The funny pages: “What’s Left?” December 2008, MRR #307

When I was three, four years old, my dad sat my sister and me down on the living room rug most Sunday mornings, spread out the color comics, and read them to us. I quickly picked up on what was going on in the word balloons and captions, and that’s why I could read before I entered kindergarten. Of course, that’s not how reading was taught in schools at the time. I saw whole words, not words made up of individual letters in an alphabet. My teachers had to teach me to read all over again, a very painful experience especially because I could read to them the very words they insisted that I couldn’t read.

I’ve had a special fondness for the comic section of a newspaper ever since. It’s the first section I turn to when I’m reading the local paper, which is why I was pissed off when the SF Chronicle announced a month ago that they were cutting back the Sunday comics from six pages to four. Here’s a newspaper going down the toilet, losing a million dollars a month according to rumor, and they’re cutting back on one of the few things that people purchase the paper for? Makes no sense. They cut some strips and reduced others to magnifying glass size. Fortunately, they haven’t messed with the daily black and white comics page. If they ever do I’ll boycott the Chron. Maybe make it a campaign

Comics are important. That’s something I have to say to folks of my age and older. Comics aren’t merely entertaining. They frequently convey the “news of the day” much more effectively than the printed pages in which they’re embedded. That’s why a good editorial cartoon is worth a thousand editorials. On their own, as comic books, graphic novels, and the like, they can convey most anything a short story or novel can, and then some. This is old news to people who are younger than me, but worth repeating anyway.

As a newspaper comics aficionado, I discovered that the Oakland Tribune printed their daily strips in color, and that the LA Times had not just two plus pages of daily black and white comics, but two full sections of color comics on Sunday. Heaven! On line, the Washington Post has a pretty good, free comics section. That’s where I ran into the September 27, 2008, “Tom the Dancing Bug” by Ruben Bolling.

Entitled “Today’s USA is the USSR of the 1980s,” the comic draws hilarious, not to mention striking parallels between present day America and a bygone Soviet Union. There’s state ownership of a command economy, secret police spying on citizens, loyalty oaths and mandatory patriotism, a military quagmire in Afghanistan, and an economy going to hell in a hand basket. What particularly tickled me was the last panel: “Next: The Breakup of the Empire.” Depicted is the front page of the New York Times with a report that the USA has been reduced to its original thirteen colonies. The Anchorage Daily News features a President Todd Palin declaring Alaska an independent nation.

Clever stuff.

I do a lot of on-line news and information gathering, but I also peruse physical copies of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for ruling-class news and opinion at my local public library. Remember libraries? I also subscribe to the Guardian Weekly, to get the acceptable leftist slant on things. All serious newspapers, with no comics sections. Deep down though, I guess I don’t feel a newspaper is really worth much without comics.

Nostalgia for the 60s: “What’s Left?” September 2008, MRR #304

I was having flashbacks.

I laid out the columns for MRR #302 at the end of May. As I sat in front of a computer in the Mother Ship—MRR HQ—the soundtrack playing was ‘60s rock’n’roll, protopunk, garage, psychedelia, whatever you want to call it. The Seeds, 13th Floor Elevators, Them, on vinyl of course. Yet, other than myself, no one listening had been born when that music was first produced.

Intellectually, I understand the impact that Sky Saxon, Roky Erickson, Van Morrison and their break-out bands had on the music that followed, up to the present day. Emotionally, however, I was asking myself, why the hell does anybody listen to this crap? That’s because the music threatened to invoke nostalgia. I’m no fan of nostalgia, even on the best of days.

For me, nostalgia is pitiable emotion conjured up by less than accurate memory. I’m particularly repelled by nostalgia for the “good old days” of the 1960s because, in my opinion having lived through the decade, very little was changed by the unrest and ferment of those years. Recently, I listened to a Brecht Forum panel discussion on Obama and the Left put on by the Nation Magazine and broadcast on NPR. I couldn’t help shaking my head, and chuckling out loud. For all our pipe dreams of revolution and overthrowing the Establishment in the ‘60s, in America today the Left is a joke. I recognize that we were delusional at the time, but it still makes me sad, and not a little angry, to realize how pathetically insignificant the Left, not to mention the left of the Left, is at present. And how out-and-out reactionary this society remains.

