Plumbing Salinger for the Depths of Salinger

I have a perverse tendency to like authors not for their best-known books, but for the other ones. I appreciated Catch-22, but it’s Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold and God Knows that make me fall out of my chair laughing and to which I turn again and again. I enjoyed The Adventures of Huck Finn, but I think The Mysterious Stranger is the more meaningful, and superior, work. And while I, like damn near every other American adolescent since 1951, read The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s Glass Family stories mean infinitely more to me. I don’t care if I never read Catcher again. I didn’t particularly enjoy it the first time. I thought Holden was a self-important, insufferably condescending little jerkoff. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories off the shelf.

J.D. Salinger is on my mind lately, I suppose, because of “Salinger,” the recent documentary by Shane Salerno and David Shields, and its bombshell revelation that there are five more complete books, which will be published over a period of years beginning in 2015. Which revelation, by the way, is the only reason to see it. Now that I’ve given away the spoiler, you can avoid it. It’s a gruesome piece of work that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about ol’ Jerry from the kiss-n-tell “memoir”, At Home in the World, by the profoundly unprofound and talentless Joyce Maynard, with whom he shacked up for a few months, and Dream Catcher, his daughter Margaret’s more interesting, but still lousy, memoir.  

Salinger, undoubtedly thinking about himself. 

Salinger fans tend to fall into one of two camps. One faction is made up of the kind of obsessive stalker-freaks in whom Dylan fans will see analogs to A.J. Weberman: the deeply disturbed cultist types who haunted the environs of Cornish, NH, where he holed up for the last five or six decades of his life, skulking around town hoping to go through his garbage, or talk to him and see if some kind of contact from The Master couldn’t heal their own tormented psyches, or just to get a glimpse of the guy.

The other group, less creepy but more irritating, is constituted by his self-appointed guardians, the ones who bellow, “JUST LEAVE HIM ALONE” whenever a new article or biography or reminiscence appears because, after all, that’s what he wanted. They swell up in righteous indignation when anyone attempts to shed a little more light on him. They regard curiosity about him as an incursion on his own legendary privacy. I’m not a fan of Margaret Salinger’s Dream Catcher, but the chorus of Salinger fans acting like her writing about what is, after all, her own life and who was, after all, her own father was some kind of unforgivable betrayal of the guy struck me as almost psychotic. She might be a lousy writer, but she’s no Judas.

I don’t belong to either of these camps. I like some of his stuff quite a bit, I think he’s an important American writer, and I, for one, would like to know more about him. Salinger isn’t sacred (nothing is, really), and his life ought to be as fair game as anyone else’s. What puzzles me is why the stuff we do have about him—the biographies, the memoirs, and now the documentary and its accompanying volume—is so uniformly shitty. Both his memoirists sucked--Joyce Maynard cashed in on him, and his daughter might very well be bonkers. The biographies are largely dreck. Kenneth Slawenski's is the best, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, glosses over the unpleasant bits, and is generally unsatisfying. Why hasn’t anyone serious—a first-rate academic, critic, or biographer—someone who actually knows what he or she is doing, and who could actually give us some genuine insight into the guy—tackled him yet??

Because somebody damn well should. All of us who read and appreciate him would benefit from a good critical account of his life and work. His long-term significance remains to be seen. Maybe he’ll endure, maybe he won’t. I have my doubts. But his significance to the millions of people for whom Catcher resonated is undeniable. It’s not that he owes us anything. It’s that it’s natural for people to be curious about someone who means as much as he does to so many people, and, like it or not, as a major 20^th century American writer, he’s going to end up under the critical and biographical microscope no less than any other writer or public figure of such significance. So it might as well be someone good who does it.

Some of Salinger's more outre weirdnesses--his thing for young girls, his various religious phases, his short-lived enthusiasm for drinking his own urine, his parsimony in regard to food and money, and of course most notably his self-imposed seclusion, etc., etc.--are already well-known, and I don't care to know more about them. It isn't that uniquely Anglo-American obsession with celebrity that drives the desire of mine to know more about him. If salacious revelations and celebrity gossip is what butters your potatoes, go watch the Salinger documentary—that garbage was unalloyed Us Magazine. 
It’s that we simply won’t be able to understand his work in all its complexity without knowing more about him, because quite possibly no other American writer has been more obsessed with himself. It's all he ever wrote about. Other writers have written about the Civil War, or Jews and comic books, or North Korea, or any other topic under the sun, but the only answer to the question, when applied to anything he ever wrote, of "What did J.D. Salinger write about?" is "J.D. Salinger." 

The secret of Salinger's enduring appeal has less to do with his work than it does with a fascination about him--both his personality and the persona he created. He said, more or less in so many words, that HE didn’t matter, so don’t worry about him. Just read his stuff. Which is kind of ironic, because he spent his career writing about nothing BUT himself, thereby cultivating--perhaps unwittingly, although I don't think so--a cult of personality which he then took an almost sadistic pleasure in denying to damn near everyone (including his own family).

So maybe his defenders can forgive the rest of us for being interested in learning more about him. He was a fascinating guy who spent a lifetime thinking about a fascinating thing: himself.

It’s a truism, of course, to say that every character is an extension or facet of the author. We can’t get out of ourselves. Every word each of our characters says is us, or part of us, talking. But Dostoevsky wasn’t Raskolnikov, Twain wasn’t Huck, and Bellow wasn’t Herzog in quite the same way that Salinger was Holden. Perhaps no other character in literature is so unadulteratedly the author, which Salinger more or less admitted when he said that he would never allow Catcher to be made into a movie, because he was the only person on planet Earth he would allow to play Holden. 

Well, no other character in literature except for the Glass family. Because he was them even more so. 

This is why, I think, I like the Glass Family stories better than Catcher. Catcher was a young man’s book. Its darkness is an adolescent’s darkness, and its sneer is the sneer of every 17-year old in the world, who thinks he knows everything there is to know, but who doesn’t know himself nearly as well as, with any amount of honest introspection, he will later. Catcher is about precocity, not profundity.

The Glass Family stories, on the other hand, are written after many more years of Salinger’s obsessive self-contemplation, and the greater knowledge of himself that a few more decades of that activity. Narcissistic? Undoubtedly, but when you’re most likely the most interesting person you know, perhaps narcissism can be forgiven.

"I love working on these Glass stories," Salinger wrote on the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey, and it's no wonder, since he liked writing about himself, and the Glasses are nothing more than personifications of different aspects of himself. Taken as a whole--as I suspect they're meant to be--they amount to as complete a self-portrait as ever created. "I’ve been waiting for them most of my life," he added. Waiting for the Glasses? Perhaps that's another way of saying waiting for himself to get to the point where he could discuss himself honestly, which is what the Glass Family cycle is all about.

The Glass Family cycle, to me at least, reflects Salinger’s coming to terms with who he was, right down to their shared ethnicity. Holden was a WASP blueblood: an identity which Salinger, the grandson of a rabbi and the son of a kosher cheese importer, probably envied, at least as a young man. Holden, has much as he despised Pencey Prep, belonged at an elite East Coast boarding school. It was the logical place for him to be. The prep schools Salinger’s own socially-ambitious parents sent him to were manifestly not, and I can’t help but wonder if Holden’s alienation didn’t spring, in part, from Salinger’s own experience of being a Jew thrown among Episcopalians.

Or, more accurately, a half-Jew, as he reportedly found out soon after his bar mitzvah. Turned out that his mother Miriam was really Mary, a German-Irish woman from Iowa, who was passing as Jewish so as not to upset her husband’s family. By the time Salinger got around to writing about the Glasses, he’d ditched his WASPy pseudopersona. His fictional avatars, the Glasses, were Jewish on their father’s side and Irish on their mother’s, a pedigree almost identical to Salinger’s own. 

Even Les and Bessie's prior occupations as vaudeville performers rings truer to Salinger’s experience—being the child of a vaudevillian is no more ridiculous to a kid brought up on Park Avenue and educated in elite boarding schools than being the son of a kosher cheese importer. Les and Bessie’s background of sawdusty shticklach on the vaudeville circuit is probably a wry, veiled nod to his own father’s less than glamorous livelihood.

I’m also a little surprised that no critic, or at least none that I’ve read thus far, has noticed the phonetic similarity of both Salinger’s and the Glass family’s names. Bessie’s (the Glass matriarch) maiden name is Gallagher—more recognizably Irish, but still phonetically similar to Salinger’s own mother’s maiden name of Jillich (they probably have the same Celtic root)—and every letter in “Glass”, S, A, L, and G, is represented in Salinger’s own surname.

