embarked upon
a career as an illustrator, taking a job as staff artist for Macfadden’s True Detective magazine where he dabbled
in “gangster gore,” doing lettering, retouching photographs, and drawing
diagrams of crime scenes for $15 a week. “It was just a job,” he said later, denying that it affected his outlook
on life or his sense of humor: “It didn’t hurt me.” But he confessed that he
liked the photographs un-retouched, “with just a tad more blood and gore.” More
self-promotion.
At the same time, he started
submitting cartoons to various magazines. The
New Yorker bought a spot drawing from him in 1932 for $7.50. Soon
thereafter, Addams was selling regularly enough that he quit his job at
Macfadden The cartoonist's popularity,
however, began with the publication in the magazine for January 13, 1940 of a
cartoon showing the parallel tracks of a skier leading directly up to a tree
and then going around it, one track on either side. No caption, but Addams put a second skier in the cartoon, pausing
in his The phenomenon of the tracks is so
astounding that we seldom notice that the skier who made them is still in the
picture, just downhill from the tree a bit, slipping off the picture into
limbo. And because we seem to have forgotten, or never actually noticed, this
skier, most of us are surprised to realize that the skier is a woman. Or so it
would seem. That’s surely a hank of hair waving in the slipstream behind the
skier’s head, not a scarf. So if it’s a woman that Addams drew there, what does
that mean for the mystery? Addams, as I said, professed not to understand any
of it. Neither does Davis, but she notes that Addams’ skier came along after
the skiers in several cartoons by other New
Yorker cartoonists.
Given the effect “the Skier” had on
his subsequent career, it is surprising to note, as Davis does, that the idea
was not Addams’ but, probably, a New
Yorker staff member’s. Davis had access to Addams’ notebooks in which he
recorded sales and the amounts earned as well as the names of gag writers with
whom he shared the proceeds. No name appears in his notebook, which, I gather,
is what happened when the idea was conjured up by a staff member—or, perhaps,
by Addams himself. But Davis asserts that “someone had pitched the idea to him,
and he had drawn it.”
The magazine’s staff members,
chiefly E.B. White and James Thurber, were usually the
contributors of ideas for the cartoons, a practice that continued until the
1950s, when William Shawn inherited Ross’ mantle and decreed that cartoons,
henceforth, would be the product of the cartoonist alone, unassisted by
writers. In the 1930s, drawings and gags were often submitted as separate,
individual entities. A cartoon rough submitted by one cartoonist might be
finished by another, whose style was better suited to the subject. If a gag
idea needed a crowd scene, Davis says, Carl
Rose was frequently picked to draw the cartoon because he did crowd scenes
so well. If someone sent in a gag about a middle-class matron, Helen Hokinson might get the
assignment—or Mary Petty. Although
both managed convincing matrons, there was a difference: “A Mary Petty
dowager,” Davis says, “was to a Helen Hokinson matron what a hothouse flower
was to a garden perennial.” In a career lasting over fifty years with The New Yorker, famed cartoonist George Price produced only one idea of
his own for a cartoon, a cover drawing of store Santas commuting on the subway.
Some of the magazine’s newer cartoonists initially felt disappointed when they
learned that “the wizard wasn’t a wizard,” Davis reports—that Addams worked
with purchased ideas. But they eventually came around to cartoonist Mischa Richter’s view: Addams, Richter
felt, “was like ‘an actor doing a part’ written by another person.” Richard
McCallister, a writer, and Herb Valen, an agent who found advertising
commissions for cartoonists, were Addams’ chief idea men. But Addams’ most
famous creations started, apparently, as his own inspiration.
In the late 1930s, Addams created
the vaguely fiendish family for which he is usually remembered—“the Hallowe’en
version of Norman Rockwell and Grand Wood,” as Wilfrid Sheed put it in his
Foreword to The World of Chas Addams. The first to appear in the gloomy gothicky
Victorian pile that writer Wolcott Gibbs At the time of inspiration, Addams
had no intention of developing a The rest of the household accumulated slowly over the
next few years: a necromantic Peter Lorre-like husband named Gomez and the
baleful couple’s children, an undernourished girl with six toes on one foot and
a little fat boy who foments explosives and poisons with his chemistry set, and
a hag witch of a grandmother. In what may be their most celebrated appearance,
the family is on the roof of their house, poised to reward a band of Christmas
carolers below by tipping onto them a cauldron of what appears to be boiling
oil. (Ross thought it was hot lead.) Like the Skier cartoon, this one was
not Addams’ invention. The drawing was originally conceived by cartoon editor
James Geraghty and novelist Peter DeVries, then on The New Yorker staff, as a cover for the 1946 Christmas issue.
Ross, when he saw it, was aghast. But Geraghty loved the idea and Addams’
execution of it—the lovingly detailed rooftop, the mansard windows, the wisp of
steam emitted by the heated contents of the cauldron—and finally persuaded Ross
to publish it inside the Christmas issue, dated December 21.
Christened “the Addams Family,” the
ghastly ensemble became the touchstone Addams cartoon and created a pervasive
image: "An Addams house, an Addams
family, an Addams situation are archetypes that we see all around us,"
according to New York Times art
critic John Russell; and Addams, Russell said, was "an American landmark,
one of the few by which one and all have learned to steer."
The
New Yorker’s pay scale was a multi-layered labyrinthian puzzle invented by
Ross to incorporate a variety of considerations, some actual, some mystic: the
size of the published cartoon (full-page cartoons were worth more), the
productivity of the cartoonist, and other vagaries more peculiar to Ross’s
opinion of the caliber of the cartoonist’s work than any objectively verifiable
criteria. Addams was “a triple-A” in Ross’s private ranking, Davis says. Only
Petty shared that ranking. But three others—Peter Arno, Hokinson, and Gluyas Williams—were “golden,” above all ranks. Double-A artists included Thurber, Whitney Darrow Jr., and George Price. In the A-rank was Sam Cobean, Rose, Otto Soglow, “and
others.” In my private pantheon of New
Yorker cartoonists, four stand above all the others: Arno, Hokinson, Price,
and Addams. In my view, this quartet embodied New Yorker cartoon comedy: they defined, if they didn’t create, the
humorous ambiance of the magazine. And none of them appeared very often
anywhere else. I realize that describes Petty and Thurber, too, but—hey,
opinions on such matters are usually highly personal and, as such, virtually
indefensible. And that’s the case here.
Holding up for examination all sorts
of morbid and vaguely sinister curiosities, Addams’ cartoons, it has been said,
evince the repressed violence that lurks within normal people everywhere. Writing the Foreword to one of the thirteen
collections of Addams cartoons, Addams
and Evil, Wolcott Gibbs saw Addams' cartoons as "essentially a denial
of all spiritual and physical evolution in the human race.” At the Saturday Review of Literature, John
Mason Brown said: "His is a goblin world of bats, spiders, broomsticks,
snakes, cobwebs, and bloodletting morons in which every day is
Hallowe'en." Addams maintained that he arrived at his ominous ideas simply
by observing people. One favorite observation point was near the William
Tecumseh Sherman statue opposite the Plaza Hotel on fashionable Central Park
South in New York. “After five minutes of looking at people there,” Addams
said, “even my oddest drawings begin to look mild by comparison.”
But the alleged necropsical
preoccupations of Addams’ cartoons abide more in the fervid imaginations of his
fans than in the cartoons themselves. As cartoons, as humor, the Chas Addams
cartoon is a somewhat simple and not at all spectral mechanism. Its supposed
weirdness proves, under examination, not to be weird but quite conventional in
dramatic terms. The comedy of the Addams Family proceeds quite logically, quite
naturally—not preternaturally—from the characters. Once a vaguely sinister,
morbidly preoccupied family of spooks, monsters and mad scientists has been
conjured up, the rest follows as effortlessly as the eldrich night follows a
gloomy dusk. If Morticia seems to be some sort of witch with death and
dismemberment as amusements, it follows that if she goes next door to borrow an
ingredient, the ingredient won’t be a cup of sugar. It will be, and was in
Addams’ cartoon, a cup of cyanide. In short, the celebrated necromantic wit of
the Addams Family cartoons surfaces whenever the family members simply act “in
character.” And so if they are all at the window observing dismally windy and
rainy weather, one of them, the husband in this case, is bound to say, as he
does: “Just the kind of day that makes you feel good to be alive.” And in
another cartoon not involving any of the Addams menage but the witchy hag next
door, the hag’s daughter would say, like any teenager under similar
circumstances, “Mom, can I have the broom tonight?” Using the same unyielding
logic, when Uncle Fester goes out to feed the birds, we see that they’re
vultures.
