Retro-Journal: Picking the Lesser of Two Evils in Early 2004

This week, in mid-2008, brought our Debate at Lolita Bar about Bob Barr, seen above with yours truly in an anti-Clinton t-shirt that’s likely to be outdated soon, possibly even today. The same day as the debate, Clark Caldwell of CBS shot a vlog of Barr’s reaction to the possibility of Hillary Clinton as a vice presidential candidate, and Caldwell expects to post a fuller Barr piece next week.

By contrast, in early 2004, libertarians were starting to argue about whether Bush’s reelection would be a disaster or the less evil of the two most likely outcomes. Or less evil and a disaster.

Politics is the art of the possible, and even among radical libertarians, it’s hard to find a candidate who agrees with all my views — I wouldn’t even necessarily vote for myself, since I’m inclined to think a good candidate requires a more thorough nuts-and-bolts knowledge of existing law and regulations than I possess, not having gone to law school. (Even a roomful of avowedly Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists might disagree on, say, abortion or immigration, not to mention the countless topics that libertarians definitely don’t think fall within the scope of law, like art and religion, but about which they certainly have varying private opinions.)

The main idea of libertarianism, though — you might almost say the only idea, so it shouldn’t be hard to wrap one’s mind around even if you disagree — described in a practical, game-theoretical way as opposed to a lofty metaphysical way (since metaphysics invites confusion and creative reinterpretation), is that individuals have strict property rights that should never (or almost never and only in the most dire emergency circumstances) be violated. This is not (at least in the most sophisticated formulations of the philosophy) so that individuals can exist in some metaphysically pristine, inherently morally superior state of independence, like Romantic sculptures representing Freedom placed upon pedestals, but rather so that interference with market processes is minimized: Instead of violence and mob rule and centralized autocracy, individuals trade in accord with their own preferences, each person saying yes or no to a proposed exchange based on whether he thinks he’d be made better or worse off than if the trade did not occur. Repeat ad infinitum and watch individuals’ utility, on balance, tend to increase as efficiency gains are constantly made.

•••

No one is omnipotent or infinitely wealthy in the scenario, but at least all exchanges are ones deemed mutually beneficial by the trading parties, whereas in any non-libertarian arrangement, by definition, people are coerced to make “trades” they do not think will make them better off (such as paying taxes to fund services that could more efficiently be performed privately or that shouldn’t be funded at all) and, perhaps even more tragically, are prevented from making trades they would find beneficial (and that might set precedents for innovative new ways of doing things that open up new possibilities for other observers). Every deviation from a state of secure property rights, then, is a loss for utility/happiness (in a long-term, process-maintenance sense), a squelching of human will and preference — and to the extent a libertarian ventures into the morass of electoral politics, he’s trying to reduce violations of property rights and nudge things toward a property rights regime.

The Republicans deviate from property rights in numerous ways but until very recently had at least sounded as if their long-term goal (though repeatedly delayed by circumstances like the Iraq War), unlike the Democrats’, was a reduction in the size of government and the encouragement of a more market-based society. That’s arguably no reason to see the Republicans as preferable to the Libertarian Party, but with the LP marginal and sometimes needlessly crazy, you can’t blame libertarians for instead playing the game of picking between the two major parties, reluctantly putting up with wrongs like the drug war or distracting religious rhetoric in hopes of steering things in a slightly-less-socialist, slightly more property-respecting direction. Nothing’s perfect (conservatives and liberals usually don’t call their candidates “perfect,” and it’s not clear libertarians are being any more hypocritical by picking some least-bad viable option).

Then, too, some of us long hoped for the spread of “fusionist” thinking, in which conservatism would be yoked to libertarianism in such a way that conservatism is tamed, as it were (sticking closer to free-market principles than to religious or military authoritarianism), while libertarianism gained broader appeal through piggy-backing on a far, far more popular movement. This strategy not only made historical sense, given how much overlap there has been between, say, the staffs of conservative and libertarian magazines and thinktanks, but makes a fair amount of philosophical sense: There is no need to violate property rights to admire tradition (you can even be a religious fanatic without violating property rights, if you insist), while there are countless reasons to think creeping socialism is a threat to bourgeois, Western civilization as we have known it.

On a more practical, immediate level, there really is a significant subset of Republicans and conservatives (very unhappy ones these days) that wants smaller government and laissez-faire economics, while the Democratic Party and the left more generally are largely defined by their desire to maintain or expand government programs, rail against capitalist excess, aid unions with anti-market regulations, redistribute income, etc., etc. Republicans like capitalism but don’t go far enough, while Democrats often see righting the supposed wrongs of capitalism through beneficent government action as their primary reason for being involved in politics.

Now, we may have reached the point where the difference between the two parties is too small to be worth worrying about, but any libertarian who claims to see no historical reason for a natural sympathy for the right over the left is either lying, ignorant, or highly irrational.

•••

None of that means that Bush was necessarily a wise gamble in 2000 or 2004, of course, though his efforts to partially privatize Social Security and Medicare and cut taxes were clearly ones libertarians could respect, as far as they went (which wasn’t far). Whether things that were meant to be short-term deviations from that agenda, such as toppling Saddam, were such egregious mistakes as to warrant tipping the balance of libertarian support in favor of the Democrats is debatable, but it is natural that libertarians first ask “How are the Republicans doing?” when looking to the two parties for tiny glimmers of hope, rather than expecting much good to come from the Democrats — aside from counterbalancing the excesses of the Republicans (and some libertarians were already rooting for divided government and thus a Kerry victory in 2004, while others would despair of the Republicans only later and root for divided government in the form of the Republicans losing Congress in 2006 — and I was still hoping for the Republicans to prevail, come to their senses, and accomplish some sort of useful market-based reform if they won in 2006, only giving up around…now).

We can disagree about strategy and the proper level of optimism or pessimism — and can even disagree about how heavily to weigh different deviations from property-adherence in a complex utility calculus (one in which the value of political allegiances for future reform efforts must itself be weighed, so that today’s idiocy by an ally may be partly redeemed by the ally’s strategic usefulness for more important policy battles ahead). But that needn’t imply some contradiction of basic libertarian principles. The existence of the government (not to mention decentralized property violations such as burglary and, crucially, terrorism) is the real violation of libertarian principle, and all electoral political action is a desperate defensive action. We should not begrudge victims the right to attempt defensive actions, especially ones aimed at decreasing rather than increasing coercion, relative to the other likely outcomes.

In an idealized right/left political world (which is not the one we live in, admittedly), the right has an obnoxious but short list of things it’d like to control — basically, some aspects of sex (that are largely unpolicable anyway) — while the terrifying, blandly totalitarian list of things the left would like to tax, regulate, or otherwise control is literally endless: There is simply no form of human behavior, from telecommunications to medicine to home-building to car manufacture to the use of food coloring, that the left does not see as benefiting from increased regulation. The left is where libertarian hopes, weak at the best of times, go to die. If readers want to do me a favor, in fact, vow never to speak sympathetically of the left in my presence ever again.

At the same time, a certain condescension toward the right is acceptable and indeed is now necessary. Bush does not seem to have been a gateway to small-government fusionism between the right and libertarianism. Perhaps now, four years later, it’s time to make a radical, quixotic statement in favor of such fusion by voting for (ex-Republican, now-Libertarian) Barr, though rational people (and irrational ones) can certainly disagree.

•••

Luckily, though, 2004 wasn’t all politics. Just as I’d seen Human League, Billy Idol, Psychedelic Furs, Paul Weller, and White Stripes concerts in the latter half of the previous year, in 2004 I saw the Fall in concert for a second time — having discovered the amazing band Magnapop (who are a bit like a cross between the Go-Go’s and Dinosaur Jr.) as the opening act when I’d first seen the Fall years earlier. Meanwhile, a growing number of friends were writing books, including Kyle Smith’s Love Monkey and Caren Lissner’s Starting from Square Two. And Lefty Leibowitz founded the Gotham Girls roller derby league, part of the eclectic batch of activities that would leave him too busy to run the barroom debate series he’d created a few years earlier with LB Deyo, who moved to Austin, TX in 2003. That would leave me and moderator Michel Evanchik to run the show starting in 2005 — but before that point, we have a very heated election to relive, in next week’s Retro-Journal installment.

Barr Debate Afterthoughts

Two thoughts about Bob Barr, one of the figures discussed — and one of the audience members in attendance – at our historic Debate at Lolita Bar last night:

1. A recent Rasmussen poll puts him at 6% already — even though only about a third of the population have heard of him, which in a way makes the 6% even more impressive.

