Originally published October 16, 1992, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #987
Ramblings about a couple of things:
I’ve had the interesting experience of witnessing the polar opposites of comic book collecting within a 48-hour period.
On Friday, I flew out to Austin, Texas, and did a signing at a store down there called The Book Source. A very nice place, I might observe, with a solid assortment of SF titles and signed editions.
(The eyes of one of the owners, in fact, lit up when I mentioned that I have two books signed by Stephen King. They’re not for sale, though. Actually it’s somewhat interesting in that those two books chronicle the beginning of my writing career. This was back in the days when King still did public signings in bookstores, something that–to my knowledge–he doesn’t do any more. Considering some of the fruitcakes who are out there and the nature of much of what he writes, I can’t say I blame him.
The first is a copy of Firestarter, and at the time I told King that I also did some writing on the side, and hoped to make a career selling short stories to SF magazines. And he wrote on my copy, “Keep up with your writing.” The next Stephen King signing I went to was a year later, and I gushingly informed him that I had sold my first short story, to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. And he wrote in my copy of Danse Macabre, “Congratulations on your first sale.” So 10 years later I’m writing comic books, and I’m in an anthology called Shock Rock with Stephen King. Go figure.
But I digress…)
At any rate, I sat there and signed lotsa books. And at one point, a young man about 13 or so, along with his parents, handed me five copies of Spider-Man 2099 to sign.
I said the line I frequently say in such instances, which is, “Now I hope you’re planning to read every single one of these copies.” And the kid looked at me with surprise and said, “No.” And his mother put in, “He doesn’t read any of them.” I know I shouldn’t be surprised and frustrated every time I encounter this mindset, because it’s so common. And yet, I am.
“You’re not going to crack open the comic and read the story so you can find out what the character’s all about?” I asked the kid.
He shook his head.
At which point I tried to explain to him that his attitude was tremendously frustrating to a writer. A writer’s bottom-line desire is to tell stories. Is to communicate.
(Which, I must admit, is why I always feel a little sad whenever I run into someone who tells me that he only writes for himself, and then tosses his material into a desk drawer and never shows it to anyone. To my mind, that’s kind of like having sex by yourself. It’s OK and it’s safe, but the sound of one hand clapping is a hollow one.)
When I write a story, I’m doing so with the attention of getting it to my audience. But if the audience then takes the story and puts it in a bag without even reading it, it’s aggravating. I want the buyer to experience the story. To get involved with the characters. Not just because it means that he’ll buy the next issue (although that certainly wouldn’t upset me) but also because I, as a writer, find it gratifying if I’m able to get readers involved in the fictional lives of my cast. That’s what it’s all about, after all.
So when someone buys the issue and doesn’t read it–not so much as one single copy–the communication act has been thwarted.
Writus interruptus, as it were.
I tried to explain this (without the sexual allusions, of course) to the kid. I am going to hope that he understood it to some degree, and might actually read the dámņëd thing.
But I’m not counting on it heavily.
This, however, is to be contrasted with my appearance less than two days later at “New York Is Book Country.” This is an annual major-league street fair held on Fifth Avenue that’s analogous to the American Booksellers Association conference, except that it’s in the street and anyone can come. Publishers and booksellers set up booths, all to increase general awareness of What’s Out There.
In previous years Marvel Comics had set up there. But this year, no one had taken the initiative to do so. Why take the effort and risk getting some positive publicity for once? Maybe DC will get off the dime and step in to fill the breach next year, if Marvel can’t be bothered.
Comics, however, did not go unrepresented, as Jim Hanley’s Universe was, as near as I could tell, the largest display in the entire place. (Jim Hanley, the only comic dealer with the guts to admit that, as far as he’s concerned, the cosmos centers around him. Other dealers believe it about themselves, but only Jim has enough chutzpah to publicize it.) At one point, I ran into Walt Simonson and Danny Fingeroth in front of Hanley’s and immediately started bowing and shouting, “I’m not worthy!” Then Chris Claremont showed up. Louise Simonson materialized moments later, wearing her hair long and looking like she just stepped out of a Lucille Roberts ad. A mini-convention, and none of the customers bustling around knew.
Either that or they just didn’t care.
Earlier, however, I was doing a signing at another location, at the booth of a store called Science Fiction, Comics and More! (The store itself is down on Chambers Street near the World Trade Center.) It was a lot of fun, particularly when old friends such as former assistant Sandy Schechter and current Marvel Age maven Steve Saffel stopped by.
And at one point, a boy–about the same age as the one in Austin–came by and was looking at the back issues of my work that were on display. He seemed eager and interested, and his father was making it clear that he was going to support his son on whatever he wanted to buy.
He was trying to decide between two back issues of Hulk.
One was in significantly better shape than the other which, from a collecting standpoint, made it the preferable buy. But the banged-up one was, I thought, the better story. So when the kid asked my advice as to what he should get, I asked him if he was planning to read it.
He looked at me as if I’d completely lost my mind.
“Of course I’m going to read it,” he said. His tone indicated he thought the question ridiculous.
He bought the more banged-up one–and, in fact, the store manager decided to knock a few bucks off it when he realized what poor shape it was in, which I thought was pretty classy.
Of course you read a comic. What else would any sensible person do? I think I’m going to try and put a fumetti book together called 101 Uses for a Collectible Comic. And it would feature pros using clearly valuable comics as coasters, fish wrapping, stuck into bicycle spokes, etc. And of course the 101st picture would have to be mom throwing them all away.
