Sir Thomas Crapper did not really invent the flush toilet. The word “gringo” was not inspired by the American troops who sang “Green grow the grasses-o,” during the Mexican-American War — the word was in use 100 years previously. Still, those popular misconceptions and countless others survive through constant repetition, and someday they will be joined by new linguistic fables even now being born.
Here’s a likely candidate — years from now it will be widely circulated that the word “crummy” derives from the work of cartoonist Robert Crumb, a world-class malcontent of the late 20th century. Crumb surveyed the urban landscape of his era and pronounced his verdict: Everything sucks big time, including humanity and, most especially, Robert Crumb. “At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else,” Crumb once said. Coming from the author of “Self-Loathing Comics,” you can take that to the bank.
Crumb certainly did. His status as the bull-goose legend of underground cartooning meant that in the early ’90s he was able to trade six of his sketchbooks for a house in the South of France. But Crumb’s career has never been about maximizing financial possibilities — that would mean signing on with mainstream pop culture, which Crumb, of course, despises. In fact, Crumb’s repeated rejection of commercial opportunities (he once turned down an offer to do a Rolling Stones album cover because he hated the band) marks him as one of the last remaining exemplars of the egalitarian ’60s hippie ethos he came to represent for so many people.
There’s only one problem with this — Crumb despised the ’60s hippie ethos he came to represent for so many people. And the ’70s sucked even worse and he’s not that enthused about drawing and he really hates Bruce Springsteen. “The only burning passion I’m sure I have,” he once said, “is the passion for sex.”
Robert Crumb was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 30, 1943, to a Marine father and a devout Catholic mother. His first cartooning efforts were inspired not by love of the art form but by sibling dynamics — as the third of five children young Robert inevitably fell under the sway of his oldest brother. “Charles forced me to draw comics,” Crumb recalled in “The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book” (Back Bay Books). “If I didn’t draw comics I was a worthless human being. It was tedious labor, so I worked fast to get it over with.”
Crumb and his brothers soon became experts on the comic form, treasuring late ’40s work like Little Lulu and, later, Walt Kelly’s Pogo. The 1995 documentary “Crumb,” directed by the cartoonist’s friend Terry Zwigoff, unforgettably details the Crumbs’ suburban gothic world — a father described as a “sadistic bully” who broke Robert’s collarbone at age 5, a mother hooked on amphetamines and, down in the trenches, a fierce three-way fraternal rivalry dominated by the increasingly reclusive and unbalanced Charles.
Crumb’s burgeoning misanthropy was stoked, as is so often the case, by adolescence. “I realized I was a geek and I wasn’t going to make it with the girls,” Crumb wrote. “I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist.”
In the late ’50s young Robert discovered Mad magazine and later Humbug, which introduced him to the work of Harvey Kurtzman. “I lived, breathed and ate the pages of his magazines,” Crumb recounted in a 1989 cartoon called “Ode to Harvey Kurtzman.” “I was truly in love.”
In 1962 Crumb got his first real job as an illustrator at American Greetings in Cleveland. The tedious grunt work had him on the brink of quitting until he was elevated to the role of illustrator for the slightly edgier Hi-Brow line. (Crumb’s boss was future Ziggy creator Tom Wilson, who encouraged Crumb to make his drawings “less grotesque.” Crumb claims it took years to expunge the resulting “cuteness” from his work.) After sending an early Fritz the Cat cartoon to Kurtzman at Help! magazine, Crumb received the following note from his boyhood idol: “We really liked the cat cartoon, but we’re not sure how we can print it and stay out of jail.”
But print it they did. Soon Crumb was working as Kurtzman’s assistant at the short-lived Help! (where the staff included future Monty Python animator and filmmaker Terry Gilliam).
“My dad always said I’d marry the first one who came along,” Crumb remarks ruefully in one autobiographical strip. That turned out to be Dana Morgan. “Big mistake,” Crumb later wrote — the new husband was just 21 years old and chronically broke. Nearly destitute, the couple traveled in Europe while Crumb continued to do work for Kurtzman and American Greetings. Dana stole food.
The turning point in Crumb’s career came in 1965 — specifically, it came in a little glass vial. “LSD was legal the first time I took it,” Crumb wrote. “The first trip was a completely mystical experience … It was the Road to Damascus for me. It completely knocked me off my horse and altered the way I drew. I stopped drawing from life.”
With the exception of Fritz the Cat, all of Crumb’s best-known creations date from his post-acid phase, including his most inspired character, Mr. Natural. Crumb’s bearded little guru is no con man — he’s too unapologetic for that. A straight-talking sybarite (booted out of heaven for telling God it’s “a little corny” in “Mr. Natural Meets God”), Mr. Natural is chronically plagued by tight-ass neurotics like Flakey Foont and Schuman the Human, and may be the only Crumb creation who can genuinely be described as likable.
Zap Comics, consisting entirely of Crumb art, debuted in 1967, with the artist and his wife selling the first issue on San Francisco street corners. Underground comics are now remembered as an indispensable part of the era, but it was Zap that blazed the trail. “The people who ran the hippie shops looked at Zap and said, ‘Comic book? What do we want with a comic book?’” Crumb recalled.
