Mary K. Brown was one of the small group of renowned visual artists regularly contributing to National Lampoon back in the day (which also included cartoonists Roz Chast, Mark Alan Stamaty and Gahan Wilson, as well as illustrators like Bruce McCall, comic book artists like Neal Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz and Walt Simonson and fantasy painters like Boris Vallejo). She was married to the late fellow cartoonist (and frequent National Lampoon contributor) Bernard Kliban, whose 1975 bestseller Cat is still in print.

From 1979-1984, Brown had a regular strip called “Aunt Mary’s Kitchen.” Aunt Mary gives recipe advice and shows how to cook different dishes — but, over time, the strip goes strangely astray into various surreal subplots and eventually becomes a story of aliens landing on the earth.

Brown is a very unusual and extremely talented artist and writer, and while I was going through the back-issues (on the complete DVD edition) I began to finally realize just how brilliant “Aunt Mary’s Kitchen” was, so I collected all the strips together chronologically and put them on a web page (hopefully this counts as “fair use”):

http://www.jordanorlando.com/aunt_marys_kitchen

Rush Limbaugh is easy to dismiss (or rather, to not “take seriously,” since his statements are so exuberant and grandiose — so obviously geared to foment certain primitive emotions in his listeners), but I think he’s very interesting. Limbaugh is absolutely crucial to those entrenched, institutional forces of injustice, malfeasance, and the corruption and exploitation of the public trust that are dependent on mass support; he’s an essential component in every one of the mechanisms by which the powerful extend their dominion over the powerless and the countervailing forces of progressivism, Enlightenment (in the strict 18th Century sense; the egalitarian principles which our nation was ostensibly founded upon) and political, cultural and social advancement are kept at bay.

What few people understand about Limbaugh is the degree to which his entire operation serves as a “loss leader,” in the strict business-school sense — Clear Channel Communications struggles with debt in order to maintain Limbaugh’s $400 million paycheck, and then forces radio stations to accept his syndicated programming as part of their content packages (Limbaugh is also distributed to the Armed Forces). In many American markets it’s impossible to avoid hearing him, even though nobody else is making money from his broadcasts (especially in light of the chronic loss of advertisers his programming inspires). But he’s clearly worth every cent, since his ability to disseminate a message to all those enforced listeners is unparalleled. Joseph Goebbels pioneered the Volksempfänger-based technique of using radio to control public opinion, and the effects have not become any less corrosive and devastating since the 1930s.

Limbaugh’s rhetorical talents — not his incendiary polemics, his blatant racial and gender-based slurs, his overwhelming dependence on falsehoods and hyperbole, his willingness to say anything and everything necessary to advance those viewpoints and positions that best serve to galvanize the widespread elements that retard the progress of our society, but, rather, the potency of his framing devices and presentational slight-of hand — cannot be overestimated. My hardline-conservative step-grandmother (who passed away a year ago at the age of 98) used to ask me if I enjoyed listening to Limbaugh, and, when I told her that I did not, since I support and respect everyone whom he is against, she hastened to point out that he “isn’t against anyone” but is, instead, “accepting of all views” and “just wants to get past the politics and find the common sense answers we can all agree on.” Limbaugh has a gift for the creation of inverted logic — for finding ways to express indefensible positions backwards and upside down, so that they sound reasonable. In his extraordinarily cynical, sophisticated handling of current LGBT rights controversies, he beautifully exhibits the singular force and effectiveness of these skills.

As everyone knows, NBA player Jason Collins just announced (in the April 29 Sports Illustrated) that he is gay. Limbaugh did not attack Collins for being gay. He did not attack homosexuals or homosexuality. He did not talk about morality, children, religion, or mention any of the other lynchpins of conservative anti-gay sentiment. He was much shrewder than that. First, he lamented:

Folks, I grew up in a family where people’s sexual orientation preferences, whatever, weren’t even discussed. Why – why can’t – why can’t everybody just put your sexual preferences on Facebook and call it a day? What do we need to stop everything and have a national day of celebration – or mourning, depending on your view – recognition, or whatever, about this. [...] If you’re like everybody else, they’re sick of hearing this. They’ve got gay-news fatigue. Alright, we got it. Just put it up on Facebook and forget it. Why does it have to be rammed down our throats, figuratively speaking? Why does this have to be thrust at us?*

How many listeners found themselves nodding in agreement with this, since it’s possible to find some recognizable sentiment in his outburst (even die-hard liberals and progressives, emerging from provincial upbringings, occasionally admit to some buried squeamishness about social conventions that they’re unaccustomed to) without ever admitting to being anti-gay, or even thinking about “homophobia”? Limbaugh continued:

And this tolerance, you know, it only goes one way. So, Person X of some national stature announces his sexual orientation is gay. And, applause. ‘Great day for America. We’re really taking giant leaps ahead.’ If anybody says, ‘You know, I’m not big on that.’ ‘You bigot! You – You – You racist! You – you extremist! You – you – you homophobe!’ There is no tolerance at all here. Not only do these people have to publicly announce, everybody else has to applaud and accept it. My point the other day about how it’s only us conservatives who are divisive. You know, I’m one of the most loving, unifying, want everybody to do well, like everybody, hope everybody has a great life-kind of guy you’ll ever run into. But because I’m not a liberal, I’m called divisive. Liberals are never divisive. You know why that is? ‘Cause to them, liberalism is just status quo. Anything that’s not liberal is divisive. So, liberals believe this country has been racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, and now we’re making great strides.