A similar logic operates in most
other Addams cartoons, many of which, as Davis notes, are not at all
ill-omened. Here’s a shepherd surrounded by his flock as he knocks on the door
of a cottage and asks the woman of the house: “Crop thy lawn, lady?” Once you
have a shepherd with a flock of sheep who customarily eat grass, biting it off
very close to the ground, why wouldn’t you expect the shepherd, as a purely
logical matter, to take up lawn “cropping” as a way of earning a little extra
cash? Much of Addams’ humor results from extending the logic of a particular
situation—and extending it and extending it. And so when a man in a restaurant
introduces to a friend the woman he’s dining with, saying, “Miss Osborne poses
for subway posters,” it is quite logical that Miss Osborne would have a
moustache and a goatee as do most faces on posters in the subway. And it is
equally logical that on a street of shops all of which have signs over their entryways
depicting their product—a watch at a watch repair shop, a shoe at a
cobbler’s—the mortician hangs a sign in the shape of a prone body wearing a
tux. And when we see a small band of Boy Scouts crossing a log bridge carrying
a flag proclaiming them the Beaver Patrol, it is quite logical that they all
have prominent buck teeth and that the log they’re walking on is a freshly
felled tree, leaving a gnawed-on stump at the river’s edge. Logically, If one
fakir on a bed of nails turns to his comrade, also prone on a bed of nails, and
proposes a pillow fight, the pillows will be bristling with nails.
These cartoons all follow Groucho
Marx’s prescription for professionalism as invoked by Sheed: “Groucho Marx once
said that the difference between a professional comedian and an amateur was
that if the script called for an old lady to crash down the hill and into a
wall in her wheelchair, the professional insisted on using a real old lady. And
this is what caused the sharp intake of breath with an Addams cartoon: this guy
really means it, doesn’t he? He is using a real old lady. ... In a period when
Disney and lesser functionaries had domesticated evil and almost rendered it
cute, Addams went all the way with his ideas, crashing them into the wall and
leaving them there bleeding.” That’s logic, the terrible comedic logic of the
Chas Addams cartoon.
In other cartoons, Addams simply
juxtaposed a conventional utterance and an unconventional setting; or vice
versa, a time-honored cartoonist device. Here a landlord is showing an empty
apartment to a man and woman who are obviously gangsters on the lam. The man
stands at the side of the window, peering out furtively; the woman clutches a
large violin case. The landlord says, as landlords do everywhere under these circumstances,
“Any children?” And in the back of an opium den is the sign reading: “Occupancy
by more than 31 persons is dangerous and unlawful.” And here’s a shepherd
awakened by one of his sheep, which says, “Meow.”
But there is no explanation for the
Skier.
Most of Addams’ humor can be
analyzed with relative ease, but it was always humor of a particular, not to
say peculiar, kind. He didn’t traffic in ordinary incongruities or everyday
premortem comedy. His sense of humor, to which his gag writers carefully
tailored their suggestions, was so distinctive that an Addams cartoon could
achieve its comic effect just by being an Addams cartoon. In one such production, a man is watching
television and drinking from what seems to be an ordinary soft drink bottle. His wife, who has just returned home and is
standing in the doorway to the room, has asked a question to which the man
replies, "I got it out of the refrigerator. Why?" The mere fact
that Addams concocted this cartoon suggests that the bottle must contain
something more depraved than a soft drink.
Once Addams achieved fame as a
cartoonist, he sought a suitable notoriety as well, appearing at costume
parties in odd robes, calling himself “a defrocked ghoul,” or pedaling a
child's tricycle while smoking a cigar. On camping trips, he drove a van that he called "the Heap,"
the interior of which was outfitted with dignified plush furniture, a stuffed
partridge and a stuffed grackle. It is
somehow fitting that he collected medieval arms and armor, which he displayed
in his home. He also had a coffee table made from an embalming table, and
stuffed bats and skulls and an antique headsman’s axe were displayed in his
abode. As Sheed observed: “In other words, Charles Addams was a consummate
craftsman, or magician, who understood that it’s not a bad idea to keep the
illusion going between tricks if it helps the tricks to work better.” More
conventionally, he also enjoyed owning and driving vintage automobiles and
sports cars—Astin Martins, Bugattis, Alfa Romeros, Bentleys.
During World War II, Addams served
from 1943 to 1946 in the Army Signal Corps, illustrating manuals and making
animated training films warning against syphilis (his only “job” other than the
one he held at Macfadden). The Signal Corps Photographic Center to which Addams
was assigned was in Astoria, Queens, so he was never far from the city, and he
continued submitting cartoons to The New
Yorker throughout the war. “For Addams,” Davis writes, “the Signal Corps
was cartoonist Sam Cobean,” whom Addams
met in the Astoria shop and called “one of the great comic artists of all
time”—a dark, strikingly handsome man who, Davis tells us, looked like Tyrone
Power. Addams and Cobean bonded, and Addams introduced Cobean to The New Yorker. Ross bought the first
cartoons Cobean submitted. After the war, the two shared an office at The New Yorker, and when Cobean died in
1951 at the tragically early age of 38, swerving his car to avoid another and
running into a tree, Addams couldn’t believe it. “Sam killed,” he wrote in his
notebook, using a pencil, Davis says, “as if the entry might be a mistake he
would later erase.”
Addams was married three times and
divorced twice. He married Barbara Day, a former model, May 29, 1943, having
obtained a few days’ leave from the Signal Corps over the Memorial Day weekend.
But Barbara wanted a child, and when Addams reneged on adopting one in 1951,
she left him, with another man, a neighbor, in June 1951, just three weeks
before Cobean was killed. Addams’ opinion of children might be derived from
their numerous deranged appearances in his cartoons, but Addams liked children
as long as they weren’t his own. His divorce from Barbara Day was finally
achieved in October 1951, and Addams began playing the field with such
enthusiastic abandon as to earn a reputation as one of New York’s “most
sought-after men.”
Then in the spring of 1953, Addams
joined some friends at a bar and met another Barbara, with the unlikely
Hollywoodian sur-name Barb, who was apparently so smitten by the cartoonist
that she showed up, uninvited, at his apartment, naked under a mink coat. She,
like the first Barbara, was a slender brunette who reminded witnesses of
Morticia, and Barbara, like Morticia, was somewhat fictional not to say
fraudulent. She’d invented a personal history that seemed to her more glamorous
than her actual biography, which was a pretty impressive success story. Despite
a humble origin, she was a high-powered attorney, specializing in international
law. By September 1953, she was Addams’ almost constant companion; they married
in December 1954, and trouble began almost immediately. She ferociously
provoked fights with her husband, usually destroying property as she raged.
Sometimes, she attacked Addams—once with a stiletto heel applied to his head so
severely that he went to the hospital, once by pressing lighted cigarettes into
his arm. Davis, who looks a little like Dorothy McGuire in “The Dark at the Top
of the Stairs,” calls her “Bad Barbara,” continuing: “Her role in Addams’ life
was that of the bad fairy at the christening.” Bad Barbara maintained
throughout their marriage a “loving correspondence” with a titled British M.P.,
Lord Colyton, who she visited frequently and married right after Addams
divorced her in October 1956.
Addams had known of her infidelity
with the Englishman since the summer of 1955, but—as strange as his sense of
humor—in order to get the divorce, he had signed away to her the rights to many
of his cartoons and even, although apparently unwittingly, to the Addams
Family, an arrangement that later plagued prospects for developing the
characters in other media. Addams, almost right away, in December, met the
woman who would be his third wife, Marilyn Matthews Miller, called Tee, another
brunette and former Powers model who was, at that time, married to a friend,
Bedford Davie, and lived with her husband in Nashville, Tennessee. She married
Addams 24 years later after she had gone through another husband or so and
Addams had dallied with every lusting female in New York (which included, as
we’ll see anon, some surprising playmates). Their wedding on May 31, 1980 was
held at Tee’s country place in her cemetery for pets; the bride wore a black
dress and carried a black feather fan, saying that the groom "likes black
and thought it would be nice and cheerful."
In 1963, Addams was approached by
David Levy, an independent television producer, who wanted to bring the Addams
Family to the small screen. By September, they’d worked out the details. Then
Bad Barbara found out and sprung her surprise, revealing her ownership of the
characters. In letter after letter from England, tantrum after tantrum, she
demanded more and more. The prospect of the tv series was very nearly scuttled
by her machinations, but at the last minute, Addams’ lawyers maneuvered a
rescue, and “The Addams Family” debuted on ABC on September 18, 1964, a Friday,
with Carolyn Jones playing Morticia; John Astin, her husband; and Ted Cassidy,
Lurch. A week later, September 24, a Thursday, “The Munsters,” an obvious
clone, started on CBS, with Yvonne DeCarlo paying the mistress of the manse,
Lily Munster, and Fred Gwynne playing her husband, Herman, the Lurch
counterpart in the series. Both shows lasted only two years, their final
telecasts as nearly simultaneous as their debuts had been: “The Addams Family”
on September 2, 1966; “The Munsters,” September 1.
