Over on Slate, they’re serializing the new graphic novel about Ronald Reagan’s life. I don’t know whether or not the printed version is in color, but the online edition is black and white — which seems perfect, because the entire enterprise seems close to a whitewash. Not since George Washington and the cherry tree have we seen such hagiography in service to a dead president. Not only that, the caricatures are bad.

Want to judge for yourself? Click here.

For me the identify of the writer is perhaps the most distressing aspect of this. I expect to disagree with some people about Ronald Reagan and his legacy (which I sum up as turning a blind eye to AIDS, plunging us into debt, manipulating the (non)release of hostages to help secure his election, starting an illegal and undeclared war south of our border, dealing arms to Iran, and launching the government investigation into our bedrooms and bookshelves). But I didn’t expect it to be Andy Helfer. In the late 1980’s, Helfer was the writer of a relaunched comic about the Shadow that brilliantly brought an absurdist filter to the subject. From wikipedia:

In the late 1980s, another DC reincarnation was created by Howard Chaykin, Andy Helfer, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Kyle Baker, in a miniseries and sequel ongoing series. This version brought The Shadow to modern day New York. While initially successful, this version was not popular with “Shadow” traditionalists, because it depicted The Shadow using Uzi submachineguns and rocket launchers, as well as featuring a strong strain of black comedy throughout. It was canceled after an issue in which the Shadow’s head was transplanted onto a robot body.

While I have endlessly recycled thousands of comics over the years (thank you, eBay), I have held onto those. They are wonderful reading. Now it’ll be harder to enjoy them, knowing that 20 years later the writer is plumping for the guy who put all the mental patients out on the street while enriching his friends through an illegal war.

This video, courtesy Mad TV, has eerie ramifications for us all.

One great tonic for the fear-based culture is a strong daily dose of humor. One place I like to get that is from New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. Chast finds dementia in the daily outlandishness of human relations and household appliances.

Another humorist I enjoy is Steve Martin, he of the stand-up act, the arch fiction pieces, the witty plays, the banjo and balloons, and recently several unfortunate family comedies.

Here is a wonderful video I found online today in which Mr. Martin interviews Ms. Chast about her work. If you’ve had a bad day, well, ever — this is the cure. The entire interview is positively delightful, the cartoons are hilarious, and Martin and Chast, who clearly adore and admire each other, are having the time of their lives. I think Steve Martin deserves an interview show all his own, and I hope that some day we get it. If used properly, this video, which you really should watch, could bring more good to the world than anything currently transpiring in the highest echelons of power.

This was just sent to me, one day after Osama bin Laden rattled his beard at us again. Please note the response from my friend (the sender), and then mine.

To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;

Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 9:13 PM

Subject: Fw: NOT A JOKE

From [name removed by Lee to protect, well, foolishness]

—Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 4:24 PM

Subject: NOT A JOKE

Subject: Fw: Not a Joke!

>

>

>>> I did check this out @ snopes and it is factual.

>>>

>>> Re-Charging Cell Phones went to snopes.com to be sure it wasn’t an

>>> urban

>>> legend & it’s not.

>>> It is very true! And I do this all the time! Not anymore!!!!!!!!

>>> This seems important enough to forward to others. It’s wise to be safe

>>> and

>>> safe being wise.

>>> This was also on Pittsburgh ‘s WTAE channel 4 News.

>>>

>>> Never, ever answer a cell phone while it is being CHARGED !!

>>> A few days ago, a person was recharging his cell phone at home.

>>> Just at that time a call came and he answered it with the instrument

>>> still

>>> connected to the outlet. After a few seconds electricity flowed into the

>>> cell phone unrestrained and the young man was thrown to the ground with

>>> a

>>> heavy thud. His parents rushed to the room only to find him unconscious,

>>> with a weak heartbeat and burnt fingers. He was rushed to the nearby

>>> hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival. Cell phones are a very

>>> useful

>>> modern invention . Howev er, we must be aware that it can also be an

>>> instrument of death.