This stunning logical conjuring act is mirrored in yesterday’s tearful remarks by Minnesota State Representative Peggy Scott (R), on the occasion of a definitive same-sex-marriage bill passing that state’s House. Scott said:

My heart breaks for Minnesota. It’s a divisive issue that divides our state. It’s not what we needed to be doing at this time. We want to come together for the state of Minnesota, we don’t want to divide it.

Nicolaus Copernicus established the heliocentric model of the universe (i.e. the earth goes around the sun, and not vice versa) in 1543, which always seems late to me; the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round (although that understanding was lost for centuries after the birth of Christianity — no comment), but the fact that hundreds of years’ worth of people lived and died observing the sun’s changing orientation through the seasons and just assuming it followed a corkscrew path (rather than extrapolating a tilted earth) is unnerving to me. It took yet another 200 years for the “Copernican Revolution” to take hold; like Darwin’s ideas, the heliocentric model fought an uphill battle against brute intuition.

The two crucial features of the Copernican model (and of all subsequent paradigmatic insights that are called “Copernican Revolutions”) fit together: first, the observer is removed from the center of the figure — in this case, literally, the center of the universe. Overcoming the tyranny of one’s sensory impressions, and, more important, thinking beyond the subjective primacy of self that those impressions under-gird and uphold, is the most essential breakthrough of the Enlightenment (again, in the strictest sense; the interlocking philosophical, moral, and scientific doctrines upon which the American identity is overtly modeled). And, second, the Copernican model (wherein the observer is no longer the fixed point of reference for the entire observable universe) is simpler, and more reasonable, containing far fewer arbitrary and/or inexplicable elements. Look at the animated diagrams above, showing the orbits of the earth (blue) and Mars (red) around the sun (yellow): the pre-Copernican model (on the right) has Mars performing a mysterious loop (“apparent retrograde motion”), which is the only way to explain its passage across the night sky while maintaining one’s insistence that the earth (and the observer) is the center of all things. Put the sun in the center (left) and suddenly it’s all clear, and it’s all much simpler.

The dark brilliance of Limbaugh’s (and Scott’s) diatribes is that they represent pre-Copernican thinking in all its pervasive, persuasive, retrograde glory: all you have to do is coronate your own blinkered perceptions as the armature of American reality, and the entire observable society ties itself in loops and knots around you, assuming a complex shape whereby you are right and those that trouble you are wrong. It’s not gay Americans who are oppressed and struggling for equality, dignity and those freedoms promised in our founding documents: it’s the straight people who are being punished; who are being asked to sacrifice. Limbaugh fondly remembers a time when he did not even have to think about homosexuality, and all its unsettling implications: can’t we just go back to that? Why is he being punished — even discriminated against — for his intolerance? From his vantage point, everything was fine until the gays and their supporters and allies came out of the woodwork and started causing all this conflict. (Similarly, in 1974 Ronald Reagan told the attendees of First Conservative Political Action Conference — in his famous “City Upon a Hill” speech — that “When I was your age, believe it or not, none of us knew that we even had a racial problem.”) Pre-Enlightenment thinking like this — appealing to the hindbrain rather than the intellect, and so going resolutely backward against the tide of intellectual history — is, in so many words, un-American.

In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle was done with Sherlock Holmes, the literary “consulting detective” he had created in 1886, whose appearances in two novels and 23 short stories had made Doyle wealthy and famous (and who is currently considered the most popular fictional character in history). “I think of slaying Holmes in the last [of the stories he was contracted to write] and winding him up for good,” Doyle wrote to his mother — “I must save my mind for better things, even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him.” Doyle did kill Holmes — or, rather, he tried to kill him, and ultimately failed — and the circumstances of this attempted “protagicide” comprise one of the most convoluted recursive knots in fiction.

I

Having determined to get rid of Holmes, Doyle followed a series of logical steps that may be extrapolated from what he eventually wrote (since his literary methodology remains obscured from view). First, Holmes had to die, rather than merely departing like Peter Pan. That conclusion had, clearly, already been reached when he make that speculative remark to his mother: ending the story of Holmes and Watson for good would require the detective to sacrifice himself both to guarantee the finality of his departure and to avoid the risk of anticlimax.

This question of “climax” (or its absence) is crucial because Doyle had innovated, not just in the creation of the character of Holmes, who was intended as an improvement upon (and rebuttal of) Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of Auguste Dupin,* but, perhaps more important, in the stringing together of a series of short stories focusing around a single character, forming a continuous narrative with its own formal structure, which had never been done before. Doyle’s arrangement with The Strand Magazine suited this template, allowing monthly anecdotal “installments” in Holmes’ saga to build each upon the last, sketching out an accumulation of depth and detail. Because The Final Problem (1893) would follow from this existing series of episodic (but self-contained) stories, it needed scale and gravitas fitting to its role as the conclusion to an overarching über-story that readers had been following for six years.

So Holmes had to be killed while doing something important — more important than anything he had already been shown to have done — facing an adversary greater than any he had previously faced. This was clearly problematic for Doyle because no such adversary existed. Hubris always faces Nemesis — Beowulf has Grendel; Valjean has Javert; Frodo has Sauron; Dorothy has the Wicked Witch; Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader — and all these diametric confrontations are laid out in the first act, allowing both for mounting suspense and for dramatic closure. But there was nothing like that in Sherlock Holmes’ world. So Doyle had to create Holmes’ “long-standing” Nemesis (in modern terms, “retcon” him) and, somehow, work around the obvious fact that this towering, ultimate impending conflict came out of nowhere:

       “You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?” said he.
       “Never.”
       “Ay, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!” he cried. “The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That’s what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime. I tell you Watson, in all seriousness, that if I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit, and I should be prepared to turn to some more placid line in life. […] I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.”

