A World Without Mad Magazine

By Jordan Orlando The New Yorker

Alfred E. Neuman’s misaligned features and insouciant grin graced nearly every cover of Mad magazine, which is ceasing publication after sixty-seven years.

Photograph from The Advertising Archives / Alamy

The California painter and critic Manny Farber extolled “termite art” as occurring “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” That need for art to be ugly, to go where it is not wanted, burrowing destructive channels into sacrosanct carpentry, was essential to the creation of Mad magazine, which announced this month that it is ceasing publication.

In 1952, William M. Gaines, the publisher of EC Comics, a New York imprint responsible for the bloody and garish “Tales From the Crypt” and other successful horror, war, and crime titles, invited the staff contributor Harvey Kurtzman to launch a humor title. Kurtzman’s “Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD” (subtitled “Humor in a Jugular Vein”) began as a parody of other EC titles, using the same artists—Jack Davis, Will Elder, Wally Wood, John Severin—to spoof their own over-the-top horror vignettes. The first Mad story was a frenzied, ridiculous haunted-house tale called “Hoohah!” Later issues branched into satire of television, movies, and literature, all done by Kurtzman in the same frantic, punning style (“Dragged Net!” “Flesh Garden!” “Shermlock Shomes!”). Readers loved Mad’s exuberantly lowbrow tone: an early, anonymous letter declared, “What you publish is cheap, miserable trash! Fortunately, I also am cheap miserable trash!” The June, 1954, cover was styled like a literary journal, so that readers “ashamed to read this comic-book in subways and like that” could make “people think you are reading high-class intellectual stuff instead of miserable junk.”

In the spring of 1954, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings in New York City on the menace of comics, largely prompted by the notoriety of the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s best-selling book “Seduction of the Innocent,” which contended that “chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books . . . are contributing factors to many children’s maladjustment.” Gaines was called to testify, and disputed the arguments in Wertham’s book, insisting that “delinquency is the product of the real environment in which the child lives and not of the fiction he reads. . . . The problems are economic and social, and they are complex.” His testimony was not persuasive, and the hearings resulted in EC and other comic publishers acquiescing to self-censorship, necessitating the creation of a Comics Code Authority, which would henceforth review every issue of every title before granting permission to display a “Seal of Approval,” without which the comics could not be sold.

Mad’s publisher, William M. Gaines, on a promotional tour in the early nineteen-seventies, when the magazine was most overtly political.Photograph by Popperfoto / Getty

No EC titles survived the purge except Mad, which escaped the Comics Code by expanding its trim size to become a “magazine”—and this new, adaptable hybrid format was the key to its longevity. The writer Maria Reidelbach, in her history “Completely Mad,” from 1991, explained how Kurtzman and Gaines “styled Mad as a parody of the slick photo magazines, a format that had the advantage of allowing for large illustrations . . . allowing filmlike sequences of drawings and articles with varying amounts of text.” Mad magazine carried no advertising, freeing its satire from any conflicts of interest, but “following magazine conventions, full-page advertising (parodies) appeared on the inside and back covers.” Tony Hendra, the English humorist, observed that the congressional investigation “unwittingly created a vacuum which Mad filled with a vengeance. . . . In the harsh climate of the fifties it is now possible to see there was perhaps room for only one magazine, one fountainhead of impudent print humor.” The placidity of the Cold War boom generated an urgent need for rudeness and disrespect, and Mad responded, broadening its critical gaze beyond comic-strip-art parody and into more generalized social and cultural commentary.

As Mad grew nationally, it received letters from readers who wanted to know what “furshlugginer” and “Potrzebie” and “Ganef” meant. Al Jaffee, now ninety-eight years old and the longest-serving of Mad’s “Usual Gang of Idiots” (as the magazine billed its contributing artists and writers), explained in an interview with Leah Garrett, in 2016, that “the average reader in the country” would not have “made a connection between these strange words and the fact that a lot of people working for Mad were Jewish.” The postwar influx of European-Jewish thinking into suburban American life was, by this time, well under way: the psychoanalytic movement was finding mainstream expression through Gentile icons like Marlon Brando (whose demonstration of Konstantin Stanislavski’s “method” revolutionized Hollywood acting), Hugh Hefner (whose magazine, Playboy, which launched in 1953, aggressively exposed the male id), and Charles Schulz (whose comic strips explored adult neuroses through the prism of a fancifully eloquent childhood).

Jews in the arts who could not freely ascend into high culture (as Leonard Bernstein or Saul Bellow did) brought the Jewish-American comedy tradition, pioneered by Groucho Marx and others, to television, which could deliver its message and tone beyond city limits. Sid Caesar, an early Mad contributor, who graduated from standup jobs in the Catskills—the “Jewish Alps”—created the popular variety show that gave a young Mel Brooks his first television-writing job. (“If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish,” the comedian Lenny Bruce said. “It doesn’t matter, even if you’re Catholic . . . [But] if you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish, even if you’re Jewish.”) Jewish comic-book writers and artists performed a different sort of assimilation, cloaking their idiosyncrasies behind a Nordic veneer, and blending in like the superheroes they created. The comics wunderkind Frank Miller wrote that comics were where “a bunch of American Jews imitated a bunch of Greek heroes,” starting with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Depression-era Superman, which was later described as a symbol of mainstreamed, camouflaged Jewish power.

