Fishing Is More Than Dangling The Line

Fishing Is More Than Dangling The Line

 BY ADELE A. WILBY 3 Quarks Saily

On occasions, while meandering the various English countryside and woodland paths, I have been pleasantly surprised to come across anglers. I have met fishermen dangling their lines in either a pond in some remote corner of the low-lying areas, or wading in water and casting a line down through the waters of a gently flowing river.

Brief dialogues with these men, and they have all been men, on how far they have been successful in their catches yield different responses: some are satisfied that they have indeed caught several fish and subsequently returned them to the water, while the response of less successful anglers is to express optimism that by the time they leave at the end of the day, they will most certainly have landed a fish!

However, arguably more interesting than whether or not the hooks have snared a catch is the demeanour of the men involved. Decked out in their layered fishing jackets with pouches containing various equipment adding inches to their already substantial, ageing girths; sturdy boots at various levels on the way up their calves, waterproof trousers well tucked in; hats of different shapes and sizes and colours; tackle boxes splayed open revealing their array of hooks and other stuff I have no knowledge about; standing or sitting, sometimes with the rod in hand, or not infrequently, just circling the same spot eyeing their rods, they exude more a sense of enjoyment and ease at the tranquillity of the natural environment in which they are immersed, than the actual fishing; it is their space, and they appear to relish the moment.

Nevertheless, neither a hunter of either animals or fish myself, the fascination over the pleasure these men, and some women, obviously experience in the challenge to catch a fish has frequently perplexed me. Why would anybody want to sit on the edge of a pond in any type of weather, sink a line and hook and wait to catch an innocent fish, or stand deep in water consistently casting a line back and forth down or up a stream, until a hungry fish in the wrong place and at the wrong time is snared on a hook?

I have never delved into these subjects with the fishermen I have come into contact with; I am not sure that such questions would be welcome, indeed they might feel offended at such trite, perhaps ignorant, questions about a sport they obviously feel is worth all the time and effort to learn and practice, and indeed the money spent on the equipment. However, recently a friend suggested the book, Blood Knotsby Luke Jennings that would be an alternative read from my usual choice in books, and the reading of it might shed some insights into what it is about fishing that draws so many men into the sport. I agreed to have a go at reading the book, and in the process perhaps learning the answers to the questions as to what is so fascinating about fishing that engages so many men in particular.

Not far into the book, I began to realise that perhaps the ardent anglers are right; there is more to fishing than sinking a line and hook into the muddy bank of a pond or river. My first ‘awakening’ was to realise that what lies below the water is of equal interest to the angler as that of the preparation of fishing equipment and is as much a part of the challenge when fishing. The habitat of the fish is as important consideration as the technique of tying knots and hooks and casting the line as a prelude to catching a fish. Jennings comments on this aspect when fishing in the river Thames: ‘It maybe that your hooks are caught in the rusting spokes of a bicycle wheel, that your bait has already been stripped from the hook by Chinese mitten-crabs’. However, the fisherman is not to be demoralised by the rubbish lying on the river bed for that is, he says, ‘the nature of fishing’, even though, ‘the odds are almost overwhelming against you and that is how you like it’ in which case, ‘all that you can do is offer your bait to the water, empty your mind, and reach for your thermos, your hip flask and whatever other comforting poisons you’ve brought with you. In other words, you must acknowledge the ritual nature of what you’re doing’.

‘The ritual nature of what you’re doing’ and an ‘empty mind’? Are those qualities of fishing and approach consistent with skills required to master a sport? Perhaps it is best put in more sophisticated terms when Jennings says ‘half of you is intensely expectant, while half of you enters a zone of no time at all.’ In other words, fishing it seems, is, for the angler, intense, both in terms of anticipation and experience.

My curiosity roused about fishing and the fisherman, I read on as Jennings narrates his autobiography bound up in an account of how he eventually mastered the ‘art’ of fly fishing: he has laced his history of learning and experiencing fishing into his personal and family history.