The Glass kids’ own childhoods as prodigies on the radio show “It’s a Wise Child” likewise probably mirror Salinger’s own youthful conviction, nurtured by overdoting parents, that he was special, a junior genius destined for greatness. When Salinger, speaking through Buddy, describes the popular perception of the Glass kids as "a bunch of insufferably ‘superior’ little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth," one can't help but feel that Salinger is looking back, less than enchantedly, on the guy who wrote Catcher.

Each Glass kid represents some aspect, some facet, of Salinger’s own character. Seymour commits the suicide that Salinger almost certainly flirted with, but couldn’t bring himself to commit. Buddy and Waker are the hermits—Waker becomes a Carthusian monk, and Buddy, the Glass family scribe and chronicler, disappears up into the mountains (but continues to teach at a women’s college where, conveniently, he’s surrounded by all those young, pure, innocent girls Salinger himself obsessed over and occasionally seduced). Boo Boo, the perfect mother who can heal the scars inflicted on her son Lionel by the anti-Semitism of the family servants, is the parent he probably simultaneously wished he had and could be (or is he Lionel, the little kid who wants to run away?) Franny’s breakdown mirrors the one Salinger experienced in Europe, after D-Day, the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, and an ill-advised quickie marriage to a German woman with Nazi associations, and Zooey...

Ah, Zooey. My favorite Salinger character, and to my mind, the most memorable. Him with the insults, the neverending bath, the cigar, and the trickle of sweat that sticks his shirt to his back. Is it possible to read Zooey as Salinger’s sendup of himself? An irascible, know-it-all, prematurely gruff little twerp, who not only thinks he’s smarter than he is, but knows he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Is Zooey Glass Salinger’s own affectionate mockery of both Holden Caulfield and the guy who wrote Holden?

Because, at the end of the day, what very few of his critics seem to get is that the Glasses are funny. Seymour, for all the reverence his siblings slather onto him and his memory, is kind of a yutz. He’s clueless—selfish in the manner of people who are oblivious to other people’s feelings. What kind of person disappears the day of his wedding, show back up, and then blows his brains out laying next to his sleeping bride on their honeymoon?

Zooey, alone of all the Glass siblings, gets it. He’s the only one who calls out Seymour for being the jerk he was. A genius, a being of almost pure spirit, too pure for this fallen world and all its imperfections, yes, but a self-centered jerk nonetheless, a Vedantic Henry Higgins who deformed his younger siblings’ development by exposing them, prematurely, to Eastern mysticism. Zooey, the way I read him, is Salinger poking fun at himself, mocking his own pretensions and predilections. Zooey gives the rest of the Glasses the grounding that they need to survive in this miserable world. It came too late for some of them, but Franny, the youngest, subjected to Zooey’s own brand of tough love, might just be the redemption from Seymour’s suicide that the family needs so desperately.

One can’t read the Glass Family stories—or at least I can’t—without coming away from them with a sense of Salinger’s own loneliness. The Glasses aren’t merely his mouthpieces and different aspects of himself—they’re the family he wished he had, the family he wished he’d been a part of. And that, perhaps, is the central tragedy of J.D. Salinger’s life—the dumb son of a bitch HAD a family. He had two children whom, by his daughter’s account at least, he kept at arm’s length, ignored, belittled, and eventually brushed aside in favor of his fictional ones. 

At the end of the day, he preferred the company of his made-up friends to that of his own. He couldn’t forgive his children for not being as much like himself as the Glasses were, and he couldn’t forgive the world for not being the way he wanted it to be. Perhaps understandably—he went through some pretty stuff during the war. So he hunkered down in Cornish, drew the curtains tight, and dealt with the world on his own terms, filtering out whatever he didn’t like and whatever couldn’t live up to his standards.

Perhaps that’s the tension, and the tragedy, underlying Salinger’s life and work: knowing that that his narcissism was, ultimately, self-defeating and destructive--and that he was unable, and would never be able, to get beyond it.

The Found Child

Most of my blog posts are sort of polemical. Either I’m arguing a point, or trying to convince nonexistent readers of something, or just up on a soapbox ranting, like a homeless street-preacher. This is, however, just as tedious for me as it is for the readers (if they existed). So instead, today I’m just going to tell a story.

Last Sunday was, in the Orthodox Christian faith, the Feast of the Assumption, which marks the death and ascension to heaven of the Virgin Mary. It's a big deal at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, my wife's family's church, which is named for the event. The congregation celebrates the Assumption with a big formal sit-down luncheon and dancing following the church service. We're not particularly regular about church attendance, but we show up for this one.

This year, my family happened to be seated at a table with an elderly couple—immigrant Greeks with thick accents, like my in-laws—and their young grandson. 

Something about the kid's appearance and demeanor appealed to me. He was a short, skinny little guy with pointed, birdlike features, thick glasses and a mop of unruly hair. He wore a knit polo shirt buttoned to the neck, khaki cargo pants, and a crucifix and a couple of other religious medallions around his neck. The first hints of a downy mustache were appearing on his upper lip, and he blinked frequently. He looked like a Hellenic Harry Potter. He sat quietly next to me, picking uninterestedly at his salad, which he eventually offered to me, saying, "I'm really not crazy about salad."

After exchanging a few pleasantries, the two families mostly kept to themselves. Unlike most other congregants at Assumption, this family doesn't know my in-laws particularly well. I felt like I should say something to the little boy--some kind of small talk--but I didn't. I'm fine with my own, but talking to other people's kids always makes me nervous. So we talked amongst ourselves and they amongst themselves, until I overheard the boy say something to his papou (grandfather) about, of all places, Hobbiton.

“Did you know there are actually forty-four families living in the Hobbiton village they built for the movie?” he asked excitedly. His papou, who looked to be about eighty and, like most elderly Greek immigrant men of my acquaintance, neither knew nor cared anything about The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or the movies based on them. He just nodded indulgently.

But geek stuff like Tolkien is something I know a bit about, and his mention of Hobbiton provided a good conversational opening. We started chatting. Along the way, the little guy informed me that his name was Leftheri (short for Eleftherios), and that he was eleven years old.

His manner of speaking was, initially, marked by a certain kind of awkwardness, which I recognized immediately. It’s a variety commonly found in precocious boys in early adolescence. It's born of the competing desires to show an adult that they’re smart enough to be taken seriously, but not to sound too nerdy. It’s the awkwardness of someone who wants to impress favorably and not alienate. It’s the awkwardness of someone who wants to be liked. It worked, because I found myself liking him.

Having suffered painfully from that awkwardness during my own own early adolescence, I know how to set someone in that predicament at ease. I spoke to him like I would to an adult, listened intently, and nodded. Little by little, his woodenness and reserve melted away as he realized he was talking to someone who shared his enthusiasms--someone he didn't have to impress--and he grew more animated as we talked, his big religious medallions bouncing against his thin little chest, 

We talked hobbits for a while, and then moved on to the other area where we had some commonality, which was Greekness. I'm not Greek, but after fourteen years of marriage to one, having two half-Greek children, having been there four times, and being passably conversant in the language, I’m about as close to that culture as a xeno--a non-Greek--can be, so I felt like I was on pretty solid ground.

“So how’s your Greek?” I asked him, assuming that, like most of the young people at Assumption, he’d spoken it growing up.

“Not so good,” he said, surprising me. “I only started learning it after my mom died.”

When he said that, I realized that I knew who he was. I'd heard his story, which had been pretty big news on the St. Louis Greek gossip circuit.

As of about a year ago, his grandparents had no grandchildren. They had three children, but none of them had married, which caused them great sadness. Greeks, like all Mediterranean peoples, are deeply, almost smotheringly, family-oriented. Family ties, even across several generations, are suffocatingly strong—you’d better have a damn good reason if you miss a Sunday family dinner. God help you if you want to move to another city.

Being immigrants brought another, even more painful, dimension to having no grandchildren. Their family's eventual extinction would be an admission of defeat, a mockery of their wrenching dislocation from the old country for the sake of giving their family a better life in the new one, if, a generation hence, there wouldn't be a family to benefit from it. 

And then their son, who, like a lot of young Greek men, still lived at home with them, got a phone call.

It was from an old girlfriend, an American (as the Greeks refer to any white person who doesn’t belong to an identifiable ethnic group). After they’d broken up, she'd moved away from St. Louis, and he'd never heard from her again. She was dying of cancer, and was calling from her deathbed with a dying request.

