Support Your Local WEIRDO…!

Hola, Bloggers.  So every once in a while I receive a complimentary invitation to some incredible FREAK’s idea of a webcomic. And you might ask yourself: “why does he put up with it?”

He puts up with it because of crazy-ass anarchic shit like the stuff delivered by my friend here.

I mean I almost feel quite stupid saying this, but…?

Just read the first thirty-five, and you’ll be hooked.

I mean whaddaya want, it’s funny.

I mean honestly what am I supposed to tell you about it.

Just take a look for yourself.

…

(don’t tell anyone, but I kind of think it’s really good)

Midnight In The Garden Of The Antiquities Wing

Or:  “Recalled To Life:  The Long Weird History Of A Cover Illustration”

Hey…

How about a magic trick?

This one’s called “Pop Art Comics”. Notice that at no point do my fingers ever leave my hands…

Enquiry Concerning Superhuman Understanding

Hello there, Bloggers!  I think we must just take a short break from this whole “bunch of stuff I should be writing that hopefully hangs together half-decently except when I’m driven to just totally interrupt it” stuff, because today (as I’d nearly forgotten) is of course the very most perfect day for talking about the problem with Daredevil.

What?

Well, didn’t you know that there was a problem with Daredevil?

Let me just say it up front, that I was an avid reader of Miller’s DD, but after his tenure ol’ Horn-Head became a lot less interesting to me.  I won’t blame Ann Nocenti for it — that’d be as silly as me blaming Mary Jo Duffy for me being less interested in PM/IF than I thought I was going to be — and I won’t say that I wasn’t interested in the Bendis/Maleev or Brubaker/Lark DD either, although after a while I confess it did all start to pale, a bit.  But I think I can blame Miller and his collaborators themselves, for it!  Because their performances were so indelible, and so amazingly reconstructive — after they left, it was still “their” Daredevil everyone had to work with.  And it still is.  And, rightly so.

But, I miss my Daredevil.  Daredevil the Rationalist…not Daredevil the Religionist.  That first guy really appealed to me, you see.  “When young David Hume was struck by radioactive chemicals, he lost his sight, but his other senses became SHARPER…!“  Yes, of course:  but what a recipe for disorientation, when the senses are precisely what we can’t trust, eh?  We’re all blind, in that sense:  lost in the synaptic gulf between world and self, perception and action, existence and non-existence…

“…They became sharper, but still it DIDN’T HELP…!”

And so the problem with Daredevil is that this May 7th of 2011 is David Hume’s tercentenary, and yet the writers of superhero comics — of all people! — seem to have forgotten all about him.  SHOCKER! I know;  and yet what other conclusion can we draw, but that they’ve forgotten about him?  God help me, I almost feel like I need to put in a link, here…to the historical philosopher I probably most resemble…

…So that we may revisit once again the marvellous world of superhero pedagogy.

Daredevil is a funny old bird;  as I’ve mentioned before, somewhere around here, he has the most cleverly-vexed secret identity problem of any superhero:  when he’s being DD, he’s in deadly danger of revealing the secret fact that he’s actually just a blind man in a fancy suit, and when he’s Matt Murdock he’s in deadly danger of revealing the secret fact that he’s not just a blind man in a fancy suit.  And yet in both cases he is, in fact, a blind man…and as a result of this, as a result of his superpower lying in his disability, his world is under constant, fantastic, paranoiac tension.  This isn’t like Superman having to pretend to be a coward.  This is somebody who has to remember to keep bumping into things.  And once the suit goes on he also has to remember to make everything he’s really doing look like something else.  So in a manner of speaking he’s like Clark Kent both ways — he’s Clark when he puts the glasses on, and when he takes them off he’s Clark once more.  In place of the amazing world of Krypton and a rocket ship he’s got a boxer Dad with a cauliflower ear who can’t make the hydro payments, and a promise to study hard and do well in school…in place of Perry White and Lois Lane he’s got Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, and so why go on with the comparisons then?  What’s the point?  If inside most superheroes is a chewy centre of freedom, wish-fulfillment, the pretense of magically-easeful adulthood that is childhood’s greatest privilege, inside Daredevil is the sheer difficulty of negotiating with the adult world that children above all are most familiar with…and also, shadowing it, the difficulty of negotiating with the adult world that adults are most familiar with.  Both ways, see?  Daredevil’s always getting it both ways.  Matt Murdock’s that terrific rarity in superhero comics, the genuine grown-up in his civilian identity who is returned to childhood when he puts on his suit…but the child’s world is hard to navigate too, when one is just pretending.  And hardest of all is the way the link between those two states makes it clear — after a while — that it is all just pretending:  Matt Murdock dominates his world so completely that he actually holds it up, maintains it, and without him it would just collapse into pieces.  He is the spine of the thing, and everything in it refers back to him;  he doesn’t fit into a larger society and he doesn’t have people like pillars holding the house of his life up for him, the exterior existence of things doesn’t reflect back on him to make his contexts cheerfully solid, and the things that determine him do not lie outside him, but he himself is the determiner of things.  And all this puts a rather edifying strain on the character of Daredevil, that would remain subliminal until Miller et. al. chose to finally have him snap…and when religion entered the picture all was made straight and clear, the uncomfortable dualism given a familiar shape and name:  concentrations that were reliable in part because they were stereotypical.  Solid, of course.  That DD lives a lie instead of merely having a secret is something we always sort of knew anyway:  after Miller, the lie has walls and a ceiling, and most importantly a floor.  You can see how Matt Murdock moves around in it, counting steps:  his most intimately familiar ground, his ultimate fortress of solitude.

But once — let me tell you — it was all another way.

If you don’t know David Hume, I’m not going to hold it against you.  There’s so much of him to know, after all, and I’ve forgotten most of what I knew about him anyway, so I couldn’t help you out too much even if you wanted me to, which you probably don’t.  And you’re probably right not to want that.  But the quick rundown’s easy enough:  what we think of as certainties are ususally just pretty flimsy probabilities;  and what we think of as “probable” is more usually unprovable by the means we employ to assess it.  We can have knowledge and we can be empirical, but in this as so much else, man is the measure:  knowledge of the world and knowledge of the nature of man is the same knowledge.  The world is more shadowy than we think it, causes are doubtful ghosts, reason stems from different sources than we think it does, and the continuity of our world and of ourselves alike is only an assumption we make.

But…where does the assumption come from, then?