Watson’s ignorance excuses our own: Moriarty’s conspicuous non-existence (and his sudden, last-act arrival into the story) are evidence, not of Doyle’s revisionism, but of Moriarty’s ultimate significance. He’s so important that you’ve never heard of him.

Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes’ “friend and chronicler,” who narrates the stories while participating in them, is another of Doyle’s structural innovations. Beyond his crucial emotional role (both as a balancing anchor to Holmes and as a foil for his idiosyncrasies and wit), and beyond the suspenseful purposes Watson serves (ensuring that the reader is fed the clues and other information in a sufficiently exciting manner and sequence) and the explication Watson provides (since his bafflement at Holmes’ deductive conclusions prompts lengthy explanations for the reader), Watson is a groundbreaking metafictional device. In a way that presages far more modern and radical 20th century fiction, Watson’s “accounts” exist in their own fictional universe: the characters whom Holmes and Watson encounter have read the stories themselves — the same texts that we are reading. (“I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler,” Holmes’ brother Mycroft tells Watson upon meeting him.) The importance of this Pirandello-esque trickery, which Doyle deploys almost immediately — in The Sign of the Four (1890), the second Holmes adventure, Holmes tells Watson that he has himself read the first, A Study in Scarlet (1886), and disliked its overly dramatic presentation — can’t be overestimated in its effect of bringing a faux-journalistic immediacy and force to the Holmes “canon.” And Watson’s (and Doyle’s) framing device is crucial to the presentation and success of Holmes’ (intended) denouement.

I I

Watson begins “The Final Problem” by insisting that he did not want to write it. Running through a synopsis of his published “accounts” of Holmes’ cases, from A Study in Scarlet (a homicide investigation that’s Holmes’ first experience working with Scotland Yard) to “The Naval Treaty” (1893) (in which Holmes’ actions essentially prevent a European war), Watson explains:

It was my intention to have stopped there, and to have said nothing of that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill. My hand has been forced, however, by the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother, and I have no choice but to lay the facts before the public exactly as they occurred. I alone know the absolute truth of the matter, and I am satisfied that the time has come when no good purpose is to be served by its suppression.

So this recounting of Holmes’ Götterdämmerung arrives at a fitting time, but abruptly — and the abruptness is meant to result from Watson’s reluctance to tell the story. He goes on to admit that the only reason he’s compelled to overcome this reluctance is the existence of conflicting, erroneous reports of the events: “As far as I know, there have been only three accounts in the public press [...] Of these the first and second were extremely condensed, while the last is, as I shall now show, an absolute perversion of the facts. It lies with me to tell for the first time what really took place between Professor Moriarty and Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

Doyle had used this trick before — in his role as metafictional filter, Watson is frequently “setting straight” what happened, flattering the illusion of reality (and of the “journalistic” nature of his “accounts”). But “The Final Problem” has two other features that are unique: First, there is no case. No crime is investigated, no clues are amassed, no deduction is performed. Moriarty stands apart from all previous Holmes antagonists in that everything bad he has done is irrelevant to the present action. To be sure, Holmes hits florid rhetorical notes describing him as “the Napoleon of crime,” and hinting darkly at his role as “the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,” but no details are provided; no explanation is given (and no crimes are solved). Alone among Holmes villains, Moriarty gets by on pure atmosphere; pure bombast.

The second unique element in the story is how little of it is actually seen. The lens through which Watson perceives the main action is unusually opaque. There had been other Holmes stories taking place entirely offstage, such as “The Five Orange Pips” (1891),† but their concluding scenes (wherein Holmes works his deductive magic) were always front-and-center. Aside from a great deal of (admittedly exciting) racing around by train, “The Final Problem” contains just two actual scenes: both are direct, isolated confrontations between Holmes and Moriarty, and both are presented solely through Holmes’ account. In the first, Moriarty shows up at Holmes’ Baker Street rooms with an ultimatum, demanding that he forestall his pursuit, since “The situation is becoming an impossible one”:

       “ ‘All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,’ said he.
       “ ‘Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,’ I replied.
       “ ‘You stand fast?’
       “ ‘Absolutely.’

The total lack of substance in this exchange would be conspicuous even if an author less in love with detail than Doyle had written it. Moriarty recites the dates on which Holmes has “incommoded,” “inconvenienced” and “hampered” his criminal activities, but exactly what those activities are remains unspecified. In fact, throughout the entire story there isn’t a single clear description of a single criminal act Moriarty has performed.

The second Holmes/Moriarty encounter is their famous fight to the (mutual) death atop the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, which, again, we do not witness: Watson sees and describes the fittingly Gothic location but is cleverly waylaid and returns after the fact, reconstructing the fatal events (“I began to think of Holmes’s own methods and to try to practise them in reading this tragedy,” he explains—“It was, alas, only too easy to do”). His deductive efforts are helped along by the verbose note Holmes has left pinned under a rock for him, which, Holmes explains, Moriarty has magnanimously agreed to let him write (the implausibility of which somehow never occurs to the grief-stricken reader). The adversaries engage in a hand-to-hand struggle that propel them off the cliff together and into the falls (as the Swiss police help to determine after an examination of the scene) and so concludes Watson’s hagiography of “him whom I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.” Doyle had apparently succeeded in ridding himself of his problem, by means of a Nemesis as elemental and titanic as he is fortuitous and utterly free of substance or detail.