He had a son. She'd never told him that he'd impregnated her before they broke up and she left town. And, as she had no family or friends to take the boy in after she died, she needed to find someone who could raise him. 

Naturally, the guy was astounded. He was also a little skeptical. Perhaps rightly so. I know nothing about Leftheri’s mother's character, but during the course of our conversation, he mentioned that he’d been moved around a lot when he was younger. That and her lack of any family or friends, any support system whatsoever, indicated to me a certain free-spiritedness (or instability) which may have merited a certain amount of skepticism on his part. 

But the DNA test he insisted upon left no room for doubt. The boy was his. And, with nowhere else to go, he came to live with his father's family in St. Louis.

I can't imagine what it was like for the boy. He'd had no idea who his father was. He didn’t know he was half Greek, or that his grandparents were immigrants. He may not have known any other Greek-Americans. They can can be a little overwhelming, and I suspect that the culture shock was significant. But his grandparents, unsurprisingly, were over the moon about it. They DID have a grandchild, after all. And, like all Greek parents, they know more about everything than you do, and decided to take over his upbringing.

Leftheri's embrace of his newfound Greekness was striking. His grandparents, naturally, had given him an Orthodox baptism and a Greek name, which he’d taken to using. I have no idea what his American name was, and I don’t suppose I need to, since he’d discarded it. He joined the youth Greek dance troupe in which my daughter also dances, enrolled in Greek school and began learning the language, and proudly wore his Greek bling on the outside of his shirt for all to see.

After they left, I got a little weepy at the table thinking about him. Drinking wine in the middle of the day might have had something to do with it. But I couldn’t help wondering what his nomadic little life had been like, before coming to St. Louis and meeting his father and his family, or why he'd been so eager to shed his original name for a Greek one. I couldn’t help feeling sad for a little boy who’d lost his mother and who hadn’t had a father for those crucial early formative years. And I couldn’t help but be happy that, having come through the greatest loss a child can experience, he’d found not merely a family, but an entire nationality to enfold him in its loud, close, boisterous arms--an ethnic identity to help a lost boy define himself.

Or maybe I just saw something of myself in a quiet, undersized, bookish kid with a penchant for losing himself in imaginary realms and who found a defining lodestar in an ancestral culture, as my grandmother's Jewishness had helped me carve out a path toward self-realization.  

Leftheri was luckier than most of the children in his situation—the casualties of life’s shuffles, the kids left bereft by the questionable life-choices of the people on whom they depend. He'd found a softer landing than most. But his story, this strange hybrid of Charles Dickens and Jeffrey Eugenides, still pierced me in a way that few other people’s have. And I'm concerned about him. His grandparents, as glad as they were to get him, aren't exactly spring chickens and won’t be around forever. I worry about that eventual loss coming on top of the horrific one he's already suffered. Something in me wants to adopt this little guy. I want to mentor him, to take him under my wing. He’s clearly on a fast track to geekdom, and he's going to need someone to help him navigate the process of melding geek and cool. Trust me, no one does that better than I do.

But mostly, I suppose, I just want him to be okay. 

A Lecture from a Dead Man: What Joseph Pulitzer Would Think of the American Press in 2013.

Because I’m one of about three people in the country who actually cares or knows anything about Joseph Pulitzer, the visionary genius who more or less singlehandedly created the modern American press—and because, irrepressible show-off that I am, a published a few articles about him—I’m occasionally asked to speak about him.

These aren’t big or important venues. Mostly they’re small retiree groups from churches and synagogues, groups of the kind of elderly people who read things like the Missouri Historical Society’s journal. But I’m always glad to do it. They’re nice people and they ask interesting questions, like the one I was asked at the most recent gathering: “What would Pulitzer have thought of the state of the media today?”

My immediate answer was, “Not much.” But a longer answer is probably in order. Joseph Pulitzer was one of the most demanding men who ever lived. He literally drove himself into an early grave, and expected no less of his employees, his papers, and his family. He was a martinet of the first water, constantly hectoring, badgering, cajoling, noodging, and demanding improvement—not perfection, but improvement—from everyone with whom he came into contact.

The American media is, in large part, his creation. Part of his genius was an almost uncanny sense of what would appeal to the reader—what would grab their interest and keep them coming back for more. He was probably the greatest huckster in our history, a carnival barker with the soul of a philosopher-king.

And although it sounds like a truism today, he genuinely wanted everyone to read the paper and came up with tricks and tips to reel the public in and keep them there. He realized that new labor laws were giving the working class at least one day off a week, so he created the Sunday Magazine—lighter and more interesting fare that people could read at their leisure. He stuck in games and puzzles and comics to snag the kids. He added sections on fashion and housekeeping to rope in women. Although he thought sports was a waste of time, he created the sports page because he knew people would read it.

Because ever-growing numbers of New Yorkers were recent immigrants, he made the paper easier to read. Simplified the style. Increased the font size and the headline size. And went crazy with the illustrations, which were so good and so evocative that you didn’t even have to be able to read to get the gist of the day’s news—you could get it from just looking at the pictures.

By creating a paper that cut across all lines—age, race, gender, class, creed, native born/immigrant, level of education, etc.—he created a truly People’s Paper which addressed issues of interest to all New Yorkers. And in doing so, he laid the foundations for the creation of a national media—one that all Americans would read, watch, or listen to, and which would serve as a sort of forum for the dissemination of information, and discussion of issues, of interest to all Americans.

So, considering it is, in many ways, his creation, the thought of what he’d say if he could see the current state of the American media is daunting.

In my self-appointed role as The Guy Who Thinks He Knows What Mr. Pulitzer Would Think, I’m confident when I say that, as regards the current state of the American news media, I don’t think he’s spinning in his grave. I think he’s doing triple axels in it. Frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t drilled himself out of there by now, brushed off the grave-dust, and started haranguing at the top of his harsh, shrill voice. I think Joseph Pulitzer would be deeply disappointed in the American press for three major reasons.

~          ~          ~

First off, he’d be appalled at the extent to which the press is controlled by corporations. In 2013, 90% of the American media is controlled by six corporations: GE, Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Time/Warner, and CBS. Think about that. Six executives control what 277 million Americans see, hear, and read. Do you think any of these six guys have any interest beyond financial in controlling what goes into your head?

This is what Pulitzer feared the most, and the thing against which he fought hardest—that the flow of information would be controlled by interests which have something to gain by controlling it. Pulitzer himself went to lengths that would be considered absurd today to keep both himself and his newspapers free of any kind of entanglements—personal, political, or financial—that could potentially have compromised his ability to report the news.

He was terrified of debt, for example. When he bought his papers, he paid cash—when he built his buildings, he did so with cash. After the New York World built its new building on Park Row in Manhattan—it was, for about five minutes, the tallest building in the country—the World’s headlines trumpeted, “Tallest Building In The World, And Not A Penny In Debt.” This wasn’t just boasting about the proprietor’s financial acumen (which was substantial)—it was reassuring his public that he hadn’t sold his soul to build a new building, and that no lender would have any leverage on him.  

Including leverage from himself. He once pulled an editor aside, and said, “Boy, as you know, I am a large owner of stocks. If ever I order you to write a story favoring one of those companies, or withdraw one that might damage one of those companies, you are to disregard that order and remind me of this conversation.” He never had to, of course... but I find it very telling that Pulitzer held his papers’ independence to be so sacrosanct that he didn’t trust even himself with its safekeeping.

Joseph Pulitzer was no socialist. He understood, probably better than anyone before or since, that a newspaper is, first and foremost, a business, and that before it can do anything else, it has to make a profit. And he understood that newspapers are bought and sold. He didn’t found either of his papers, he bought both of them. But I think it’s fair to say that he would have regarded the sale of a newspaper to a corporate interest, which is accountable only to its bottom line and shareholders and which has absolutely no interest in either reporting the news or protecting the public, as a rank betrayal of the public trust.

But that’s precisely what’s happened.

~          ~          ~

Secondly, he’d be shocked at the extent to which the media has allowed itself to become the willing patsy of the United States Government.

I don’t know whether it’s more reflective of the government’s increasing stranglehold over all aspects of our lives, or whether it’s laziness on the part of the press, but the government is now an absolutely integral part of the news process, which shouldn’t have happened.

