In the Two-Party Trenches

I’m thinking about the election as a lesson not in whatever’s unique this year but as what’s become utterly predictable: our precise and inflexible partisan divide.
       The narrative being written about this election is almost entirely about those people who were extremely excited about Trump and showed up in much bigger numbers than usual. But I’m trying to understand another, quieter narrative that I think is just as important. Those Trump loyalists did tip the scales in the end—but only because they were added to the votes of at least thirty million people who actively didn’t like him, people who weren’t particularly driven by blue-collar anger or fear of globalism or xenophobia or the other bullet-points of most election postmortems. 
       We’re no longer the America of 1964 or 1972 where millions of members of one party would cross the line because of a candidate. We’re now so deeply wedded to our party affiliations, have made them so much a part of our social identities, that instead of adjusting our choice of party according to the candidates we adjust our perceptions of the candidates to support our party biases. “Undecided” voters are mostly undecided between voting for their party’s nominee or staying home. Even most “independent” voters have sympathies with one party or the other that rarely shift.
       This isn't about conscious loyalty. Hardly anyone actively likes their party anymore—or at least the party’s leadership. More and more of us register as independents and feel like we’re constantly stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. But if you look at the county-by-county results of the past five elections (especially if you leave out the panic-year of 2008) they’re astonishingly similar. If you look at exit polls, the demographic breakdowns of who voted for which party in those counties is also astonishingly similar. And what difference there is can be mostly explained by relative turnout among different groups—not changes in people’s preferences.
       There’s a disconnect between the feeling and the doing. I can say, in full sincerity, “I hate Starbucks.” But if you keep catching me in line at Starbucks and every time I say, “I do hate Starbucks, I just didn’t really have a choice this time because I was in a hurry and blah blah blah,” it’s still true that I feel hate for Starbucks—but it’s also true that I’m a regular Starbucks customer and they can probably count on me to keep giving them my money even while I bitch about them.
       Obviously a lot of this reflects the fact that Democratic and Republican candidates are much more consistent than they used to be on their main issues. If Roe v. Wade is high on your agenda, you know which party is for and against it, election after election. But even when you get a candidate who rejects big pieces of the usual party agenda, I don’t see it making any real difference. How many Republicans or Democrats for whom global trade is a major concern actually voted the other way, even with Trump talking protectionism and Clinton’s background on globalism? Looking at the results, it almost seems like the only Republicans who defected were the big-name Neocons in the news. 
       A lot of political scientists have been saying lately, “Candidates don’t matter much.” If any election were ever going to disprove that, it was this one. Instead it bore it out. After all the talk about “realignment,” the only real surprise was the number of Rust Belt states Trump won—but there’s a reason they’re called “swing states.” Their swing wasn’t any big shift of allegiances, it was turnout. Kind of a mirror image of the increased black turnout and lower working-class white turnout in those same states last time. The only real significance of individual candidates now is how well they inspire some subset of the party’s loyalists to vote. It’s enough to tip the balance in a race, but not enough to break the duolith.
       I see a deep cultural split manifested around political parties, a group-identity split that shapes not only our final choices but the lenses through which we see everything. We’ll say, “I hate my party for sticking me with this lousy candidate…but we have to stop That Monster.” And we prepare the monster role for the other party’s candidate before we know who it is.
       This year has been so heated and bizarre that it’s hard even to talk about this, but when I look back four years I remember a lot of fairly reasonable people calling one centrist, pro-Wall Street technocrat a radical leftist or the other centrist, pro-Wall Street technocrat a radical rightist. And I can see the lenses in action this year. I know sensible Republicans who were appalled by Trump in the primaries but were actively supporting him in the end because they saw Hillary as a threat to everything that makes America what it is. From my side, I can’t conceive how anyone could possibly see a cautious, centrist wonk like Clinton as a threat to everything that makes America what it is (or at least any more of a threat than any Republican or Democratic candidate of the past forty years). But they had no doubt. On the other hand, they don’t understand how I can see Trump as a racist, fascist threat to everything that makes America what it is, where they see just an impulsive jerk who attracted some wing-nut supporters but is basically a pragmatist who will at least preserve most of those things that make America etc. Leaving aside any argument about who’s closer to the truth, there's a split in perceptions here that’s clearly in place long before we know what candidates we’ll be dealing with.
       A lot of that is typical election-year rhetoric. In my research on this new book of mine I’ve found plenty of people who were equally apocalyptic about Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. I remember my parents getting in fights with relatives about whether Goldwater or Johnson was going to destroy the country. What’s different is the relatively tiny number of people who are inclined to look at the other party’s candidate outside the preset partisan lens. (And I include myself in the vast majority who aren’t. I can tell you right now that in 2020 I’m going to hate the Republican candidate and have lots of arguments as to why the Democrat isn’t nearly as bad as those right-wing liars claim.)
       It’s temping to take this as proof that we’re ready for a third party, but the truth is the opposite. This is precisely the situation, when warring camps have divided the field in half, that breaking ranks is hardest. It would be like trying to start a peace movement in the trenches of World War I: the knowledge that stepping back from the battle even for a moment will allow the enemy to advance is too terrible. Even with two candidates deeply unpopular with huge swaths of their own parties and endless talk about how broken the party system is, Johnson and Stein barely broke 4% between them—and less in the swing states.
      Until we can change this, we’ll be stuck in this quadrennial rehash of anger, lies, and prophecies of armageddon, ending with some thin slice of the electorate making the choice for the rest of us. And we’ll be wrestling with the same frustrating challenge we have now: how to make our parties relevant to our beliefs and needs while also targeting them at subgroups of voters in a few counties in Florida and Ohio. But how do we change it? Massive demographic shifts may do it someday, or new generations with very different ideas. I don’t think I can believe that a candidate or strategy or set of policies can do it anymore.
      In the meantime, maybe we can at least look at our nominating systems and see if we can bring more sanity to our choice of the “two for the see-saw.”

