Today’s Globe and Mail contains a column I wrote trying to explain the popularity of Newt Gingrich among GOP voters. Despite its obvious newsworthiness, the column hasn’t been posted online. So I decided to offer a slightly expanded version of the article for Sans Everything readers:

Bewitched by the Eye of Newt by Jeet Heer

For Republican voters, presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is like an ex-spouse who provokes a complex mix of longing and remorse. Even after the bitterest divorce, people often hook up with their exes, in ill-advised attempts to relive fonder days.

For many Republicans, as his last-minute surge in South Carolina shows, Mr. Gingrich is an old flame who still has that bad-boy charm. Voters remember all his faults, with the intimate knowledge of a former lover, but he has a way of melting their hearts: No other candidate is so adept at caressing GOP hot spots, such as fears of Mitt Romney being a “Massachusetts moderate” or of Barack Obama’s “socialist-secular machine.”

All this explains why Mr. Gingrich’s campaign remains hot, despite his well-known liabilities. He is either leading or a hair’s breadth behind the establishment-supported Mr. Romney in polls for the primaries being held today in the Palmetto State. Mind you, Mr. Gingrich’s numbers have been a roller-coaster ride: He soared in the spring but quickly fell back to Earth after reports about his lavish personal spending, including an account at Tiffany’s. There was another spurt of popularity in Iowa in early December that was beaten back by a barrage of negative ads. South Carolina, then, represents primary voters’ third fling with Mr. Gingrich in this long campaign season.

And frankly it is hard not to want Mr. Gingrich to stay in the race, no matter how you feel about his politics. Compared to the staid centrists and uptight puritans around him, Mr. Gingrich at least has character and colour (generally beet-red from shouting). If the Republican primaries are like a reality show, can anyone deny that Mr. Gingrich is Kim Kardashian – hyperactive, morally dubious and with an inexplicable power to hold attention?

Barack Obama ran an emotionally charged race in 2008, but he’s governed as a pragmatic technocrat, more than living up to his nickname, “No Drama Obama.” Mr. Romney looks and acts like a father from a 1950s sit-com, with a personality as square as his chin and hair. By contrast, Mr. Gingrich is a prankster and trouble-maker, an irrepressible life-force.

In classic Freudian terms, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are self-controlled super-egos, Mr. Gingrich is pure id, a creature of appetite and unchecked anti-social impulses who accepts and even embraces the darker side of human life.

He first came to national prominence in 1994, leading Congressional Republicans to victory and making his mark with remarkably intemperate rhetoric. When a woman named Susan Smith killed her two sons in 1994, he quickly linked the crime to liberalism, saying there was “a direct nexus between the general acceptance of violence” and “the pattern that the counterculture and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society began in the late ’60s.” In a 1990 memo, he urged his fellow Republicans to link the Democratic Party to these words: betray, bizarre, decay, anti-flag, anti-family, pathetic, lie, cheat, radical, sick, traitors.

The outlandish language wasn’t incidental to Mr. Gingrich’s politics. He was the first Fox News Republican, less interested in policy and governance than in scoring points loudly on TV.

That was the honeymoon period, but Mr. Gingrich’s political career unravelled in the late 1990s, due to a Congressional corruption investigation and revelations about his baroque personal life: He divorced his first wife, Jackie, in 1980 while she was battling cancer and he was carrying on an affair with Marianne Ginther, whom he married the following year. In the 1990s, even as he inveighed against Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity, Mr. Gingrich carried on another affair, with Congressional staffer Callista Bisek; meanwhile, Marianne Gingrich was grappling with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

In an interview this week on ABC News, Marianne claimed that in the late 1990s her husband suggested that they have an “open marriage” in which she’d allow him to continue to enjoy the favours of his mistress. She refused, she says, and so Callista became the third Mrs. Gingrich in 2000. (Mr. Gingrich denies the story.)
Mr. Romney comes from a church founded by the notoriously many-wived Joseph Smith, but Mormons have long since adopted the monogamous norm and the former Massachusetts governor seems to have a blissful nuclear family. If there’s a polygamist in this race, given his serial overlapping relationships, it’s Mr. Gingrich.

