"It is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty" (1939)

I have been reading E.B. White's One Man's Meat, the collection of White's dispatches from his Maine farm. I have been reading the book because I need something to read, and I can't read the news anymore; I can't read the humor section of The New Yorker anymore, or look at its covers; I can't look at the A.V. Club anymore; I can't do much of anything anymore without seeing one name over and over again: Trump. 

He shows up in the unlikeliest places these days - every thought seems to have its destination in the White House. The A.V. Club has been going downhill for a while now, but it seems to have doubled-down on its culture coverage lately - meaning Trump coverage. He shows up unbidden in reviews and thinkpieces that have nothing to do with him. It seems to me that people feel that if they aren't talking about Trump, he's getting away with something, or that by not professing their hatred for him at every turn, they are endorsing him through silence. I recently watched Patton Oswalt's new comedy special, and it was interesting to me how several times he says that he won't deal with Trump, that the special isn't about Trump, that he's moving on from the Trump material - and yet at least half of the special is about Trump.

I don't agree with our President, and I hope that he is either removed, Nixon-like, or his fairy godmother waves her wand over his sleeping form and he wakes up with good ideas. But to fill every waking hour with disdain for him, hatred of his policies, despair at the direction our country is taking... It seems like he wins that way, because he controls me.

A passage from One Man's Meat struck me as being particularly applicable to this quandary. Of course, White had the rise of fascism on his mind in January 1939, when this entry was written - throughout the book, the situation in Europe provides an ominous undertone to White's small-town life in Maine, and his attempts to wrestle with his idyllic rural isolation and his responsibility to be interested and involved with global affairs make the book a much more powerful one than a simple "personal record of life on a Maine coast salt water farm" (as the book's cover describes it) would be. But I feel that his message here is perfectly suited to the state of letters and media today:

I was sorry to hear the other day that a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world, had pledged himself never to write anything that wasn't constructive and significant and liberty-loving. I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news.

All word-mongers, at one time or another, have felt the divine necessity of using their talents, if any, on the side of right - but I didn't realize that they were making any resolutions to that effect, and I don't think they should. When liberty's position is challenged, artists and writers are the ones who first take up the sword. They do so without persuasion, for the battle is particularly their own. In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into a panic. His is a double allegiance to freedom - an intellectual one springing from the conviction that pure thought has a right to function unimpeded, and a selfish one springing from his need, as a breadwinner, to be allowed to speak his piece. America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious. The transition has been disturbing, but it has been effected, and the last part has been accomplished largely by the good work of writers and artists, to whom liberty is a blessed condition which must be preserved on earth at all costs.

But to return to my man who has foresworn everything but what is good and significant. He worries me. I hope he isn't serious, but I'm afraid he is. Having resolved to be nothing but significant, he is in a fair way to lose his effectiveness. A writer must believe in something, obviously, but he shouldn't join a club. Letters flourish not when writers amalgamate, but when they are contemptuous of one another. (Poets are the most contemptuous of all the writing breeds, and in the long run the most exalted and influential.) Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or cinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy. 

The movement is spreading. I know of one gifted crackpot who used to be employed gainfully in the fields of humor and satire, who has taken a solemn pledge not to write anything again till things get straightened around in the world. This seems to me distinctly deleterious and a little silly. A literature composed of nothing but liberty-loving thoughts is little better than the propaganda which it seeks to defeat. 

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn't fear eloquence writers preaching freedom - he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. His gravest concern is lest gaiety, or truth in sheep's clothing, somewhere gain a foothold, lest joy in some unguarded moment be unconfined. I honestly don't believe that a humorist should take the veil today; he should wear his bells night and day, and squeeze the uttermost jape, even though he may feel more like writing a strong letter to the Herald Tribune.

Satire/Sincerity: The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot (1995)

Rusty trying vainly to stop an A-bomb sponsored by McDonald's,
Mercedes, "H&R Blockbuster," and others.

I'm a big fan of comics, if not exactly a die-hard one. I have a comics collection that I guess could be described as wide-ranging rather than extensive. I didn't really have much interest in "Comics" growing up, preferring "comics" - Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Mutts, and thanks to a coffee table book of my dad's, Krazy Kat. I read a lot as a kid, but I didn't read a lot of humor; I usually read adventure fiction like Jules Verne, the Hardy Boys, etc., or nonfiction books about World War II. Eventually I discovered Dave Barry, who I thought was endlessly hilarious (and I still think his best pieces are), but for a long time when I read and laughed, it was because I was reading comics.

I also ended up somehow with Little Lit, a collection of fairy tale comics edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. I think I was excited about Little Lit, and I certainly spent a lot of time looking at the drawings, but I didn't end up connecting with many of the actual stories. I realized that Little Lit was closer to Maus, another book that was on my parents' bookshelf and that I'd looked at but hadn't really been able to read, or the book of work by Seth that my dad had at one point - that is, it didn't make me laugh. In fact, some of the work in Little Lit - Chris Ware, creator of another Rusty, springs to mind - actually made me sad. Today, beautifully drawn and emotionally deep comics draw me in as deeply as Calvin and Hobbes flying down the hill in their wagon.