I I I

The Return of Sherlock Holmes (as heralded with enormous boldface type in The Strand Magazine) after ten years (or, three years of fictional time) was very much an unwilling concession to popular demand. Once “The Final Problem” was published (according to the uncredited Introduction to the 1976 Complete Sherlock Holmes Treasury),‡ “Doyle was looked upon as an assassin; people wept; men wore mourning bands to their offices, and Doyle was called a brute by at least one outraged reader.” But the author was resolute: “I couldn’t revive him if I would, at least not for years,” he wrote to a friend, “for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté-de-foie-gras, of which I once ate too much.” By 1901 Doyle’s palate was presumably cleansed (and the financial stakes had grown ridiculously high), prompting him to write and publish the carefully-backdated, novel-length The Hound of the Baskervilles, for which Londoners stood in line at the printer’s — and which remains the best known of Holmes’ adventures. (It takes place before Reichenbach Falls, and contains no references to Holmes’ “upcoming” demise.) The circulation of The Strand increased by 30,000 copies with the first installment and remained high throughout, obviously indicating which way the wind was blowing, and finally, Doyle (interviewed by Harper’s Weekly that same year), seemed to be softening in his resolve:

I know that my friend Dr. Watson is a most trustworthy man, and I gave the utmost credit to his story of the dreadful affair in Switzerland. He may have been mistaken, of course. It may not have been Mr. Holmes who fell from the ledge at all, or the whole affair might be the result of hallucination.

Compared to “The Final Problem,” “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903) is a straightforward crimefighting adventure, requiring none of the backing and filling of its predecessor — Doyle has a much easier time knocking over his house of cards than he did building it.** There are no tiresome conflicting “accounts” to rebut; instead, Watson hits the ground running in the opening paragraph, setting the stage — springtime, 1894, when “all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed” by a recent sensational murder — leading swiftly to his impulsive trip to the scene of the crime (old habits die hard) and his run-in with a decrepit bookseller, who follows him home, only to be unmasked as Holmes in disguise. This brilliant sequence (one of Doyle’s best) is so gratifying, so unabashedly indulgent and enjoyable, that the reader may be forgiven for not looking too closely at the explanation that follows, in which Holmes essentially takes “The Final Problem” apart.

Of course, Holmes did not fall off the cliff — he bested Moriarty in combat (“I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu,†† or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me”) and watched him plunge, alone, to his death. It wasn’t Doyle who got everything wrong; it was Watson, whose entire analysis of the crime scene (which Holmes has read, and characteristically disdains) may be summarily set aside. The “Napoleon of crime,” however, is gone for good, his purpose served, and all of his lieutenants and his entire criminal organization have been brought to justice, thanks to the information Holmes provided to the police before his and Watson’s departure for Switzerland. (Scotland Yard got their hands on this material thanks to instructions Holmes included in his final note to Watson, which, again, Moriarty quite preposterously allowed to be written.) So the entire Moriarty criminal edifice — the “web” with “a thousand radiations” — is now gone as quickly as it was conjured into place, except for Colonel Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s second-in-command (now “the most cunning and dangerous criminal in London”), whom Holmes is, of course, poised to capture. “I have a piece of work for us both to-night which, if we can bring it to a successful conclusion, will in itself justify a man’s life on this planet,” he finishes, and, a mere 2,000 words later, Moran is in custody and the entire grandiose saga is over, without a single criminal detail ever having been provided: Moran is guilty of the “unusual and inexplicable” murder that opened the story, but Doyle doesn’t even bother to provide a motive — “There we come into the realms of conjecture,” Holmes tells Watson, “where even the most logical mind may be at fault.”

And that’s it for James Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, Sherlock Holmes’ vaunted arch enemy. He is referred to in four other stories, always in passing, and always merely as a point of comparison, an abstracted absolute invoked as one would refer to Everest or Einstein; and he appears briefly in The Valley of Fear (1915), the last of the four Sherlock Holmes novels (the plot of which is backdated so as to precede the events in Switzerland), but he and Holmes never meet in that book, and Moriarty plays an indistinct, ancillary role. Doyle seemed to understand that he had created, not a character, not an antagonist, but a symbol — one that persists beyond its immediate utility (which, as we have seen, resulted directly from the mechanics of an author attempting to escape his self-imposed obligations to his characters), and, ultimately, is as enduring as Holmes himself.

I V

More than a century has passed, but Sherlock Holmes is still very much with us — perhaps, now more than ever (given his current tripartite revival on British and American television and in Hollywood) — and, with him, Professor James Moriarty. What’s especially interesting is how subsequent authors have struggled to fill in the gaps in Doyle’s spare outline: The BBC/Granada Television Sherlock Holmes series (1984-1994), starring Jeremy Brett, while unusually faithful to the original texts, took great pains to thread Moriarty into the fabric of many of the earlier adventures, making good on Holmes’ insistence (in “The Final Problem”) on his adversary’s ubiquity and the reach of his criminal influence — essentially, providing the narrative substance that Doyle only hinted at. Both Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey, Jr. have faced incarnations of Moriarty far more complex, devious and accomplished than anything found in Doyle’s work.

Probably the most intriguing (and devilishly sophisticated) extrapolation of Doyle’s techniques, however, was Nicholas Meyer’s excellent pastiche novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), which works aggressively in the opposite direction. After a clever, Nabokovian “preface,” in which he pretends to have come by a previously-undiscovered Watson manuscript, Meyer then creates a flawless simulacrum of Doyle’s style and format, in which “the truth” is “finally” revealed: James Moriarty was merely Holmes’ math tutor at university, and it’s only the detective’s cocaine-fueled delusions that have elevated him, in Holmes’ paranoid imagination, to the status of terrifying, over-arching crime-lord. As Meyer’s (perfectly Doyle-like) narrative goes on, Watson brings Holmes to Vienna to meet Sigmund Freud, who cures his addiction; when Watson asks how to broach this delicate subject to his readership, the now-lucid Holmes recommends that he disingenuously present the “Moriarty fantasy” as the truth (for which reason, “Watson” admits, “his” Moriarty characterization and recount of the confrontation were so implausibly sparse). Meyer “amends” Doyle by writing a “Watson” who corrects the “real” Watson — and so, in this superb flight of literary fancy, Moriarty recedes even further into the complex shadows of metafiction.