That’s a darn good question, so it deserves a darn good answer, but the answer we’re going to use is a bit rougher and readier than that:  the assumption comes built-in to us.  Why do we assume that the world keeps its shape when we’re not looking at it?  Why do we perceive in ourselves a continuity of person?  Why on earth do we trust our senses, and why would we ever exalt our powers of reason above them?  Hey, I’m not even going to get into the way the Romans managed their inheritance laws!  But we could learn a lot from the Romans, actually:  they had gods for everything, only because they took nothing for granted.  Everything around them was imbued with a character, and every social relationship implied a mathematics;  causes and effects were descended from divinity just as people were.  Oh, the crazy Romans:  they didn’t have gods of numinous qualities, they had gods with jobs.  Gods for washing the windows and gods for mowing the lawn, gods to get hungry and gods to get thirsty, gods to go to sleep at night!  Gods of keeping yourself neat and tidy so you don’t embarrass your mother when you go outside!  And if they’re not boring enough for you, how about the Greeks?  Who above the gods set the facts, and went so far as to have causes cause themselves by partaking of causality.  Dostoyevsky gets to this later on in The Brothers Karamazov:  “and God said let there be light, and there was light.”

“But where did the light come from?”

SMACK TO THE HEAD!  “That’s where the light came from, all right?  Bit clearer on it now, or do you need a bit more of this theology I’ve got for you right here?”

As far as Hume’s concerned, there’s a lot there to reckon with, if we can just figure out how to reckon with it.  But to do that, we have to know what kind of a measure man really is.  What kind of registration can we achieve with this instrument, what is it made for?  But, you know…all that, you can get anywhere, and for Hume’s 300th birthday I really ought to try doing something a little bit different from the stuff you can get anywhere…not to mention the stuff that almost anyone will be able to do better than me.  A more personal note will make me look less like a putz, maybe…and maybe it’ll even not be bad, for a minute or two.

So, you wonder if there really is a link between David Hume, and Matthew Murdock?

I wouldn’t bet against the reading habits of comic-book creators, if I were you.  Look, here is a big problem of Hume’s day, and a problem of our own, that I don’t actually hear people talking about very much, which is:  once you embark on a Cartesian project of skepticism, where the hell do you go next, and how the hell are you supposed to know where to stop?  Doubt can’t swallow the cogito, but that ultimate reduction is what it is precisely because doubt can swallow everything outside it!  Inside the chocolatey coating of the superhero is the chewy centre of pretense, but inside the sweet fruit of ontology is a stone, and whether you pick it out or eat around it it’s still a stone.  Fine for regular living?  Fine for regular living, but if one wants to do some useful philosophizing the problem of knowledge is always there, for Plato as for Descartes as for you.  So in Hume’s time there was something like (let’s call it) a Roman-style longing for practicality that was making itself felt, in Scotland particularly:  moderation, compromise, balance, the limits of the problem of limits.  How does one go about looking for them?  Can the search be justified by anything less than a discovery?  Because a mere solution just won’t do, if you see what I mean:  this thing everyone wants, it’s too tempting to just say “oh, here it is, why it was here the whole time, okay that’s lunch everybody…!”  When people deceive themselves all the time, you know, you’ve got to admit the possibility they might be doing because they like it.  So what you have to find is some sort of principle that frees you from like-based conclusions.  But maybe that’s okay, eh?  I mean, maybe this is how the whole problem of the limits of knowledge came about anyway, by not realizing it’s getting too big for its britches!  Go back to Descartes:  existence exists, anyway.  We know that much.

But if it exists…then it must also be something, mustn’t it?

So if figuring out what that is can be a task, then it can also be a positive task.  Skeptical empiricism need not be entirely concerned with finding ultimate reductions of pure logic and reason like the cogito;  the mind is not all that there is, nor even all there is to find stuff out with.  A big task?  It’s a big task, indeed, and it all but makes the entire Scottish Enlightenment come into being.  What did Voltaire and Mandeville alike miss?  Hume is interested in the question, and will not have anyone tell him it is not a question.  It costs him his job, his girl, and his home, but his question remains, and even succeeds.  Three hundred years after his birth (um…give or take an hour or two, sorry Our Dave) we can only stop and stare at the vision of a non-Humean world zooming by us to the vanishing point, philosophy grown too compactly crystalline to allow anything but a conclusion.  I am not saying the Scottish Enlightenment had no radicals in it;  indeed Hume was its chief radical!  But he was a more sober one than Voltaire, a more sober one than Hobbes too…like Rousseau (uh, in my opinion I guess), he saw that even limits must have limits.  We can talk all we want about divinity, we can be fer it or agin’ it…but it doesn’t really matter either way, because God is not really the issue at hand.  And Hume proved that, you know.

Everybody else thought about it, but he actually went and did it!

At least, according to me he did.  But then you can’t necessarily go by me, because I am also saying that Daredevil did it.  There’s a thing we don’t see too much anymore in DD comics, partly because of the abandonment of thought-balloons (so necessary for this superhero, of all superheroes!  Yea, even unto Spider-Man!) but also partly because of Matt Murdock’s post-Millerian religious background.  I mean, yes DD was getting a little pointless before Frank injected that stuff, but in typical Frank style reinvigoration for the Batman of Hell’s Kitchen came at the cost of the existing mythological programme’s subtleties.  When Matt Murdock was Daredevil, he used to be the closest thing to a “happy-go-lucky” hero Marvel ever had:  the schismatic nature of his identity was (paradoxically?) intact, and the nightly escape into renascence worked…at any rate, far better than it ever had for Peter Parker.  But since Miller everything about the character is unified in a way it wasn’t before.  Look at that movie they made of it, Ben Affleck crunching handfuls of painkillers each evening.  Hey, I do understand it — hey, I do!  Remember, I liked it!  But maybe if you’ll remember that you’ll also remember my main artistic complaint about the DD movie:  that Matt never smiles when he’s under the hood.  And he should smile.  Heck, he should grind down those Tylenols while grinning.  Because it’s the only way to recall, even (though I prefer it as an irruption of unexpectedness into character) to recontextualize, that old happy-go-lucky stuff that used to be such part-and-parcel with Daredevil’s underlying grimness and seriousness in the pre-Miller days.  Hmm, and I guess I should also make a note to myself here, to remember to hunt up the relevant links:  Zom’s wonderful Miller/Mazzuchelli posts, my own revisitations of the Affleck movie, wherever the heck David Brothers hid that first “Ann Nocenti’s DD is all about how violence is stupid” thing…

