We don’t need another hero: Nearly 25 years later, Alan Moore’s Watchmen remains a stirring warning against absolute power

NOTE: I wrote this, according to the time stamp on the file, back in 2009. It was published by a libertarian student organization called Young Americans for Liberty. It doesn't seem to be otherwise webbed anymore, so here it is again:

You can tell a work of fiction is influential when other writers are still grappling with its implications nearly a quarter of a century later — usually with limited success.

Since its publication in the mid-1980s, Watchmen has been the poster child for pop art that transcends its origins. Having garnered accolades usually reserved for highbrow literary fiction, Watchmen is the reason we now refer to comic books as graphic novels. It birthed countless newspaper stories with unfortunate headlines like “Bam! Pow! Comic books aren’t just for kids anymore.” It changed the aesthetics of superhero comics, both for better and for worse. And this year, of course, it inspired a major motion picture that, if nothing else, perplexed audiences expecting the next The Dark Knight or Iron Man.

While Iron Man and The Dark Knight both deal with issues of power and corruption, they ultimately side with their vigilante protagonists. Superheroes, those movies tell us, are a good thing. Watchmen, however, remains admirably faithful to its source material and comes to a different conclusion. Its costumed crusaders are, at best, powerless when it comes to doing good and, at worst, make the world a far more dangerous place. If, as Lord Acton said, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then unaccountable superhumans with near God-like powers are not necessarily a good thing to have around. Like a powerful central government that is able to dominate local governments or an imperial presidency that co-opts powers properly belonging to Congress, superheroes upset existing power structures, and not always in a good way. “Who watches the Watchmen?” It’s a question with no obvious answer.

It is little surprise, then, that libertarians have latched onto Watchmen, claiming it, along with the works of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, and the 1960s cult-favorite television series The Prisoner, as part of libertarianism’s artistic canon.

The graphic novel, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, is set in an alternate 1985, in which the existence of superheroes has turned the United States into a virtual dictatorship. President Richard Nixon, having engineered the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, is in his fifth term, and corruption and chaos are rampant. As gangs terrorize the streets, the U.S. and the Soviet Union plunge toward seemingly inevitable nuclear annihilation.

The main point of divergence between our 1985, which turned out comparatively well, and the 1985 of Watchmen is the existence of Dr. Manhattan, the one costumed hero in Watchmen who possesses superhuman abilities. With Dr. Manhattan’s help, the U.S. wins the Vietnam War, a victory that Nixon uses to become all but president for life. The Soviets, meanwhile, regard Dr. Manhattan as such a threat that they’re willing to risk nuclear war to avoid U.S. domination. In Watchmen, the old adage “Better dead than Red” might as well be “Better Armageddon than American.”

Dr. Manhattan, in short, changes everything. As one character in the graphic novel observes, “It is as if — with a real live Deity on their side — our leaders have become intoxicated with a heady draught of Omnipotence-by-Association, without realizing just how his very existence has deformed the lives of every living creature on the face of this planet.”

Dr. Manhattan is the literal embodiment of amoral power. Following the accident that gives him his superhuman abilities, Dr. Manhattan gradually becomes more and more removed from his humanity. Time, for him, has no real meaning because he can see past, present, and future simultaneously. As a result, death has no meaning for him, either. As such, he is the perfect tool for the politicians who would seek to exploit him.

It’s also no surprise that the U.S. government in Watchmen maintains a monopoly on superheroes. A law bans costumed adventurers except for those who work for the state, namely Dr. Manhattan and the equally but more aggressively amoral Comedian. The only masked crimefighter working, illegally, outside of the system is Rorschach.

Of the characters in Watchmen, Rorschach comes closest to being a real libertarian, although Moore’s portrait of libertarianism isn’t exactly flattering. Rorschach is brutal, smelly, and, most importantly, psychotic. Moore bases him on The Question and Mr. A, two characters created by Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, an adherent of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. Despite his antiauthoritarianism, Moore is still a man of the political left, and his Rorschach is a not-at-all-subtle critique of Ditko’s “right-wing” libertarianism.

Libertarians, however, tend to focus on the positive character traits hidden beneath Rorschach’s psychosis. Rorschach believes in truth and justice, and he is uncompromising in his pursuit of them, which is why he continues to work outside of the government even after the government criminalizes costumed vigilantism. He is, whether Moore likes it or not, the moral center of Watchmen, and readers — not just libertarians — gravitate toward him. Rorschach remains the book’s most popular character. Rorschach may be insane, but at least he sticks to his principles, even in the face of death.

Even as Moore’s Rorschach was capturing readers’ imaginations, Frank Miller’s daring interpretation of an old mainstay was doing the same, and for the same reasons.

Published at about the same time as Watchmen, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns covers many of the same themes and is no less influential. It casts a middle-aged Batman in the Rorschach role of uncompromising individualist and Superman in the Dr. Manhattan role of government stooge. Yet despite the shared dark tone of both works, the similarities between Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns end there. Moore’s only solution to the problem of Dr. Manhattan is for Dr. Manhattan to leave Earth, leaving humanity to its own fate. Miller, however, has faith in superheroes, so long as it is the right superhero.

Miller’s Batman is a quasi-libertarian anarchist, a genius hero who, like the characters in Rand’s novels, uses his brain to thwart the brute, physical power of Superman and the state. And like the image of the student standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, Miller’s version of Batman as an ordinary man prepared to stand up to seemingly omnipotent power has endured, inspiring everyone from libertarians to politically apathetic fanboys to subsequent Batman writers.

The libertarian/Randian themes are even more explicit in Miller’s follow-up, The Dark Knight Strikes Again. In the sequel, Miller brings in Ditko’s The Question as a mouthpiece for Objectivism, of sorts. The difference here is that Miller’s version says, “I’m no Ayn Rander! She didn’t go nearly far enough!”

But can libertarians put their faith in even a libertarian superhero? The treatment of Batman post-Miller raises lots of red flags. Just as Miller’s Batman developed a contingency plan to take down Superman, Batman, as portrayed in more recent comics, has formulated plans to deal with just about any superhero who, for whatever reason, might go bad. Unfortunately, time and again, Batman’s plans have fallen into the wrong hands, with disastrous results. For example, in the recent series Countdown, Batman creates Brother Eye, an artificial intelligence to watch over all of Earth’s superpowered heroes and villains. Yet, as one might guess from Brother Eye’s Orwellian name, this ends badly when a covert government agency takes control of the A.I. for its own purposes.

As a new generation of comic-book writers picks up and runs with the ideas Moore and Miller first explored, it seems there is need for a libertarian critique of even “libertarian” superheroes. Ultimately, even superheroes who operate without government sanction, so as to preserve their independence and integrity, run into problems because they still serve a law-enforcement function. They’re still appendages of the state, if only unofficially.