Like queer art or hip-hop, which invert prejudicial slurs into badges of empowerment, Mad’s defiantly labelled “trash” reclaimed the language of highbrow cultural disdain. The Mad “idiots” subverted the comic form into a mainstream ideological weapon, aimed at icons of the left and the right—attacking both McCarthyism and the Beat Generation, Nixon and Kennedy, Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Their urban sensibility was elevated into a national platform for contrarian and anti-authoritarian rebellion, led by a mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, whose misaligned facial features and insouciant grin graced nearly every Mad cover. Like Marcel Duchamp drawing a mustache on the “Mona Lisa,” Mad stamped Alfred E. Neuman onto an endless series of beloved public figures and fictional characters, with his home-plate-shaped head replacing or mocking everyone from Darth Vader and Ronald Reagan to E.T., Michael Jackson, Donald Trump, and Jared Kushner.

The sweep of history that Mad illuminated, from the early nuclear age to the present, provided the magazine with a rich and vital narrative of America and the world. The members of the staff, who posed for the photographs in the fake ads—since models could not be persuaded to mug so garishly—began as mid-century teddy boys, some with goatees or horn-rimmed glasses or berets, cigarette packs rolled into the sleeves of their T-shirts. They were replaced, as the decades passed, by long-haired men and women in floral shirts and bell-bottoms, and then by New Wave hipsters and skate punks. The early nineteen-seventies, probably the peak of it all, were when Mad was most overtly political, excoriating Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew and deriding the “pushers” and “pollution” that stained those years. The April, 1974, cover, arguably Mad’spurest, was a Norman Mingo painting of a fist with a raised middle finger.

The principal writers and artists stayed for decades, usually until they died, maintaining their evergreen features: the flawless caricatures with which Mort Drucker populated his movie parodies (George Lucas called Drucker and the writer Dick DeBartolo “the Leonardo da Vinci and George Bernard Shaw of satire”); the endless, wordless yin-yang battle of needle-nosed Cold War spies created by the Cuban refugee Antonio Prohías; Paul Coker, Jr.,’s sweet, baffled figures defeated by everyday happenstance; Sergio Aragonés’s microscopic, exquisitely tooled “marginal” sight gags; Don Martin’s crazy cityscapes, populated by grotesque clowns with hinged feet, their injuries punctuated with “kloon” and “zeem” and “fladat”; the leaden gags of Dave Berg, Mad’s token square, conservative and religious, whose suburban foils in leisure suits and nitwit hippies in bell-bottoms delivered thudding punch lines; Jack Rickard’s charcoal-sculpted fake ads, the products’ slick spokesmen menacing behind gleaming grins.

By Sarah Larson

Unlike science fiction or rock and roll or fantasy literature or superheroes, Madcould never escape its ghetto, by design. The slicker, more cultured progeny that superseded the magazine—among them Lorne Michaels, the Onion, and Stephen Colbert (who wrote the introduction to a collection of Al Jaffee’s “Tall Tales” comic strips)—arose to heights of acclaim and sophistication unthinkable decades ago. Gaines’s death, in 1992, altered his creation about the same way that Steve Jobs’s did his: the venture continued uninterrupted and essentially unchanged, but the essence was gone. When the magazine finally switched to glossy, full-color printing and digital typesetting, in 2001, and began to accept genuine ads (mostly for video-game cartridges and candy), the demographics of the current readership became abruptly visible: the campus radicals and stationed military men and college students who wrote the earliest, most fervently grateful “Letters to Mad” had been replaced by grade-school children.

Sixty-seven years is a good run for anything, but, when Mad confirmed that it was joining National Lampoon and Life and Spy in the magazine graveyard, and the Elysian Fields of online archives, the pang that many felt, as if leaving a childhood bedroom for the last time, was that its departure was nonetheless abrupt and premature. Wherever we are headed, we must now get there without “the Usual Gang of Idiots.” Yet the magazine’s final moment of thumb-in-the-eye relevance—this May, when Donald Trump compared Pete Buttigieg to Alfred E. Neuman—emphasized just how deeply Mad has tunnelled its way into the culture, waiting to inspire anew.

Jordan Orlando is a writer and an artist. He is the author of “The Object Lesson” and the co-author of the Edgar-nominated “7 Souls.”Read more »

How Picasso’s Muse Became a Master

How Picasso’s Muse Became a Master Françoise Gilot was the artist’s lover and pupil. Then she wanted more.

By Alexandra Schwartz The New Yorker

Picasso called Gilot “the woman who says no,” and their courtship was a playful battle for dominance.Photograph by Gjon Mili / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

In 1946, not long after she fell in love with Pablo Picasso, Françoise Gilot made a painting called “Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple.” Two flat, angular figures sit at a table. The woman placidly clasps her hands in front of her as the man—bald, blocky, with one dark, piercing eye shown in profile—thrusts the fruit into her mouth. Temptation, knowledge, punishment, exile: these are things, in Gilot’s version of Genesis, that come from man, even if it is woman who will be blamed. The same year, Gilot moved in with Picasso. A friend warned that she was headed for catastrophe. “I told her she was probably right, but I felt it was the kind of catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid,” Gilot recalls in her remarkable 1964 memoir, “Life with Picasso,” written with the art critic Carlton Lake, and recently reissued by New York Review Books Classics. In the painting, the woman’s eyes are clear, and wide open.

