A Long and Splendid Journey

Before I beat myself up too much for taking over a year to face the fact that I'm not getting my new book written as fast as I thought I would, I should acknowledge a lesson I just received in the mysterious tides of creation.

      It will probably come as no surprise to you that some books take longer to write than others. A research-heavy non-fiction book, like this Undressing of America, can typically take three or four years to complete. But another book may have a completely different timeline. A humor book, for example, written by two collaborators in a white heat of inspiration and excitement. Last night I uploaded the first episode of just such a book—My Pal Splendid Man, my new collaboration with Will Jacobs—on its own website. And how long did My Pal Splendid Man take to write, from conception to completion?

      Just a little over twenty-seven years.

      In January, 1981, a young Will Jacobs was sitting in his apartment on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco looking out at the gray sky and drizzle, having just finished reading a few old superhero comics, and a scene flashed into his mind. There's this frustrated would-be writer named Will, see, sitting around catching up on his self-pity, and suddenly there's a knock on his door. He opens the door and a friend walks in, a guy in a blue business suit and glasses who looks unprepossessing enough—but there's something special about him. Something that does not immediately meet the eye. And after some cryptic dialogue between Will and his pal, we suddenly get it: this guy is a superhero, the most powerful superhero in the universe, in his secret identity. And with all the great crises a hero could and should be tackling, this one, for some reason, had come around to help Will snap out of his funk.

      Our young Jacobs wrote a few pages, liked it, and called up the even younger Gerard Jones to read it to him. Jones thought it was funny and intriguing and asked what happened next. Jacobs had no idea. He'd have to let it sit and see if the next scene came to him. Jones said he'd love to hear it when it happened. Back in those days, you see, Jacobs and Jones had written a few unpublishable things together for fun, but they didn't think of themselves as any sort of humor-writing team. Whereas now if Will Jacobs has a humor idea his first thought is, "I wonder if Jones will want to work on this with me?" and if Gerard Jones likes an idea of Jacobs's his first question is, "Can I help?" back then their friendship was still on a "Well, let me know when you've got more to share" basis. So those few handwritten pages of story on lined paper went back into Will's stack of fragments and notes.

      Four or five months later, however, our young Jacobs and Jones found themselves starting a humor book together—they called it The Summer of the Beaver but it would eventually be renamed The Beaver Papers—then finishing it, then sending it to agents and editors, and finally selling it to a real publisher in New York. As neither of them had ever sold anything to anyone before (aside from used books and discount jewelry), this had a tremendous effect on them. They decided that they had a talent for writing humor together, and so they looked for the next funny idea they could develop. One of them, they no longer know who, remembered those few pages about the would-be writer and the superhero. They figured out what the odd friendship would be based on, they developed the characters, and they hurled themselves into the stories with the aforementioned white heat.

      By the end of 1982, Jacobs and Jones had written several inter-connected stories about Will Jones and his god-like and supremely virtuous pal. (Who was not yet named Splendid Man. He's gone through a couple of names along the way.) Some of them were pretty lame, but some of them were actually quite funny. Unfortunately, even the better of them somehow didn't add a book. Our young writers had become extremely fond of the characters and the style of humor and the narrative voice, but they just couldn't figure out how to bring it all together. So they put it down for a while. And then, in the fall of 1983, they got a job with The National Lampoon, and life carried them on.

      Occasionally over the years they dusted the pages off to see if they could do something with them. They got a few of the stories printed in a little comic book fanzine. In 1987, when the now not-so-young Jacobs and Jones scored some success with their comic book The Trouble with Girls, they got a publisher quite interested in adapting My Pal Mighty Man (as it was briefly known) into a comic book. But when the publisher almost immediately folded, they moved on again. A few times in the late 1990s, Jacobs would have an inexplicable brainstorm and crank out another My Pal Whoever story or scene, and Jones would say, "Hey, that's funny." But by then it was just a hobby.

      By the time Checker Books contacted them in 2006 to ask about reprinting their old Trouble with Girls comics in graphic novel form, our now middled-aged friends had ceased to write humor together at all. But the knowledge that their collaborations were going to be seeing print again got them missing the days when they had regularly made each other laugh and fall in love with preposterous characters. So Jacobs pulled the old superhero stories out of his desk drawer. "You know what?" he said to Jones (emailed, really). "Some of these are really good. And I'll bet with what we've learned about storytelling over the past couple of decades, we could figure out what it's been lacking."