…But it’s getting pretty late now for a David Hume tercentenary commemoration, and I’m getting goddamn sleepy, so I guess I’ll just have to do all that tomorrow.  And use this time instead, to return once more to the thing we never see in DD stories too much anymore:  Matt’s own point of view.  Remember that?  The silhouetted horns, the radar-circles, and the shadows they show up to his perception…my God what fantastic use was once made of such devices!  Dude cannot see.  What we would see, what in fact we do see there on the printed page, with all the contextualizing assumptions trailing in that sight’s wake, Matt doesn’t even know is there.  So he can’t put it all together as we do:  immediately, easily, soothingly.  He has to fight his way through Humean “connexion” even to get to the point of recognizing other superheroes who’ve got their own books, and even when he does get there, there is still…strangeness.  Look away from the world and then look back, are you really that sure it will be the same?  Are you really that sure all the logical consistency will hold?  Daredevil may see in every direction all at once (well he does, you know), but he is always surprised by the world and what’s in it.  The other Marvel characters are even weirder to him, then they are to us!  Because we are closer to their contextualized reality than he is.  All the other characters can see what we see, see as we see, even if it’s only us that know we’re holding a comic book in our hands.  But Daredevil reminds us that assumptions, even the assumptions that make up “suspension of disbelief”, are reasonably hard work.  And hey, I know it verges on the dumb to go that metatextual with it all, I really do:  Daredevil represents a different reading that lies under the text, which is a basic perplexity that we as readers share with him even if we can delight in the play of its contradictions and he can’t, yes yes, I know that’s all very airy-fairy and very far-off from the point — indeed the act — of reading these things in the first place…I mean what am I really saying there, that can’t be said more elegantly and more truthfully by simply noting that Daredevil is a superhero with a disability that occurs in the real world?  Not gamma-poisoning, not supercharged spider-bites, not mutations that make you look and function like a neat-o Jack Kirby drawing meant to tell a story but blindness or something.  But is even that phrasing entirely honest?  Is Matt Murdock really a representative of diversity in superhero comics, automatically because somewhere between Stan Lee and Bill Everett there grew an “oh wow cool” moment made up of the words “what if he were blind?“  No one credits Iron Man with opening peoples’ eyes to the reality of heart-disease sufferers, so why should Daredevil receive any similar credit?  After all — and you knew I was going to say this, of course — if you actually are blind like Matt Murdock is, you can’t feel he is speaking there on your behalf, as your lawyer if you’ll allow me that, if you can’t actually read the comic.  Can you?

No, of course you can’t.  Even his problems with not being able to piece together a rationale for the presence of other superheroes in his world (I mean superheroes, who believes in those, they don’t make any sen…oops here is one!) are only educational in the sense that they put before sighted kids some narrative uses of blindness…maybe a bold thing for superheroes at the time, to use Matt’s blindness as a psychodramatic inflection of superhero action, but then again the superheroey-ness of it all makes him kind of not really blind, too…so…

Where’s the real diversity, here?

It actually could be in Hume.  Because Daredevil’s blindness gives him a recurring problem to deal with, but it probably would be a stretch to say that the problem is only logistical, or that it only refers to the Superman-style secret identity business, when beyond doubt there is an existential problem here as well.  It isn’t that super-hearing is just another modality for story explication.  Until Steve Gerber comes along DD’s non-sighted-ness won’t be made explicitly Phildickian, but then again up until Gerber there is still the paranoia this particular secret identity engenders, and even Gerber’s capacious bookshelf can’t find any improvement on the absence of God that permeates a world where Matt Murdock is the defining character, the orienting character, the one-and-only pole of his own milieu’s tent, that holds it up…and yet is still a work of many hands, necessarily schizoid, changeable, I mean who is Matt Murdock, really?  Until Frank Miller and his local geniuses come along, the question will go forever unanswered…after they come along, it will go forever darn well answered.  But our old friend (I hope by now you will consider him a friend) David Hume would say, much as Marvin Minsky or the Buddha, that there is no self, that the self’s solidity undergoes transpiration as soon as it is looked at carefully, rises slowly up from the lotus pond into the golden cloud of the atmosphere, and then is seen no more.  In other words:  the mirror turns into mist, and diffuses away.  Of course all the Enlightenment thinkers, Hume not least, would probably remind us that Newton already showed each tiny water-droplet to be a prism in its own right (hey, maybe Morrison should write DD?) (that’d be cool!), but that doesn’t exactly do much more to tether “selfhood” to earth, does it?  But rather makes it a thing essentially dispersible anyway.  Naturally if God is in the picture all the water-droplets turn to iron and fall right to the solid ground, even find a magnet to cluster around:  and we call that “character” today, that sort of clustering…

But once — let me tell you! — it was all another way.

A way in which neither the senses nor the reason could be fully trusted, and yet we were still not ever relieved of the burden of having to try to understand.  So…yeah:  I guess it isn’t that Daredevil has a problem I wish could be solved, it’s that the problem of Daredevil is what I miss about Daredevil.  Hey, so:  Romans, I come not to bury Daredevil but to praise him…!

And maybe that seems like a bit of a weak ending, here?  After all it is easy for me to plug in all this stuff after the fact, and make a pattern of comprehension where maybe none ever really existed.  But that pattern made a big difference to me as a young comic-book reader, and so I’m not willing to say it never really existed at all…

Only to say, perhaps, that if I have seemed to see further in this case than can be seen, it’s only because I have swung across the rooftops of giants…!

And so further, deponent saith not.

And anyway it’s time for bed.

Happy Birthday to David Hume, and to all the ships at sea!  There was a three-hour delay on this one, but then they do say no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

“If This Be Email”…!

I have a lot to say about this…and maybe I’ve said a lot about it before…but I’ve always found the construction “e-mail” intolerably complicated.  It is not so much the act of making the hyphen go in there, but the whole way of thinking that insists on the hyphen.  I mean, how come this hyphen?  Just to be all “e”?  I dunno, something about it offends me, there is something about it like genuflection.  I can’t stand it, and I won’t.

So, for the last few years, I haven’t:  I’ve said “email” instead.  But this is really no better, because it makes me feel loike I’m stupidly misspelling the name “Emile”.

And so here it is:  do it our way, or do it some other way that is just as annoying.  This is how engineers design.  I do not mean to harp to much on the foibles of engineers, mind you — I have nothing at all against engineers, if the truth be told, except that they only ever offer me a wrong way, and demand that I get used to it or endure a worse way.  And I’m well aware that this is not because they are bad people, but only because my ways differ from their ways, what they find useful is not what I find useful, it is simply a matter of subjective values.

NEVERTHELESS.

