Category: The Dish

The War On Comics

By Patrick
Jeet Heer on Frederic Wetham’s campaign against comic books:

For Wertham, even the most beloved comic-book heroes were suspect: Superman reminded him of Nazi Germany’s SS (a cadre of self-styled supermen), the adventures of Batman and Robin had homoerotic overtones, and Wonder Woman threatened to turn healthy young girls into lesbians. At the time Wertham made his attack on comics, the medium was at the height of its popularity, selling between 80 million and 100 million copies every week in scores of genres, ranging from funny animals and superheroes (for kids) to romance and horror (for teenagers and young adults).

As David Hajdu reminds us in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Wertham’s ideas had remarkably wide currency in postwar America. Countless religious and patriotic organizations organized book burnings to set comics aflame, and leading politicians held congressional hearings where William Gaines, the owner of EC Comics, publisher of the gory Tales From the Crypt and the satiric Mad comic book (later retooled as a magazine), was grilled as if he were a mobster.

As a result of this moral panic, the once-thriving comic-book industry went into a severe decline. In the two years after Wertham’s book came out, more than a dozen publishers and hundreds of cartoonists left the field. Those publishers that remained were severely restricted by a self-imposed code that prevented comics from publishing anything but the most anodyne kiddies’ fare. Only with the rise of graphic novels in the last few years have comics recovered from the stigma of the Wertham years. For Hajdu, the comic-book crackdown was a "purge," a precursor to later panics over rock music and video games.

The Illusion Of Security

By Patrick

From Jeremy Waldron’s review of Worst-Case Scenarios by Cass Sunstein:

The One Per Cent Doctrine: it’s a striking methodology and a liberating one, and many people think it’s the only way to respond to the threat of low-probability, high-impact events. With it, the endless evidence-gathering and analysis that characterises traditional intelligence policy gives way to clarity. Nothing any longer needs to be conditional. We no longer say, ‘If X has happened, then we need to do Y,’ with all our effort being devoted to finding out whether X has in fact happened or (in an uncertain world) what its probability is. Instead we say, ‘If there is the smallest significant chance that X has happened, then we have no choice but to do Y.’ If X may lead to a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (like a nuclear attack on an American city), then we need to swing into action immediately and do Y. No further questions.

This reminds me of the following segment of George F. Kennan’s 1954 The Illusion of Security (here is a pdf):

There is something about this quest for absolute security that is self-defeating. It is an exercise which, like every form of perfectionism, undermines and destroys its own basic purpose. The French have their wonderful proverb: Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien–the absolute best is the enemy of the good. Nothing truer has ever been said . A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. And a ruthless, reckless insistence on attempting to stamp  out everything that could conceivably  constitute  a reflection  of improper  foreign influence  in our  national life, regardless of the actual damage it is doing to the cost of eliminating it, in terms of other American values, is the one thing I can think of that should reduce us all to a point where the very independence we are seeking to defend would be meaningless, for we would be doing things to ourselves as vicious and tyrannical as any that might be brought to us from outside.

This sort of extremism seems to me to hold particular danger for a democracy, because it creates a curious area between what is held to be possible and what is really possible–an area within which government can always be plausibly shown to have been most dangerously delinquent in the performance of its tasks. And this area, where government is always deficient, provides the ideal field of opportunity for every sort of demagoguery and mischief-making. It constitutes a terrible breach in the dike of our national morale, through which forces of doubt and suspicion never cease to find entry. The heart of our problem, here, lies in our assessment of the relative importance of the various dangers among which we move; and until many of our people can be brought to understand the what we have to do is not to secure a total absence of danger but to balance peril against peril and to find the tolerable degree of each, we shall not wholly emerge from these confusions.

When Coalitions Dissolve

By Patrick
Welch on libertarianism’s rocky relationship with the GOP:

The remaining libertarians in Reagan’s shrinking big tent aren’t just being ignored or marginalized; they’re being blamed for the Reagan coalition’s crackup. While John McCain was heading toward the nomination in January, The Weekly Standard published an online piece by the political scientists Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey slamming McCain’s critics as “strict free-market” ideologues whose rigidity jeopardized the conservative movement. “The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life,” the Storeys wrote. “Conservatives who forget that the free market is properly a piece of policy rather than an ideological end-in-itself not only obscure the importance of individual virtue, they undermine it.”[…]

I wonder how responsible it is to add libertarian votes to a shrinking coalition whose dominant rhetoric and political standard-bearer stand in increasingly explicit opposition to the party’s libertarian strand. McCain, whose National Greatness conservatism is openly hostile to individualism, has recently hit some encouraging free market notes. Nonetheless, a Republican defeat this November might just leave fiscal conservatives more orphaned than people yet realize.

Should He Stay Or Should He Go

By Patrick
Since Mark Penn’s latest misstep, certain unions and bloggers have been calling for him leave the Clinton campaign. Some opinion from around the web:

Ezra Klein:

In 2000, George W. Bush dealt with these problems by insisting Karl Rove step down from his other companies in order to work on the campaign. Clinton has done nothing of the kind, leading to all sorts of huge conflicts of interest. It’s time for Clinton to make Penn step down. Either from her campaign, or from his other jobs.

Yglesias:

…if it’s time for anyone to go, I think it’s time for [Clinton] to go. And, of course, I do think it’s time for her to go. And Penn probably realizes that at this point nothing he does or doesn’t do is going to put her in the White House so he might as well start transitioning back to his real job. Hence meeting with the Colombians.

Publius:

It’s vital for Obama that Penn remain in his current spot. If he’s fired, the Clinton campaign might be forced to hire a competent strategist.

Update: Colombia does what Clinton won’t and fires Penn.

The Protest Vote

By Patrick
Larison outlines the potential downfalls of Bob Barr’s presidential run:

Despite the fact that both [Democratic and Republican party] nominees are broadly committed to maintaining much of the status quo, there are enough real differences on policy that third party critiques that focus on the “duopoly” will be much less effective this time.  Disgruntled progressives don’t want a repeat of 2000, and disaffected conservatives have to bear in the mind that any strong showing for a third party candidate backed by them will be used as a scapegoat for any McCain defeat.  The paradox for the antiwar right challenger remains: win enough votes, and you may actually pull antiwar support from the Democrat, thus electing the Republican against whom you are rebelling; win just enough votes that make the difference and throws the election to Obama, and McCain’s defeat will be pinned on the antiwar right rather than his own militarism and pro-amnesty views.  The latter will serve two purposes: it allows the interventionists to save face and fight another day (another reason why the 2008 outcome will probably not affect the strength of interventionists in the GOP), and it frees mainstream conservatives of any blame for their previous intransigence against McCain.  If the purpose of the protest candidacy is simply to provide an alternative and a voice for disaffected conservatives and libertarians, none of that matters.  However, if it is supposed to accomplish something more significant, I am not sure how it does that.