Does Sherlock Holmes find his meaning in opposition? Is Moriarty his bête noire or just a transparent device to free his creator from a cul-de-sac? Were it not for the extraordinary sophistication of Doyle’s presentational techniques and advanced meta-fictional apparatus, no such entity, so fleeting and impressionistic that he may barely be called a “character,” could achieve literary immortality. It’s especially interesting that all this sublime trickery arose from the circumstances of Doyle’s artistic fatigue: It was the author’s need to exile his greatest creation from his own thinking that Moriarty really represents — he is Holmes’ “adversary” in an internal struggle for the author’s fidelity. Holmes’ account of how he spent that exile, touring the perimeter of Doyle’s imagination, must be read simply for purposes of savoring the author’s pure joy in the invention of suggestive, intriguing, paper-thin illusion:

I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France.

It sounds like fun.

There’s a scene in Stephen King’s 1978 apocalyptic epic The Stand (in the 1990 extended edition, with the wonderful Berni Wrightson drawings and the lamentable Cyndi Lauper references) in which we are able to read several of the final top-secret reports by one of the United States government scientists who are desperately trying to contain the rapidly spreading plague (with its 99.4% communicability) that will soon kill nearly all of the human race, and which was created in a California military laboratory, presumably as part of a germ warfare program. We read the scientist’s rote recitation of his team’s most recent test results—they have been working tirelessly both to try to stop the geometric infection rate in the American Southwest and to understand why certain people are immune to “Project Blue,” their lethal superflu virus (which immunity King never explains) — and the facts and figures and sputum slide results and blood test antigen reactions are punctuated, as the memos continue, with more and more frequent interjections, breakdowns in formality, and other terrifying signs of the author’s increasingly wild panic, and his intimations of both his own mortality and the incipient end of the human race.

It’s a particularly memorable passage in a pop horror novel that’s unusually dependent (in its earlier chapters describing the plague days, before the world is swept clean of most of its population in preparation for the Biblical showdown to come) on “official” material like this memo: King deploys his unparalleled structural mastery to ensure that the glimpses we’re afforded of the “inside story” — the actions of the men who cause the end of the world — are both suggestively fleeting and painstakingly, totally believable. There aren’t monsters in these scenes (although the whole book more than lives up to King’s epigrammatic description as “this dark chest of wonders”), nor are there Strangelovian caricatures, grappling with “megadeaths” by means of insane polemics; these are reasonable people doing reasonable jobs, and the way that the mundane, circumspect, benign, officious military and scientific personnel gamely destroy the human race is probably the most realistic of all the elements in what turns out to be an elaborately fantastical story. The scientist concludes, “Those sons of bitches out in California did this job a little too well for my taste.”

That’s how I felt yesterday, seeing three news stories. Two of them were poll results: according to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind, a “staggering” 29% of Americans feel that “an armed revolution might be necessary” (in “the next few years”), “in order to protect our liberties.” (It breaks down along party lines: 44% of self-identified Republicans agree, and 61% of self-identified Democrats disagree.) And, according to a new study reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, self-identified Conservatives are less likely to buy light bulbs (and other consumer products) that are identified as cutting carbon emissions, reducing “carbon footprint” or in any other way upholding “green” values — even if they are saving money in doing so — “because they so strongly object to the thought of climate change.”

The third story — about a Northern Virgina cabdriver and Iraq war veteran, who also served in the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, and who is Muslim, being physically attacked by a passenger who called him a “jihadist” and compared him to the Boston marathon bombers — can be dismissed as a statistically irrelevant “one-time” event, as can, I suppose, the fourth of the day’s stories that caught my eye, the North Carolina arrest of rapper Christopher “Xstrav” Beatty for refusing to hand over his can of AriZona iced tea to a police officer when asked to do so; the can of iced tea, of course, recalling the Trayvon Martin shooting, which was itself an unusual incident of little statistical significance despite its ongoing incendiary effects. But the polls I’m citing are real, and scientific, and scare me more than even the most egregious “isolated” instance of American stupidity, intolerance, cruelty and paranoia.

The men and women who will not buy light bulbs because they have been re-designed to protect our environment against the threats of global warming, as well as the men and women who believe that they must own guns to protect themselves against the government (when it has already been clearly demonstrated that the second amendment was ratified to preserve slavery — in other words, the diametric opposite of the power vector imagined by today’s pro-gun-violence advocates) are part of a new breed of Americans whose resistance to reason and truth is profoundly frightening because it is not experientially inspired and cannot be understood to represent the regional persistence of intractable, retrograde pockets of backward thinking. They don’t think this way because they’re cut off; they think this way because they’re tuned in: the polled ideas about global warming and guns have been put there by means of systematic propaganda, astroturfing (the effects of which I became depressingly familiar with during my two-year stint at the nonprofit media forum Center for Communication) and programmatically distorted “reporting” dating back at least to the Reagan-era deregulation of the FCC that relaxed ownership rules, allowing five “Fortune 500″ companies to determine, today, 80% of what Americans watch on television.