***
It took four months, but finally the other shoe dropped.
“What planet is he on?” demanded Murphy Brown rhetorically in response to Veep Dan Quayle’s assertion that Candace Bergen’s character is glorifying single motherhood.
Yes, it was four months ago that Quayle decried a lack of “family values” in the United States, stating that Murphy was the glamorizing epitome of the single mother.
Now there’s two levels on which to examine this–and the second one actually relates to comic books. So bear with me while I discuss the first one.
Quayle managed to sidestep all of the marvelously eloquent points Murphy made (for the sake of brevity, I’ll just treat Murphy as a real person from here on, rather than constantly refer to her as “Bergen’s character” or say that “the program’s writers said.” After all, if it was good enough for him…) by stating that Hollywood still didn’t “get it” (whatever “it” is) and that the hour-long season opener was a “campaign commercial,” presumably for the Democrats.
This is, of course, a silly comment, since he’s the one who made the non-issue of “family values” a campaign issue in the first place. The family values business is the latest, and most pathetic, attempt by the administration to try to avoid taking responsibility for anything.
The Bush Administration, considering everything that it has lacked in the areas of education, child support, family health care, social programs, jobs, and everything that goes towards improving family life–has more than made up for that lack in the one arena in which it truly excels: placing blame.
Unwilling to support something even so fundamental as the Family Leave Bill (a bill which would have guaranteed unpaid leave for people with newborn, newly adopted, or sick children, something which already is commonplace in many other countries), the Bush Administration is instead playing a game of misdirection.
Members of the current administration find fault everywhere but in themselves. The current decay of the country is the fault of Congress. It’s the fault of the Japanese. It’s the fault, ultimately, of the people–or, at least, the wrong kind of people. It’s the fault of anyone but he who occupies the Oval Office.
And they have the temerity to say that Clinton doesn’t want to take responsibility for his actions? What’s amazing is that this simple magician’s misdirection trick is reliable. It worked four years ago, when the pledge of allegiance and Willie Horton managed to draw attention away from the excesses of Reaganomics. And now we have this. Family values.
The thing is, the morale of many families is, indeed, very low. So is the morale of the country. Any thinking person would be inclined to chalk that up to lack of leadership. But, obviously, the administration doesn’t want to say that. So its spokespeople invented this “family values” blanket and wrapped themselves in it, just as they did with the flag four years ago. It could, however, wind up being a shroud instead of a blanket, if enough people don’t fall for it.
But here’s the second level, namely: Dan Quayle reminds me of Green Arrow.
Follow: Quayle now states that he wasn’t attacking single mothers in his earlier remarks. In fact, he had never even seen Murphy Brown before he attacked it. (Why clutter an opinion with facts?) In fact, when watching the program for the first time Sept. 21, he did so accompanied by 10 single moms, just to show that he has nothing against them.
This despite the fact that the most reasonable inference to be drawn from his remarks four months ago is that women who elect to have a child solo ought to have scarlet letters stitched on their clothes. To speak in a derogatory fashion of single mothers being glamorized is to say, implicitly, that they’re not deserving of that treatment. Which means there’s something wrong with them.
His claim now is that he was attacking absentee fathers–which is just dandy, except he never made any mention of the absentee father of Murphy’s son. He attacked Murph.
Now here’s the interesting part.
I think Quayle was telling the truth. I think he really doesn’t have anything against single mothers.
Even more than that–I think he believes women should have a right to choose abortion as an alternative to childbirth.
Hëll, I know he believes that. Quayle and Bush and their respective wives were all presented with a scenario of their daughter (or granddaughter) stuck with an unwanted pregnancy.
And three out of the four said that they would support the woman’s right to have an abortion (the holdout being Marilyn Quayle, who said she wouldn’t let her daughter have an abortion.)
(I’m sure her daughter must have been thrilled to hear that.)
Last time I checked, 75% support of keeping abortion legal is roughly parallel to the national average in opinion polls.
So why has Quayle turned into such a hardcase? I think it was summed up by Frank Fontana in last night’s episode when he tried to calm a distraught Murphy with a contemptuous, consider-the-source brushoff of “It’s Dan Quayle!” Here was a guy with ZPG–Zero Popularity Growth. When people thought of him at all, it was as a living, breathing joke.
A walking argument for voting Democratic–or Independent, or Communist–anything but having four more years of this guy a heartbeat away from the presidency.
And someone somewhere said, “We gotta do something about this. We have to convince the American public that Dan Quayle can kick butt and take names.” Which is why the whole thing reminds me of Green Arrow.
Green Arrow, for decades, had no personality to speak of.
None. He was Batman but nowhere remotely as interesting. A bored millionaire with a kid sidekick and some trick arrows. A vapor, a null-and-void.
And then, overnight, he changed.
Literally overnight.
Suddenly, from nowhere, he had a beard. He had a moustache.
He had a new costume. And, most importantly, he had an attitude.
Y’see, here were all these Marvel characters with angst and attitudes, and the DC stable was whitebread through and through.
And someone decided, “Enough. We have to show that DC heroes can kick butt and take names.” There was an air of unreality about it. Suddenly Green Arrow was unrecognizable from what he had been before. Suddenly he spit and snarled. Suddenly he was the moralizing conscience of the DC Universe.
It wasn’t remotely realistic. People don’t just do a 180 like that. It was painfully clear that an editorial and/or creative hand had reached him, grabbed Green Arrow by the shoulder, swung him around and commanded, “You’ve been going in this direction until now and no one cares about you. So now you’re going to go in this direction, and our constituency will know that you’re a Real Bad Dude.” And yet, despite the artificiality, it worked to a large degree. And I think that’s what we’re seeing now with Quayle.
