The FBI Cooks Up a Nothingburger for the GOP

The big corporate news is some terrible, awful scandal that’s something somehow about emails that nobody knows anything about.

It’s so shocking one swoons!!! 

Comey, the Republican FBI chief, has cooked up a perfect nothingburger for the GOP — no facts, no emails, no charges, no allegations, no names, just a big cloud of suspicion about Clinton that the Republicans will fan until election day. After that, the matter will be completely forgotten. After all, it’s hard to remember something that consists of nothing.

Do Do That Judo That You Do So Well

A surprising number of superheroes moonlighted as judo, jiu jitsu and karate instructors.

One-page features of “judo tricks” were not uncommon during the Silver Age. Harvey Comics’ stuntwoman turned movie star turned masked crime-fighter, the Black Cat, offered them. In Archie Comics’ Adventures of the Fly, the 1940s superhero the Black Hood was recruited for the task. A little later, in the mid-1960s, Charlton Comics’ ‘action hero” Judomaster joined the club.

But the oddest and most obscure of the lot was Bobby Bell, a teenaged sidekick and/or mascot to a superhero who actually outlasted the hero himself.

In Adventures of The Fly 1 (Aug. 1959), the boy made his debut wearing a costume like the Shield’s (who had debuted two months before in his own title as Lancelot Strong, a Silver Age revamp of MLJ’s Golden Age Shield Joe Higgins).

Apparently president of the Shield’s Young Americans’ Club, Bell’s relationship to the Shield — whether sidekick or just fan — was never made clear because the Shield’s comic was killed after only two issues, the victim of a lawsuit threat. DC Comics had claimed the hero was too much like Superman.

Even his name was ambiguous, shifting from Bill Bell to Bobby Bell or Bob Bell. Whatever. Bell stayed in the ring giving instructions in the martial arts through Adventures of the Fly 11 (July 1961).

This quirky how-to sideline of superhero comics eventually died out, and it’s easy to see why teaching children how to battle each other might raise some eyebrows. Superheroes may not fear the criminal element, but they have a healthy respect for lawyers.

I Wish, I Wish He'd Go Away

The Chinese artist Liu Bolin

“Why is the mutual interdependence between ourselves and the external world not the most obvious and dominant fact of consciousness?” Alan Watts asked in his 1960 book This Is It.

“Why do we not see that the world that we try to control, our whole inner and outer natural environment, is precisely that which gives us the power to control anything? It is because we look at things separately instead of simultaneously.

“When we are busy trying to control or change our circumstances, we ignore and are unconscious of the dependence of our consciousness and energy upon the outer world.

“When, on the other hand, we are oppressed by circumstances and feel controlled by the outer world, we forget that our very own consciousness is bringing that world into being.

“For, as I said, the sun is light because there are eyes to see it — noises because there are ears to hear them, hard facts because there is soft skin to feel them.”

“…If, therefore, consciousness ceases to ignore itself and becomes fully self-conscious, it discovers two things: (1) that it controls itself only very slightly, and is thoroughly dependent on other things — father and mother, external nature, biological processes, God, or what you will, and (2) that there is no little man inside, no ‘I’ who owns this consciousness.

“And if that is so, if I do not own my consciousness, and if there is even no ‘me’ to own it, to receive it, or to put up with it, who on earth is there to be either the victim of fate or the master of nature? ‘What is troubling us,’ said Wittgenstein, ‘is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.’”

I’m reminded of the 1899 poem Antigonish by the American educator and poet William Hughes Mearns:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn’t there again today,

I wish, I wish h’'d go away...

I think I know what’s on the landing at the top of those stairs. It’s a mirror.

America: The Wreckage and the Reckoning

The American government, run by corporations whose sole motivation is greed, has ignored the needs of ordinary Americans for decades.

From the world economic wreckage caused by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to the Iraq war based entirely on lies to the disintegration of middle-class wages to an epidemic of armed toddlers to the police shootings of unarmed citizens in the streets, Americans’ quiet desperation has been growing steadily louder and louder and louder.