Gilot and Picasso met in May, 1943, at Le Catalan, a Left Bank restaurant near the building on the Rue des Grands-Augustins where Picasso lived and worked. She was twenty-one, and “already felt that painting was my whole life.” Picasso, forty years older, was sitting with his lover Dora Maar, the “weeping woman” of his paintings from the late thirties, and brought over a bowl of cherries, to flirt. Later, he liked to say that he had painted Gilot during his Blue Period, before she was born. Gilot, too, composes the scene like a painting: the red of the cherries is set against the green of her turban, which is echoed by the “intense bronze-green eyes” of the glowering Dora Maar.

Green: the color of envy. Maar was hardly the only woman in Picasso’s life. He was still married, to Olga Khokhlova, a minor Russian aristocrat and former Ballets Russes dancer. That union was a disaster—one look at the saw-toothed grotesques that he painted during their separation will tell you more than you want to know about his feelings for her—but French law prevented them from divorcing. Then there was Marie-Thérèse Walter, athletic and sunny, whom he had seduced on the street when she was seventeen and he was forty-five. She and their daughter, Maya, lived in an apartment near his, and Maar lived in another; much to his amusement, the women despised each other. Picasso expected Maar, a noted Surrealist photographer, to make herself completely available to him, so she sat at home all day, in case he might call. After he took up with Gilot, Maar had a breakdown. When he went to see her, she confronted him with the truth: “As an artist you may be extraordinary, but morally speaking you’re worthless.”

Picasso did not like to hear this, but he didn’t disagree. There were two kinds of women, he said, goddesses and doormats. Gilot diagnosed him with a Bluebeard complex, which “made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he had collected in his little private museum”:

“Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple,” from 1946.Courtesy the Elkon Gallery, New York

But he didn’t cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove that there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread.

The Bluebeard story is one of escape: just as he is about to behead yet another wife, her brothers swoop in and save her. So is Gilot’s, but she did the saving herself. After ten years and two children with Picasso—Claude, born in 1947, and Paloma, born in 1949—she left him, becoming, in the Picasso mythology, the only one of “his” women to do so of her own accord. That distinction conferred on her a morbid celebrity, as if she were the sole survivor of a plane crash. Reporters camped outside her door. Even Picasso was impressed. He had Gilot prance in on horseback to open a bullfight hosted in his honor at Vallauris, the Riviera town where they had lived—a final tribute to a worthy adversary. Things were uglier behind the scenes. When Gilot told Picasso that she wanted to “live with my own generation and the problems of my time,” he put a curse on her head:

Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life has touched mine so intimately. And you’ll be left with only the taste of ashes in your mouth. For you, reality is finished; it ends right here. If you attempt to take a step outside my reality—which has become yours, inasmuch as I found you when you were young and unformed and I burned everything around you—you’re headed straight for the desert.

He was wrong—mostly. For one thing, Gilot ended up happily married to Jonas Salk, who was doubtless secure enough in his own accomplishments to like her for reasons that had nothing to do with Picasso. And she went on to have an admired career as an artist. Gilot is ninety-seven now; she has been painting nearly as long as Picasso did, and is enjoying something of a revival. In October, I went to Sotheby’s to watch a curator interview her about a new edition, from Taschen, of fanciful travel sketchbooks that she made in Venice, India, and Senegal. Gilot, still beautiful in a navy-blue suit and knotted silk scarf, was lucid, witty, and pitilessly dry in the French way. Though she has given numerous interviews on Picasso over the years, her interlocutor had evidently been advised not to make any mention of him: this was her time.

But it is true, too, that Picasso branded Gilot. She became the symbolic rebel, the muse who got away. He had marked her reality, and she repaid him, in “Life with Picasso,” by signing her name to his

Her book ends with an act of rupture, but it begins with one, too. Gilot was the only child of a wealthy agronomist who, like other disappointed haut-bourgeois fathers of the time (Simone de Beauvoir’s comes to mind), compensated for having a daughter by raising her as a son. He decided that she would become a lawyer, but she had a sense of calling. A self-portrait made the year that she met Picasso shows a sober young woman resolutely approaching her canvas:

Until then I had been cushioned by a kind of cocoon that my milieu formed around me. I had the impression that the noises of life had been reaching me so muted that all connection with reality was strained out. But I knew that an artist draws from his direct experience of life whatever quality of vision he brings to his work and that I had to break out of the cocoon.

Study for “Mother and Child,” from 1952.Courtesy the Elkon Gallery, New York

Gilot informed her father that she was giving up the law for art. In response, he beat her, cut off her income, and tried to get her committed to an insane asylum. She went to live with her grandmother, gave riding lessons at a stable, and painted. She describes, with no small pride, her habit of rising from bed and reporting straight to her easel without even bothering to brush her hair. Essentially, this well-bred girl from Neuilly-sur-Seine became a bohemian overnight.

That was Gilot when she met Picasso: independent and hungry for experience. She had been trying for some time to “get beyond that barrier called virginity,” but most of the men she knew were off in the Resistance. Now the most famous artist in the world was giving her tours of his studio, introducing her to people like Gertrude Stein (imperious) and Matisse (a total peach), discussing his work with her, and actually encouraging hers. He went to see her first exhibition, and pronounced her “very gifted for drawing.” The comment sent her back to her studio, ecstatic.