Marvel Comics’ recent Civil War story arc illustrates the point. After a botched operation in which a team of young superheroes accidentally kills 600 civilians, the political leaders in Marvel’s fictional universe take a page from Watchmen. They pass a law outlawing all costumed superheroes except for those who agree to register with and work for the federal government. The Superhuman Registration Act splits the superhero community, with pro-registration heroes lining up behind Iron Man and anti-registration heroes backing Captain America.

Although it is never spelled out so explicitly in Civil War, the pro-registration side has a point. What are superheroes, anyway, except unauthorized, unaccountable law enforcement agents? Superheroes don’t obtain search warrants. They don’t read suspects their Miranda rights. If they screw up, they don’t face disciplinary action. And it’s almost impossible for a wronged party to sue them for misconduct. Just try serving a court summons to the Hulk. In short, all of the real-world problems associated with police misconduct are potentially worse when it comes to superheroes. They exist outside the rule of law.

Against that possibility, the Superhuman Registration Act seems, in libertarian terms, to be the lesser of two evils. Of course, as libertarians are fond of pointing out, the lesser of two evils is still evil. Any law that can be abused eventually will be abused. In our world, Republicans constantly pass laws they would never trust Democrats to enforce and vice versa. Each side, when out of power, complains that the other is abusing the powers of government. Yet when the sides swap places, the incoming party never repeals the laws that the other side abused.

In the Marvel Universe, Iron Man currently finds himself on the outside, on the run and wanted for crimes he didn’t commit. Meanwhile, the villainous Green Goblin, in his civilian identity of Norman Osborn, has become leader of the government’s registration effort. If there is any consolation, it’s that Iron Man may have learned his lesson. After all, he is one of the smartest characters in the Marvel Universe, which puts him leagues ahead of our real-world politicians.

For all their efforts, no one writing superhero comics has yet come up with an answer to Moore’s critique of superhero power. Moore’s own solution isn’t really conducive to writing ongoing superhero comics. He sends Dr. Manhattan packing. Dr. Manhattan decides to leave our galaxy — end of story. When all else failed, Moore opts for abolition, which is, of course, what one would expect of any anarchist, of either the left-wing or the libertarian, anarcho-capitalist variety.

Perhaps that is why Watchmen maintains its resonance with libertarians, despite Moore’s antipathy toward much of libertarian thought. Unlike Miller, Rand, Ditko, and others who gave us idealized libertarian supermen who could fly in and save the day, Moore takes a more radical, yet more realistic approach. His hero-turned-villain, Ozymandias, is named so as to evoke the image of the broken idol in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem of the same name. Essentially, Moore is telling us to put not our faith in idols, even if they’re wearing a smile and spandex.

The Watchmen movie and the renewed interest in the graphic novel couldn’t have been better timed. Several comic-book artists have taken to depicting President Barack Obama in superheroic terms. Alex Ross’ painting of the president striking a Superman pose emblazons posters and T-shirts. Spider-Man and Obama do the fist bump in a recent issue of Amazing Spider-Man. And for his part, the new president seems happy to play up his heroic image, as when he posed with the statue of Superman in Metropolis, Ill.

Whatever your politics, if you’ve grasped the message of Watchman, images like that ought to have you at least a little worried.

SPLICE TODAY: Doomsday Was Yesterday

My latest for Splice Today is a look back at the 1979 Bible prophecy documentary The Late Great Planet Earth, based on Hal Lindsey's unlikely bestseller and hosted by a slumming Orson Welles. Nearly 40 years on, Lindsey's brand of Bible exegesis motivates the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, but his prophecies are all busts.

REASON: Captain American Exceptionalism

My latest for Reason is online: "Captain American Exceptionalism".

On Trumpism

By Franklin Harris

Trumpism is bullshit. That is to say Donald Trump, his bombastic proclamations, his haphazard policy pronouncements, and his supporters are bullshit.

I don’t mean bullshit in the usual sense of a crude insult. Nor do I mean it in the sense of magicians Penn and Teller, who on their Showtime television series referred to frauds and hucksters as peddling “bullshit,” rather than in terms that might lead to lawsuits, no matter how frivolous.

Rather, I mean bullshit in a precise, technical sense.

Ten years ago, Harry G. Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton, published a slim little book called On Bullshit. Surprisingly, this philosophical essay became a best-seller. Frankfurt was on to something. He surveyed the landscape and saw bullshit.

The best way to summarize Frankfurt’s analysis is through his distinction between a bullshitter and a plain old everyday liar. They have different relationships with the truth.

A liar knows and cares what the truth is, because the truth is something to avoid. The bullshitter, however, doesn’t care about the truth. He is indifferent to it. For the bullshitter, the truth literally doesn’t matter. Sometimes he may even tell the truth, and that’s fine, too. But most of the time, he doesn’t. When you speak or write without regard to the truth, the odds are against being truthful.

Talk radio, website comment sections, and cable television are fertile ground for bullshitters. But bullshit on Trump’s scale is new to presidential politics. We’re used to politicians who simply lie.

Richard Nixon lied. Bill Clinton lied. George W. Bush either lied or was lied to and passed it on. Hillary Clinton is intimately acquainted with the truth and wants no part of it.

President Barack Obama lies, but sometimes he bullshits. Is “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” really a lie? President Obama would have said whatever he thought people wanted to hear regardless of its truth value. The only important thing was enacting the government program that would be his legacy. Regardless, Obama is not in Trump’s league when it comes to bullshitting. Compared to Trump, Obama is — as he himself might say — junior varsity.

Trump bullshits all the time, no matter the subject. Does he still believe thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11? Who knows? He said it, and he’s sticking with it. The truth isn’t something to avoid or embrace; it just doesn’t matter.

The same goes for illegal immigration. Trump speaks off the top of his head, calling upon half-remembered headlines and something he may have seen on TV. The details are unimportant because the truth is unimportant. All that matters is Trump says what he says with gusto, that he convinces his supporters he’s the fighter they longed for.

The news media can fact-check Trump and proclaim his pants on fire, but for Trump that’s just another baseless attack. Truth is irrelevant to the bullshitter. Trump gets that, so why can’t those losers at The Associated Press and The Washington Post?

If the polls showing Trump extending his national lead are to be believed, Trump has found a constituency eager for bullshit. He also has found room to operate. If a candidate isn’t beholden to the truth or trapped in a lie, he has true freedom. He becomes the uber-candidate, a candidate beyond mere truth and falsehood. The old rules don’t apply to him.

Trump supporters display the same lack of regard for truth. Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast interviewed Trump donors and found people like “the man who believes Trump has great intellect and his bold pronouncements are just showbiz.” They know Trump is bullshitting, and it’s part of his appeal. It may even be the key to his appeal. If so, it’s the answer to the question pundits and pollsters have asked themselves since Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in June and immediately claimed front-runner status, which he has yet to relinquish.

Trump is a bullshit candidate with bullshit ideas and bullshit supporters. As those of us not under Trump’s spell have feared, this presidential campaign is going to shit.

