Take Care of Mr. Wheeler. See That Some Harm Comes to Him

By Dan Hagen

The novelist Patrick Hasburgh has, I think, something in common with Ian Fleming.

Rattled at the prospect of a first marriage at the late age of 43, Fleming took his mind off his troubles by shaping his experiences as a World War II British intelligence officer and a determined womanizer — combined with his fussy-bachelor gentleman idiosyncratic taste in prewar Bentleys, Sea Island cotton shirts, Tiptree Little Scarlet strawberry jam and Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade — into the credible consumer-culture specificity he needed to ground the fantasy adventures of the protagonist in his first novel, James Bond.

Author Patrick Hasburgh with his brainchild

And in his first novel, 2004’s “Aspen Pulp,” Hasburgh forms us an unlikely detective hero from his own fairly glamorous background.

Working with the famed television writer and producer Stephen J. Cannell, Hasburgh wrote “The Greatest American Hero,” “The A-Team,” “LA Firefighters” and “SeaQuest 2032” and co-created “Hardcastle and McCormick” and “21 Jump Street,” the hit police series that brought Johnny Depp to national attention.

Handsome, young and successful in every sense sought by American society, Hasburgh reportedly did his share of sampling Hollywood’s various sybaritic delights. Then he got disgusted and decamped to Mexico to raise a family and ride the serene surf.

So here we have Jake Wheeler, a burned-out Hollywood writer living in Colorado, trying to climb gingerly out of a past pickled in booze and dappled with drug deals. It’s a character drawn, in Hasburgh’s own words, from “…a vague pattern of personal experience, providence and calamity.”

If Wheeler could write about TV detectives, maybe he could function as a real one? Wheeler is no more convinced by that dubious proposition than we are, but he’s a what-the-hell kind of guy.

As down at heel as Jim Rockford (another Cannell creation), but lacking even that private eye’s professional competence, Wheeler marches merrily into the murky-minefield search for a missing high school student.

I was slow to warm to Wheeler — somewhat put off, I think, by the self-pity that’s a recurrent downbeat note in his first-person narrative. But it’s a convincing characteristic in an addictive personality, and luckily it’s balanced by a dose of winning wit.

Wheeler, mourning a relationship that ended in April “like a bad Harry Chapin song,” confides, “I never got over Annie, but I did learn how to drink my way through the loneliness. I was even married once, briefly, during a weekend bender in Las Vegas, to an actress who didn’t know that Canada was north of the United States. I kid you not.”

I like to read Conan Doyle, Rex Stout and John D. MacDonald for the coziness of the homes their heroes have created for themselves. I like to read Ross MacDonald for the steadying, courageous liberal compassion of his hero. I like to read Adam Hall for the furious, fed-up professionalism of his “shadow executive.” And I like to read Patrick Hasburgh for his wit, for what his friend Cannell called “…Patrick’s social commentary, keen sense of dialogue and funny take on life.”

Finding his young female friend Lynda in bed with a “Persian” person, Wheeler wonders aloud whether it’s true that the states of Iran and Iraq are going to merge and form Irate, and chides her for “…screwing some guy that looks like he should be on the cover of Newsweek.”

Flush with ill-gotten gains, Wheeler buys himself a fire-engine red Hummer for $82,969. “Two jerry cans were strapped on the roof rack for extra water or fuel,” Wheeler observes. “Apparently this was a vehicle designed for soccer moms who wanted to make sure their kids would still get to practice in the event of a nuclear attack.”

On the move, Wheeler casts a cold eye not merely on Aspen, but also on Burning Man and Vegas, where he explains that Siegfried and Roy’s act “…closed down after the younger of the significant others had finally gotten a tiger to act like a real tiger.” Passing the Paris Casino, he observes that “…a quarter-scale Eiffel Tower straddled over it like a giant stick figure attempting to crap on the roof.”

