Monthly Archives: November 2003

Here we find William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg discussing the Republicans' new TV commercial that suggests the Democrats are against fighting terrorists. The discussion makes a good point that Bush's policy of shooting first and looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction later is getting tougher to defend.

The other day on Crossfire, Paul Begala challenged Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri on this ad. He quoted the line that says "Some are now attacking the President for attacking the terrorists," then asked Bond twice to name someone who's actually doing that. No names were forthcoming.

Maybe there should be a TV show during elections called "Defend Your Commercial." In it, the producer or candidate would come on and their commercials would be shown. They would be asked to substantiate each claim, and there would be a jury of statisticians to fact-check whatever they said. At the end of the show, a panel would vote on the truthfulness of the ad and would itemize the assertions they felt were false or misleading. The show would also fact-check the commercials of those who refused to come on and defend them. I wonder if a network could refuse to air any spot that declined to submit to this process.

Richard Cohen has some pretty strong words for the Bush administration and what they got us into with Iraq. I wish I could link to one of Cohen's columns from the lead-up to the war because it sure seems he's changed his tune.

As I mentioned, I'm probably not going to tune in to the infomercial formerly known as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. But I might to see the announced return of some of their older balloons, including one (four? three?) of the Marx Brothers. And I did enjoy browsing around a website the Macy's folks set up to give out info and some of the history on their annual Turkey Day ritual. Actually, one of these days, I'd like to go to N.Y. and see the parade in person. It marches down Broadway past the windows of several companies I do work for, and at least one of them will usually open the office on Thanksgiving for the employees who want to come in and watch the festivities below and sometimes above. One year, a friend of mine called me from his desk to say, "I took a secretary into my office, closed the door and we started making out…until we saw a sixty-foot Bullwinkle peeking in on us. That kind of killed the mood." I imagine it would.

I doubt there's anyone anywhere who thinks that Newsmax is a legitimate news source. It's not that they're a rabidly right-wing website and news service but that they're rather fiercely committed to printing whatever will get right-wingers fired up enough to send money. For a long time, they were flogging the idea that it was an absolute certainty that Hillary Clinton has a firm plan to run for president in 2004 and were soliciting donations to stop her. Lately, they've been edging towards the idea that she now realizes she's so unpopular that she can't win. So if she doesn't run, that will be the reason. (Uh, it couldn't be that she never planned to run?)

Anyway, they recently posted this "news" story that flows from an interview on Larry King Live the other night…

For all the coverage generated by the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination this past weekend, the media managed to miss the only genuine news to emerge from the commemoration. Nellie Connally, wife of former Texas Gov. John Connally and the only person still alive who rode in the presidential death limousine, publicly disputed for the first time the Warren Commission's "magic bullet" theory, a scenario absolutely essential to its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy's lone assassin.

They're wrong about this being the first time she's said this. She's said it hundreds of times. The Newsmax piece says it's the first time she said it publicly but also quotes her as saying she said it to the Warren Commission. Her statements there and elsewhere are quoted in around 95% of all the books that seek to refute the official findings, and that's a lot of books. Here's a link to the text of a 1998 interview in Texas Monthly where she not only says it but says that she's never wavered from her view. I think she's incorrect about the second shot but it certainly is not news that she believes that.

It is also kinda dishonest for them to pull that one item out of the interview (here's the whole transcript) and not cite that she also said that she was positive there were exactly three shots and that all three came from behind. Of the thousands of conspiracy theories that have been tossed out since 11/22/63, I'm not sure there are any that believe there were three from behind, that the second hit Connally and that the third hit Kennedy only. That description does not match the physical evidence. In any case, Nellie Connally may firmly believe the "single bullet theory" isn't right but she also firmly believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. She's wrong about some part of it, and Newsmax is wrong to quote only the part that supports their agenda. They do a lot of this.