So the National Rifle Association, which, after their May 21, 1977 leadership coup, shed its obligations to its membership and ceded control to a new board of directors comprised entirely of representatives of armaments companies, and the much broader industrial lobby who stand to lose billions of profits should their activities be constrained within even the most modest climate-aware regulations (and who, along with the NRA and the food lobby and the “Club for Growth” and other well-funded top-down advocacy groups, have established an unbreakable stranglehold on even the most urgent topical debates), have created a situation where majorities of polled Americans support their initiatives without even understanding why they are taking the positions they’re taking. Every time a “person in the street” with a microphone in his or her face talks about the dangers of “the deficit” or a state representative won’t support Islamic prayers before legislative functions because she doesn’t “condone terrorism,” the broad, lasting corrosive effects of these institutionalized dogmatic agendae become more and more deeply and irrevocably entrenched.

The Stand is, of course, a novel about Armageddon, in so many words (with the biblical overtones and undertones very much front and center), although King never quite maps out the connections between the human-created apocalyptic disaster (the concept of which clearly has its roots in the post-Watergate institutional mistrust of the time) and the broader, more overtly supernatural (and spiritual) elements of his story. But I like the way he left it vague, because it makes his allegory all the more applicable to the present day, when an alarming number of people are not deterred by the concept of global disaster, since they are looking forward to the “End Times” (“foretold” as prompted by Middle East violence) and the cosmic moral reckoning it will provide them. Forty-two years after Nixon consultant Roger Ailes sat in the Town Hall of California with his team of political operatives and laid out the armature for controlling the public discourse, more and more Americans believe that they have their own, good reasons for not buying the new reduced-carbon light bulbs and not giving up their guns (no matter how much slaughter occurs) and not providing Muslim Americans with basic civil rights and not doing anything to arrest the ongoing upward transfer of wealth or the loss of our manufacturing base or the failure of our public schools. Those sons of bitches out in California did this job a little too well for my taste.

Since the Oscars there have been dozens of articles I’ve noticed links to, and some I’ve skimmed or read, in different kinds of publications, about how “everyone” (or “EVERY WOMAN ON THE INTERNET”) can’t stand Anne Hathaway, and I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of it. (See The New York Times, Huffington Post, Slate, The Daily Beast, Express, CNN, and Salon for just a few of the elaborate theories.) Usually, offscreen shortcomings of movie stars don’t really affect my judgment of their work (or, more important, of their onscreen personae, which is a far more ephemeral, elusive, valuable, indefinable quality); I didn’t stop liking Woody Allen 15 years ago when we all learned that the real man wasn’t the moral paragon he played (and wrote) onscreen, and I don’t have any problem enjoying Tom Cruise or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis movies. (It’s true that Willis isn’t as egregious an example as those other three but he just seems like he’s generally kind of a jerk and the Kevin Smith anecdotes about directing him seem to bear this out.) I have no problem enjoying Clint Eastwood’s onscreen presence even though he supported Ross Perot and talks to furniture on TV.

But this is different. I’m in the same boat: she drives me nuts. And I haven’t seen most of her movies, which usually makes me suspend judgment, and I thought she was totally fantastic in The Dark Knight Rises (after her very first scene, I whispered to my friend, “I rescind all criticism.”) And the clip of her singing that big song seemed very good to me (and I generally don’t go in for staggeringly consequential Broadway numbers); I was fascinated by the “live singing” gimmick and actually came very close to going ahead and seeing the movie, before I came to my senses. Even Joan Rivers let me down: I thought she, if anyone, could nail it, however crassly; could put her finger on what nobody seems able to define, and I listend with bated breath when she was asked what she thought of Hathaway. But Rivers whiffed it, and just made gagging noises; even the queen of horrible putdowns (who, I remember, called Mondale and Ferraro “Fritz and tits” 29 years ago) came up empty.

But last night, I finally figured out what’s wrong with Hathaway: it comes down to one word. I gave in and followed a link to another think piece about Hathaway’s Oscar night behavior, wherein she’s quoted as responding to a question about getting married and then winning the Academy Award. And she said it was “the cherry on top of a wonderful, wonderful dish of vegan ice cream.”

And that’s it — that one word explains the whole thing. Not “a dish of ice cream,” which is a fairly straightforward conclusion to the frequently-used “cherry” metaphor: the cherry is something extra, the better thing after the (more important) good thing. (Olympic athletes talk this way; everybody understands.) And not just a “wonderful, wonderful” dish of ice cream, denoting excitement, breathlessness, winsomeness, and other good things that we like to see when people win things and are charmingly flustered. Vegan ice cream.

Because Anne Hathaway is a vegan, and she’s going to make sure that, while she’s on television, she’ll use the opportunity to proselytize for her cause. (Which I have nothing against, either in terms of form or content: I had no trouble with Marlon Brando’s stunt with Sacheen Littlefeather or, especially, Michael Moore’s challenge to George W. Bush. I like it when the Oscars are “politicized.”) But look what she did: she stuck that carefully-considered word — totally unnecessary for her simile: it’s ice cream; it tastes good and you put cherries on it no matter what kind it is — into the middle of a sentence that was supposed to be so natural and off-the-cuff that she said “wonderful” twice. She’s “gushing,” but she’s also making a point.

And that’s the whole ball game; that’s what’s wrong with her. Not only is she condescending to me and everyone listening (because she figures that this is an appropriate opportunity to advertise and to advocate her dietary preferences); she’s insulting us (mildly insulting us, admittedly) because, like somebody who “accidentally” name-drops their school or their job title or salary, she thinks we won’t notice what she’s doing; she genuinely believes that it will come across as an inadvertent nuance in her excited word-flow, and not as a carefully placed node of self-aggrandizement or advocacy.

I don’t know about you but I hate people who do that: brag or lecture in a way that I’m not supposed to notice. So that’s what’s wrong with Anne Hathaway; the subject is now closed.