And Picasso, too, was alone, in his very different way. Many artists and intellectuals had fled Paris when the Germans arrived. But he was convinced, arrogantly but correctly, that he was too famous to be harmed. Although he was officially at the top of the Nazis’ list of degenerates, he got special treatment. When Gilot first went to visit him, he bragged about his hot-water supply and invited her back for a bath.

Her appeal to Picasso seems obvious. She was young, unattached, beautiful. But so were many girls. More unusual, she was confident, opinionated, unafraid. “I knew that here was something larger than life, something to match myself against,” she writes, like a scrawny prizefighter training to take on the champ.

Picasso called her “the woman who says no.” He was funny, charming, expansive—she reports that they spoke to each other with total understanding—but pretty soon she had an idea of what she might be getting into. She describes arriving one evening at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, only for Picasso to shout that he would rather be at a brothel. Gilot’s strategy in ugly situations, and there were many, is to insulate herself with irony. Coolly, she calls his bluff: he doesn’t even like whores; he is only trying to test her. But she is wary. For months, she stays away, and goes back only “as a birthday present to myself.” This is sweet, and startling—one of the few times that Gilot sounds as young as she was.

A 1995 Novel Predicted Trump’s America

ESSAY The New York Times

A 1995 Novel Predicted Trump’s America

By Alec Nevala-Lee NY Times

“Consider how the titles of tyrants change,” the historian William Frederick Kohler once wrote. “We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger our boys; the masses make such appointments now; the masses love tyranny; they demand it; they dance to it; they feel that their hand is forming the First Citizen’s Fist; so we shall murder more modestly in future: beneath the banners of ‘Il Duce,’ ‘Der Führer,’ the General Secretary or the Party Chairman, the C.E.O. of something. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called Coach.”

Kohler’s words seem especially resonant today, and their power is undiminished by the fact that their author exists only as a character in a novel by William H. Gass. Gass, who died in 2017 at the age of 93, began working on “The Tunnel” in the late 1960s, and he finished it a quarter of a century later, when it was published by Alfred A. Knopf. Even under the best of circumstances, this plotless book of over 600 pages would have been one of the least commercial novels ever released by a major publishing house, and it had the additional misfortune of appearing halfway through a decade that was uniquely unprepared for its despairing vision of America. The critic Robert Kelly wrote in The Times Book Review: “It will be years before we know what to make of it.”

Kelly was more right than he realized. When Gass’s book was published, in 1995, the cycle of history had revolved to a point more or less directly opposed to the moment in which it was conceived. Now that the wheel has come full circle, it seems frighteningly ahead of its time, as does Gass himself. After the publication of his earliest stories, some of which were collected last year in “The William H. Gass Reader,” he became renowned both for his unyielding fidelity to the art of the sentence and for his uncompromising pessimism. As he said of his most ambitious novel: “I wrote ‘The Tunnel’ out of the conviction that no race or nation is better than any other, and that no nation or race is worse; that the evil men do every day far outweighs the good.”

Kohler, its narrator, is a 50-year-old professor of history at a thinly disguised version of Purdue University, where Gass himself taught for more than a decade. As the novel opens, he has just completed a book, “Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany,” that he’d once hoped would be his masterpiece. When he sits down to write the introduction, however, he finds that he despises it, and he starts to pour out his life story instead — his dismal boyhood, his unhappy marriage, his failed love affairs. He also begins to dig a tunnel to nowhere out of his basement, although this evocative symbol occupies only a fraction of the narrative, which is dominated by Kohler’s seemingly endless flood of rage, interspersed with typographical tricks, cartoons and obscene limericks.

At first it can be hard to understand why Gass dedicated so much of his career to writing in such an unbearable voice. As we learn more about Kohler, however, we find that Gass is assembling a case study with the meticulousness of a psychological profiler. We gradually discover that Kohler — who keeps a trunk of Nazi memorabilia hidden under his porch — is drawn to the Hitler era because it reveals the unspeakable truth about his own soul. As a young man, he studied in Germany, and on Kristallnacht, he was so swept up by the fury that he hurled a brick at the window of a Jewish grocery store.

After brooding over his actions, he concludes that violence is an eruption of disappointment — the attacker hurts those whom he sees as unfairly advantaged, even if it costs him everything. Kohler connects this irrational longing for revenge to the Holocaust, as well as to a distinctly American bitterness caused by “an implicit promise broken, the social contract itself,” which deprives its victims of the happiness that they had seen as an inalienable right. This theory of history reflects his own toxic envy, but the picture that emerges of Kohler himself is painfully real, and his humiliation over his own minor failures leads him to exhibit what Gass diagnosed as “a slightly hidden fascist mentality” common in the United States.