The Addams Family members had
acquired their names before the tv series began: a set of cloth dolls in
production in the spring of 1963 needed names. Addams named them all except the
gaunt six-toed daughter, who was christened Wednesday (for the child of woe) by
the doll manufacturer. Consulting the phone book under “morticians,” Addams
named his heroine. He offered two names for her spouse, Repelli or Gomez (an
old family friend), and let actor Astin make the final choice. Gomez. Lurch was
suggested by the Frankenstein monster’s halting gait; Uncle Fester—“I just
thought that up as befitting a rotten guy.” The homicidal son, Pugsley would
have been called Pubert if Addams had achieved his wish; but the doll people
thought it sounded dirty.
At The New Yorker, William Shawn refused to publish any more Addams
Family cartoons once the tv series was launched—as if the Hollywood treatment
had somehow “compromised Addams’ evils,” as Davis puts it. And Addams was
bitter about it even though he wasn’t producing as many Addams Family cartoons
as he had been. The show went into syndication and ran in various countries for
the next twenty years, but Addams saw little income from the series. His last
check came in 1974; it was for $179. Bad Barbara, on the other hand, kept going
to the bank. Her greed, however, sabotaged a number of other potentially
remunerative deals, and her tactics—tears, flattery, tantrums, harassment by
phone—were legendary in the entertainment industry. In 1991, three years after
Addams’ death, “The Addams Family” motion picture arrived, starring Anjelica
Huston and Raul Julia. “During the making of the movie,” Davis reports,
“Paramount reportedly hired a woman whose sole responsibility was to take calls
from Lady Colyton.” Tee, as Addams’ widow, shared in the earnings of the movie
and its sequel, splitting $6 million with Bad Barbara.
Addams died of a heart attack
suffered just as he parked his Audi in front of his Manhattan apartment on the
morning of September 29, 1988. He was returning alone from a trip he’d made to
Connecticut with cartoonist Frank Modell to see a house Modell was thinking of
buying; the two had stopped overnight to visit another New Yorker cartoonist, James Stevenson. Each of chapters 23 through
25 of her 26-chapter book, Davis begins with portions of a prolonged narrative
describing the trip, the detours Addams always took on such expeditions (“to
find ‘historical sites and architectural landmarks,’ a typical Addams drive in
which getting there was the real fun”), and the pleasant time the three
cartoonists had shared, watching the Mets play the Phillies on tv, laughing and
telling stories about people and cars—“they never, ever talked about
cartoons”—and “pissing off the porch.” Interspersed in the narrative are
flashbacks to other Addams adventures and events in his life, a kind of
scrapbook of miscellany that could have been fitted in elsewhere but isn’t. We
know something is coming, though: Addams was “unusually talkative,” laughing
“openly” (which he didn’t normally do). This elongated and episodic maneuver
serves as a desultory and affectionate farewell to a person who Davis, as
biographer, has come to know and love, perhaps even admire, and Addams’ death
slips almost unobtrusively into the narrative at the end, with the dying part
merely alluded to. “His was an easy death,” Davis says; “he was found slumped
behind the wheel ... he had had a heart attack.”
The book is well but not amply illustrated with Addams’ cartoons. Most of them, despite Davis’ acknowledging that not all of his work was macabre, are of that sort. A modest array of sketches, mostly by Sam Cobean, and several photographs completes the illustrative content. Quite adequate.
Davis’ book is a very good book
because she is a very good writer and a meticulous researcher and apparently a
persistent interviewer. But her understanding of cartooning is fairly
elementary. In a book about a less quirky personality than Addams, this
shortcoming would be conspicuous and therefore disastrous. Fortunately, Davis
can dwell on Addams’ personal history, which so fills the book’s pages that we
scarcely notice that she says very little about the cartoonist’s life as a
cartoonist.
I confess that my reservations about
Davis’ ability to discuss cartooning began almost at once. On page 4, she
describes Addams’ distinctive signature, his name “abbreviated in thick black ink.”
I stopped at “thick.” It wasn’t the word I would have used. “Bold” maybe. And
it wasn’t the ink that was bold, or thick, it was the line that made the
letters of Chas Addams. About the
thickness of the ink in Addams’ ink bottle we can only speculate. I would have
said that Addams inked his signature with bold, black cursive script.
Admittedly, word choices are not scientifically arrived at; these are stylistic
matters, and Davis’ manner of describing Addams’ signature is probably
perfectly understandable to the normal reader who is doubtless not obsessed by
cartooning. But her word choices here put my teeth on edge a bit. You might say
that I proceeded thereafter with a bias waiting to pounce.
And it didn’t take long. On page 43,
describing Addams’ first macabre cartoon in the March 23, 1935 issue of The New Yorker, Davis reveals that her
grasp of what makes a cartoon funny is either somewhat tenuous or her ability
to isolate the key comedic element flawed: “Addams submitted a sketch of
newspapers rolling off a printing press. In the midst of a line of Herald Tribunes a tabloid appears with
the headline ‘Sex Fiend Slays Tot.’ The editors approved the idea but asked
Addams to change the Tribune to The New York Times.” The inexplicable
here, the hideous hilarity, arises from the sudden incongruous appearance of a
sensation-mongering tabloid coming off the same printing press as a cascade of
dignified newspapers. How the tabloid achieved this impossibility is part of
the comedy; the other part, however, requires that we understand that tabloids
in 1935 were sensational rags compared to such dignified dailies as The New York Times. Davis realizes this
because she mentions the change from the Herald
Tribune (which, then and for decades thereafter, was highly regarded for
the literate nature of its news stories but not necessarily any inherent
dignity) to the Times, which The New Yorker editors realized was a
more recognizable bastion of respectability for contrast with the tabloid and
its sensational headline. Although the joke here is implicit in the aggregate
of what Davis writes, she could have made it clearer: “In the midst of a line
of dignified and respectable Herald
Tribunes a sensation-mongering tabloid appears with the headline ‘Sex Fiend
...’.” A trifling matter, surely, but Davis displays a similar laxity again
within a few pages.
On page 46, she refers to the famous
early George Price cartoon series
“of a levitating man [that] ended with a gunshot. ‘He never knew what hit him,’
the man’s wife tells the cops, with the smoking rifle still in her hand.”
That’s all Davis says. How can we tell, from this cryptic notation, that the
“levitating man” appeared in a series of cartoons that began August 13, 1932,
just two months after Price’s debut in the magazine, in which the cartoonist
depicted a man reclining in space, hovering about three feet over his bed,
being observed by his wife, who says to a visitor at her elbow in the doorway,
“He’s been up there a week.” The same drawing is repeated several times over
the ensuing months, and at every appearance, his wife comments differently on
this weird circumstance to a visitor.
Davis isn’t writing a book about
Price, so she probably didn’t feel the need to go into as much detail as I’ve
mustered here. But why, then, refer to a cartoon in terms so cryptic that the
joke isn’t apparent? She does it again twenty pages later, referring to an
Addams Family cartoon “involving a squeaky trapdoor” which she apparently
expects us to know all about even though the cartoon appears nowhere in the
vicinity. She doesn’t analyze Addams’ humor
much at all, and you’d think she would. Addams didn’t and disliked the idea of
doing it; so maybe she’s following his lead. Or maybe she doesn’t actually see
the humor.
She also gets some crucial dates
wrong. Addams first New Yorker cartoon,
the skateless hockey player, appeared in the issue for February 4, not January
4. The celebrated skier cartoon was published in the issue for January 13, not
January 12. These are trifling matters in the grand scheme of things, but they
loom somewhat larger in a volume purporting to record historic moments in a
cartoonist’s career. Davis’ recitation of Addams schooling seems confused about
dates until I decided, without her telling me, that Addams had probably
graduated from high school at age 17, not 18, the usual age these days.
More seriously, Davis seems baffled
by Addams’ writing one of The New Yorker editors
in the summer of 1935 to tell him that he was going out of town for a couple
weeks and wouldn’t be submitting any cartoons for that period. “Why, as a
freelancer,” Davis writes, “he felt the need to cover for a lack of submissions
is uncertain.” But that’s exactly why—because he was a freelancer. To anyone
who freelances, Addams’ conduct is perfectly understandable: he had just begun
to sell regularly to the magazine and, feeling a growing sense of engagement,
wanted to foster and sustain that sense of mutual commitment by staying in
touch with the editors even when not submitting cartoons. But Davis doesn’t see
that, revealing that her grasp of a freelance cartoonist’s lifestyle is nearly
non-existent.
That makes her achievement in this
book all the more remarkable.
The book, as I reflect on it, seems
mostly about Addams’ social life—his affairs, his women, his trips with them to
antique shops in Pennsylvania and favorite cemeteries en route, his
marriages—and not much about his work life. With Addams, who apparently had a
very energetic sex life and a bizarre sense of humor that Davis frequently
refers to, this void is not so noticeable. It is probably impossible to trace
the evolution of every cartoon idea in the detail she devotes to the “Sex
Fiend” cartoon or the “Boiling Oil” cartoon, but she might have found a way to
get us more deeply into Addams’ work methods or his life in The New Yorker offices or his relationship
to Ross or other magazine staffers. Davis touches on these matters—a paragraph
or two about Addams’ drawing tools and methods, a couple dozen nicely achieved
passages scattered through the book about his daily routines—but not much of
this has the inky-fingered feel of actual labor at the drawing board.