No, everything is not “just fine.” Societies in which things are “fine” do not create demagogues, people who use misdirection to peddle ugly, racist, violent solutions to the enraged and fearful. Demagogues do not arise by happenstance, out of nowhere. They arise only because you have ignored the festering conditions that create them.

Solving the Mystery of Lew Harper

Something about Paul Newman puzzled me.

More than once, I’d heard the anecdote about how Newman changed the name of Ross MacDonald’s private eye character Lew Archer to “Lew Harper” for the 1966 film Harper. The story went that Newman had had two hits in Hud and The Hustler, and wanted to extend his lucky strike with a third alliterative title.

But that would have made Newman kind of stupid, and the keenly compassionate liberal Newman didn’t strike me as being stupid. Hence my puzzlement.

The mystery was solved by Tom Nolan, the biographer of Ross MacDonald (who was really Kenneth Millar). Eyeing United Artists’ immensely popular James Bond films while considering turning McDonald’s first Archer novel, The Moving Target, in to a movie, Warner Brothers decided to acquire all the film rights to Lew Archer and make a series. But Millar wasn’t willing to part with those rights for less than $50,000.

“I’d much rather see the deal fall through than risk having Archer lost in the clutches of the Warner octopus … I say nuts,” Millar said. But the studio didn’t want to pay Millar’s price. Their solution: change the character’s name and make a series anyway.

Newman’s wife, actress Joanne Woodward, later told the anecdote about her husband’s H superstition on the Tonight Show, and a myth was born. Presumably that sounded better than saying that the studio wanted to cheat the writer out of his fee.

Screenwriter William Goldman knew the true story, because he was the guy whom the studio asked to think up a new name for Lew Archer. Goldman picked the two-syllable “Harper” because it sounded like “Archer.”

 “If you know anything about the movie business, you know it’s all bullshit,” Goldman said. 

The God of Thunder Clouts a Kind of Castro

A weak, vulnerable person is transformed by magic lightning into a caped, Herculean hero who can fly.

Um, could you narrow that down a little more? That could be anybody.

In his second adventure (Journey Into Mystery 84, Sept. 1962), the Mighty Thor exploited his built-in Captain Marvel motif by having Dr. Don Blake trapped before a firing squad, unable to reach the walking stick that would change him into the thunder god. This echoed the many times in which Billy Batson, Mary Batson or Freddy Freeman ended up bound and gagged and unable to utter the villain-vanquishing word “Shazam!”

Having fought off an alien invasion in his first outing, the thunder god flexes his considerable muscles against a modern army this time out. The story is full of those multi-panel feats of staggering strength that Jack Kirby was so good at delivering.

The tale continues the commie-bashing featured in Marvel’s brief superhero revival in 1954, but this time the heavy has a heavy resemblance to Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, who’d only been in power three years. Because DC’s superhero titles usually backed away from real-world politics, Stan Lee instinctively went in the other direction, toward giving Marvel’s characters additional verisimilitude by grounding them in a more recognizable world.

How the GOP Fell Into Its Own Fox News Trap

Fox News is the cutting edge of conning the American public. They road test the propaganda at top speed, then get CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Lara Logan to buy the used sedan.

Propaganda posing as journalism is great for your side, right up until you fall off the cliff in the dark. By creating the Fox News fog machine, the GOP has blinded itself.

“It is, after all, the right-wing radio, TV and internet fever swamps that have gotten them into this mess, that have led to massive misinformation, disinformation and cynicism among Republican voters,” Catherine Rampell wrote. “And draining those fever swamps is the only way to get them out of it.

“For a sense of just how misinformed Republican voters have become, consider a few of the provably wrong things many believe. “Seven in 10 Republicans either doubt or completely disbelieve that President Obama was born in the United States. Six in 10 think he’s a secret Muslim. Half believe global warming is possibly or definitely a myth concocted by scientists.”