They figured it out fairly quickly. Crumb’s rambling, hallucinogenic, sexually explicit cartoons became the visual expression of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Particularly potent was his “Keep on Truckin’” image from Zap #1. Inspired by the language of the ’20s- and ’30s-era blues recordings that Crumb collects obsessively, the famous cartoon depicts a goofy parade of big-footed pedestrians doing an exaggerated strut down the city streets. It was soon regurgitated onto posters, T-shirts and head-shop memorabilia, mostly without Crumb’s permission or participation. (Eventually the cartoon caused legal and financial headaches for the artist — in 1976 a judge ruled that the image did not belong to him, and subsequently the IRS pursued Crumb for unpaid taxes stemming from royalty payments.)
As an unpopular kid, Crumb had longed for the sweet revenge of fame. As a gawky adult in San Francisco, he longed for a little of that free love supposedly floating around. And suddenly, it happened — the candy store was open. Keep on Truckin’, along with Fritz the Cat and his cover art for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s “Cheap Thrills” album, helped make Crumb famous, an icon of the hippie scene and a babe magnet.
He reacted with contempt. Crumb felt scorn for the hippies, the women, the commercial exploitation, even the work itself. Keep on Truckin’ in particular inspired his disdain, a theme that he revisited more than once. In a 1990 cartoon about the creation of the iconic image, Crumb described pop music as “the rhythms of cultural death. In my own spaced-out, inarticulate way, I tried to draw the images I saw in my mind when I heard modern pop music on LSD … clownish fools boppin’ and jivin’ in the garbage heap they were making out of the Earth. … I was fooled by my own drawings. Other people thought they were happy images of relaxed cartoon characters just havin’ a good ol’ time … so I did too! I forgot what they really were. Photographs of the dance of death!”
Well, fair enough — but as Crumb points out elsewhere in the same cartoon, “I guess I don’t like to see people having a good time.” Most of Crumb’s work is suffused with the sullen attitude of the high school loser who has never escaped the cloud of early rejection. “The instant I realized I was an outcast I became a critic,” Crumb has said, “and I’ve been disgusted with American culture from the time I was a kid. I started out by rejecting all the things that the people who rejected me liked, then over the years I developed a deeper analysis of those things.”
In an essay from “The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book,” the artist describes his passion for old 78s that began when he heard “Happy Days and Lonely Nights,” a 1928 record by Charlie Fry’s Million Dollar Pier Orchestra. Enthusiastically, Crumb avows his love for this old music and other artifacts of the era. The essay is titled: “To Be Interested in Old Music Is To Be a Social Outcast!”
There’s probably some pleasure to be had from it, too, but I suppose that can’t be helped.
By late 1969 Crumb had hooked up with S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez and Robert Williams to create the seven-member Zap Collective, which published copies of the magazine sporadically for the next two decades. Crumb also turned out voluminous work in publications with titles like “Weirdo,” “Black and White,” “Big Ass Comics” and “People’s Comics,” in which he killed off Fritz the Cat in 1972. (Not surprisingly, Crumb loathed “Fritz the Cat,” the Ralph Bakshi
animated film that starred his randy feline.)
Crumb is neither a gag writer nor a yarn-spinner. Aside from occasional flights of fancy and the visions dredged from his subconscious with an acid shovel, most of his work is autobiographical. Crumb cartoons are typically marked by a painful, neurotic honesty — also, women with shelflike asses and legs like telephone poles. “My personal obsession for big women interferes with some people’s enjoyment of my work,” Crumb wrote in “The Coffee Table Art Book.” “I knew it was weird and disturbing and even offensive to a lot of people, particularly women. But I couldn’t keep it out of the comics. I would always try to give it some sort of metaphorical sense because I derived such masturbatory pleasure out of drawing these women in bizarre situations with these little guys doing stuff to them. Similarly, using racist stereotypes — it’s just boiling over out of my brain, and I just have to draw it … All this stuff is deeply embedded in our culture and our collective subconscious, and you have to deal with it.”
To reveal your own dirty laundry is one thing — to have it exposed onscreen is something else, as Crumb and his second wife, Aline Kominsky, discovered in 1995 with the release of Zwigoff’s documentary. The director was an old friend and fellow member of the Cheap Suit Serenaders, the group Crumb formed in the ’70s to play his beloved old music. Winner of the grand jury prize at the ’95 Sundance Film Festival, “Crumb” was a revelation — a sometimes creepy and always fascinating journey that did far more than simply enumerate the artist’s renowned peccadilloes. Robert may be a seething cesspool of misanthropy and sexual neuroses, but after a couple of scenes with older brother Charles and younger brother Maxon, Mr. and Mrs. Crumb’s second boy begins to look positively mundane.
Maxon is the film’s purest comic relief — a late-blooming artist of genuine talent, his other hobbies include attempting to molest Chinese women on the street, pulling women’s pants down in department stores, sitting on nails for hours on end and eating long cords of rope that take three days to shit out. “It gratifies the intestines,” Maxon explains.
Charles, made passive and easygoing by tranquilizers and antidepressants, evokes more complex reactions. A benign, housebound Buddha (“Can you give me one good reason for leaving the house?” he asks rhetorically), Charles’ mild manner and toothless grin belie the darkness he describes. Late in the film he calmly reveals that, in his teens, he struggled with the powerful urge to stab Robert to death in his sleep. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Charles reviews his life with the bemused detachment of a fired coach recalling a championship game lost years ago. “Believe me,” he chuckles about his morbid solitude, “it’s nothing to envy.”
Charles developed an early fixation on the 1950 Disney movie “Treasure Island,” starring Robert Newton as Long John Silver and Bobby Driscoll as young Jack Hawkins, filling reams of paper with variations on the story. In one scene, Robert reveals that the source of Charles’ Treasure Island obsession — a sexual fascination with Driscoll — emerged only years later. Young Robert, dutifully slaving away at their pirate comic serials, had no clue as to the true nature of Charles’ inspiration. In that way at least, their intense fraternal relationship was fairly typical — big brother’s actual motivations are rarely perceived by slavishly imitative little bro. It’s a religion, and as with any religion, you don’t ask questions.