      The first thing they did was come up with a character name that made them laugh: Splendid Man. Which opened up a whole new subplot that, they suddenly realized, would tie all the stories together in a wonderful way. (I'm not telling you what it is. I want you to read it.) Suddenly they were able to throw themselves back into the stories in a white heat of inspiration and excitement that belied their advanced years. They showed it to some people and heard that it was very funny but not quite ready for publication yet. So they set it down, wrote a whole different book (Million Dollar Ideas) in a heat of comparable whiteness, and came back to it. This time they—we—think we've really got it. We're putting it on line, one story every three weeks, to draw attention to it and solicit some reader comments. And already we're hearing very nice things.

      What struck me most forcefully when I scanned the Splendid Man website this morning is that the initial spark from 1981 is still alive in it. (You'll recognize the original scene described above as the opening of Episode Two.) And yet there's so much else in it that Will and I have learned in the journey from our twenties to our fifties. It's a rare gift to be able to connect so intimately with one's own past, and to bring something back to life that I honestly thought I'd have to put down.

      I need to remind myself of this whenever I catch myself falling into the trap of dropping each new day that I don't write The Undressing of America onto the scale of my self-worth. Sometimes books happen when they happen.

      Unfortunately, there is that problem of the contract with FSG...and that other half of the advance that would sure come in handy....

Presidents' Day

This "President" thing has always vexed me.

     The first time I ever heard of a president was when I asked why my mother was crying and my brother told me "the president" had been killed. I was told that he was a great man and he had two children around my age who were now very sad. A president, I gathered, was a good thing, but also a vulnerable one who brought pain and fear.

      My first awareness of what a president was came through Lyndon Johnson. At first I was hearing good things about him in my family, as he signed the Civil Rights Act, but then came that hideous war and I began to hear about his cruelty and duplicity, his vulgarity and madness. A president, then, betrayed people.

      When I was eleven, I first began to understand some basic political realities, and the American people elected Richard Nixon. He defined "president" during the six most formative years of my political education. I don't imagine I need to elaborate.

      I almost thought Ford was going to get in and out without causing too much damage to the nation or its soul, but then he pardoned Nixon. Not just for the crimes we knew he'd committed, but for any crimes he might have committed.

      And yet, all through this I was being taught in school that there had been great presidents in the past who changed history in noble ways and came to represent what was good about our country. Not all of them, not hardly: one February my class held a "Presidents Pageant," and somehow I ended up being James Knox Polk. And even then I suspected that the story was a bit cleaned up. But clearly it had once been possible for a president to be a leader. My parents spoke of one—"FDR" my father called him, with something like infatuation in his voice—who in their childhoods had turned the mood of the country from fear to hope and sustained that hope through twelve hard years. I fell in love with '30s movies and through them—Warner Brothers from Little Caesar through 42nd Street to Dead End—I could feel the transformational power of that president across the intervening decades. Even Truman and Eisenhower didn't sound so bad against the self-destructive losers I'd seen in the job.

      I wanted to give my heart to Jimmy Carter, although even before the election there were yellow flags waving all around him. I waited and hoped for him to rise above the confusion and ineffectiveness of the first part of his administration. I even wanted to believe that his "malaise" speech was the turning point, although that cold spot in the middle of my gut told me that it was really the opposite. Perceptive sociology but lousy politics. Then came the Iran hostage crisis and his announcement that he would not leave the White House until it was resolved, still my personal choice for the just-plain-stupidest presidential moment in history.

      Reagan at least acted presidential. He at least made it through two full elected terms and actually became more instead of less popular as he went along. And a lot of things went pretty well during his tenure: the economy perking up, the vile Soviet empire beginning its final crack, a national snapping-out of the malaise, a lot of fun dance tunes. (Those were also the most exciting years ever for the comic book industry, for reasons that had a lot to do with Reagan; but that's another essay.) The problem with Reagan was that I hated what he was doing to the country long-term. The hastening of the two-tier economy, stirring up our latent social intolerance into a hostile and wrong-headed "values" movement, the so-called war on drugs that's still crippling us as a country, the manipulation of the Iran-Iraq War that led us straight to where we are now.

      The first Bush was more a place-holder than a president, at least until his own contribution to the Middle East mess.

      I was 35 years years old and feeling pretty well beaten up by American presidents when Bill Clinton caught my fancy. Yes, I was a bit troubled by the faint aroma of sleaze that filled every room he entered. Even then he had the air of a man who would say anything to get the approval he craved. But he said some fine things, and I liked his wife, and I saw the potential in him to turn the nation's political tide. Then came those infuriating first two years, when he handed Gingrich and the neocons everything they needed to take over Congress. The dawning awareness that he would cut any deal to remain the main conduit of power in the room. He did some good things too, and for a while my country seemed to be doing better, but gradually his obvious love of political gamesmanship and symbolic victory came to overwhelm his political agenda.