It’s strange to realize that you’re old enough to have seen the world change. The idea comes out of nowhere when you don’t expect it and aren’t looking for it but the frisson of recognition is always very strong — we grew up hearing our parents and grandparents talk this way and dismissing it as imposture, as willful dissociation from the present, so it’s disorienting to suddenly realize that you’re doing the same thing.

Two trains of memory collided this weekend, forcing me into the individual/historical fugue state I’m describing — but I wasn’t doing anything special; just catching up on some current events. Finding a bootleg copy of the acclaimed movie How to Survive a Plague (which just lost the 2012 Best Documentary Feature Oscar to the superb Searching For Sugar Man) and starting to watch it, I was immediately plunged back into what Gawker lovingly calls (in a pictorial feature on the passing of Ed Koch) “the gritty 1980s New York.” The Gawker selection of photographs and videos (including some bland, plotless VHS footage of subway platforms and graffiti-covered trains that had me stupefied with recognition and nostalgia) showed a vanished world, and the ensuing commentary plunged into the questions of which era was better or worse, and in what ways.

But the opening sequences of Plague are much more forceful (you see the World Trade Center immediately and the pain only escalates from there) as the 1987 “Act Up” march on City Hall unreels in riveting, ponderous amateur-video montages. Activist and editor Garance Granke-Ruta’s brilliant memoir in The Atlantic (in which the author’s direct involvement in those agonizing struggles of the second Reagan Administration — the “plague years” before AZT and other drugs were available at all — are searingly described) hadn’t prepared me for the shock of the footage itself; the screams and the police violence and the callous press conferences and news features playing out against the brightly sunlit, cigarette-smoke-drenched Manhattan that I recognize so vividly from my high school years.

My first strong memory of Reagan’s first term (aside from his shooting) was his brutal response to the PATCO air traffic controller’s strike in 1981, which Alan Greenspan has called “perhaps the most important” of Reagan’s domestic actions. My anti-labor relatives in the Midwest applauded what Reagan had done, the precedent he’d set by firing all those Federal employees (their positions have not changed) and the ensuing contentious Christmastime discussions were among the first overtly political arguments I personally involved myself in. By 1983, when Lech Walesa got his Nobel Peace Prize, I was calling myself “a liberal Democrat” (although I was years away from voting), and I understood the narrative that defined Walesa’s triumphs as a counterstrike to Reagan’s actions — a progressive victory in the struggle between labor and capital, no less.

But in 1983 I was also sitting in a friend’s East 72nd Street apartment watching a VHS tape of Eddie Murphy’s concert movie Delirious, which had just come out, and which my friend’s mother had already seen and described as “just the raunchiest thing” — I remember envying that kind of parental hipness and permissiveness (she knew exactly what was on it and let us watch it anyway). The recent HBO roundtable special “Talking Funny” (with Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais, Louis C. K. and Jerry Seinfeld) had me thinking about older standup routines and (on the same day I was watching How to Survive a Plague) I ended up following some YouTube links to a complete, uploaded copy of the Murphy movie.

And it’s all about “faggots.” Murphy spends at least the first half hour of his act running through a series of riffs and bits about gays, “homos,” and “fags” that has his audience gasping for breath because they’re laughing so hard. Leaning forward peering at the miniature YouTube playback, watching Murphy (whose transvestite-arrest incident was 14 years in the future) strut and preen onstage, insisting that he “has to keep moving” so that “the faggots don’t stare at my ass” and doing mincing impressions of real and imagined homosexuals, I didn’t laugh once. I was transfixed by my memory of sitting on my friend’s carpet late at night in the summer of 1983 and smiling along with every joke, while wincing in pain and embarrassment at the same material, today.

Lech Walesa made headlines this past weekend for his universally-condemned remarks about how homosexuals in Parliament should “be behind a wall” (comments that he apparently refuses to recant). Walesa’s “legacy destroying” statement is being condemned around the world on the same weekend that the Associated Press and others are reporting that a baby born with HIV “is apparently cured.”

Thirty years after Walesa’s Nobel Prize and Eddie Murphy’s movie, the Village Voice‘s Michael Musto laments that How to Survive a Plague lost the Oscar, but points out that the structure of the voting procedure made that loss inevitable: “After all, these are the people who wouldn’t even look at Brokeback Mountain because it made them squeamish.” And yet, Ang Lee’s new, second Oscar win is being seen as “making amends” for that 2005 oversight. On my television Ed Koch is framed in blurry analog video answering hostile questions about his labeling of the Act Up marchers as “fascists” while on my computer Eddie Murphy’s audience is applauding his opening routine about the “nightmares he has about gay people” and I’m realizing that I’ve seen the world change.

When Francis Bacon used this painting as the basis for his 1953 Study after Velásquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (the famous “screaming Pope”), he insisted that his intentions weren’t political, as he had nothing against Popes; he just needed “an excuse to use these colours, and you can’t give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner.” But judge for yourself:

I saw this painting in London at least a decade ago and I remember reading at the time that the superimposed face was from another source — and a Huffington Post article confirms that Bacon used a still from Eisenstein’s 1925 silent Battleship Potemkin (the one with the baby carriage going down the stairs, which got ripped off in The Untouchables), showing a nun screaming in the moment of being shot “while witnessing a bloodbath killing.”

Bacon (whom Margaret Thatcher called “the man who paints those dreadful pictures” — could you ask for higher praise?) died in 1992, but the savagery of his worldview and the particular lens through which he viewed both ecumenical and secular power has particular relevance today. Who knew, back then, that Sinead O’Connor was ahead of her time? Bacon didn’t throw his career away (as O’Connor did) attacking the Papacy, but the accumulated thousand cuts seem to be finally taking their toll.