The film’s most disquieting moments record the contents of Charles’ old sketchbook. With each page the “Treasure Island” characters become smaller and smaller, pushed to the bottom of the frame by an increasing torrent of words. Then there is nothing but writing and finally, terrifyingly, page after page of cursive lines — like the CAT scan of a brain’s descent into madness. It’s eerily reminiscent of the “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” scene in Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but with the considerable added impact of reality.
Perhaps saddest of all is Robert’s memory of how the unpopular and prematurely embittered Charles spread the virus to his siblings. Any display of enthusiasm on Robert’s part would be squelched by Charles’ trademark sneer: “How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure.” Charles, the closing credits reveal, committed suicide a year after being interviewed for the film. Robert’s life and career begin to look heroic by comparison. (Art and writings from Charles and Maxon can be found in “Crumb Family Comics,” published in 1997 by Last Gasp of San Francisco. The collection also features work by son, Jesse — born to Robert and Dana in 1968 — daughter, Sophie, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Although Kominsky’s best-known work has, not surprisingly, involved collaboration with her legendary husband, the native of Long Beach, N.Y., was already cartooning when they met in the early ’70s. Kominsky’s characters include Blabette Yakowitz, based on her mother. She and Crumb married in 1978. Sophie was born in 1981.
The documentary also neatly summarized the opposing critical camps that have formed around the artist’s work. Leading the cheering section is Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, who calls Crumb “the Breughel of the last half of the 20th century,” and also compares him to Goya. For the prosecution, Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones, examines Crumb’s 1969 epic “Joe Blow” (the target of obscenity busts at comic stores), a gleeful tale of incest in a picture-perfect Eisenhower-era family. She sees something other than satire. “You sense that Crumb is getting off on it himself,” English says, “and I think this theme is omnipresent in his work. It’s part of an arrested juvenile vision.”
Crumb himself pleads ignorance. “I don’t work in terms of conscious messages,” he tells Zwigoff. “I can’t do that. It has to be something I’m revealing to myself as I’m doing it.”
Crumb had mixed feelings about “Crumb,” which, naturally, he expressed in cartoon form. “Head for the Hills” was published in the New Yorker in 1995 and contains Robert and Aline’s ruminations on Zwigoff’s project: “He was kind of creatively at a loss and we felt responsible for his well-being,” Crumb says in the strip. “So we let him film the intimate details of our life.” “He kinda used us to push his own ideas,” says Aline.
Zwigoff doesn’t disagree. “People don’t seem to understand that ‘Crumb’ is a very subjective film,” he later wrote in the collection “Family Album.” “What the film reveals about me is as much a part of the equation as what the film reveals about Robert.”
Whatever Crumb’s feelings about the film, it frequently paints a more sympathetic portrait of the artist than the one presented by his own published work. Reading collections of Crumb cartoons can be an enervating experience. It’s true that for someone like Crumb, who possesses the required taste and discernment to appreciate folk traditions, today’s trash culture can seem like the sixth pot of tea from the same withered bag. Regardless, Crumb frequently comes off as a determinedly miserable sod. He wanted fame, got it and despised it. He wanted women, got them and hates them. Crumb’s anti-consumerist ideals are definitely ’60s vintage, but he can’t seem to decide whether he misses the decade or loathes its memory.
But Crumb’s saving grace is Crumb himself. There is virtually no criticism you can make of him that he hasn’t already made — his most merciless gaze is usually directed into the mirror. The same 1990 cartoon that contains his attack on those who love his most famous image — “So Keep on Truckin’, Shmucks!” Crumb jeers in the final panel — also features a postscript by Mr. Natural: “Don’t forget, Bob, that it was the compassion, the loving forgiveness, that they found so appealing in your cartoons, that made you so popular, that got you laid, that earned you a living. Keep it in mind!”
Well said, Bob — er, Mr. Natural.
Moreover, Crumb’s critics depend on Crumb for their ammunition. Attacking the man as a misogynist? Sure — you know it because he told you so in cartoons like My Trouble with Women, Parts I and II. The cartoonist’s commitment to brutal honesty is the most consistently admirable aspect of his work. Casual readers, too, need to remember that their information about Crumb comes largely from the source. “We only tell ‘em what we want them to know,” says Crumb in “Head for the Hills.” “An’ they assume it’s all true,” adds Aline.
Zwigoff’s documentary also highlights a man who, whatever his failings, is certainly no hypocrite. Big money deals, the Rolling Stones, the chance to host “Saturday Night Live” (in 1976 when it would have meant something) — Crumb spurned it all. Fellow cartoonist Bill Griffiths (Zippy the Pinhead) says admiringly, “This is not something you see every day in America, where selling out is everybody’s ambition.”
“Crumb, like all great satirists, is something of an outcast in his own country,” Hughes remarks in the film. Father of Mr. Natural, murderer of Fritz the Cat — Crumb’s repudiation of modern America will remain trenchant, particularly for the underground culture that has always been his natural home.
But if you choose to immerse yourself in the collected works of Robert Crumb you might subsequently find yourself with a certain craving — the urge to draw the drapes, throw “Saturday Night Fever” on the stereo and do the Dance of Cultural Death till you puke. And then thank your lucky stars that you’re so easily amused.