This is an immensely important theme, and Gass explores it relentlessly. His narrator’s memories begin with his bigoted father, who scorned the ideas — “free trade, for instance” — that his son learned at school, while dismissing immigrants as “parasites, scabs, seducers” and ranting against “those who let these people into the country in the first place, when there were few enough jobs.” Gass methodically depicts what he elsewhere called the “fascism of the breakfast table,” as domestic combatants “crow over every victory as if each were the conquest of a continent, grudge every defeat as if it were the most meanly contrived and ill-deserved bad luck a good sport ever suffered,” in performances that can expand outward to define an entire culture. He also devotes many pages to the small towns over which “sunsets were displayed in the deepest colors of catastrophe, the dark discordant tones of the Last Trump.”

As Kohler recalls the resentments of his father’s generation — “They were America, damn it, and Americans should come first” — he offers a word of advice to those who have been abandoned by history: “Don’t invest in a future you will never see, a future which will despise you anyway, a future which will find you useless. Pay for your own burial plot. Get the golf clubs out. Die with a tan your daughter’s thighs would envy.” This sense of betrayal, which can shade into vengefulness, leads to a radical strain of politics that Gass later described in an interview: “Fascism is a tyranny which enshrines the values of the lower middle class, even though the lower middle class doesn’t get to rule. It just gets to feel satisfied that the world is well-run. It likes symbols of authority and it likes to dress up. It likes patriotic parades.”

In the novel’s most prophetic passages, Kohler fantasizes about forming a movement called the “Party of the Disappointed People.” He draws pictures of its insignia and merchandise (including special caps) and explains: “What the other parties avoid, we shall embrace. We shall be the ones with the handshakes like the Shriners, the symbols, the slogans as if we were selling something, the shirts, the salutes and the flags.” By definition, its constituents feel disenfranchised by life, so they need powerful collaborators: “If we were to recover a bit of pride, we might be able to make ourselves into harassing gangs. So we shall make our pitch to the huddled elites, the ins who are on the outs.”

The party will need to be circumspect about its intentions — Kohler proposes a secret hand signal that will allow its members to recognize one another — until a public figure arises to amplify its anger: “What a pool of energy awaits the right voice.” Kohler’s ideal tyrant is modeled on Hitler, but he also looks ahead to the demagogue of the future. “And now the hero comes — the trumpet of his people. And his voice is enlarged like a movie’s lion. He roars, he screams so well for everyone, his tantrums tame a people. He is the Son of God, if God is Resentment. And God is Resentment — a pharaoh for the disappointed people.” Kohler anticipates the role of the media — “TV faces and their blatant lies are now our leaders” — and contemplates the shape of such a man’s life: “Our favorite modern bad guys became villains by serving as heroes first — to millions. It is now a necessary apprenticeship.”

As for Hitler, Kohler calls him “a petty little twerp” whose one undeniable gift was to openly state what other politicians left to implication: “Yet Hitler — the dissembler, the liar, the hypocrite, the mountebank, the deluded, the con man, the sophist, the manipulator, the dreamer, the stage manager and the ultimate ham — he was probably history’s single most sincere man.” Kohler speculates at length about the motivations of Hitler’s opportunistic supporters, “all of those who weren’t twerps who willed what Hitler wished,” and he finally arrives at a shattering conclusion: “I would have followed him just to get even.”

After “The Tunnel” was published, Gass made its true subject clear: “I’m not talking about Germany, I’m talking about the United States.” The novel ends without a solution, but Gass had once hinted at a potential way out. In his 1968 novella “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” he evokes a Midwestern town in which tribalism transcends mere selfishness or greed: “I have known men, for instance, who for years have voted squarely against their interests.” Politics is treated as a sporting event, with voters lined up on opposing sides, and their need to see themselves as winners may turn out to be their unlikely salvation: “They tend to back their country like they back their local team: They have a fanatical desire to win; yelling is their forte; and if things go badly, they are inclined to sack the coach.”

Alec Nevala-Lee is the author of “Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.”

FROM DAVID A FAIRBANKS

Recent studies of low income whites in various states, north and south, find the same self defeating mindset.

"Let the black man starve to death, let the Jew lose everything and starve to death. Let the liberal die of cold and the queers die of whatever disease! I am a common man and these evil thugs have taken my religion, my racial pride and my daughter and ruined them. If I have to starve to make these people starve, I'm ready! God bless Donald Trump, Jesus sent him to save me!" 

The Debasement Puzzle

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Everybody knows what real-world political disagreement is like: shouting, name-calling, dissembling, browbeating, mobbing, and worse. As it is practiced, deliberation in actual democracy has little to do with collective reasoning about the common good; it’s instead a constrained, but nevertheless ruthless, struggle for power. Notice, however, that hardly anyone embraces this condition. When people describe democracy in such terms, they are most often complaining. But notice that lamentations over the cut-throat nature of politics make sense as criticisms only against the backdrop of an aspirational alternative. Our forthcoming book, Democracy in a Divided World, develops a democratic ideal worth aspiring to. According to that ideal, democracy is a system where political equals govern together by means of well-run political argument.

This ideal is admittedly distant, but it hasn’t been plucked from thin air. Despite the condition of our democracy, citizens and officials alike hold one another to high standards of civil conduct. When the President characterizes those he perceives to be his critics as “very dishonest people,” he appeals to the public virtue of honesty. Charges of bias uphold the related public virtue of even handedness. When one criticizes a news organization for being slanted, one is insisting upon a public virtue of fairness. Note, too, that it is common now for the word “partisanship” to be used as a criticism; when one official charges another with being “partisan,” she is claiming that the other is dogmatically committed to a party line. Such charges uphold the ideal of proper argumentation. The fact is that real world politics, warts and all, is still animated with the aspiration to democracy as a system of well-run argumentation.