What has gone before doesn’t matter. Some political editors somewhere have suddenly grafted a new personality on to him, and he’s trying to cling to that personality with all the hopes of someone who is praying that his political career doesn’t end four years from now–or, worse, four months from now. And, like Green Arrow, Quayle apparently has little say in the matter.
Then again… Green Arrow is a fictional character. He does battle with fictional characters.
Now Dan Quayle, on the other hand, is a real person–who does battle with fictional characters.
Cue the Twilight Zone music.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, regrets that he has inadvertently kept people hanging. Yes, the Eisner plaque and the computer came through the crash unscathed. The soft-sided suitcase, which was filled with clothes, acted as a cushion. And thanks also to the concerned medicos in the audience, but the neck hasn’t hurt for a month now, so I don’t think a visit to a chiropractor is called for. It’s so nice to know you care.)
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Good reading to start the day. Thanks for that.
Interesting that this would mention Green Arrow at a time DC seems to be trying, once again, to make him a maverick. It’s like Bullwinkle and the hat sometimes.
I assume you meant “paid leave” rather than “unpaid leave” there.
No, I think was really unpaid leave. As opposed to being fired.
Corey
And, it being unpaid leave makes Bush’s opposition to it all the more shameful.
The only times I ever read any Green Arrow stories were in the ’70s, so the bearded guy with an attitude is the only one I even knew about.
Have you considered writing a Green Arrow vs Dan Quayle story? That might be kind of cool. (Has anybody seen Dan Quayle since the mid-90s? You might have to explain to the readers who he is.)
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Yeah, he was on TV a couple of weekends ago talking about the reconciliation process and cluelessly making a fool out of himself (as per usual) while doing it.
“To my mind, that’s kind of like having sex by yourself. It’s OK and it’s safe, but the sound of one hand clapping is a hollow one.”
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I’m never going to be able to hear that expression without giggling again.
Jerry Chandler,
“Yeah, he was on TV a couple of weekends ago talking about the reconciliation process and cluelessly making a fool out of himself (as per usual) while doing it.”
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Didn’t see that, but he was still right in 1992 regarding this.
Have you ever met a GOP talking point you DIDN’T embrace?
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PAD
Seems like some things are universal constants. Right-wing policitians will almost always make clueless remarks about social issues, 1992 or now. But, to be absolutely fair, it surprises me that Bush Daddy and Quayle were in favor of a woman being able to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. If you asked the same thing now to Dubya and Palin, would they say the same?
But a 13-year old kid buying comics not to read them is WORSE by far than anything a politician could say or do.
I’m not here to try to defend Dan Quayle (is that even possible?) but don’t you think there was something just a little bit screwy with the creators of Murphy Brown responding to Quayle as though he had bìŧçh-šláppëd an actual human being on live television, instead of insulting someone who doesn’t actually exist? (Cue the jokes about Linda Bloodworth-Thomson going after someone who didn’t much exist either, i.e. Quayle.)
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Not really. The show creators were vocal Democrat supporters and even without that I would think that the opportunity would just be too great to pass up. I mean, lets face it, you have a comedy set around a “real world” newsroom with characters that are mostly left leaning and the sitting Republican VP goes after your lead character. It’s just begging for storyline use.
I didn’t say it was a surprising decision on their part. The problem with that is that they played it in-universe, as though Quayle had called out an actual person with no provocation, and devoted an episode to responding to the slander he didn’t actually commit. It’s no different than if Joe Biden were to make some crack comparing Bin Laden to Dr. Doom, and the Fantastic Four had a storyline about Biden causing a diplomatic incident with Latveria.
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(Using the word “slander” in its colloquial rather than legal sense. Your mileage may vary. All rights reserved. This claim has not been reviewed by the FDA.)
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Not sure what your asking here then. I don’t think anyone at the time was thinking that Linda Bloodworth-Thomson wasn’t going to respond in some way. I’m also not sure why the “in-universe” response is at confusing since they weren’t going to spend the show breaking the fourth wall and discussing why Quayle’s comments were boneheaded.
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They threw a one show response out there and left it alone after that.
The in-universe aspect isn’t confusing, it’s obnoxious. Because within the episode, it looked like Quayle was insulting a real person. He did not. (“What? He made fun of our fictional character? How dare he impugn her integrity like that!?”) It’s a ridiculous conceit.
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And why wouldn’t they let it go? Isn’t having people critique or comment on your work something you sort of expect to happen when you publish it? Particularly since, as you mentioned, the show is political to begin with. The West Wing didn’t go after real-world people who made snide comments about renaming the show The Left Wing. They also didn’t use real-world politicians as straw-man targets; they created fictional foils for their fictional characters, and (with the exception of Season 5 after Aaron Sorkin went off to Mandyland) they usually gave them depth. Moving away from shows that intentionally immerse themselves in controversy, JK Rowling didn’t bother mocking people who claimed Harry Potter books encouraged witchcraft. I assume she correctly decided that would have been petty, if she even gave it a thought at all. Maybe expecting the Murphy Brown folks to grow up and deal with it (like Rowling and Sorkin did) is too much to ask.