There’s nothing like the deep, satisfying belch that follows a good meal. But hey America, what about dessert? Iran and Syria have both been offered up as succulent dishes to follow the Iraqi main course. May I suggest a simpler alternative, right next door? Invade Canada. Hell, we’re asking for it.
Canada — a ripe plum ready for the taking. And the plum was probably imported from Florida, which will make it all the easier. It’s not like it hasn’t been considered before — Michael Moore’s one stab at a fictional film (unless you count his documentaries) — was “Canadian Bacon,” in which President Alan Alda takes on Canada. The mere convenience of it is enough to justify it — a regiment in Detroit could blitz Toronto from 9 to 5 and still go home to watch the CNN highlights with the kids every night.
There are plenty of reasons to invade your passive-aggressive northern neighbor. (Or “neighbour,” as we spitefully choose to spell it. Doesn’t that just piss you off?) But never mind — thanks to the lessons learned in Iraq, reasons are no longer necessary. The Bush administration’s labored justifications for the Iraq invasion, served up as convincingly as a chocolate-smeared 6-year-old’s explanation of where the cookies went, proved to be utterly irrelevant. Most Americans, it turned out, were only too happy to kick some non-American ass and didn’t really require an explanation. As a prelude to the invasion of Canada, Bush could merely produce satellite photos proving conclusively that American troops are bored. Good enough for most.
So why bother? An excellent question. The United States owns most of Canada already and, unless you’re unusually fond of thick socks and earnest magazines, there’s not much worth plundering. But the invasion of Afghanistan proves that when sufficiently provoked America will invade and conquer the most God-forsaken acreage imaginable. You might live in an Oklahoma trailer park in tornado season but if you flip America the bird, the troops will come.
Lately, Canada has been flipping America the bird with suicidal abandon. For those who haven’t noticed (roughly everyone except Vegas bookies during hockey season), Canada has been acting rather snotty of late. After failing to support the invasion of Iraq, the Canadian government has been embarking on policies that threaten to turn our shared continent into a giant cesspool of sin.
Canadian Prime Minister Alex Trebek (trust me, it’s easier this way — at least you’ll be able to picture somebody) has also been profligate in his criticism of America, and President Bush in particular. On his way to the recent G8 summit, with Canada-U.S. relations already severely strained, the prime minister treated reporters to hearty criticisms of Bush’s economic and social policies. This after his director of communications had referred to Bush as “a moron” last fall and one of his party members was caught by a reporter’s microphone saying: “Damn Americans — I hate the bastards.” Bush’s planned visit to Canada, already postponed once in a fit of pique, has now been delayed again until after a new prime minister takes office. (Shania Twain, perhaps?)
Canceled visits are small beer of course, unless they presage a full-scale attack. Justifications are plentiful, if you want to be gentlemanly about it. Consider the moral issues.
Following a recent court decision, the Canadian province of Ontario has begun performing gay marriages. The Canadian government has indicated it will not fight the ruling, but will instead prepare legislation legalizing gay marriage nationally. The resulting influx of gay couples into Toronto is almost certain to spill over into Buffalo, N.Y. This could doom President Bush’s chances of carrying the state of New York in 2004. Or, even worse, that giant sucking sound of gay Americans pouring over the northern border could lead to economic catastrophe. Broadway will go dark.
Drug laws sound another alarm for American policymakers. Just last week, local authorities announced that they would open a legal “safe-injection” site for drug users in Vancouver, the first shooting gallery of its kind in North America. The U.S. response? “A lie,” said Bush drug czar John Walters. “Immoral.”
Recent moves to decriminalize pot in Canada may have disappointed Canadians who had been promised more drastic action (under pending Canadian legislation, possession of over 15 grams will still be criminal, less than that a misdemeanor), but they are still worrisome enough to have drawn dire warnings from Washington. During a Canadian speaking tour, Walters said Ottawa’s push toward decriminalizing marijuana could “complicate” border security. “Frankly, I’m worried about Canada beginning to look like Mexico as a major supplier of drugs into the United States,” he told one Canadian news program. Indeed, there are tremendous dangers here for the U.S. — a potential Cheech & Chong revival is only the beginning. But never mind the smuggling issue — that’s merely a smokescreen.
Bush’s real concern will be the state of the Canadian economy. It’s currently outpacing the U.S. quite nicely. Canada’s budget deficits are under control while America’s soar; the once-pathetic Canadian dollar is climbing steadily against the U.S. buck. Once Americans realize that even a dope-addled nation enveloped in a giggling fog can do a better job of running its economy than the Republicans are doing, it will be curtains for Bush. America’s next president will be Dr. Dre. An invasion must begin now.
Or how about a protective invasion for health reasons? A prophylactic invasion, a complete Canadian quarantine to prevent the spread of SARS and mad cow disease. Currently Canada is a festering cauldron of plague, our streets strewn with bloated dead. That’s pretty much an accepted fact. Summer tourist traffic is down in Vancouver, B.C., due to fear of SARS. That the only reported SARS deaths (about 30 so far, none recently) have been recorded in Toronto, Ontario — roughly as close to Vancouver as Los Angeles is to Panama City — is apparently not important to the American traveler. (Nor does it seem to matter that even in Toronto, SARS poses less risk to visitors than the flying spittle of Mayor Mel Lastman.) The fear of SARS is real, as real as was Saddam’s threat to the American way of life. Americans will cheer decisive action.
Mad cow disease could provide another pretext for invasion. So far, mad cow has been a singular Canadian experience — it has been found in a single cow. (Even that cow may only have been disgruntled.) Still, one dangerous cow is something - tough to sneak old Bessie past Hans Blix.