This occasions a puzzle. We all embrace the same democratic ideal of well-run argument and joint governance. And no one wholeheartedly approves of the political status quo. So why is our democracy so dysfunctional? Call this the debasement puzzle.

The short answer to the debasement puzzle is that we did this to us. Here’s the longer answer. Deliberation is a collective enterprise of argument. When it is engaged in a democracy, deliberation is also an enterprise of argument among political equals. Political equals owe one another a kind of civic respect, an acknowledgement that among citizens there are no bosses and subordinates. This means that in a democracy political disagreement must evince the participants’ recognition of one another’s standing as political equals. So that’s why it has to be argument that runs deliberation, not merely giving orders or speaking excathedra. To fix terms, we can call the collection of dispositions, attitudes, and practices that constitute this recognition and argumentative orientation civility. Hence we can say that, in a democracy, citizens owe to one another the duty of civility.

To be clear, civility is a term freighted with associations that we are here rejecting. It’s worth emphasizing two key ways in which our usage diverges from what is common. First, in our view, civility does not require a gentle tone, a concessive posture, or a general stance of conflict aversion. Rather, we mean by civility that collection of traits that enable citizens to manifest their respect for the equality of their interlocutors even amidst heated disputes over important political matters. Second, as we have argued previously, the demands of civility are reciprocal; that is, we each have a duty to engage civilly provided that the requirements of civility are generally upheld by our interlocutors. In our view, civility does not impose duties on us come what may. Now, even granting these stipulations, there will be competing views regarding what civility amounts to. But we can leave debates over civility’s nature aside; our purposes lie elsewhere.

Whatever else democracy is, it involves the thesis that a decent social order is possible among equal citizens who disagree, often vehemently, about the precise shape their collective life should take. This means that in addition to thinking together about questions of public policy, citizens must also be able to think together about questions concerning how political argumentation should be conducted. And this in turn means that democratic citizens must evaluate not only one another’s political judgments regarding the policy questions they face; they must also evaluate each other’s performance in political argumentation.

Normally it’s easy to see that these two levels of evaluation are conceptually distinct. Ann might articulate a severely flawed view of, say, immigration without thereby violating her duty of civility. Similarly, Bill might articulate the correct position on that matter in a way that is uncivil. In Ann’s case, those who disagree with her should criticize her position by engaging her reasons; in the case of Bill, however, citizens as such – even those who agree with his view on immigration – should criticize him for his incivility. In a democracy, mistakes regarding questions of policy are to be expected, and when a citizen comes out on the wrong side of a policy question after having deliberated in good faith, she’s blameless. By contrast, even when a citizen has impeccable judgment regarding a policy question, if he is uncivil in expressing his view, he deserves censure.

And here is where the trouble lies. Although the distinction between the two levels of evaluation is clear on paper, it’s difficult to keep them distinct in the heat of high-stakes democratic decision-making. Given the importance in a democracy of coalitions for achieving one’s preferred results, the tendency is to regard agreement on the policy questions as sufficient for civility. And for the same kind of reason, there’s an inclination to regard those who disagree with us about the policy issues we think most important as ipso facto also failing at civility. And the reality is that those who reject the things you hold dear and do so explicitly to you seem to be uncivil people. Indeed, in a democracy, there is often a strategic advantage in treating one’s allies as beyond all criticism, and one’s opposition as not merely wrong about the policy issues, but as wholly inept.

Thus the debasement puzzle finds its explanation. In regarding our policy adversaries as wholly inept, we come also to regard them as so thoroughly misguided as to be incapable of proper citizenship. Accordingly, although we all embrace the same democratic ideals of civility, we regard our opposition as unable to meet civility’s requirements. Given the reciprocal nature of the duty of civility, once we are convinced that our opponents will not reciprocate, we no longer have a rationale for upholding civility. Our opponents, of course, reason similarly. The result is a dysfunctional democracy. However, the dysfunction is compounded by the fact that much of the incivility is, in fact, blameless: ordinary citizens often have adequate reason to take their opposition to have divested from civility; thus they also have adequate reason to conclude that that civility’s requirements no longer hold. The debasement puzzle hence points to a tragedy for democracies: perhaps this particular debasement dysfunction is an inevitable result of democratic practice.

Ross Perot, Dies at 89

Ross Perot, Dies at 89 

By Robert D. McFadden NY TIMES

Ross Perot, the wiry Texas gadfly who made a fortune in computer services, amazed the nation with audacious paramilitary missions to Vietnam and Iran, and ran for president in 1992 and 1996 with populist talk of restoring Norman Rockwell’s America, died on Tuesday at his home in Dallas. He was 89. 

The cause was leukemia, a family spokesman, James Fuller, said. (Perot at 19)

They called him the man from Texarkana, but he really came out of an era — the Great Depression, World War II and the exuberant postwar years — when boys had paper routes, folks tuned in to the radio and patriots rolled up their sleeves for Uncle Sam and built innovative companies and a powerful nation. 

“Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success,” Mr. Perot liked to say. “They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.” 