You’d think this might be a problem for conservatives who preach family values, but apparently not: Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin encouraged South Carolina voters to give their support to Mr. Gingrich and said this week that he is “now going to soar even more” because he’s being targeted by the mainstream media. Right-wing radio stalwart Rush Limbaugh quipped, “Everybody’s had an angry ex-spouse.” (Mr. Limbaugh has been married four times.)

Mr. Obama admires the novels of Philip Roth, but it’s Mr. Gingrich who lives his life like a Roth novel, as given to free-floating rants and illicit sexuality as a full-grown, pastier Alexander Portnoy. Roth’s famous anti-hero had a special fondness for receiving fellationes, a practice that Mr. Gingrich also allegedly enjoys (in part because it allows the wily politician room to deny he was having sex).

Much of the appeal of Rothian mischief-makers  like Alexander Portnoy and Mickey Sabbath is that they act on impulses which are widely shared but commonly repressed. They say and do things that most of us are too polite and repressed to do. Mr. Gingrich is the Republican Portnoy, not just in his sexual extravagance but in his tirades and rants against Obama as a Kenyan socialist, the mainstream media as the enemy of conservatism, and African-Americans as a people who need to be lectured on the importance of hard work.

Will Mr. Gingrich make a Saturday-night conquest, and might voters regret it Sunday morning? Ultimately, with him and the GOP, it’s a love-hate affair. In 1995, David Frum described him as “a man of ideas and a subversively high level of culture”; last year, the former George Bush adviser offered a harsher view: Mr. Gingrich’s problem, he said, “is not the infidelity. It’s the arrogance, hypocrisy, and – most horrifying to women voters – the cruelty. Anyone can dump one sick wife. Gingrich dumped two.”

But that’s the thing about Newt: Whatever he is, he’s not just anybody.

Rick Santorum, via Gage Skidmore and Creative Commons.

Rick Santorum was riding high in Iowa earlier this month but his presidential campaign now seems to be faltering. I wrote about Santorum as a lightning rod in the cultural wars for the Globe and Mail in an article that can be read here. Below is a slightly amended and expanded version of the same piece:

Santorum’s Surge by Jeet Heer

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is nobody’s idea of a sexy politician. With his earnest theological lectures and propensity for grandpa-like sweater-vests that even Stephen Harper would find too dowdy, he’s the opposite of a Kennedy, a Trudeau, an Obama or a Palin.

“I may not be the guy that the girls are initially attracted to when they walk into the dance hall,” Mr. Santorum himself admits. “But ultimately, once you get to know all the folks, I’m the one you want to take home to Mom.”

Yet the truth is that, whether you’re with him or against him, Mr. Santorum’s candidacy is all about sex. From birth control to abortion to same-sex marriage, matters of the heart and loins are the main planks in his conservative-culture-warrior platform. And that seduced enough of the Republican base to have brought him within eight votes of victory in this week’s Iowa primary.

Where less-virile candidates rail against abortion, Mr. Santorum denounces even birth control. “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is, I think, the dangers of contraception in this country,” he told an interviewer last October. “Many of the Christian faith have said, ‘Well, that’s okay. Contraception is okay.’ It’s not okay. It’s a licence to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

He has also used remarkably pungent terms to attack same-sex marriage, comparing it in 2003 to “man-on-child” or “man-on-dog” sex. Those remarks earned the ire of gay-rights activists – including, with regrettable consequences for Mr. Santorum, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage.

To give the then-senator from Pennsylvania a lesson in the dangers of abusive language, the Seattle-based but nationally syndicated columnist asked his readers to come up with alternative, offensive meanings for “santorum.”  If you google Santorum, one of the top results will take you to the winning entry: “Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.”

