Liberal Legerdemain

ALMOST COMICAL

Liberals distract attention away from their own penchant for controlling everyone's lives, by accusing Cap-C conservatives of themselves being that jack-booted thug.  Abortion is the major arrow in the quiver - invading a womans body and  bedroom,  but there are others.  One is pointing out how puritanical Republicans  held congressional hearings on comic books!  and magazines!   Comic-book Liberals like Stan Lee, the late William (MAD) Gaines, and others injecting it into the public debate is old hat. Am I alone in that remembrance?  George Will's column today, then, made me sit up and bark. “ An estimated 90 percent of children 8 to 13 then read 10-cent comic books, of which scores of millions were sold weekly. The worry du jour was juvenile delinquency. [...] In 1954, Fredric Wertham brought science - very loosely defined - to the subject of juvenile crime. Formerly chief resident in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was politically progressive: When he opened a clinic in Harlem, he named it for Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law who translated portions of "Das Kapital" into French, thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals. ad_icon Without ever interviewing the convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg, Wertham testified on her behalf concerning what he called her "prison psychoses." Since 1948, he had been campaigning against comic books, and his 1954 book, "Seduction of the Innocent," which was praised by the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills, became a bestseller by postulating a causal connection between comic books and the desensitization of young criminals: "Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry." Wertham was especially alarmed about the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the "homoerotic tendencies" were patent. Even before Wertham's book appeared, a committee of New York's legislature considered government licensing of comic-book publishers ... [Our puritanical progressives]