till that day love led them astray

"If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." - Alexis de Tocqueville

Eh, it's nothing a little exceptionalism and a massive military arsenal can't fix, right?

Fred Hughes - Don't Let This Happen to Us (from a 1971 single, collected on Let's Boogaloo, Vol. 3, 2006) - The pinnacle of soul perfection.

The Avengers - The American in Me (from a 1979 12"; collected on The Avengers, 1983) - I'm angry because I still care.

Plymouth Rock would land on them

What I thought was a sinus headache has turned out to be something even nastier and more virulent, and I've spent most of the day feeling like I'm controlling my body via remote feed through a haze of electromagnetic interference.

My planned topic for today has been temporarily shelved. In its place are some highlights from the unsubtle, yet prescient What If? #44 (April 1984) -- "What if Captain America were revived today?" -- by Peter B. Gillis, Sal Buscema, and Dave Simons.

"...and the Federalist Society and the Project for a New American Century and the Board of Trustees of Regent College's Law School..." Actually, I'd be more comfortable with a secret ruling cabal that included 1930's movie serial villains, Revolutionary War re-enactors, and luchadores than with the one currently running the show.

"...and that's Giuliani's campaign strategy?" A tip of the hat to Cap for his clever decision to disguise himself as Billy Crocker.

The organizers of the White House Correspondents' Dinner thought they were making a "safe" choice by asking Cap to emcee. The video of his monologue went on to become the most viewed clip in YouTube's history.

The Cortinas - Fascist Dictator (from a 1977 single) - Straightforward, no-frills '77 Britpunk...and there's nothing wrong with that, really.

Ella Fitzgerald - Anything Goes (from Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, 1956) - This marks the second time I've used a track from Anything Goes, and it's not even my favorite musical. That honor is split between between Show Boat and Bye Bye Birdie. (Unless you consider Clambake a musical, though wise souls try not to consider Clambake, period.)

America’s right behind you

There are few things worse than being forced to pander to your boss's unnatural Henry Luce fetish. ("Oh, oh, I love it when you talk about the China Lobby, Billy. Don't stop!") I have left more than one job because of similar circumstances.

Another July 4th, another day spent contemplating the dissonance between America in theory and in practice. It shouldn't have be this way; not because I ever assumed the pursuit of a truly egalitarian society was going to be effortless, but because the current roster of issues should be no-brainers in a nation that supposedly prides itself on the ideals of liberty, equality, and opportunity.

Yet we, as a nation, have gotten stuck in the wilderness, repeating hollow catechisms that pay lip service to high ideals while offering insidious qualifiers -- "but not for them." What had once been rooted in hope, in the faith of progress and the inherent (if not ubiquitous) decency of humankind, has sunk its roots deep in the noxious swamp of fear and bigotry...to benefit of all sorts of opportunistic parasites.

Throwing Muses - America (She Can't Say No) (from untitled, 1986) - 4AD says the album is self-titled, but the band stated that it has no title. This is the shit that drives compulsive CD collection organizing types up the wall. Good.

Au Pairs - America (from Sense and Sensuality, 1982) - This track, included on a budget-priced "politics of punk" box set, is what converted Maura into a fan of the band, thus leading me to dust off my collection of their material and fall in love with them all over again.

they feed your pride with boredom

I was doing some research (translation: flipping through justifiably forgotten comic books from the 1980’s) for an upcoming post when I came across this advertisement:

It was in one of those dense three-column ad pages that have since gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Even if you’re not a comic book fan or collector, I’m sure you have an idea of what I’m talking about, those eyestrain-inducing crazy quilts of pitches for correspondence schools, foreign stamps/coins, karate lessons, and other dubious propositions buried in the middle third of nearly every comic published up until the mid-1990’s. I never really paid attention to them when I was a kid, and pay even less attention to them when I come across them nowadays while reading a musty refugee from the quarter bin, but this one happened to catch my eye with its ultra crude lettering (that’s the “Jr. High Notebook Sans” font in the title caption, I believe) and accompanying illustration. Then I read the ad copy and knew that I had a real winner on my hands.

This is the AMERICAN WAY not oriental. Apparently the wave of Japanophobia that washed across American culture in the 70’s and 80’s managed to extend as far as martial arts techniques (in a really low budget manner). In the automotive and electronics fields, the bitter taste of the early fruits of globalization was tied into greater economic issues – a slumping economy, rising unemployment, factory closures, the retrenchment of the labor movement. “Buy American” was a clever bit of smoke and mirrors propaganda that played of off xenophobia and more tangible economic anxieties. Corporate leaders used diminishing market shares as an excuse to break the post World War II social contract, while refusing to adapt their products for a changing environment. Continuing to put out acre-long behemoths that got 16 mpg highway at a time when gas prices had gone from thirty-five cents a gallon to a buck and change a gallon would seem to be a more logical reason for failure than employee benefits or a conspiracy helmed by shifty zaibatsu. Americans have always had a difficult time looking at the big picture and thinking long term.