The neologism quickly took off, becoming one of the most successful digital pranks of the decade, and raising this novel conundrum: Can a man become president if his last name is not safe for schoolchildren to Google? It’s been suggested that Mr. Santorum’s entire presidential campaign is motivated in part by a desire to wipe clean, as it were, Mr. Savage’s smear.  The hope is that  when Mr. Santorum is sworn in as commander-in-chief, the x-rated definition of Santorum will become less popular on google and be replaced by more wholesome websites.

Now, because of Mr. Savage, it is almost impossible to write about Mr. Santorum without double entendres, whether deliberate or accidental. On National Public Radio, a reporter referred to the “come-from-behind candidate” while the Christian Broadcasting Network proclaimed, “Santorum surging to the top.” Fox News made the unfortunate decision to use the colour brown to highlight areas in Iowa where Mr. Santorum was most successful.

Mr. Santorum repeatedly has complained about the savaging of his good name, arguing that it is an affront to civility. “There are foul people out there who do horrible things,” he told an interviewer in 2011. Weekly Standard writer John McCormack has complained that the Santorum prank is an affront to democratic civility. The obvious retort is that neither Santorum nor the Weekly Standard have a history of civility when dealing with gays.

A former altar boy, Mr. Santorum is often portrayed as an avatar of Catholic conservatism. Yet it’s only on “family values” issues that he follows Vatican dictates. As a foreign-policy hawk, an opponent of the welfare state, a believer in the death penalty, an adversary of immigrant rights, a foe of environmentalism and a climate-change denier, he is well outside the mainstream of Catholic social thought as articulated by both the Vatican and the American church.

Or to put it another way, cultural conservatives like Santorum have redefined and narrowed Catholic social thought so that only sexual issues are important. Religion, for Santorum, is only relevant when it deals with human genitals; in every other field of human interest, capitalism and nationalism are free to dominate.

In fact, his biggest fans are among evangelical Protestants, who made up the bulk of his Iowa supporters. In past decades, conservative Protestants were usually pro-contraception (and often anti-Catholic), even when they opposed abortion. This has been changing: Increasingly, evangelical Christians are starting to echo their Catholic brethren in arguing that birth control is the first step in the moral regression that leads to abortion.

One significant glue in this alliance is the “personhood” movement, supported by Catholics and Protestants alike, which seeks to bestow legal rights to fetuses, a move that would make illegal not just abortion but some forms of a birth control such as the intrauterine device.

Will the Santorum surge soon be, er, spreading across the United States? Even some conservatives are skeptical, believing that Mr. Santorum’s holy war against sexual freedom goes too far.

As David Frum dryly noted on Twitter, birth control is “pretty popular outside Iowa.” On the National Review website, Ramesh Ponnuru, himself a conservative Catholic, confessed that “there is no significant constituency in the GOP that wants a president to make the case against contraception.” Yet perhaps these pundits underestimate the appeal of Mr. Santorum’s brand of sexual politics.

With the lingering recession and the European Union teetering, the 2012 election was supposed to be all about the economy. Divisive social issues were to be put on the back burner. But Mr. Santorum has shown that even in hard times, it’s still easier to spark some voters’ imaginations by talking about bedroom controversies rather than boardroom ones.

Bruce Bawer in happier days.

I’ve been enjoyed Bruce Bawer’s essays on politics and culture for nearly 30 years, so I’ve been troubled over the last few weeks by the way his name has become entangled with that of the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.

Bawer has had a fascinating career: he’s a gay writer who made his name in some extremely homophobic magazines, an avowed Christian has sought to reconcile his sexuality with his faith, a literary essayist who is also a formidable political polemist, and an American expatriate who has become a central figure in Europe’s burgeoning anti-immigration movement.

I first came across Bawer’s byline in the very early days of  The New Criterion, circa 1983 or 1984. He was a fledgling book reviewer but wrote with great confidence about poets and novelists like Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bishop and John Hawkes. I was particularly impressed (in fact overjoyed) by the fact that he very convincingly analyzed a particularly thorny fiction collection by Guy Davenport, a great favorite of mine but also not a very easy writer to decipher.