Pulitzer conceived of the press as the independent Fourth Branch of government, the Oversight Branch. Supported entirely by its own revenue generation, whether through ad sales or subscriptions, the Press, protected by the First Amendment and the Power of Public Opinion, is there to hold the government in check—a responsibility it abdicated when it became reliant on the government for its information. This puts the press in an extremely precarious position. If you’re not in the government’s good graces, then you’re out in the cold, cut off from precious information, and scooped by your competition. Ask Helen Thomas. After the legendary AP reporter asked one too many awkward questions of the Bush Administration, she was banished from press briefings. A disgraceful act—she deserved better treatment than that, and it should have sent up red flags across the nation. An administration with nothing to hide doesn’t send reporters to Siberia. But too little noticed at the time.

I’m thinking specifically of the New York Times, which, in spite of its status as the Paper of Record, has, under the leadership of Arthur O. “Pinch” Sulzberger, has taken some very serious missteps. Take the Valerie Plame case, for example. When the Bush Administration, on orders from Dick Cheney, outed her as a spy because her husband, Joe Wilson, told the truth about Iraq, the Times, on information from a government informant, published the story--and then fell all over itself to protect its secret sources, even to the extent of letting the main reporter on the story, Judith Miller, sit in jail for a month for contempt of court, with Pinch crowing, “We will not reveal our sources! We must protect our friends within the government!”

Which is all very noble and heroic, but misguided. Because, as Mr. Pulitzer said, that “A newspaper should have no friends.”

Why it shouldn't ought to be obvious. When you become dependent upon the government for your information, you have, ipso facto, allowed the government to control the flow of information.

If you think that sounds like paranoia or conspiracy theory, think about this. In late August of 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office “leaked” a story about weapons of mass destruction buildup in Iraq. Of course there was no leak. The story was placed there with Cheney’s full foreknowledge. It might even have been his idea. But the New York Times ran it on the front page on September 9, 2002, as some great expose, quoting “anonymous Administration officials.”

That very same day, Cheney himself appeared on “Meet The Press,” and said, “There's a story in the New York Times this morning... I don't want to talk about obviously specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, he [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire... the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb."

In short, he cited a story that his office had placed there as justification for our government’s horrific actions in Iraq—a war crime far greater in scope and size than anything Saddam had ever done, or ever would do. 

Like him or loathe him, you have to admit that this was a masterstroke on Cheney’s part to achieve policy aims. And the Times looked like (hell, didn’t look like, was) a complete patsy.

This simply would not have happened on a Pulitzer paper, precisely because of Pulitzer’s dictum: “A newspaper should have no friends.” The government is not your friend, and no one in it can be expected to be. There may be leaks. There may be whistleblowers. And perhaps you can get some good information out of them from time to time... but when you are dependent upon the government for your information, then they control it.

~          ~          ~

Finally, Joseph Pulitzer would be disgusted by the press’s incessant whining that no one’s reading them.

This is true, actually. Newspaper circulation is at historic lows—it’s below pre-World War II numbers. In 2009, Bloomberg reported that the decline of daily average circulation for 395 papers nationwide had doubled in a six-month period—and the numbers have only continued to go down. Newspaper management and other industry apologists blame competition from television, the Internet, and general lack of interest in the news, but as a friend of mine who writes for the AP put it, “Newspapers sleepwalked through the 90’s.” Assuming that they’d always be there, as they always had, they ignored the trends and woke up, Rip Van Winkle-like, to find themselves irrelevant.

But one can almost hear Old Man Pulitzer’s throaty Eastern European gutturals screaming from beyond the grave, “Well, if no one’s reading you, then goddammit, find a way to make them. You want to talk competition? I got people to read the paper when they worked twelve hour days, six days a week!”

As a dedicated newspaper reader since the age of seven, a one-time aspiring journalist, editor of my high-school paper, staff writer on my college paper, a working writer, a freelance magazine writer, and a longtime observer of the industry, I can tell newspapers what the problem is and it’s not competition. It’s content.

Pick up the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—a battered, flickering shadow of a ghost of the magnificent paper that it used to be—and you’ll realize immediately why people don’t read the paper any more. It’s because there’s nothing there worth reading. It’s boring, more than 70% of the news on Section A comes from the wire, and the rest of it is bra ads. Which are, admittedly, fun to look at, but again, I can see better porn online. The rest of it is either ersatz or flat. Newspapers became irrelevant not because of competition from screens, but because of their own lassitude.

But newspapers reacted in a predictably stupid way to the plunge in revenue. They gutted staff--the very writers that actually write the stuff worth reading--and got rid of the elements that, back in the day, roped readers in in the first place. The comics page—the home and cradle of our greatest American art form—is a joke and a disgrace, still limping by on the same old “my wife, she’s such a bitch” yuks of Hagar the Horrible, the "Sarge, he's such a jackass" yuks of Beetle Bailey, and the three-frame antics of a fat cat. The great strips, like “Peanuts,” “Bloom County,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “The Far Side,” are gone—and with the comics page being ever shrunken and the future of newspapers themselves questionable, we will not see their like again. And many of them responded by raising prices to offset falling revenues--which, as any two-bit business major can tell you, is the last thing you should do.

Essentially, newspapers give us no reason to read them. Which is too bad, because we need them.

News on the ‘Net is bites and clips. You can absorb the headlines, but there’s no time and no space for the in-depth analysis that newspapers, as a medium, can provide. People simply don’t like to read the amount of material that good journalism requires online. It hurts the eyes. Online news isn’t journalism. It’s trivia. Online journalism and print journalism is the difference between multiple choice and an essay question.

And this is a tragedy, not merely for the newspaper industry, but for our democracy. A working democracy requires an informed and knowledgeable public. Pulitzer, who fled a repressive regime in Europe, knew this better than anyone. It’s why he worked so hard at what he did. He cherished liberty, and he knew that the price of it, as Jefferson had said, was eternal vigilance: a service that only the press can provide.

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together," the old man wrote. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. Look around and tell me Joseph Pulitzer wasn’t a prophet.

I'm Still Kicking Mitt While He's Down--A Few Reflections On The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie

I recently had occasion to look over some old family photographs with my dad. There aren’t many. Pop’s family wasn’t much for taking pictures, and some of the places in the photos I didn’t recognize. When I asked Pop where they’d been taken, his answer surprised the hell out of me.

“Oh, that one’s at the Country Club,” he said offhandedly.

“Your family belonged to a country club?” I asked, surprised.

“We all did,” Pop said. “All the families my folks knew did.”

My pop is most assuredly not the country club type. He’s a lifelong Democrat, he bristles at any form of exclusivity, and he doesn’t really have proper country club demeanor. He swears. A lot. He likes to pick fights with Republicans. He’s been known to throw his clubs into the water hazards when he shanks it. But what surprised me even more than my father’s family having belonged to a country club was that there had been one in his hometown.  

“Peru had a country club?” I asked, dumbfounded.

Peru, Indiana, my father’s hometown and the town where I spent my adolescence, is a mighty desolate place these days. In the two decades since I left for college, the population has sunk from 14,000 to 11,000. There’s not much to eat if you don’t like Subway, Taco Bell, or McDonalds. Forget shopping there. The town’s only remaining major employer manufactures auto parts, and it’s been shrinking as those jobs go to China. Jobs are scarce, wealth practically nonexistent. How a place like this had ever sustained a country club was beyond me, and I told Pop so.

“You don’t get it,” Pop said. “When I grew up, there were lots of small businesses and small businessmen. That’s how you make money. You don’t get rich working for somebody else. Hell yes, there was plenty of money in Peru when I was a kid. There was a real middle class. But that’s all gone.”

He’s right. It is all gone. Peru has few, if any, small businesses left. It’s a strip of chains from one end of the rapidly-shrinking little town to the other. Blue’s Drugstore is now a CVS. First Farmers Bank and Trust is now a Bank of America. The town is a wasteland of corporate outlets staffed by part-time employees grateful for whatever crumbs they can get from their corporate overlords.

But this phenomenon isn’t limited to places like Peru. My St. Louis suburb is located right off Watson Road, a pretty busy street lined with businesses on both sides. After Pop and I spoke, I realized that St. Louis, like Peru, is losing small businesses left and right. Along Watson Road, it’s all Office Max, Office Depot, Home Depot, Kohls, McDonalds, KFC, Bank of America, and just about every other big chain you can imagine.

~          ~          ~

It’s rare that I would agree with Mitt Romney. On anything. But one line he spoke in one debate sort of resonated with me--that about starting your own business. “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,” he said, citing a friend of his who took out a $20,000 loan from his parents.

Borrow a little money, start a business. Have a good idea, believe in yourself enough to go for it, sell the idea to an interested investor, and make money with it. It’s not bad advice.