2. He looks vaguely like someone else in disguise — or like I’ve seen some movie with a German spy character or amiable country doctor that resembles him or something…or maybe an amiable country doctor who is actually a German spy. Can’t quite put my finger on it.

P.S. I’m told he was involved with the CIA in some capacity, so he may simply be one of those “grey men” Robert Ludlow writes about who seem to blend in too easily to be real — but I’ll probably be voting for him in November nonetheless, and he seems to me like a genuine convert to the cause, as we all were at some point, except for the rare few who were born this way. I won’t hold earlier DOMA-promotion and drug-warring against him, just as I wouldn’t have wanted anyone back in 1991 to doubt my libertarian credentials because I’d been pro-drug-war (out of a desire to combat reason-warping mental degeneration) four years earlier in high school.

P.P.S. I loaned him my copy of the July Reason to read on the plane back home — having brought it mainly as a prop to wave around while telling the audience that next time we’ll have a panel of women who’ve sold their eggs, including Reason editor Kerry Howley — so join us July 22.

Pre-Debate Thought

A side question on my mind during the lead-up to the debate I’m hosting tonight about the relative merits of John McCain and potential spoiler Bob Barr:

Might paleoconservatives (especially if Edwards ends up on the Dem ticket, though Hillary as v.p. seems increasingy inevitable) see even Obama, never mind Barr, as a more pious, populist, and antiwar candidate than McCain?  Indeed, might we yet see, say, Pat Buchanan endorsing Obama?  (I predict Buchanan’ll endorse Barr, actually, but if he were to express an opinion on the two major-party candidates, I wonder what he’d say.)

We know that even some moderately-conservative and/or libertarian folk sympathize with Obama to some degree, such as Manhattan Institute ethno-linguistic analyst John McWhorter, McCain critic Matt Welch, and self-contradicting post-hawk Andrew Sullivan.  It seems not just that many people like Obama but, more eerily, that many people want to like Obama, which makes him more of a political vortex.  I remain immune.

Book Selection of the Month: "Sources of the Self" by Charles Taylor

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (June 2008): Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor

Not to be confused with the authoritarian former president of Liberia recently put on trial, this Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher sometimes considered a communitarian who, five years after Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (which was one of my Book Selections last year), addressed similar themes of modern moral fragmentation and the search for shared standards of the Good, in the 1989 tome Sources of the Self (which I read at the suggestion of Richard Ryan, to whom I in turn recommended last month’s Book Selection, Final Crisis, which some may see as a less substantial work, but Richard shares my excitement about it). Taylor also wrote last year’s A Secular Age (a skeptical review of which is noted by Taylor’s fellow McGill professor Jacob Levy here — Jacob was present the first time I ever heard of Taylor, nearly two decades ago, from a very skeptical Tom Palmer, a libertarian who sees Taylor as hellbent on forcing us all to abandon our individual lives in favor of Athenian-style collective participation).

Since Taylor has run for office as a social democrat in Canada, I expected this book to be more political than it was: I assumed his long description of Western civilization’s trek from communal and spiritual life to individualistic and materialistic/inward-looking life would end in a lament that only socialist/democratic participatory politics can save us from atomization — a view largely the opposite of my own, but still one for which I have some small modicum of sympathy, since I think communal and traditional bonds are perfectly natural and can indeed be forgotten in the hectic flurry of modern capitalism — I just don’t think government should have any role in addressing that problem, nor indeed that government should exist.

The Amish are not “individualists,” but they are certainly not pro-government totalitarians or socialists as a result. And the same might be said of some old-fashioned left-anarchists, I might add. Why not simply take a determinist rather than free-will-individualist view of character formation but see government as more brutally deforming than, say, advertising or whatever comparatively mild complaint the left currently has?

But that’s not what Taylor’s book is about, really. It’s a description of how (ironically) even as Westerners have increasingly mastered the natural world and structured life around instrumental rationality instead of the divine cosmic order, our culture and philosophy have increasingly focused on psychological interiority (not just since the Romantics or since Freud but even, with increasing force, throughout the longer and older development of theology). I was just about ready to write off this mix of ancient-Greek and modern-Continental philosophy as a 500-page historical descent from lofty metaphysical speculations to the harsh, barren ground of twentieth-century philosophizing about language, spectatorship, and other things that get very fuzzy in a mostly-unproductive way if looked at too closely, when Taylor surprised me by bringing it all together in the final pages with a moral-political warning after my own heart.

•••

On those rare, quiet occasions when I have time to explain myself fully instead of just sounding like one more partisan warrior, my real meta-political concern is that in a world of political factions each deeply invested in its own assumptions and founding myths — and having built vast edifices upon them — we have very little hope of coming up with some commonly agreed-upon means of settling big political disputes or compromising about them (where we should), since compromising just isn’t what we’ve been training our ideologues to do for the past few centuries.

That, in more high-faluting terms than usual, is why I’m fascinated by political and cultural hybrids of one sort or another and why I think the most sophisticated political philosophies are usually the ones that contain some awareness of their own limitations and strive to be not just sets of right answers but formulas for brokering truces, as it were. Fancy and sophisticated as we humans sometimes get, let it never be forgotten that we live in a world where plenty of people’s first impulse upon encountering irreconcilable differences is to herd the enemy into death camps, get out the machetes, declare jihad, or at least invoke imagery from the Book of Revelation (or Earth in the Balance) and demonize the enemy.

There has to be a better way, as your average-yet-civilized, non-ideological Joe senses, which is why people who sound like bridge-building hybrids of some sort sometimes find themselves with political clout, as in the cases of Obama and McCain, for all their underlying flaws and important differences. If we must be ruled, we’d rather not be ruled by people who seem too one-sided. Of course, to most people unfamiliar with libertarianism, that probably seems like a narrow, extremist creed, but it can be thought of as the ultimate moderate compromise: Everyone take your hands off the weapon that is the state and back away from it simultaneously, never to wield it against your political foes ever again. (Though putting it in that pacifistic way sounds, on a mere rhetorical level, very unlike the aggressive tone of Rand, more like the flexible tone of a Hayek or Nozick — but I shouldn’t make Rand sound too harsh: odd as it may seem, Rand’s writings and Martha Nussbaum’s lectures simultaneously contributed to making me a bit more Aristotelian/pragmatic and a bit less Platonic/absolutist in college.)

•••

Given:

(a) how inhuman and obscurantist the writings of people like the deconstructionists are,

(b) how simply godawful and fanatical the writings of Marx himself are,

and (c) how angry and alienating the whole protestor-leftist, smash-everything type of books you see in specialty leftist bookstores (and college campuses) is,

it’s sometimes surprising to me how familiar and approachable leftist, socialist, or communitarian-inclined writers like Richard Sennett and MacIntyre and Taylor sound — even the Frankfurt School Marxists at times. That’s partly because they’re drawing on conservative, traditional sources like Aristotle and religion, so they talk about weighty things like character development and heroism and finding purpose in life in a way that plenty of modern liberals would find uncomfortable but nonetheless jibes neatly with the way most ordinary people talk about life’s tensions and their own psychology.

That in no way vindicates their statist policy prescriptions, mind you, but it makes the possibility of dialogue with them seem more real. I feel I could talk to Charles Taylor about the pursuit of happiness — for all his condemnations of utilitarianism and “everyday life” — in a way that I could not hope to talk to Michel Foucault, for example (not to mention Karl Marx, who would no doubt quickly peg me — quite rightly — as bourgeois in my hopes for a happy, prosperous, secure human race).

What Taylor admirably dreams of doing at the end of Sources of the Self is finding some way to acknowledge that we have a checklist of priorities — utility, individual expression, adherence to tradition, respect for nature — that simply cannot all simultaneously be taken to extremes without contradicting other parts of our complex cultural/philosophical inheritance. We’ve got to find a way to talk about them all as admitted goods but perhaps incommensurable goods instead of pretending that proving one of these things to be good is license to dismiss the others completely or even label them evil (or at least obstacles). Note that I still maintain all this can be done without government, which would make me a hopelessly stubborn extremist in some people’s eyes — but then again, don’t assume you know what “moderation” and “a middle ground” has to look like. It may not require government any more than it requires, say, a king.

•••

Taylor treats as three separate moral axes the following: (1) utility/rules, (2) rich descriptions of the good life/lives, and (3) the respect/recognition owed persons by the nature of broadly-shared self-definitions. Much like MacIntyre, who was writing just a few years earlier, Taylor denigrates the dryness and empty rationalism of #1 in favor of the more-traditional, tribal #2, though he adds his own complex plug for #3 being important as well.