In contrast, her recitation of
Addams’ adventures with the opposing sex seems as exhaustive in its catalogue
of conquests as it must have been exhausting for Addams to live through. Addams
dated a lot of women and had sexual relations with many even during his
marriages. And in the twenty-four years between Barbara Barb and Tee Davie, he
logged time with such notable actresses as Greta Garbo, who once traveled with
him on a holiday in Barbados, and Jane Fontaine, who, it was widely rumored for
a time, the cartoonist was destined to marry. He didn’t.
Addams’ datebook shows that he was
squiring Jackie Kennedy around town three months after JFK’s assassination. He,
however, was not rich enough to sustain that relationship. And she, it seems,
was something of an insensitive snob. She never regarded him as husband
material, Davis says. “Well, I couldn’t get married to you,” she exclaimed one
time; “what would we talk about at the end of the day—cartoons?” It was a put-down that “crushed” Addams, Davis says.
Their relationship was probably not
sexual, Davis thinks. But most of his women friends were in bed with him at one
time or another. Astonishingly, they all knew of each other’s peccadillos with
Addams and remained friends with him, and with each other. One exception
involved a young woman named Megan Marshack, who lived in the same building as
Addams. He’d noticed her but had done nothing until Nelson Rockefeller died.
Scandalously, Rockefeller, it was slowly revealed, died of a heart attack while
“visiting” Marshack, who was his assistant on various book projects. Addams was
soon boasting to friends that he “was in the sack with Megan the day after
Rockefeller died.” This relationship between the 67-year-old Addams and the
26-year-old Marshack continued for about a year until Tee Davie, who was
becoming more and more indispensable to Addams’ happiness even though she
traveled abroad a great deal, told him to cut it out. Within months, Marshack
disappears from Addams’ life, and he and Tee were married.
Addams emerges in Davis’ narrative
as a man who loves women in a companionable as well as sexual way. With Addams
and women, it wasn’t just sex, according to Tee. “Charlie had a true interest
in women as friends,” she said. “Where another man would be wondering, ‘Can I
get her into bed?’ Charlie would be thinking, ‘Now here’s an attractive person.
I wonder what her story is.’”
Davis returns often to Barbara Barb,
the femme fatale and pervasive villain in the book, because the woman haunted
Addams after their marriage. When, on business, she came to this country from
England, she often stayed with Addams. Or he with her in her hotel. All of this
extra-conjugality took place despite her plundering of his life and fortune.
Addams’ lawyers constantly warned him about documents that Barb presented for
his signature, but he always signed them—even though he knew he was giving her
things he shouldn’t. He seems a genuine patsy. Or, as I say, a man who loves
women—in the case of Barbara Barb, too well.
Hampered by an inability to
understand or to articulate an understanding about cartooning, Davis
nonetheless has produced a highly readable and entertaining biography of one of
the medium’s legendary practitioners. She quotes from Addams, his record books,
and his friends’ recollections about his antics, and then—cherry-picking just
the right bon mots to drop into her
narrative at just the right moments to enhance its flavor, like nutmeg on high
octane eggnog—she meticulously integrates all the fragments into a lively and
cohesive story, as brilliantly illuminated by, as it revealing of, the
personality of her subject. The narrative is so enlivened by quotations that it
becomes a long conversation with Addams and his friends, a triumph at
revelation. We get to know Addams pretty well, and we can’t ask much more of a
biography (even though it would have been wonderful to know more about how
Addams wielded a brush or interacted with other New Yorker regulars).
Davis reminds us more than once that
Addams looked a lot like Walter Matthau, and by mid-way in the book, Addams was
always Matthau in my mind’s eye, the Matthau in the movie “Hopscotch”—an easy
smile, warm, supremely competent and self-assured, humorous and not macabre. I
see him that way when reading Roger Angell’s farewell to Addams in The New Yorker:
“Charles Addams was a tall, quiet,
silver-haired man with a commanding nose and a courtly manner. He was grave and
gentle by habit, but when he laughed, his face caved in around a chasmed,
V-shaped grin, and he shook [silently] with pleasure. He was not introspective
about his cartoons, and he turned away from questions about his art—where it
came from, how he did it, what it meant. He did his work with serene authority;
there was no thrashing about artistically. He seemed shy, but he loved company
and had a great many friends; men and women were drawn to him. ... He was
elegant and uncontrived.”
Said Sheed, who knew Addams well:
“If you had only the drawings to go on, you couldn’t imagine calling him
Charlie; but if you ever met him, you couldn’t imagine calling him anything
else. And if I had all day, I couldn’t describe him better than that.”
Addams was also, incontestably, the
cartoonist who invented the Addams Family. Awful things were reportedly
hilarious to him, and he tended to giggle at funeral orations. But he was
mildly annoyed, Davis tells us, by people focusing, as Davis must, on the dark
side of his humor. “I’m sick of people calling it macabre,” he said. “It’s just
funny, that’s all.”
Okay: funny, that’s all.
Bibliography. Before Davis’ book, most Addams’ life is merely hinted at in the
obituary in The New York Times for 30
September 1988 and in Current Biography 1954, in The New York Star Magazine (19
September 1948), in The Saturday Review
of Literature (11 November 1950), and in Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker (1975). His famous family of lovable monsters was
turned into a television series, "The Addams Family," 1966-1968, and
a movie, “The Addams Family” (1991) and its sequel, “Addams Family Values”
(1993). Addams' cartoons are reprinted in The
New Yorker anthologies of drawings and in collections: Drawn
and Quartered (1942), Addams and Evil (1947), Monster Rally (1950), Home Bodies (1954), Nightcrawlers (1957), Dear
Dead Days (1959), Black Maria (1960), The Groaning Board (1964), The Charles Addams Mother Goose (1967), My Crowd (1970), Favorite Haunts (1976), Creature Comforts (1982), and a posthumous compilation, The World of Charles Addams (1991), in
which reproduction is terrible.
NOUS R US
All the news that gives us fits.
Robert
Downey, Jr. has been tapped to play the part of Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, in
the Paramount movie based on the character. Marvel president Kevin Feige told Hollywood Reporter that filmmakers look
for the actor who best embodies the character. “The Marvel characters,” he
explained, “are not just about how high they jump or how fast they fly; they’re
about their character flaws. They’re about their inner demons. They’re about
the struggles that they go through between being a human and being a hero.” One
of Stark’s struggles involves his drinking problem.
Creation of the Joker Again. The other comics show at the Jewish Museum in New
York—the one in addition to the “Masters of American Comics”—is called
“Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics,” a more focused vision, Jerry Robinson says, of a show he did
last year for the Breman Jewish Center in Atlanta, “The Superhero: The Golden
Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950,” now on tour. For the New York encore, the show
has “an accent on the Jewish artists of the New York area, although it’s not
exclusively that,” Robinson told Daniel Robert Epstein of Newsrama. Robinson
has been researching the prominence of Jewish artists, writers, editors and
publishers in the comic book industry and is assembling a book on the subject.
For the show, he selected fifteen artists and writers who he thinks made “the
greatest impact on the fledgling comics industry.” One of the pieces on display
is “the concept sketch” for the Joker, the Batman villain that Robinson created
with Bill Finger, the writer who
co-created Batman with Bob Kane. Asked
if the Joker was based on Conrad Veidt in the film “The Man Who Laughs,”
Robinson said: “No, it was not. That’s been written about, but that’s not
exactly correct. What happened was Bill Finger knew of Conrad Veidt because
Bill had been to a lot of the foreign films. Veidt was a great star of European
films, and in the film, Veidt had this clown makeup with the frozen smile on
his face. When Bill saw the first drawing of the Joker [the “concept sketch”
Robinson had done], he said, ‘That reminds me of Conrad Veidt in ‘The Man Who
Laughs.’ He said he would bring in some shots of that movie to show me. That’s
how that came about. I think in Bill’s mind, he fleshed out the concept of the
character.” This version of the oft-disputed creation of the Joker is almost
exactly the one I conjured up to reconcile the Kane version and the Robinson
version; see “How Much Did Batman Knock-off Dick Tracy?” in Hindsight by
clicking here. I’ve always thought Kane took more credit for the
creation of the Joker than was accurate—just as he did for Batman, Robin, and
the whole enchilada.