Hasburgh has chosen his settings well. Idyllic resort destinations awash in undercurrents of criminal, personal and sexual corruption offer the same kind of dramatically useful ironies that Chandler and other detective story writers exploited effectively in perpetually summery, perpetually shadowy LA. Things do rot out there in the sun.

And that rot has spread far and wide in Wheeler’s post-9/11 nation. Jake Wheeler may be damaged goods, but so, clearly, is the 21^st century America in which he lives.

A latter-day knight errant needs a corrupt society the way Quixote needed windmills, and here and now offers possibilities as richly convincing as the lawless Jazz Age or the desperate Depression ever did.

Depp in "21 Jump Street," a series created by Hasburgh

Wheeler’s ironic comments on the irrationalities of the Bush administration, popular culture and the creeping U.S. police state are the last line of defense of a sane man, and the sane readers in Hasburgh’s audience can recognize a kindred spirit.

Wheeler tells us he’s heard about “…some poor bastard being arrested for carrying tweezers. Maybe he was planning to pluck the pilot’s nose hairs unless he was flown to Algiers.”

Wheeler reflects sourly, “That our cheerleader-in-chief and his madrassas of dissemblers had the Third World’s cheap seats cheering for Saddam’s side during the second half of the Gulf War also forbodes what else might happen when genetically connected Skull & Boners skip political science class.”

He sizes up Ann Coulter as “…a bleached bag of neocon bones who mixed WMDs with PMS for the electronic media.” And he has an idea for a Hollywood project to star Rose O’Donnell in “The J. Edgar Hoover Story.”

Clearly my kind of guy, after all.

Such sardonic observations serve to punctuate Hasburgh’s satisfying story of surprise and suspense. Hasburgh and the witty novelist Richard Russo have similar literary voices.

So, is Jake Wheeler finally paladin or patsy? Worth your while to take a trip to Aspen and find out.

I will tell you this much. Wheeler ends up in a spot tight enough to challenge even Mr. Bond at his Flemingesque best.

Patrick Hasburgh and his family and the "21 Jump Street" movie franchise. Patrick created the TV show.

What's Wrong With Fox News, Vol. 3, Part 6,798

Remember, there isn't any Republican War on Women. That's all just a ridiculous liberal ...  
Fox News Alert! This just in!!!
Fox News guest the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson says that allowing women to vote was “one of the greatest mistakes that America made.”
“Look at every place where a women is in control,” said Peterson. “You see nothing but confusion. There’s no good in it at all, none.”

Atlas Coughed in Embarrassment

By Dan Hagen

Ayn Rand’s fans should, perhaps, get into their private industrialist super-planes and fly them to Rand's Atlantis where they will find like-minded companions who never needed anyone else, never had a vulnerable childhood — or any other kind of childhood — and who share a perfect, harmonious contempt for anyone who is, unlike them, imperfect. 

They will find this libertarian Never Land in Colorado, right behind the invisible force field.

When I was a young man, I was besotted by Rand's philosophy, which works wonderfully in the fantasy world of supermen that she created for herself.

However, intellectual honesty eventually won out, and I saw that while her philosophy does offer certain useful anthems to the individual, it is finally destructive.

Rand offers nothing but sophistic rationalization on monopoly power. She creates a fantasy world in which greedy monopolists are somehow NOT permitted to seize government power, and then pretends it can exist.

She failed to see, or refused to see, that vast monopoly wealth is finally IDENTICAL with power — that liberty creates wealth, but then wealth works tirelessly to DESTROY liberty.

Did you ever consider that not one of those Ayn Rand heroes had a childhood? If they had grown up, that would mean that they had once been dependent on someone else’s help and support, and that would never, ever do. So Rand had her supermen and superwomen spring full-grown from the mind of Zeus.

In other words, in order to make her philosophy work, she had to edit out an extremely large chunk of the human experience.

I hope that her fans can summon that same intellectual honesty. If they do, they will find that Marcus Aurelius was a much better philosopher than Rand. He said, "The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

And here’s what they are — I remember when they had the “Atlas Shrugged” film premiere in Effingham as an Ayn Rand Tea Party rally in a theatre bankrupted by capitalists who cheated their ticket holders and got bailed out by city government money. I found that pretty funny, all things considered.