I’m using “@”, from now on, as the mark in place of both the hated “e-mail” and the ugly “email”.  And this may cause some confusion on Twitter or elsewhere, doubtless elsewhere as “@” gets used for more and more things, but I say this to you all in complete seriousness, that FUCK IT IF I AM WRITING EITHER “E-MAIL” OR “EMAIL” EVER AGAIN IF I DON”T ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO FOR REASONS OF ABSOLUTELY PRECISE CLARITY!  Which may be one of my core values but which is definitely not one of the core values of software engineers.  Christ, the system of machine-beeps that regulates our lives in the home and workplace doesn’t have any regulation either, but at least the beep-people of major manufacturing corporations give a damn about the magic principle of clarity, which to them simply equals minimum fucking fuss, and lack of confusion!  So I can deal with them…!

But with the grotesquerie known as “e-mail” I cannot deal.  A joke’s a joke, fellas, but this one’s gone too far.  And I am not only NOT typing that hyphen anymore, but I’m not typing the absence of the hyphen either.  The whole thing’s an assault on language.  Why if the Beep People ran their show like that, they’d be fired out a torpedo tube.

And THAT!  Is THAT.

So if anyone has trouble understanding what I’m saying from now on, well at least I don’t have any trouble understanding what I’m fucking typing, and I’ll take that trade-off.

Therefore it’s “@” from now on.  Sorry.

Sorry.

But man, you can’t believe for how long that has gotten my goat.

Anyway it’s over now!

Election Night Blues

Well, and so the Liberals finally have both their own Robert Stanfield and their own Kim Campbell in one person…but none of the people who voted for either of them, voted for him, and the result has Canada doing pretty poorly, after all the fuss dies down. As I write this it is just barely possible that Stephen Harper will not be able to quite gain his projected majority…but there’s no betting on that. Even I wouldn’t bet on that.

[EDIT: I woulda lost my shirt.]

I would certainly have bet on Elizabeth May being elected as a Green Party MP (hmm, and probably should have), since if you knew Saanich like I know Saanich, you had to know she was going to get in tight with those people. No better place for her. But to tell the truth I no longer feel like much of a betting man when it comes to elections here. The ruthless handicapping and carnival barking by TV talking heads makes it tough to watch anyone who isn’t Chantal Hebert, Allan Gregg, Craig Oliver or Rex Murphy — everybody has some weird axe to grind, some nose for news to stuff vacant theories up. Better, of course, that they should put the nose on the grindstone and chop the theories into kindling…but I don’t hold out much hope, I’ll tell you. Especially since they are already planning their bold and dramatic take on the next election…or, if they’re at the CBC, I guess they’re brushing up their resumes. But as always they get it all wrong from the beginning.

So here is what’s going to happen, if the politicians don’t make the horrid mistake of listening to what pundits say. The Liberal Party will be back, and it will be the most remarkable recovery from a galling defeat that anyone has ever made in Canadian politics. Of course as the pundits would be swift to point out (but they are not as swift as all that, so it took them a couple hours), the Tories got whittled down to two seats back when Chretien gave the big boot to the Mulroney Machine…and they came back, right? I mean, just look at ‘em now…!

But, this is incorrect. They didn’t come back. Instead, they were destroyed. Nowhere in the land will you find the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, because it simply doesn’t exist — all its eminent heads stormed out in a huff throwing curses behind them. Peter McKay gave them away to the Reform Party, and that was that. Well…that was almost that. Because I wouldn’t have bet very much on an unsuccessful Harper Conservative Party (and don’t make the mistake of believing that isn’t what it is) being able to fully digest the Big Blue money-printing apparatus it was permitted to swallow, if they hadn’t won this election the way they wanted to. Eventually some rich Ontarian cottage-owning alien would’ve burst from their still deep-down Western Separatist chest, and put all back to normal, if not exactly to rights…because (as I may have mentioned before) this absorption of small party by large party is what gets popular talking-points into faster circulation, in Canada, but to do it the large party has to actually absorb. Stephane Dion wanted to absorb the Green Party, and it was probably a brilliant idea, but in the end he couldn’t do it — he disappeared. And I still miss him, but maybe it was still better for me to suffer FIVE GODDAMN YEARS of Harper in minority, and unless something dramatic happens another FOUR HELLISH YEARS of him in majority, rather than have the Green Party not really exist as an independent entity by this time next decade. But on the other hand it is not all stinking roses, because this win tonight makes it a lot less likely that the real Tories — those bastards — will ever be able to come back to where they belong. Because if what you believe in is pretty much just “conservativeness by any definition and at any price” then a blue-bleeding Tory just isn’t what you are; rather, you’re a U.S. Republican. Donald Savoie (I believe I also mentioned recently) has floated the idea that there are no parties anymore, only leaders who inherit bumper stickers from other leaders, along with their old station wagons…Michael Ignatieff, bless his little heart and his great big Muppety head, certainly deserves my thanks by running as though his party was more important than he was, though if his supporters within his party had felt the same way it might’ve been Bob Rae in there instead of him, and might’ve been a win instead of a loss…but right now it’s an idea whose time has passed, for the moment. When the Liberal Party comes back, it’ll come back too, but for now it’s gone. A lot less gone than the old familiar Tories, but gone nonetheless. Boy, are those Tories ever gone! Still, here is the thing, and it’s about the exact opposite of the thing most pundits would have you believe: in Canada’s political landscape there’s always room for a Centre, because the centre is always the biggest part. Billionaires all over this land, from sea to sea to…okay, just from the one sea to the other, really, anyway all our very best billionaires want two big things over any number of smaller things: lower taxes and a two-party system. Well, but on the one hand taxes can only go down where the expenditures of individuals go up, because Canada needs money to pay for things (and I don’t know what our big billionaires need their money for, exactly, but I’d like to keep as much of mine as possible), and on the other it ought to be a maxim that extremes only suit extremists. And most of Canada needs what the billionaires want about as much as we need two extra holes in the head. As the electorate fills up from the bottom with younger voters, things are already changing, ridings voting differently, old stable patterns collapsing…it’s already happening, and it ain’t slowing down. Did I say this before too? The post-1980 political narrative is already deader than a doornail, but no one really gets it yet. Young voters don’t care about gay marriage, the climate change debate is over as far as they’re concerned, they don’t remember Rene Levesque or Lucien Bouchard, they’re not nostalgically ga-ga for Justin Trudeau just on the strength of his father’s name, they’ve never made a dime from trickle-down economics. Unemployment’s been pushing ten percent since they were born. Children of single-parent families, blended families, all types of familes that are not out of promotional stills from Leave It To Beaver or Tourism Alberta, or even the alarming, overwhelming whiteness of your average beer commercial (“young white people in Canada love the outdoors and maple-leaf kitsch and have money to burn!”), are not intrigued by get-out-of-guilt-free privatization mania, and for those of them interested in money there is always more down south than there is up here. But most importantly, they have not been raised in a two-party system, and consequently they don’t value it. It doesn’t do much for them.