One of my earliest heroes was the world's greatest ventriloquist, Paul Winchell. If Paul was on TV with his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, I was in front of the TV. Always. I read and re-read his autobiography, which was also a kind of "how-to" book on his craft, and practiced many hours with my toy Jerry Mahoney. I loved my little Jerry and kept it long after most of my other toys of that era had gone into the dumpster or off to Goodwill. About seven years ago, the water heater in my basement burst and the only thing destroyed was my old Jerry Mahoney doll. I cried a bit, then ran to the computer, logged onto a new thing called eBay and won my first auction: $300 for a new old Jerry Mahoney doll. I have since purchased exact, working replicas of Jerry and Knuck, which sit around my house and do a great job of scaring my maid every single time she walks into the room.

Shortly before the water heater incident, I'd written this column about Paul and the current "best ventriloquist" I've seen, a talented gent named Ronn Lucas. I'll have to write another, better one since that column doesn't begin to do justice to Paul. In the meantime, you can find out a lot about him at his website. They're still erecting the new version but there's already some good biographical information posted there.

Here's an Interview with Don Novello…writer and performer for Saturday Night Live, creator of Father Guido Sarducci and "Lazlo Toth, American," and candidate for Governor of California. Don't thank me for noticing it. Thank Kevin Walsh.

For some time now, comic book entrepreneur Todd McFarlane has been locked in a legal dispute with hockey player Tony Twist. Briefly: McFarlane named a villain in one of his comic books after Twist as a sort of in-joke and (he said) tribute. Twist sued, claiming that his right of publicity had been violated by the use of his name. McFarlane won a lower-court decision on the grounds that his use of Twist's name fell within the purview of the First Amendment. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed that judgment and reinstated a huge cash award to Twist, asserting that since this involved merchandise and not commentary, the First Amendment did not apply. McFarlane's attorneys are attempting to get the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and reverse the Missouri Supreme Court, and briefs are now being filed to urge for or against this intervention.

Attorney Eugene Volokh writes one of the most-read legal weblogs on the Internet. Here, he summarizes the case and provides this link to an Adobe PDF file of the brief he is filing on behalf of Michael Crichton, Larry David, Jeremiah Healy, Elmore Leonard, Harry Shearer, Ron Shelton, Scott Turow, Paul Weitz, and the Authors Guild, Inc. They all believe that the lower Missouri court was right and the Missouri Supreme Court was wrong. Here's a link to the latter's decision.

For what it's worth, I'm with Todd on this. And as I said elsewhere, I'm amazed that there are a few folks in the comic book business who ought to be on his side but, in a burst of schadenfreude, are rooting against him. If he loses this one, we all lose. (Thank you, Bob Cosgrove, for calling my attention to Volokh's posting.)

Treasure Chest was a comic book published from 1946 through 1972 by George A. Pflaum and the Catholic Guild, and distributed to kids in Catholic schools. It usually came out bi-weekly during the school year and was crammed full of stories that promoted pretty much the kind of worldview you'd expect. There were some lovely historical tales and some very preachy tracts. Among those who contributed splendid artwork to the book were Joe Sinnott, Dick Giordano, Fran Matera, Bernard Baily, Bob Powell and even EC Comics' own "Ghastly" Graham Ingels. It is likely that the editorial board of Treasure Chest would not have approved of some of the comics those men had drawn for other publishers, like "The Spectre" or Tales From the Crypt.

Beginning in '61, the Catholic funnybook got even more political than usual with a serial called "The Godless Communism" that summarized almost every hysterical fear that the John Birch Society then voiced about the Commies. (One is reminded of John Wayne's definition of a fanatic: Someone so right-wing they made him want to move to Moscow.) Today, the series is an amusing relic that is best appreciated for its fine artwork by Reed Crandall, who was best known for his work for EC and on Blackhawk. Reportedly, Crandall did not see the irony in contrasting the message of this series with those other assignments…or even some of the work he did later for Creepy and Eerie. The entire "Godless Communism" series can be read online here.