Or at least it wouldn’t have been forty years ago, when it was still possible to be an entrepreneur. Because about ten seconds after Mitt gave his fatuous advice, two reasons occurred to me as to its fatuity.

1)      Whose parents have $20k to stake them to a business? Not the vast majority of Americans who are barely getting by.

2)      The time to be an entrepreneur in America is pretty much over, thanks to Mitt Romney himself and people like him—the sons of bitches who leveraged other people’s money into buying businesses, stripping them of their assets, selling them off piece by piece, and firing the workforce. Ask the people who used to work for Ampad. Or Kaybee Toys. Or any of the other businesses—started by entrepreneurs—that Bain Capital took over in hostile takeovers and then dismembered.

As Mitt Romney knows full well, because he’s the miserable prick who did it, so fuck him and his fatuosity.

It may sound counterintuitive, but big business, which you’d think would be the successful end result of entrepreneurialism, kills it. In essence, big business—almost always with the collusion of your elected representatives, whom they’ve bought—gobbles up the little guys, underprices them, drives them into extinction, or forcibly takes them over. Mom-and-pops disappear under the big-box’s parking lot, and suddenly, where Cutler’s Hardware used to be, there’s a Lowe’s. Instead of Scholin Brothers, we get Office Max. Goodbye Cunetto’s House of Pasta, hello Olive Garden.

Not only do you not get rich working for the chains, you don’t even make enough to survive. The big-box stores keep their employees in a state of perpetual indentured servitude. Each Walmart, for example—the biggest, ugliest, and most evil of the bunch—according to a recent study, costs its community approximately $900,000 a year in public revenue, because they pay their workers so little that most of them are on food stamps or other forms of public assistance.

“Well, hell,” you can almost hear the conservatives saying, “let ‘em vote with their feet! If they don’t like it, let ‘em go get a job somewhere else!”

Except there isn’t anywhere else to go, because Walmart’s already driven its competitors out of business.

~          ~          ~

And as small businesses go, so goeth the Middle Class—the kind of people who could afford to belong to a country club in Peru, Indiana. It may not have been big or fancy. But at least there was one. Now there isn’t. Matter of fact, there’s not even a Walmart. They did a feasibility study, and concluded that there wasn’t enough money left in the town to justify building one there.

The demise of the American Middle Class terrifies me for a lot of reasons. One, I’m a member of it, and who wants to be on a sinking ship? But two, because a middle class is absolutely necessary for a stable civil society.

The Middle Class has certainly come in for its share of abuse. To refer to something as “bourgeois” is to relegate it to the realm of the chintzy. The realm of bad taste. Small-mindedness, pettiness, puritan attitudes. Webster’s defines it as “marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.”

The upper classes—the aristocrats—scorn the bourgeois for their parvenu tastes, their vulgarity, their gaudiness, their pathetic attempts to ape the manners and mores of the aristocracy, for the unforgivable sin of not having been born one of them. The lower classes despise them in equal measure. “Boozhie” has been a Black English insult for a long time now. Napoleon Bonaparte derided his enemy England as “a nation of shopkeepers”—a country of petty bourgeoisie, hardly worthy of notice.

Wonder if he ever thought about that in exile on St. Helena. Because the Nation of Shopkeepers, in the end, proved tougher than the nation of Bastille-burning peasants and ancient aristocrats.

You can mock them all you want, but there’s no getting around the fact that society, in order to be able to function as a society, needs the middle class. We need our doctors, our lawyers, our teachers, our dentists, and, perhaps most importantly, our small businesspeople, not only to provide us with the goods and services we need, but to employ us as well.

Russia is a terrific example of a country without a functioning middle class. For a number of historical reasons to complex to go into here, Russia, in the early part of the last millennium, divided itself essentially between the serfs—the peasants—and the aristocracy. Throughout most of the history of the institution, it was forbidden to educate serfs. Serfs were not allowed to have their own money, and serfs couldn’t leave their masters’ estates—they were born, lived, and died in the same place.

Which meant that a middle class, an entrepreneurial class—that class of people that understands money, how to get it, how it works, and how to use it to make more of it—never developed. Which meant, further, that the class which spawns the professionals that society needs to function never developed. Which meant, yet further, that Russia was, throughout most of its history, forced to rely upon non-Russians (Jews, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, Poles, etc.) or marginalized Russians (the Old Believers, who, because of their resistance to reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church, were cast out of mainstream Russian society) to perform the roles played by the middle class.

In essence, Russia outsourced its bourgeoisie, with predictable—and lousy—results.

The middle class does more than just provide society with the people it needs to get stuff done. It’s a moderating influence in society—it’s a buffer zone between the exploiters at the top and the exploited at the bottom. The middle class is, generally, the most highly educated of the social classes—the rich don’t need it and the poor don’t have access to it. It stabilizes society. The more people you have in the middle class, the fewer potential recruits you have for angry mobs of penniless proletariats.

Take the case of Germany. At one point, the German Principalities had a large and thriving middle class. But then came the Revolutions of 1848, the Uprising of the Bourgeoisie, which decided that, as the backbone of society, it deserved a little more say in running the affairs of the nation.

It had worked in England. The English Civil War has traditionally been cast as a religious conflict, one between the Anglican Cavaliers and the Puritan Calvinist Roundheads. But Michael Walzer’s “The Revolution of the Saints” recasts the conflict as one between the emerging bourgeoisie (largely Calvinist) and the traditional English aristocracy (almost exclusively Anglican). And the middle class, for the first time, got a stake in the running of society, which, predictably, calmed everyone down and gave England the stability, the industry, and the infrastructure it needed to become the world’s first superpower.

But it didn’t work in Central Europe. The Revolutions of 1848 were put down in pretty short order. And as a result, a gigantic chunk of the German middle class—its lawyers, journalists, professors, teachers, bankers, artisans, businesspeople, etc.—packed up and left Germany altogether. And they came to the United States.

There is an interesting school of thought that holds that Germany, once the pinnacle of European civilization, was able to slip so easily into the fanatically nationalistic militarism that led to Bismarck, the Kaiser, and, eventually, Hitler, because its middle class—that tolerant, synthesizing, moderating force within society—had come here.

The lesson is pretty clear: countries that never develop a middle class, or which dispose of them, come to bad ends. And America’s middle class is in bigger trouble than the African white rhino. It’s being strangled, bit by bit, by tax policies which favor the wealthy and ignore the poor, but which hit the middle class especially hard; by the migration of good-paying jobs overseas; and by an ever more powerful and predatory plutocracy of corporations that crushes small business, and with it, the potential of entrepreneurialism.

“It’s all over for the little guy,” laments Soprano Family soldier Pasquale Parisi in Season Six of the show. He’s leaving a Jamba Juice store, unable to shake it down for protection money as he used to do to its predecessor, a Mom-and-Pop poultry store forced to vacate the premises for this single store avatar of the soulless corporate giant behind it.

And he's right. It is over for the little guy. It’s done. There’s no more room left for the entrepreneurial spirit in America. And with that goes the middle class. And with that, I fear, so goes the America we grew up believing would last forever. We’re becoming a nation of wage-slaves and wage-slave masters—and no democracy can sustain itself like that. 

Oh, The Places He Took Us: Why I Love Dr. Seuss.

One bright and sunny winter’s day when I was a young and callow grad student studying Russian literature at the University in Pittsburgh and still believed I’d get a job one day, I ran into a Russian friend of mine taking a walk with his young daughter along Forbes Ave. I think she was four at the time. We stopped to chat, and I complimented Vadim on his daughter’s English (they’d only been in the States for a couple of months at that point).

“Well, there’s a problem,” Vadim said. “She’s in daycare right now, and she’s learning her English from Dr. Seuss.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

“Do you like snow?” the little sylph interrupted her daddy to ask.

“I do,” he answered.

“Well, here you go,” she said, smearing a fistful on his jacket.

“Do you want some in your face?” he asked, bending over and picking up a handful.

The little girl took a step back and howled, “I do not want it any place!”  

I think it took me the better part of 45 minutes to recover from the mixture of hilarity and awe this exchange occasioned.

One of my greatest heroes—shamefully unrepresented on the masthead above—is the immortal Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known, of course, as Dr. Seuss. I, like about a zillion other American kids, grew up on his books (and his TV specials, brilliantly given sound and motion by Chuck Jones, the genius animator behind Looney Tunes). But we did more than just read him. We traveled with him. Each Dr. Seuss book was a doorway into Seuss’s own world.  