I hate to sound like a dry, rational #1 guy, but it seems to me that most of #1’s shortcomings can better be overcome by simply collapsing #2 into #1, seeing rich descriptions of good ways to live as things that make the ultimate goal (the outside metric he scoffs at), utility (i.e., happiness), achievable. A world where people received no wisdom from their forbears and peers besides the vague injunction “Go be happy” would indeed be an empty and odd one, but just because we value details of life such as inherited tradition, geographic rootedness, ethnic or gendered self-definitions, etc. doesn’t mean happiness ceases to be the thing that ultimately matters. If these other things are valuable, I still contend it is precisely because they make people happy (on balance, over the long haul, usually, we think). Cultural and psychological nuances enrich and inform utilitarian and rights-based thinking but need not eliminate such thinking.

Taylor argues that moral arguments should not be about measuring life by some impersonal, ahistorical metric such as utility but rather about ongoing efforts to improve our moral perspective through shifts from position A to position B, as we reorient ourselves and our moral intuitions through argument and the experience or careful consideration of specific moral problems. I think he confuses the purposes of moral philosophy with the far, far more important purpose of morality itself, though — as one might expect a philosophy professor to do.

Humanity doesn’t desperately need moral philosophy, except when it gets moral thinking wrong (which is admittedly a frequent occurrence, but that is a contingent fact, not a fundamental aspect of moral thinking, I’d argue). What humanity does need desperately is morality itself, and the better the moral rules are by the abstract metric of utility, the more we will flourish. Reconciling our intuitions is secondary. Better a human race, in other words, that remains very confused about the basis of morals but enforces the rule “Don’t murder” than a human race that debates, argues, philosophizes, reconciles theories, and decides at the end of the day to kill someone.

Again: the purpose of morality is to prevent harm and foster happiness, not to make our thoughts jibe neatly, important though that latter function may seem to a philosophy professor (and to philosophy buffs like me). It is a sort of academic elitism to think that the grand conversation of moral philosophy is more important than the functional, practical rules that keep people from getting mugged and raped.

This point is closely related, really, to my reasons for instinctively preferring conservatism to liberalism — bizarre as that may sound, given that I’m the one defending abstract metrics and Taylor is the one defending rich cultural embeddedness. But my recurring underlying point — in political, religious, scientific, and moral arguments — is that reconciling ourselves to real-world consequences and empirical facts is more important than mastering “theory” of any sort. If you achieve some metaphysical stunt like reconciling Rawlsian models of fairness and Marxist dialectics, or achieve some religious-apologetic stunt like reconciling the existence of evil with a pantheistic reformulation of Christianity, it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is the real world, made of dirt, gas, human flesh, bullets, buildings, viruses, and plywood. Describe that world accurately — in ways that everyone could in principle verify — and give us practical rules by which the average person can navigate that world, and you’ve done a good deed. Get lost in the realm of theory — or even the self-justifying realms of legal precedent, constitutional doctrine, or other political processes — and you’ve simply handed rule of everyday life over to one or another mysterious priesthood — likely lawyers, legislators, or college professors of some sort.

Morality is not an armchair exercise for comfortable intellectuals — it is the set of rules by which we keep savages from setting your house on fire and by which we discourage the guy in the next office from taking credit for your work. Everyday life, which Taylor explicitly denigrates as a moral standard, really should trump the dreams of philosophers, the theories of liberal academics, and, yes, thank goodness, the grandiose and brutal premodern/non-utilitarian warrior creeds and so forth that helped keep humanity miserable for so long. Long live the bourgeoisie and the pragmatic rules that keep it safe and prosperous, theoretical objections notwithstanding!

•••

Jeez, over 2,200 words and, as usual, I feel guilty for barely scratching the surface, but I’ll leave it all there for now (Taylor shares my Beckett-like anxiety about never have said enough to cover all my bases, by the way, but could use a dash more of my contrary fear, admittedly weaker, about rambling on too long).

If, after reading all that, you need a dose of anti-philosophical writing, by the way, here, from two years ago, is one of the funniest essays on political philosophy I have ever read, if you can laugh at a McCain foreign policy advisor lightheartedly explaining, as Robert Kagan does, why “I Am Not a Straussian.” And if you have strong feelings about McCain one way or the other, of course, you must attend the Debate at Lolita Bar I’m hosting tomorrow night at 8.

Laugh at Hillary Clinton While There's Still Time

With this week being the time when Democratic leaders — crucially, leaders other than Hillary Clinton — have said people should make up their minds between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, we may not have HRC to kick around much longer. That’s why I’m wearing my anti-Hillary t-shirt (“Re-Defeat Communism [in] 2008”) at every opportunity — such as when I host this Wednesday’s Debate at Lolita Bar between Avery Knapp and Ken Silber about whether conservatives and libertarians should vote for Bob Barr or John McCain, a Nader/Gore-like battle leftists could learn from as well.

A fading Hillary also means you should hurry up and read Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing, and Suspect Musing of Billary, edited by (rare) conservative comedienne Julia Gorin. Then again, if comedy = tragedy + time, we may laugh even harder at Hillary in years hence. I know I’m hoping my “2008” anti-HRC shirt will have retro-kitsch value once 2009 rolls around and someone else is inaugurated as president.

And whether that someone else is Obama, McCain, Barr, Nader, or whoever the Greens pick, it will still be someone who I expect to lie less and commit fewer crimes than Hillary would, though that’s not saying much. The Gorin book reminds me, for instance, that Hillary claimed to have no role in or knowledge of the pardons scandal — or her brother being involved in it — aside from being handed envelopes that she just sort of, you know, passed on to other people, as First Ladies constantly do without asking what they contain. And we’re surprised when she claims to have dodged bullets in Bosnia, to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, or to think it’d be undemocratic if her Florida and Michigan delegates weren’t seated?

If America doesn’t know when to take out trash like this — like Pepper Potts ousting Tony Stark’s Brown-alum one-night stand — we may deserve dictators.

P.S. I was flattered that a couple I know — the male a fellow Brown alum but not prone to one-night stands or haranguing Iron Man — say Tony Stark reminds them of me. Not that Stark is entirely admirable, mind you, but given his arch-capitalist/reformer, cynic/do-gooder, and hawk/dove tensions, I could be compared to far worse characters. Like the Mandarin. Or the Living Laser.

Epilogue to the Month of the Nerd: Final Crisis

Just as nerds typically juggle several mythologies in their heads — Marvel, animean, Narnian, UFOlogical, to take this month’s four big filmic examples — any fantasy universe with multiple writers is likely to show many mythological influences. Grant Morrison went a step further with the first issue of the comic book Final Crisis, though, and seems to be very consciously (and subtly, given the usual jumbled tone of such comics) blending several major real-world mythologies along with the comic book ones (especially given what we know about plans to have all of Earth’s heroes face a choice in the middle of the series about whether to “Submit” or “Resist,” as two of the spin-off comics are titled). The following should all ring a bell for readers of issue #1 (and doesn’t really give away much explicitly for those who haven’t):

•Hopi: At a time of transition from the Fourth World to the Fifth World, after the skies have been rendered black and red, when a choice must be made between living in earthly time and living in a seductive time-beyond-time, the White Brother appears, transformed, before the Fire Clan, who recognize him from ancient symbols — but a blue figure (a living star) also appears, to naive children, and eventually removes his mask in a public plaza.

•Greek: Fire becomes the first weapon given to man that can be wielded against the gods (though it can also do terrible harm, as Martians and smokers know — Morrison’s point, not the Greeks’ — though I will note a dual meaning in the “God of War” title for issue #1 that he must have had in mind — with a little Spear of Destiny vibe thrown in, which leads us to…).

•Christian: The great seducer who fell from Heaven will finally demand that each of us choose whether to take the Mark of the Beast…

•Nietzschean: …which in this case means a choice between Life and Anti-Life.

•Norse (but also perhaps a famous, oft-drawn-upon, unpublished pitch from comics writer Alan Moore): All of this takes place during a Twilight of the Gods/Superheroes (the depressingly cyclical Ragnarok when the gods die and are born again in fire and ice) — and in DC mythos specifically, the Spear of Destiny has both Crucifixion and Ragnarok resonances, something DC may have gotten from the Nazis.

Then, too, invoking New Gods, Monitors, and the villain Libra in all this obviously means blending ideas from Jack Kirby, Marv Wolfman, and Len Wein (who also created Marvel’s Wolverine), respectively, but then comics do that six times before breakfast even on a normal day (and throwing in the Green Lantern Corps means drawing heavily upon the Lensmen novels of E.E. “Doc” Smith, but if we really started tracing every hack influence on comics, we’d be here all day, sort of like trying to list all of George Lucas’s influences, from Flash Gordon to Edgar Rice Burroughs).