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Okay, we’ve hit the nut of it. You personally didn’t like the bit so it’s therefore bad and Bloodworth-Thomson and crew needed to “grow up and deal with it” like others you can bring up. Well, some of us that liked the show thought it was a funny bit. And, unlike shows like the West Wing that (A) weren’t comedies and (B) had long running and complicated story lines, a one off gag using Quayle’s remarks could fit in to the show and then be forgotten story line-wise very easily.
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Bloodworth-Thomson seemed to like using real world people in her shows where the topics were political. In Hearts of Fire they had two characters discussing Hillary while not realizing that her father, played by real her father, was sitting right next to her as well as having Rush on an entire episode playing himself.
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The Bloodworth-Thomsons liked to play with real world characters in some of their shows and most of the fans of the various shows they did liked the bits they did. You didn’t like something done in a show they did almost20 years ago. Grow up, deal with it and get over it already.
You personally didn’t like the bit so it’s therefore bad and Bloodworth-Thomson and crew needed to “grow up and deal with it” like others you can bring up.
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Yes, that’s exactly the logic I was using. Very good. I don’t suppose you have any actual response to the specific reasons I gave for not liking it? I’m not persuaded by your distinctions, by the way. There’s a massive difference between people voluntarily doing cameos on a show, and making an entire episode premised on deliberately misrepresenting what a public figure said. If you want to do an episode on it, make up a Vice President, or have Murphy go off on Quayle for disparaging single motherhood in reference to some fictional character in Murphy-world. Don’t depict the guy as an ogre for insulting a person who doesn’t actually exist. Depict him as a dûmbášš for not knowing how to spell various food products. Depict him as unsuited to be Vice President. I mean, really, to have fodder for Dan Quayle jokes, do you need to fabricate a scenario where he’s randomly insulting a newscaster? There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to criticize Quayle without misrepresenting what he did.
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And here I thought “the nut of it” was that I was criticizing the Murphy Brown people for being petty and oversensitive to criticism of their storyline. Thank you for pointing out that it was entirely a matter of me not liking the show (which, actually, I watched and enjoyed for years) as opposed to my having a problem with a show intentionally creating a controversial storyline and then (1) getting offended when someone they didn’t like criticized it and (2) attacking the critic for something he didn’t do. Thanks for straightening that out.
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Incidentally, what if, instead of Dan Quayle, it had been Bill Buckley critiquing Brown’s choice of single motherhood? There are perfectly legitimate critiques of the Murphy Brown storyline– most single parent families are caused by divorce, poverty, child pregnancies, and other social problems, and an extremely wealthy professional choosing to go it alone is hardly typical of the social phenomenon, and does tend to whitewash real problems. Probably, as in the real speech, the Murphy Brown reference would have been a single line in the midst of a broader discussion of family breakdowns. Would it have been okay for Bloodworth-Thomson to do an episode attacking Buckley for writing such a column, or was the real episode okay only because it was Dan Quayle? Personally I’d have a big problem with a hit prime-time show using its might to pillory a member of the press for doing his job. Of course, Quayle was also doing his job– we really should expect politicians to talk about real issues, instead of “where’s the beef?” and “I feel your pain” soundbites– so where do you draw the line? How is it acceptable for a politician’s passing reference to a sitcom character to invite an entire show dedicated to his abuse?
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And since this entire blog posting is about stuff happening 20 years ago, shouldn’t your comment about reacting to things people “did almost 20 years ago” pretty much shut down the entire thread?
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”Thank you for pointing out that it was entirely a matter of me not liking the show (which, actually, I watched and enjoyed for years)”
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Interesting argument for you to make since you can’t quote me saying that. I wouldn’t be able to know if you were a fan or not and didn’t comment on that. You might try actually reading the bit from me that you cited in your post. I said that you didn’t like ”the bit” and not that you did not like the show. There have been bits they’ve done on The Daily Show that I didn’t like or find funny, but I’m not about to say that the show itself isn’t or that I’m not a fan. If I had wanted to say you weren’t a fan of the show I would have said that you weren’t a fan of the show.
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” I’m not persuaded by your distinctions, by the way. There’s a massive difference between people voluntarily doing cameos on a show, and making an entire episode premised on deliberately misrepresenting what a public figure said.”
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Two Points:
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(1) They weren’t “distinctions” of any kind. That was pointing out that the show’s creators liked to use real world people and events on some of their work. Here they had practically custom made video for the show with Quayle, as per usual, sticking both feet in his mouth while referencing Murphy Brown by name. I’m sorry, but if I’m a comedy writer, especially for the show of the same name, I’m grabbing that and running with it.
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(2) They didn’t really misrepresent what he said. He said that the character of Murphy Browns was “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘life-style choice.'” They used that and worked their story around that where they basically dismissed Quayle as little more than a living cartoon character, a total joke.
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They actually went pretty easy on the guy to be honest. If they really wanted to rip him a new one, they could have included more of the context of the speech around the remark. He started out discussing the LA riots and then declared that we had to address the causes of the LA riots. The cause?
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Quayle: “In a nutshell: I believe the lawless social anarchy which we saw is directly related to the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society.”
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And what’s the best example he can come up with, after much more talking, to underscore his point?
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Quayle: “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another “lifestyle choice.”
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I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. Now it’s time to make the discussion public.”
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So the LA riots were, in the end, all the fault of Liberals, Hollywood and TV shows like Murphy Brown on Planet Quayle. If they really wanted to be nasty to him, they could have really ripped him to shreds by just playing forage of even more of his speech and making him look like an even bigger clown than they did.