Even though Seuss peppers his text with references to real places (one of his characters, clad in a slicker, runs off to Palm Springs to avoid the Midwinter Jicker) and some of his language and allusions are unmistakably mid-century American, I have this theory that Seuss’s books, with the exception of his first, “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street,” all take place in a different world: the world that young Marco, the narrator of “Mulberry Street,” imagined.

Seuss's world is one in which the bizarre is the norm and where the mundane would seem jarring and out of place. It's a strange, loopy, colorful, surreal place of physically-impossible architecture, nonexistent (yet perfectly logical) flora and fauna, and dazzling wordplay (much of it created with his own words) that seemed perfectly natural when I was a kid, and stuns me by its genius today as I read it to my own kids. Dr. Seuss had, arguably, the richest internal life of any of our American writers or artists, and his ability to make it accessible and comprehensible to generations of readers indicates a rare sort of genius.

Having opened that window in “Mulberry Street,” Seuss leaped through it and never looked back. And he took his readers with him.

The audacity of the man’s accomplishment is stunning. Lots of other storytellers have been content to mine the same mythological veins that have informed our storytelling for millennia—C.S. Lewis didn’t invent fauns, or lions, or the idea of traveling to other realities. Lewis Carroll didn’t make up playing cards or caterpillars. But Seuss made up his own mythology. Ex nihilo. Out of the whole cloth. And he isn't part of a tradition, either. There are no influences, no precursors, to Dr. Seuss, either to his style of drawing or his writing style in children's literature. His art resembles that of the first generation of comic strip creators--he's closer in tone to George Herriman of "Krazy Kat" or Elzie Segar of "Popeye" than he is to any other illustrators, and perhaps newspaper cartoons are where one should search for Seuss's roots--he was a cartoonist for Judge, Puck, and other humor publications before he went into advertising (his first career), and he once considered a regular strip called Hejji before giving up the idea.

He's also the first children's book writer for whom the illustrations are an essential--indeed, indispensable--part of the story. They aren't there merely to support the copy--they're a part of it. That seamless melding of words and pictures speaks more to comic strips than it does to traditional illustrated literature.

He is, sometimes, fatuously compared to Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but had neither of those gentlemen ever been born, there still would have been a Seuss. He didn't need them, and he isn't indebted to them. While Carroll and Lear were clever, no doubt, neither of them wrote, or could have written, what is in my humble opinion the most perfect poetic passage in the English language:

          I had terrible trouble in staying alive. 
         Then I saw an old pipe that said "Vent Number Five."
         I didn't have time to find out what that meant, 
         But the vent had a hole. 
        And the hole's where I went. 

*     *     *

He was clever enough to make his work educational (another towering accomplishment, to make a world of the sheerest, merriest whimsy educational. Had he been a chef, I have no doubt he would have somehow made Twinkies good for you). “Green Eggs and Ham”, which was written (on a hundred dollar bet) using only 50 words, got him into educational publishing. He pretty much started Beginner Books, an imprint of Random House, on his own. The fact that it was educational, and explicitly marketed as such, served as excellent camouflage. It obscured the deeply subversive nature of his work.

Subversive? Dr. Seuss? A kiddie books writer? You better believe it.

Geisel himself wasn’t exactly the kind of person that most American parents of the period—or now—would want teaching their kids. Politically, he was a flaming liberal, radical to the core. A dedicated anti-Fascist who drew reams of political cartoons for the wartime liberal magazine PM¸ he accused home-grown conservatives and isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and Gerald L.K. Smith of treason, lacerating them as viciously as he went after Tojo, Mussolini, and Hitler.

Later on, he lent the text of "Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Leave Now" to his friend Art Buchwald, who reproduced the entire book in his column, replacing "Marvin K. Mooney" with "Richard M. Nixon," after the Watergate break-in had made the headlines.

His politics came out explicitly in later books like The Sneetches, The Lorax, and The Butter Battle Book. They espouse dangerously anti-Establishment sentiments, and it was noticed. They were banned from any number of school libraries, which puts Seuss in good company. But by the time those books—about racial prejudice, corporate destruction of the environment, and the idiocy of the arms race—appeared, he was already too well-established, too beloved an American icon, to ignore or marginalize.

Personally, he was hardly an exemplar for the rosy-cheeked and well-scrubbed children of Middle America, either. He was a chainsmoker, consumed copious amounts of vodka, was gleefully profane, and, in one of the darker episodes of his life, an adulterer and wife-stealer (his first wife, Helen Palmer, committed suicide after finding out about his long-running affair with Audrey Stone Dimond, who became his second wife). In his early days as a young and successful Madison Avenue adman, he was a carouser, a practical joker, and more than a tad ribald, a quality demonstrated by the earliest poem of his which survives: 

           

            Mrs. Van Bleck

            Of the Newport Van Blecks

            Is so goddamn rich

            She has gold-plated sex.

            Whereas Miggles and Mitzi

            And Blitzie and Sue

            Have the commonplace kind

            And it just has to do.

Not someone who can be trusted to be a good influence on the kiddies. Matter of fact, I suspect he was at least partly responsible for the social unrest of the 60’s. 

Consider what children’s literature looked like before Seuss—Dick and Jane dutifully doing their homework, helping Mother set the table, going to church, putting their clothes away, learning to be good citizens. Dick assiduously studied his math and science so we could beat the Rooskies into space—Jane was in training to be a good little mommy just like her mommy. Children’s literature was “moralistic” in the worst possible way, the way George W. Bush, who is responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqis is considered “moral” for no better reason than because he didn’t screw around on Laura. Kids' books were insipid, dictatorial, and preached conformity. There was a norm, you better comply with it, and it was all for the good of God and country and good solid American values.

And then came the Cat in the Hat in 1957. Under the guise of “this is good for you because it’s teaching you to read with simple sight-words,” Seuss unleashed his own demons of whimsy and contempt for societal mores upon a whole generation of tender young American readers. The Cat, this capricious Spirit of Anarchy, with his disdain for property rights and good manners--his impossible three-looped bow tie is itself an affront to both sartorial conformity and physics--bursts into the children’s house while Mother is away, and proceeds to destroy it over the protests of the fish, who’s obviously a big fan of Dick and Jane--the Superego to the Cat's unbridled Id. 

The Cat turned children’s literature on its ear. Suddenly, instead of putting toys away and making beds, the protagonist is turning the entire house upside down, smashing this, juggling that, turning loose evil little equally-destructive minions, and throwing order, propriety, and social niceties out the window. Dick and Jane's center couldn't hold. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world.    

Sure, the Cat eventually puts everything back in order at the end. But the message is clear: do whatever you want as long as you can get away with it. And authority, in the form of that goddamned goody two-shoes fish, is there to be questioned, flouted, mocked, and stuffed in a box.

Dr. Seuss. He also liked bow ties. 

This was revolutionary. And by the time that generation of readers who’d grown up on Dr. Seuss hit college, they were deeply disenchanted with the status quo, and ascribed to a different, deeper morality than the "be a good citizen" variant practiced by Dick and Jane. It was a moral code according to which treating black people, or gay people, or women, as second class citizens, or bombing people in their own country, or raping the environment in the name of profit, is immoral. It was the the morality of Seuss's antifascist wartime cartoons, and that of  "The Sneetches," "The Lorax," and "The Butter Battle Book." It was a generation of young people who, perhaps unconsciously influenced by Seuss, rejected the reality imposed by their parents’ generation and instead created their own. 

And eventually, after some fits and starts and setbacks and Kent State, America began the process of becoming a much nicer and more civilized place.

I don’t think it’s too much to ascribe to Seuss the same kind of influence that Bob Dylan had. Seuss plowed the fields on which Dylan planted the seeds. I just don’t know if “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” would have taken root if the Cat hadn’t already tilled the soil.

*     *     *

Dr. Seuss is irreplaceable, and his work is irreplicable. There is no school of Seuss, no Seussian movement, no disciples, or at least none worthy of carrying his mantle. He's one of a kind. No other creator of children's literature even begins to come close to him. In the history of children's literature, Seuss stands alone. Much as I've been unable to identify any influences, I've been unable to identify any worthy successors.

After his death, his characters, images, and name were all licensed--criminally, in my view--by his second wife, Audrey Stone Dimond Geisel, of whom I am not a fan. The result has been ghastly. None of these posthumous properties--the books like “Cooking With the Cat” and “There’s No Place Like Space”, Seussical The Musical, Seuss Landing at the Universal Studios theme park, the Grinch and Cat movies with Jim Carrey and Mike Myers, or his website--has the ethos of the originals. They’re all pale and transparent imitations. They may look, fleetingly, Seussian—but they’re soulless, inauthentic, and more than mildly irritating to those of us who grew up on the real thing. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, “I can’t define Seussian, but I know it when I see it.” Those ain’t it.

