Current Events

Originally published February 4, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1055

I have absolutely no idea where this is a nationwide problem or not.

I suddenly noticed that my kids don’t have “Current Events” homework anymore. That, indeed, Current Events seems to have vanished from the local curriculum.

You remember Current Events. Once a week–sometimes every day, if you had a particularly aggressive and socially conscious teacher–you were supposed to flip through the newspaper and clip out an article about what was going on in the world.

And we would page through the articles, which were no cheerier back then than they are now. Back in the 60s, the most prominent ones would be about Vietnam or race riots or international relations. Once we got to the 70s, it was gas lines and Watergate, mostly.

Even as recently as a few years ago, my eldest daughter, Shana, would have to bring in a Current Events article. I’d know which day was Current Events day, because it would be the day that I’d sit down with the morning newspaper and find a gaping hole neatly clipped somewhere. Or perhaps an entire page would simply be gone. (Annoyingly, if she took page 23, for example, she’d always wind up getting page 24 as well. It works out that way.)

But I suddenly noticed recently that the kids are not being assigned to comb the paper for the latest newsworthy events. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, huh.

It’s a tough time to be a teacher dealing with Current Events, because the stories that are making the headlines these days… jeez, you discuss these things in classrooms, and you’re going to get reamed out by irate parents.

Parents traditionally want to protect their children. They want to shield them from not only the harsh realities of the world, but–even more importantly–the embarrassing questions of the world.

When I was a kid, the toughest news-related questions my folks might have had to field was the pronunciation of Vietnamese or Soviet names.

Now, though, a perusal by youngsters through the papers can engender all sorts of fun queries, such as…

“Daddy, why did this woman cut off her husband’s pens?”

And you have to wince, because the exegesis isn’t going to be a simple one. Explaining the correct word is going to be the least of your problems (kind of like when a friend of mine was a young girl and her mother chose to explain the “facts of life” by giving her a book and saying, “Here, read this.” And my friend went through the whole book and still didn’t understand what Virginia had to do with female reproduction.)

How is a teacher supposed to send adolescents perusing the paper when you know that they’re going to zero in on the Bobbitt case (the incident that gives new meaning to the old joke of “You don’t have to call me Johnson”).

Or maybe they’ll ask about Michael Jackson. “Mom, what’s pedophilia? Mom, why was Michael Jackson touching some boy’s pens?” “Hey, Mom, want to hear a joke? Why is Michael Jackson like Sears? Because they both have boys’ pants half off. Is that funny? Why is it funny?”

(Year of the Woman? Nonsense. Year of the Pëņìš is more like it. You know how you listen to the radio and get sick of hearing a song after a while? Well, I don’t know about you, but I am fed up with the word “pëņìš.” I mean, it’s a pretty lousy word to begin with. Pee-nis. Say it a few times. Roll it around in your mouth (figuratively, that is.) It sounds dinky and pathetic. I mean, okay, maybe that’s accurate in most cases, but of all things to be tagged with truth-in-advertising, did it have to be that?

Can’t they get rid of that word entirely and come up with a new official word? Maybe… “Ike.” That’s good. “Ike.” It’s friendly. It’s masculine. It’s already got its own slogan: “I Like Ike.” She cut off his Ike. Sounds much better than, “She cut off his pee-nis.” The headline for the Michael Jackson stuff could be succinct:  “Ike and Mike.” Not to mention “Ike” sounds like what a guy might say, purely spontaneously, upon discovering it missing: “IIIEEEEEEKE!”

By the way, in today’s courtroom testimony, John Wayne Bobbitt revealed that he noticed he was one member short of a quorum while he was brushing his teeth. Brushing his teeth? Good God, I’m all in favor of dental hygiene, but this man does not have his morning priorities in order. When he finally looked down, what did he think? “Honey! The floss musta slipped!” Of course, if he didn’t brush regularly, then some years down the line, he might have wound up keeping his teeth in a glass… and Lord knows what else might wind up in there with it…)

Or perhaps kids can read about the presidency. Sure, they might clip an article about meetings with foreign heads of state.  On the other hand, they’re just as likely to zero in on stories about alleged sexual forays while governor of Arkansas, or investments he was involved with that not only didn’t pan out, but are now being held up for all kinds of scrutiny.