Scott Adams Speaks—Miraculously. The
diabolical disease seems devised expressly for the creator of the sardonically
farcical satire Dilbert. It sounds
like something Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams would fiendishly concoct and
inflict on one of his more arrogant and insensitive cubical occupants. There’s
no known cure for spasmodic dysphonia, which afflicts about 30,000 Americans,
usually in their 40s and 50s, causing loss of speech. Sort of. People with SD
typically can’t talk in their normal voices: they gasp and stammer as spasms
wrack their vocal chords. But if they distort their voices, talking in a
falsetto or baritone, or if they recite poetry or speak in rhyme, they can talk
a little. Adams talked by speaking in rhyme or by pinching his nose, according
to the Associated Press. “Nearly three years ago, he developed a tremor in his
right pinky whenever he tried to put pen to paper. He turned to a digital
drawing tablet and stylus, and the spasms disappeared. Dilbert has been
computer-generated ever since. Then Adams lost his voice in early 2005 after a
bout of bronchitis and laryngitis.” A specialist diagnosed SD and began
treatments with the tissue-paralyzing drug botulinum toxin, “botox.” Injections
work for only about three months, and Adams hated it. Every night, he recited
nursery rhymes in the hope of “re-mapping” his brain. Then a couple weeks ago
while chanting “Jack Be Nimble,” he realized he wasn’t experiencing the usual
symptoms: “he wasn’t having a stitch of difficulty. He’s been talking ever
since, albeit with a raspy, tinny voice.”
BOOK MARQUEE
Roy
Crane had a crushingly embarrassing time ending World War II. Since 1943 when
he launched Buz Sawyer, his comic
strip about a Navy pilot, he had earned a reputation for authenticity that
rivaled Milton Caniff’s in Terry and the
Pirates. But now, in August 1945, the War in the comic strip was still
going on almost two weeks after real life Japan had surrendered. Thinking that
the invasion of the Japanese homeland was imminent that summer, Crane had
started a continuity that had Buz about to make bombing runs over Tokyo on
August 16, the day after Japan formally surrendered. Because daily strips are
prepared to be pumped into the distribution pipeline four weeks in advance of
publication date, Buz Sawyer could
have been fighting a now-nonexistent war well into September, but Crane
scrambled frantically and was able to abort his bomb raid continuity and get
into another storyline within two weeks. In the strip for Tuesday, August 28,
the news comes over the ship’s PA system: “Japan Has Surrendered! The War Is
Over!”
Crane’s ending of World War II is
embraced by the just released second volume of Manuscript Press’s reprinting of
the strip, Buz Sawyer: Sultry’s Tiger (210 8x10-inch pages in black-and-white paperback, bound on the short side, $25;
P.O. 336, Mountain Home, TN 37684), which takes the continuity from January
1945 through mid-April 1946. Crane not only tore up his bomb run episode and
concocted some transitional continuity, he asked his syndicate to short-circuit
as much as it could the dispensing of the embarrassing storyline and he
produced a single installment of the strip for emergency distribution to be
printed “both on and off the comics page” of client newspapers on August 16. In
this rare item, which Bill Blackbeard has provided for this book, Roscoe
Sweeney, Buz’s crew member, runs out to tell Buz the news: “The war’s over,” he
yells, “—the Japs have quit!” Bus is, naturally, delighted, but then, in the
strip’s third and last panel, thinking of the bomb run story unfolding elsewhere
in the newspaper’s comics section, he breaks the fourth wall: “Hmmm—makes us
look sort of silly, doesn’t it?” Crane supplies a caption, attempting to
explain the incongruity while also preserving the illusion of real life he’d
worked so hard to establish in the strip: “The current story sequence began
before the Jap surrender. In reality, the action takes but a few hours. Its
presentation in a strip, tho’, requires several days. Can you bear with us
while the episode runs its course?” In other words, he seems to be saying, the
action you’re witnessing in the strip actually took place before the Japanese
surrendered, but the action being depicted, while taking only a few hours in
reality—and now completed—takes longer to present in this narrative form. He
could have explained that the strips published in the paper that week and the
next were prepared weeks in advance and there wasn’t time to immediately
correct their course; but instead he tried to preserve the illusion that the
strip was recording actual events in the Pacific war. A formidable task, but
achieved—albeit awkwardly, requiring readers to “know” while “not knowing.”
The remainder of this volume covers Buz’s discharge and return to
civilian life. En route, he runs into the Cobra, the female guerilla leader who
is Crane’s version of Caniff’s Dragon Lady. When not a freedom fighter for her
people, she’s the Maharani of Batu, her name is Sultry, and she wants Buz for
herself. She is poised on the edge of insane jealousy, and when Buz declines her
offer of a job on her island, she assumes he’s in love with someone else and
flies into a rage. Buz gets his discharge and goes back to the states, where he
is reunited with his fiancé, Tot Winter. Soon Sultry shows up with her pet
tiger, and on a particular starry night, the tiger attacks Tot—with tragic
results. But you’ll have to go there to know what they are.
The strips here are probably
reprinted from newspaper clippings, and Crane’s celebrated Craftint duotone
shading turns a little muddy with reproduction from such flawed originals.
Hoping to offset this effect, editor Rick Norwood and publisher Jeffrey
Lindenblatt run the strips just two to a page, so they appear at a giant 2 7/8
x 8 ½ inch dimension, large enough to prevent the mud from clotting completely.
This is as good a reproduction as we’re ever likely to get: Crane’s
spectacularly photographic seascapes and battle scenes are stunning, and this
book gives them to us in at least as good a condition as the newspapers in
which they initially appeared.
More Reviews. This department, Book Marquee, was intended, when I first
thunk it up, to include short reviews and notices of forthcoming tomes. I
wanted a niche that I could fill with short, quickly written articles about
books that come sweeping in here by the carload lot, too rapidly for me to read
thoroughly and then comment intelligibly on. Quick and fast, that was going to
be my motto. I’ve rather regularly violated that principle, at least as I
envisioned it, by including longish reviews like the one we’ve just concluded.
For the next couple books, I’m trying to get back to the original conception of
this department. But now, another distinction. A “review” in my lexicon is what
happens when I describe a book I have in hand—how big is it, what’s in it. For
the reader of a review, the review serves as a substitute for actually seeing
and holding the object, but a review doesn’t examine the merit of the
object—its accuracy if history, its logical soundness if an argument. An
article that performs the latter function is a critique, not a review. A
critique is also a review, but it’s more than a review: a critique includes
opinion as well as description. Elsewhere in this week’s opus, I’m critiquing
the biography of Chas Addams. My reviews invariably veer off in the direction
of critiques: in the Buz Sawyer review
above, I’m getting into a critique mode when I start talking about the quality
of reproduction. But I started out just to review the book, not to critique it.
Ditto what follows.
Ode
to Kirihito measures 6x9x3 inches. It’s a brick of a book, 3 inches thick.
It’s somewhat over 800 black-and-white pages long and is said to be the
favorite creation of manga godfather, Osamu
Tezuka, who, with this work, entered for the first time the world of gekiga, a term invented by another
Japanese artist, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, to distinguish his gritty adult-oriented
genre from manga, traditionally aimed at younger readers. The title role in Kirihito, drawn in a more realistic
manner than Tezuka’s pace-setting classic, Astro Boy, goes to a young doctor
who sets out to solve a medical mystery, which has been manifest in the form of
a man/beast. The jacket fly leaf proclaims that this work “demolishes naive
notions about human nature and health and likely preconceptions about the
comics master himself”; $24.95 from Vertical at www.vertical-inc.com
And here’s The Rejection Collection (272 8x10-inch pages in black-and-white;
hardcover, $22.95 from Simon Spotlight, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), a
handsome compilation of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff, who produces an amusing Foreword for this book, and
various other of the magazine’s editors, enough of them that Mankoff can say,
with a straight face, that “if it were really up to just me, some of these
cartoons would probably have made it into The
New Yorker.” He continues: “Many of the offensive, obscene, disgusting
cartoons here will actually make you laugh out loud—and, in some cases, cause
incontinence, nausea, and fainting. So before looking at these cartoons, ask
your doctor if incontinence, nausea, and fainting are right for you.” Edited by New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee, the book offers a prize
collection of rejected cartoons by thirty well-known New Yorker cartoonists, beginning with Pat Byrnes and Leo Cullum and going all the way through the cartoonist alphabet to Gahan Wilson and Jack
Ziegler. That’s funny enough in itself, I suppose, but Diffee has improved
upon the usual rejected or censored cartoon collection by including photographs
of each of the rejected ’tooners and their responses to a two-page
questionnaire that begins: How did you learn to draw that way? To which Sam Gross responds: What way? There’s
more of the same, some of it actually revealing. Diffee’s object in ginning up
the questionnaire, he explains, is to try to re-create on paper something of
the shop talk atmosphere that permeates the table-talk among the cartoonists
when they all meet for lunch on Tuesdays after having submitted the week’s
cartoons to Mankoff. The conversation is unique, Diffee says, consisting of
heated arguments over which is the funnier, “Scranton” or “Cleveland.” As
words, mind you, not as actual cities. Myself, I’d opt for Schenectady but
that’s because I get all my ideas from there, and I’ve never had the dubious
benefit of attending one of those Tuesday luncheons. Each cartoonist is
represented by five of his best rejects, and Mankoff is right: they’ll make you
laugh. “Funny,” Mankoff warns us, “isn’t about beauty: it’s about freedom.” And
these cartoons are the kind that cartoonists produce when they are free from
all editorial restraint (when they are in an unpublished state, in other words)
to do whatever tickles their risibles. Unhappily, the good taste of New Yorker editors seems devoted to
preserving civilization rather than permitting the untrammeled exercise of
cartoonist freedom. These are funny. Untrammeled.