It’s not as if the fever for war would be entirely manufactured, either - certainly not for Canadians. Northerners express a litany of grievances against the U.S. — for example, the annoying tendency of Bushites to make pious pronouncements about the sanctity of free trade while slapping specious duties on Canadian lumber and grain.
Mostly though, Canadians are galled by the fact that we can get as angry as we want and nobody cares. Our refusal to participate in Iraq drew a few of the usual protests. A Chicago competition for school choirs refused to accept a Canadian group on account of our nation’s treachery. (Thank God you can always count on a few dedicated wingnuts.) But for the most part, no one noticed. Why would they? France was snubbing America too, and they have the bomb. Canada’s ancient helicopters are more dangerous to their pilots than to enemy combatants; Canada’s underpaid soldiers are mostly a threat to default on loans. Hold the “freedom bacon” — nobody missed our help anyway.
It is this sense of our irrelevance that drives Canada’s incessant whining about the States. We’re better than you, goes the Canadian refrain — nobler, more caring, more tolerant, given to smiles and hugs where Americans opt for assault weapons. And yet no one notices. What’s the point of being good if Mom’s not even watching? So we sit in a passive-aggressive funk and vote for leaders who exact our revenge by pissing in the Rose Garden and running away.
Damn it, we’re obnoxious little pests. Squash us like bugs, America! We’ll probably apologize afterwards.
It takes a lot for Canada to make the papers, but this was a good one. Last week at a NATO conference Francoise Ducros, a top aide to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, was overheard calling President George W. Bush “a moron.” Out loud.
It was, to say the least, a bit of a diplomatic faux pas. In the Canadian Parliament, opposition politicians screamed for the head of Ducros, Chretien’s director of communications. Ducros paid the price for her indiscreet comment Tuesday when Chretien accepted her resignation. (She had offered to resign last week, but the prime minister initially refused to accept her resignation.) Before Ducros departed, a Canadian news organization ran a poll, asking the public what Ducros’ fate should be.
The winning suggestion: Give the woman a promotion.
No, these are not good days for the president’s international image. Bush may bask in warm approval ratings back home, but Canadians seem to view him with a mixture of fear and contempt, a German government official compared his foreign policy to Hitler’s, while European political cartoonists almost uniformly portray him as various species of monkey. And those are his allies.
Prime Minister Chretien, a man who often seems to speak both English and French as second languages, promptly offered a helpful clarification. “He’s not a moron at all,” Chretien said of Bush. “He’s my friend.”
That ought to show up in future Bush campaign literature. Pretty much lays the issue to rest (although Chretien left open the question of whether the president might be a chucklehead or possibly a putz).
Canadian antipathy to the States is neither new nor secret. A recent cover story in the National Review pilloried Canadians as “Wimps!” decrying our mewling, hypocritical complaints about U.S. behavior and facetiously suggesting that a good, sound bombing would do wonders for our attitude.
The Review story had a point. There is indeed a facile strain of Yankee-hating on the Canadian left, a relentless demonizing of the American ogre combined with an utter lack of gratitude for the military and economic benefits of having such a kick-ass next door neighbor. While 9/11 prompted an overwhelming grass-roots outpouring of Canadian solidarity with America, it also gradually uncovered an appallingly deep and intellectually lazy anti-Americanism among many educated Canadians. There was a widespread tendency to seek justifications for the terrorist attacks; a sort of “Yes, it was awful, but so is U.S. foreign policy” approach. The long habit of criticizing America proved so durable that many Canadians began to cast Osama bin Laden as a legitimate grievant.
That’s inexcusable. But in many other ways, northern anti-Americanism is not only understandable but inevitable. And for that, President George W. Bush must carry the can.
Try to walk a mile in fur-lined Canadian galoshes while you consider the following.
As the U.S. prepared to attack the Taliban, Bush called for allied support. Canada responded by sending troops to Afghanistan.
And how did the president say thank you? By imposing a massive tariff on Canadian softwood lumber, a tariff that threatened doom for the West Coast lumber industry and made a mockery of our vaunted North American Free Trade Agreement (not to mention the supposedly fundamental Republican commitment to free trade). The World Trade Organization criticized the U.S. tariff as pure politics. The Canadian government howled. No matter.
Meanwhile, four Canadian troops were killed in Afghanistan when an overzealous American pilot bombed them during a training exercise. The military investigation was secretive and grudging, while Michigan politicians began raising money to protect the U.S. pilots from a “witch hunt.”
And Canadians asked: Is this how America rewards its friends?
More irritants have been piling up of late. Recently Canada’s Foreign Affairs Office took the previously unthinkable step of issuing a travel advisory after the Americans threatened to single out Canadian citizens of Middle Eastern descent.
Lately, Canadian newspapers have been full of the tale of Michel Jalbert, a Quebec duck hunter who recently spent a month in a Maine jail. His crime: filling up at an American gas station in his hometown of Pohenegamook, which sits on the Canada/U.S. border. It’s a daily routine the villagers have engaged in for years (the gas station’s driveway is in Canada, but its pumps are in the United States). American authorities imprisoned him for crossing the border with a gun, not allowing him to contact his family for over a week.
The Jalbert story has been huge in Canada, ignored in the States. Which only adds to Canadian irritation — such affronts sting all the more since the Americans are no more aware of our outrage than a baboon who walks through a spider web. (Pat Buchanan recently caused a top-of-the-newscast Canadian furor when he referred to us as “Soviet Canuckistan.” Buchanan really ought to consider moving to Canada — up here, people pay attention to him.)