Pitching an all-American method of self-defense though? That’s just bizarre. Most of the folks I know who are into that sort of thing revel in the ex oriente lux overtones. They’re the mystical and exotic icing on the cake, inseparable from the whole martial arts experience. What would the AMERICAN WAY of self defense consist of, anyhow? Guns, alcohol, and axe handles? Two shitfaced guys in a parking lot pushing each other’s chests until both of them fall, then rolling around on the ground grabbing shirts and rabbit punching each other? Or maybe something like this exhibition of the sweet science. (Warning: Pretty gruesome, contains much profanity.)

I wonder what happened to AMERICO? In my mind’s eye, I imagine it located in one of those brick and glass monstrosities visible from the highway, with immaculately landscaped grounds and a classy lobby area decorated with stills from The Quiet Man and Straw Dogs. It would have been a pretty nice place to work, providing that one understood that parking a Subaru in the lot or bringing a bento box in for lunch was grounds for termination. The weekly staff meetings would start off with a pep talk by the CEO…

…followed by a slide show from the R&D folks demonstrating how the “Twenty Ways to Inflict Grevious Bodily Harm with an Ordinary Plastic Ice Scraper” rollout will allow the firm to seize a greater market share from rival Karatedyne in Q4.

Or the entire business could have been one individual hand-stapling eightieth generation photocopied pamphlets together in a seedy furnished apartment by the train tracks.

Soft Boys – I Wanna Destroy You (from Underwater Moonlight, 1980) – Psychedelic sounds and punk sensibilities collide, with wondrous results.

Modern Warfare – Street Fightin’ Man (from Hell Comes to Your House, Volume 1, 1981) – In which the Stones are ground into sharp pieces of gravel.

(Thanks to Kevin for providing the exterior shot of AMERICO corporate offices.)

sweet land of liberty, feels like a prison to me

The reaction to the already-infamous Civil War: Frontline #11 has been echoing across the comics internet for the past twenty-four hours. That makes it old hat at this point, but I still feel the need to ask, “What the fuck, Marvel?”

In the unlikely event you haven’t yet heard the news, the Michelle Malkin-in-training (Boy, the Daily Bugle will hire anyone these days.) featured in the above panels takes Captain America to task because his quaint ideals – y’know, justice, freedom, and equality – don’t encompass the “real” America of MySpace, NASCAR and YouTube (her namedrops, not mine) and the diminished set of expectations passed off as the true face of our national beast.

As a commenter on Kevin Church’s site pointed out, it’s a bastardized version of an old Michael Moore spiel. Moore’s argument was that there is a huge pool of sympathy for classically liberal ideas among the “unwashed masses,” but the political elites need to leave their ivory towers and speak to – not “down to” – these people. It’s a valid idea, proved by the results of Howard Dean’s full court press strategy for the 2006 congressional elections, but it has a very specific context. It boils down to (in my words, not Moore’s): “We are not so different, you and I. Not nearly as different as those billionaire motherfuckers who exploit your religious convictions in order to push more tax cuts for themselves through congress.” (Yeah, yeah, the Democrats are no great shakes, either, but I’ll take “inept” over “evil” any day of the week.)

As presented in Frontline, the argument isn’t about the dangers of being out of touch, but as a false dichotomy between idealism and realism: “How dare you disrupt the shitty world I had grown comfortable with, when you can’t even name a single contestant on American Idol!” I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me that when I “grew up,” I’d evolve past my idealism and accept how “the world works.” I’m going to turn 35 in two weeks, and it hasn’t happened yet. If anything, my idealism has grown stronger over time. It’s has been tempered by empirical factors, but the underlying convictions remain rock solid. That pressure to accept the status quo strikes me as the evangelizing of the shoulder-shrugger, the whimper of a whipped dog attempting to justify why it wears a leash and collar.

I’m all for the common touch, but anyone who tries to define their “Americanism” by mass culture trends of the moment, and not by ideals is a fucking dipshit. Even as a counter-point in a work of disposable fiction, it’s beneath contempt. The only thing that could have made it more embarassing would have been to have a Greek chorus of 9/11 first responders echoing the sentiments in the background. Given Marvel's willingness to exploit or hamfistedly emote over (U DECIDE!) the events of that day, I'm surprised they didn't take that route.

Toxic Reasons – God Bless America (from Kill By Remote Control, 1984)

The Checkers – Seeing Spots (from Make a Move, 2003)