I’m not alone in admiring Bawer as a literary critic. A friend of mine who is a superb poet still remembers with delight an essay Bawer wrote about Helen Vendler that appeared in the Hudson Review in 1989.

Later Bawer took up film reviewing for The American Spectator. His reviews were by far the best thing in that magazine, which is perhaps a slightly insulting way of putting it since much of that journal was given over to right-wing frat boy humor of the “Nuke the Whales” variety. In retrospect it is interesting that almost all the good prose in the American Spectator in the 1980s and early 1990s came from closeted (or semi-closeted) gay men. Aside from Bawer there was Thomas Mallon (who would make a distinguished name for himself as a novelist) and David Brock (whose journalistic exposes were obnoxious but at least written in readable prose, unlike much of the rest of the magazine which tended to feature pale pastiches of H.L. Mencken).

As can be guessed by Bawer’s affiliation with The New Criterion and The American Spectator, he was then a man of the right. But he never seemed comfortable in that role. One obvious reason for this discomfort was sexual politics. Bawer would start explicitly writing as a gay man in the 1990s and both The New Criterion and The American Spectator had their fair share of homophobic content.

One notably example is worth recalling: P.J. O’Rourke’s 1986 article “Manhattan Swish” from The American Spectator which contained such insights as this: “The rights of inverts are debatable. A school board may feel it has good reason to not want a lesbian girl’s gym teacher….Some people believe (and the first amendment allows them to do so) that homosexuality is a horrid transgression of God’s plan. Do these people have to live and work with a man whose activities they detest?….Their prejudice is, no doubt, as foolish as any other prejudice, but there is a difference. A black man is not free to be white, but a sodomist is free not to sodomize.” O’Rourke has a reputation in some circles of being a wit but again I don’t think Mencken’s ghost needs to tremble and quiver in the face of such competition. For a while, Bawer showed a surprising forbearance by being willing to share the pages of a magazine that printed rubbish like this but to his credit he became increasingly uncomfortable with the homophobia of his fellow conservatives.

But aside from the sexual politics, although not unconnected with it, was the simple fact that Bawer was much more cosmopolitan than his conservative peers. To be sure, he could often mouth mindless neo-con catchphrases. He was quick to condemn any artist that offered a satirical view of contemporary life as being “anti-American” or “anti-Western”.   But such lapses were offset by his evident learning and curiosity which took him far off the political reservation.

In the 1990s, as he came out of the closet as a writer and grappled with his Christianity, Bawer started writing with even greater confidence and verve. To be sure, he still remained far too conservative for my taste. I didn’t like his habit of snidely dismissing gay radicals, the peoples whose bravery going back several decades made it possible for Bawer to enjoy the sexual freedom of the contemporary era. This tendency to mock earlier writers like Allen Ginsberg seemed ungrateful and childish, like a trust-fund kid who mocks the hard work of his parents and grandparents.

Still, as an openly gay Christian conservative, Bawer was able to bring a message of tolerance to many readers that would otherwise be unreceptive. Along with Andrew Sullivan, Bawer has been crucial in spreading the message of gay rights to the American political conservative movement. Bawer’s 1993 book A Place at the Table remains a compelling argument for sexual freedom all the more compelling because it is grounded in essentially conservative arguments.

This strong conservative streak in Bawer’s thinking was part of his appeal to me. As a social democrat, I’m leery of only reading left-wing writers lest I fall into confirmation bias, so I’m always looking for intelligent conservatives who can challenge my pre-established ideas and force me to make better arguments. John Stuart Mill used to read the arch-reactionary Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the same reasons. Along with Andrew Coyne and David Frum, Bawer has long been my favorite right-wing foil.

Bawer’s political evolution took another turn after he moved to Europe in 1999 and after the events of 9/11. Suddenly, rather like Christopher Hitchens and Mark Steyn, Bawer became an instant expert on radical Islam, quick to issue warnings about how the Muslim hordes were destroying the West. I have to say, this particular development didn’t impress me at all. Unlike his writings on Christianity, Bawer was clearly out of his depths when writing on Islam and his work was marked by a nasty xenophobic tendency to lump all Muslims into one category and to deny any gradations to the Muslim experience. This stands in sharp contrast to Bawer’s writings on Christianity, where he often tries to distinguish between what he sees as the true loving heart of the faith (liberal Christianity) from various pharisaical pretenders.

