Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Nixon Destroys JSA, JFK (per ad in NYT)

A couple very rich, very insane guys took out a highly-expensive two-page ad in the New York Times today, the spread just prior to the editorials, to explain the truth about the JFK assassination, with the funniest paragraph being the third from the bottom in the first column, which lists everyone you can imagine, in the first sentence, as conspirators (from LBJ to Life magazine, I kid you not) — then follows it with one short sentence saying “President Richard M. Nixon was also involved.” It’s almost as if they forgot to list him in the prior sentence.

Coincidentally, I was recently reminded that it is canon in the history of DC Comics’ fictional universe that “The Man Who Defeated the Justice Society [of America],” that is, the government bureaucrat who forced the world’s first superhero team (including Wonder Woman, the Atom, etc.) to break up for decades by pressuring them, in his capacity as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to reveal their secret identities, was none other than Richard Nixon (identified by his distinctive profile though not by name). Given that the Justice Society formed in the first place at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt, I’d say it’s safe to say that even superhero comics are part of the liberal media conspiracy, as I may one day explain in a two-page letter to the New York Times, depending on how my investments fare.

4 comments:

Peg Fikes said...

Is there a link to the ad?

Todd Seavey said...

It may be a sign of the writers’ non-linear thinking that their text is not easily accessible online, nor their company’s website functioning, but the second comment at this URL resembles some text from today’s ad:

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid31507.aspx

And since they spent a fair amount of time denouncing _Washington Post_ editors for stringing them along and failing to return some of their mailed-in research (that part I can easily believe — bigtime media folk are selfish users), MediaBistro notes the whole thing here, reprinting a couple paragraphs from the ad:

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/newspapers/a_beautiful_mind_takes_on_ben_bradlee_64164.asp

Jacob T. Levy said...

Is it canon? Wasn’t that from America vs. the JSA, which was pre-COIE and prominently involved Batman-2?

(Even apart from the whole “nothing published before last June is canon” problem, of course.)

Todd Seavey said...

Actually, given the whole continuity-revision minefield, I should perhaps have made it more clear that I simply meant “they really depicted it that way” (and there’s no reason yet to think it’s been undone, since it was depicted in the late-70s JSA series, not just _America vs. the Justice Society_, and was not thus dependent on an appearance by the original Batman). As far as we know, the JSA still broke up (for a long time) in 1951 under HUAC pressure, so most likely Nixon still gets at least part of the blame — as he does for driving some free-marketeers out of the Republican Party and into the then-new Libertarian Party, but that’s a topic for another entry, such as this one: http://toddseavey.com/2007/08/01/mr-fusion-ron-paul/

On a related note, I notice that not even Wikipedia (at the time of this comment) mentions that the original Batman — and for all the convoluted things that DC Comics has done to its fictional history, the “Earth-2″ Batman was undeniably the original — died at the hands of villains named Bill Jensen and the Soul Thief. Have we forgotten the classics in this society?