This gem can be found on a pop culture website called The Authentic History Center which also features a display of comic books about atomic energy and bombs, a section about comics of the seventies, and comic books about 9/11. There are also some fascinating pages that have nothing to do with comic books, so wade around there. And my thanks to the fine comedy writer, Marvin Silbermintz, for letting me know about this site. And why do I have the feeling they didn't distribute Treasure Chest at his school?

Posting was light today as I spent a lot of time with men of medicine. I have developed a heel spur on my left foot and if you don't know what that is, believe me: You don't want one. The inflammation comes and goes but there were times today when it hurt so much, I literally could not walk. A specialist took x-rays, issued me crutches and a Handicapped Parking Placard, and send me off to mend. This is going to take a few weeks, if not months. On the other hand, it may lead to more posts here because I won't be leaving the house as often. So my pain may be your gain.

In almost record time for this kind of thing, I have reached my saturation level of the Michael Jackson matter. With O.J., there came a time when I said to myself, "Self…if you try to follow this thing, you won't get any work done for months." The reason was not so much the trial as the case itself and the ancillary exploitation. There was such a public curiosity about that trial, and a willingness to watch and buy as much of it as they could get that the media complied and made it as voluminous as possible, dragging in peripheral matters, examining details to the nth degree and turning out a parade of "experts" who all wanted a piece of it. (As you can guess, I think we're too quick to fault the press for giving us that for which we create a market. If we didn't tune in and buy it, they wouldn't offer as much.)

L'Affaire O.J. case fascinated America because it had everything: Sex, race, drugs, a movie star, colorful hangers-on, rich people…even sports and a dog. The Jackson trial, assuming there is one, will have most of those same categories. As with O.J., there will be days when every single new development can be summarized in under five minutes, but Larry King will still try to fill sixty, while Fox, MSNBC and Court TV will devote whole days plus a nightly recap. We'll have books. We'll have dramatizations. We'll have "experts," many of them former O.J. experts who've been biding their time with less stellar tragedies like Jon Benet, Gary Condit, Robert Blake and Laci Peterson. At the end, regardless of the verdict, most of America will be asking, "Do you think he did it?"

You can watch if you want but I've decided to pay as little attention to it as I can. Check in regularly here to see if I make it.

Most people don't know her name today but for a few years there, Barbara Weeks was a movie star of minor incandesence. Some sources say that her screen debut was in the 1930 Whoopee! starring Eddie Cantor and Ethel Shutta. A former Ziegfeld Follies girl on Broadway, Ms. Weeks went uncredited in that film as did several other future stars, including Betty Grable and Ann Sothern. This was followed by several other uncredited bits but the next time Barbara Weeks shared a screen with Mr. Cantor, in the 1931 Palmy Days, she was up to co-star billing. Throughout the thirties, she was seen in small parts in several dozen movies, including Now I'll Tell, which starred Spencer Tracy and Alice Faye, and Pick A Star, in which Laurel and Hardy appeared. She also occasionally snared a lead in a B-movie, such as a Buck Jones western. Still, by 1938, either she was tired of Hollywood or Hollywood was tired of her. She traded her career for marriage and did such a good job of severing ties with the industry that in 1954, Variety published her obituary. This came as a shock to the former Barbara Weeks, now Barbara Cox, who was then working as a secretary at Douglas Aircraft and very much alive. Matter of fact, she was alive until July of this year, living peacefully as a landlady in Las Vegas. Fans occasionally tracked her down but otherwise, she had put that part of her life well behind her. Even her tenants didn't know that the lady who collected their rent had been a star. Here's a link to a long obituary that tells this lady's story.

Have you got 13 minutes? Do you have Windows Media Player 9? If the answer to both questions is yes, you can have an exciting new career in pizza. That's right…I said pizza. Here, from the 1964 New York Worlds Fair, is a film that proves "There's Profit in Pizza!" (This may or may not play if you don't have Media Player 7. If it doesn't, try this link. And if that doesn't work, I don't know what you can do.)