On July 22 2011, as everyone knows, the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik went on a killing spree in Norway, targeting those associated with the Norwegian Labour Party, which he thought was destroying Norway by letting in Muslim immigrants. In his manifesto Breivik cited numerous sources for his thinking including Mark Steyn, Geert Wilders, Theodore Dalrymple, Robert Spencer and Bruce Bawer.

On finding himself on Breivik’s reading list, Bruce Bawer should have simply written a note saying, “I’m horrified that this evil man has linked himself to my work, but no author can be responsible for how his words are used. Mr. Breivik’s actions are his own.”

Instead Bawer has penned two very disturbing responses. On the website Pajamas Media he listed off the faults of Norwegian society. And then he wrote the article “Inside the Mind of the Oslo Murderer” which appeared on July 25th in the Wall Street Journal.

In this article Bawer writes that  Breivik is “highly intelligent and very well read in European history and the  history of modern ideas” and has “legitimate concerns with genuine problems” about the Islamification of Europe but of course Breivik’s methods are beyond  the pale. Breivik is guilty of offering an “unspeakably evil solution” to those “genuine problems”.

Having waded my way through Breivik’s turgid and verbose Manifesto, I’d dispute the idea that we are dealing with an intelligent man. It’s true that Breivik was a voracious reader of Anglo-American right-wing journalism and he could expertly regurgitate standard talking points about the evils Eurabia, feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. Repeating such tired political jargon hardly constitutes intelligence.   

A curious pride of authorship runs through the piece as Bawer notes, “Breivik quotes approvingly and at length from my work, mentioning my name 22 times.”
But Bawer’s main concern, which takes up the bulk of the column is that this massacre will discredit more reasonable Islamophobes like Bawer himself (who merely want to limit migration of certain religions and deport people, not commit mass murder).
In this article and elsewhere Bawer draws on his own years of living in Norway to criticize that society for being too open to undesirable immigrant groups. It is perhaps worth pointing out that people of non-European ancestry make up less than 7% of Norway’s population and Muslims make up less than 4% of Norway’s population. It is one of the whitest societies on the face of the earth but still too “multicultural” for the likes of Bawer and Breivik.
Worth recalling is the fact that Bawer’s Breivik article was written two days after a killing spree that among other things involved the use of explosive dum dum bullets against children so that their wounding and death would be especially excruciating.
What Bawer’s article reveals is that he’s so entirely consumed by his anti-Muslim obsession that he can’t process new information. Everything Bawer sees – even a news report of an anti-Muslim terrorist on a killing spree – serves simply serves as fodder for a pre-existing political agenda.
It is hard for me to reconcile the Bruce Bawer I remember – an elegant and humane essayist – with the Bruce Bawer who authored this Wall Street Journal column and is entirely concerned with protecting his intellectual assets than in bearing witness to those wounded and killed by a hate-filled terrorist.

Here is Bruce Bawer writing about the plight of being gay in a homophobic society: “Straight Americans need an education of the heart and soul. They must understand – to begin with – how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.”

This is a very different tenor from the Bawer who offers the following solution for Europe’s supposed Muslim problem: “European officials have a clear route out of this nightmare. They have armies. They have police. They have prisons. They’re in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday. They could start rescuing Europe tomorrow.”

 As a gay man Bawer quite rightly wants to be treated with dignity and respect but he refuses to extend this courtesy to European Muslims, preferring instead to write about them in the language of fear and incomprehension. As a member of dispised and often misunderstood minority, Bawer should have more empathy for the plight of Europe’s immigrants.