That's Why They Call It the Future

One helpful slap in the face I got from this election: the pointlessness of my obsession with poll forecasts and horserace-style news. I’m great at paying lip service to not “future tripping,” not being attached to outcomes, not thinking that I can ever settle my anxiety in the present by imagining that I know what’s coming. But in practice, at election time, I become consumed by polls and analyses and odds and trends and turning points and gaffes and scandals and everything else that I want to believe will either determine or predict a result.
       This year, everything I read and clung to was wrong. As of Tuesday night all the time and energy I gave to 538 and RCP and TPM and HuffPo felt like a total waste. The truth is, though, that even if the predictions had been right, it still would have been a waste. It would have felt better, but it wouldn’t have amounted to anything. Political information is useful when it helps me make up my mind or persuade someone else or take some other effective action. When I’m trying to use it to see the future, it’s worse than useless. It’s a distraction from whatever would actually be worth doing. I need to do whatever I believe is the next right thing and let the universe take care of the results.
       As a writer and a political being, there’s value for me in understanding what happened based on what we actually know. But if I’m trying to convince myself that the future isn’t in fact utterly unknowable and beyond my control, forget it. From here on I may have to let Nate Silver go it without me.

Out of the Past

When I was twelve or thirteen, probably in 1970, my parents took me on a drive up Highway 395, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas. We stopped in a town called Bridgeport, and I was struck, even at that age, by how it seemed left from an earlier era. None of the high-desert towns we saw on that trip were what you'd call cutting-edge communities, but they had all been more visibly shaped by Post-War America than Bridgeport.
       About fifteen years later, my friend Will Jacobs showed me a then-obscure movie from 1947 called Out of the Past. I was startled to see a road sign reading “Bridgeport” appear during the opening credits, and still more surprised to recognize the town—not much different from the town I'd seen nearly a quarter-century after the movie had been shot. The movie was, of course, about our relationships with our pasts, and in it Bridgeport represented a lost, simpler America in contrast with the corruption of Reno, Los Angeles, and my own San Francisco. It kicked me into a fervent exploration of film noir, mostly because it's a great movie but I think partly because of the way Bridgeport linked me to its doomed protagonist through that same eerie sense of timelessness I'd experienced in my own past. 
       Some months ago, my wife and I decided to take a driving trip along that same Highway 395, and I made sure we spent the first night in Bridgeport. It had been forty-six years since I'd seen the town for the first time, nearly seventy since Robert Mitchum had filmed his scenes there. As if I'd gone back to it in a dream, I found it quiet, nearly empty, and almost unchanged. 
       The town knew nothing of me, and I knew very little of it, really. But walking down those nearly empty streets in the late evening and early morning, I had a sense of having stepped not only into a lost American but somehow into a lost part of myself that I can't clearly see, a part both real and imagined.

Bookends of History

All year I’ve been forcing myself not to blog about the election. It’s not easy: I’ve been a passionate election-watcher since 1976, and I’ve never seen one as weird and gruesomely fascinating as this one. But I have a book to revise, a big book, and my publisher has now set a publication date, in October of next year. Which means I can’t take my brain off it unless I want to cause some real trouble.
       I have, though, persuaded myself that I’m allowed to write a little bit about the election when I can put in the framework of my book. In my last post I compared the current lunacy to the election of 1828. This time I thought I should tie that up. Because the election of 1828 was the beginning of a vast narrative arc in American history, and I think now we’re arriving at the end of that same arc: the age of the white working class. 

       For the first few decades of our republic, voting rights were restricted nearly everywhere to men with property and money. Then, starting mostly in the 1820s, a wave of democratic sentiment pushed state governments to extend the suffrage to nearly all adult white men. Barely over 100,000 Americans voted for presidential candidates or electors in 1820. About 360,000 voted four years later. Over 1.1 million voted in 1828.  
       That changed everything. An elite electorate had chosen a series of Founding Fathers for president, then the aristocratic son of a Founding Father. The voters of 1828 threw out John Quincy Adams and overwhelmingly chose Andrew Jackson, a war hero, a Westerner, and a populist. Ever since, the most powerful group in every American election has been working-class whites. If either political party could win the hearts of most of those voters, it could dominate the nation.