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”If you want to do an episode on it, make up a Vice President, or have Murphy go off on Quayle for disparaging single motherhood in reference to some fictional character in Murphy-world.”
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Yeah, so they make up a VP and everyone just says it was Quayle anyhow since he says the exact same thing Quayle says about Murphy. Everyone and their dimmest family member knows it’s really Quayle. Plus you’ve got Quayle on file footage calling out a make believe character to use. Why let the comedy gold go to waste.
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As for having Quayle rip on some made up character instead… Why? Seriously, what’s the difference? Well, actually there is a difference. You (A) have the entire audience wondering why they wasted time making a fictional character for Quayle to rip on when he actually named Murphy Brown in his speech and (B) remove the comments focus from the center of the show’s focus.
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”Don’t depict the guy as an ogre for insulting a person who doesn’t actually exist.”
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Odd, but I don’t remember anyone claiming that he came off as an ogre back then. They claimed that, both before and after the show, he came off looking like a dûmbášš.
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”Depict him as a dûmbášš for not knowing how to spell various food products. Depict him as unsuited to be Vice President.”
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They did. Maybe you forgot the dump truck full of potatoes dropped in front of the White House at show’s end. And they didn’t need to depict him as unsuited to be the VP. He did that very well on his own.
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”I mean, really, to have fodder for Dan Quayle jokes, do you need to fabricate a scenario where he’s randomly insulting a newscaster? There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to criticize Quayle without misrepresenting what he did.”
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Dude, he went after a fictional character. The Vice President of the United States decided that, in a speech that started out talking about the LA riots, he would pin the blame in part on Hollywood and take on by name a specific TV character as an example of that. They didn’t exactly fabricate the scenario as much as they just had their TV character fire back at a VP who was practically a living cartoon character by that point anyway.
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”And here I thought “the nut of it” was that I was criticizing the Murphy Brown people for being petty and oversensitive to criticism of their storyline.”
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Or maybe they simply took advantage of the situation and made fun of it. And I’m still not sure how they could be described as being “petty and oversensitive” here. Repeating what I said above… The Vice President of the United States decided that, in a speech that started out talking about the LA riots, he would pin the blame in part on Hollywood and take on by name a specific TV character as an example of that. And it was their character. I would think that it’s kind of hard to pass up an opportunity like that. He put both feet in his mouth and then they offered him a nice helping of shins and knees for desert.
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Seriously dude, were you secretly the president of your local chapter of The Dan Quayle Fan Club or what?
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” Would it have been okay for Bloodworth-Thomson to do an episode attacking Buckley for writing such a column, or was the real episode okay only because it was Dan Quayle?”
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Well, addressing this and your “petty” remarks both, they could have done that show with any of a thousand “family values” proponents. They didn’t. Other critics of the story didn’t get so much as a peep from the show just as they didn’t go after people who were critical of other aspects of the show during the show’s run. However, and I would think that this would be glaringly obvious to dámņëd near anyone with a brain, that there is a huge difference between critics, pundits and columnists getting up on a stage and saying something VS the then current VP of the US saying something. Scale does make a difference.
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” There are perfectly legitimate critiques of the Murphy Brown storyline– most single parent families are caused by divorce, poverty, child pregnancies, and other social problems, and an extremely wealthy professional choosing to go it alone is hardly typical of the social phenomenon, and does tend to whitewash real problems.”
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Yeah, except that most viewers saw the show’s development as only a story line, as something happening in Murphy’s life that she had to deal with, and not some social critique. Nobody I knew of was looking for some deep, meaning of life relevancy in the story line. And, sure, you could easily rip it apart by saying that it was unrealistic when compared to the real world version of what was going on with Murphy, but you can pretty much say that about any television story line on just about any television show.
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” Personally I’d have a big problem with a hit prime-time show using its might to pillory a member of the press for doing his job. Of course, Quayle was also doing his job– we really should expect politicians to talk about real issues, instead of “where’s the beef?” and “I feel your pain” soundbites– so where do you draw the line? How is it acceptable for a politician’s passing reference to a sitcom character to invite an entire show dedicated to his abuse?”
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Wow, you just must despise The Daily Show, SNL, Southpark and the Simpsons to name but a few.
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” And since this entire blog posting is about stuff happening 20 years ago, shouldn’t your comment about reacting to things people “did almost 20 years ago” pretty much shut down the entire thread?”
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Not really. Most of the posts in the thread have been in the nature of looking at then compared to now. Not a bad discussion topic for any thread. Your initial post seemed like an interesting discussion starter that may have gone into the more interesting points of satire in general and of political satire specifically. Had I known in advanced that this was going to be about you declaring that, since apparently you specifically didn’t like the bit they did, the show’s creators were “petty and oversensitive” and they were just so gosh darned mean and unfair to poor Dan Quayle I wouldn’t have responded in the first place.
Hmmm, still missing my point here.
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They weren’t “distinctions” of any kind.
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Yeah, brain fart on my end. I meant to type “comparison” and somehow ended up using a word that largely meant its opposite. Oops.
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(2) They didn’t really misrepresent what he said. He said that the character of Murphy Browns was “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘life-style choice.’” They used that and worked their story around that where they basically dismissed Quayle as little more than a living cartoon character, a total joke.
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Here’s the real crux of it, and your summary is quite correct: he said that the character of Murphy Brown mocked fatherhood. However, the show played it straight, as though he mocked an actual person, and did an entire episode giving that (nonexistent) person an opportunity to respond to the insult that Quayle leveled at her (except that he didn’t really because she didn’t exist).