I’m wondering why I’ve been so saddened by Bawer’s churlish response to Breivik’s crimes. It has something to do with the way readers form relationships with writers. Having read Bawer for nearly three decades, I felt I knew something about the man. I had my share of disagreements with him, just as I do with many people I otherwise like, but I still found he had a voice that was worth a listen, a sensibility describing experiences that I needed to acknowledge. But now, post-Breivik, I feel that the readerly trust I had given Bawer was entirely misplaced, that he is much more of an ideologue than I had been willing to acknowledge, a writer mainly winning intellectual chess games in his own mind rather than paying attention to reality as it offers itself to us.         

Guy Davenport, 1964, as recorded by Jonathan Williams.

In his last letter to his sister Gloria Williamson, written shortly before he succumbed to cancer, Guy Davenport wrote, “”I hope you’re as happy as I am.”

In an essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins, Davenport quoted the poet’s last words: “I am so happy.” Another Davenport essay about Ludwig Wittgenstein gives the philosopher’s last words: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Elsewhere Davenport quoted the ancient Egyptian adage “A man’s paradise is his own good nature.”

It’s entirely characteristic of Guy Davenport that while composing what he knew might be his last letter to his sister he was making a complex allusion to some beloved writers.

To be sure, Davenport was very interested in last words, even if they were unedifying or bizarre. He also took note of Noah  webster’s last words: “The room is growing crepuscular.” Walt Whitman’s last word were “shift.” As Davenport explains it was a “request to be turned on his water bed.” This was noted by Whitman’s acolyte Horace Traubel, whose own last words, uttered exactly one hundred years after Whitman’s birth, was, “Walt says come on, come on.”

Davenport was also interested in funerals and wakes, and gave a wonderfully moving account of a memorial service for the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. It, like the best of Davenport’s essays, can be found in his book The Geography of the Imagination.

Literature has many uses, not least of which is teaching us how to die and how to remember the dead.

Jack Kirby's cover for Captain America #1

Over at the Globe and Mail last week I published an article about the evolution of Captain America. A few errors crept into the article, so I’ve tidied it up. The preferred version is below:

It was the punch that sold a million comics, the sock in the jaw that amazed newsstand readers in 1941 and still carries resonance to this day. Right on the cover of Captain America #1, the star-spangled superhero gives a knuckle-sandwich to none other than Adolf Hitler while a group of Nazi storm troopers stare on in amazement.

To understand why Captain America was an instant sensation when he was first created and remains enough of an iconic figure to headline a Hollywood summer blockbuster, it’s necessary to remember the historical circumstances that gave birth to him. Captain America was co-created by two young Jewish cartoonists, named Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg). As historian Gerard Jones argues in his 2004 book Men of Tomorrow, Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby were the children of immigrant Jews and both strongly identified with American nationalism.

“What Simon and Kirby together brought to the superhero was the passion of the immigrant, of the Jew,” Jones noted. “Captain America brought … metaphors of masking to a new poignancy. Steve Rogers shuffles into a secret lab scrawny and slump shouldered, then is given an injection of a super-solider serum and is transformed into an Adonis. … The underfed ghetto kid transformed into a roof-rattling power by seizing American opportunities, the weary old-country survivor reborn as the new fighting Jew through the crucible of American freedom and violence. And through that immigrant passion Simon and Kirby captured an entire national awakening: America the provincial stirring itself to become a world power.”

The cover of Captain America #1 made a spectacular impression because it came out in March of 1941, 10 months before America was attacked at Pearl Harbor and entered the war. At the time, much of the country was still isolationist and many in the media were afraid of featuring Nazis as explicit villains for fear of offending those who wanted America to stay out of the war. While there had been patriotic superheroes before Captain America, notably an also-ran called The Shield, no previous character was so forthrightly advocating that America become a global dynamo.

“It was a provocation for intervention as well as an anti-Nazi commentary,” notes Matthew J. Costello, a professor of political science at Saint Xavier University and author of the book Secret Identity Crisis, in an e-mail interview. Since his birth as a Nazi-fighter, Captain America has remained the most topical of superheroes, with adventures that have reflected the vicissitudes of American foreign policy from the early Cold War to Vietnam to the current war on terror. Yet despite the changing political tenor of the times, Captain America has persisted as a symbol of American exceptionalism, the belief in America’s invincibility, its inherent goodness and its world-historical destiny.