       "Working class" is a messy and poorly defined term, of course, and making too much of it can distort things. Most political scientists these days base the definition on formal education. Income is an unreliable measure, mostly because of the way issues of age throw it off (an Ivy League law student can earn a lot less than a union industrial worker of his own age), so "high school only" vs. "college educated" becomes the easiest way to attempt to isolate most of the things we mean by "class." Those voters aren’t necessary industrial workers; in fact, through most of our history, they were overwhelmingly farmers, and now more of them are in service jobs than industry. A better name might be that phrase popular in Jackson's era: the "common man."
       Whatever we call them, before World War II they accounted for about 85% of the American electorate. Over the next few decades, two things changed: first, more white people started attending college, leading to changes in occupations, social allegiances, and political agendas; next, the non-white population soared. The proportion of those "working-class" whites had sunk to 65% of voters by 1980. It plummeted to 48%, no longer a majority, only twelve years later. In 2012, it had slid to 37%.
          The Democratic dominance of American politics from 1932 to 1968 was based on those voters. When the Democrats began to lose that demographic in the wake of the Civil Rights years, the Republicans rose, triumphing with the emergence of the blue-collar "Reagan Democrats." It was Bill Clinton’s ability to pull most of them back away from the Republicans that enabled him to win in 1992. When George Bush won them back again, the Republicans took back the White House.
       Then, in 2008, Barack Obama won only 40% of no-college white voters but still easily won the election. Four years later he was reelected with only 36%. He still had to fight for those voters: he would have lost some key states, including Ohio, if he hadn't run much better among them there than he had nationally. Still, for the first time, a candidate could lose that constituency and not lose the election.
       This year, what had formerly been one of a whole constellation of demographic, numerical phenomena has become the center of the narrative. Donald Trump has targeted those voters ("I love the poorly educated!") like no candidate since the Great Depression. He’s virtually turned the election into a battle between them and everyone else. And he’s succeeding with them, usually polling close to 70%. 
       The kind of dominance Trump has among working-class whites would have brought on a landslide victory in the mid-20th century, and even just a few elections ago would have guaranteed a victory. But now he's decidedly trailing in the polls. It looks as though Hillary Clinton is going to be rejected overwhelmingly by the white "common man," and more narrowly by the white "common woman," and yet still become president. 
       I’ve seen Trump compared to Andrew Jackson many times this past year. I even did it myself, in my last blog post. I think, though, that they aren't so much parallel as complementary. They’re bookends. One stands at the beginning of a story, the other at the end.
        Of course, it’s still conceivable that Trump could win. This could turn out to be a late rally by the white working class before the rising generation of non-white Americans swamps them, a demographic Battle of the Bulge, made possible by the peculiarities of the Electoral College system. But it’s more likely that we’re watching a grand pageant, a sort of vast, improvisational theater production, about the end of an era.
       So right now I’m simultaneously revising a book about the beginning of the long dominance of Jackson’s "common people" and watching the end of that arc played out dramatically. The election is still distracting as hell when I’m supposed to be working on the book. But it's interesting and moving to see it as a summation of so much of what I’m writing about. (And, anyway, that makes for a great pretext to write political blogs.)

Has there ever been an election like this before?

My work on the book this week compels me to write about the presidential election. A national turning point, pitting a steady but boring representative of the dominant elite who liked to talk about economic plans and infrastructures against an unpredictable populist running on his questionable achievements outside politics, dodging clear policy statements and harping on the corruption of the system. The ugliest campaign ever, all about mutual character assassination—one candidate called a secretive quasi-aristocrat with ties to the banks who rose to power through family connections and corrupt bargains, the other a hateful, adulterous sleazeball in it for nothing but personal glory—and almost nothing about the issues. Old sex scandals trotted out by the press. And both sides wailing with apocalyptic predictions of national doom: They're going to keep selling the people out to the international banking establishment until we've lost control of our country! He's going to usher in mob rule, violence, and chaos!
       At least in the election I'm writing about there's no suspense to endure—we've known the ending for a long time. The poor old establishment voters really thought they had a chance to win, convinced that the American people would never be stupid enough to give the country to that hot-headed egomaniac with the big, silly-looking hair. But of course it was the candidate with the huge rallies and insanely enthusiastic followers who won in a landslide, thanks mostly to working-class men who'd never voted before. When the returns came in from Ohio and Pennsylvania, the incumbents knew they were finished.
       Welcome to 1828.

Historian Humor

I found this bouncing around Facebook. Having spent the past several years writing a book on social history in the "Jacksonian Era" (or "Market Revolution Era," depending on your orientation), I found it pretty funny.

Q: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?

A: There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was "one": and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the "Great Man" school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff. This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist. Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.