See what I mean? That review turned
into a critique.
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind beats everything. —Dennis
Miller adv.
This
one has been floating around the electronic ether: A college class was told
they had to write a short story in as few words as possible. The instructions
were that the short story had to contain the following three things: religion,
sexuality, mystery. Here’s the offering that earned an A-plus: “Good God, I’m
pregnant. I wonder who did it?”
More World History in the Middle
East. I was puzzled, an opus or
so ago, when I reviewed the history of the conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians—or Jews and Arabs, as it happens—and learned that the British, who
controlled that part of the world for some time during the “Mandate” after
World War I, favored the Arabs over the Jews, almost to the point that we would
be justified in suspecting the English of anti-Semiticism. Why, I wondered,
would the British favor the Arabs? Then I ran across a fascinating book, A Peace To End All Peace: The Fall of the
Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David
Fromkin. The explanation of the British bias is quite simple and has nothing to
do with anti-Semiticism and everything to do with Empire. By 1900, remember,
the British had a globe-girdling Empire from India to Canada and back again,
and after Word War I, the Empire included, by reason of the Mandate (which gave
Britain administrative responsibility for various “immature” countries), the
Arab countries that were once part of the Ottoman Empire, an Empire that,
because it sided with the Germans during the war, was split up and portioned
out among the victors after the War. Many, if not most, of the Arab citizenry
over which the British now held sway were Muslims. The British, like many
well-intentioned but ill-informed conquerors, believed that Islam was a single
entity, a centralized, authoritarian structure like Roman Catholicism with the
Caliph presiding like the Pope. And so the British believed that they could
control the Muslim populations of the countries over which they reigned by
controlling the religious leadership, namely, the Caliph, who in the wake of
WWI, was, for Sunni Muslims anyhow, the Turkish sultan. This was a serious
consideration: in Britain’s India alone the Muslims numbered 70 million;
altogether, the British Empire included over half the world’s Muslims, and they
constituted a majority of the population in Egypt, another country in the
Empire, which controlled access to the Suez Canal, the vital sea link to India.
And in the post-war politics of the region, it looked as if the Turkish sultan
was likely to become a tool of the Russians, so the British set out to preclude
the effectiveness of any such capitulation by maintaining that since Muhammad
started in Arabia (today’s Saudi Arabia), his successors, the modern-day
caliphs, should be Arabian, too, and the British began encouraging this view.
And so it was in the interest of advancing this scheme that the British tended
to favor Arabs, or Palestinians, in the roiling unrest in Palestine during the
Mandate years and up to the time the British gave up the Mandate and departed
the country in 1948.
Having chanced upon this morsel in
this book, I thumbed further in it, looking for references to T.E. Lawrence,
famed as “Lawrence of Arabia,” who had welded tribes of Arabs together long enough
to lead them in overthrowing their Ottoman overlords during World War I. In my
quest, I ran across a reference to an information sheet published by Britain’s
Arab Bureau in Cairo, the Arab Bulletin, which Lawrence, for a time, edited. The first issue, which he edited, appeared
in June 1916, just as a revolution against the Ottoman Empire was getting
underway. “Lawrence,” writes Fromkin, “indicated that there were problems in
holding Arabs together even for the purposes of revolt. He wrote that whenever
there were large tribal gatherings, dissension soon arose; and, knowing this,
the Turks [who were running the Ottoman Empire] held back and did nothing. They
delayed ‘in the sure expectation that tribal dissension would soon dismember
their opponents.’” Sound familiar? Does to me. The book, by the way, is an old
book, copyrighted 1989; so all of us have had plenty of time to read it. And I
wouldn’t be surprised that some in the State Department had read it and
recalled it when trying to plan for a post-invasion operation in Iraq, an
operation Rumsfeld didn’t want any planning for because, it is alleged, if the
American public heard about such plans, they would quickly come to believe that
the Invasion of Iraq might last longer than the few months all the Pentagoners
were steadfast in predicting those days. We’ve never understood tribal
societies. That way of thinking is foreign to us, and in our arrogance, we
don’t think we need to know about foreigners.
GRAFIC NOVIL
The Jungle
One
of the nation’s most influential literary endeavors passed its one hundredth
anniversary last February without much fanfare or folderol. Early in 1905, a
27-year-old hack writer named Upton Sinclair, who had earned his way through
the City College of New York by writing dime novels, spent seven weeks living
with stockyard workers in Chicago to observe the meat packing business, his
expenses paid by the socialist newspaper, Appeal
to Reason, which subsequently published in serial installments Sinclair’s
novel about the grinding misfortunes of an immigrant stockyard worker. Sinclair
then tried to get The Jungle published as a book, but after being turned down by five publishers, he finally
published the novel himself. Its publication caused enough ruckus to attract
the attention of Doubleday, Page and Company, which quickly published the next
edition of the book in February 1906.
For the next year, The Jungle was the best-selling book in
the U.S. and was translated into seventeen languages. Its portrait of the
unsanitary conditions in meat packing houses so disgusted and alarmed Americans
that Congress enacted the Pure Food and Meat Inspection legislation in less
than four months, a spectacular enough achievement on its face, considering the
dilatory pace of congressional actions these days, but even more startling when
we realize that the law momentarily interfered with the profit-making endeavors
of a major American industry. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the only other work
of American fiction with similar social impact, had taken years to effect the
changes it advocated. Agitation for government standards to improve the
conditions of large-scale food processing had been building for years before
Sinclair’s novel burst upon the scene; The
Jungle was scarcely the sole cause of reform, but it focused public
attention on the issue, becoming the catalyst for legislation.
Sinclair, whose previous five novels
had produced almost no income, was overnight a wealthy man and a celebrity, but
he regarded The Jungle as something
of a failure. A passionate Socialist, he had written the book to inspire a
wholesale social revolution not the reformation of the food processing
industry. The protagonist of his novel, a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis,
comes to this country with dreams of a better life, but when he takes the only
job he can find for an unskilled laborer in “Packingtown,” he is thoroughly,
mercilessly, exploited by a concatenation of capitalistic chicanery and
political corruption: every American institution he encounters cheats him and
brutalizes him. Another Socialist author, Jack London, at the time on the crest
of his fame, wrote of the novel: “It depicts what our country really is, the
home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering,
a human hell, a jungle of wild beasts. ... What Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the black slaves, The Jungle has a large chance to do for the white [wage] slaves of
today.” Alas, as Sinclair came suddenly and bitterly to realize, his reading
public was more moved by the menace of “tubercular beef” than by the
dehumanization of the working man and the destruction of the human spirit.
Sinclair would be gratified at Peter Kuper’s graphic novel adaption of The Jungle (48 9x12-inch pages in
paperback; full color, $10.95), a 1991 First Publishing edition just re-issued
by NBM, a little late for the centennial celebration, but better late than
never. While Kuper’s treatment includes mention in narrative captions of some
of the more sensational of the novel’s allegations—rats ground up in the meat,
workers falling into processing vats and being boiled to death and, later,
incorporated into “a fancy grade of lard” or tinned meat—his pictures focus our
attention on the unfortunate Jurgis, fated to endure a catalogue of disasters
before finally finding happiness as a Socialist. Reporting the manufacture of
potted ham from dead vermin and other of the novel’s unsavory insights took
only a dozen or so of the original book’s 300-plus pages: Kuper restores
Sinclair’s emphasis on the evils of capitalism.
Newly married, Jurgis is cheated by
a real estate broker who sells him a sub-standard house, saddling him with
mortgage payments he can barely make, a hardship compounded when Jurgis is
injured on the job and must spend weeks recuperating. When he returns to go to
work, he finds his job has been given to someone else. “They had worn him out;
and now they had thrown him away.” He finds another job in a fertilizer plant,
the odors of which soak into his clothing and skin, making him smell so bad
that his whole family is ill in his presence. Then he takes solace in drink,
and his young wife turns to prostitution to help meet expenses. Jurgis assaults
the man who corrupted his wife and spends weeks in prison; when he is released
and returns home, he discovers that the house has been repossessed and his
family has moved to a lodging house, where he finds his wife dying in
childbirth.
Jurgis’ misfortunes continue in a
steady, relentlessly downward spiral. He becomes a tramp, a mugger, then a scab
during a strike. He meets his wife’s cousin, who has become a prostitute
because of her drug addiction. Downcast, miserable, Jurgis wanders into a
Socialist meeting and is transformed by an inspirational orator who describes a
new dream, the dream of a Socialist utopia.