It's not finished yet but I'm glad to report Jesse Hamm has been setting up a website devoted to the late comic book artist, Jesse Marsh. Marsh, who is best known for his 15-year stint drawing Tarzan comics, was one of the most controversial illustrators ever in the field. Artists as acclaimed as Russ Manning and Alex Toth found his work brilliant and said they learned from him. Readers must have liked him too, as the comics he drew seemed to sell better because of him. Other professionals and some students of the form either consider his work insignificant or less than competent. A number of devout fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs particularly loathed the non-E.R.B. interpretation of the character that Gaylord DuBois wrote and Marsh drew, and organized a letter-writing campaign to get Marsh replaced with Manning. The Marsh output they hated has probably not received enough attention from comic art scholars for there to be any clear consensus, but the comment has been made that his simple, primal style made adventure stories seem uncommonly accessible to young readers.

Marsh was a former Disney storyman (he got screen credit on Make Mine Music, Melody Time and a few others) who began freelancing for Western Publishing Company around 1946. He decided he liked drawing comic books better than writing gags for Walt, and the editors at Western gave him all he could handle. For a long time, he was their "star" adventure artist on the Dell Comics they produced, working on westerns, Tarzan, movie adaptations…any number of comics and occasionally on their line of books for children. As far as I know, he never worked for any other company.

He was incredibly fast, sometimes doing all the art and lettering for an issue over a long weekend. In fact, he believed that good comic art should be done in a bold, spontaneous manner so if he found himself spending a lot of time on a page, he'd tear it up and start over. He cared very little about anatomical correctness in his figures or proper perspective. According to his friend Russ Manning, Marsh had but two goals in his artwork. One was to tell the story with maximum clarity. The other was to spot his large black areas in a manner that formed a balanced design on the page. Often, he would start a new page by laying in a large abstract design that would fill the entire drawing area. Then he would divide the page (and that design) into six panels and, working with very little pencilling and a thick, ink-loaded brush, he'd attempt to incorporate one sixth of the design into the composition of each panel. Sounds odd, but it seemed to work.

At least for some people. The editors at Western loved both the man and his work, which was fortunate for Marsh. In the early sixties, execs with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate began demanding an artist with a more sophisticated style…someone who would draw a slicker, more muscular Tarzan like the one seen in the newspaper strips. The editors replied, in effect, "We like what Marsh is doing and the book is selling well. If you want to take the rights away from us, fine…but we will not replace Jesse." Knowing that Marsh was in poor health and could not last forever, the Burroughs folks elected to wait him out on the condition that Manning would succeed him. Marsh retired in '65 and died the following year. His last year or two of Tarzan comics must have been excrutiating for the E.R.B. company and fans since failing eyesight caused the artist to continually simplify and exaggerate further. In other words, he intensified everything his detractors disliked about his work. I suspect history will eventually side with the Western editors in praising him but for that to happen, the comic art community will have to pay a little more attention to his artistry. That's why I'm glad we have this new website to begin to correct that oversight.

A few more points about the JFK assassination…

I set my TiVo to record most of the specials noting the 40th anniversary of the shooting in Dallas. So far, wading through them, I get the feeling that the big story of November 22, 1963 was not that President Kennedy was murdered and that the leadership of the United States changed, but that reporters rose to the challenge of covering it. The news reporting that day is of great interest but it is not of more importance than the event itself. Except maybe to newsmen.