The First Three Years Are the Hardest

For the last three years I've been involved in the most intense and complicated relationship of my life. My partner is demanding, fragile, inconsistent, often inscrutable, and utterly contrary. But it's all been worth it, because of the passion and joy I feel whenever we're truly in synch, because of how the relationship forces me to grow and change...and because I'm finally beginning to see how beautifully we're coming together. And in the end I believe we'll have created something truly special.
       We're over the hardest part: the rough draft. Now we're in the revisions phase, with the help of a great couples counselor (although his job title is "editor"). Next comes copyediting, and then, next fall, my beloved and I will finally come out together...from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I never knew a relationship with a book could be this damned hard, but I know that when I get to hold it and gaze at it and kiss it at last, all the tears and yelling will have been worth it. 
       Today I'm celebrating our third anniversary. Oh, we've known each other much longer than that. But three years ago today was when we finally stopped flirting and got serious. It was on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 10th, 2013, that I had the breakthrough that turned a long-frustrating ramble through a wilderness of conflicting ideas into the pursuit of a coherent notion that quickly became the book I'm now revising, Nation of Faith and Flesh. That's when an idea sprang into my head for a sequence that showed me the tone and point of view I should use and effectively opened the door to the whole process of discovering what I should be writing. 
       Here's Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, noisy, too hip for its own good, but spacious and stimulating, where I was working that day:

       Here's the view I had from my counter in the front window, with the earnestly pondering young folks of Valencia Street and the afternoon sunlight that inspired me:

Here's the very spot on the counter where that breakthrough happened:

       And here's the beginning of what I wrote:

       Those words don't appear in the book. In fact, that character doesn't even appear in the book. I gradually moved the time frame of the book earlier, so it ends right before this passage would have appeared. But following this thread started me on the road that will result, in just about a year, in the publication of this book. Allow me to raise a $4.00 glass of cold-brew coffee in a toast.

The Twisted Roots of Comics

I first went to the San Diego Comics Convention in 1984. I went as a fan, but also to do some interviews and research on a book Will Jacobs and I were writing, a history of modern superhero comics called The Comic Book Heroes. I'd been to comics conventions before, but nothing like this: more than 5,000 people filling two rooms of a decent-sized convention center, and almost all of them talking about comic books. There were already a few people lamenting the early days, when the con had been small and intimate, but for me it was a thrill.
       The next year I went back as the author of a book of comics history about to be published, with copies of the cover in hand. The year after that I went as a somewhat well-known member of the industry's "fan press." In 1987 I went as what we called a "pro" or "creator," specifically as the cowriter of a low-profile comic book called The Trouble with Girls, which made me feel like a member of an exclusive club. The next year I went and discovered I had fans. In 1989 I went as the writer of a DC superhero series, with more projects in the works to brag about, and it was at the con, in the lobby between the two big rooms, that I learned that The Trouble with Girls had been picked up by 20th Century-Fox. I could plausibly pose as a big shot.
       The convention had its own experience with big-shotism in those years. Comics got hip. Dark Knight, Watchmen, Maus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and finally the Tim Burton Batman. Attendance soared suddenly to 11,000. Two years later, the con moved to the colossal new convention center by the harbor, with its interlocking halls and absurdly high ceilings, and the bigger publishers started setting up towering, flashing, booming displays as if they were at a real trade show. The video game business jumped on board, then Hollywood. By its second year at the new location, attendance had broken 20,000, two years later 30,000. The comic book business itself suffered a bubble-popping and cataclysmic decline in the mid-'90s, but by then comics were a small enough part of Comic Con that it was easy not to notice. 
       My own career didn't follow the same upward trajectory. I found myself much in demand, took on too much, burned out, started doing mediocre work, and became pretty negative about the whole industry. In the lean years it took a lot of work just to find work, and I didn't have the stomach for it anymore. By the end of the '90s I was happy to move my career back to nonfiction, where it had started. 
       Still, I kept going to the con. It was getting pretty unpleasant in a many ways by the time attendance broke 50,000 around the turn of the century (and my the con became more and more just a pretext to hang out with my friend Joe Filice, who lived in San Diego), but I never stopped wanting to go. By then, what kept me most connected to the thing was just what had brought me there in the first place: my love for the medium and its history. I went there to research another book about comics history, Men of Tomorrow, then again to promote it, then again to accept an Eisner Award for it, and several times since to join various esoteric panel discussions of how comics came to be.
             In the past few years, most of my appearances have been about a new book I'm working on with Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, the biography of her grandfather, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, who pretty much founded the American comics industry as we know it. And so it was this year. About 130,000 people attend that thing every year now. I'd guess that the great majority of them have little or no interest in comic books themselves. Even of the many thousands who do love comics, I'd say that only a few hundred are willing to go out of their way to attend a panel on the early history of the field. But those are the few hundred I want to be among.
         This year, our "Twisted Roots of Comics" panel was subtitled "Pulp Magazines and the Birth of the Modern Comics." I moderated, with my cowriter, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, to one side and three experts in their fields on the other: Nathan Vernon Madison, a historian of the pulps and author of Anti-Foreign Imagery in Pulps and Comic Books 1920-1960, Brad Ricca, author of the superbly researched and written Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Creators of Superman, and Michael Uslan, writer, producer, teacher, and a boy who still loves Batman. Here's the audio. If you get a chance to listen, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed doing it (even if it doesn't look like it in the pictures).