>>>

>>> Never use the cell phone while it is hooked to the electrical outlet!

>>>

>>> FORWARD THIS TO THE PEOPLE THAT MATTER IN YOUR LIFE, I JUST DID

>>>

>>>

>>>

>>>

>>

My friend’s forwarding note:

Here’s an interesting new trend. People still send these alarming e-mails, but they mention at the beginning that they checked it on snopes.com and it’s true. I checked this one on snopes and, while it’s true that there was one incident like the one described, they go on to point out that it’s the only one they found and doesn’t suggest any danger of it happening again. So, if you get a message that cites snopes, you might want to check that site yourself to find out what it really says.

With reference to the original email:

Oh, brother.

Yet another reminder that assuredly we live in the most fear-based society on the planet.

Ooh, the deadly cellphone is going to kill me.

If this were truly an epidemic, the lawsuits would have been filed long ago, it would have been major news, and cellphones would come wrapped in thick layers of non-conducting rubber.

Every time I come across some new major terribly deadly alert (like those killer bees! imminently arriving for 30 years now!) it makes me wonder about the people who profit from these nonsense distractions. After all, there are truly awful things happening right here in our own society — with our own government, and with uninsured people either suffering untreated or bankrupting hospitals, and with people who should be mental patients left to wander skid rows near you — but who can do anything about any of that, because we’ve got to fear the cellphones.

I pity the kids of the era of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and Boomerang and Fox. They’ve got too much choice. For them, every day is a smorgasbord of animated wonderfulness.

For those of us who came of age in the late 1960’s, network cartoons were reserved for Saturday morning, the rest of the day and week were strictly off-limits but for “The Flintstones,” and Sunday was a wasteland unless you settled for the claymation Lutheranism of “Davy and Goliath.” (As I did.)

However.

We did have local kids’ shows, which featured a host and whatever old cartoons he or she could lay hands on. My kids have no idea what a friend my Philadelphia-area generation had in people like Captain Noah, Sally Starr, Wee Willie Webber (that’s him above), Pixanne, and Gene London.

Captain Noah showed terrific cartoons like “Popeye” and sang his own theme song in a thick Philadelphia accent I associated even then with police chief (and then mayor) Frank Rizzo. Gene London drew beautiful sketches (something I envied). Wee Willie Webber showed “Spider-Man” (!). Sally Starr, now an octogenarian, is still doing a regular three-hour radio show from my old stomping area of Vineland, NJ.

This delightful site logs information about the great Philadelphia kids’ shows of the 1960s. An email exchange between friends just now got me thinking about those old TV shows, and led me here.

And now I’m off to the tech rehearsal for my play.

Evidently the backlash on the iPhone price drop was felt in Cupertino and beyond. Apple has announced a rebate for those early adopters.

Interesting that what sparked the outrage was, essentially, good news: the price drop. Clearly, it wasn’t good news to those who had paid full truck.

When I was a kid there was an assumption that all prices would always rise. This was the era of the Nixon/Ford/Carter economy, and the Arab oil embargo (which put my father out of business), so I understand the logic. But now we live in an era when many many prices fall — food prices (adjusted for inflation), gasoline prices the past month or two, and certainly, and ongoingly, technology prices. The laptop I’m writing this on — a MacBook pro — was state of the art in June of 2006 when  I bought it. It was $2500 and came with 512 mb of RAM, 80 gigs of storage capacity, and a 1.83 ghz processor. Now, just over one year later, a similar model would have four times as much RAM (2 mb), 50% more storage, and 20% more speed (2.2 ghz). And it would cost $500 less. The lesson is that you can’t chase technology (as Steve Jobs says, in the link above):  computing power will increase, and prices will decrease — as they have done consistently for 25 years.

So why are the early adopter iPhone buyers who are angry about this price drop so miffed?

Because it makes them look foolish. They bought early, and Apple discounted the price too quickly, so they were punished for buying early.