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However, and I would think that this would be glaringly obvious to dámņëd near anyone with a brain, that there is a huge difference between critics, pundits and columnists getting up on a stage and saying something VS the then current VP of the US saying something. Scale does make a difference.
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Somehow I made it through law school without a brain, then, because I really don’t care who says things, they deserve to have their statements, however lame-brained, accurately characterized. It’s not like people walk around with pieces of paper reading “PRESS” in their hat brims, so you can tell who’s entitled to pundit-based immunity. And bear in mind that my hypothetical example was William Buckley. Buckley would have been a much bigger deal than Quayle, because Buckley had to be taken seriously. No Frank Fontana “It’s Dan Quayle!” dismissals.
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If they really wanted to be nasty to him, they could have really ripped him to shreds by just playing forage of even more of his speech and making him look like an even bigger clown than they did.
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I’d have been okay with that, actually. In fact, you can invert that argument: Quayle spent the first half of his speech tying riots to unwed mothers, and an allusion to a TV character is what gets the attention? Some people need to get their priorities straight.
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On the other hand, you do mischaracterize his point further on: And what’s the best example he can come up with, after much more talking, to underscore his point? and then, later, Dude, he went after a fictional character. I’m not sure that it’s a fair reading of the speech. The Murphy Brown bit was one line in a half-hour speech. He hardly made it the centerpiece of his argument (which, as you mentioned, tried to tie the breakdown of the family to the LA Riots– seriously, he’d have been better off arguing about television). “But his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did.” — Candice Bergen, 9 July 2002. (As it happens, I agree with you that his interpretation of the LA Riots was kind of stupid, so “perfectly intelligent” is not how I’d characterize the speech in general.)
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Wow, you just must despise The Daily Show, SNL, Southpark and the Simpsons to name but a few.
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I have yet to see any of those shows jumping all over a guy for making a negative passing reference to one of their characters. Really. The first few seasons of the Simpsons, there was no shortage of talking heads decrying Bart as a horrible role model, but they didn’t spend an episode wallowing in self-righteous indignation. South Park lampoons real people all the time, but does it in a cartoon, and as a cartoon. They have Al Gore chasing Man-Bear-Pig. They don’t treat a passing reference to Kenny’s death as an excuse to bash him. The shows you mentioned use actual satire, usually not about anything as petty as making a negative reference to a fictional character. As opposed to the Murphy Brown approach, of taking a quote out of context and creating a straw man out of it.
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The context is the whole thing. Quayle commented on a fictional character being a bad role model, essentially. That’s it. That was his whole offense. Apparently, the producers really, really object to their character being described as a bad role model, even for 8 seconds in a campaign speech about other stuff. So they took him out of context, and ran a story premised on him calling out an actual person. That makes them obnoxious as all hëll, in my humble opinion. I think it’s petty and shows an absurd sense of self-importance. You can agree or disagree, but that is, and has been, my point.
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You didn’t mention this show by name, but I do despise the Colbert Report, because I think Colbert is as big a jáçkášš as Bill O’Reilly, but less funny.
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Seriously dude, were you secretly the president of your local chapter of The Dan Quayle Fan Club or what?
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You know, if you could find an example of me actually saying something nice about Quayle in anything I’ve written here, this would be a better point. Unless you think Quayle is so sad that even his fan club presidents use the word “dûmbášš” in “defending” him, sort of like that “Kerry Haters for Kerry” website that came up during the 2004 election.
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Had I known in advanced that this was going to be about you declaring that, since apparently you specifically didn’t like the bit they did, the show’s creators were “petty and oversensitive” and they were just so gosh darned mean and unfair to poor Dan Quayle I wouldn’t have responded in the first place.
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And if I’d known that I’d create a firestorm of controversy by saying it was “screwy” to twist Quayle’s words and make an episode about it, I wouldn’t have bothered posting. Because it’s not like a critical analysis of fiction writing is ever a live topic on this blog. Oh well. It could be worse. At least the Bloodworth-Thomsons haven’t made an episode about me yet.
To the Bold One–
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Since you seem to think it would’ve been better for the Murphy Brown writers to have invented a new fictitious character for Quayle to criticise in a fictitious speech, I was wondering if you saw the ‘Mr Casual-Sex’ sketch on Saturday Night Live that did just that. Basically, it was a spoof of the Murpshy Brown episode about Quayle. It began with Lorne Michaels talking about a fictitious speech by Quayle in which he criticised Mr Casual-Sex, a fictitious recurring character on SNL (by fictitious, I mean here that the character had never actually been used before). The sketch featured Rob Schneider as a guy who goes around impregnating women and then leaving. In the sketch, he was all upset over Quayle’s words, so his friends all tried to comfort him by pointing out that Quayle could not spell ‘potato’ (a point they made over and over). Then the sketch ended with Schneider speaking to Quayle through the camera and introducing several average guys, who all go about impregnating women and refusing to take any responsibility, just as Murphy had displayed a bunch of ‘nontraditional’ families on her show.
I don’t know if I have a real point here. It’s just that your suggestion of writing a show around a fictitious remark by Quayle about a non-existent fictitious character brought this sketch to my mind.
I did like the way this sketch made fun of the sanctimoniousness of the Murphy Brown show (in the way Murphy had all the families at the end). I also thought it was very unusual that Saturday Night Live actually seemed to take Quayle’s side in this sketch, in that the Mr Casual-Sex character really was a horrible person and a terrible role-model. It may be the only time Saturday Night Life took Quayle’s side in any way whatsoever. (Whenever they featured Quayle in a sketch, he was usually played by a young child, and behaved as one.)
