| Monday, February 24, 2003 |
11:53 - The more things change
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Zjonni brought over a compilation trade-paperback of The Watchmen over the weekend; I'm about a third of the way into it, and it's turning out to be a fascinating period piece, quite unexpectedly. Written in 1986, gritty in its graphic Blade Runner alleyway dimness, but still evoking the 1950s with the curious pulp-comic primary colors of hair and clothes and cars and skin (since then replaced by the Vertigo comics' more subtle and mood-altering realistic earth-tones), it's a time-capsule from the days when we still worried about the Reds while snickering knowingly about McCarthyism. With characters like Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, and the Comedian-- none of whom I'd heard of before-- it's thus far a dismal and depressing tale of the death of a society's innocence and self-confidence, terrified and intimidated by superheroes rather than comforted by them. It's prescient in a way; how long would a radioactive super-being last today without attracting a class-action lawsuit from all his past sexual partners for giving them all cancer?
Anyway, one facet of the story is a strong undercurrent of liberal-vs-conservative banter between the heroes-- the kind of thing they seemed to talk about in the 80s, but which became deeply unfashionable in 90s pop-culture, only to reappear with a bang post-9/11. That's another way in which this story is a time-capsule; it's like an old acquaintance has come back for a visit, tweaking my cheek and telling me the last time he saw me I ran naked into the living room and knocked out a tooth on the wooden couch while all the houseguests clucked and fluttered.
Dr. Manhattan, one of the characters firmly in the conservative camp, made an interesting observation: since these were all superheroes whose heyday was in the early 40s, a fad begun by Siegel and Shuster but (in the comic's storyline) deeply gauche after the concentration camps were cracked open and let out the stench of real good and evil onto the world, the whole team of heroes ("masked adventurers" in those days) found themselves disillusioned and unloved by the public. In an essay about his own genesis (centered on the media's "God is real-- and he's American!"), he made a crack about the ensuing 50s: the nation's pop focus was now on beatniks and a hip-swinging subversive musician, rather than on the black-and-white world the heroes had exemplified before the war. "We fought a war for American values-- only to have the nation turn its eyes to Elvis?" was the refrain.
Fast-forward to two or three weeks ago, when Lileks called America "The Axis of Elvis". None of the "conservative" bloggers batted an eye; in fact, they rallied around it and quoted it, much as Den Beste and Sullivan and Reynolds and Johnson are doing now, gleefully co-opting as a banner a meme that was intended as a slur. If I may invoke a Simpsons quote that's too newly broadcast to have become recognizable yet: "We're the Learn to Fart state!"
But that's the thing about America, apparently. What defines us is our ability to reinvent ourselves so quickly, so readily, rejecting the mindset that came before us but unafraid to make whatever we ourselves latch onto be even more vibrant and self-defining. Elvis was a threat to the very fabric of society at first-- but rather than suppress him, we let him tear up the fabric of our society. And the result was that society knitted itself back together in a way that was more amenable to the times, rather than stretching and straining under the load of old sensibilities as well as new. We require our elder generations to keep up with the times or risk being disenfranchised, because it's the younger generations that write the social rules. Some might see that as a lack of respect for our elders, a quality that makes us contemptible in the eyes of other peoples for whom such respect is paramount. But what I think is telling about us is that for the most part, our society does adapt as it ages; it assimilates new ways of thinking and speaking. We might giggle at cell-phone ads featuring little old ladies speaking hacker-l33t or cane-leaning men conversing in fluent hip-hop 'hood, but it's less a joke than an ideal that we seem to regard with affection. We like to think of our elders relating to us on our terms; it's our preferred mode of operation, rather than idealizing relating to them on their terms.
And perhaps that's what gives us the ability to reinvent ourselves so quickly, and to redefine what "American" means-- for Elvis to go from subversive object of derision and suspicion to beloved, nostalgic national symbol in the space of twenty or thirty years. My culture, growing up, was the 80s of Nintendo and Transformers cartoons; today, that age bracket is using cellphones and listening to progressive techno and watching anime and playing DDR, and I find myself wishing I could be a part of it rather than sneering at it and popping sour grapes. (Mmmm, sour grapes.)
Does this make us any different from other countries in the world? Perhaps, if the implication is that we continue to believe that the Golden Age is in the future, and we're inching toward it every day, sometimes even leaping and flying toward it-- rather than in an imagined past, a grace from which we're falling farther with each new fad and reinvention of the world. It's certainly true that a lot of European countries have seen better days, and aren't likely to see them again if they keep on their current track; but there are other countries in the world-- among them Russia, China, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, and the United States-- for whom it still feels as though the story is building to something.
There's still a good two hundred brightly colored comic pages in my right hand. The story's pretty bleak at this point, but there's plenty more on the way-- and blood or no blood, gritty alleys or no gritty alleys, sex scandals between superheroes or no sex scandals, somehow I still expect a happy ending.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste tells me that everything I expect about what's coming is wrong. Boy oh boy.
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