These later Seussian properties are bowdlerized, whitewashed, made safe for society. The original sense of mischief, that gleefully subversive spirit, is gone. They lack danger and unpredictability. They’re tame, which is the antithesis of the Seussian spirit. Ted Geisel's world was scary. There are vugs lurking under the rug. There's a lunatic destroying the house. There are skritzes and skrinks and green-headed Quilligan quails lurking behind every rock, poozers snarling in Pompelmoose Pass, Grinches plotting in the mountains, and Once-lers cutting down all the Truffula trees and making the Bar-ba-loots sick.

Dr. Seuss, in a word, was dangerous, and the world he created was a dangerous world. But our world is dangerous, too. Every kid knows that. Danger is the flip side of wonder. And it’s that danger, that wildness, that unpredictability, that makes his world so much more real, authentic, and ultimately satisfying to us than the world of his predecessors, the creators of Dick and Jane, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Nurse Nancy, or any of his successors who've failed to live up to the standards he set. 

The Population Bomb Turned Out To Be a Dud

The state of the planet scares me. It really does. I don’t just believe in global climate change—I know it’s real, and my family is trying, in our own small way, to be more or less green and more environmentally responsible.

We recycle. We have a composter. It doesn’t really compost, but I’ll get around to figuring that out one of these times. We use those super-efficient halogen bulbs in all our lamps. We installed energy-saving windows on our house. My wife drives a Prius. I recently installed rainwater-catching barrels to my downspouts. We grow a ton of our own food and just got a couple of chickens for eggs.

But—and it may just be the contrarian in me—the one thing I absolutely refuse to get worked up over is overpopulation. I don’t think it’s a big deal.

People get angry if you say this out loud. Overpopulation is an absolutely sacred shibboleth of the environmental movement. I’ve had people look at me, dumbfounded, and say things along the lines of, “But you’re an intelligent human being! How in the world can you not be worried about overpopulation?” as if I’d said something really crazy, like I believe in the Immaculate Conception or creationism or supply-side economics.

But it’s true. I genuinely don’t believe population growth is a problem. And I have good reasons for doubting it.

The overpopulation scare isn’t a new one. Way back in the 18^th century, a particularly gloomy (even for a Calvinist) English pastor and amateur economist, Thomas Malthus, postulated that humanity was, very soon, going to reach the point beyond which it could feed itself, and his prediction was, admittedly, based on sound reasoning.  

Malthus pointed out that the human population increases geometrically. Two people can have ten kids. Each of those ten kids could, theoretically, have another ten kids, and so on and so on. Every generation, the population increased exponentially. Whereas, on the other hand, food production can only grow arithmetically. One acre of land can only yield 100 bushels of corn. If you want to grow more food, you need to cultivate another acre. As the human population increases, land cultivation may keep up for a while, but eventually, it’s going to catch up—and then we’ll all be screwed.

But Malthus turned out to be wrong. Almost embarrassingly so. He was wrong for two reasons: first, because he didn’t take into account human ingenuity, and our ability to improve crop yield. Through selective breeding for hardier plants that yield more produce, improved fertilization and irrigation, and other clever improvements we’ve made to the soil and to the plants that grow on it, we’ve also been able to increase our crop yield exponentially as well.

Malthus isn’t the only one to make this prediction. It was famously revisited in the 70’s by Paul Ehrlich in his extremely influential book The Population Bomb. And, like Malthus, many of Ehrlich’s predictions haven’t come true, either. But still, the spectre of overpopulation terrifies us. Ehrlich himself advocates zero-population growth, and people still take him seriously.

But I don’t.

No one is debating that the planet is seriously strained, that there are a lot of hungry people, and that we could be reaching unsustainable levels of consumption. But that’s the key concept right there: consumption. The problem isn’t too many people. The problem is the misallocation of resources.

My country is, without question, the worst offender. Americans aren’t humans, they’re locusts. We gobble up way more than our fair share of the world’s resources. We’re not the biggest per capita meat-eaters on the planet (that distinction, oddly enough, belongs to Luxembourg), but as a country, we do consume the most meat. And meat consumption is a disaster for the environment. It’s incredibly wasteful. It takes more than 2500 gallons of water to put a pound of meat on a cow, and the amount of land it takes to grow enough feed to put a pound of meat on an animal could feed 16 people for a year. The Amazon valley is being deforested largely for use as cattle ranches, all to feed the American appetite for meat.

Likewise with oil. The United States, with 4% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of all the oil produced worldwide. And fossil fuel consumption is, again, a disaster for the environment. And it’s like that for nearly every other commodity on the planet. Americans gobble up far more of their fair share and then they wonder where the planet's resources are going. 

There’s something deeply disturbing about this picture, and something almost racist about it. Essentially, when Americans rail about overpopulation, what they’re saying to the rest of the world is, “You need to quit producing people so that we can continue to consume way more than our fair share of the world’s resources.”

Resource allocation aside, the other reason I don’t lose too much sleep over overpopulation is historical demographics.

One of the things that concerned Malthus was that improvements in medical science were saving way too many lives. Far fewer children were dying in childbirth—far too many of them were living to adulthood. And it’s true, the European population did spike like crazy in the early 19^th century thanks to pretty basic advances in medicine. Like, you know, washing your hands.

But then something happened that Malthus didn’t foresee. The European population actually started going down, and has continued to do so. Most European countries are now not only at zero population growth, they’re at negative population growth, and the only ones that haven’t experienced negative population growth are those which have grown due to immigration.

What happened? Industrialization happened, that’s what happened. When people leave the farms and go to the city, their families shrink. You need lots of kids to work the family farm when you live in the country. You don’t when you live in a tenement apartment in the city. Matter of fact, all those mouths to feed become a liability, not an asset.

I can point to an example from my own family. My great-great grandparents had eleven children, all of whom lived to adulthood. Oscar, Wolf, Ida, Lena, George, Louis, Maude, Pearl, and who can remember all the rest of them. This was from about 1870 to 1890. Although they weren’t farmers, their livelihood was closely related to agriculture. They owned grocery stores, and I suppose they needed the extra help, much like farmers needed the extra help in the fields. But my great-grandmother, Pearl, only had two kids in her family. Her daughter, my grandmother, likewise had only two children. And so did my mother. And so do I. And my brother doesn’t have any children at all.

That’s a pretty precipitous drop over the course of three or four generations.

That pattern fits not only Europe and the United States, it fits the rest of the world as well. India and China, the two largest populations in the world, are rapidly industrializing. In fact, they’re doing so at a much more rapid rate than Europe and the States did. China’s got its own set of unique and self-inflicted problems. Thanks to its draconian one-family, one-child rule and the rather predictable resulting mass abortions of girls, China is facing a major demographic crisis in the next generation, so watch for their population to take a rather precipitous dip.

Malaysia, Indonesia, and other major population hot spots will also most likely level off and then decline as their populations move from rural, subsistence-farming model to the urban, industrial model as well.

Moreover, more and more girls worldwide are being educated. That’s a good thing, not only for the girls themselves and for the societies in which they live, but for humanity. There's a strong correlation between the number of educated girls and a drop in birthrates. And increasing numbers of educated girls worldwide is inevitable. For every young girl the Taliban shoots in the face for the unforgivable sin against Allah of wanting to be smarter, thirty or forty will take her place. And when they’re studying, and working, and taking their rightful place in the world, suddenly the prospect of having ten or more children is far less attractive.

Overpopulation, like so much else that we worry about, is an oversimplification of the problem. It’s another example of looking for a silver bullet to a complicated problem. Yes, there’s a shortage of resources in the world. But too many people isn’t the cause of it. And as long as we keep ignoring the underlying causes of the resource crisis, it won’t get any better. 

England Ascendant

About a year ago, I wrote a script for a graphic novel called “Doctor Falk,” which I’m trying to talk a pal of mine into drawing. It’s about a scientist of the supernatural who lives in London.

The story is loosely based on the life of a real person. There actually was a guy named Chaim Samuel Jacob Falk. He was born somewhere in Eastern Europe (opinions differ as to where), fled (for various supposed reasons) to London in the 18^th century, and set up shop as a magician, sorcerer, and wonder-worker—a “practical Kabbalist.” Sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s not. The fact that it isn’t is sort of the kernel of the story.