Kuper has been drawing “Spy vs. Spy”
for Mad magazine for some time in a
gritty minimalist manner, and in The
Jungle his graphic style—figures rendered in an almost diagrammatic
geometry, boldly, simply, outlined in stencil fashion and then deeply shadowed
and air-brushed with the dull colors of a gloomy, overcast day—is a blunt
instrument of attack on our sensibilities. The pictures are as bleak as Jurgis’
blighted fate, their carefully crafted crudeness a stark echo of the merciless
grind that crushes his every chance at happiness and nearly ends his life as
well. The faces of Kuper’s characters are skulls, their eyes glowing white
holes in hollow ocular cavities. No life shines from within: they have become
zombies, the walking dead casualties of the grim struggle to survive in
capitalism’s industrial jungle.
The last three chapters of
Sinclair’s novel virtually abandon narrative as the book becomes a tract.
Jurgis appears occasionally between fervid speeches by heroic advocates for
Socialism, but his story is lost in the declamatory excitement, and the drama
of the tale evaporates forthwith. Kuper’s conclusion seems similarly weak but
is not as disappointing dramatically. Kuper and his co-adapter Emily Russell
clearly believe in improving the lot of ordinary workers in America and
elsewhere, but I doubt that they think Socialism is the remedy Sinclair
believed it to be. The word “socialism” appears only once in the graphic
novel’s last pages, rather dimly lettered on a banner over the door to the
lecture hall Jurgis enters, and the speaker he hears doesn’t use the word.
Instead of encouraging his listeners to join a movement, the orator urges them
to take action, to become their own deliverance. And then the audience throws
hats into the air, chanting “Chicago will be ours!” While the jubilant imagery
of this finale is in concert with the visual rhetoric of the book, the four
pages of the conclusion seem pallid coming after 40 pages of Kuper’s vivid
depiction of Jurgis’ misfortunes. Given the source material and the seeming
reluctance of Kuper-Russell to advocate Socialism (whether from lack of
conviction or from a decorous recognition that Socialism isn’t as popular a
panacea as it once was), we should probably expect little else. Sinclair, at
least, gave us glimpses of Jurgis, happily at work in the Socialist cause,
providing a dramatic conclusion however feeble. But Kuper, wittingly or not,
exploits the hollow conclusion he is left with, lending new meaning to the book:
his last picture of Jurgis shows him cheering with the mob, and his eyes, and
those of everyone in the picture, are still vacant white in cavernous sockets.
They are zombies still, just animated by a different agenda.
Although The Jungle seems a period piece, welded so firmly to the early
history of the last century that it can scarcely apply to our times, I kept
thinking, as I followed Kuper’s version, that there was something hauntingly,
vaguely, pertinent in the oppressive drama of Jurgis’ fate. Merely my own
paranoia, probably—a disturbing sense that our lives today are as much beyond
our control as Jurgis’ was then. Are the international businesses that today
control U.S. foreign policy as sinister in their pervasiveness and as callous
in regard to human suffering as the meat packing business was a hundred years
ago? They are less obvious than the stinking slaughterhouses of yore, but are
they less malevolent? Doubtless I’m reading too many of the wrong books and
magazines, but whenever our somnolent news media wake up, as they have recently
to the betrayals of the Bush League, their momentary vigilance serves mostly to
suggest that a vast arena of unreported and not always benevolent activity
lurks just beyond our ken, its existence all but denied by “powerful interests”
and glossed over by a watchdog press too eager to be a lapdog. Take, for
example, the under-reported story of Halliburton’s selling key components for a
nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil development company as recently as January
2005. Read on.
MORE UNDER-REPORTING IN 2005 AND 2006
For
thirty years at Sonoma State University in California (okay—I know, I know: the
lala-land of the kooks and crackpots; but they can’t always be goofy with
world-saving campaigns and dire prognostications about the end of life as we
know it, can they?), Project Censored has published an annual list of the most
important newsstories not covered by mainstream media, “a compilation of the
best examples of journalism that the corporate media marginalized.” Project
Censored is operated by the SSU Department of Sociology in the School of Social
Sciences and has a “staff” of over 250 university and program staff, students,
faculty, community experts, research interns, guest writers, and a panel of
about two dozen “national judges,” newspaper columnists, faculty at other
institutions, editors, and so forth. I’ve mentioned this outfit before, and
while it is tempting to dismiss their findings as the wild fulminations of
environmentalists, pro-lifers and other liberal wackos, I don’t. I follow the
news closely enough to realize that the stories they bring up have, indeed,
been “undercovered” by the major media. And you can usually tell why: the
stories that would bump up against the vested interests of major businesses are
stories that get swept under the carpet fairly quickly. So while I’d rather not
be counted among the rabid wackos of these Unitey States, I don’t think Project
Censored is in that bunch, and I therefore and forthwith present a quick
summary and/or bald-faced listing of the top censored stories in 2005 and early
2006 from the just published report entitled Censored 2007. Here we go:
1. Future of Internet Debate Ignored by
Media
A tug of war between two sides: on
one side are consumers and services providers that advocate that cable
companies continue to allow free access to their cable lines; on the other
side, the cable companies, which, claiming the need to recoup investments
they’ve made laying cable lines and expanding speed and quality, want to charge
for the use of their cables. Probably the reason that ordinary news media
haven’t much covered this on-going crisis is because it’s pretty complicated,
with both sides presenting their arguments in ways that disguise their real
agendas. It often appears, for instance, that what’s at issue is “regulation”
of telephone companies, say. Well, yes, but certain kinds of regulation will
ultimately have an inhibiting effect on the use of the Internet. Under the
guise of debating regulations, legislation and court opinions are slowly
foreclosing on free access. At the moment, the cable companies appear to be
winning, and one reporter in this book says a recent court ruling “marks the
beginning of the end for a robust, democratic Internet.” Mainstream Media are presumed
to be against the continued “free” Internet and so they don’t cover the
dispute. For more, try http://www.freepress.net. I’m not very
clear on this myself, but as far as I can tell, the Internet is the greatest
stride forward in human freedom since the discovery of fire: government, so
far, cannot suppress the information available on the ’Net as it can the
information it hoards and keeps from the traditional news media. More
“regulation,” in the form of greater power for the FCC, will slowly erode the
availability of the Internet, first to poor people, then to the rest of us.
2. Halliburton Charged with Selling
Nuclear Technologies to Iran
As recently as January of 2005,
Halliburton sold key components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil
development company. Frankly, I believe that the more engagement the West has
with Iran and other Muslim dictatorships, the more the regimes in those
countries will be weakened. So, let Halliburton do its thing. On the other
hand, that Halliburton can get away with this sort of underhanded
double-dealing with a potential enemy of the U.S.—one that is attempting to
develop the nuclear capability that Halliburton is assisting with—is of-a-piece
with the overall hypocrisy of the Bush League and Darth Cheney, its snarling
mastermind and the chief beneficiary of Halliburton success; see No. 24 below.
3. Oceans of the World in Extreme
Danger
The top half-mile of the ocean has
warmed dramatically in the past forty years as a result of human-induced greenhouse
gases. Atmospheric litter is also altering sea chemistry as thousands of toxic
compounds poison marine creatures and devastate propagation.
4. Hunger and Homelessness Increasing
in the U.S.
Despite claims of an improved
economy, the number of hungry and homeless people in U.S. cities keeps growing.
This in the most advanced nation on the planet!
5. High-tech Genocide in Congo
Six to seven million have died since
1996 as a consequence of invasions and wars sponsored by western powers trying
to gain control of the region’s mineral wealth. Extortion, rape, massacres, and
bribery are all part of the criminal networks set up and maintained by huge
multinational companies.
6. Federal Whistleblower Protection in
Jeopardy
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel,
charged with protecting whistleblowers, is dismissing hundreds of cases while
advancing none.
7. U.S. Operatives Torture Detainess to
Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
ACLU released documents about 44
autopsies held in Afghanistan and Iraq last October; 25 of those deaths are
listed as homicides because detainees died during and after interrogation.
8. Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of
Information Act
In December 2005, Congress passed
the 2006 Defense Authorization Act which renders Defense Intelligence Agency
“operational files” fully immune to FOIA requests, the main mechanism by which
watchdog groups, journalists and individuals can access federal documents. This
could frustrate the work of the ACLU and other organizations that have relied
on FOIA to uncover more than 30,000 documents on the U.S. military’s
involvement in the torture and mistreatment of foreign detainees.
9. World Bank Funds Israeli-Palestine
Wall
The Wall will run deep into
Palestinian territory, aiding the annexation of Israeli settlements and the
breaking of Palestinian territorial continuity. The World Bank’s vision of
“economic development,” however, evades any discussion of the Wall’s
illegality. The new president of the World Bank, by the way, is Paul Wolfowitz,
the neo-conservative architect of most of the collapse of civilization in the
Middle East.
10. Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More
Civilians
If and when American soldiers leave
Iraq, their function will be replaced by American airpower, which, as has been
established, isn’t nearly as precise as it’s claimed and often misses targets
and kills innocent civilians by the bushel.