Franklin Harris is an editor and writer based in Alabama. His website is franklinharris.com, and he tweets at @FranklinH3000.

Are the Dukes’ days numbered?

How you reckon them Duke boys are gonna get out of this one?

Well, them Duke boys have got themselves in a real heap o’trouble this time. How do you reckon they’re gonna get outta this one? They’re just spending their days the only way they know how, but that’s just a little bit more than Hollywood will allow.

“The Dukes of Hazzard,” long ago a staple of family television viewing, is now collateral damage in the culture war, and it’s all on account of that Confederate battle flag on the top of the series’ iconic 1969 Dodge Charger, the General Lee. After all, why react when you can overreact?

First, the consumer division of Warner Bros., which owns the series, said it would no longer license merchandise emblazoned with the Confederate flag, which means no more General Lee models and toys. Then TV Land abruptly dropped reruns of “The Dukes of Hazzard” from its schedule, drawing the ire of one of the show’s stars, John Schneider.

We should have seen it coming. Although it appears in a recent Autotrader.com commercial, the General Lee is shot entirely from low angles, so the spot where the flag should be is never visible.

This all comes as the Confederate flag in particular and reminders of the Confederacy in general are becoming as endangered as photos of Leon Trotsky in Stalinist Russia.

Even NASCAR, once a uniquely Southern sport, has turned on the battle flag, going so far as to ask spectators not to fly the Confederate flag at NASCAR races and offering to accept used Confederate flags in trade for the Stars and Stripes.

That went over about as well as you might expect. At Daytona, for the first race after NASCAR boss Brian France told fans to leave their Confederate flags at home, the infield was full of pickups and RVs decked out in Confederate colors. Tell some Southerners they can’t fly the battle flag and they might do it just to show you they darn well can — even if they might not do it otherwise.

Whenever the issue of the Confederate flag is raised, we go around in circles with the same old arguments about what the flag means. Is it a symbol of heritage, as its defenders say, or a symbol of hate, as just about everyone else says? If only it were that simple.

The problem with symbols is they don’t mean anything in and of themselves. They mean different things to different people at different times. The battle flag is no exception. If someone tells you the Confederate flag means heritage, he’s right. If someone else tells you it means hate, he’s right, too. And heritage and hate don’t even begin to exhaust all the possibilities.

That brings us back to “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Running for seven seasons from 1979 to 1985, the series came at the tail end of a period when the South embraced the romance of the outlaw. Movies such as “Smokey and the Bandit” and “White Lightning” turned bootleggers and moonshiners into heroes. A lesser-known entry in the cycle is 1975’s “Moonrunners.”

“Moonrunners” became the basis for “The Dukes of Hazzard,” which toned down the lawbreaking for family viewing, but just the same was an outgrowth of the outlaw South, which pitted honest outlaws just out to make an honest, if illegal, living against the same corrupt authority figures who in real life were the villains of the civil rights era.

Confederate flags atop Southern state capitols are a relic of 1960s Southern intransigence on civil rights. But the Confederate flag atop the General Lee is a symbol of something else — opposition to corrupt politicians who use the law to keep honest folks down, regardless of their race.

The Confederate flag is as complicated as the South itself. The South likes to think of itself as the Bandit, but it keeps voting for Sheriff Buford T. Justice. And while we Southerners love the backwoods glamour of bootleggers and moonshiners, Southern prisons — just as Northern ones — are filled with pot dealers, a disproportionate number of them black.

Maybe the period when the Confederate flag was an outlaw symbol was a brief window, one that has since closed. So, maybe we can’t do “The Dukes of Hazzard” today; even the movie version was 10 years ago. But that doesn’t seem like a good reason to consign the reruns to the memory hole.

‘Ultron’ criticism highlights feminism’s fissure

Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow in "Avengers: Age of Ultron."

When Joss Whedon is getting slammed as an enemy of women, there's something wrong with the world. Where once there was the planet Earth, there is now Bizarro World.

This is the Joss Whedon we're talking about — the guy who created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the guy who is famous for writing Strong Female Characters (trademark pending). But given some of the criticism of “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” you'd think he wanted to repeal the 19th Amendment.

From The Daily Beast, filed under “Sexism,” we get the headline “ ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’s’ Black Widow Disgrace.” From io9.com there’s “Black Widow: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” At Indiewire we find “An Open Letter to Joss Whedon from a Disappointed Feminist Fan After Watching ‘Age of Ultron.’ ”

And the source of this outrage and disappointment? Whedon committed what is, according to some but not all strains of feminism, the ultimate sin. He wrote a female character, in this case the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), who wants to have children but can’t. Worse, her infertility actually upsets her, and she seeks a surrogate form of maternal fulfillment in playing aunt to Hawkeye’s kids.

Because of this, The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern reduces Black Widow’s contribution in “Age of Ultron” to doing nothing but “flirt and whine about being barren.”

This line of criticism has two problems. The first is it overstates the importance the Black Widow places on infertility as part of her identity. When the Widow thinks of herself as a “monster,” it’s about everything she gave up by becoming a Russian spy. She sacrificed family, yes, but also part of her humanity. Whedon practically spells it out with a flashback to the Black Widow killing her first victim.

The second, more significant problem is it belittles the fact that some — indeed most — women do find quite a bit of fulfillment in having children.

This is where the war brewing within modern feminism comes into play.

There’s liberal feminism, which is about empowering women, women having the same opportunities as men, and expanding the range of choice available to women. Then there’s the feminism that leads people to send hate tweets Whedon’s way, at least until he left Twitter.

The latter is the feminism of “social justice,” summed up by video game critic Anita Sarkeesian (a friend of Whedon’s, ironically enough) when she tweeted recently, “Feminism is about the collective liberation of women as a social class. Feminism is not about personal choice.”

A feminism that isn’t about personal choice is a perverse thing indeed. It’s no surprise that it didn’t start with women. The anti-choice, social justice feminism of Whedon’s critics originated with a dead white male. And not just any dead white male, but the wrongest of dead white males, Karl Marx — as passed down by another dead white male, Marxist cultural theorist Theodor Adorno.

All social justice feminism does is replace class with gender. So, just as orthodox Marxism has its “class traitors,” anti-choice feminism has its gender traitors. All a woman need do is make the wrong choice, one that doesn’t further the cause of feminism as anti-choice feminists define it.

By liberal feminism’s standards, the Black Widow as portrayed in “Age of Ultron” is a feminist hero. She kicks butt, embraces her sexuality and can hang with some of the most powerful men (and gods) on the planet. Yet by anti-choice standards she’s a gender traitor, and Whedon is a traitor for writing her that way, as well as for giving Tony Stark a “rape joke” when Stark cracks wise about re-instituting primae noctis if he lifts Thor’s hammer.

This is not just bad feminism. This is a terrible way to go about critiquing popular culture. It’s an immature criticism that acts as if artists agree with everything their characters say, and as if fictional heroes can’t sometimes behave improperly, say by telling off-color jokes.