Living Silents

One of the highlights of my year, every year, is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Every year, my friend Joe Filice flies up from San Diego and we make a four-day orgy of it. It's also about the hardest of the things I love to describe adequately to other people. That the movies are hypnotically beautiful some people will believe, and more of them can understand that the live musical accompaniment is exciting and that the Castro Theatre is a spectacular showcase. What's difficult to convey, though, is that the showcase never feels like a museum. What we're celebrating never feels like a lost art form.
       For one thing, there's a quality of discovery for the vast majority of people in the audience, just because these movies are so rarely screened. I'd seen only two of the sixteen features at this year's festival, and several I'd never heard of. For another, the musicians are brilliant and innovative, entering living collaborations with the images on the screen that give new life even to movies I've seen before. But beyond that, there are new movies. One of the most exciting aspects of following the business of silent-film restoration is the fact that they keep finding films not seen in decades, films long thought lost. 
       Ever since I was a kid I've known of a Laurel and Hardy short called The Battle of the Century, famous for its monumental pie-fight sequence but surviving only in pieces. It was possible to see clips of it, but not the whole thing. But the pieces have been found in recent years, restored and assembled, and at this year's festival I got to sit there and watch that almost mythical movie whole for the first time.
       Another film shown this year, Behind the Door, had been known only in very incomplete form for several decades, and another, Mothers of Men, hadn't been shown anywhere in over ninety years. During "Tales from the Archives," the festival's annual presentation on what's up in the world of film restoration, came news of another great project in the world: a new edit of Abel Gance's monumental Napoleon, already restored to great fanfare a few years ago, that promises to bring it back, for the first time since its premier in 1927, to the director's original conception. I already spent a few years waiting for Kevin Brownlow's restoration of Napoleon, which finally arrived and more than pleased me in 2012. Now I get to wait a few more years for this one...and along the way, I know there will be more new discoveries from that extraordinary period of cinematic creativity, miraculously brought back to us from the past.

Happy Fathers' Day

My son is coming to spend the night, talking about taking me to a movie and dinner tomorrow. I’m guessing his girlfriend reminded him that it was Fathers’ Day, because it’s not the kind of thing he remembers on his own. Which is fine. I usually forgot to do anything for my own dad on Fathers’ Day unless my mom or my girlfriend reminded me. Half the time I forgot my parents’ birthdays when I was younger. For that matter, they forgot mine a couple of times. We’ve never been much for dates.
       When my dad was old, though, and I was middle aged, I remembered his birthday and Fathers’ Day every year. It wasn’t just that I’d grown more responsible or learned how to use a calendar, it was also that I knew the years I had with him were getting scarce. When he turned eighty I wrote him a long letter thanking him for being my father. It was an emotional time. His wife, my mother, was dying of cancer. A vast depression was closing in on him, and he was showing the first signs of dementia. I wanted to say everything I had thought about but never said while he could still hear it.
       He didn’t say much about the letter. That had always been his way: the more he felt, the less he said. For a while he said nothing at all about it, but finally he said one thing: “I’m glad you feel I was a good father to you. I never knew how to be a father. I didn’t have one, you know.” It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak of the early loss of his own father as anything other than a piece of biographical information, the first time I’d heard him acknowledge it as a loss. And although I’d often thought how his dad’s death must have shaped him, I’d never thought to apply it to his own role as my father. When my brother was born, he’d had to make it up as he went along, go with his gut, think about what he wished he’d had and try to be that himself. By the time I came along he’d had some practice, but I was such a different kid from my brother that a lot of it he had to make up all over again.
       Early in my life I thought he was a great father, and then there came some years when I thought more about how he’d fallen short than how he’d succeeded, and then I started to accept that he’d done okay after all. But it wasn’t until then that I realized what a miracle he’d pulled off. He’d had no father after the age of two—just a loveless, mentally unstable mother—and yet he had somehow shown up for me, year after year, challenge after challenge, with a steadiness I could count on and a love I never doubted.
       A few months ago I found myself at dinner with my son, one of the few times in the last couple of years it’s been just the two of us sitting across a table talking, with neither my significant other nor his in attendance, and I talked to him about some things I felt I’d gotten wrong as his father. He thanked me for it. Some of what I’d apologized for were things that had actually bothered him, and he appreciated the acknowledgement. Others were things he’d completely forgotten about or never even noticed. Over all, though, he said, he thought I’d done a really good job as a father. He said it simply and matter-of-factly. Nothing effusive. And it was neither my birthday nor Fathers’ Day. I could tell he was leveling with me.
       I was luckier than my own dad. I’ve had to make up a lot as I went along too. Sometimes I think it was only through a miracle that I got anything right. But I had a father to show me how to be one. I wish my dad had had the same, for his sake. But I’m awestruck and grateful at what he did without that.
       All right. My kid just walked in. Time to show up for him while he shows up for me. And in doing that, I can show up for my own dad too.
       