•••

And it’s not just my sick mind but Morrison’s as well (and detective Turpin’s in his line about “something sick and sad with whips and leather” perhaps going on in the S&M-like setting of Club Dark Side) that also foresees something sado-masochistic in the impending choice in Final Crisis about whether to resist or submit — to evil gods one of whom is named DeSaad, after all.

In this added layer of perverse allusion, Morrison (an admitted dabbler in cross-dressing) seems to be following in the footsteps of the Wachowski Siblings (who may have ripped off elements of his Invisibles comics for The Matrix, so it’s only fair), whose most brilliant achievement — for all Speed Racer’s, V’s, and lesbian gangster-fighters’ charms — remains the fact that the Matrix movies manage to be interpretable as emphatically Platonic, Christian, Gnostic/Estian, Buddhist, Asian-pop, computational, and, yes, S&M all at the same time. My media-professor friend Read Schuchardt notes the prevalence in the Matrix movies of characters like the white-clad and androgynous Morpheus associate named Switch, for instance, whose name suggests electronics and hacking but is also apparently slang for people willing to be either submissive or dominant in S&M. Similarly, Neo dies and is resurrected to save us all but also liberates everyone from life in the cave (as Plato hoped to) and does so through the Zen-like realization that “there is no spoon” — but enough about the Matrix.

•••

If we want to know how Final Crisis is likely to end, I say average together the outcomes of Norse, Christian, Hopi, Greek, and DC legends and see what you get — combined with Morrison’s recurring hope that humanity will evolve together to the next level, overcoming dualities, however you interpret that. (I’d settle for a truce where we stop using force against each other and more fully embrace capitalism and science, but I don’t want to go all messianic on you.)

Given that Morrison, unlike some people, clearly prefers the chaos of a multiverse full of possibilities to the rigid order of a single, perfect fictional reality, I wouldn’t be surprised if all this ends with the Monitors, like the Linear Men before them, learning that no tidy system built around one universe (or even fifty-two) can encompass all our wondrous options — and that periodic Crises can only be overcome by embracing the megaverse of infinite possibilities (but also real time and real change).

And I doubt Dan Didio was joking when he said the 3D spin-off comic Final Crisis: Superman Beyond would involve Superman painting his eyes red and blue so that he, too, can see in 3D — that’s simply too Morrisonian an idea not to be real, and if the fourth dimension is time in our world, perhaps seeing in 3D if you’re a 2D being on a comics page means suddenly being able to perceive the whole multiverse, while also evoking the old Superman Red/Superman Blue doppelganger story (itself likely inspired by the mid-century split of NBC, at monopoly-fearing federal behest, into NBC Red and NBC Blue, later spawning NBC and ABC — ah, if only the feds would instead make political parties fission once in a while, then things would get interesting, but more on that later in the week, as the Dems try to settle the Clinton/Obama issue and our Debate at Lolita Bar settles the Barr/McCain issue).

•••

One continuity quibble about the Wachowskis’ version of Speed Racer reality, by the way, though it doesn’t ultimately matter one bit given how much more important visuals are than plot in that beautiful film: it seems to take place in the near future, since Mr. Royalton recalls working with a Commodore 64 computer as a child, but one of the men who raced in the oft-invoked big race of 1943 appears to Speed in the locker room — and would have to be roughly a century old but sure doesn’t look it. Maybe the very near future will perfect plastic surgery, though. And after all, Susan Sarandon is holding up remarkably well over thirty years after The Rocky Horror Picture Show — and Christina Ricci still seems to have barely reached adulthood, something that might also be said of a lot of nerds, I suppose.

Perhaps the continuity glitch is a side effect of the movie being set partly in an alternate future-for-us and partly in an alternate future-for-1960s-Japanese-writers, who created the original animated series. The Wachowskis may have flat-out forgotten that the characters displayed nostalgia for the mid-twentieth century at one point, as a 1960s series set in the near future easily might, and implied a world circa 2020 at another. These things happen in movies with multiple script drafts, you know, even with millions of dollars at stake and lots of people paying attention.

Nonetheless, I think I will ultimately look back upon Speed Racer as the most important and visionary of the Month of the Nerd’s four big films, even while the Iron Man, Narnia, and Indiana Jones franchises go on to make billions of dollars.

UPDATE 6/2/08: Here’s an unexpected tie between Narnia and Speed Racer, by the way: Trixie (or rather, Christina Ricci) has an Aslan tattoo on her right shoulder (not that you see it in the film). I’m also told she once urinated on the floor of a restaurant while drunk, though, which is hardly good Christian behavior — maybe she was trying to bond with the creatures her pals at PETA claim to protect.

UPDATE 6/3/08: Speaking of odd connections, I certainly never expected a connection between the Wachowski lesbians-vs.-gangsters movie mentioned above and Hillary Clinton’s collapse as a prez candidate, but there are reports today that some HRC supporters were concerned about Bill Clinton romancing women on the campaign trail — and perhaps being involved with Gina Gershon, who played one of the Wachowski’s lesbian gangster-fighters in Bound.

Ultimate Nerd Day

Nerd culture, which I’ve celebrated all month long on this blog and will cap off today by rewatching the month’s four big nerd film releases, has different tiers, if I may deploy something akin to Marxist class analysis.

•There are “low” nerd-culture manifestations such as the performance of the ongoing, episodic play/variety show Rev. Jen’s Really Cool Neighborhood that I saw Wednesday night. Don’t get me wrong, Lower East Side comedienne/performance artist/author Rev. Jen is always at least Vulcan-fabulous in her fake elf ears — and dressed for a 60s time travel sketch this week looked downright Romulan-fabulous — but I honestly think some of the performers or open-mic participants surrounding her have real mental illnesses or heroin habits, possibly both. I counted myself lucky to be seated safely in the fourth row between a chihuahua and a friend dressed as a homicidal nun (it’s fascinating to me, by the way, how dogs can tell when things are weird, even in a perpetually-weird environment like New York: chihuahua “Rev. Jen Jr.” barked like crazy at a burly dancing man in a unicorn mask and at a crowd meant to be Salem witch-hunters menacing the human Rev. Jen — and I recall that when Ali Kokmen and I carried the suit of armor I bought from Chris Whitten up the East Side years ago, at least one dog looked startled).

•There are “mainstream” nerd-culture manifestations, like the movies mentioned above, next month’s second attempt at a Hulk movie, and the July batch, as plentiful as May’s but darker (making it a month in which the Dark Nerd Returns, you might say): Hancock (which may have even more comedic potential than the ads let on, reportedly being a rather dark and perverse depiction of a superhero who just doesn’t care about looking good), Dark Knight (which should perhaps be accompanied by a comic book depicting the late Heath Ledger battling the late Brandon Lee from The Crow), Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, and against all odds a second X-Files movie, which David Duchovny once told me in a bar would have nothing to do with aliens, just before Reason’s Nick Gillespie got him to autograph a napkin addressed to “piece of shit.”

•There are “high” nerd-culture manifestations, like that exhibit of superhero-based fashion and art at the Met — fittingly, pointed out to me by someone who has a certain friend, a past Lolita Bar debater (who shall remain nameless) who was struck by how “dirty” our Lolita crowd looked — just imagine the debater’s reaction if we had Rev. Jen’s “low-nerd” pals in our crowd every time.

On the mainstream-nerd front, though, some parting thoughts about other upcoming films:

•I had my doubts from the get-go about the new M. Knight Shyamalan thriller The Happening — the hippie title, the laughably vague “people are dying everywhere” premise, and now the clincher — TV ads ominously intoning that “the director of The Sixth Sense and Signs brings you: his first R-rated film.” That sounds more like an ad for another Harold and Kumar movie. Are R-rated films a rarity now? Did Shyamalan write that ad himself — while insane and too powerful to be stopped, like George Lucas (whose older works I’ll briefly skim this morning, just to cover all my nerd bases)?

•Some doubters — I’m not naming any names — have said Watchmen could only be successfully adapted in miniseries form, but reports like this make it sound more and more like it virtually is being adapted as a miniseries, given all the extra material accompanying next year’s film. I am getting downright optimistic.

•In other news, I’m pleased that DarkHorizons also makes it sound as though next year’s Terminator movie, set in 2018 amidst the post-apocalyptic cyborg war, will really focus on that time period (as opposed to the present), with only a dash of time travel, rather than the other way around as previous films in the series have — this is progress! Brutal, metallic progress! Also, the hot lead singer of Garbage will play a recurring character on the Terminator TV show next season.