If writers and filmmakers actually paid attention to their social justice critics, we’d end up with art and entertainment about as inspiring as the old boy-meets-tractor morality plays of Soviet realism.

Culture Shock 11.20.14: Bullying spoils science achievement

And then the shirt hit the fan....

The perpetually aggrieved are why we can't have nice things.

Last week, the European Space Agency did something incredible. It landed an unmanned spacecraft, launched more than 10 years ago, on a comet roughly 300 million miles away.

To give you a ballpark idea how far that is, the average distance from Earth to the moon is 238,900 miles. From the Earth to Mars is 140 million miles. And from here to Jupiter is 484 million miles.

It was an amazing feat of science and engineering, and for a little while, those of us who weren't alive for the Apollo moon missions got just a little taste of what it must have been like to watch Neil Armstrong take his "one small step" into the history books.

It isn't likely a lot of people will recall where they were and what they were doing when they heard a probe had touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. With a name like that, it isn't likely many people will remember 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at all. But in the annals of space exploration, the Rosetta mission is a pretty big deal.

That's why it's so frustrating that all some people could talk about afterward was one rocket scientist's bowling shirt. Matt Taylor, the lead mission scientist, made the mistake of thinking he could wear a shirt, made by a friend and given to him for his birthday, during the live Internet feed for the Philae lander's touchdown. Little did he suspect that doing so would make him a target for people who search for reasons to be offended.

The shirt wasn't stereotypical "rocket scientist" gear. It was covered with cartoon images of sexy women holding guns and posing provocatively, the sort of thing you used to see painted on the side of vans. Suddenly, Taylor's accomplishment wasn't the story; his "sexist" shirt was.

The most shrill response came from The Verge, which went after Taylor and the ESA in an article headlined "I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing." ("Ostracizing"? Really?) The article, by Chris Plante and Arielle Duhaime-Ross, goes on to say, "This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields."

That sentiment was echoed by other bloggers and on Twitter. It didn't matter that the friend who made the shirt for him, Elly Prizeman, is a woman, who took to her own blog to defend Taylor and thank him for the "sweet gesture" of wearing it on one of the most important days of his life.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, I was taught that women could do any job men could do, that women were just as tough as men, that they didn't need knights in shining armor to protect them and should be just as free with their sexuality as men have always been. That was feminism.

What passes for feminism now, however, says women are afraid to go into science-related fields because male co-workers might wear loud bowling shirts sewn by their female friends. It says those female friends are mindless dupes of the patriarchy. And because I'm a male, this strain of feminism says I need to shut up, "check my privilege" and stop "mansplaining." I'm especially not supposed to have an opinion about what feminism is, nor cite any female scholars or writers who agree with me.

Bloomberg View columnist Virginia Postrel coined a wonderful term for this feminism of constant outrage: "link-bait feminism." Find any slight, real or imagined, no matter how small, and take offense. Blog about it, attach a sensational headline, and watch the outrage go viral. Rarely is the outrage even genuine.

This sort of cynical offense-stoking cheapens feminism and renders it increasingly irrelevant. Only 23 percent of U.S. women identify as feminists, according to a HuffPost/YouGov poll. The brand is tainted, because link-bait feminism isn't really about equal rights, equal pay or reproductive rights. It's about a right not to be offended, even if you're only pretending to be offended. That's not feminism; it's Puritanism.

The link-bait feminists won the battle. They bullied Taylor into a tearful apology. But with any luck, this is the overreach that will cost them the war, allowing feminism to become relevant again.

Culture Shock 10.09.14: It's the end of Saturday morning as we knew it

Print advertisement for NBC's 1983 Saturday morning cartoon lineup. It was the
debut season for "Mr. T" and "Alvin and the Chipmunks," while "Thundarr the
Barbarian" moved to NBC from ABC, where it had aired the previous two seasons.

For as long as I can remember, "children's advocates" have hated children's television.

They always said the same thing: Children's television was too violent, too dumb and too commercial. And because kids watched "too much" of it, it was, by implication, too entertaining.

Not anymore. Mark your calendar, for this is a date that shall live in infamy: Saturday, Oct. 4, 2014, was the first Saturday since the 1960s when there were no Saturday morning cartoons on broadcast network television. For those of us who were kids during the Golden Age of Saturday morning cartoons, in the 1970s and '80s, it's Saturday mourning in America.

At last, the self-appointed children's advocates have slain their dragon.

In place of the animated cartoons that Generation X and the millennials grew up with are a bunch of live-action "educational and informational" programs. They're designated by the little "E/I" logo on the screen, which means the broadcaster is counting every second of them toward its government-mandated quota of E/I programming. It doesn't matter if anyone watches; it just matters that it's there and that it's "quality," as defined by the children's advocates.

Kids, meanwhile, have responded just as you'd expect. Those who can have flocked to cable TV and the children's section of Netflix, both of which operate blessedly free of the dictates of the Federal Communications Commission, for the most part. For now, anyway.

How did this happen? How did children wake up in a world with no Saturday morning cartoons?

It started 24 years ago when Congress passed the Children's Television Act of 1990. The act was the culmination of 20 years of agitation by activist groups such as Action for Children's Television, founded by Peggy Charren, who became the go-to talking head whenever the national news media needed someone to pontificate about kiddie TV, because why would you ever ask a kid?

The Children's Television Act limited advertising during both cable and broadcast children's programming and mandated that broadcasters devote a set amount of airtime each week to E/I shows.

The act's first victims were the cartoons that aired after school each weekday. The ad restrictions made them less profitable, which was the kiss of death in the highly competitive broadcast syndication market. Stations quickly dropped cartoons and added more talk shows and TV judges. Indirectly, we have the CTA to blame for Judge Judy and her ilk.

The CTA's full impact didn't hit Saturday mornings until later, as the FCC "clarified" the act and spelled out exactly what "educational and informational" meant, always tightening the screws.

NBC was the first to fall. The proud peacock that once had aired "The Smurfs" and "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends" farmed out its Saturday morning airtime to corporate sibling NatGeo.

Print advertisement for CBS's 1982 Saturday morning cartoon lineup.

CBS and ABC were next, followed by Fox. When the end came, only The CW was still airing cartoons, all of them Japanese imports. It was a painful, lingering death. Saturdays deserved better.

The image of children getting out of bed at the crack of dawn to watch Saturday morning cartoons along with a sugary cereal chaser has become a cliché. But it's no less true. My generation looked ahead to Saturday mornings — filled with Superfriends and Snorks — as if each were a mini Christmas. The networks trumpeted their new Saturday morning lineups each fall with preview specials in prime time. It was a big freaking deal.

Sure, kids still have Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and the Disney channels, but Saturday morning's passing matters. Maybe those old cartoons weren't "educational" in the approved sense, but they were a springboard for our imaginations. More than that sugary cereal, those cartoons fueled us, not just for the rest of the day but for life.