      Finally came the nightmare of the Lewinski aftermath. Not that I couldn't feel some compassion for his obvious sexual compulsiveness: I grew up under a cloud of addictive behaviors, especially alcoholism, and I've had to deal with plenty of my own compulsive patterns. What sickened me was the smug, gleeful game-playing afterward. The hairsplitting over not having had "sex" with that woman. The definition of "is." His apparent belief that he had won the fight, although he had demoralized his party and his country on the way to scoring a legalistic stalemate. For years the public life of my nation was about Bill Clinton's dick. Literally and metaphorically.

      By the election of 2000 I felt thoroughly disgusted with presidents. I started telling myself that there was something so inherently wrong with the post or the system or the country that we could not do any better. I even voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election—and I don't even like Ralph Nader very much. I just wanted to believe that there could be some way out of the duality of the party of Clinton and the party of Tom DeLay. So disgusted was I that the difference between a Democratic and a Republican president didn't really seem to matter.

      Then the Republicans on the Supreme Court hijacked my democracy and handed my country to a gang of thugs. That taught me something about the need to choose between the Democrats and the Republicans, but even it wasn't enough to thrill me about the prospects the Democrats were offering up. I campaigned some for Kerry, seeing him as clearly the lesser of evils, but I also felt some relief at his defeat; I didn't see a Kerry presidency doing the progressive cause much good in the long run. Knowing that Hillary Clinton would be up next did not thrill me. I liked her a lot more than Kerry. I knew I could admire her savvy and toughness, and with a Democratic Congress she might be a lot more effective than her husband. She might well be a president who could engineer the legislative and executive changes I wanted to see made. But I also saw her pulling us deeper into a political drama I was sick of. She still seemed to have her punitive streak, her feeling of entitlement, her love of conflict for its own sake, and, of course, that husband and co-president of hers. I would vote for her, even campaign for her, but with a certain sickness of heart.

      I found myself at 50, beaten up and resigned and not believing that I would never know what it was like to have a president who wanted to make this country better and had the mind and soul to do so, who had the skill and the spiritual soundness to turn his values into realities, who could actually represent what I hoped was still true about America, who could actually be an inspiration and not an obstacle to my belief in my country. Then I heard Barack Obama speak, and I found myself thinking that it might be possible. I began to follow his campaign, I studied him, I talked to my trusted friends about him. And sometime in January I realized that I'd begun to believe.

      I've wanted to know a Presidents' Day that actually made me want to celebrate the president. Next year I think I may get that at last.

Hard Choice

I wish my mom had lived to see this election. Leslie Jones was the definition of a Loyal Democrat. In November 2000 she was dying of cancer—she’d chosen not to continue chemotherapy and we all knew that the end couldn’t be more than a few months away—but she was more depressed about George Bush’s victory than about the end of her own life. “God, I hate to go out on this note,” she said. “I was hoping I could at least leave you all with a Democrat in the White House.” She did, in fact, die a few months later, and over the past seven years I’ve often been glad that she didn’t have to see what was happening to her country. But I wish she was here for this one. I wish I could ask her who she would choose between Obama and Clinton.

      My mother was a feminist: by instinct lifelong, by political self-identification starting in the late ‘60s. On camping trips our family game was Parcheesi, and one year, when I was twelve or so and newly in thrall to Marvel Comics, I named my four Parcheesi men after the Fantastic Four, writing the names Reed, Ben, Johnny and Sue on their wooden bases. My mother snatched my pen, tipped up her four "Parcheesi women" and marked them with the names of her heroes: Germaine, Gloria, Betty and Simone. (As in, for you younger readers, Greer, Steinem, Friedan and de Beauvoir, four great mid-century feminists.)

      But before feminism, her driving political passion was civil rights. She was born in the piney woods of Mississippi into a family of Methodists who spoke up for racial decency in a time when the Klan spoke for the mainstream. She was finding radical civil-rights groups to join in the mid-‘40s, before most of liberal America found its voice on racial issues. She took non-violent resistance training through the Congress of Racial Equality in 1962, planning to participate in sit-ins or freedom rides in the South. Ultimately she didn’t go, I think because she didn’t want to die and leave two young sons.

      My mother dreamed of the day she would someday be able to vote for a woman for president. One of her favorite elections was 1984, when she got to put a mark by Geraldine Ferraro’s name for the vice presidency, even though she knew Reagan was going to roll to victory. I know she dreamed too—though more privately, not daring to believe it could ever come true—of the day she would be able to vote for a black nominee.