Hey: it doesn’t do much for you and me, either.

Because this is a century of Difference, or it very well might be, and so whenever you see any “Unite The Right!” stuff or (shudder) “Unite The Left!” stuff, what you are seeing are the death-throes of the old political narrative. One last chance to get into that Fountain of Youth, and live forever…and it won’t work, because the past is the past, and we call it that because it’s the past. A two-party system? What the hell good would that do anybody? This isn’t the United States, where people come and go but Big Oil goes on forever! This isn’t the land of attractive politicians who are sane on the outside with a chewy core of nutcase on the inside, for heaven’s sake! No, we wear our bubblegum over our clothes here, like Superman. And in five years — sorry, damnit, four years! I keep forgetting! — in four years it won’t make any difference what the pundits are predicting tonight, because they are predicting all kinds of stuff that they think would be cool, and when you get right down to it they are the only ones who really care about that kind of future-cool stuff, where elections are like a really great episode of 24, or something. And the rest of us desire other sorts of things. It really is a shame about Ignatieff, I didn’t hate the guy, but he didn’t do anything in Opposition — but over a hundred seats for the NDP, you get the sense that’s the real shocker in the land of punditry. I mean, so shocking is it that they have not even managed, at least tonight, to articulate what it is exactly that makes it so shocking. “Canadians just felt like a change”?

No, that isn’t it. That’s never it.

Ignatieff is easy. “He just didn’t connect with Canadians, he’ll be gone by tomorrow morning”: the big media wheel spins on and on, never stopping, never resting, always looking for the next big story. Layton, on the other hand, is a tougher nut. Yes, he’s got all the charisma Ignatieff and Harper both lack (actually not all of it, since all the charisma those two don’t have is about enough to float an average-sized ark for forty days and nights), and yes he stole votes from Iggy while driving others to Steve-O…

But who among us can think, that that’s all that happened here?

Four fucking years. It is going to be tough, being stuck back here in 1984 for that long. I just thank God it’s too late for Harper to deregulate the banks or send us to Iraq, but don’t worry…he’ll find something. Don’t you worry.

But in 2015 it will be a completely different song that people are singing, and he won’t have heard it before. And then maybe all this will finally be over.

It’s gotta be over sometime, right?

Still, my party did get one in there. The party of Arts and Science, as I like to think of them.

How weird, it still seems to me, that there should be such a party as that…and weirder still that we should sort of need one.

Aw, screw it…I’m having a beer. Good night to Canada and Newfoundland and all the ships at sea.

Tomorrow there’s opera, and hockey.

Interlude: Interview With A Figment, Part IV

This might be the last one of these…

So here, pretty much as it occurred and largely unedited, is a transcript of the interview Bill Clinton gave in that dream I had the other night.  But before we begin, I’d just like to note that the opinions of the dream version of Bill Clinton, whether about politics or comic books, are entirely his own — and in fact, though I find myself in agreement with him on several points, there are others on which we part ways, and indeed if I had been the interviewer in this dream we might’ve had a lively back-and-forth on those matters, but since I wasn’t the interviewer that didn’t happen.

(You can tell I’m not the interviewer, because the interviewer doesn’t say much.)

However I guess I was something to Dream Bill Clinton in this setting…the host, maybe?  Not sure if anyone else was in the audience, so it’s entirely possible the whole thing was put on for my benefit, so I guess I should say…

…Thank you for making the time to stop by, Mr. President.  Always a pleasure.

***

INT:  So, you’re saying that no Middle Eastern regime is safe, from this…”spirit of revolution”, or whatever it is?

BC:  Well, to say that no regime is safe, doesn’t mean all regimes will necessarily topple.  For example, I don’t want to make any predictions for anywhere else, but I’m pretty sure the United States won’t topple because of it.  On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we’re safe.

INT:  The…excuse me, did you say the United States?

BC:  Absolutely.

INT:  I take it you mean, to the extent that we’re committed to two wars, and now also committed to a coalition effort in…

BC:  No.

INT:  No?

BC:  That’s not what I mean.  I’m not talking about a revolutionary wave that’s confined to the Middle East, or the Mediterranean basin, or anywhere else.  These things don’t necessarily just obey the lines on the maps.  Once they’ve started, they can go anywhere.  That is really the number one lesson about political and cultural upheaval, that we should take from the twentieth century.  Sometimes things look very quiet…or sometimes they look very loud, but very far away…but they’re not.

INT:  “Very loud but very far away”…you recall the Jonathan Safran Foer book about 9/11.

BC:  Well, 9/11 changed a lot of things, but that’s the thing:  it changed things.  It made some new ones too, but it also took some old ones and spun them around.  We’re not a brand new country since that day;  we don’t have a brand new mission out there in the world, any more than we have a brand new one here at home.  What 9/11 did was, it didn’t uproot the tree…but it bent some of the branches.  This actually goes back a long way.  Maybe Safran Foer’s book is just evidence of a new accent on it, evidence of knowing something is happening, and even roughly what it’s about, without being able to put a name to it.  And that wouldn’t be new either;  there’s a lot of great American literature of the twentieth century, some people I know would say it’s most great American literature of the twentieth century, that struggles with that ability to say what it is, to find out what to call it.  It doesn’t even have to be the great literature, it doesn’t even have to be literature at all.  In the Sixties, it was more diffuse than that.  Literature was only part of it.  But this was all over the world, rebellion in a youth movement, in Europe it was explicitly political.  Political in a way, a very obvious and direct way, that we weren’t…but change swept America too.  And Britain, and France, and Canada for that matter.  And it was political, it was just that its targets were much more diffuse.  It’s hard to see how to effect change in a democracy sometimes, if it’s functioning properly by its own lights…

INT:  You can’t carry around signs saying “Down With Democracy!”