Early adopters want to look cool, not foolish. They want to feel ahead of the curve, not caught in the blowback of a tailspin.

An important lesson for Apple.

They just dropped the price by a third.

Had I bought one three months ago — as several of my friends and colleagues did — I would be pretty pissed right now.

With reference to this post:

This morning I received an email from some leadership institute. I chortled when I read this, which seems written with a current occupant of the White House in mind:

The Leadership Minefield!

As part of developing yourself as a leader, you want to explore some of the “land mines” that are hidden in the landscape of leadership. It is very useful for a leader to watch for what robs them of power. Understanding the dynamic of what NOT to do is just as critical as knowing what TO do.  I say it is more powerful to discover what something is Not than what it Is.

The point of this conversation is to introduce you to the some of the most critical and dangerous “mines” that lie ahead so that you will be able to navigate your way effectively. The hard knock (the reality) of leadership is that followers sometimes enjoy seeing a leader go down in flames.  It keeps them in their comfort zone, hiding as a spectators, watching – you.

What rob a leader of her/his power?

1. Being a legend in your own mind.  Ego, the mighty killer of effective leadership. Ego to leadership is like gas to a fire.  Remember – there is a distinct difference between arrogance and confidence!
2. Believing in your own assumptions.  The source of all screw ups. Maybe, just maybe, other people have different (and valid) interpretations.  Leadership lives in the community, out in the world, not in a vacuum.  If for some mysterious reason your assumptions are wrong, change your mind!
3. Driving an “Agenda”.  It is not about what you want; it is about what is needed. Your “plan”, as glorious it might seem to you at the time, may not always be the best one.  Leadership is designed to serve a purpose that is bigger than just you.  Do what is right, and not the right thing!
4. Being defensive and upset.  If you are on defense, who’s on offense?  Defense is the way to lose the battle.  It temporarily assigns the circumstances to be the guardians of your power.  So you are upset.  Who cares?  Compose yourself, the world is watching!
5. Lack of Integrity.  You do not do what you say, they do not do what they say, no one does what they say.  Integrity to leadership is like water to the fish.  Honoring your word is all that you’ve got.  You can’t hold anyone to their integrity if you do not hold to yours!
6. Putting trust first.  Putting too much emphasis on trust can get you in trouble. You want to consider that trust takes time to build, and you may not have it (time, that is). Focus on workability and integrity, not trust. Trust is overrated.  You can be effective without it
7. Speaking no possibility.  The people that “vote” for you want hope, or as I say, to be enrolled into that which is possible. They want you to tell them that everything will be all right, and if you lose sight of the future, what do you think happens to them?  People have their own doubts; they do not need yours!
8. Being serious and significant.  Leadership is serious business, but no one said that you have to be significant about it. We are living in a serious world.  It doesn’t mean that you need to be a comedian, but a bit of lightness never hurt anyone, and it can ease the pain!
9. Lack of communication.  In the absence of communication, people’s minds go places you do not want to know about. They need to know – otherwise they will make things up as they go.  It is much easier to face reality than to clean up the mess of the alternative!
10. Pushing too far.  You can push as far as the safety net will allow you to. Fear can be a great motivator, but it cuts both ways. You can get extraordinary results – or paralyze a nation. You need to provide a safe environment for people to take risks. They will do something because they can see it, not because you say so!
11. If you make mistakes as a leader (and trust me, you will), make sure you make “worthy” ones.  Do not sweat the small stuff.  It is a waste of a life. Make the kind of mistakes that will be impossible to hide or sweep under the rug.  That way, you will have to deal with what it takes to tackle it head on, publicly, taking the world on with no fear, as if your life is depending on it (because it really is).
12. Don’t commit “petty crimes”. If you are going to go down or be judged on your leadership sins, at least be judged for something worthy of your life, for what you stand for and are willing to die for, in glorious flames that will not be forgotten for generations to come!