Recently, PBS ran a two-part biography of the great Benjamin Franklin. It detailed his subtle and brilliant diplomatic work in Paris during the American Revolutionary War, tirelessly ingratiating himself with the French to gain their support against Britain.
Not many Ben Franklins around these days. Then again, there is virtually no one in the Bush administration who feels the lack. Apparently, the new America does not need friends.
This American attitude was detailed with sobering clarity last September when the administration released its “National Security Strategy.” In it, the U.S. frankly proclaimed its intention to dominate the globe and, as the world’s only superpower, to play by its own rules. All justifiable, the manifesto claimed, because unlike the imperialist titans of the past, America always acts for the common good.
The honesty was almost refreshing. And the reality of the global situation is undeniable. What’s annoying is that America is not content to be the world’s über-bully. It also wants to be loved. It’s like Bogart and Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon. “When you’re slapped,” the U.S. sneers, “you’ll take it and like it.”
Few outside the U.S. accept the country’s automatic claim to the high moral ground. On the contrary, postwar history suggests that the U.S. tearily celebrates its own democracy while coldbloodedly subverting any other governments — including democratic governments — deemed to be hostile. Bush’s “You’re either with us or against us” rhetoric might have been all right when the villain was bin Laden. But now that this noble battle has been replaced by what is widely considered an irrelevant vendetta against Iraq, the attitude doesn’t wash internationally.
President Bush appears to have the instincts of a congressman. Congressional representatives do not generally care about foreign policy (unless it leads to local defense contracts). If some trade issue gives a congressman the opportunity to bash foreigners while championing local voters, he’ll snap it up like a whorehouse gift certificate. Likewise, the Bush administration often seems unconcerned with how American actions are perceived abroad.
Most of the media attention accorded Bush’s National Strategy focused on military matters. But grass-roots anti-Americanism often centers on an issue that American commentators rarely deign to notice — trade. The National Strategy revealed an interesting attitude toward free trade, a policy usually considered intrinsically American. Free trade, it announced, would be pursued as a sacred good. With one caveat: American workers must never suffer.
Hello? America will sign free trade agreements with you but if they ever start working in your favor, it’s tariff time? What sane nation would sign a deal like that?
A nation with no other choice. A nation like Canada.
The favorite Canadian quote on cross-border relations came from the late Pierre Trudeau. Living next door to the U.S., the former prime minister said, is like sleeping with an elephant; you feel every twitch and grunt.
He was perhaps too diplomatic to point out that Canada is actually more like a flea on an elephant’s ass — invisible unless we prove too annoying, and then easily crushed. That’s a fact Canadians are forced to accept. But it doesn’t lead to fond feelings.
Recently I was talking to some friends about that Ben Franklin documentary and happened to mention the inspiration French revolutionaries took from the Americans. My friends were skeptical — surely, they insisted, the American Revolution must have followed the French. The idea that those heroic peasants from “Les Misérables” lit their torches from an American flame seemed impossible to my Canadian peers. Today’s America is viewed as Republican — not bravely-manning-the-barricades republican, not teaching-the-world-the-ways-of-liberty republican. George W. Bush Republican.
And we know what Canadians call him.
Today, everybody loves New York. Mayor Rudy, New York’s Finest, the firefighters — all part of the corny Big Apple bumper sticker plastered on our collective heart. As we watch the city get off the mat and start swinging again, people everywhere salute the plucky citizens of America’s mightiest metropolis. And then some of us turn toward Yankee Stadium and offer salutes of a different kind. To hell with solidarity — we still hate the Yankees.
Now, in the fall of 2001, is that OK? Is it cool to lie awake wishing painful strains on every pinstriped groin? At this dark moment when we stand shoulder to shoulder with all the residents of Gotham, can we pause a moment to curse the Bronx Bombers and all their works? Hell yes. I hate those Bronx bastards.
I know — sports don’t matter anymore. Sept. 11 put everything in perspective. Empty athletic contests mean nothing in the big scheme of yada yada. Why then do my teeth grind like tectonic plates as I watch Paul expletive O’Neill circle the bases like a prize spaniel prancing around a dog ring? Why does my Yankee loathing run so deep?
It’s the inevitability — the numbing predictability of Yankee success when the pumpkin wears frost. They say baseball is like life, and it’s true insofar as this: No matter what you do, what deals you make, what successes you enjoy, you cannot forestall the inexorable end. There are only two certainties in this life: death and the Yankees.
Taxes? You can cheat on your taxes. Taxes are random compared to the Yanks. In the 2001 playoffs they first faced an Oakland Athletics team that won 102 games and compiled the best record in the majors after the All-Star break. The Yanks lost the first two games of the best-of-five series on their own home turf. That left them in need of three straight victories, two of them in Oakland where the A’s had a 17-game winning streak going.
But the sun continued to rise and set as usual and the Earth failed to wing crazily off into space like a runaway truck tire. So a week later the victorious Yanks were heading into Seattle for the American League championship. The Mariners, you may know, tied the major league record for most wins in a season with 116. One hundred and sixteen victories, piled up steadily from April to September like sawdust from a Washington wood chipper.
And what are the victories of spring and summer? They are the youthful Hollywood dreams of a future chartered accountant. They are the salad days of a high school quarterback, destined someday to land steady work as the overnight security officer at a parsnip warehouse. They are a 10-course banquet of nachos and cream soda. They leave you as fat and gassy as the other half of a Mike Tyson fight. When the Yankees hit town, Seattle had as much chance as a crippled pigeon on a LaGuardia runway.