(But will the heroes in the TV show prevent the events in the movies from happening, that’s the really interesting question, one that pits one half of the franchise against the other, in a way. It’s sort of like if there were a Clone Wars cartoon series in which time-traveling Jedi had a real chance of preventing Darth Vader from being created — but I’m through with watching new Star Wars material, by the way. Enough already.)

And in conclusion, for those wishing to pursue further research on nerdism and nerdistry, I leave you with this intriguing tidbit I haven’t looked into any further:

Claudia Christian, who of course portrayed a bisexual, Russian, telepathic space station commander on Babylon 5, wrote her first published fiction, a story called “Revenge Is a Bitch to Swallow,” in a 2007 issue of the erotic comic book Forbidden Love — which I have not seen and do not own. But someone out there probably does, lurking in the shadows.

All right, I’ll end the Month of the Nerd on a slightly higher note than that: As it happens, my Arkansas legislator friend Dan Greenberg is giving a speech about the future today to some of the best kind of nerds, tech college students he’s inspiring, in part with jokes about the science vs. sorcery elements of this month’s nerd movies. Tradition and the future, together. That’s beautiful.

And the future of this blog brings…shorter entries for June — I’m exhausted.

Retro-Journal: Nerd Romance and a Nerd on Trial in Late 2003

Today was the purported unveiling of videotaped alien life (ha!) by some guy who’s been trying to inspire the creation of an office of extraterrestrial affairs in Denver, as you may have read in the “news” — and tomorrow’s the last day of this blog’s Month of the Nerd (assuming the aliens don’t take over — but we nerds would be ready for them, of course).

Five years ago, though, 2003 was the Year of the Nerd, or so I declared at the time, due to the many nerd-pleasing movies that came out then. More about the Year of the Nerd in a moment.

First, I have to note that since the Denver guy has shown a laughable reluctance to let the press record his purported alien — and since he says the footage is a brief grainy infrared night shot — I think it’s safe to say the Denver alien is as phony as the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, a hoax/joke Dave Whitney just brought to my attention — and to which I can only say “Cthulhu ftagn!” (sp?). Actually, as aesthetic nightmares go, I’ve always thought we’re fortunate octopuses and squids don’t fly, so I should shudder at the tree octopus.

While the Northwest’s octopuses may not be in the water where they belong, there’s clearly something in the water in Denver, since this year that city’s not only hosting the major gatherings for the Democrats, WorldCon sci-fi nerds, any press interested in the “alien footage,” and — just this past weekend — the Libertarian Party, it also got (as an embarrassing package deal with the Libertarian convention) talks by 9/11 Truthers and Richard Hoagland, who thinks NASA is concealing evidence of alien civilizations on multiple planets and moons, including Mars, where he famously thinks one unremarkable rock among millions looks a little like a face (you’ve probably seen it — the “face” was even the basis of an X-Files episode, the first one I ever saw, which I hated, leading me to avoid the show for a year, but which, as it happens, X-Files creator Chris Carter himself said was probably the worst episode). The late Carl Sagan once responded to Hoagland by pointing out that with millions of photographed Mars rocks to choose from, one can easily find ones that look like Kermit the Frog or just about any other damn thing you want. People love to spot patterns, even when they aren’t there (e.g., synchronicity, astrology, etc., etc.).

Anyway, Hoagland is also apparently a libertarian or at least wants to abolish NASA’s near-monopoly on space money (and on the truth!!) — and if authoritarianism in space scares him, as it should, he’d be aghast to know that the comedic moon-Nazis are coming soon — to a theatre near you, in the form of the film Iron Sky, as I just learned this week.

•••

Sigh.

1. There’s often a strong skeptical streak among libertarians (e.g., me), but there’s also a strain of what might almost be called staunch anti-skeptics in the libertarian camp, people (often from California, in my experience, arising from the same soil as the Pynchonesque happy/paranoid anarcho-hippies out there) who more or less start from the premise that whatever the Establishment doesn’t want you to believe may be worth giving serious consideration — fluoride-as-poison conspiracy theories, UFOs, a hollow Earth, CIA psychics, Oswald as robot, anything for which there’s zero evidence and no plausibility, basically.

2. In a similar and often overlapping way, I notice there is a split among freedom-lovers between those wanting to live online and those wanting to live off the grid, each m.o. having its uses. (Todd Seavey’s formula: blogging by day, blogging by night, yet no cell phone, no social-networking-sites memberships [sorry to all who've asked -- you can always e-mail], no cable TV — and maybe no TV period once the digital transition occurs, which would be fine, frankly, as I’ve gone through periods without TV before and fared OK.)

There’s a whole hippie-like libertarian wing that mainly wants freedom to do primitive things like drink raw milk (sort of like the libertarian owners of Whole Foods and a couple organic-ish friends of mine). Indeed, a raw milk seller hassled by regulators was depicted rather heroically in the last issue of Reason. Let us hope he doesn’t puke or kill someone. I think for some people freedom and living on a tiny self-sustaining plot of land without any chemical fertilizers just naturally (so to speak) seem to go together, the way that freedom and returning to a decentralized checkerboard of tiny little parish communities across England went together naturally in the mind of century-ago Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton (but more about him in December — put that on your calendar). People’s intuitions seem to split pro-modernity or anti-modernity on a lot of things. Robots for me, please.

3. In a third (and again, highly analogous) split, plenty of libertarians (me included) are arch-materialists, seeing that stance as a pretty good fit with our earthy, capitalist views (and, far more importantly, seeing it as the truth) — but, for instance, the head of the Independent Institute, David Theroux, when I met him in Vegas of all places, denounced strict materialism and argues that things like this month’s Christian-tinged Narnia movie are the perfect recruiting tools for libertarianism (he’s president of the C.S. Lewis Society of California, I now realize), precisely because spirituality, to his mind, leads people to a love of free will and dislike of earthly rulers (he’d go further and argue that materialism is logically incoherent because, to oversimplify his point a bit, determinism supposedly can’t account for freely choosing to believe in things like determinism, an argument that I, of course, find flawed — for reasons deterministically rooted in my neural makeup, for anyone doubting my consistency on this point — and, yes, historical circumstance and genetics also led me to add that last bit — and this one…).

But more about late 2003: having, only months earlier, been dumped by a born-again Christian, I was pleased to find myself dating women who were, in their very different ways, all very unlike a born-again Christian — and each of them a nerd in the best sense of the word, including: a gangly, charismatic, 5′10″, sometimes-Belgium-dwelling PR vice prez who I half-suspected may have been Bryan Ferry’s lovechild, given her mother’s long-ago involvement with that rock star, despite the daughter’s insistence on having been fathered by an expert on spiders; and, early the next year, a personal trainer and freelance science writer twenty years my senior (but also a competitive body-builder).

And I have been lucky enough to date other interesting women since: a scientist, a former White House intern, a disgruntled postal employee, and so on — stopped short of marriage by some tricky obstacle such as, more often than not, my steadfast refusal to have children (be warned). But now we may approach too close to the present and too close to recent wounds for me to say more, so let us turn away from such matters for the remaining three and a half years covered by the Retro-Journal — there is a war to talk about, after all, and the death of conservatism, issues more divisive for libertarians than even the conspiracies, unpasteurized milk, and divine powers mentioned above.

•••

But before moving on to such somber matters — and on this, the penultimate day of the Month of the Nerd — let me recount how 2003, the Year of the Nerd, ended with vindication, in court, of my nerdiness. Thanks to the ever-alert — none dare call him hyperactive — Michael Malice, who overheard (as was then his wont) some TV producers talking about needing guests for their show, he offered himself and me — as plaintiff and defendant, respectively, on the Style Channel’s show Style Court, in which one person accuses another of having a bad wardrobe. I stood accused, on national television (taped in late 2003, aired in early 2004) of dressing like a nerd and played it up a bit on the show, wearing my rarely-deployed glasses and garish Marx Brothers tie (from that brief period in the early 90s when bad ties with pictures were ostensibly a good thing).

Since neither Malice nor I actually cared about fashion (indeed, Malice had his real taste arbiter, punker Tibbie X, along in the courtroom as an advisor), we did what I contend was a masterful job of cramming as many references as possible to things we do care about into what was edited down to a seven-minute segment, done with no retakes. Malice mentioned tropical fish and Virginia Postrel’s libertarian aesthetics tome The Substance of Style, for instance. I mentioned the American Council on Science and Health, the idea of a book called Conservatism for Punks, Star Trek, my mother’s love of the ABC soap opera All My Children (a cute actress from the series was one of the “style jurors,” so I seized a “Hi, Mom” opportunity), philosophy, Looney Toons, the time I went to Limelight in the early 90s with Chris Nugent and Kyle Smith (who was told to “dress it up a little next time” by the doorman), and even the fictional character “Sebastiano,” created by my fellow Film Bulletin writer Andrew Clateman back when we were at Brown (in a poem containing such bold, Nietzschean lines as “If I were Sebastiano/ I would butt my head through the Chagall stained-glass windows, my friend” — and the unrelated interlude, as I recall, “When you’re down and feeling blue/ At the end of the eight-forked path, there’s a Buddha for you”). And it all worked in context. Again: seven minutes.