Here’s
the rest of the Top 25, mostly without elaboration:
11. Dangers of Genetically Modified
Food Confirmed
12. Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
13. New
Evidence Shows Dangers of Roundup, Most
Widely Used Weedkiller in the World
14.
Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the U.S.
Sorry,
can’t let this one go unimpeded. These centers are the 21st century
version of the detention camps to which Japanese Americans were confined in
World War II. Probably just a precaution in case the Bush League—employing
recent legislation that lets it incarcerate anyone GeeDubya says is an “enemy
combatant” without having to produce any evidence—decides some citizen is a
threat to U.S. security. Or to Republican re-election plans. Or—well, you get
the idea.
15.
Chemical Industry Is Now EPA’s Primary Research Partner
16. Ecuador
and Mexico Refuse to Sign Immunity Agreements for U.S. Military
17. Iraq
Reconstruction Promotes OPEC Agenda
18.
Physicist Concludes Official September 11 Explanation is Implausible According
to the Laws of Physics
I’d
run across this one before but because it seemed so much a wild-eyed conspiracy
theory, I’d sort of dismissed it. Its presence on this list does not endorse it
or validate its truth: this is a list of censored or ignored newsstories,
remember, and there’s been precious little coverage of this one. According to
Steven E. Jones, a physics professor (and a conservative) at Brigham Young
University, the complete, rapid, and symmetrical collapse of the Twin Towers
looks more like a successful demolition operation than a largely accidental or
at least haphazard bombing-by-missile event. If so, who arranged for the
demolition?
19.
Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
20. Bottled
Water: A Global Environmental Problem
The
bottled water fad, inducing us to buy bottles of water the quality of which
often isn’t any better than water from the tap, is producing vast quantities of
garbage (those empty plastic bottles that don’t degrade) and is consuming great
quantities of energy. And that’s not all. Here’s the joke: “At up to $10 a
gallon, bottled water costs ore than gasoline in the U.S.” But you can’t run your
car on it.
21. Gold
Mining Company Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
22.
Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
23. U.S.
Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe, Aiming to Derail Efforts at Reducing Greenhouse
Gases
24.
Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose over 3,000 Percent Last Year (2005)
25. U.S.
Military in Paraguay Threatens Region
There now, feel better?
As I
cast a wetly rolling eye over this list of terrors, I wonder if I haven’t,
unbeknownst to me, joined the ranks of the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists. Are
we really threatened on every hand by every menace known to man? Well, maybe,
maybe not. Again, as I said before, this is a list of newsstories that have
been largely ignored, or their implications overlooked. If some enterprising
journalists had looked further into some of these matters, it’s possible the
horrors would be exposed as exaggerated to the point of fabrication. But I
would like to know just how the Twin Towers managed to come down in such an
orderly, symmetrical way—almost as if they were being demolished by explosive
charges placed at strategic points in the structures.
All
the stories in the book are footnoted with the sources of the information, so
it’s not easy to pooh-pooh the seeming truth of the allegations. And at the
beginning of the book, one of those who endorses Project Censored is the most
trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite himself. Order your copy of this
enlightening book of alarmist nightmares at www.sevenstories.com where all 430 pages are available for $18.95.
ONWARD, THE
SPREADING PUNDITRY
More Roving:
The Efficacy of the Big Distraction
Immigration has become the Big Issue in this election
in many states. Like the so-called War on Terror, illegal immigration has
become the Big Distraction. Politicians love to talk about these two “issues”
because then they don’t have to talk about Real Problems, things that matter
but that voters might disagree about, and as every candidate knows, if a voter
disagrees with a candidate, the voter might not vote for that candidate. The
simple-minded logic of American political life, tovarich; sad but true. The War
on Terror is safe: everyone agrees that we should stomp out terrorism, and as
long as the candidates keep us cheering for that, they’re pretty sure we won’t
talk about how screwed up the Invasion of Iraq is and how off-track Israel and
Palestine are on the Road Map to Peace. Illegal immigration is also safe:
everyone agrees that we need more secure borders in order to keep terrorists
out, and as long as the candidates can keep is cheering for 700-mile fences
between the U.S. and Mexico, they’re pretty sure we won’t notice the idiocy of
the plan or the Real Problem. We can build that fence along our southern
border, thumbing our noses at a widely held view that the wall between Israel
and Palestine is obnoxious and an affront of the human spirit (which years to
be free, that is, wall-less). Don’t look for logic in political double-think.
So we can build that fence, but what will we do about our other borders, the
ones that butt up against oceans? Another fence? Not likely.
Meanwhile,
the Real Problem continues, unmentioned and ignored. The Real Problem is that
we’ve never quite outgrown our need for slave labor. Everyone knows that the
way to stem the flow of illegal immigrants is to eliminate the jobs they come
here to find, the jobs that, reputedly, no American will take because they
don’t pay enough. The way to eliminate this employment opportunity for
immigrants is to go after the employers who hire illegal workers. But the
minute someone suggests this as an eminently practical solution, someone else
screams that our precious economy will be thrown out of whack if certain
industries were not able to depend upon cheap, illegal immigrant labor. Some
years ago, the Immigration folks cracked down on the employers of illegal
immigrants in South Dakota, I think it was. Worked fine. Got rid of the illegal
immigrants. None of the employers were jailed or fined; the illegal immigrants
were just apprehended and send back to wherever they came from. But the
businesses immediately complained to their congressmen, who, in turn, persuaded
the Immigration folks to cool it. Businesses that depend upon cheap illegal
immigrant labor couldn’t survive, they said, if they didn’t have that cheap
labor; so for the survival of American business, we had to let illegal
immigrants into the country to work. The cheapest labor of all was slave labor,
which I thought we eliminated in the middle of the 19th century. But
we have the next best thing, cheap illegal immigrant labor. But maybe we should
eliminate it. Maybe the businesses that say they need cheap illegal immigrant
labor should arrange to survive without it. Maybe they should raise the wages
they’re willing to pay high enough to attract indigenous legal citizen labor.
That would mean the price of their product would go up, and we’d all have to
pay for it at the higher prices. Maybe that’s what we should have been doing
ever since we outlawed slave labor.
Holy Shit
Candidates all around the hustings are suddenly
holier than their opponents. Or they hope they are. This ludicrous attempt to
out-jesus each other is inspired by the panicky desire to attract the so-called
“values voter,” who, the pundits were sure, voted Republican in the last
general election and thereby kept the Republicans in control of Congress and
the Halliburton House. So in order to prove they are as Christian as the next
hypocrite, Democrat candidates are now voicing their faith and wearing their
religion on their sleeves. Apparently in their religious fervor, none of them
have read any of Matthew’s Chapter 6, which is actually quoting Jesus, the
paragon they so often invoke. So I’ve decided to make the pertinent part
handily available to them here at the Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer; to
wit:
“Be
careful not to parade your righteousness [good deeds] before men to attract
their notice; by doing this you will lose all reward from your Father in
heaven.... And when you pray, do not imitate the hypocrites: they love to say
their prayers standing up in the synagogues and at the street corners for
people to see them. I tell you solemnly, they have had their reward. But when
you pray, go to your private room and, when you have shut your door, pray to
your Father who is in that secret place, and your Father who sees all that is
done in secret will reward you.”
Church and State, Religion in Government. This is a bad bargain. Nobody wins. As a tenet of
knee-jerk liberality, most persons of that persuasion would fear a
church-and-state lash-up because it would stuff someone else’s religion down
their throats. That is doubtless one of the pitfalls of this seemingly devout
proposal. But there’s another. I venture to guess that in every instance in
which a nation has designated a particular religion the “state religion,” the
religion has suffered. Usually, the religion has suffered from what every human
institution suffers from: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. You can look it up. In any
history book. F’instance, until Christianity was adopted as the official state
religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity was almost, er, Christian—loving,
compassionate, gentle. Once Christianity had the power conferred upon it by
becoming the state religion, it was slowly corrupted, developing a hierarchy of
priesthood and all the bureaucratic trappings of nationhood. And Christianity
isn’t the only susceptible religion. Once Islam became the national religion of
Arab countries, it, too, was corrupted, becoming warlike and intolerant.
Christianity was no better by the time of the Crusades, deploying the
monarchy-backed power of the sword to kill infidels by the score. If religion
has any self-respect, not to mention hope for its ability to shape moral
conduct, it will eschew any connection with the state that comes along. Stay
pure. Stay moral. Avoid governmental power. We need to return to that Good Ol’
Time Religion, the National Religion.
THE
NATIONAL RELIGION
America's religion is the world's most prominent
secular kind—in short, the country's history and traditions. America is its own
religion, as Norman Mailer is reputed to have said. "The religion of
America is America," he said, to be precise. And it has its trinity,
too—George Washington, the father (of his country), Abraham Lincoln (the savior
of his country—who died for our sins on Good Friday), and the Holy Spirit (the
Constitution). These are the things for which we have reverence. It's true that
our money bears the legend "In God We Trust," but with that expression,
we're merely labeling the true symbol of our worship.
Metaphors
be with you.
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