The Illustrated Fascist, Part 6

The 14 defining elements of fascism.

No. 6, A controlled mass media.


“Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.”

The American right wingers have waged a long campaign against professionalism journalism — denouncing it, infiltrating it, faking it, extorting it, distorting it, planting prostitutes in it and telling every manner of lie about it.


Spring-boarding off right-wing radio ranting, in 1996 a propaganda TV news channel, Fox News, became the Pravda of the Bush White House. 
Even Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan admitted that corporate media reporters had willingly rolled over for the Bush lies that caused war.

The rescue of Private Jessica, the “enemy attack” slaying of Pat Tillman, the fall of Saddam’s statue, the WDMs —  all were lies planted by the Bush administration. 
To fake news, they added fake journalists.

They bribed columnists. Local TV stations aired propaganda generated by Bush PR hacks, pretending it had been prepared by real reporters. The $200-an-hour male prostitute “Jeff Gannon,” a/k/a James Guckert, was able to get daily access to the White House press briefings for two years while working for a hack right-wing “news service.” And this is what conservatives are pleased to call the “liberal news media,” while laughing up their sleeves.
What we have is a corporate media overwhelming tilted right, and frightened of even challenging glaring Republican lies. When Rudy Giuliani lied on national television that we had NO domestic terrorist attacks under George W. Bush, ABC's "liberal" coward George Stephanopoulos was afraid even to call him on it.

The real mission of the corporate media is to reassure the public about the benevolence of corporate-welfare capitalism and to justify both inequality and the role of the corporation as the exclusive and only acceptable provider of all income and benefits.
"(T)he right-wing mass hysteria is what sociologists call a 'moral panic.' It occurs when a society is undergoing a wrenching transformation," wrote Michael Fumento. "Somebody then comes along and creates a 'folk devil' both to provide an explanation for bad conditions, real or imagined, and a target. Kill the devil; eliminate the bad conditions. But the right has no serious incentive to help solve or ameliorate these problems. Indeed, as with the reelection of Obama, it will benefit from their continuation or worsening."

The Avengers: No Assembly Required

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans) battle alien invaders in Manhattan.

By Dan Hagen

Thanks to director/screenwriter Joss Whedon and a superb cast, ”The Avengers” is the best roller-coaster ride I’ve ever had, with perfectly paced thrills, wit, surprises, the bombastic bellicosity we want from our heroes and villains, and even the necessary dramatic yeast of humanity without which no story can rise to the occasion.

Mark Ruffalo really brings something new to the role of Dr. Bruce Banner, all that deliberate calm as a studied answer to the volcano he really is inside. Jeremy Renner (the cold-eyed Hawkeye, Marvel's answer to DC's Green Arrow) has long been a favorite of mine. The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), an effective cross between Emma Peel and Spider-Man who's been around since the 1960s, is a super-martial artist who has you cheering for her smarts. 

Whedon has an affinity for presenting strong female characters with empathy, style and wit, a fact evidenced by his well-loved series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Here his heroine is the Black Widow, Natasha Romanov, a former freelance spy/assassin whose “very specific skill set” includes Captain America-level hand-to-hand combat skills and expertise in cool, brainy strategic duplicity. She is particularly adept at manipulating powerful men who enjoy terrorizing women, as the film demonstrates in two deft scenes. It’s a wonderful subversion of the old melodramatic clichés about cowering, victimized women. When the Black Widow plays that scene, you know she’s merely a move away from checkmate.

Captain America (Chris Evans) is a believably steady-eyed, old-fashioned democrat, ready to lay down his life for humanity and liberty. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is all power and nobility, carrying the gravitas of a Norse god lightly on his red-cloaked shoulders. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) is a cheeky, egotistical genius, a font of quips and irresistible charm since Downey catapulted him straight onto the A list of costumed do-gooders.