Left on the cutting room floor, alas, was me saying (in what I still think was a funny and anarchist comment), “Your honor, Michael Malice has no respect for the authority of this style court!” Also cut: Michael (after I got a verdict of not-guilty for sticking to my nerd principles and thus being aesthetically consistent) explicitly endorsing elitism and exclusion, causing the oddly peeved style judge to liken him to a Nazi (and even less plausibly, a communist), leading to the judge and Michael both revealing they’d lost relatives in the Holocaust and to Michael doing an ironic Nazi salute — probably Style Court’s first and last. They also cut some of my lines about The Substance of Style, and afterwards Postrel complained that we didn’t defend her book adequately against the judge’s dismissive comments — and like most of those who criticize Malice (such as the aforementioned born-again Christian, Dawn Eden, who’ll be just fine), Postrel now has cancer, though I do not believe in black magic.

In any case, having been officially vindicated in court five years ago as a principled and thus permissible nerd, I will feel no guilt about spending tomorrow, the final day of my Month of the Nerd and indeed the Ultimate Nerd Day, watching or rewatching all four of May’s major nerd films, mentioned at the start of each of this month’s four prior Retro-Journal entries.

Book Selection of the Month: "Final Crisis" by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (May 2008, Month of the Nerd): Final Crisis by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones

I won’t give anything away about this long-awaited seven-issue comic book miniseries written by a comics writer I blogged about on Tuesday and drawn by the artist of Wanted (which becomes a movie with Angelina Jolie and lots of machine guns this summer). I will say it’s good — not Dark Knight good or anything but more like, say, New X-Men good, which is fine.

And I won’t waste your time with continuity quibbles — I decided in advance that I like Morrison enough that I don’t care if every panel of this series rewrites a year’s worth of past DC Comics stories without explanation. Let Morrison do his thing.

I will criticize DC executive editor Dan Didio for just a moment, though: He oversaw one solid year’s worth of DC Comics output that had little real purpose other than to put pieces in place in order to make Morrison’s Final Crisis fit into continuity — in large part by having two whole series (Countdown to Final Crisis and Death of the New Gods) devoted to killing off the characters called the New Gods. For a year this was going on. A year. And yet, let’s just say, it doesn’t seem like some of the characters in Final Crisis issue #1 read those two series, or at least not that particular subplot, which in the case of Countdown, from what I’ve heard, makes them quite fortunate — but I’ll stop myself there. No looking back. No regrets. Excelsior!

The new series (about which I should say something for the uninitiated) depicts “the day evil won” in the DC Universe, with evil gods coming to take over the Earth — and its superheroes all but powerless to fight back — all of it climaxing decades worth of related “Crisis” storylines throughout DC’s history in the perfect nostalgic treat for this, my Month of the Nerd (a month in which I’ve already ready several old comics Dan Greenberg gave me, including Thriller [visionary], Cadillacs & Dinosaurs [lame output from professional comics nostalgist and continuity-obsessive Roy Thomas], Micronauts [my favorite at the time], and First Six-Pack [from the comics company Larry Doyle used to edit, long before New York magazine and even before he co-wrote comedy at National Lampoon and MTV with my then-roommate Christine Caldwell, who chucked comedy for medieval history]). The poetic high point of my Month of the Nerd comics-reading may have been an old (and, due to complex lawsuits, out of print) trade paperback of Neil Gaiman’s stint on Miracleman, also about gods taking over the Earth, albeit in a less-sinister fashion.

Were Final Crisis not such a perfect encapsulation of so many dreamt-of plotlines and resolutions and story elements from decades of my past comics reading, I swear I would not have fallen off the no-comics-buying wagon, upon which I’ve been stably seated for about a year now and to which I promise I’ll return for good once all this is over around the end of the year. I just can’t think of anything left for them to do after this that I’ve wanted to see them do for so long, plotwise. (And I’m not the only one to theorize that it all fits into a “red vs. black” masterplan in Morrison’s mind, by the way.)

•••

I’m skipping the numerous Final Crisis tie-ins, spin-offs, and companion miniseries, aside from the five-issue Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds. Like the main Final Crisis miniseries, it combines too many Todd-pleasing elements to plausibly ignore, including the villain Time Trapper, about whom I’ve blogged before (indeed, this blog was at one point recently the highest Google hit for the search “Darkseid Libra Time Trapper,” oddly enough), and the art of George Perez, who drew not only the best-known prior “Crisis” minseries, 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, but also drew the first superhero comic book I recall ever buying, Avengers #149 in 1976 (at age six), which I now realize was a Marvel homage/rip-off of DC’s “Crisis” stories (with the added thrill of demigods and a delightfully eclectic bunch of Avengers including Iron Man trussed up all Franken-bondage-like with electrodes on their heads by evil oil company captors, it being the mid-70s).

A few years later, like a lot of Gen X Marvel zombies, I’d follow Perez over to DC as he started work on New Teen Titans in 1980 — with the one other DC series I bought at the time being Legion of Super-Heroes, the very same characters he’s now drawing in this new series (including Brainiac 5, the alien super-genius who I plan to be for Halloween, and whose adventures, ironically, I was given as a reward by my parents for keeping an eye on my maternal grandmother as her mind increasingly wandered due to Alzheimer’s).

Fans have been complaining about the numerous Final Crisis spin-offs — all because the aforementioned editor, Didio, made the mistake of claiming a while back that the central Final Crisis miniseries would be “self-contained.” But it’s funny: I actually don’t think there are too many (eighteen miniseries, one-shots, or story-arcs within ongoing series — see Appendix A below). In fact, I have to admit that if I were in charge, I’d probably stick the attention-getting “Final Crisis” prefix on at least three additional miniseries DC has right now: Rann-Thanagar: Holy War, Reign in Hell, and The War That Time Forgot (maybe even the Ambush Bug parody miniseries). I mean, with Final Crisis being about a war in Heaven and disruptions in time, how hard would it have been to bring these three similarly-themed stories under the Final Crisis aegis? Will, say, Final Crisis: Revelations or Final Crisis: Rogues Revenge really be any more closely related to Darkseid, the main villain in Final Crisis? But perhaps I should admire Didio’s restraint.

•••

A few miscellaneous additional observations:

•If, as rumored, one Justice League member dies early in the Final Crisis (possibly at this odd character’s hands) and another returns later after a long absence, as may already have crossed your mind, a chance for a big reunion of the whole Justice League line-up will have been narrowly missed after a twenty-three-year wait, surely a source of frustration to some.

•My guess for Time Trapper’s destiny, incidentally: he’ll now be depicted (after years of contradictory origins) as an extremely aged Superman-Prime (he’s already whining about deserving “better than I’ve got,” is striving to eliminate the current Superman’s legacy, and is able to physically manipulate time — it would all make a certain amount of sense, and would make him not so unlike Gog from The Kingdom).

•Morrison has been depicted as a petty god himself, in the recent Doctor Thirteen miniseries that contained continuity- and metafiction-play after his own heart (and a talking Nazi vampire chimpanzee). Let us hope he does not toy with us too cruelly, or at least not ineptly, in the remainder of Final Crisis — but I’m quite optimistic (I’d be even more optimistic if they gave Morrison permission to lump every weirdo character DC has into one giant Doom Patrol, but maybe someday).

•And while I’m at it, let me add that the ad for an unrelated young-adults adventure series of novels on the back of Final Crisis #1 is one of the most brilliant one-word concepts I’ve ever seen: Vampirates. I would have high-fived myself and headed directly to Hollywood after coming up with that, and I bet it sells like hotcakes.

APPENDIX A: The components of the Final Crisis storyline, rather broadly defined

I think it’s now these nineteen bits throughout the remainder of 2008 ($$$ = ones I’ll buy or have already bought, according to my plan as of this writing):

DC Universe: Zero (prelude one-shot) $$$

Batman arcs (two of them counted as one here)
Wonder Woman arc
Infinity Inc. arc (Dark Side Club)
Teen Titans arc (Dark Side Club)
Green Lantern arc
Justice League of America issue #21 $$$
(Justice Society of America “Gog” arc, sort of) $$$

Final Crisis (the main seven-issue miniseries itself) $$$
FC Rogues Revenge
FC Legion of Three Worlds $$$
FC Revelation

DC Universe: Last Will and Testament (one-shot by thriller writer Brad Meltzer)

FC Sketchbook
FC Requiem
FC Rage of the Red Lanterns
FC Submit
FC Resist
FC Superman Beyond (two issues exploring the multiverse in 3D)

APPENDIX B: YOU THINK I’M OBSESSIVE?

