Comics and Common Sense

It’s always been fairly easy to stampede the American herd into a moral panic.

In the early 1950s, comic books had been around less than 20 years, and were said to be corrupting and destroying America’s children — “seducing the innocent,” as one overwrought psychiatrist and author put it.

Artist Jim Mooney had a cabin in the mountains where he tried to avoid the topic of what he did for a living, noted David Hajdu in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America.

“In the summer of 1954, Stan Lee, Mooney’s editor at Timely, came to visit the artist for a weekend, and one of Mooney's area friends dropped by,” Hajdu wrote.  “The fellow, a dealer in hunting equipment, engaged Mooney in conversation about antique rifles, and Lee interrupted, noting that, as a comic book editor, he had expertise in weapons. ‘The guy blew his stack,’ remembered Mooney. ‘He said,  “You do comic books? That is absolutely criminal — totally reprehensible. You should go to jail for the crime you’re committing,’ and on and on.”

That former friend never returned to Mooney’s cabin in the Catskills. But Mooney later discovered what the moralist did for a living. He was a gunrunner to South American mercenaries.

A Mueller Nothingburger? Color Me Unsurprised

I never expected much to come from the Mueller report, and I was not disappointed. We're going to have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.

The Bottom of the Barrel, That's Where We Are

Our entire society is corrupted by money, top to bottom, so completely that even the fig leaf of respectability it used to wear has been torn away.

Truth, Justice and the Liberal Way

When the term "welfare" had not yet been demonized by fascist propagandists.

The Party That Cages Children

And when the U.S, starves captive children to death, Secretary Nielsen will call it "dieting."

The Republican Party Is the Epidemic

A reminder that Trump is merely a symptom. The Republican Party is the disease epidemic. The “reasonable conservative” is a species as dead as the dodo. What we have left are what we saw at the GOP presidential debates even when Obama was running — audiences that cheered wildly for poor people to die in agony without health care, for child labor and for wholesale executions. They created Trump. American conservatism is finished. It’s fascism that’s fashionable.

So no, Republicans aren’t getting off the hook for installing a would-be banana republic dictator as president of the United States. History will hang this around GOP necks like the stinking corpse of an albatross.

Life, Liberty and "Socialist Plots'

A century ago, the American goal was civic progress. Today, we let roads and bridges collapse, permit the destruction of public education, scheme to turn Social Security and Medicare over to Wall Street, invite sectarians to dismantle secular government, relieve the rich of the burden of taxation while rewarding them with corporate welfare, and constantly seek new means to prevent citizens from voting. Today, the American goal is civic regression.