Memorial Day

In 1941, Ruth Atwood, a 16 year old in Rawlins, Wyoming, fell in love with a boy named Bobby Benson. The next year, he joined the Navy and was sent to the South Pacific. On board the USS Astoria, he made friends with a young Marine named Russell Jones. The Astoria went down in the Battle of Savo that August. Russell Jones survived. Bobby Benson didn’t.

       A few months later, Ruth Atwood went to stay with Bobby’s parents in Los Angeles, where they’d moved after their son had enlisted. Russell Jones, then stationed in San Diego, drove up to visit them and offer his condolences. He met Ruth there. They were drawn together by a shared grief, but as they spent time together other emotions grew.

       They were married in 1944. Thirteen years later, they wanted to name their second child after the young man whose death had brought them together. The family was already full of Bobbys and Bobs and Roberts, so they decided to give their new baby Bobby’s middle name.

       I’m thinking today about Petty Officer Robert Gerard Benson, who died for his country and made my life possible.

RIP Darwyn Cooke

One of the nicest moments of my post-comics years came when Darwyn Cooke hollered my name and chased me down at a Toronto convention to let me know that Martian Manhunter: American Secrets, a mini-series I’d done with Eduardo Barreto and Brian Augustyn, had been one of his inspirations in creating his splendid DC: The New Frontier. It was my only direct contact with Darwyn, but it meant a lot to me.
       He was a brilliant cartoonist, a fine writer, and a good guy. He’ll be missed.

Say Hey

This afternoon I was building some Ikea furniture in my living room and heard the sound of a marching band coming from outside. Not something one normally hears in this part (or any part) of San Francisco. My wife realized it was probably coming from AT&T Park, Giants' stadium, which we live near.
       We went and stood on the balcony, and out of the percussive marching band racket we heard the horn section starting on the Birthday Song. Then a huge chorus of voices rose, muddy at first but then clearly resolving into “Happy birthday, dear Willie.”
       Willie Mays had turned 85.
       I wanted to put my hand over my heart or something. It was a great moment in a great town.

Superman, Philip Wylie, and Young Writers' Dreams

I was recently asked by Dover Books to write the foreword to their reissue of Gladiator by Philip Wylie, a book I’ve long had an interest in as both a historian of comics and a general commentator on American culture and history. I find Wylie complicated and interesting to think about, and it was a fun piece to write. 

Of all the artistic legacies a person might earn, I think the most bittersweet is to be remembered only for having inspired someone else to do something better known. I imagine Cimabue would have been thrilled to know that art historians would still be talking about him seven centuries after his death, until he realized that they weren’t talking about him as the great painter of his age but only as the guy who may (or may not) have taught Giotto to paint. Would Max Linder, who committed suicide when he thought his movie career was washed up, have been pleased to know that his work would still be shown in occasional film festivals nearly a century later—if he’d had to listen to himself always described as the sadly forgotten comedian who inspired Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd? It’s a legacy that means future generations will still come back in time to look at your work, but they’ll never really see it for what you meant it to be. They’ll always see it through the eyes of some third party—very likely someone you resent for outshining you.
    Philip Wylie, in his prime years, would probably never have imagined that he’d be a candidate for such a fate, let alone that he’d be the man mainly responsible for creating it. From the mid-1930s through most of the 1950s, he had a remarkable run as a writer: bestselling books of social commentary, literary novels of decent reputation, science fiction thrillers that got turned into movies, and a constant presence in the Saturday Evening Post and other major magazines. By 1963, however, when he agreed to be interviewed by the science-fiction historian Sam Moskowitz, the world’s attention was already clearly leaving him behind; which may be why he felt moved to complain so bitterly about how the creators of the comic strip Superman had stolen their idea from one of his early novels. He lived only another eight years, but by the time of his death, his own literary reputation was rapidly evaporating as Gladiator’s fame was rising among pop-culture historians in search of the hidden origins of the superhero.

    So it is that of all his forty or so published books, the only one in print is the one in your hand—not one of his bestselling, not one of his more highly regarded, not one of his personal favorites, but the one that was read by a teenager in Cleveland named Jerry Siegel, who borrowed some of its ideas to create a comic strip that Wylie considered a load of garbage.
    Siegel (and his artistic collaborator Joe Shuster) drew on far more than Wylie’s novel for the idea of Superman: the Doc Savage pulp magazines, a raft of other science fiction and fantasy stories, Douglas Fairbanks movies, Popeye, lots of things. But none of them have held the “missing link” glamor for comics historians that this odd little novel holds. A body of legends has grown up around the relationship between Gladiator and Superman, some spurious and some outright false (and some, to my enduring embarrassment, passed on in my own book, Men of Tomorrow). The truth is that Jerry Siegel never reviewed, or even mentioned, Gladiator in the fanzine he published in high school. If Wylie threatened to sue for plagiarism or Siegel signed affidavits claiming he’d never read the book, there is no record.