Or Heidi Fleiss’s book. (“Mom, what’s a prostitute? Dad, what’s a Madam?”)

Or Joey Buttafuoco’s mouth. (“Dad, what’s an affair?”)

Or priests in sex scandals.

And so on.

I mean, when I was a kid, no one understood what we were doing in Vietnam. Nowadays, no one understands what we’re doing in this country.

Maybe I was simply naïve or oblivious, but I don’t remember sex being that much in the news when I was a kid. The main purpose of a pëņìš, as far as newsworthiness, was that it served to make you eligible for the selective service. Even then, the notion didn’t really work its way into too many news stories.

Hëll, even the normal news stories are weird. The January 1994 Esquire reported, “A cruise line was ordered by a Frankfurt court to refund money to a German couple who had booked what they thought was a salsa-music cruise but was in fact a ship with five hundred Swiss yodelers who repeatedly sang a capella renditions of ‘The Village Sparrows of Oberageri’ and ‘Lisbeth Sidler-Fritz Arnet Yodeling Duet.’” At least we won’t see three network movies on the subject (although I’d like to see Werner Klemperer and Olympia Dukakis as the couple, myself).

By way of a segue, that same issue also featured a photograph of Seinfeld star Jason Alexander modelling the Jill Thompson-drawn Dream/Delirium/Death t-shirt. Comics continue to make their incursion into the “real” world.

This prompts two observations. First, it’s of continuous annoyance that the real world so infrequently invades the pages of comics. By having the adventures of the heroes exist in a vacuum, the stories have little to no impact. They don’t seem to relate to anything of consequence. On those rare occasions when they do, the word “relevancy” is hauled out, making the comic sound as if its some sort of throwback to the quaint 1960s when it was “in,” and even okay, to be socially relevant. But the 1960s are long gone, relevancy is quaint and unwanted, and even our nostalgia craze has already moved to the 1970s. (God help us.)

Second, this might be one of the reasons that parents squawk and complain so loudly about any adult content in comics. Assaulted every day by subjects that they’d much rather not deal with, they want to cling to comics as a source of harmless, vapid entertainment. If you want your kid to have reading material but the newspaper presents too many uncomfortable pitfalls, then comics are the “safe” thing to go for.

Except that comic books are being produced by former readers. When we were kids we read comics for one form of entertainment. As we grew up and got into the production end, we started producing comics for ourselves and our sensibilities.  Stories of greater sophistication developed. It’s an understandable, perhaps even inevitable, evolution.

This doesn’t always go down well, though. Of course, as illiteracy takes a firmer and firmer grip on the MTV generation, comics with simplified and nonexistent stories, but lots and lots of simplistic action. Even that, though, could backfire, if the anti-violence forces in this country, currently ripping through the world of TV, set their sights on the comic book industry.  And don’t think they won’t. Because since comic books have a “Can You Top This?” mentality, the more violent comics will invariably become even more violent. I sure hope comic book publishers, if the hammer comes down, handle themselves with more aplomb than they did in the 1950s, and someone reminds them that the 1st Amendment does afford some protections.

Ultimately, comics present something that parents wish existed: Some other world. A world where they don’t have to cringe every time there’s some new broadcast. Explaining death, murder and mayhem in its broadest sense… that’s easy. Having to explain specific mayhem and how it applies to a woman, her husband, a knife, and alleged marital problems (“Dad, what’s a rape?”), that’s hard. Because all that stuff is associated with being “grown up,” and somehow you’re never prepared to have to explain grown up stuff to your eight year old.

Which is why, as I mentioned above, I don’t envy teachers their task in this respect. For example, New York parents rejected the notion of condoms being distributed in schools because they felt that the school was not an appropriate environment for such things. This, of course, made all the newspapers, and if any teacher is doing Current Events, he or she has to deal with questions about condoms… which is what the parents wanted to avoid in the first place.

Proving, ultimately, what parents, comic book creators, and most particularly comic book villains, have always known: You can run, but you can’t hide.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, was working on names with toddler Ariel today. “What’s my name?” he asked her. “Daddy,” Ariel replied correctly. “What’s your name?” he asked. And, bursting with triumph, Ariel declared, “Cheese!” At least she didn’t say “Pëņìš!”)