I can’t resist sharing this fantastic, funny — and nicely egalitarian! — spat from the official DC Comics message boards over whether the main DC Comics Earth is “New Earth” (with “Earth-1″ being in another universe) or is in fact itself called “Earth-1″:

[JAMAL IGLE:] the name is Jamal Igle . I’m the guy who has been drawing this series for the last five months, the guy who has weekly meetings with Nachie Castro, the series editor, conversations with Dan Jurgens the series writer and meetings with Dan Didio the executive editor. New Earth is Earth 1, Tangent Earth is Earth 9. This was in the script, this has been in all the scripts. I made sure I confirmed it before I ever spoke about it. You don’t have to like it, It however is an uundeniable fact.

[FAN RESPONDING:] I deny it and I’ll continue to deny it.

As for Dan Jurgens…this is the guy who thinks 90’s Hawkman was Carter Hall (recent Booster Gold issues).

Earth 1 is NOT New Earth….too much official fiction PROVES otherwise, so I really don’t care what you say. You can also say that the current Batman is earth 2 batman disguised as earth 1, but I won’t believe it because the printed fiction says otherwise.

You guys screwed up in tangent, just admit it and move on.

Cry Tyroc and Let Loose the Legion of Super-Heroes

In honor of the start this week of DC Comics’ Final Crisis event — which will involve the Legion of Super-Heroes in August (and be this site’s Book Selection of the Month tomorrow), here is one of my favorite Wiki. passages of all time, about the Legionnaire Tyroc’s different scream-powers:

Scream effects

Among the screams in Tyroc’s arsenal:

• EEYYAAAHH! — pyrokinesis
• AHHRRRRRR! — force field
• OYYUUUUUU! — teleportation
• ARRRRHHHH! — explosions
• ZZZRRRUUGGHH! — telekinesis
• UIUUIEEEE! — transmutation
• ARRREEEEG! — weather manipulation
• IRRRRWWWW! — chlorokinesis
• CCCIIIRRR! — vertigo
• RRRYYYY! — wind manipulation

Wine and Cheese Anarchy

The New York Post noted yesterday that even a local cop disapproved of the arrest of an East Hampton art gallery owner who had the audacity to hold a wine and cheese reception for Hamptons art aficionados without having a liquor license. The crowd booed and derided the cops — who of course said they were just enforcing local laws — as they cuffed the defiant sixty-seven-year-old owner, Ruth “Vered” Kalb, in her gallery-hipster spectacles and took her away.

Now, this strikes me as one of those incidents — like a lot of the cases of intrusive government noted in the old-fashioned anarchist magazine The Match — that should just cut across ideological divides and unite everyone not simply in thinking “That sounds excessive” but in thinking “Government is complete bullshit, and we were not born to be slaves to these uniform-wearing goons.”

I mean, you know how I see it, as a libertarian — let the harmless art people consume their damn wine and cheese, just as all activities that inflict no damage on the bodies or property of others should be allowed. But how exactly do rightists and leftists — you know, that 90 or so percent of the population that thinks my philosophy is crazy — evaluate such a case?

•Do mainstream conservatives ask themselves whether wine and cheese consumption is more mainstream than, say, reefer at a dice game and thus permissible?

•Do paleoconservatives ask themselves whether wine and cheese consumption is part of the traditional local art scene in East Hampton?

•Do liberals, noting the cops’ comments about equal enforcement of the law, ask themselves whether letting the gallery off might be unfair to previously-arrested drunken hippies and other fringe figures in the area?

•Do leftists ask themselves whether the art was “outsider” or “radical” enough for the cops to constitute oppressive enforcers of bourgeois society (are they especially concerned that the place had some gay scenes on its walls)?

•Do greens want to know how the grapes were raised?

How about just reacting with outrage based on the timeless principle that humanity was not born divided into those destined to be ridden like enslaved animals and those booted and spurred, ready to do the riding?

Government is nonsense, and no “town meetings” or any other morally-irrelevant little rituals of supposed legitimization East Hampton went through before deploying its goons, no matter how popular, can make it right (contrary to what either conservative majoritarians or leftist social-democrats might claim, gussying up the principle “We outnumber you and have guns” with the democratic-era claptrap meant to distract us from the obvious fact of some people physically bossing around others).

Sometimes it’s the little incidents that put it all in perspective, and I’m just not sure I can pretend to respect non-libertarian positions at all anymore. But I promise I’ll stay civil, even when the conspirators in violent oppression, red, blue, or green, don’t deserve it one bit.

It’s things like this that make a man an anarchist…and make an anarchist a beatnik.

ADDENDUM: This being the fortieth anniversary of riotous May 1968, that beatnik reference will have to suffice as my soixante-huitard homage — but aren’t the users of force the real weetards?

Michael Moorcock vs. Grant Morrison

So my favorite comics writer, Grant Morrison (whose comic book miniseries Final Crisis sees its first issue released tomorrow and reviewed as my Book Selection of the Month on Thursday), is quoted in one article summing up what he likes about current media by asking “Have you seen the site American Dwarf?”

Intrigued and hoping for something mind-realigning, I looked for it in vain — then doublechecked his comments by looking at another transcript of the same group interview. Turns out he actually said “Have you seen the South American dwarf?” — and was apparently referring to that goddam “gnome” who made the tabloids a few months ago, a prank-playing, mask-wearing dwarf who terrified some Latin American locals by running in and out of the shadows, which is apparently all it takes to make international headlines these days.

Sigh. No American Dwarf site (as of this writing). I don’t believe in nothin’ no more. Fabricators everywhere you turn.

•••

What I was really hoping for, I suppose, was a site full of articles on weird cultural phenomena resembling the trippy things in Morrison’s comics, like the L.A. Times piece about Roky Erickson and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators from which this passage comes:

“Easter Everywhere” [their final album] was the last gasp. Though the band performed sporadically throughout 1968, Erickson was frequently absent, increasingly unhinged at the prospect of going onstage. A year later, it had fully blown apart. Sutherland was hooked on smack, Hall was dealing drugs and Erickson, whose grip on reality had slipped, was persuaded by a public defender to plead insanity to avoid hard time for possession of a small amount of pot. He was charged with offending “the peace and dignity of the state,” diagnosed as schizophrenic by the court and spent nearly four years in a maximum-security asylum. As Drummond puts it: “[T]he vision of utopia that many tried to achieve by ‘turning on’ led to a massive toxic overload by the end of the decade.” By the end of the 1970s, Sutherland was dead and Erickson had legally declared himself a Martian.

I’m no crazed, logic-bashing Situationist, obviously, but there is something to be said for reminding people real life can be as odd as sci-fi.

•••

One real-life situation odd enough to seem like, if not sci-fi, at least an exercise in metafiction, is the animosity between Grant Morrison and one of his biggest (and quite openly acknowledged) influences, fellow British writer Michael Moorcock. Now, Moorcock, much like Situationist leader Guy Debord, has encouraged a certain “open source” approach to his work, applauding people who do homages that seem almost to take place within Moorcock’s fictional multiverse, like Bryan Talbot (who wrote my favorite comic book miniseries of all time, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright). And like Guy Debord’s widow, who recently hypocritically sued people for making a Debord-based boardgame, Michael Moorcock is apparently upset that Morrison so heavily lifted elements of the Moorcock character Jerry Cornelius (who, meta-meta-ironically, is supposed to have many incarnations across the multiverse, all part of the composite being called the Eternal Champion). Two issues of Morrison’s Invisibles comic book depicted an amoral, 60s-mod adventurer resembling Cornelius but named Gideon Stargrave.

Well, since these British sci-fi types seem to thrive on grouchy confrontation instead of friendship, I humbly suggest (if Grant Morrison or someone close to him, perhaps at DC Comics, is listening) that instead of trying to patch things up with Moorcock, Morrison use the opportunity provided by the Final Crisis storyline — which touches upon three multiversal versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes (manipulated by the Time Trapper) — to drive Moorcock into a state of absolute rage by depicting Gideon Stargrave fighting a battle against 1970s Legion villain Pulsar Stargrave, a bizarre character (possibly a green-skinned man from Colu related to Brainiac 5, the character I plan to be for Halloween, but also possibly an android or living star masquerading as a relative of Brainaic 5) who looks like a cross between a disco dancer and something vaguely influenced (without sparking rage) by Moorcock book covers back when they were still cutting-edge.