    What we do know for sure is that Siegel, in his unpublished autobiography, wrote that he “read and enjoyed Philip Wylie’s book Gladiator” and that, along with a great many other pop-culture items, “it influenced me, too.” (Courtesy of Thomas Andrae, author of Creators of the Superheroes.) We also know that there are many details shared by Gladiator and the first several months of Superman stories that are awfully hard to dismiss as coincidence. Most specifically, we know that the physical attributes of Wylie’s Hugo Danner—what we would now call his “superpowers”—were a unique combination at the time, and they were precisely, no more and no less, the same as those of the first incarnation of Superman.
    What Wylie did, essentially, was establish the “superhero” as we know it—or at least the superhero’s physical nature. He posited a rogue scientific experiment that gives a man unasked-for physical superiority: great muscular strength, the ability to leap vast distances and heights, tremendous running speed, and skin so tough that nothing less than an artillery shell could pierce it. Popular fiction was full of strongmen, and science fiction featured a few interplanetary characters who could jump high because of gravitational differences. But combining power with speed, creating a hero who could both lift and outrun a locomotive, was something new. We don’t usually see those two as going together (weight lifting isn’t in the decathlon), and the combination created a new template for across-the-board superhumanity. The addition of invulnerable skin cranked the idea up another notch. Hugo Danner was (to quote Will Murray’s excellent Gladiator of Iron, Man of Steel), “A quantum leap forward in the concept of the preternaturally-powerful protagonist.”
    Jerry Siegel gave Superman’s powers an extraterrestrial rather than chemical origin, but the powers themselves were the same as Danner’s; it would be a few years yet before Superman could fly instead of leap, longer still before he picked up x-ray vision, super-hearing, and the rest of it. Siegel also followed Wylie’s lead in suggesting that a man of such abilities could never fit in with normal humanity, that the rest of us could only make him an object of fear or curiosity, that many of us would try to find some way to exploit him for profit. But what Siegel chose to do with that realization was drastically different from what Wylie had done—and there opens the greatest difference between the characters, one that says a great deal about Philip Wylie and why his literary fate has been to play a supporting role in someone else’s origin story.
    He was born in Massachusetts in 1902, the eldest son of Edmund Melville Wylie, a Presbyterian minister of some renown. His relationship with his father was apparently difficult from early on, and he grew up defining himself in opposition to a certain kind of moral and conventional authority; he usually portrayed his father as intelligent but rigid, overly attached to his own righteousness, trapped in his own doctrine and ultimately hypocritical. Whatever mediating influence his mother might have brought ended with her death when Philip was five. His father remarried, but he didn’t get along with his stepmother.
    By his early teens, Philip was already striking dramatic postures of resistance to the worldview his elders were attempting to inculcate in him. “One evening during a thunder storm,” remembered his sister Verona Wylie Slater, Philip “was inspired to make an unholy experiment. He stood on a sloping rock, which jutted out into the lake near our summer home. Holding his face upward, he defied the Almighty to strike him with a bolt of lightning. The skies opened with a terrifying flash, but the bolt flew across the dark waters a mile away. We felt relieved, foolish, and very insignificant.” Wylie reconstructs that scene at a crucial moment in Gladiator, but in such a way that one is left suspecting that he felt less relieved than disappointed at being passed over by the divine wrath.
    Philip attended Princeton University, but in his third year he dropped out because of a conflict with a teacher. For a while he knocked around as a sailor, not the first bright young man who disliked authority to take up that job. Then he tried working in advertising and publishing, including some time on the editorial staff of the young New Yorker magazine, but it never took very long for him either to get fired or resign in frustration. So he staked his future on writing novels.
    The literary culture of the early 1920s provided a great deal of reinforcement for a young man with a desire to stand on metaphorical rocks during intellectual lightning storms. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was the book of the age. F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose shadow stretched over Princeton when Wylie was there) was being called a voice of the modern generation. D. H. Lawrence and James Branch Cabell were fighting battles with the censors (mainly New England Protestants greatly reminiscent of the Reverend Wylie), cheered on by H. L. Mencken. A young writer was expected to unmask society’s hypocrisy, destroy sentimentality with brutal honesty, fling himself against convention with a “romantic egoism.” He should advocate hard science and reject religion, immerse himself in Freud and know Nietzsche. And he should suffer. He should, as Wylie said of his protagonist in an introduction to one edition of Gladiator, “share the isolation of geniuses and with them…learn the inflexibility of man's slow evolution.”
    Gladiator was Wylie’s first novel, written in 1926, when he was twenty-four years old. He submitted it to Alfred A. Knopf, H. L. Mencken’s publisher and a champion of challenging new fiction, who was taken with its author enough to buy it—but also leery enough to lay it on the shelf for a while and ask Wylie to write a more conventional novel to introduce himself to the world first. Ultimately, Gladiator would not be published until 1930, after Wylie had produced two novels based more or less on his own life, Heavy Laden and Babes and Sucklings, and in a rewritten form.