Robert Downey Jr. as the semi-autistic super hero Tony Stark

“The Avengers” let me notice something I should have spotted before — that Downey has invested his billionaire playboy Tony Stark with certain semi-autistic quirks. Stark is a motor-mouth who can’t stand being handed things by other people. He can be gratuitously annoying in his emotional detachment, even to the inadvisable point of poking Dr. Bruce Banner with a stick and staring into his eyes to see what will happen. This super-genius can focus single-mindedly on arcane subjects for long periods, is fiercely independent and also has a habit of rather charmingly stating the obvious in moments of high stress. As alien invaders plummet from the sky, Iron Man mutters, “Army. Right.”

And in this film, and in "Thor," Tom Hiddleston's Loki is my favorite Marvel villain, driven to evil by consuming jealousy, deeply dangerous but still psychologically recognizable and just plain fun.  In his quest to subjugate the planet Earth merely in order to revenge himself on his brother we see the strange spectacle of a superhero and a super villain who, on some level, will always love each other.

In a confrontation set tellingly in Germany, having forced humanity to its knees, Loki even lays out the philosophical core of fascism with scene-chewing relish. The dash of philosophy never spoils the taste of the popcorn, though. It enhances the proceedings like butter.
The elaborate multi-picture set up to this film exactly parallels the creation of The Avengers in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1960s Marvel Comics. Unlike Marvel's Fantastic Four but like DC's Justice League of America, the Avengers were a super-team composed of popular characters who had each already been introduced in their own comic book titles. Doing the same thing on screen — introducing each superhero character and the villain separately in earlier films — turns out to work both commercially and artistically for this movie. Each earlier movie helped create audience anticipation for the big event to come, and the fact that each character's personality has already been well defined means that Whedon needs waste no time introducing anyone. They all arrive ready to interact in crowd-pleasing ways.
And there are moments here — I won't mention them now — that rank among the wittiest crowd pleasers on film, When I think of how hard it is to engage an audience of millions in juggling-act mythology about a garishly costumed band of Übermensch without groaning, I am amazed. This is a movie I have waited all my life to see, and never expected to.
---
Now that everyone on Midgard has seen this film, I am free to add some other observations. 
Every great superhero movie should have something to say about the nature of heroism itself, and this one does, playing Iron Man's freewheeling, libertarian Three Musketeers style off against Captain America's Depression-informed New Deal-Tom Joad sense of community responsibility. 
Steve Rogers — who, from his point of view, has watched many good men dying only days ago in the fight against totalitarianism during World War II — chides Tony Stark about his failure to understand the true nature of heroism. Downey shows us that the words from this living legend sting, even as he throws them back in Cap's face, churlishly. 
But at the climax, Stark shows us that he has fully understood Cap's lesson, sacrificing his life to save Manhattan from a nuclear strike. 

Whedon handles Tony's sacrifice with a perfect economy of understated, choke-'em-up melodrama. As his fate becomes clear and inevitable, Tony's artificial intelligence servant Jarvis suggests a goodbye call to his love, Pepper, and Tony agrees. But Pepper, riveted to TV news accounts of Tony's dangerous heroics, ignores her phone, and with Iron Man already passing into another universe, the call fails as Tony, having saved the city and the planet, lapses into unconsciousness... 

Not a dry eye in the proverbial house.

It is only by the merest accident that Iron Man survives, and then because his heroism is so evident that it has moved even the raging heart of a monster.
---
As the months pile up, and I watch this film again and again, I realize that it is simply one of the best superhero movies ever made.

Doggerel by Dan

By Dan Hagen

Eye of Newt and bling of Palin,

That GOP, it sure is ailin'.

By the tricking of the dumb,

Something wicked this way comes.

The Illustrated Fascist, Part 9

The 14 defining elements of fascism,

No. 9, Corporate Power is Protected

The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. Although the lives of ordinary citizens were under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production, but also as a means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.