That’s where the resemblance between the real guy and the character I made up end. Beyond that, I’m proud to say I did absolutely no research whatsoever.

I let another friend of mine (I do have more than one) read it for his opinion. After he finished it, he looked at me and said, “Boy, you really have a thing for England, don’t you?”

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk with a proper Holmesian pipe. 

His reaction surprised me, because that genuinely wasn’t what was in my mind when I wrote it. Dr. Falk—the real Dr. Falk, and, by extension, my character—actually did flee his shadowy origins in Eastern Europe to live in London. Consciously, I didn’t think of England as anything more than a backdrop, a setting, the place where Falk does his weird stuff. So I re-read my own script (which I hate doing. Benjamin Disraeli once said he had a horror of reading his own books: “It is worse than masturbation”) in light of his comment. Turns out he was right. I do have a thing for England. It’s as obvious as the nose on my face.

Unwittingly, I’d peppered “Doctor Falk” with all kinds of quotes, allusions, references, and homages to England and the English imagination. Falk himself veers perilously close to being a pastiche of that most English of characters, Sherlock Holmes: the cold, tweedy, sexless, emotionally-deficient, quirky, yet heroically patriotic and morally upstanding wizard of Baker Street. The central conceit of my story—a brilliant eccentric living in the center of London whom desperate people consult for help—would not have been possible without having read Conan Doyle’s. Matter of fact, I actually ripped off a few lines verbatim from Holmes (“This looks like one of those tiresome social summonses that calls upon a man either to be bored or lie,” and “[I am going] To smoke. It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you will not disturb me until morning’) and stuck them in Falk’s mouth.

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk in his study, a
subterranean chamber underneath his shop.

And along the way, I shoehorned in bits and pieces from Shakespeare, Disraeli (like I did a few paragraphs above. Did you notice?), The Lion in Winter, Dickens, Smollett, Thackeray, Tintin (not technically English, actually—created by Herge, a Belgian, but lots of the stories take place in and around Tintin’s friend Captain Haddock’s country-home of Marlinspike Hall. Come on. Does it get any Englisher than that?) and Robert Louis Stevenson. Falk goes to Stonehenge, hobnobs with British aristocrats with names like Lord Aethelthwaite, the butchers of Hogbristle Square (okay, I made that place up, but it sounds an awful lot like the kind of place you’d find in England), and is finally rescued by the brave sailors of the Royal Navy.

Even more revealing is a squib of a paragraph I stuck in the creative brief, to give a bit of a visual guide to the artist:

The London where he lives is a gloomy, foggy, dark, Gothic place with tons of weird little details half-hidden in the fog and darkness. It’s exaggeratedly English, Dickensian—quirky and eccentric, full of grotesque people and stone buildings leaning over at crazy, dangerous angles; silhouettes of castles and cathedrals against the moon. Signs advertising the kinds of shops and places that people THINK might exist, but don’t really; streets with ridiculous Englishy-sounding names like Dunwhistle on Tyne, Old Baptist’ry, High Harlotry, Hogbristle Market, etc. A decent amount of ravens and the kinds of places where ravens might live.

In other words, England as imagined by someone who’s never actually been to England.

Essentially, this script that I wrote about a profoundly non-English guy—a (probably) Ukrainian Jew—is a paean to Great Britain. A tribute to England. Why I was so struck by this, I don’t know. It should have been obvious.

I once had a professor, Fred Stopsky, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, who said that the first time he went to England, it felt like home. It struck me, because here was a guy who had not a dash of England in his background. His family’s trajectory had been a straight shot from the shtetl to Brooklyn. And yet, England felt like home to him. And I remembered his remark as I reconsidered my funnybook script, because he’s right. Even if we’ve never been there, somehow, for most Americans, England is home.

I could pontificate on the power of a shared language (although the English might debate whether we actually share a language at all), on the cultural bonds between Brits and Americans, or on the idea that Great Britain and the United States constitute one great Anglo-American commonwealth, irrespective of different governments and the ocean and centuries that separate us, the central thesis of Kevin Phillips’ book The Cousins’ Wars. I could mention the interesting hypothesis that the American Civil War was merely the last battle of the English Civil War, that epic struggle between the industrious, middle-class Roundheads and the aristocratic Cavaliers.

But all that aside, there’s no denying how deeply and profoundly the English imagination has influenced, and continues to influence, the American one.

The typical bookish American child, as I was myself some millennia hence, spends very little time in mythical America and a hell of a lot of time in mythical England. Sure, we’ve got Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and cowboys and Indians—all red-blooded American kid stuff. But we spend far less time rafting down the Mississippi of legend than we do in the England of legend.

Instead, we travel with the Pevensie children through the wardrobe door to Narnia or join the Fellowship of the Ring in Middle-Earth which, while, admittedly, are non-existent countries, are still about as British as it gets. Or we travel with Alice down the rabbit hole or though the looking-glass. Or we picture ourselves standing on Platform 9 ¾ , donning black robes and attending Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, and Herbology with Harry, Hermoine, Ron, and Neville at Hogwarts, that perfectly idealized version of an English public schools. Or we check each candy bar we open for a golden ticket that’ll let us tour the Chocolate Factory with Charlie.

When we get a little older, we move up to Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe (whose characters we identify with as fellow-Brits marooned on distant islands, and, with them, we dream of returning to the Blessed Plot) and Sherlock Holmes and John Galsworthy. We wish there really was a Drones Club where we could hang out with Bertie Wooster and have Jeeves sort out the disasters of our own making and pick out our clothes for us. We wander the dusty, crumbling hallways of Gormenghast with Titus Groan. And we take Neil Gaiman’s hand, and let him guide us across the vistas of his imagination, a world that may initially appear as terrifyingly phantasmagoric as any we’ve ever seen, but which, at its foundation, remains as comfortingly and as unalterably English as Surrey.

The truly geeky among us graduate to Doctor Who—not even human, but nonetheless about as quirkily, and stereotypically, English as a guy from Gallifrey with two hearts can be, what with his long scarves, tweedy coats, bow ties, and cricket gear. Our sense of humor derives, almost in totality, from Monty Python, part of that great old British music-hall tradition. And we remain glued to our screens to see who dies next on Downton Abbey.

I suppose that’s why, when, as a high school graduation present, my grandmother (whose own family history mirrored that of Professor Stopsky) took me to England for a week, it hardly felt like I was in a foreign country at all. I felt as though I was coming home, back to the very place that had spawned the imaginary landscape in which I’d spent my childhood.

This is not to say that we love the place unreservedly. There’s a lot about English history and culture—and current policy—for progressives like myself to despise. We can detest what was done in the name of King and country during the colonial period. We can mock their outdated class system and deride them for being a bunch of effete crumpet-monkeys. We can blame them, with some justification, for how they handled their custodianship of Palestine, resulting in many of the headaches the Israelis and Palestinians now suffer. We can discern, in the New Atheists’ (like Dawkins and Hitchens) disdain for the religious tendencies of the less advanced peoples of the world, echoes of the same arrogance and certainty of British superiority of colonial times. And we can excoriate the cowardice and hypocrisy of Tony Blair and his servile second-fiddle role in Dubya’s sacred mission to stamp out terrorism in the wrong country. And those of us of Irish descent have a hell of a lot to hate the Brits for.

But regardless of the tragedies of national histories,  if you’re an American kid who likes to read, you simply won’t be able to escape become a citizen of the England of the imagination. Even if you’re from one of the countries and peoples who suffered under the colonial boot, eventually it’ll suck you in. Ask Salman Rushdie who, his Muslim Indian roots notwithstanding, is about as properly British as a guy can get, from his posh BBC accent to his penchant for two-tone Oxford shoes he mentioned in his memoir Joseph Anton—a strangely revealing choice of footwear, if one puts any stock into semiotics at all.   

As justified as our anti-England vitriol may be, we simply can’t help but be Anglophiles at our core. How can you hate, in any consistent and thoroughgoing fashion, the place that spawned you, that gave form and landscape to your imagination, that informed your sense of story, and peopled it with the best characters ever created?

Peter S. Beagle, in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring, wrote, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.” Maybe that’s England’s final triumph, its most fully-realized colonization. It may be a second-rate power in the temporal world, reminiscing about the day when Victoria Regis et Imperatrix ruled an empire on which the sun never set, but “Rule Britannia” never stopped playing in the empire of the imagination, and probably never will so long as the species survives.

Now you’ll pardon me as I reflect on this with a spot of tea.