He was no quitter: an Eagle Scout, a Navy officer out of Annapolis, a top I.B.M. salesman, the founder of wildly successful data processing enterprises, a crusader for education and against drugs, a billionaire philanthropist. In 1969, he became a kind of folk hero with a quixotic attempt to fly medicine and food to American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. 

In 1979 he staged a commando raid that he asserted had freed two of his employees, and thousands of criminals and political prisoners, from captivity in revolutionary Iran. 

And in 1992 he became one of the most unlikely candidates ever to run for president. He had never held public office, and he seemed all wrong, like a cartoon character sprung to life: an elfin 5 feet 6 inches and 144 pounds, with a 1950s crew cut; a squeaky, nasal country-boy twang; and ears that stuck out like Alfred E. Neuman’s on a Mad magazine cover. Stiff-necked, cantankerous, impetuous, often sentimental, he was given to homespun epigrams: “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.” 

Under the banner “United We Stand America,” he spent $65 million of his billions in a campaign that featured innovative half-hour infomercials about himself and his ideas. They were popular, with ratings that sometimes surpassed those of prime-time sitcoms. Ignoring negative newspaper and magazine articles, he laid siege to radio and television talk shows. Switchboards lit up with calls from people wanting to volunteer. 

Mr. Perot, running as an independent, sparred with President George Bush and Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas on Oct. 13, 1992, in a presidential debate broadcast from the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Before long, millions were responding to his calls to cut government deficits, red tape and waste, to begin rebuilding the crumbling cities and to restore his vision of America: the small-town life idealized in Rockwell’s homey portraits of ballpark patriotism, barbershop wisdom and flag-draped Main Street, a world away from corrupt Washington. 

While Mr. Perot had done business with every administration since Lyndon B. Johnson’s, the federal government was one of his favorite targets. Washington, he told its own denizens, “has become a town with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don’t ever accomplish anything. We need deeds, not words, in this city.” 

He’s Up, He’s Out, He’s Back In 

Improbably, he surged in the polls while the Republican incumbent, George Bush, and the Democrat, Bill Clinton, trained their fire on each other. Polls showed that Mr. Perot’s support came from across the spectrum, from Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, mostly from the middle class. Citizen drives got him on the ballot in all 50 states. He was on the cover of Time magazine. 

But at the peak of his popularity, he unexpectedly dropped out of the race. Months later, he jumped back in, saying his withdrawal had been prompted by Republican “dirty tricks” to sabotage his daughter’s wedding with faked compromising photographs. 

He did surprisingly well in three presidential debates, often mocking the “gridlock” in Washington. “It’s not the Republicans’ fault, of course, and it’s not the Democrats’ fault,” he said in the second round. “Somewhere out there there’s an extraterrestrial that’s doing this to us, I guess.” 

On Election Day, Mr. Perot finished with 19 percent of the popular vote — almost 20 million ballots — compared with 38 percent for Mr. Bush and 43 percent for Mr. Clinton. It was the strongest third-party showing since Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose run in 1912. 

It also it led to claims by some Republicans, including the president’s son and future president George W. Bush, that Mr. Perot’s candidacy had cost President Bush a second term — a contention refuted by many political analysts, who pointed to, among other things, exit polls showing that Mr. Perot’s strength had not come disproportionately from defecting Republicans. 

In 1996, Mr. Perot ran again, this time on a new Reform Party ticket, but he fared poorly. By then the epigrams had paled, and voters suspected that his business strengths, the risk-taking and stubborn autocratic personality, might not serve a president constrained by Congress and public opinion. And by then more was known of Mr. Perot, who could be thin-skinned and meanspirited, who had subjected employees to moral codes and lie detector tests, who was drawn to conspiracy theories and had hired private detectives to chase his suspicions. 

His candidacy was crippled when a commission refused to let him join debates between President Clinton and the Republican nominee, Senator Bob Dole, on the grounds that he did not have a realistic chance of being elected. He won only 8 percent of the vote. But, as he liked to say, “Failures are like skinned knees: painful but superficial.” 

He was born Henry Ray Perot on June 27, 1930, in the East Texas border city of Texarkana to Gabriel and Lulu May Ray Perot. His father was a cotton broker and a horse trader. The boy did well in local schools, but teachers said his good grades had more to do with persistence than with superior intelligence. 

He began working at 7, selling garden seeds door to door and later breaking horses (and his nose) for his father at a dollar a head. When he was 12, he began delivering The Texarkana Gazette on horseback in poor neighborhoods, soliciting subscriptions and building his route from scratch for extra commissions. He did so well his boss tried to cut his commissions, but he backed off when the boy went to the publisher. 

An Eagle Scout at 12 

He changed his name to Henry Ross Perot in honor of a brother, Gabriel Ross Perot Jr., who died, just a toddler, in 1927. The family pronounced the surname PEE-roe, but in his 20s he changed that, too, making it puh-ROE, because, he said, he got tired of correcting people. He called himself Ross; years later, the news media added the initial “H” at the beginning of his name, but he never liked it. 

Mr. Perot aboard a chartered jet airliner in Tokyo in December 1969 as he sought to deliver food, medicine and gifts to prisoners of war in North Vietnam. The mission was rejected by Hanoi, but it embarrassed the North Vietnamese government and led to better treatment for some prisoners.