Pulsar Stargrave is as bald as Morrison, so throw some Morrisonian dialogue in his mouth about him being metafictionally aware that his character’s been revised from man to machine over the years (the opposite of Maxwell Lord’s story, for those in the know — though now his transition from man to machine to man to dead is apparently all in continuity, thanks to problem-solver Geoff Johns). Then let Gideon Stargrave rage in Moorcockian fasion about wanting to wreck amoral havoc on his enemies and imitators, possibly implying in the process that Moorcock’s multiverse is but a subset of DC’s. Instant nerd inside-joke classic, and with both writers left-anarchists, probably no one hires a lawyer and sues. But then, that’s probably what the people who made the Guy De-boardgame thought.

•••

On a vaguely related note, I was pleased to see that in a chapter of Morrison’s DC One Million storyline (this one written by James Robinson), an overdue dialectical synthesis of Moorcock, Morrison, Bowie, Adam Warlock (a Marvel character influenced by Moorcock), and DC Comics’ multiverse was implicitly achieved when the Starman of the 853rd-century DC Universe turned out to have a gem on his high, teutonic forehead that made him look quite Warlock-like. Watch out for his bursts of raw synergy!

In similarly fusionist fashion, the one time I met Bryan Talbot, he told me he considered making his most famous character, the openly Moorcock-influenced Luther Arkwright, look exactly like Bowie but settled for having Bowie be mentioned briefly in the story as an off-panel assassination victim during the mounting violence and chaos in the story. I am available for the Arkwright role if anyone’s planning a local-theatre stage version, by the way. And here’s hoping that the fact that actor David Tennant of Doctor Who (and Harry Potter and Casanova and Quatermass) fame once played the character on radio increases the odds of it getting made into a movie one day — with all those alternate-universe Prussian flying machines and the like, it would be spectacular — as would the Amazonian body of another open-source character who appears in the Arkwright stories: Russian comic book heroine Octobriana, created by actual anarchist underground comics writers back in the Soviet days, a wonderful fusion of character, artistic process, and political symbol.

But speaking of political fusion (instead of just fused comic book universes), if Thursday’s Book Selection (Final Crisis) seems too fluffy for you, come back a mere week from today when my Book Selection for June will be Charles Taylor’s effort to square the circle of all modern philosophical contradictions, his opus Sources of the Self. And if you can see why efforts to reconcile communitarianism and post-Romantic individualism are analogous in my brain to efforts to explain the modern Flash’s brief presence on Earth-2, you understand me very well — and would probably get along with Morrison and Moorcock to boot.

(And the day after my Taylor review, don’t forget to watch our circle-squaring efforts at Lolita Bar, June 4 at 8pm, to determine if libertarians and others should vote for Bob Barr.)

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Should Conservatives and Libertarians Vote for Barr Instead of McCain?

Next week, Wed., June 4 (8pm), Avery Knapp (who ran the Ron Paul Meet-Up group, remains active in the movement, and is a radiologist by day) will argue yes to that question and writer Ken Silber (whose writing has appeared in Reason, TCSDaily, the Freeman, and several prominent right-leaning publications) will argue no — while interested Democrats look on to see what happens when the right develops a Nader of its own — on the basement level of 266 Broome St. at Allen St. (one block south and three west of the Delancey St. subway stop), with Michel Evanchik moderating and Todd Seavey hosting.

Today, though, Memorial Day is observed — and some might find themselves thinking of war heroes like John McCain or soldiers in Iraq and planning to vote for the Republican in November’s presidential election.

And today is also the final day of the Libertarian Party convention, and former Republican Rep. Bob Barr has emerged as their presidential nominee, with fairly mainstream libertarian sportcaster Wayne Allyn Root as his running mate — the six hundred or so delegates at the convention narrowly picking Barr over Mary Ruwart, who has suggested legalizing child pornography and investigating whether explosives were used to fake the World Trade Center collapse. (Let us never speak of her again.)

Whether you favor McCain, Barr, or just seeing conservatives experience electoral pain in some small way comparable to that which Gore experienced in 2000 and Hillary is experiencing now, please join us.

•••

Note that after our June 4 Barr/McCain debate, our next Lolita event will be Tue., July 22 (a panel of women who have donated eggs) instead of our usual first-Wednesday-of-the-month. Our previous debate, on congestion pricing for traffic (not quite the privatized roads and adjustable user fees I’d most like to see), yielded some more fine photos by the talented J.D. Weiner.

After that debate, by the way, I mentioned to the crowd that one of my old ABC News colleagues (Michael Mendelsohn) has mused, interestingly, that subsidizing the federal highway system may have stunted the evolution of personal flying craft that might otherwise have occurred. But lest we fear all such flying ambitions are lost, see this footage of a rocket-winged solo flying man over the Alps.

As legislator/philosopher Dan Greenberg, who visited the Seavey family home in Norwich yesterday, has said, civilization is largely a race between technology and regulation, so I say that as long as private-sector rocket men stay ahead of public-sector rocket men (and FAA regs), it will get harder and harder to stifle freedom with things like the Berlin Wall.

On the other hand, it’s become pretty obvious the military will be the first major users of real-life “Iron Man” tech and smart robots, which could spell trouble.

Private agents may want to start building — and implicitly socially-normalizing — as many Heinleinian jump suits, Cody-esque rocket packs, and Starkian exoskeletons as possible right now before the government gets anything like a monopoly on them. The time for a revolution that is not purely intellectual/legal may yet come, and it may be fought with weapons bearing little resemblance to today’s.

UPDATE: WebMD lists the “100 drunkest cities,” using various indicators of unsafe drinking in making its tabulations — and making special mention of Colorado, where, perhaps fittingly, the Libertarian convention just occurred.

But I also see my friends in Hartford, Boston, Austin, and DC on the list — and I think we all know that the only thing that kept New York City off it is that so few of us drive here.

The Idiots Will Win Regardless

As a nerd, I owe it to my own kind to mention once in a while my overall pessimism about the grim prospects for civilization, regardless of whether some short-term political skirmish is won by my favorite faction (libertarians, some of them picking a presidential candidate in Denver this weekend).

I mentioned seeing Read Schuchardt, a religious critic of commercial culture, speak Thursday, and his fear is that the future is one in which we’ll all be reduced to icon- and logo-loving Pavlovian dogs.  Advertising veteran and fellow libertarian Joy Bergmann, far from countering with a rosier scenario, predicts a future much like the dystopian film Idiocracy.  And if all goes according to schedule, this weekend I’ll visit with Dan Greenberg, long ago one of my fellow Brown philosophy majors, who at least shares my amusement at that movie.  Our perspectives vary — Schuchardt dislikes commercialism, I like it, Dan is more wary of biotech than I — but any way you slice, long-term victory for stupidity seems to haunt our dreams.

(Schuchardt’s lecture invoked philosopher Charles Taylor, incidentally — himself a moderately religious Canadian communitarian who fears modernity leaves us without some shared standard of the good — and it just so happens that Taylor’s Sources of the Self will be my Book Selection of the Month for June in a week and a half, so stay tuned.)

My meta-concern about civilization is that the idea of being civilized may itself become passe, with the young increasingly seeing as archaic things like:

•etiquette

•quiet reflection

•industry (it seems counterintuitive to the older among us to consign it to the past, but it’s increasingly despised, along with global commerce, which is opposed by the antiglob, nature buffs, local-food nuts, and various neo-agrarians)

•science (opposed without reflection, in almost any of its new manifestations, by the masses — some 30% saying in surveys that they’re against nanotech, which surely can’t be for any reason other than it being some new thing they don’t know about)

•morality

•significant legal consequences for real crimes

•standards for gauging sanity and insanity

•etc.

Well, no time to explain my thinking on all these things now — I would if I were smarter — but today I hang out with the parents and with their dog Jaycie, thinking occasionally of departed family dog Uber, who was a mutt but looked a bit like the puli disguised as a Rastafarian hairdo in this ad.

Libertarian Party Convention vs. Republican Party Convention

I’m sure there are some Republicans who are rooting for things to get as silly and circus-like as possible at this weekend’s Libertarian Party convention, but one thing should give them pause: Given the way (small-l libertarian) Ron Paul delegates have been disrupting Republican state conventions this year to remind people that McCain’s not universally beloved, wackiness at the LP convention in Denver could be a foretaste of what the GOP’s early-September gathering in Minneapolis will look like, for good or ill. Hee hee…