BC:  That’s exactly it.  And nor would you.  So you can never get anything more than a tentpole for protest, here.  There will always be this big tent, too, and the tentpole may be in the center but the tent weighs a lot more, and it’s stitched together from all these different pieces of fabric, sometimes not very well.  The pole has to be really strong, to get all that stuff to hang together.  Now, in the Sixties there were the protests against the war in Vietnam, that was something people could agree on that directly addressed the actions of the government, but it was also symbolic of all the things that couldn’t be said out loud, or couldn’t be said out loud as effectively.  That’s what having a strong tentpole is like.  To have someone, some specific person, some specific thing or situation to address, that makes a revolutionary spirit easier to conceive of as a thing you can address as well.  Something to respond to, something to clarify your own position when otherwise it’d be a little more fuzzy at the edges.  This is why a revolutionary spirit expresses itself differently in the West, because we don’t have totalitarian regimes here, we don’t have a police state per se…but we do have inequities, and those inequities can even be harder to address because not everyone is suffering from them.  If you were a member of a minority group you might well think that we do have a police state in America, and I wouldn’t have much hope of convincing you otherwise, but you won’t have much luck carrying that message to the people, because those inequities may be widely spread, but they are not evenly spread.

INT:  So what tentpole is the Tea Party rallying around, in this case?  Health care?

BC:  I just want to be real clear about this:  I’m not talking about the Tea Party.  The Tea Party is no more a reflection of the enthusiasm or the need for change that’s sweeping the globe now, than they’re a reflection of the Prague Spring or the hippie movement.  Structurally there are differences between the way a progressive spirit expresses itself in a country like ours, and the way a reactionary one does.  The Tea Party doesn’t have a tentpole.  They pretend to have one, but they don’t.  Everything they do in terms of public relations is designed to convey the impression that they’ve got one, but in they end they don’t have one because they don’t need one.  Their tent’s too small to need one.  They just don’t have the kind of breadth they’re trying to say they do.  What they’ve got is a lot more like stone soup, than any kind of big tent.

INT:  Their tent doesn’t go all the way to the ground, maybe?

BC:  They have some real trouble keeping that up, it takes an incredible effort to do it.  Whereas the real revolutionary spirit takes a monumental effort to keep down, as soon as it’s able to find a focus.  And they always do find it, because the focus is always about bringing change where change is needed:  where people are crying out for it.  When I said America wouldn’t topple, but wasn’t safe, I meant it wasn’t safe from being changed again, as it’s been changed before and will no doubt be changed in the future…and change of any kind isn’t what the Tea Party wants.  If they can’t get the current of history to reverse its course, they want it to stand still, totally immobile.  In this way, not physically and certainly not ethically, but philosophically, they’re like a reflection of jihad inside America.  A reflection of the idea, that freedom is what you get when you stop the sun in the sky overhead.  And do nothing, nothing except try to prevent other people from moving forward into the future.  We don’t have jihad here in America, thank God.  In a democracy we don’t need it, and it wouldn’t work anyway, because it results either in perfect order or perfect chaos…and I think that offends the basic outlook of most Americans, old and new Americans, so much that…well, we may have people who are not agents of dissent and protest and change, even those who sense the revolutionary mood and try to turn it to their own advantage, but we don’t have widespread terrorism because that’s just not what people are feeling about their country, and that’s why America is not a place where we suffer from a consistent threat of, say, suicide bombers.  However, we do have something like the cultural equivalent of suicide bombers in our national discourse, we do have actions that are motivated in destructive ways, absolutist ways that reject conversation.  For example, we have anonymous people who claim to represent an unseen mass of sentiment, but they’re anonymous not because they blow themselves up, they’re anonymous because they fade back into invisibility as soon as they’ve appeared.  So they have this in common:  they can’t be questioned.  And we never know just who they are, or whose message they’re spreading.

INT:  Are you saying that, in the Tea Party for example, the agenda of some of the more well-known financiers, that these are furthered by more subterfuge than what we’ve already…?

BC:  It isn’t just large payments to known groups, the kind that allow someone to make a name for themselves as a voice and a face.  What we also have is a person, say it’s a farmer or that’s what we’re told, somebody who gets in his truck and drives a couple hundred miles or more, to show up at a rally some afternoon and get in front of a camera…and there he is, he says “I’m the common man, and I’ve got this to say”…but it isn’t plausible that he’s a farmer, it isn’t plausible that he’s just as he seems.  A farmer, and I should know, can’t actually do that.  Can’t afford to do it, and isn’t going to do it.  Not on his own, not when he’s got to make his living.  For some abstract, inflexible, call to arms?  But in America we haven’t had anything like a real call to arms of peaceful people since World War Two.  So it’s…dubious, you understand what I’m saying.  The claim to authenticity can’t last more than a split-second, or it just evaporates.  We saw that during the McCain campaign, what happens when one of these people lingers in the public eye…

INT:  Goes off the reservation?

BC:  Well, Hillary calls it a soap bubble.  The surface of it looks interesting, looks significant, complicated, information-rich, until you touch it.  When you had that fellow, Joe the Plumber, and the more he lingered the less convincing he was as an example of the common man…or the idea of the common man was actually lowered by that attempt to say it was being reflected, debased even though there is nothing in the world more incorruptible than that, because he didn’t fit what most people think of as the common man, the average virtuous American who’s engaged with his democracy even though his voice is never heard on TV.  This was a cultural suicide bomb that didn’t go off, the speaker failed to become anonymous again, and when he was…

INT:  Interrogated?

BC:  …When he was in the public eye too long, then you couldn’t do it anymore, you couldn’t say “here’s an average person”.  It isn’t like in the movies, average people don’t stay average for long once the camera gets them in its focus.  “Average” isn’t “equal”;  “average” is a myth invented by those who oppose equality.  And it can’t stand the light of day…of facts.  But mark my words, as time goes on we will have more and more of these untraceable people, these sudden intrusions of points of view that won’t give you the chance to reason with them, and it will be by design.  It’ll be far more efficiently stage-managed, just because we’ve already seen how it falls apart when it isn’t.  But the thing is…the thing is, this isn’t new either.  Just like everything we’ve been through recently with the new-look Republicans, from my Presidency through to today…I mean, you saw the issues of the George W. Bush Presidency played out in movies for fifty years, these have always been the issues at the forefront of our democracy, because our democracy is always being contested, it’s built on the constant conversation between different extremes, different values.  That’s what makes our movies so enduring, and morally relevant.  Even romantic comedies, or action movies where you are sure who’s the good guy and the bad guy…America never forgets that everybody is involved in deciding about the present moment, the viewer too.

INT:  I know you’re a big movie fan…

BC:  Well, everybody knows that about me.  But you see I’ve brought along some props with me today…

INT:  These are comic books?