Which is weird because conservatives in this country believe exactly the opposite, that the Left won what they call the Culture Wars of the 1960s. For them, the remnants of LBJ’s Great Society welfare state and the much curtailed countercultural hedonism of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll are signs that the Antichrist triumphed some forty years ago, which conservatives have been assiduously fighting to overturn ever since. The Right has successfully used affirmative action, feminism, liberal media, abortion, gay rights, school prayer, et al, to distract people from the reality that corporate capitalism is fast reducing the United States to a Third World banana republic.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft summarized popular attitudes to that contentious decade in a Guardian Weekly opinion piece (“It was fun, but 1968’s legacy was mixed,” 9/5/08) when he wrote:

[André Glucksmann] now sees les événements de mai as “a monument, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury,” which is one way of putting it. Another is that 40 years ago were sown the seeds of the story since, when “the right has won politically and the left has won culturally.” Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but not for long.

Wheatcroft proceeds to systematically demolish the myths of 1968, beginning by comparing Paris 1968 to Europe in 1848, using the analogy of sexual orgasm followed by post-coital depression. “Even at the time, as Paris was brought to a halt by rebellious kids, there was an awful lot of play-acting.” He quotes the French Communist Party’s analysis of those events as “street party, not revolution,” and favorably mentions AJP Taylor’s comment about 1848: “it’s a sure sign of political backwardness when any movement is led by students.”

The list of ‘60s veterans who have become part of the establishment, even right-wingers, is disheartening, and not at all “amusing, if unkind” as Wheatcroft puts it. But he is particularly cogent when he discusses the political consequences of 1968:

The copains believed they would bring down Charles de Gaulle, but they didn’t. When he did resign the next year, he was succeeded by Georges Pompidou, and the Elysée palace has been occupied by the right for 26 of the past 40 years. Likewise, British youths jeered at Harold Wilson, who was duly replaced two years later by Edward Heath, and the Tories were in power for 22 of the next 27 years.

Across the Atlantic, 1968 saw assassination, riot and antiwar protest; the year ended with Richard Nixon’s election, and Republicans have been in the White House for 28 of the 40 years since. It’s true that the US eventually left Vietnam; that country now has an explosive capitalist economy—not quite what those who chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, We will fight and we will win!” had in mind.

Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the collapse of Soviet Bloc Communism heralded the political and economic victory of the Right, as foreshadowed in 1968. Yet, with respect to the cultural (“or emotional or sexual”) victory of the Left, Wheatcroft contends that “even there, the story is ambiguous.” For, as he points out, the 1960s cultural upheavals were profoundly individualistic, even libertine, and that “since 1968, the West had grown not only more prosperous but more sybaritic and self-absorbed” as a consequence of the Left’s cultural successes. “The ‘bourgeois triumphalism’ of the Thatcher (and Blair) era, the greed is good ethos and our materialistic individualism might just have had their roots 40 years back.” I consider myself a proxy soixante-huitard, yet I heartily agree with Wheatcroft’s rather bleak assessment of the legacy of 1968. I’m even inclined to second Eric Hobsbawm’s comment that “the revolution is puritan,” by which “[h]e meant that the sex-drugs-and-rock hedonism of the 1960s was not only not the same thing as changing the foundations of society, it might be actively inimical to doing so.”

Damn, I’m getting old.

This analysis doesn’t take into account that the rebellions of the 1960s had two disparate sources; the hippie counterculture and the student New Left. Hippies were often proudly anti-political, whereas New Leftists frequently dismissed the counterculture as escapist. Wheatcroft is essentially saying that while the counterculture nominally won, the New Left was resoundingly defeated. Another way to look at this period is to see both counterculture and New Left going down to defeat, with the ruling elite of the day then selectively recuperating elements from each camp in order to stave off future rebellion. Had these two aspects of the ‘60s truly triumphed to any degree, we might have seen a creative fusion that could have shaped a stunningly libertarian socialism to shame Stalin’s gulags and Mao’s reeducation camps. But this is the stuff of science fiction and alternative history, not of thoughtful analysis.

As I write this column the San Francisco Mime Troupe begins a new season of free theater in the city’s parks. The current production, called “Red State,” has as one of its themes that the US economy is becoming so bad that the Right can no longer bamboozle the American public with social and moral issues. The sleight-of-hand trickery that stirred up people with the red flags of gay marriage, teenage abortion, reverse discrimination against whites, and welfare mothers on crack so that they voted, and acted, against their economic interests, is no longer working. Economic issues are once more coming to the fore, and overshadowing the rabidly repressive social agenda of the conservative movement. We should comprehend and encourage this potential, instead of futilely pining for the “good old days” of the ‘60s.