"Scooby-Doo," for one, taught us real-life lessons. We learned not to worry about scary-looking ghosts, because the odds were those ghosts were just con men trying to pull a fast one.

With cartoons teaching lessons like that, it's no wonder Congress was so eager to replace them with FCC-approved boredom.

Culture Shock 01.23.14: The Groucho Marxism of Armond White

Armond White trolls his fellow critics and his readers with
his annual "Better-Than List."

You've probably never heard of Armond White, which is a shame.

White is a unique voice in film criticism, combining fearlessness, encyclopedic knowledge and a sensibility best described as unhinged. Like the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, you're never entirely sure if White's criticism is brilliant or just bizarre, serious or an elaborate put-on. It is performance art that exists apart from the films he examines.

This month, White, formerly of the late, lamented New York Press and currently editor of CityArts.info, became the first person ever excommunicated from the New York Film Critics Circle, an organization White chaired three times, as he boasts via his Twitter handle, 3xchair.

White's crime was allegedly heckling "12 Years a Slave" director Steve McQueen as McQueen took the stage to receive the NYFCC's award for best director. White disputes the received account of events, but the incident does seem like vintage Armond. During his chairmanship in 2011, White presided over an NYFCC awards dinner that is now legend. His passive-aggressive, and sometimes just aggressive barbs made Annette Bening cry.

And White is no fan of McQueen's work, especially "12 Years a Slave," which White savaged, as is his fashion. White may be idiosyncratic, but he has an entirely understandable dislike for condescension, which may explain his visceral reaction to "12 Years."

White — who is black, I'm obliged here to note — called the film "torture porn," comparing it to "Hostel" and "The Human Centipede." White concludes his City Arts review with, " '12 Years a Slave' is ultimate proof that Hollywood's respect for Black humanity is in absurd, patronizing, Oscar-winning decline."

I've not seen "12 Years" yet, so I can't say whether I agree with White's assessment. But I have seen McQueen's shallow "sex addiction" drama "Shame," which White rightly dismisses as "a sex-phobic art fraud." McQueen has a track record of producing critically acclaimed phonies.

But "Shame" was about sex, and despite what you may think, Hollywood still isn't comfortable with sex. A movie that says slavery is bad, on the other hand, is "important," which is why "12 Years" is now a front-runner for a Best Picture Oscar.

That brings us back to White's excommunication and my suspicion that it was about more than White allegedly being rude in public. White has been rude in public before. Just ask Bening. The difference is, this time he did the unpardonable, not only contradicting 97 percent of his peers (according to Rotten Tomatoes) but doing so loudly, unflinchingly about a movie they deem "important," because without "12 Years a Slave," how are any of us to know slavery is wrong, eh?

It's impossible not to see some politics at play here and sense that White's fellow critics have had enough of his politically incorrect opinions. Tolerating White's baffling love affair with Adam Sandler films is one thing (see his absurd rave of "Jack and Jill"). His deeming the "Schindler's List" of slavery films a fraud, however, is another. It's a sense reinforced by Mollie Hemingway's observation, at thefederalist.com, that many of the same critics who damned "The Passion of the Christ" on the basis of its brutality praised "12 Years" for the same. Torture porn is in the ideology of the beholder.

The late Roger Ebert called White a "troll." It's true, to an extent. White's annual "Better-Than" lists, in which he pits movies he favors against the consensus favorites, elevate trolling to an art. And as a fellow contrarian, I'm fully in agreement with about half his better-than picks. The others....

If White is simply an embarrassment in public, the NYFCC could ban him from the awards dinner without banning him entirely. White is a vital part of American film criticism. Infuriating, occasionally insane, but vital precisely because he is so infuriating and insane.

Yet I suspect White is secretly pleased with his ouster. No contrarian can really want to belong to a group that would have him as a member, and Armond White is a Groucho Marxist film critic.

Culture Shock 03.28.13: The Day Iraq stood still

What if I told you the justification for the Iraq War was laid out in a 62-year-old science fiction movie?

As unlikely as it may seem, the case for President George W. Bush's preemptive war against the regime of Saddam Hussein is summed up in finale of 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," regarded by many critics — although not this one — as a classic of both sci-fi and Cold War cinema.

Ten years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. That didn't exactly work out as planned, and for the past week, backers of the war, both conservative and liberal, have looked back and wondered, aloud and in print, whether it was worth it.

Some conservative hawks, such as the Weekly Standard's William Kristol, likely will go to their graves defending the Iraq War. But their unrepentant stridency is quite the contrast to the contorted and feckless mea culpas of liberal hawks such as The Washington Post's resident wunderkind Ezra Klein or New York magazine's Jonathan Chait.

In their apologies, Klein and Chait devote the now customary attention to Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's supposed mental instability, but neither engages what was the most fundamental issue in the run-up to the war: whether or not preemptive war, in general, is a legitimate course of action. Probably they don't talk about it because, except for what little remains of the Code Pink anti-war left, most liberals and progressives have no problem with preemptive war. It simply isn't a concern.

That attitude certainly comes through in "The Day the Earth Stood Still," which apart from being a movie about aliens, flying saucers and robots, is a liberal message movie.

At the film's conclusion, the alien ambassador Klaatu (Michael Rennie) gives the Earth an ultimatum: "It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration."

Yes, in the 1950s, preemptive genocide when faced with the mere threat of violence from a vastly inferior military force was considered a liberal idea. Go figure. But that was the '50s, and the liberals were the internationalist crusaders (such as Harry Truman, who gave us the Korean War, which still is causing us a spot of trouble today), while the conservatives, such as Republican Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, were the peaceniks.

Naturally, the movie is more complicated than that. Klaatu is portrayed as an almost Christ-like figure, bringing a promise of hope and peace to the people of Earth, but also the prospect of damnation if we don't mend our ways. And yet the plot point about an army of space-patrolling robots programmed to pounce on any planet that gets too big for its britches remains. And that is kind of hard to ignore. Being the galaxy's policeman versus being the world's policeman is only a difference of degree, not of kind.

Since "The Day the Earth Stood Still" premiered, there has been an ideological shift. In the late '60s and early '70s, some liberals got "mugged by reality" and became neoconservatives. They, their children and those they've influenced are now the face of conservatism. And because they were the most hawkish of liberals, conservatism became more hawkish, too.

So we had a war with a liberal justification, launched by a conservative president, supported by a mix of liberal and conservative pundits and now second-guessed mostly by liberals. And the war became so unpopular it tainted the conservative brand and led to President Barack Obama.

Even when the Earth stands still, politics doesn't.

Culture Shock 03.07.13: Obama's geek cred disappears at warp speed

Election Day has come and gone. The inauguration has passed. Too late, the truth about President Barack Obama has revealed itself.

The president is a fake geek.

Ever since his arms akimbo photo op with the iconic statue of Superman in Metropolis, Ill., the president's adopted home state, Obama has enjoyed an image as the most geek-friendly chief executive in the nation's history. He invited comparisons to the logical Mr. Spock, and his White House responded gamely to a petition asking the administration to build a Death Star. (The White House said no, for once deciding a program was just too expensive.)