I feel nostalgic for the time liberals actually had some balls. If it happened today, they would actually apologize to Quayle and try to put the blame on the letterer… (and all the time claiming they’re not really liberals, because liberal is such a dirty word)
Better “liberal” than “progressive.” Is there any more arrogant label to attach to oneself? “With my keen insight into the future, not only do I know what progress is, I embody it.” Please.
Well, “progressive” makes sense if you’re talking about individual freedoms, I believe. It doesn’t take particularly keen insight or imagination to realize in which direction and what forms the fight for greater individual rights will take. Basically it’s simply demanding rights that other people in society already enjoy.
When we move to other arenas, “progressive” becomes more problematic. Particularly the economic…
PAD,
“Have you ever met a GOP talking point you DIDN’T embrace?”
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Yeah, PAD. Others I disagree with here recognize that. It would be nice – though hardly necessary – if you did the same and engaged me with substance instead of sarcasm.
It was a genuine question, actually. If there was a GOP talking point you didn’t embrace, I wasn’t aware of it. Then again, your posts tend to go on and on and on and on, sometimes in solid blocks of copy, so usually I skip over them. So I really didn’t know.
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PAD
Rene,
“But a 13-year old kid buying comics not to read them is WORSE by far than anything a politician could say or do.”
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Thank you for bringing us back to the most important part of this thread! And I agree! Seriously, kids who read comics do better in school and I hope to be in a position where I can get younger people more aware and excited about them – and reading in general – someday.
“It was a genuine question, actually. If there was a GOP talking point you didn’t embrace, I wasn’t aware of it. Then again, your posts tend to go on and on and on and on, sometimes in solid blocks of copy, so usually I skip over them. So I really didn’t know.
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PAD”
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Can we just have a rational, respectful and reasonable exchange of ideas? Thanks so much.
Jerome: You’re really not getting it. I’m not being irrational, not disrespectful, nor unreasonable. You really DO seem to me like a parrot of Fox News and the Post. Your posts go on for so long that I typically skip over them. I’m not saying that’s your fault; I just don’t feel like wading through them since I just figure they’re going to be more regurgitated GOP talking points. Others apparently do, displaying far more patience than I possess. Good for them. I figure, hey, I provide a forum for you to express your opinions whether I agree with them or not, which is more than quite a few forums do. So I’m doing my bit.
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PAD
Dan Quayle has never been right about anything.
Out of curiosity, and without denying that Quayle was a terrible choice for Vice President, do you actually know what he said in the speech?
Quoting entirely from memory, I think he said, ‘… and it doesn’t help that on TV you have Murphy Brown having a baby out of wedlock, and calling it just another “lifestyle choice”.’
Did I get it right? I don’t want to go to the trouble of looking it up.
As for what he said in the rest of the speech, I have no idea. None of the news reports I saw said anything about it. Although I do have a vague feeling– and I may very well be wrong– that the theme of the speech was that the loss of traditional ‘family values’ was the cause of the social problems that led to the riots in Los Angeles.
I think the speech may have been what popularised the term ‘family values’, but I’m not certain about that.
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Mary,
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http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/20thcentury/92-05quayle-speech.html
Well, I don’t knowing anything about the history between you and Jerome, Peter, but sight unseen, I’m going to give you a score of 2 out of 3. Right off the top, you’ve accused the guy of being rambling and susceptible, with nary an insult from him (in this blog) to prompt it.
Since he’s taking Dan Quayle’s side of this agrument, I’ll give you “rational” and “reasonable.”
But “respectful?” Again, Peter, I don’t know your history, and maybe there’s a vast accumulatation that’s brought you and Jerome to this point, but my thoughts on your comments were, “Gee, for PAD, this isn’t respectful. This is SNIDE.”
Either ignore the guy or have the actual conversation with him, but you’re better than the cheap shots you’re giving here.
Well, I don’t knowing anything about the history between you and Jerome,
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At which point you should’ve stopped typing and realized what you were about to say is going to make you look a bit foolish.
“At which point you should’ve stopped typing and realized what you were about to say is going to make you look a bit foolish.”
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In whose eyes, Craig, yours? Because for someone who said in a recent thread he wants to have a “rational discussion” with me, it’s peculiar you never respond to me the few times when I actually agree with you, yet seem determined to put whatever disagreement – about politics especially – I have with you in the harshest,negative light regardless of my vocabulary or tone and you seem to relish taking shots at me whenever possible. Which is fine. I grew up in coal country , so I’ve heard a lots worse (not to mention spending the majority of the past decade in Philly) – and what’s funny, is most of those insults are because they considered me to be a radical liberal! So I learned a long time ago to not let what people who are determined not to like me or anything I say – regardless of reason or rationality – affect me at all. Have a nice day, now.
David The Bold,
“The Murphy Brown bit was one line in a half-hour speech. He hardly made it the centerpiece of his argument (which, as you mentioned, tried to tie the breakdown of the family to the LA Riots– seriously, he’d have been better off arguing about television). “But his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did.” — Candice Bergen, 9 July 2002. (As it happens, I agree with you that his interpretation of the LA Riots was kind of stupid, so “perfectly intelligent” is not how I’d characterize the speech in general.)”