But why? Why do the Yankees wait like a terminal disease at the end of every tedious campaign? Money, of course; for all baseball’s trumpeting of midbudget successes like the A’s, the poor are no more likely to prosper in the major leagues than they are in the America’s Cup.
Nonetheless, winning is not just about cash. The Texas Rangers proved that with spectacular flair this year by vomiting a quarter-billion bucks onto shortstop Alex Rodriguez. Evidently Rangers’ management hoped their pitching staff, like Anna Nicole Smith, would perform better in front of a rich guy. Instead they finished with the worst earned run average in the major leagues and the Rangers missed the division title by 43 games. A-Rod played well, but to match expectations he would have needed the kind of season not seen since Moses went 10-for-10 against Pharaoh. The fact that ownership of the Texas Rangers now appears to be a springboard to the White House should have American taxpayers clutching reflexively at their wallets.
Money doesn’t help if you’re stupid. But Seattle spent wisely. So did Oakland. Baseball fans grown tired of the annual October pinstripe parade had every reason to believe that deliverance had come at last. And when baseball’s reliable rat fink Roger Clemens stumbled out of the playoff gate, losing Game 1 to Oakland and looking shaky in his second start, tyranny finally seemed on its last legs.
The Yanks didn’t need their ace. The Yanks, it seems, don’t need anything but that famous two-letter pileup stitched onto their hats. Logic becomes futile. Throw away the racing form. Yankee mystique trumps all.
The World Series begins this weekend. National League champion Arizona owns the deadliest one-two pitching combination in recent history with starters Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson. Yankee hurlers seem vulnerable. Finally, the stage may be set for new October heroes.
And maybe George Steinbrenner will be president. Sorry, Rudy, but I hate the goddamn Yankees.
These are dark days for pop radio. Calculation rules. TV shows like “Making the Band” and “Popstars” celebrate the corporate Meccano set that is current pop culture; the deluge of boy bands and Britney leaves us grateful even for a bloated and self-indulgent remake of “Lady Marmalade” if it can at least remind us of an inspired original. Pop fans wait for the dawn to break — and in the meantime, thank the radio gods for Janet Jackson.
For 15 years, spanning the eras from Journey to Destiny’s Child, Janet Jackson has frequently provided the best reason to turn on the radio — although, admittedly, the case for opening a good book is usually a lot stronger. Top 40 has always been more or less a sausage factory. Between the occasional bursts of true genius that change the prevailing flavor of pop, journeyman producers and performers rush in to fill the gaps with sawdust imitations of the real joy. Much of pop history has consisted of marking time until the next big thing.
Janet Jackson is not, and never has been, the next big thing. Working with producers/songwriters Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Jackson could be fairly described as yet another sausage merchant. But Janet’s gourmet links are so fine. Since her 1986 breakthrough album “Control,” whatever Janet Jackson song happened to be on the radio at any given time was usually the song you wanted to hear. At their best, her singles represent the kind of quality craftsmanship that made us listen to the radio in the first place — the kind of songs that make you swallow a stream of crap from O-Town and 112 because the next song might just be “Someone to Call My Lover.”
That hit from Jackson’s latest album, “All for You,” demonstrates much of what makes her records stand out from the radio dross. Opening with a guitar sample from America’s “Ventura Highway,” the producers demonstrate how such samples ought to be used — as filigree on an original work, rather than the basis for a Puff Daddy-style karaoke record.
As for the singer, she is dreaming aloud about the lover she seeks: “Maybe we’ll meet in a bar/He’ll drive a funky car/Maybe we’ll meet in a club … ” A bar? A club? Hardly a Cinderella scenario. And yet there is a quality in Jackson’s voice — the kind of sweet yearning Diana Ross brought to the Supremes — that culminates at the end of each verse as she sings a wistful “Maybe!” Somehow, Jackson makes a tale of club-hopping sound as innocent as “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
“Innocent” is not a word that has been attached to Janet Jackson’s music of late — ever since 1993′s “Janet” album, her lyrics have displayed startling sexual frankness. And yet while her songs have often been raunchier than Madonna’s, Jackson’s image retains a certain wholesome quality. Perhaps it’s because of the inherent sweetness of her voice, or perhaps it’s the power of first impressions. Aside from some early performances with her famous siblings, Janet’s first real introduction to the public came via roles on the sitcom “Good Times,” in the late ’70s, and then “Diff’rent Strokes,” in the early ’80s. That initial clean-cut image has subsequently allowed her to explore the subject of sexual pleasure as the natural province of a mature young woman.
Then too, the public may cut Janet some slack because, as she has admitted in interviews: “People see me as the ‘normal one.’” A relatively uncomplicated pop career is not what people have come to expect from the offspring of the most famous showbiz clan ever to come out of Gary, Ind.
Born May 16, 1966, Janet is the youngest of Joe and Katherine Jackson’s nine wunderkinds. The Jackson 5 were already stars when she was just a child, and Janet was spared the poverty of the family’s early years. After beginning her acting career, Jackson released her self-titled debut LP in 1982. She was only 16. The record drew little attention, and 1984′s “Dream Street” didn’t do much better. Meanwhile, brother Michael was dominating the charts in a way that few artists have ever accomplished.
Janet’s first real attempt to break away from the tight strictures of the Jackson clan was personal, not professional. At 18, she eloped with singer James Debarge for a quickie marriage that was just as quickly annulled, sending her back to the family home in Los Angeles. Her next breakaway would be more successful; it took her not to the altar, but to Minneapolis.