The geek community returned the love. Obama appeared in Image Comics' "Savage Dragon" and in a heavily promoted issue of Marvel Comics' "The Amazing Spider-Man."

But with one slip of the tongue, it all vanished faster than Marty McFly's siblings in a snapshot.

During a press conference last week, President Obama said he couldn't force Republican leaders to come to an agreement with him by performing a "Jedi mind meld" on them.

At the speed of Twitter (roughly 0.999 the speed of light), word of the president's fall to the Dark Side spread. He had confused "Star Trek" and its "Vulcan mind meld" with "Star Wars" and its "Jedi mind trick."

What followed was a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and wouldn't shut up about it. Within minutes, #ObamaSciFiQuotes was trending: "Beam me up, Chewy," "Set lightsabers to stun," and, combining Obama's faux pas with the news of the day, "These are not the drones you are looking for." Talk about an un-Forced error.

Some fans claim Obama's gaffe wasn't really a gaffe, because in some "Star Wars" spinoff novels, the Jedi are shown performing a "Force meld." I'm not buying this explanation for a second. First, I doubt the president reads "Star Wars" spinoff novels. Second, the novels don't count, and Boba Fett died in the sarlacc pit.

Saying "Jedi mind meld" is like your mom referring to that show you used to watch in reruns when you were a kid as "Star Track." It's a signpost that tells you your next stop is the Clueless Zone, warp factor 9.

So, the president isn't as much of a geek as he let us believe. Perhaps his handlers encouraged the geeky facade to help his image among young people. President Obama isn't the first president to tell a core constituency what it wanted to hear, and his online image certainly benefited from his seeming geekiness.

Yet the more important takeaway is this confirms what has appeared to be true for the past decade: Geeky is the new cool. It's worth faking. Once geeks pretended not to be geeks, but now it's sometimes in the interest of non-geeks to pretend to be geeks.

The idea of fake geeks smashed headlong into gender politics last year when a debate raged online about "fake geek girls." These supposedly are attractive women who pretend to be geeks for nefarious purposes. By early this year, the discussion had made it to mainstream websites like Slate and The Atlantic. A consensus formed that fake geek girls exist only in the insecure minds of male geeks who feel threatened by attractive, geeky women intruding in their He-Man Woman Haters Club.

I've met a lot of attractive female geeks, so I know they're real. But the feminist response about insecure males reeks of its own kind of sexist overgeneralization. There are fake geeks — "poseurs" is a better term — of both sexes. How do I know? Because I've met them, too.

Male or female, don't tell me you're an anime geek if you don't know who Leiji Matsumoto is.

Culture Shock 09.13.12: 'Thick of It' is back with some more bite

After spending the previous season as a supporting player — and in the opposition — it is Peter Mannion's time to shine.

Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker in "The Thick of It."

And if you believe that, you're alone because not even Peter, the new minister for the fictitious Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, believes that.

The parties change, but the challenges and humiliations of government remain the same as the wickedly brilliant British political satire "The Thick of It" returns for a fourth season, following a three-year hiatus. And this year, for the first time, it's also airing in the U.S.

New episodes appear on Hulu on Sundays, and if you want to catch up with previous seasons, Hulu, which is co-producing the new season along with BBC Two, has those as well.

Stuck leading a worthless department staffed with civil servants who would just as soon be laid off, and having to share power with a junior minister from another party, Peter (Roger Allam) has been put out to pasture. He's a relic of the 1980s, with '80s suits, '80s hair and '80s ideas.

That especially puts Peter at odds with the prime minister's modern, tie-hating, chai-drinking PR man, Stewart (Vincent Franklin), whose chipper Zen exterior conceals a cutthroat political operative.

In the previous season, Peter was about the closest thing "The Thick of It" had to a sympathetic character, but now that he's in power — such as it is — he's more bitter than ever.

The political situation echoes the current real-life climate in Great Britain, where the government is composed of an increasingly fractious coalition of Tories and Liberal Democrats, while Labour labors in opposition.

That means Peter also must deal with Fergus (Geoffrey Streatfield), a junior minister from the coalition party. And their rivalry gets even more heated when Peter is instructed to launch Fergus' new initiative, which requires Peter going to a school.

"I hate schoolchildren," is Peter's response. "They're volatile and stupid and they don't have the vote." That's Peter: ever practical.

It goes without saying that things go disastrously wrong from there, with fantastic results for us.

Shot in documentary style, "The Thick of It" is a cross between "The Office" and the 1980s British comedy "Yes, Prime Minister," and it relies as heavily on improvisation as it does the snappy scripted dialogue of series creator Armando Iannucci (HBO's "Veep") and his writing team.

Allam, who as others have noted seems to be channeling the late Christopher Hitchens with his performance, is in particularly top form.

Now if you've already been following "The Thick of It," or you've seen the equally hilarious spin-off film "In the Loop" (available on Netflix instant) you'll notice one character has been conspicuously absent so far — the foul-mouthed political shark Malcolm Tucker.

That's because Malcolm (Peter Capaldi) is conspicuously absent from the season four debut. But just because the former prime minister's public-relations mastermind and party-line enforcer is out of power doesn't mean he's out of mind. And the preview for this weekend's second episode shows us that Malcolm is scheming to get back into Number 10. But first he must deal with the opposition's new, unlikely party leader, Nicola (Rebecca Front), whom we last saw as the previous head of the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship.

If Nicola was in over her head as minister of a minor department, then as party leader — well, you can guess. And sharks prey on the weak.

Besides, it wouldn't really be "The Thick of It" without Malcolm calling people names I can't repeat here.

Culture Shock 08.30.12: '2016' more D'Souza's fantasy than Obama's America

"2016: Obama's America" is a bizarre movie, starting with the title.

It is only in the final minutes that co-director and tour guide, conservative author Dinesh D'Souza, bothers to lay out exactly what he thinks the country will look like in 2016 if President Barack Obama should win a second term. His forecast for Obama's America? Nearing broke and increasingly disarmed in a dangerous world.

It takes so long to get to what the title promises because D'Souza is busy outlining his Great Big Theory, which he takes whole cloth from his 2010 book "The Roots of Obama's Rage." In it D'Souza claims Obama is an anti-colonial zealot determined to bring down rich, capitalist, "colonial" powers like the United States while transferring their wealth to former colonies.

This theory, upon which D'Souza rests his entire case, has met with — to put it charitably — a mixed reaction. Andrew Ferguson's review in "The Weekly Standard," a conservative magazine, is one especially damning example.

D'Souza is engaging in armchair psychology. Drawing heavily from passages in Obama's 1995 memoir "Dreams from My Father," he argues Obama is trying to live up to an idealized vision of his radical Marxist father, whom he barely knew. D'Souza even enlists a psychologist, Paul Vitz of New York University, to help make the case.