As American as . . .

There is a strong link between the genre of the superhero and the idea of America as a necessary superpower. Other countries have tried to create their own patriotic superheroes – a litany of also-rans that range from Captain Canuck to Britain’s Jack Staff to Italy’s Capitan Italia or Israel’s Shaloman. None of these characters have achieved the iconic resonance of Captain America.

Arguably, the most successful Canadian foray into the superhero genre has been the Marvel comics team Alpha Flight, created in 1979 by cartoonist John Byrne and the stars of a long lasting title. Amanda Murphy, a graduate student at Carleton University interested in Canadian nationalist superheroes, argues that it is significant that Canada’s most popular heroes work as a team.

The partial success of Alpha Flight raises the possibility of whether other patriotic superheroes could emerge during a period when the United States seems to be entering relative decline. When Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby created Captain America, the United States was about to enter its long reign as the most powerful nation on earth. But what happens when American power goes into the ditch?

Foreign policy analysts like Fareed Zakaria talk about a “post-American world.” Will such a world still need Captain America? And can other patriotic superheroes emerge from rising powers like Brazil, India and China? It is too early to tell, but one factor worth bearing in mind is that comic books are no longer the mass market powerhouse they were in the 1940s. If Captain Brazil or Captain China make a splash, it will be through video games and action-adventure movies.

The fog of war

While the war against Nazi Germany offered a measure of moral clarity, Captain America’s involvement in subsequent wars – Vietnam and Iraq – have been much more problematic.

In 1973, as the Vietnam war was winding down, the theologian Robert Jewett wrote a polemic against “the Captain America Syndrome,” the tendency to see the world in simplistic black-and-white terms, with the United States an embodiment of pure goodness and its enemies the incarnation of Satanic evil. While Jewett acknowledged that this worldview had roots in the Bible, he thought that the most prominent contemporary emblem of this type of thinking were heroes like Captain America.

As recent scholars have argued, Jewett was only partially right. Undeniably, the superhero has often been an avatar for an unthinking nationalism, particularly in 1950s stories featuring “Captain America, commie smasher.”

Yet many cartoonists have also used Captain America to offer a more nuanced view of national identity and the costs of war.

Jack Kirby and Joe Simon both fought in the Second World War. Mr. Kirby in particular saw intense fighting in the aftermath of the Normandy invasion. In the 1960s, Mr. Kirby would team up with writer Stan Lee to revive Captain America but this iteration of the character was marked by severe survivor’s guilt over the death of his sidekick Bucky. Given Kirby’s background, it is hard not to see an autobiographical element in the tales of Captain America as a superhero suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 1972, writer Steve Engelhart took over writing Captain America and used the comic to directly address the political turmoil of the time. “I was writing a man [Captain America] who believed in America’s highest ideals at a time when America’s President was a crook,” Mr. Engelhart has noted on his personal website. “I could not ignore that.”

Realizing that his faith in the American government was misplaced, Steve Rogers renounced his identity as Captain America  in 1974 and became “Nomad, the man without a country.” As Mr. Engelhart’s Captain America explains, “There was a time, yes, when the country faced a clear aggressor, and her people stood united against it! But now, nothing’s that simple. Americans have many goals – some of them quite contrary to others!”

High treason

As Prof. Costello notes, Mr. Engelhart’s storyline has inspired more recent writers, who have used Captain America to exlore the contemporary dilemmas of American power. Writers and artists like Mark Waid, John Cassaday and Ed Brubaker have all used Captain America to make allegorical statements about contemporary politics. “Waid reiterated the Engelhart vision by having Cap stripped of his citizenship for defying government policies in pursuit of justice,” Prof. Costello notes. “Cassaday’s storyline [created in conjunction with writer John Ney Rieber]  emphasizes the need to avoid racial stereotyping in the wake of 9/11, as the Captain protects Arab-Americans from attacks, but also pushes for a sophisticated understanding of the sources of terrorism and anti-American sentiment by suggesting that terrorists might have some actual grievances against the U.S.” Mr. Brubaker authored a controversial storyline in which Captain America seemed to express incredulity at the Tea Party movement.