BC:  These are President Obama’s comic books.  Or some of them.  This is as American as movies, this is a true American art-form.  You don’t have to be a university graduate to understand everything here, this is real egalitarianism, but it’s expressed by real talent, so it’s clear.  Take a look:  see, comic books are a commercial enterprise, staffed by freelancers, a cover has to be striking and it has to mean something, it has to get you to buy the book…and it also has to not be something that will eat up all the freelancer’s time for doing other jobs.  And this really makes it special, it makes it so it has to be both super-artistic and super-economical, and that means there is a lot in these comics covers that we can pick out to see what’s going on…in terms of what the appeal is to people, what will grab them and what won’t.  See here, this is an early comics cover, it’s the hero versus the villain.  But then, later on, you’ll notice it’s a bunch of heroes versus the villain.  And if you look at the time, this is WWII, this is the Allies versus Hitler.  The villain’s power is big enough first to threaten the hero by undermining him, then to threaten him by fighting him…then the villain is powerful enough that the heroes have to get together if they want to stop him.  You see?  But then look a little further on, here we’ve got some other comics where the hero has to fight a group of villains, and the threat-situation is reversed:  and this is international Communism outside America, or it’s bigotry in America, or it’s maybe even an ironic connection being made between the two…the villains are dangerous now because they get together, and gang up on the hero.  The hero is pretty solid, he’s become very secure — not like he was in the early days when we didn’t know if he’d have the ability to triumph over the villain.  So what’s the next step in threats to him?  It’s right here.  But it’s still cloaked in costumes and poses;  so let’s see what happens when we uncloak it, and we kind of flip it around at the same time…until here, this is another kind of cover, from later on, and it’s the hero beset by a mob.  A mob of people, a mob of monsters, it gets very slippery here because it’s only an internal image now, it doesn’t refer to any Hitler or Stalin.  The hero isn’t fighting a villain, and if you look you’ll see he isn’t even “fighting”, physically, at all.  Nor is he even getting ready to fight:  instead, he’s just standing there.  And in the crowd he’s facing — it’s too big to take on in an individual way, the hero’s traditional strategy won’t be enough to address this conflict, and look at all the extra work that’s gone into this cover now!  That’s a lot more drawing than just two guys standing there, or even five or six.  Numerically, effort-wise, rendering-wise, this has completely blown up.  There’s something different at work.  The artist is tremendously more involved, is trying much harder to say something.  Something more difficult to say, it must be, or why the extra work?  Look:  the thing the hero is facing is in the background, not set against it…not even emerging from it.  It’s like a question.  Who is the hero?  What’s his identity?  What’s his nature, and can he trust his nature to give him his identity?  Or does he have to start again from the beginning.

INT:   Watergate…

BC:  That’s good.  You see, that’s very good.  You’ve got it.  This is the Seventies question, the mistrust of authority.  This is when the worldwide revolutionary spirit is sweeping through America, changing things.  It doesn’t change everything everywhere.  But it changes the superhero comic book, and that goes everywhere, it does go everywhere.  And the problem for the superhero is, now there is a real problem with something: with authority, with trust, with reason for being.  So the question in this time is what does the hero do, and how can he stand.  What does he stand for?  What does the focussed power of resistance or action that he represents have to offer to this scenario?  How can he even figure out how to be a hero?  Because this is internal, now;  this is America.  These people are the American people, and sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re bad — and sometimes they’re both — and the worry we see, the hero’s anxiety, is that he’s irrelevant to their crisis.  This becomes a big thing in comics in the Seventies, the hero’s relevance.  There is nothing for him to address, and the crowd can’t address him very well either.  Who represents a real, a legitimate authority here?  Look at the coloring technique in these ones, the crowd is all in reds and blacks, while the hero is in his usual costume, brightly-lit, foregrounded.  Look at these, how often the hero’s face is turned from us, and toward the crowd.  It’s like a mirror that doesn’t show either side a proper, comprehensible reflection.  The people want revolution, they’re hungry for change, and they look to the representation of their ideals…but that representation looks like it might be getting too out of touch to help them.  And so it looks on them as a chaotic threat.  The superhero, as originally conceived, doesn’t have the power to grapple with this change…because the hero’s in two parts:  one, an ideal that appeals to the people;  two, a machine for making money from them.  But the conflict is hard to state, never mind that I’ve just stated it:  I’ve been a President of the United States, and people will put weight on what I say, that they might not be willing to give to their neighbour.  If I say that people should wave around “Down With Democracy” signs, it becomes something people can address, that they can argue with or about…it becomes a thing, anyway.  But if your mailman says it, or your brother-in-law, or your drinkin’ buddy…well, it just sounds like a bunch of smoke.  They’re crazy.  Because we don’t have terrorism here, or a one-party system, or a military junta in charge:  there is no name you can put to this revolutionary urge, and so you don’t know what to do about it.  You feel it, okay.  But you have nothing to put it on.  The hero is lost in a secret identity, he is out of touch, he’s made for punching things out, but there’s no antagonist in a purple cape with a master plan for him here.  He can’t find out what’s wrong.  So he doesn’t have a purpose, and that means everybody can put him down.  Or, more than that:  they can question his reality.

INT:  …And this spreads out?  Are we out of this feeling of “questioning” now?  I can’t help but think of the movie “The Matrix”…

BC:  Exactly.  A comic-book movie.

INT:  Oh, it was from a…?

BC:  No, but it was a movie about comic books.  About that business of the hero losing his confidence, his reason for being.  This is how I get into this picture, with President Obama.  I read comics when I was young, sure.  But I loved the movies more, it was just that I couldn’t afford them.  When I was older, I concentrated on The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca…but it doesn’t mean I forgot the hero.  Bogart was a hero in those movies, even if he was an anti-hero.  But then there was Raiders Of The Lost Ark…a great movie, full of excitement, but also a great movie because it turned Sam Spade into Clark Kent, you see?  Indiana Jones takes his identity from not being like his father, not being like his teachers:  he’s a mercenary.  But he’s a mercenary with an American heart, with Superman’s heart.  He spends the whole movie running away from responsibility, from love…and he never makes the connection between the two, that’s the problem.  But his heart knows it, even if he doesn’t.  They question his reality, they try to overwrite his reality;  saying everything about him is fake, made-up.  And they’re right, except they can’t see that there’s one irreducible pebble of him that believes.  But, like I said:  this is the great American comic-book, not the great American movie.  The great American movie doesn’t grant you the irreducible pebble, but asks what are you going to do if we take that pebble away, and just leave a hole where it should be.  And that’s where the movie hero thrives, but the comic hero wilts.  Comes to his ultimate crisis.  For the superhero, it’s always a question of is there something outside himself that he stands for, or isn’t there.  And if there isn’t something outside, then there isn’t anything inside either, and he evaporates.  He implodes.  Rick Blaine can find a place to stand, if he has to, even if he isn’t trying to:  his place always finds him.  But the superhero can only stand if we stand;  he’s like a canary in a coal mine.  Rick can’t be beaten because he can’t be done away with:  even he can’t do away with himself.  That’s America at an extremity:  we don’t know who we are until it’s on us.  But the superhero is different.  He’s a warning cry, of an extremity yet to arrive.

