“Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you’re wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you…they’re Marxist radicals…these guys are worse than Robespierre from the French Revolution…they’ll kill everybody.”
Not bad.
And he gets away with it. In fact, presenting a strong point of view is one reason millions of Glenn Beck fans tune in. Ditto Rush Limbaugh. And Laura Ingraham. Not to mention Jay Leno. They all get away with the outrageous comment. That’s why we tune in.
It’s all in the timing. Great timing. Not in the way that comedians and acrobats mean when they talk about timing. Timing in the cosmic sense, not the comic sense. Because these days the cutting remark or the brutal putdown is media
meat and potatoes, devoured by the multitudes, possibly even you (and me). That is, as long as those putdowns aren’t personally aimed at you (me) or yours (mine).
There not much you can say today that will rain down real trouble on your head. Religion, politics and lifestyle choices not being among those rainmakers. But listen up, children, this was not always so. When I was just a young twerp, my
heart was broken. Not by some cheap hussy because I was still not of an age for that (thank God!) No, what it was was words. And like the man on the radio says, here’s the rest of the story…
Picture an opening scene on a weekday afternoon in late summer, a rambling old house in a small town, yours truly, maybe eleven-ish, flopped down on the floor, pages of the Greenville Daily News spread out on the living room rug. My older sister in her room is spinning 45’s on her record player. Mom is in the kitchen, busy with dinner maybe. The afternoon sun floods through the porch windows, dust motes float in its path. Me, absorbed in the comic strips.
After a day spent playing ball or catching frogs, I usually settled in on the front steps to wait impatiently for the paperboy to come flying past on his trusty Schwinn. He cuts across our scraggly lawn, tossing the News in the direction of our porch
while narrowly missing catastrophe with the big catalpa tree in the front yard.
I quickly gather up the paper and I head for the living room. I always read the
funnies before flipping through the rest of the paper, which to be honest,
doesn’t much interest me. Blondie and Pogo and Joe Palooka and the rest get my
undivided attention, but the one I always read first—my go-to strip if you will—was
Al Capp’s Li’l Abner. Many consider it to be the best comic strip ever. I certainly did. Not that the Yokum’s number one son was my ”ideel” or anything, but we did share one thing in common. We both loved Fearless Fosdick, a comic strip within a comic strip.
Fearless Fosdick’s pitched an on-going battle against Boston crime. I remember that when he got shot, it would, leave large bullet holes you could actually see through in his two-dimensional comic torso. Small birds sometimes were
seen flying through them, but by the next panel he would be completely whole
again. Designed to appeal to pre-adolescent male minds of all ages, Fearless parodied the long running Dick Tracy. When Fearless Fosdick took over the strip for a week or two, my excitement could barely be contained waiting for the next
installment.
I don’t know if kids today have that same tingly anticipation waiting for the next poke on Facebook or another hundred and forty characters to tweet them along. Text, not talk? Anyway the funny pages ain’t what they used to be. They’ve shrunk in size, physically toning down both the artwork and the punch lines. Looking back at Fearless Fosdick today, I suppose we could deconstruct him into a symbol of white male, pro-gun, law and order orthodoxy. Or was that what he was
making fun of? What was Al Capp thinking when he drew those panels?
Capp of course was pretty well known back in the day, a celebrity cartoonist with a 
higher profile then than either Charles Schultz or Jules Feiffer would have later.
After all, he invented the Shmoo and Sadie Hawkins Day. And let’s don’t forget General Bullmoose who may have influenced a young Rupert Murdock. Or Evil-Eye Fleegle whose “whammy” could flatten a grown man. Or Joe BTFSPLK, the world’s worst jinx with a dark cloud perpetually over his head. There was Marryin’ Sam, a preacher who specializes in $2 weddings, not to mention Stupefyin’ Jones so drop-dead gorgeous that any male who glimpsed her was rooted to the spot. To name, as they say, only a few. Capp also wrote a syndicated newspaper column, appeared regularly on television including both the Today show and the Tonight Show, and of course, was heard over the radio for many years.
But the hippies or the yippies or the yuppies or the puppies or something set Capp off.
He began to exhibit the dreaded symptoms of conservatism. He became—OMG!—controversial. Comments made on TV cost him those gigs. He showed up at John and Yoko’s anti-war bed-in and started a verbal pillow fight. Well, as a kid I didn’t really follow it all, but I felt bad that one of my heroes was portrayed in the press as a cranky,
old nut-job. No internet then. No Twitter or Facebook. A guy who was on the wrong side of the argument didn’t have much of a voice. So as a kid I felt betrayed by Li’l Abner’s creator because the world seemed to be of one voice about him, and well, there you go.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century. The only bad publicity really is your obituary and even that may not be true if they can only bring Steve Jobs back to life. With hundreds of cable channels, with the web having taken over the world, and the huge popularity of talk radio, there are platforms for almost any voice. A great time to be alive controversial. And while the insults fly back and forth nowadays, all they tend to do is increase your tribe. If Glenn Beck is suddenly off TV, he comes up with his own online channel with a few million viewers.
If Al Capp had only had YouTube or podcasting or even a spot on Fox News. Today, he could have been bigger than ever. Fearless Fosdick might take on the Occupy Wall Street movement, or on the other hand, maybe spoof the bankers. Or maybe do both.
I admit that I get nostalgic for those childhood days. I don’t know if they seemed simpler because I was simpler or if things really were less complicated. But I have to stop and ask myself whether those golden times were really better when a few taste makers could put the word out about what we should be thinking and actually make it stick. Poor Al, he had a great ride but in the end they did him in.
Nonetheless, I did have Fearless Fosdick.