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No. It was not stupid at all. Yes, the Rodney King verdict was of course the event that set everything in motion. The point he was making is that there is very real evidence that children born to single moms out of wedlock – exempting divorced single mothers and widow single mothers – are much more likely to have disrespect for authority, grow up in poverty, drop out of high school, etc. These are bits of powder on the powder keg, so when an alleged provocation like the Rodney King verdict comes down, there is an ‘explosion” where there otherwise wouldn’t be.
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I remember in a section of Philly a friend of mine threw some trash on the sidewalk. When i picked it up, she threw it back down. I picked it up one more time and she threw it down yet again and then quickly whispered in my ear, “You keep doing that, you’re not going to fit in here and somebody may cause you problems because you’re acting soft and they might take it like you think you’re better than them.”
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She was going to college and was the only girl on her block not pregnant by the time she was 16.
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So it is not that far a stretch to say brreakdown in our society starts with the family and that’s the only thing that makes these acts acceptable in certain quarters in the first place.
Jerry,
According to you Quayle had become a “walking cartoon character” and his intelligence is always demeaned. same with Dubya, Reagan and Palin. But Biden was picked because he is supposedly smart. Yet Quayle misspelling a word is small “potatoes” to the gafe-a-minute machine that is Joe Biden, who continues to embarrass himself and the nation publicly with his actual lack of knowledge – which to me is more serious than Bush’s struggles with syntax.Really.
“Vice President Biden added to his lengthy list of gaffes Wednesday when he took a moment to honor the memory of the Irish prime minister’s mother — a woman who’s very much alive.
“God rest her soul,” Biden said as he introduced Brian Cowen and President Obama at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the White House Wednesday.
The vice president was quick to correct the mistake, noting that it’s Cowen’s father who is no longer living.
“Wait … your mom’s still, your mom is still alive. It was your Dad (who) passed. God bless her soul. I gotta get this straight,” Biden said.”
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Yeah… And I’ve said here more than a few times, especially back before the election, that Biden is a perpetual gafe machine and a massive foot-in-mouth monster.
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He’s a total goof, but Quayle was a walking, talking cartoon.
Give the man time, he’s only been VP for a year. But he does the job he needs to do; convince even the president’s harshest critics to pray to the Gods they believe in for his continued good health.
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Yeah, but you and I both know that Biden has been in the public spotlight for a while now. He’s a massive foot-in-mouth machine, but he’s not as close to the gold standard for it as Quayle is.
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I think what works against Quayle is that every one of his best blunders comes when he’s trying to look or act very serious and respectable. It creates a much greater contrast when you’re trying to look like and sell yourself as a serious intellectual and you then turn around and say something that screams out in its cluelessness. Biden certainly has those moments, but no where near as many.
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Well, at least not yet.
It seems to me that Biden is perceived as a smart guy who puts his foot in his mouth while Quayle was perceived as stupid
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“Yet Quayle misspelling a word is small “potatoes””
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Well, if that was an isolated mistake, yeah. However…
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“Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”
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“Rural Americans are real Americans. There’s no doubt about that. You can’t always be sure with other Americans. Not all of them are real.”
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“The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.”
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“We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.”
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“I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change.”
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“Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.”
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“Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.”
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“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
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“One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared.'”
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“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”
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“I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”
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“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”
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“I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.”
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And my favorite from the run up to the 2000 election. When asked who looked like the best pick for the Republicans in their then crowded primary field he gave a classic Dan Quayle answer.
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“I am confident that the Republican Party will pick a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton.”
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He never said the thing about wishing he had studied more Latin in school after going down to Latin America. That was a gag skit’s quote that’s also been falsely credited to Gore. He also never said that a “verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. That was an old quote by Samuel Goldwyn. Well, Quayle may have said it, but it wasn’t one of his blunders.
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There was also that memorable moment where he showed off his souvenir from Chile Amazes in 1990. It was that novelty doll that was, how did even a number of his supporters put it, obscene in the nature of its novelty. I’m not sure what was funnier with that one. Was it the reaction of the press or the absolutely horrified look on his wife’s face in contrast to the clueless look on his?
I mean no disrespect to you, Jerome, but that is the reason I’ll never be a Conservative.
Quayle’s speech was not as bad as “gays and atheists have caused 9/11 by breaking down our morals!” but it’s the same kind of speech.
It’s taking advantage of a tragedy to vindicate a worldview and advocate social control. Conservatives are fond of that, but they’re not the only ones, unfortunately. Liberals do it all the time with gun control and global warmth.
I will never agree with sacrificing any personal freedoms for reasons of mantaining some nebulous social harmony. That a woman with the material means to rise her child alone shouldn’t do so because she’d be weakening the fabric of traditional family structures is the kind of idea that makes me angry.
Here is some anedoctal evidence to counter your own anedoctal evidence. One of my best friends was raised by his mother alone. Dad was a scumbag that went away and never met his kid. He was raised in an upper class environment and NEVER displayed any problems with authority or any violent tendencies.
To me, living in conditions of poverty is a much bigger factor than the absence of a father figure when we’re talking criminality and violence, but even so I dislike blaming poverty for violence either (lots of poor people are law-abiding folks).
The truth is that complicated problems have no easy answers. And liberals that want to institute gun control or politically correct censorship to diminish violence are as wrong-headed as any conservatives.
I am a human being, I’m not a bee. I’ll not sacrifice my personal happiness for the “greater good of social harmony”. And no one should. You may say that a upper class mom deciding to have a kid alone may be harming the kid. Perhaps. To my eyes that is no more harmful than raising your kid in a hyper-conservative Christian cult. But that is your right as a parent, I suppose.