If you are interested in delving into the history of the assassination and the various conspiracy theories and such, there are many websites around. Some claim to be neutral in their view but generally present what they see as a strong case for their side and a token, "straw man" summary of the opposition. Almost all present certain arguable assertions as inarguable…and then if you go over to some other site, you'll find someone insisting the opposite is inarguable. In many cases, opposing views are "proven beyond any doubt" by the exact same piece of supposed evidence. If you'd like to do your own surfing on the topic, this website makes the strongest case I've seen for the "Oswald did it alone" theory, while this one makes the best case for the view that there is too much wrong with that version (and too much still unknown) to accept it. Both sites will lead you to plenty of others, including some that take their positions to ridiculous extremes. Come to your own conclusions…but don't expect anyone else to be swayed by them.

Today's the day when, I guess, we're all supposed to answer the musical question, "Where were you when you heard JFK had been shot?" I was in Mr. Totman's third period math class at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High in West Los Angeles. The principal, Mr. Campbell, came on the public address system and told us in very cautious, non-alarmist terms what was being reported on the news. For the rest of the day, there was no other topic and no grasping of the situation.

Mr. Totman was the kind of math teacher who was always looking for reasons to talk about things other than math. His mind wasn't on Algebra and he could tell ours weren't, either so we all sat around, pointlessly speculating on what it all meant. Fourth period for me was English and we also just sat around, pointlessly speculating on what it all meant. I recall that our English teacher, Mr. Cline, didn't have any more idea than we did. Then after fourth period was Lunch and again, a lot of sitting around, wondering what had happened and what would happen.

At the time, there was a rule at Emerson that students could not bring radios to school, and the officials had been enforcing the rule with great vigor, seizing radios and punishing their possessors. You would have had an easier time carrying heroin at my junior high school. But suddenly at lunchtime, several students were openly playing news broadcasts on their little transistors and not only was no one confiscating but teachers were among the many crowding around to listen. I went to Mr. Campbell's office and suggested they pipe the radio news coverage over the P.A. system and this was done.

There was a very real fear that the shooting of Kennedy was Step One in a dastardly plot that would lead to more assassinations, invasions, nuclear bombings, whatever. Imaginations ran rampant and even after it became apparent that other catastrophes were not on tap, imaginations continued to rampage about whodunnit. They still do.

For a time in the late sixties and early seventies, I joined the throng that believed in a conspiracy. I even attended a conference of "buffs" (as they sometimes call themselves) and found about 90% of them to have some sort of obsessive, emotional need to defend wacko theories to the death, even sometimes multiple wacko theories that contradicted each other. But around 10% made good, rational arguments against the Warren Commission and I have since seen those arguments grow ever less compelling.

I eventually came around to the opinion that the "lone nut" explanation made the most sense. Yes, there are anomalies and oddments but in this country, we decide murder trials by the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt." We do not demand that every evidentiary point be nailed down because we acknowledge that almost every case does have anomalies and oddments; that if the defense digs hard enough, they can always find something that can be framed as a counter-argument. Reluctantly, for I love to see government lying and cover-ups exposed, I had to conclude that Oswald acted alone, that the single-bullet theory that I had once denounced as science-fiction was probably so, and that Jack Ruby was just a deranged night club owner.

I also concluded that it was pointless to try and convince anyone else of this; that those who had an opinion had already had it bronzed and placed on the mantel. Too many had too much invested in not believing "the official version," and as I have a certain admiration for skepticism, I don't know that this is a bad thing. So I am absolutely not attempting to get you to see it my way; just reporting that I moved from one viewpoint to another. Most people, I am well aware, do not believe it…but they also do not believe in any other particular theory. They believe "they" killed Kennedy without really identifying who "they" are. I'm afraid that is how it will forever be in the history books.

Lastly, I came to the conclusion that the death of John F. Kennedy did not mean the end of Camelot. The more I read about Kennedy, the less I think of him, except perhaps as a symbolic figure. If his assassination plunged America into a downward spiral, that was largely because we allowed it to…a mistake we sometimes seem to be making, though not as badly, regarding 9/11. I think the country is strong enough to survive the murder of one man or 3,000 men and women. Still, we sometimes forget that, and it is that forgetfulness that does the real damage.