D'Souza's long-distance diagnosis seems to be that Obama has a reverse Oedipus complex. Instead of wanting, subconsciously, to kill his distant and unloving father, he wants to keep alive the mythical father his mother told him about.

This is all fascinating stuff, and some of it might even be true, but D'Souza never brings any compelling evidence to the table.

There is, arguably, a good case to be made against both the president's economic policies — which some believe have prolonged the country's economic downturn by creating uncertainty and propping up failed businesses — and his foreign policy. But D'Souza is too enamored of his Great Big Theory to spend time with the relevant facts.

Early in the film, D'Souza shows footage of Occupy protesters disillusioned with Obama's performance in office, but D'Souza doesn't say why these protesters are disillusioned. Could it be Obama's health plan, which subsidizes the health insurance industry that helped write it? Could it be his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and launching of drone strikes throughout the Middle East? Could it be that military spending through 2021 is set to increase 18 percent even if the "draconian cuts" of sequestration take place?

Contrary to D'Souza, this doesn't look like the record of an anti-colonial extremist. It looks like the record of President George W. Bush.

But the oddities of "2016" don't end there. The first 15 minutes or so are more about D'Souza than Obama. And D'Souza begins by claiming he has some insight into Obama's mindset because of their shared colonial experience, never mind that Obama grew up mostly in the U.S. while D'Souza stayed in his native India until he came to the U.S. for college.

Even the stylistic choices D'Souza and co-director John Sullivan make are inexplicable: D'Souza conducts interviews by cellphone even though both parties are on camera. Some closeup shots are so extreme they're distracting. The shaky camerawork makes "The Blair Witch Project" look like a Stanley Kubrick film. And the subtitles used for interviewees with thick accents are so stylized they are nearly impossible to read.

I could go on. "2016: Obama's America" is a misguided film at almost every level.

It must be seen to be disbelieved.

Culture Shock 06.21.12: Bring me the head of George W. Bush; feigned outrage strikes again

When historians look back on the first two decades of the 21st century, they may well conclude that the defining characteristic of our age is feigned outrage.

This is not how you get ahead in politics.

It began in 2004, when TV viewers were terrorized by 0.5 seconds of Janet Jackson's exposed nipple during the last Super Bowl halftime show anyone remembers. But it came to a head last week with George W. Bush's head, or, rather, a facsimile of it, covered in a shaggy wig and stuck to a pike in the final episodes of season 1 of HBO's "Game of Thrones."

These are the things we're supposed to get upset about.

We're told — by people who know nothing of American history — that Americans are polarized as never before. Actually, quite the opposite.

We agree as never before. The consensus is shifting on some issues, from marijuana legalization to gay marriage — both of which slim majorities of Americans now favor — but most people don't really disagree about a lot.

Unfortunately, this makes life hard for politicians, pundits, professional activists and others whose livelihoods depend on people being at each other's throats. So, partisans of Team Red and Team Blue go around looking for things they can pretend to be angry about, and then try to make you and me angry about them, too.

These are, usually, not serious issues. How can they be? Team Red and Team Blue agree on so much. A president of one party gets a national mandatory health insurance plan enacted, and the other party, which says it is against mandatory health insurance, nominates a challenger who enacted the same insurance plan in his own state. From the size and scope of government to issues of war and peace, there are no serious disagreements among our leaders or the opinion makers who orbit them.

So, bring me the head of George W. Bush.

The head, not meant to be President Bush's head but just the head of some unlucky bloke who got his noggin lopped off, as happens to so many "Game of Thrones" characters, appears in an episode that first aired more than a year ago. No one noticed. The producers commented about the head when season 1 was released on DVD, saying they needed a head to put on a spike and the head of the former president happened to be what they had lying around. No political message was intended, they said. Again, no one noticed.

Until last week, when, suddenly, feigned outrage struck again, with Team Red scribblers like the New York Post's Andrea Peyser saying this was yet another example of the liberal Hollywood elite slamming wholesome American values. Never mind that getting beheaded by the repugnant, inbred King Joffrey is, if anything, an honor that puts you in pretty good moral standing.

Did William Shatner get upset when the makers of the "Halloween" movies put a bleached-out Shatner mask on their lumbering serial killer Michael Myers? I think not.

But HBO folded. It pulled the offending episode from iTunes and its HBO Go service, and it stopped shipping new DVDs.

All this because of trumped-up outrage over an "offense" it took the offended a year to notice. Don't think I'm picking on Team Red. Team Blue over to our left is no better.

Remember when getting really upset about something Rush Limbaugh said was a thing? Yet most of the people claiming to be upset were probably delighted, because it turned Limbaugh's otherwise unremarkable target, Sandra Fluke, into a martyr and gave Team Blue an excuse to engage in one of its favorite sports — beating up Limbaugh for saying something stupid.

Maybe someday we'll go back to being outraged about things that matter. But not today.

Steal This Comic

Via Geeks Are Sexy.

Booknotes

Because I also do politics, I'm currently reading The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America by Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie and Reason magazine's Matt Welch. Just to let you know how atypically well-written and culturally aware this is for a political book, there's a reference to Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS on page 23 of my advance copy.

Culture Shock 06.09.11: Sexting mishaps not just for teens

Not since the late Sen. Ted Stevens described the Internet as "a series of tubes," has a sitting congressman's misunderstanding of how the Internet works provided comedians — and lowly columnists like me — with so much material.

Oh, Anthony Weiner, where have you been all my life?

It's one thing for a politician to get caught up in an embarrassing sex scandal. It can even be a good career move. Exhibit A: former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. As attorney general, he crusaded against prostitution. Four years later, he resigned the governorship after he was unmasked as Client 9 in a high-profile prostitution sting.

Did that keep Spitzer down? No way. You can watch him weeknights on CNN, which has got to be a better gig than dealing with the New York State Assembly day in, day out, especially now that he no longer has to share his time slot with former co-host Kathleen Parker.

But it's another thing to get caught in a sex scandal usually associated with teenagers.

That's just what Rep. Weiner has done.

He denied it to the bitter end. He now says it was a misguided joke.

But the fact is, Rep. Weiner's accidental public tweeting of a crotch shot of his own crotch, now public for all to see, is just the sort of thing adults have been warning kids about ever since cellphone cameras made it easy for teens to take their own — how to put it? — "self-portraits" and share them with friends.

You never know, for example, when a girlfriend might turn on you. But it'll probably happen after you cheat on her with her best friend. And then the ex will send that compromising picture of you not wearing pants to all of her friends, who now also hate you because you're a two-timing jerk. And the next thing you know, pictures of your junk are all over campus.

(No, this is not a personal story. We didn't have cellphones when I was in school. And the only embarrassing pictures of me in the public domain are the ones my "friends" have posted on Facebook, in which I always seem to be holding a bottle of PBR. People could easily get the wrong idea. They might think I'm an alcoholic or, worse still, a hipster.)