     I haven’t been able to discover anything about the original manuscript or how different it may have been from what saw print, but given Wylie’s complaint that Knopf pushed him to rewrite it “against my will and judgment,” I’m inclined to think that he did his best to preserve his original intent. Or let me put it this way: I find Gladiator much easier to appreciate if I read it as the creative eruption of an unpublished twenty-four year seized by a big idea than as the third novel of a twenty-eight year old who should have learned something from working with Alfred Knopf. Its charm is in its newness, its quality of discovery, and its painful, sometimes confusing collision of two very common but very different sorts of young male fantasy: breathtaking feats on the battlefield, the gridiron, and the public arena of crime and justice on the one hand; literary and intellectual acclaim on the other.
    In his childhood, Wylie was a great reader of H. G. Welles and other authors of those fantastical stories that would later be classified as “science fiction.” He came up with the idea for Hugo Danner (by his own report) while lamenting the inferiority of the human body to machines. He began speculating on what a man might do with a superhuman body, and if he’d been at a different point either in his own development of that of American fiction, he might have found his way to a fun adventure story, maybe something like one of Welles’s lighter novels, with a touch of social speculation or satire. By the time he reached his thirties, Wylie would demonstrate a comfort with that sort of storytelling, which contributed to his successful career. At twenty-four, however, pumping himself up for the solitary quest of the novelist, the temptation to climb onto that rock in the thunderstorm was just too great. Some years before his fellow Princeton alum, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy,” Wylie concluded that a man like Hugo Danner “would be foredoomed to vulgar fame or to a life of fruitless destruction.” And he spent a book proving it.
    Jerry Siegel, born twelve years after Wylie, coming of age after American culture had mostly dismissed its Twenties as an embarrassing youth, comfortable with himself as a lover of pulp science fiction and Hollywood movies, had no interest in writing a tragedy. When he saw that his superman would never be able to function as a normal human being, he also saw the obvious solution: Clark Kent. His hopelessly isolated hero would put on a pair of glasses and wink his way through the great in-joke of pretending to be one of us. Siegel also understood that what most readers would want of such an outlandish hero was an equally outlandish message: that our great problems were simple enough to be solved by a man who could lift a car over his head. For the young Philip Wylie, such a compromise with “the cynical piddling of modern society,” by either the protagonist or the author, would have been the height of the very hypocrisy that he had committed himself to fighting.
    In the early 1930s, frustrated by his experiences with Knopf and serious fiction, Wylie turned his energies to making a living off what he called “a bumper crop of crap.” Two of the books from that period would provide still more inspiration to the spinners of fantastical adventures: The Savage Gentleman from 1932 clearly inspired the Doc Savage pulps, which in turn worked some influence on Superman and other comic-book heroes, while When Worlds Collide, cowritten with Edwin Balmer the following year, probably inspired Flash Gordon and perhaps also Superman’s interplanetary origin story.  Over the next several years, an entire industry of comic books, comic strips, movie serials, and licensed merchandise grew up around superheroes. Most of those were spun straight out of Superman and probably owed nothing directly to Wylie (although with some of them, like Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America, a man transformed by an experimental serum into a very Danneresque super soldier, one has to wonder), but they all rested, to some degree, on the foundation of Gladiator.
    By that time, however, Wylie himself had moved on. He tackled serious fiction again in Finnley Wren, then donned his own heroic garb in an assault on American sentimentality and mediocrity via his 1942 collection of essays called Generation of Vipers. For some years, he was a prominent presence in book stores and magazines, almost a household name. Then he faded, while Superman and his brethren only grew more numerous, more famous, more artistically complex, and more central to our popular culture. 
     I’m glad we have this opportunity to look back at his contribution to the superheroes—but I also suspect Wylie would appreciate it if we could leave that behind for a moment and read this first novel of his for what it was before Jerry Siegel discovered it: the self-conscious but heartfelt roar of a young man of wild ideas and wilder ambition, climbing onto a rock in the lightning storm of the first decade of the modern world.

Happy New Year

I was blessed with a great 2015. I was able to write the bulk of Nation of Faith and Flesh, (enough that I’ll surely meet my January 15 deadline for this draft). Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson and I made big progress on developing our upcoming collaboration, Lost Hero, so we should be able to move forward full speed early next year. Will Jacobs and I completed and saw published My Pal Splendid Man, a humor book we’d begun to write as a labor of love many, many years ago. I was asked to write introductions to rereleases of a couple of things that matter to me, the animated Watership Down and Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator. And my wife and I sold our house after twenty-four years, setting ourselves free to enter a leaner, lighter way of living that suits us well in this (mostly) post-parenting era of life.

       Some of these things were already on the schedule before 2014 ended, some were surprises. One, the selling of the house, didn't even seem to be a possibility when this year started, but it’s turned out so well that I want to pretend I planned it all along. This past year has been good for reminding me to trust luck and providence, and to take all my own plans with a grain of salt. I entered 2015 with a fair amount of trepidation, but I’m looking forward to seeing whatever 2016 brings. I hope it’s good to us all.
       Happy new year!