President Trump Takes the Joy Stick

Trump said he can easily “fix Obamacare” because he “knows how to do this stuff.” That's the extent of his policy. That he's “good” and ”knows how to do stuff.” He still sounds like a third grader.

What Bernie Sanders Saw That the DNC Ignored

“Let me be very clear. In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate, will not gain the House and will not be successful in dozens of governor’s races unless we run a campaign which generates excitement and momentum and which produces a huge voter turnout.

“With all due respect, and I do not mean to insult anyone here, that will not happen with politics as usual. The same old, same old will not be successful.

“The people of our country understand that — given the collapse of the American middle class and the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality we are experiencing — we do not need more establishment politics or establishment economics. We need a political movement which is prepared to take on the billionaire class and create a government which represents all Americans, and not just corporate America and wealthy campaign donors.

“In other words, we need a movement which takes on the economic and political establishment, not one which is part of it.”

— Bernie Sanders Aug. 28, 2015 

Where Did That Masked Man Go?

“Weighed down by anxieties they were largely helpless to resolve, audiences in the 1950s craved simplicity and clarity,” wrote literature professor Kathleen L. Spencer in her thoughtful book on Have Gun Will Travel. “The Western gave them a world in which social problems could be solved by direct action, including violence if necessary.”

A cover painting from the Masked Rider pulp magazine.

Pop culture historian J. Fred MacDonald observed, “What the TV Western was offering was open warfare, a protracted battle between obvious legality and illegality. At stake was control of civilization. There was neither time nor reason for studied response. The answer to each dilemma was obvious: enough strategy, enough muscle, enough gunpowder. Through the concerted application of the brains and brawn of good men, this form of adult entertainment showed, indeed advocated, an efficient way to tame the savage and rescue humanity.”

Spencer said, “In the process of exploring such issues, the TV Westerns of the 1950s provided models for how a man was supposed to act: protecting the weak, facing down the brigand (whether outlaw, marauding Indian or tyrannical cattle baron) to prevent them from abusing the innocent, even while restraining his own violent impulses within the boundaries of a rigorous ethical code. The Western hero, in his purest form, sacrificed himself to make a better world for others, to transform a nearly lawless frontier into a place where civilization could take hold.”

“There is no way to know how many viewers took these lessons to heart and and acted on them in the real world,” Spencer wrote. “Perhaps some of the idealistic college students who risked their lives to fight for civil rights for blacks  in the South were inspired in part by the Westerner; certainly (as anecdotes reveal) some small but real percentage of the young men who volunteered to go fight in Vietnam were motivated by the television heroes of their childhood and adolescence.”

So why did these cowboy heroes, once so ubiquitous on TV and movies, ride off into the sunset? The answer is they did not. They merely donned disguises.

In all important respects, the western hero has become the superhero, now all dusted off, now streamlined and jet propelled. Civilization is still threatened, but now by forces tricked up as super criminals, alien invaders and supernatural monsters.

Like the western hero, the superhero is still simplistic in his solutions, still self-sacrificing in his ethics and still stands between us and the savage menaces of the frontier, but one that is no longer merely geographical. The superhero’s frontier is, as Rod Serling once intoned, “…a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination." 

Ant Man and Robin to the Rescue!

In June 1963, in Batman 156, DC Comics decided have a little joke at the expense of that upstart superhero publisher, Marvel Comics.

In Batman’s absence, writer Bill Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff had Robin team up with the shrunken superhero Ant Man. What th--? This was months after Marvel’s diminutive superhero Ant Man first donned his shrinking super-suit in Tales to Astonish 35 (Sept. 1962).

DC’s Ant-Man was a one-off, a fraud, a cheap crook who posed as a hero but failed to fool the Boy Wonder.

Maybe DC regarded the joke as a justifiable act of revenge. After all, in Showcase 34 (Sept.-Oct. 1961), DC had introduced its real shrinking superhero in Gil Kane’s elegant feature The Atom. Of course, Marvel could claim to have introduced Hank Pym at virtually the same time — Tales to Astonish 27 (Jan. 1962) — albeit in one of their “monster” stories, The Man in the Ant Hill, and not a superhero story.

In any case, it’s interesting to compare the static art of Sheldon Moldoff to the dynamic art of Jack Kirby on the same idea. Marvel was on the way up, while Batman was on the way out. Threatened by cancellation, the Batman title would only be saved by Carmine Infantino’s “New Look” in 1964 and the popular TV show in 1966.

The sudden resurgence of the shrinking man concept in comics in the early 1960s certainly owes something to the fact that the long-running Quality superhero Doll Man had ceased publication in 1953, leaving a popular gimmick unused.

But the talented writer Richard Matheson probably also deserves some of the credit. Matheson’s innovative 1956 science fiction novel The Shrinking Man had become the critically acclaimed 1957 hit film The Incredible Shrinking Man. So we can probably thank Matheson for, among other things, Ant-Man, the Atom and the current popular culture plague of zombies (all direct descendants from his 1954 novel, I Am Legend).

People always wonder where a writer gets his ideas. In this case, we know. Matheson said he found the spark of The Shrinking Man in the film Let’s Do It Again, a 1953 remake of the stage and screen comedy The Awful Truth.

“I had gotten the idea several years earlier while attending a movie in a Redondo Beach theater,” Matheson recalled. “In this particular scene, Ray Milland, leaving Jane Wyman's apartment in a huff, accidentally put on Aldo Ray’s hat, which sank down around his ears. Something in me asked, ‘What would happen if a man put on a hat which he knew was his and the same thing happened?’”

No, It Already Has Happened Here

Whatever happens tomorrow, we’ve reached an important juncture in this country. The corporate media and the public have established the practice of treating a racist, openly fascist candidate for president as no different than an ordinary candidate. That’s a real milestone on the direct path to hell.

Marvel Still Has That Old Black Magic

I concur with what Matt Mattingly said: “ ‘Doctor Strange’ was brilliant. Equal parts wit, charm, Eastern mysticism, and absolutely amazing graphic effects. While waiting for the end credits scene, we noticed Charleston’s own Tanner Bartlett had a screen credit as a digital compositor. Especially neat for Dan and Paul since he grew up next door to them.”

It’s a first-rank Marvel film like Iron Man, one that also uses wit to enhance rather than undermine the melodramatic action. Tilda Swinton is a perfect Ancient One, subtly otherworldly, wise and imperious. Benedict Cumberbatch’s skill at playing brilliant, arrogant figures like Sherlock Holmes and Alan Turing fits this role like the proverbial glove.

The movie also overcame the plotting problem inherent in super-magician stories, where the characters can just wave their hands and seemingly make anything happen. The extent of their powers being undefined tends to kill suspense, because they can always pull some deus ex machina spell out of their ass at the last minute. But here, all the magical battles had clever and logical solutions. And martial arts kinetic action was combined with the spell-hurling fireworks of the comic books to vary the action. The supernatural vistas both turn our own world inside out and upside down, and send us into artist Steve Ditko’s, where Dormammu dwells. 

Kleptocapitalism Personified: Donald J. Trump

The fact that the Republicans actually chose, as their presidential candidate, a man who’s infamous for cheating people out of their wages, goods and services whenever he can is proof America is in the grip of what I call “kleptocapitalism.”

Republicans always regard contracts as a sacred free market principle — unless they have half a chance to f*ck somebody over and defraud them, of course.