Jennings has written elegantly about his middle-class English family, and it does, in many ways, represent the quintessential middle-class English life style: conservative in outlook; proud to be a part of a family with a military heritage; patriarchal in orientation, and a lover of the countryside. His family is not untypical of many English families of the post-World War II era of the 1950s: a father who has a nostalgia for wartime experience; financial frugality; social class as an element in social relationships, and a determination that their child should attend ‘better’ schools seen mainly to be at a boarding school where his father before him had taken up residence to acquire the necessary education. But it is the story of Jennings love of fishing that is, for me, the centre piece of the book, and it is the opportunity to learn and master the sport of fishing that is an important feature of Jennings life at boarding school, and after.

Thus, we learn that Jennings was eight years old when he acquired his first fishing rod, an impulse buy by his father. But unable to gain any practical experience of fishing, Jennings turned to books written by the best anglers of his time to learn more about what fishing actually involved. Fortune fell his way at school when he established a friendship with a man as passionate about fishing as Jennings himself; the boy was set on a journey that took him to different ponds and streams in the English countryside where he was able to learn the technique of how to catch a fish. We are left in little doubt however, that catching that elusive big fish is more than casting the line in the water in the correct place, or flicking the wrist that will allow the hook to land just tantalisingly close enough to seduce the wary fish, or how well the knot has been tied or the best fly attached. The real skill, it seems, is in bringing all these components together into a harmonious casting action which optimises the probability of success, and it is that which excites the fishing enthusiast. Jennings practised the technique until he had mastered the ‘art of angling’. Commenting on the elegance of his friend’s fly-fishing ‘art’ when a trout came into view and became the target of the fisherman, Jennings says:

…Robert…his concentration total, waited until the fish had come up another three or four times before making his move. Then he raised the rod-tip across his body and gave the cane a single, deliberate forward stroke. The line wheeled upstream, unrolling at the top of its arc to flick out the leader, the fly’s forward progress arresting in a tiny puff of water vapour. It was, I think, the single most elegant physical action I had ever witnessed’.

Jennings frequently reminds us, that acquiring such elegance requires patience and practice, as all art forms do. A pity though, that the elegance of the gentle movement of the fish’s delicate fins swaying, and the sashaying of its firm, shiny, smooth body in the water could not have been appreciated on the same level, although Jennings does concede that fish have their own beauty. The carp with ‘their immensity, their ghostly elusiveness, their elemental strength when hooked…The wet-leather head with its small suspicious eye. The silver-grey mass of the body, every tarnished scale the size of a half-crown’ is one fish that he admires. Moreover, the fish, in Jennings’ terms, are distinguishable in their gendered behaviour: ‘the silvery elusive roach were as feminine in their character as the gladiatorial, bronze-armoured perch were masculine’. Inevitably he was ‘driven crazy’ by the roach! ‘To catch a prime specimen… and to linger for a moment on its exquisite fashioning –on the amber eye, the white gold of gill covers, the vermilion fins, the iridescent violet-scales is to forget the hours of frustration’, he says of fishing for that feminine roach. Perhaps his desire to snare the roach is consistent with his human ‘masculine’ behaviour, as opposed to tackling the masculinity of the ‘gladiatorial’ perch.

However, ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ is perhaps not the issue, but rather that the fish have ‘character’ and their habitat is the water that the fisherman must be attuned to if he is to snare one of nature’s beauties. Watching for the movement of the reeds in the water; for that special dark place near the roots of trees; for the air bubbles to pop up on the water surface; identifying the insects skimming the water; choosing the appropriate ‘fly’ that mimics the insects that fish feed on, is the work of the fisherman before he finally launches his challenge. Will he have chosen the right ‘fly’: the ‘elk hair caddis’, the ‘woolly bugger’ that imitates just about any bug, or will the ‘Chernobyl ant’ be as impactful as its name sake, or indeed will any of the vast number of dud insects do the trick and get the fish ‘hooked’ and bring joy to the fisherman, or will the fish’s instincts tell it danger is lurking, and with a flick of its tail propel it out of danger? Will the angler be an ‘outwitter of wild creatures’? The answer will reveal itself when the fisherman finally sends in the line; the challenge between man and fish on, and the fish, if snared, is not likely to go down easily. The fish’s muscle and guile is bound to be fully mobilised, curling its body back and forth in a frenzy of fear to free itself from that hook deep in its jaws in the battle between man and fish as the fisherman reels in his catch and wrests victory over the creature. Once onshore the fisherman, in Jennings’ younger days, proceeded to secure their victory by knocking the defeated fish on the head, putting an end to its fear and defeat. In more contemporary times, the fisherman shows magnanimity and spares its life, and, being the gladiator that it is, the fish is returned to the water to wait another day for it to face its next challenge in the watery coliseum, as the angler goes through the ‘ritual nature’ of fishing and prepares to launch yet another challenge.

For anyone interested in fishing, Jennings’ Blood Knotsoffers an insightful account of the joy of a boy who learns to fly-fish, and makes accessible the skill, or ‘art’, of fishing and the pleasure that many people get when fishing; there is obviously more to fly fishing than dangling the line in water and waiting for a bite. However, my brief excursions into fishing for yabbies in a country stream with my brothers as a young child is sufficient, I have decided, to exhaust my life experience as an angler. Thus, there is one less person in this world who will ever view fish as prey, and the catching of a fish as a challenge to be won. Instead, I will leave the fish to swim gently, and peacefully through life.

Far Beyond the Stars DS9

'Far Beyond the Stars' is more relevant today than when it was first broadcast in 1998

Susan Grigsby for Daily Kos

When I have had enough, enough of the antics of the current occupant of the Oval Office, enough of the cowardice of his Republican enablers, and enough of the media’s hunger for Democratic disagreements that can then be labeled “disarray,” I walk away. It isn’t hard. Turn off the news, shut down the computer and put away the connected gadgets, and find some harmless form of escape. 

For me, that has meant taking full advantage of the binging opportunity that is presented on streaming television services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. I think it is this commercial-free immersive experience that has turned me away from current broadcast, and even cable, television series. 

Recently, I have been on an immersive voyage to the final frontier, stopping for the past several weeks on Deep Space Nine, an outpost of the Star Trek universe. Deep Space Nine (DS9) is the third television series in the Star Trek franchise, coming after The Next Generation (TNG) and before Voyager. 

I was happily enjoying the goings on of the humans, Bajorans, Trills, Ferengis, Cardassians, and Klingons as the space station protected the stable wormhole that connected the Alpha Quadrant to the Gamma Quadrant, when I was stunned by an episode that seemed to have nothing to do with the Star Trek universe set 400 years in the future, but so much to do with today. 

For those unfamiliar with this series entry in the franchise, DS9 is a space station in the Alpha Quadrant. The Federation, of which Earth is a member, in partnership with the Bajoran people, is running the station which sits next to and protects a stable wormhole that connects to a system thousands of light-years away in the Gamma Quadrant. Captain Benjamin Sisko (played by Avery Brooks), of Starfleet, is in charge of the station, assisted by his first officer Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) of the Bajoran Militia. 

In addition to docking facilities and housing, DS9 boasts a promenade lined with shops, multiple restaurants, and a bar and casino run by a Ferengi named Quark (Armin Shimerman) with help from his brother and nephew. Overseeing the security for the station is a changeling, Odo (Rene Auberjonois). 

The cast also includes Michael Dorn, who reprises his role as the Klingon, Worf, from The Next Generation, and joined DS9 in its fourth season. And Colm Meaney, also a TNG alumni, plays Miles O’Brien, chief engineer of the station. 

In “Far Beyond the Stars,” Benjamin Sisko learns that an old friend has died as his ship was lost in the ongoing war against the Gamma Quadrant Dominion. The captain is weary of losing friends and colleagues to what appears to be a never-ending war that the Federation is statistically destined to lose. As he is contemplating a future without Starfleet, he catches a glimpse of a man outside his office dressed in 1950s business attire. He crosses the threshold of a cabin after what looks like a 1950s baseball player enters it, and steps into New York City, circa 1953. 