In 1985 A&M Records executive John McClain suggested that Janet work with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, two aspiring producers who had until recently been members of the raucous funk outfit the Time. When Janet’s father, still her manager then, heard that the duo was based in Prince’s hometown, he bristled. According to writer David Ritz, father Joe warned the two men: “I don’t want my daughter sounding like Prince.”
And that, more or less, was the end of Joe Jackson’s professional hold over his daughter. Because sounding like Prince was something eager young Janet could definitely get behind. The resulting LP, “Control,” was a statement of independence packed with insolent hits like “What Have You Done for Me Lately” and “Nasty.” In the fall of ’86, “When I Think of You” not only gave Janet her first No. 1 single, it provided a blueprint for subsequent explosions of pop ecstasy like 1989′s “Escapade” and 1998′s “Together Again.” Sausages don’t get much tastier than those.
Reworking a successful formula need not lead to tedium. Motown was perhaps the greatest sausage factory of all, with songwriters like the Holland-Dozier-Holland team recycling every hit into one or more rhythmic clones. With her own team of Jam and Lewis, Janet Jackson would continue to hone her craft through the ’90s, experiencing increasing levels of success. But listen again to “When I Think of You,” and the essential elements of Janet Jackson’s style are already there, fully formed.
Many of Jackson’s records feature a postmodern “in-studio” theme, with Janet simultaneously performing the song and commenting on the playback. (“Didn’t quite hit the note,” she mutters in 1995′s “Runaway”; “That’s the end?” she squawks at the abrupt finish of “Miss You Much.”) A more important element is the reliable presence of actual melody. These tunes have hooks. Take away the melodic edge, the lilting style her team lends to these songs, and what would you have? A famous name and a state-of-the-art studio sound wrapped around an empty, aimless groove. You’d have Jennifer Lopez. J-Lo’s records deserve their very own adjective: per-funk-tory. Listen to a few of them back to back and see if you don’t start scanning the dial for a little dose of the Janet antidote.
Between 1986 and 1997, Jackson’s four albums of original material — “Control,” “Rhythm Nation 1814,” “Janet” and “The Velvet Rope” — all hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. The 1995 hits package “Design of a Decade,” featuring two new tracks, hit the Top 5. “All for You,” Jackson’s latest opus (by now credited only to “Janet”), proved to be her fastest seller yet, moving more than 605,000 copies in its first week last spring. The title track set a new standard at Radio & Records magazine by being added to every applicable radio station playlist in its first week, loping easily to No. 1 shortly thereafter. Jackson has also maintained a screen career with performances in John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice” and the Eddie Murphy vehicle “The Nutty Professor II.” Meanwhile her concert tours, beginning with her first in 1990, have been renowned for lavish production values and meticulous choreography. When you ponder the magnitude of her brother Michael’s ’80s and early ’90s success, it’s almost incredible to think that, as of now, Janet is the biggest star in the Jackson family. Few performers have ever had to emerge from such a formidable shadow — a shadow that includes the strong taint of family eccentricity.
When a Jackson pops up on the radio today it’s generally either Janet as a singer or Michael as a punch line. Years after his last chart appearance, Michael is still the butt of morning DJs’ jokes about plastic surgery, hyperbaric chambers, questionable pajama parties, etc. His solo career has charted a very different course from Janet’s (or almost anyone’s for that matter) — hers characteristically sure and steady, his wild and erratic. You can’t become the King of Pop without also making yourself a target for regicides, and the backlash against Michaelmania has threatened to make him a ghost of pop past. His carefully staged reemergence begins this fall with his 30th anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden Sept. 7 and 10, featuring all-star guests and a handful of brothers. But never before has Michael faced the real possibility of eclipse by a sibling.
In interviews, Janet has confessed to a sense of family guilt about her relative success at a time when other Jacksons are consigned to oldies stations (and in LaToya’s case, back issues of Playboy). Likewise, reports have hinted at tension within the family — Janet will not be among those appearing at Michael’s big comeback show, a fact that she attributes to her undeniably busy touring schedule.
But regardless of whether Janet has put distance between herself and her tabloid-happy clan, she has at least tried diligently to stay out of the same supermarket publications. In that she has been largely successful, although at this level of success, it seems, no one escapes unscathed. It was only when she filed for divorce last year that Janet’s secret 1991 marriage to Rene Elizondo Jr. was revealed — a notably successful act of espionage for a woman so in the public spotlight (note to secretive celebs: Marry a key grip). Elizondo has since filed suit against his former wife for a portion of her royalties, allegedly owed to him for production work.
Aside from this marital unpleasantness, though, the only risqué thing about Jackson is her lyrics and her cheerful admission that they do reflect a healthy sexual appetite. (There is also the matter of her eye-popping promotional campaigns. In 1998, one sensual Jackson billboard was removed from a British motorway when drivers began plowing into hedgerows and each other as they gawked.)
There has rarely been a time when pop radio listeners could not legitimately complain about the dreck being dumped upon them in 3- and 4-minute piles. But the great ones stand out all the more in creatively fallow times. Janet Jackson may well be the beneficiary of contemporary pop’s Lilliputian landscape. Her singles are admittedly a hit-and-miss affair — she can sometimes descend too far into pop convention and turn out the same kind of mediocrity as her less-talented peers. More often, though, a Janet Jackson song on the radio is a deluxe buffet set up on a compost heap. Pass the sauerkraut.