Hm. Numbers 1 through 6 and 9 through 11 certainly seem immediately relevant.  Not number 12, though; none of these crimes has been petty.

In our graduate writing program at USC, one of the things taught is creative non-fiction. Every so often I’ll have to explain to a lay person what “creative non-fiction” is, because it sounds oxymoronic. In essence, it’s a novelistic approach to factual events. (For an example, read Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Or anything coming out of the White House.)

This morning’s newspapers had me thinking about creative non-fiction, or fictionalized reporting, or something akin, as I studied two rather different versions of the same story.

From today’s Los Angeles Daily News, I learned “Heat wave blamed in 12 deaths.” (That’s the headline.) That sounds pretty bad. Except the front of today’s LA Times reports, “Heat blamed in the deaths of at least 16.” So it’s either 12, or it’s at least 16. I don’t know which is true, and their mutual placement on my breakfast table casts doubt on both. It also leaves me wondering if there isn’t another verb except “blamed.” How about “Heat wave claims 16 lives”?

Reading further, I discover that “one of the deaths is a Pasadena woman in her 80s whose body was discovered in her apartment, where the temperature was 115 degrees.” (LA Times)

Except the Daily News reports “82-year-old Lugassi Max Menahem and his wife… were among a dozen residents believed to have died from the weeklong heat wave. … Their apartment window was open, letting the 110-degree air in, and their working air conditioner was turned off.”

I applaud the Daily News for the vivid irony in its reporting (a dead couple found lying beside a working air conditioner that would have saved them). I don’t find the dead spouse in Times. Even more troubling, the Daily News says it was 110, the LA Times says it was 115, and I suspect that both are reporting from an official report rather than stationing journalists outside with thermometers to personally check the temperature. If that’s so, why does the official quoted, or the official report quoted, disagree in these two stories?

Apply this sort of thinking toward the war in Iraq. Or any other news reporting. This is not an arena where one wants creative non-fiction.

Some years ago I wrote an absurdist play entitled “Uncle Hem” in which a family’s reality comes unglued because they can’t agree on basic facts, including what they read in the newspaper. The following exchange is based on coverage of the day, in which every major newspaper save one reported the dire consequences of a passenger jet. The sole holdout, the relentlessly positive USA Today, rejoiced in the miracle of  survivors. (By this logic, more than 220 million Americans have survived the war in Iraq.)

MUM
But is that yesterday’s paper? You’ve read everything in it?

DAD
I just finished the legals.

MUM
Then it’s at least yesterday’s. But you read one newspaper, it says
“Plane crash disaster: 39 killed!” You read the other, it says, “Plane
crash miracle: 61 survive!” That could be last weekend’s
newspaper, with the wrong date. Or we could have the wrong
weekend in mind for Uncle Hem’s visit. Or that could be last year’s
newspaper and you’re a very slow reader.

DAD
When the new one comes I’ll compare them. I’ll compare the dates.

MUM
Claude, I already compared two newspapers! Two liars! Don’t
trust either one of them!

DAD
I don’t know what to think.

MUM
Oh, you’re like a bit of fluff in a hurricane.

Just in case you were part of the 19% of the country who don’t think the quote unquote president is dangerously naive, read this brief excerpt from “Dead Certain,” the much-talked-about new biography of Bush. You’ll get a close look at his “leadership” style, as when he tries through the sheer power of his own personality to wish Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki into doing a better job. This is a style often associated with little girls and boys. In separate news coverage, Bush admits he “cries a lot.”

In this piece, Bush also says that if he decides that Maliki is “deceptive,” then we’ll change course, because deception is an unfit characteristic for leaders. (Clearly, Dick Cheney missed this lesson.) Deception, by the way, is the hallmark of leadership according to Sun Tzu and Macchiavelli. To Bush, who operates from the heart and can scry an opponent’s full character simply by looking in his eyes, a la Vladimir Putin, such things are demonic.

It’s distressing to be ruled by a naif, especially when he’s doing it so badly.