So, basically, Rep. Weiner didn't quite know how Twitter worked, and now what has been seen can't be unseen.

As it turns out, a couple of years ago, when psychologists and other people with too much time on their hands were fretting about teenagers ruining their college and job prospects by "sexting" naked pictures of themselves to each other, they should have been worried about the nation's lawmakers doing the same thing.

A hypocrisy-laden prostitution scandal is an adult scandal. That's what we expect of the alleged adults we elect to office. But a sexting scandal is a juvenile scandal.

How do you explain that to the wife?

UPDATE: Last week, I complained that DC Comics' forthcoming revamp of all of its superhero titles would probably mean the end of one of the company's few consistently good books, Grant Morrison's "Batman, Inc."

This week, DC announced that "Batman, Inc." will return next year. How this fits with DC's stated plans I can't guess, but I'll take all the good news I can.

The anarchist politics of 'Watchmen'

From the archives: An article I wrote in 2009 (commissioned by Young Americans for Liberty) on the politics of Alan Moore's Watchmen, the movie version of which was just arriving in theaters around that time.

Culture Shock 11.11.10: Alabamians react to bad laws in their own way

Say what you will about Alabama, but the state does take a pragmatic approach to enforcing stupid laws. In general, it doesn't.

So, in that regard, you could say Alabama is more progressive — in the true sense of the term — than San Francisco, which currently is in the process of enacting a really, really silly law that officials there will definitely enforce.

This week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors formally adopted what has become known as the "Happy Meal ban." The ban forbids restaurants from giving out toys with children's meals that contain "too much" fat, sugar or sodium.

Like a lot of dubious laws, the ban is intended to protect children, or so its supporters claim.

"It's time for fast-food companies to stop exploiting children in order to sell more junk food, and this measure would at least set basic nutrition standards for meals sold with toys," said Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a misnamed group of Washington, D.C., busybodies bent on regulating just about all human behavior.

I guess it's just too much to expect parents to ever tell their children "no." So, San Francisco will just have to save them from themselves.

If the ban survives likely legal challenges — I don't expect Ronald McDonald to take this outrage lying down — and becomes law next year as planned, you can bet San Francisco's food police will enforce it with the ruthless inefficiency one expects of California government. But it will be enforced.

California, you used to be cool. But you've changed, man. You've changed.

In Alabama, we take a different approach.

Contrary to popular opinion, and despite all appearances, the people of Alabama are pretty sensible, at least some of the time. We just do a good job of pretending otherwise. So, when state and local lawmakers pass obviously bad laws, we do what all sensible people do. We just ignore them. That's why every dry county — an endangered species now that the city of Cullman has approved legal liquor sales and sent temperatures in hell plunging — has bootleggers.

For example, in 1998, the Alabama Legislature made the state a national laughingstock by passing a ban on sex toys. Legal challenges to the law failed, and the effort to overturn the statute finally ended when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

So, to this day, the law is still on the books, and no one in the Legislature seems eager to repeal it.

And why bother? Sure, the ban is an embarrassment, but this is Alabama. We've long since become immune to the "black eyes" we continually inflict upon ourselves.

More importantly, there's no pressing need to repeal the sex-toy ban because, at present, it's not being enforced.

Sherri Williams, the business owner who took her fight against the ban all the way to Washington, is still in business. Her Pleasures stores in Decatur and Huntsville are still open and still selling sex toys. Williams is taking advantage of a loophole that allows the sale of sex toys for medical purposes. So, all of her customers fill out the equivalent of a doctor's excuse.

Thus far, local prosecutors and law enforcement officials have shown no desire to press the issue, and Williams is moving her Huntsville store to a more prominent location, complete with drive-thru service.

Some historians think there is something distinctive about the South's attitude toward authority. The theory holds that the South was settled by Scots-Irish immigrants who had rebellion in their blood, and that anti-authoritarian instinct is still part of Southern culture today.

Maybe so. But there is little doubt that we tell authority to take a hike as often as not. And in many cases, that's a good thing.

It's a trait they could use in San Francisco.

Culture Shock 05.20.10: State candidate stars in best TV campaign ad ever

Apart from "Iron Man 2," the most exciting thing I've seen this month is, of all things, a political advertisement.

Dale Peterson's ad hit YouTube on Sunday, and by Monday afternoon it was everywhere — Fox News, political blogs, and websites devoted to things that are either awesome or just plain weird. You name it.

In media speak, the ad had "gone viral." By midweek, it had attracted about half a million views on YouTube, and at least one media pundit — a blogger for Time magazine — had declared it the best campaign ad ever.

Hardly anyone had even heard of Peterson before his ad stormed the Internet like battalions of GIs attacking the beaches at Normandy. Now he is the most recognizable candidate in Alabama's Republican primary for state agriculture commissioner. Not that that's saying much. With everyone's attention focused on the contentious race for governor, the candidates for commissioner of agriculture are barely an afterthought.

Peterson's ad is like a John Wayne western. The background music evokes "The Magnificent Seven," without being so similar as to require royalty payments.

When Peterson first appears, he is, naturally, riding a horse. He's also wearing a white cowboy hat, just in case you have any doubt about who the "good guy" is supposed to be. Then he hops down, takes off his sunglasses, looks us right in the eye and goes on a glorious rant that makes him sound more than a little like R. Lee Emery's drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket." You half expect him to tell you to drop and give him 20.

It's the political equivalent of Tourette syndrome. He even calls one of his opponents a "dummy," which is either rude or refreshingly candid or, for all I know, possibly both.

But this ad is no dummy.

With the help of some fast-paced editing, Peterson comes across as a decent character actor with superb comic timing. If he doesn't win the election, he could go to California and perhaps replace Emery as Hollywood's go-to military guy.

Peterson tells us he's been "a farmer, a businessman, a cop, a Marine during Vietnam, so listen up." When he takes off the sunglasses, he's like David Caruso at the start of every "CSI: Miami" episode. But instead of assaulting us with a bad pun, he talks about the "thugs and criminals" who try to keep Alabama voters "in the dark."

I'm not entirely certain what he's talking about, but it sounds pretty good. Besides, "thug" is a great word. People don't use it nearly enough. Thug.

He does lose focus a bit when he starts talking about "illegals." I realize you can't get elected dog catcher in this state unless you support a homegrown Berlin Wall, but immigration doesn't have much to do with the agriculture commissioner's job description. Still, he gets right back on target when he fumes about his opponents stealing yard signs from his supporters.

I like a politician who has his priorities straight.

But seriously, it's not that he's complaining about stolen yard signs. It's that he's so deadly earnest about it. And to prove it, almost the next thing he does is brandish a rifle.

Other campaign commercials this election cycle have shown candidates carrying rifles, but Peterson is the only candidate I can imagine actually shooting one. (Sorry, Bradley Byrne.)

Is it wrong for voters to choose a candidate based on one clever commercial? Of course it is. But voters make decisions based on lots of wrongheaded notions. So why not this one?