In this world he is Benny Russell, a struggling science fiction writer for Incredible Tales, a monthly magazine not unlike Galaxy or Amazing Tales. Almost the entire cast of DS9 appears as characters in Sisko’s vision, sans make-up. Miles O’Brien is now a writer similar to Isaac Asimov, obsessed with robots. Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig) is also a writer, married to Major Kira who writes under the name KC Eaton, since it is believed that the public would never buy science fiction written by a woman. In fact, many women science fiction writers used the same ploy to sell their work. (Come to think of it, as late as the mid-’70s, in order to get a job in the insurance industry that required the ability to write a coherent sentence, I had to write an article using my initials instead of my first name, for the same reason.) 

But in the Star Trek universe, gender, skin color, alien status—none of that matters. For we have advanced to the point that Martin Luther King Jr. could only dream about, where what a man or woman is is more important than what he or she looks like. The fact that DS9 had an African American playing the lead, which was almost unheard of when the series premiered in January 1993, was one of the reasons we started watching it. I wanted to see what would come of it, but in a universe of people with skin that is blue or ears that are larger than one’s head, the fact that a person had black skin or even dotted skin was unremarkable. He commanded the space station because he was the commander. 

In 1953 however, he was a Negro. And when the publisher of the magazine he wrote for wanted to do a photo shoot to show their readers what the writers looked like, both Benny Russell and Kay Eaton are excluded. In the words of liberal writer Herbert Rossoff (Quark): 

"If the world's not ready for a woman writer – imagine what would happen if it learned about a Negro with a typewriter – run for the hills! It's the end of civilization!" 

To which Benny responds: 

“What about James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes? Ever heard of Native Son?” 

But his editor, Douglas Pabst (Rene Auberjonois) is adamant. 

“That's literature for liberals and intellectuals. The average reader isn't going to spend his hard-earned cash on stories written by Negroes.” 

As the story unfolds, the writers are given their choice of illustrations to write about for the next month’s magazine. One of the sketches depicts a space station reminiscent of DS9, and is selected by Benny Russell for his story. As he is leaving the office that evening, he drops the sketch, which is then picked up by two apparently corrupt police officers (an enemy Cardassian and Founder) who give him a hard time, assuming that he is a janitor of the building, even though he is dressed in a business suit. They let him go after warning him that “Next time you won't be so lucky.” 

He spends the night writing, and sees his fiancée the next morning at the diner where she works. She tells him that the owner is willing to sell, and that she and Benny could buy it when the owner retires. Willie Hawkins (Worf), a famous baseball player, strides in and begins flirting with Cassie, who is having none of it. When she asks him why, now that he is a famous baseball player, he still lives uptown, he explains that “They can hardly get used to me playing alongside them on the ball field ... living next to 'em—that's a whole other story.” A young friend of Benny’s, and apparent petty thief, Jimmy (played by Cirroc Lofton who also plays Jake Sisko, Ben Sisko’s son on DS9), in response to Benny’s suggestion that he get a real job says, “As what—a delivery boy or a dishwasher? No, thanks.” 

And so, within a few minutes we are swept away from a future of diversity, inclusiveness, and liberal values into an era that represents everything that the Make America Great Again crowd wishes to achieve. But it gets worse. 

Benny Russell is obsessed with his creation of the space station and its black captain. The other writers love his story, but the editor tells him that they will not print a story with a black protagonist. 

Look, Benny, I'm a magazine editor -- not a crusader. I'm not here to change the world. I'm here to put out a magazine. That's my job. And that means I've got to answer to Mister Stone, the national distributors, the wholesalers --(holding up the story)-- and none of them are going to want to put this on the newsstand. For all we know, it could cause a race riot. 