ADDENDUM: I just remembered that Jack Nicholson’s Joker made his henchmen deface all the paintings in the Gotham Museum of Art, but stopped them from touching a Francis Bacon, saying, “I kind of like this one.” (It was Figure With Meat, 1954, and thank you Wikipedia.) This uncharacteristically urbane touch from Tim Burton in turn reminds me of Brad Pitt’s alleged insistence that he be allowed to smash a “New Beetle” in Fight Club (wherein his character also both directs his minions to “Destroy a piece of corporate art” and — again at Pitt’s insistence — hurls an epithet at Martha Stewart). Intermingling threads of politics and art…a phenomenon that’s certainly older than the Papacy.

But I was curious about Levine’s death, so I looked him up on Wikipedia and found the usual wealth of information, including the fact that Jules Feiffer called him “the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th Century.” (Feiffer may be too much of a snob to consider Mort Drucker.) Then, after a rundown of Levine’s artistic accomplishments and accolades, there are a series of quotations about him. Vanity Fair says:

“Levine put together a facebook of human history … the durability of those Levine depicted, plus the unique insight with which he drew them, guarantees the immortality of his works.”

Then the Times weighs in:

The New York Times described Levine’s illustrations as “macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates” that were “heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles … to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg”. The paper commented: “His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one.”

And, finally, John Updike:

“Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a comic art ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease. Levine is one of America’s assets. In a confusing time, he bears witness. In a shoddy time, he does good work.”

I mean, I ask you. Every Updike utterance (with the sole exception of his New Yorker art criticism, which was uncharacteristically restrained, like Cary Grant’s performance in Notorious) just drips with this predictable, overcooked lack of form and weakness of content. Updike’s writing is like a master-class in how not to do it: here, in 77 words, is the world’s most mundane point combined with an ignorant observation and delivered with that particular Updike combination of archness and feigned self-abnegation. (In other words, the issue isn’t really Levine; it’s the urgency of Updike’s dual self-description as both charmingly “confused” by his time and yet critically aware enough of its “shoddy” qualities to discern and admire the yeoman’s job Levine does.) Look at the other two quotes: they’re short, and they make sense. Updike takes twice as long to say less than half as much, if that. Who’s “panicking”? Why do Levine’s portraits of Martin Luther or William Blake have anything to do with “unease” or “haunting”? How is ours an “exacerbated” age? What the hell is he talking about, anyway?

I give the man credit for the stylistic advances of Rabbit Run (although he went back to that well way too many times). But everything he writes has this same leaden, circuitous quality. I’d love to be proven wrong (some people swear by The Centaur) but I’m not holding my breath.

“There is one man — and only one! — who is so old, drunk, ruined, hopeless, self-destructive, sick, failed, and bitter (and yet who yet once had promise and potential to rival anyone whom you wish to compare him to); who is so estranged from all loved ones, family and former friends, who has sunk to depths of destructive self-pity, alcoholism and poverty…that only he has the towering moral authority to hold forth on every conceivable subject and issue blistering, devastating critiques of everyone in the vicinity. Others will claim the throne, but he will defeat them all…his ruination renders him infallible as the ultimate judge and jury of the entire dismal pageant of humanity, since his bitterness, vitriol and bile bestow sufficient legitimacy to destroy all optimism in the name of ‘truth.’”

I just get such a kick out of the Pirates trilogy (the Gore Verbinski movies; not the fool’s-gold fourth entry that I won’t even see). It’s such an aesthetic triumph; it’s such delightfully arty populism. I love how the writers “reverse engineered a trilogy” by finding inconsequential, throwaway elements in the first movie (Captain Jack Sparrow’s compass “that does not point north;” the ad-libbed Johnny Depp line about the native tribe who “made me their Chief”) and using them to extrapolate an overarching story that goes all the way to Shanghai, a neo-Homeric underworld (“Davy Jones’ locker,” where the rocks ambulate like crabs) and a thematic concept of the New World and the passing of the last of the post-Enlightenment, “Age of Exploration” elements out of history. I love the hyperrealist, storybook-tinted photography and the groundbreaking CGI effects (that put ILM back on the map and lined them up for Iron Man, Star Trek and more of the eye-popping work they’ve done in their current “digital baroque” period). I love how the British bad guys in their powdered wigs and the supernatural bad guys agree to work together. I love how Depp manages to keep his ridiculous, wonderful (Oscar-nominated) schtick going perfectly through the saga (which reminds me of how Christopher Lloyd was reluctant to do the Back to the Future sequels because he was afraid he “couldn’t reproduce the energy levels” of the first one). I love the contrivances by which Elizabeth Swann remains an important character throughout (and is never reduced to ornamentation or trophy-status). I love how every single minor character in the first movie is brought back and utilized to the utmost in the sequels (like how James Norrington, the man Elizabeth spurned, is re-discovered in Tortuga, drinking and depressed, and eventually sacrifices himself for her). I love the Keith Richards cameo. I love the carved-gold title and the copperplate typography (with the letters reflected in the sapphire ocean waves). I love the textures; the seaweed and driftwood and ground-glass and grime, the sand and dirt and canvas and linen, the sea foam and rum bottles and lantern oil and candles (you can nearly smell all of it, and the briny salt-water and Caribbean wind). I love the crazy, acid-trip plotting, and the psychedelic, hallucinogenic abstractions and surrealism that can be found “at world’s end.” I love how they just spun all of the above out of nothing at all; just looked at that creaky old amusement park ride and then put their imaginative pedals to the metal, expanding it into an enormous, mythologically and historically dense fantasy with a whimsical, melancholy tone halfway between the dystopian gravitas of the Matrix world and the retro-toned pop art of the “Indiana Jones” saga. They deserved the fortune they made.