He joined the Boy Scouts at 12 and in little more than a year was an Eagle Scout, an extraordinary achievement that became part of his striver’s legend. After two years at Texarkana Junior College, he won appointment to the United States Naval Academy, where, despite academic mediocrity, he was elected class president and graduated in 1953. 

In his senior year, Mr. Perot met Margot Birmingham, a student at Goucher College in Baltimore. They married in 1956. She survives him, as do his son, Ross Jr.; four daughters, Nancy Perot, Suzanne McGee, Carolyn Rathjen and Katherine Reeves; 16 grandchildren; three step-grandchildren; and a sister, Bette Perot. 

In the Navy for four years, Lieutenant (j.g.) Perot served aboard a destroyer and an aircraft carrier, sailing around the world, but he saw no combat. Military life chafed, especially the waiting in line for promotion. 

He mustered out in 1957, joined I.B.M. in Dallas and became an outstanding computer salesman, once fulfilling his annual quota in three weeks. Restless for new ventures, he urged the company to get into software and technical support, but his supervisors were uninterested. He quit, and in 1962 he founded Electronic Data Systems to sell computer services: billing and payrolls, insurance claims, check-clearing for banks, eventually the paperwork for Medicare and state Medicaid systems. 

The company struggled for a few years, but by the mid-1960s it was on its way. It went public in 1968, and its stock jumped to $162 a share from $16, making Mr. Perot one of America’s richest men. Many of his employees became millionaires, but all had to conform to his codes: conservative suits and short hair for the men, no slacks for women unless it was freezing. And no marital infidelities. 

As he coasted to success, Mr. Perot tested his skills on Wall Street, but he was no wizard. His company lost $450 million on paper one day in a 1970 market swoon, and he later lost $65 million in a futile attempt to rescue duPont Glore Forgan, a major brokerage drowning in debts and paperwork. 

His folk-patriot reputation stemmed from two adventures. In 1969, after months of speaking on the plight of 1,400 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam, he chartered two jetliners, filled them with 30 tons of food, medicines and gifts and flew to Southeast Asia. Hanoi rejected the mission, but it was hardly a failure. The spotlight on prisoners’ hardships embarrassed Hanoi and led to better treatment for some. 

In 1979, as an Islamic revolution swept Iran, Mr. Perot mounted a commando raid on a prison in Tehran to free two employees being held for ransom. A riot was orchestrated at the gates, and in the chaos of an ensuing breakout 11,800 inmates escaped, including both employees. The episode was chronicled in Ken Follett’s best-selling book “On Wings of Eagles” and in a 1986 mini-series on NBC (in which Mr. Perot was played by Richard Crenna). But State Department officials in Tehran at the time questioned whether the Perot team had truly been responsible for the prisoners’ release, suggesting that Mr. Perot’s account had been exaggerated. 

Mr. Perot with his wife, Margot, left, and children in March 1987 

A Spot in the Public Square 

Mr. Perot was recruited in 1979 by Gov. Bill Clementsof Texas to spearhead a state war on drugs. His work led to new laws that toughened sentencing and law enforcement. In 1983, at Gov. Mark White’s behest, he led an overhaul of the Texas public school system — raising education taxes, increasing teacher salaries, cutting class sizes and barring failing students from school sports. 

In 1984, Mr. Perot sold Electronic Data Systems to General Motors for $2.5 billion in cash and stock that made him G.M.’s largest shareholder. He joined G.M.’s board and rankled the chairman, Roger B. Smith, with barbed demands. 

“Revitalizing G.M. is like teaching an elephant to tap dance,” Mr. Perot said. He also said: “It takes five years to design a new car in this country. Heck, we won World War II in four years.” 

In 1986, Mr. Perot accepted a $700 million G.M. buyout. Two years later, he founded Perot Systems and raided his old executive pool to staff his new company. He was chairman for years and became chairman emeritus in 2004, when his son succeeded him. In 2009, Dell, the computer maker, agreed to acquire Perot Systems for $3.9 billion. 

Mr. Perot gave millions to schools, hospitals and cultural groups. He wrote books on politics and economics, including, “United We Stand: How We Can Take Back the Country” (1992), “Not for Sale at Any Price: How We Can Save America for Our Children” (1993) and “Preparing Our Country for the 21st Century” (1995). He was the subject of several biographies, including Gerald Posner’s “Citizen Perot: His Life and Times” (1996). 

Mr. Perot’s Reform Party faded in later years, and he cut his ties with it. In 2000 he endorsed George W. Bush for president, and in 2012 he backed Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. He was publicly quiet about the 2016 race, but in early 2000, when Mr. Trump was briefly exploring a presidential run on the Reform Party ticket, Mr. Perot backed a party faction that strongly opposed the prospect of a Trump candidacy. 

All the while his business, Perot Systems, thrived. Forbes listed him as America’s 97th richest man in 2008, with $5 billion. His ranking had dropped in the years since, however: Forbes put him at 172nd in 2018 and most recently listed his net worth at $4.1 billion. 

Mr. Perot remained proud of his singular life. “Eagles don’t flock,” he told visitors in Dallas. “You have to find them one at a time.” It was his favorite saying, and he had it engraved on a plaque, displayed in his office with his bust of Teddy Roosevelt, his Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and his collection of Norman Rockwell originals.