INT:  You mean…he folds at the first sign of trouble?  That doesn’t sound very much like a superhero!

BC:  Sure, Superman and Batman always win.  That’s in the nature of the story-form.  But what happens to them, in order for them to win, that’s the question.  Look, there’s a British comics writer, Mark Millar.  He wrote a story called “Civil War”, where Captain America tries to protect democratic freedoms from Iron Man, a technocratic billionaire…and in the end, Captain America is going to beat Iron Man, but then in their fight a New York City first responder gets hurt, and then a mob attacks him.  Attacks America, the symbol of America, because they’ve been blinded by a greater symbol:  the symbol of tragedy, and rage.  And then Captain America gives himself up, stops fighting the good fight;  and goes to jail.  The message being:  when America goes, so does its symbol.  It can’t keep fighting if it doesn’t have any support.  But, you know…that’s what the world thinks of us right now.  Mr. Millar thinks that.  They think the spirit of America’s been deserted by its people.  That’s what they think of us.  Can you imagine?

INT:  The Tea Party…

BC:  It’s the Tea Party.  It’s Fox News.  It comes down to this:  the widespread telling of lies, and nobody has the guts to call them lies.  Cultural suicide bombers, and Ayatollah Khomeinis in Stars-And-Stripes armor.  No one dares say they’re not a real American who hates other peoples’ freedom.  We have that going on all the time, discharging onto the streets like a busted sewer pipe:  lies about America, and what it is to be American.  That’s no better than lies about Islam, and what it is to be a Muslim.  And we could do something about it if we wanted to, but we don’t.

INT:  You’re not talking about some measure against freedom of speech?  Fire in a crowded…?

BC:  No, it isn’t like that.  It’s much, much simpler.  Take for example the news.  I’m no fan of needless regulation, but in Canada for example they have a law that says the news has to be — essentially — truthful reporting.  If you call yourself the news then you have to tell the truth.  And this is a way to protect freedom of speech and freedom of the press from an internal attack rather than an external one.  If the New York Times printed completely falsified stories every day, there would be an outcry, because people would sense that as a threat to everyone’s freedom of speech, that the New York Times could just say this or that or whatever it wanted to, and not call it entertainment, not even call it current events…so they don’t do it.  While on the other hand, no one is up in arms about The Onion, because The Onion doesn’t present itself as anything but satire anyway.  But how does Fox News present itself?  As satire?  No one is reading The Onion expecting to hear the truth of what happened today, but lots of people are watching Fox News with the expectation that what they’ll see and what they’ll be told won’t be made up out of whole cloth…and a lot of the time, it just is made up.  In a way you could defend if it was entertainment, if it was humor…artistic license in the way crowd scenes are spliced together, maybe…but everyone who doesn’t think it’s the “real” news knows perfectly well that it isn’t trying to be funny at all, and the people who are watching it don’t think it’s funny either.  Nobody thinks it’s performance art, whether they think it’s meeting the standards of truthful journalism or not.  So if we had a law that just said “look, if you call yourself a news organization you can’t just make stuff up”, Fox might bluster a bit but they’d have to change away from that disinformation formula.  At least they’d have to label it when they’re doing it, and make damn sure that when they weren’t labelling it, that they weren’t doing it.  We could just make a harder distinction between news programming and “current affairs commentary” programming.  It wouldn’t bother the National Inquirer!

INT:  People do sue the Inquirer from time to time…

BC:  You’re darn right they do!  And sometimes they even lose.  But ask yourself:  could Fox News win?  I’m not against their existence.  I don’t particularly like Fox News, as you can imagine, but if they can stand up in a courtroom or in a Congressional hearing and defend themselves as truth-tellers, straightforwardly and fairly, then I would have to say they had as much a right to exist, and were as much a benefit to our society by existing, in their way, as the New York Times.  Or even the National Inquirer!  But let’s not kid ourselves, no one’s asking them to do that now.  They’re not put under any sort of scrutiny, they don’t have to stand up like the New York Times, they don’t have to put up or shut up like the National Inquirer.  Instead they get the weirdest of weird free passes.  They can lie, they can foment, they can be full of it…and crouch behind the shield of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.  So this media is the new Wild West, anybody can sell anything to anyone under any label they want.  But we already have the FCC, which is to the media industry as the FDA is to the pharmaceutical industry — if we made the FCC work as well to defend the public’s interest as the FDA does, we might just raise the bar for what you have to do to be considered “news”, instead of a gossip sheet or a comedy program.  Let’s raise it to just above where The Daily Show is, maybe!  That level of accuracy.  Jon Stewart is out there every day loudly saying that these are just jokes, it doesn’t stop people from getting their news from him.  But no one thinks he thinks he’s a journalist.  (laughs)  Fox News tried to get him to say he thinks he’s a journalist, and he wouldn’t do it!  And they wouldn’t believe it!

INT:  Mr. President, we’re almost out of time…

BC:  You mean you’re almost out of time!  I could go on for a while!

INT:  Gonna have to ask you to simmer down.

BC:  Why don’t you ask my mama how that went.

INT:  Well, why don’t I.

BC:  Sure, why don’t you.  Hillary and I aren’t getting along right now anyway.

INT:  So you feel like you can just say…?

BC:  Whatever I want to, yeah.  Ex-President over here.  Going down in history.  Let me tell you, I am not 100% sure Barack Obama’s going to get another term.

INT:  You’re not?

BC:  Hell no, man!  There’s still a lot of brown-suited flat-earthers out there who might want to vote for some repressed thirteen-year-old child preacher!

INT:  So you are.

BC:  Hell yes I am.  Truth is, my brother can’t lose.  He just doesn’t know it yet.  All this Abraham Lincoln stuff.  He’s not Abraham Lincoln.  I was Abraham Lincoln.

INT:  And he’s…?

BC:  Captain America, baby.  The way it was always meant to be.  Except…

INT:  Except?

BC:  …Except he doesn’t seem to know it.  So…yeah, maybe we’re done here.

INT:  I want to thank you, Mr. President.

BC:  No, I want to thank you.

***

And then, readers…

…I woke up.

So, pretty much presented without comment, then.

Can’t blame a man for what he dreams.