Writing in the conservative journal National Review Online in 2003, movie critic Michael Medved referred to the contemporary Captain America as “a traitor” who “seems disillusioned, embittered, and surprisingly sympathetic to terrorists.” But in many ways, the use of the character to intervene in political debates is in keeping with the spirit of the earliest stories, which were very controversial in isolationist America. As Joe Simon recalled, “when the first issue came out we got a lot of … threatening letters and hate mail. Some people really opposed what Cap stood for.”

Murdoch: The Newspaper Baron Under Seige

The unfolding scandal over phone hacking, police corruption and political intimidation in Britain is filled with enough juicy details to fill a fat novel. But I thought it might be worthwhile to take a big picture view of the man at the heart of the scandal, Rupert Murdoch. My assessment of the man can be found here.

An excerpt:

Murdoch’s right-wing populism belongs to a long tradition of press barons who traded in yellow journalism while stirring up hatred against various minority groups. In their day, William Randolph Hearst (the mastermind of a vast newspaper chain) and Joseph Medill Patterson (founder of the New York Daily News) craftily combined sensationalistic reports of celebrities, sex and crimes with very conservative social messages and jingoistic nationalism.

Why has there been such a persistent affinity between right-wing populism and tabloid journalism? A simple economic explanation might suffice: To own a newspaper such as The News of the World, you have to be very rich. To make the paper a going concern, you have to appeal to a wide swathe of readers. Left-wing populism might gather a crowd, but it creates the danger that your own wealth might be expropriated if the message is too successful. So it is safer for a newspaper baron to put out a paper targeting minority groups rather than the rich. Right-wing populism is a way for plutocrats to wear the mask of plebian outrage, pretending to be the voice of the very people they are economically exploiting.

M. McLuhan

After listening to one of my recent radio appearances, the cartoonist Ben Towie generously tweeted, “Jeet Heer could talk about a ham sandwich for an hour and it’d be interesting.” I’m not sure that “Jeet Heer chats about sandwich meats” would make for a commercially successfully program or not. For those who want to listen to me discuss more substantial things might want to go to:

1. This hour long documentary about Marshall McLuhan which just aired on the ABC network in Australia. I’m one of several guests who discuss McLuhan’s Catholicism at some length. One mistake worth pointing out: I was wrongly identified by the show as an editor at The Walrus. This is a very substantial radio documentary and highly recommended if you have any interest in McLuhan at all.

2. On the Inkstuds program I and two other guests (the cartoonist Onsmith and the editor/curator Ryan Standfest) talk about the tradition of black humor (in both comics and culture at large) as well as the recent anthology Black Eye. You can listen to it here.

Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980

Over at the Walrus, I have an assessment of Marshall McLuhan at the 100 anniversary of his birth, with a focus on him as a Catholic intellectual. You can read the article here.

An excerpt:

Indeed, his faith made him a more ambitious and far-reaching thinker. Belonging to a Church that gloried in cathedrals and stained glass windows made him responsive to the visual environment, and liberated him from the textual prison inhabited by most intellectuals of his era. The global reach and ancient lineage of the Church encouraged him to frame his theories as broadly as possible, to encompass the whole of human history and the fate of the planet. The Church had suffered a grievous blow in the Gutenberg era, with the rise of printed Bibles leading to the Protestant Reformation. This perhaps explains McLuhan’s interest in technology as a shaper of history. More deeply, the security he felt in the promise of redemption allowed him to look unflinchingly at trends others were too timid to notice.

Bella Elinor Heer adopts a classic hand gesture.

Compare to this famous moment in the 1969 Olympics:

Two unfairly maligned professions: prostitutes and cartoonists

Chester Brown has an amazing new book out called Paying For It, a challenging sexual memoir about romantic love and prostitution. I’d strongly encourage everyone to read it.