      Well, here is that election of her dreams. A woman and a black man as the sole contenders for the Democratic nomination in a year when the GOP seems bound to lose. It’s not Elizabeth Dole versus Colin Powell, either, but liberals who support nearly everything Leslie Jones believed in.

      And yet, what a cruel dream it’s turned out to be. Because she would have to choose. She’d have to vote against one or the other. I can only imagine how agonizing it would have been for her—and how agonizing it must be for those millions of women who fought the feminist battles of the ‘60s and ‘70s—that in order to elect the first woman to the White House she would have to rise up against the first plausible candidacy of a black man. No wonder so many women in their fifties and older have said that they hope Obama will settle for the vice presidential spot, or just that they wish he had waited eight years.

      In her essay Goodbye to All That 2 the feminist writer Robin Morgan casts her support for Hillary Clinton as a direct continuation of those struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s. A Clinton victory will mean “Goodbye to the double standard…to the toxic viciousness…to the news-coverage target practice….”

      “The real question,” she writes, “is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?

      “‘Our President, Ourselves!’

      “Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy—as we did when Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the U.S. Senate, as we did when Rosie Jimenez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.”

      She concludes, “I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.”

      I get it. I understand the desire to believe that supporting Clinton is the right thing for any woman to do. But if my mother were still here, I’d have to ask her if she could really believe it was true.

      Yesterday my friend Xandra, a feminist of the generation after Hillary Rodham’s, born in the ‘60s, told me, “I’m not sure Hillary Clinton is the feminist hero I’ve had in mind. For one thing, her life and her career are so completely intertwined with her husband’s. From her election to the Senate until the unspoken message of her campaign has been, ‘Let’s elect the two Clintons again.’” There’s no question that Hillary Clinton is extraordinarily tough, smart and capable, and her politics are mostly true to classic feminism. But she does trade on claims of experience that more accurately belong to her husband. Polls show that much of her support, especially among blue-collar males, is based on the expectation that we’re getting Bill back. She hasn’t been a very active or outspoken Senator in her own right. And why does her husband, when ostensibly campaigning for her, keep referring to “us” and “our agenda”?

      And she’s made such painful compromises with male power. I can still visualize her on that talk show in early 1992, as her husband was working damage control on his Gennifer Flowers mess, talking about how strong their marriage was. I think how profound her humiliation must have been. And then she had to go through it again over Paula Jones, and then again ten-fold over Monica Lewinsky. Of course, her endurance of public humiliation by her husband is probably more than politics; she probably really loves him. But still. The feminist revolution of the ‘60s was supposed to do far more than merely knock down the barriers that kept women out of public power. The wife who would suffer any indignity silently in order to advance her man’s career was supposed to be one of its casualties too. And yet Hillary drags that ancient, prefeminist response to the philandering of powerful men into the 21st Century.

      She’s also trying to play her relationship with that male power in a way that’s becoming embarrassing. She’s on record in many sources, including her own autobiography, as supporting NAFTA. But now that NAFTA has become a bone of contention among the blue-collar workers she’s courting, she’s trying to dissociate herself from it, implicitly saying, “That was Bill, not me.” She seeks equal credit for whatever is still popular about her husband’s administration (her “experience”) while making him exclusively responsible for what isn’t. Every politician dances a similar dance with his or her political history, of course, but in Hillary Clinton’s case this is compounded by a quality of ducking behind the male screen, minimizing her own public self. This too feminism was supposed to undo.

      And then there’s the war. She supported that war, including troop increases after the fall of Saddam Hussein, more energetically than she now wants to admit. And when she speaks of ending it, she adds that first we must find a way to do so with “honor, dignity and respect,” words that echo eerily Richard Nixon’s “peace with honor,” which turned out to mean four more years of war. Are this the agenda of a candidate who embodies the values of feminism, or is it another uneasy compromise with an old male power?

      I would tell my mom what my friend Xandra said. And what she said next: “At first I was sure I was going to support Clinton and I saw Obama mainly as a male threat to her. But after a while I stopped seeing the candidates as people of a certain gender or race. I started seeing them as people. And the more I learned about Obama, the more I felt he was the one representing me.” We will have our female president. Now that Clinton has shown that gender doesn’t stop a candidate from being a contender, more women will emerge. There will be one who fulfills the feminist dream in a way that Hillary Clinton cannot, one who has beaten her own path and not made so many deals with the devil along the way.

      I don’t think the Democrats offer absentee ballots where my mother has gone. (They used to in Cook County, Illinois, but they’ve stopped the practice.) If they did, I’d say, “Mom. It’s okay. This is Obama's time."

Thanks...

...to those, especially Michael Chabon, who nagged me into finally creating a blog. For the time being it will mainly concern the election, but we'll see where it evolves from there.