There is a third category of comics - the classic comic book. If the great newspaper strips are seen as the Chaplin or Laurel & Hardy shorts of comics, and "graphic narratives" by artists like Seth, Chris Ware, David Mazzucchelli, Alison Bechdel, et al., are the "films" (with all the accompanying, and completely unintended by the artists themselves, snootiness that word implies), then the superhero comic book is the summer blockbuster, or the 1950s B movie. And just as arguments have been made for the stylistic and artistic merits of blockbusters and B movies, which often work within the confines of their genres to create really amazing things, it's pretty widely acknowledged that superhero comics have more going on than just muscled guys punching each other. One of my favorite comic books, The Death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin, actually does have a lot of muscled guys punching each other, while also dealing with pretty intense themes about mortality, friendship and loss.

The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot is in this third category of comics. It's a comic book that is intentionally retro in the story it tells. Its blurb on Amazon says, "Everything you remember about being eight years old and watching monster movies is right here, but with all the magnified detail that you always wanted to see." Big Guy is the kind of thing Calvin's mom would take away from him, and it's proud of it (no surprise, as it was written by professional nutcase Frank Miller). I hadn't read the comic before, but I saw it mentioned a few times as I researched artists and publishers and other comic books, so I picked up the Dark Horse edition published in 2015 and expected to be wowed.

The basic plot: Japanese scientists create a huge, sentient monster out of primordial ooze. The monster destroys buildings and eats innocent Japanese citizens in an orgy of violence and destruction that takes up the majority of the first volume. The monster, like everyone in the comic, speaks perfect English; his goal is to destroy all evidence of humanity and human consciousness from the world.

The monster's main tool to accomplish this goal is more slime, which, when it covers the people on the ground, turns them from humans into smaller monsters. The Japanese air force and army are completely powerless in the face of the monster, but luckily the government has a trick up their sleeve: "Rusty, the boy robot," a Jimmy Neutron-looking metal kid with "nucleo-protonic powers" who is also very lonely. The monster taps into Rusty's fears and insecurities, however, and disarms him almost immediately.

This is the end of the first book - almost. All the carnage, death and destruction thus far, as well as Rusty's introduction and defeat, are only a prelude to the real point of the book. As summed up by an Amazon reviewer:

The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot series is a satire of Japanese Chogokin (giant robot) stories in which a robot made by humans and piloted by one or more humans is sent to fight off an invasion of giant monsters. In those stories, western nations are often forced to rely on Japanese technology to save the day. In Big Guy and Rusty, the opposite occurs. [...] If you like giant robots, giant monsters and satire, this series is for you!

The issue with seeing The Big Guy as a satire of this Japanese genre is that it flips the usual motivation for satire - the underdog fighting against the powerful - on its head. Satire has, from Jonathan Swift to Monty Python, been used as a vehicle for the little guy to expose the big guy. When the satire is from the big guy and directed at the little guy, things get more complicated.

See, once Rusty is defeated, Japan's government, with its last ounce of life, presses the button to call... America. To my mind, there's something twisted about this, and not satirically so. Since 1945, America has cast itself as Japan's savior, giving the country a new constitution and the foundation for a new economy, reinstating its emperor, building military bases on its islands "for its own protection," and giving it a love of baseball, jazz and commercialism. All of this despite dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombs which much historical scholarship has disputed the need for. Little Boy and Fat Man. Or, perhaps, the Boy Robot and the Big Guy.

The Big Guy seems less a satire of a Japanese monster movie genre - which in its original form was a reliving of atomic destruction but with an ending where Japan, not the United States, saves the day - and more a nostalgia for a certain kind of American nationalism - an uncomplicated view of America as freedom fighter whose last true moment came in World War II.

The history of comics has plenty of these attitudes, of course (Nick Fury's original incarnation, for example). The Big Guy is different in its nostalgia. It sets out to be a cultural anachronism. That is, The Big Guy is at its essence a certain kind of conservative comic, a comic that could have been read by Reagan or George W. Bush, or perhaps by our current culturally anachronistic Commander in Chief. It does hearken back to American attitudes from the 1940s and 1950s, but it applies no critical lens, gives us no new view of these attitudes; instead, it glorifies them.

In the end of the comic, Japan offers Rusty the Boy Robot to The Big Buy - to America - as a gift. But The Big Guy doesn't want Rusty; he works alone. It's telling that, while The Big Guy takes place almost completely in Japan, it was ultimately turned into an animated TV show that moved the setting to another thinly-disguised New York City. The Big Guy isn't about Japan, or even about satirizing or reexamining an element of Japanese culture. In this comic book world, it's all about America first.