Literate Perversions

Republicans and the New Newspeak

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Gore Vidal will be a great loss when he finally dies.  He's one of the old-style intellectuals; arrogant as hell maybe, but also insightful and brimming with a moral sense that seems almost quaint nowadays. I would cheerfully rip Dick Cheney's pacemaker right out of his chest if it meant that Vidal got to stay around for just one more day.  Actually, it would take significantly less than that to get me to tear Cheney's pacemaker out (like perhaps, a free month of Netflix), but rhetorically, it illustrates my point. James Wolcott, the Interweb's inside man on the intelligensia, got an advance copy of Vidal's latest memoir, and provides the following excerpt, which neatly summarizes not only the success of the Republicans at gaining Orwellian control over the language of modern politics, but why simple decency can be made to seem like such an 

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those 'liberals' who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.

And of course, there is the other side of the coin, the perverse dismissal of every good intention as "politically correct," which not only manages to portray humane gestures and ideas as authoritarian demands while also making every possible form of thuggishness and bigotry seem not only acceptable, but noble.  The Republicans have truly mastered the language of slavemasters.

Propaganda: “How to Spot a Jap”

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Milton Caniff’s infamously racist piece of wartime propaganda.

Just in case I haven’t made it clear, I love Ethan Persoff’s web page.  It’s one of the Internet’s best resources for finding strange bits of pop culture ephemera, especially comic books. The stuff he posts is like a secret history of comic books, and his most recent addition to the site is a great example.  In the 1940’s, cartoonist Milton Caniff, best known for manly militaristic strips like Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, did a propaganda piece for inclusion in a U.S. Army handbook called “How to Spot a Jap.”  It stars the characters  from Terry and is unabashed racism depicting the supposed differences between “the Japs and our Oriental allies.” For instance, “the Chinese strides…. the Jap shuffles.”  The strip is now infamous among comics historians and rarely seen, for obvious reasons.  It’s not actually that great a departure from Caniff’s ordinary stuff; after all, one of the most pervasive Asian stereotypes is named after one of his characters: the Dragon Lady.  But it’s not just a product of Caniff, but of official policy of the U.S. Army; the strip was probably of little practical use in helping U.S. soldiers distinguish between Chinese and Japanese, but it was probably more effective at helping them to see the enemy as cowardly and subhuman. It’s a remarkable piece of history.

Syphilis Propaganda

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Back before AIDS and HIV, before the invention of antibiotics, the Big Bad that haunted sexuality was syphilis. Untreated syphilis is a truly monstrous thing, that ultimately leads to madness, blindness, and extreme disfigurement. And like AIDS, because it was a sexually-transmitted disease, it took decades before it was treated with anything like compassion; puritans found it useful as a device to control the sexuality of the masses, and attempts to treat it were often opposed as promoting promiscuity (is any of this sounding vaguely  familiar?)

Ethan Persoff, whose web site has perhaps one of the best collections of graphic ephemera on the Internet, has twenty anti-syphilis health posters from the 1940’s.  In their approach, they range from fear-mongering misogyny to enlightened compassion, and are simultaneously products of their time and strangely modern. One of the most interesting to me is the green one below, with the caption “Stomp Out Syphilis!” Note that it lists several hospitals for treatment and testing, indicating which ones are “Colored Only” and which are “Whites Only.”