Pabst suggest that Benny put the story in a drawer for 50 years “or however long it takes the human race to become colorblind.” He offers Benny the chance to write a novella for the next issue instead. 

When Benny Russell goes home that night, he writes six more Deep Space Nine stories, all with Benjamin Sisko, the “colored Captain,” in charge of the station. The editor refuses them again. It is suggested that he revise the story to make it all the dream of a current-day black man who holds a menial job. The revisions made, the magazine agrees to publish the stories at three cents a word, which is big money for a black writer in 1953. 

Cassie and Benny go out dancing that night to celebrate, and upon leaving the nightclub hear gunshots. The two police officers who harassed Benny earlier have shot and killed Jimmy because he was trying to break into a car. They claim he had a weapon: the crowbar that he was using to break into the car. Furious, Benny lunges toward one of the officers while the other hits him in the back of the head. They beat him to the ground while Cassie, pushed aside, cries for them to stop. 

Severely injured in the beating, it is some weeks before Benny is able to return to the office. When he does, he learns that the publisher has “pulped” the issue. He has all copies destroyed, claiming that the issue did not meet their standards. But we know, as does Benny, that the reason the issue was pulped was Benny’s story. Benny Russell breaks down at this final assault on his humanity and is carted off in an ambulance. 

A couple of things struck me about this episode’s depiction of racial discrimination: it was written in 1997, broadcast in 1998, and yet felt like it was today. Seven years had passed since Rodney King was beaten to the ground by a bunch of racists in uniform when this episode aired. That beating was captured on video by a nearby resident and shocked white America. 

But this was in an era before smart phones ,and while beatings of that type may have remained common in black America, white America thought we had grown past that behavior. Perhaps that is why it was suggested that Benny Russell wait 50 years to publish a story about a Negro captain. Because we thought that by 1998 we had made progress, that we had weeded out the bad cops after the Rodney King beating. And that we had taken steps since 1953 to ensure equal treatment of all Americans. 

Today, it is almost impossible to view social media without seeing a video of yet another beating, shooting, or murder of a black man or woman by uniformed officers of the law. The pictures that shocked a nation in 1991 have become commonplace today. My fear is that we have become inured to such videos. In an era where the chief executive feels that there are good people amongst American Nazis, that African nations are “shitholes,” and that infants belong in cages, it is hard to retain the fresh shock and outrage. The media has normalized Donald Trump and is freely ignoring the damage that that has done to our society. 

But this episode brings back all of that outrage, anger, fear, and grief because the racism is juxtaposed against a society that is so inclusive that diversity is a huge and welcome part of it. The writers manage to avoid the outright preachiness that seemed to permeate many of the earlier Star Trek series (and yes, I am looking at The Original Series), while still demonstrating the insidious nature of racism. It is not just the cops who beat Russell that are racists. There is racism in the attitude of the editor who is “not a crusader,” but simply a man trying to hold onto a job. That attitude allows the actions of the police and of the publisher to occur without reprisal. He, and so many other Americans were and are collaborators, enablers. We make it possible. 

The calm acceptance that a woman could not appear in the photo of the science fiction writers or publish her work under her own name reminds us that that era was rife with sexism as well as racism. McCarthyism, the real McCarthyism, was at its peak then and posed a real threat to writers, as depicted in an exchange during the episode between a writer and the editor. And this is what the MAGA devotees want: They want a society that excludes from power all but straight white males. 

I know this. I just did not expect it to be revealed so clearly in an episode of a television series written in 1997, that takes place 400 years in the future as well as 65 years in the past, and that isn’t even on the air any longer.

Man sneaks into house, stabs sleeping brother to death, police say

Man sneaks into house, stabs sleeping brother to death, police say

By Asia Simone Burns, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A man is charged with murder after police said he slipped into a Newnan (Georgia) home early Thursday and stabbed his half-brother to death while he slept. 

Zachary Lamar Martin was standing in the bedroom holding two knives when Newnan police arrived at the house on Linden Drive just after 3:30 a.m., spokeswoman Ashley Copeland said in a news release. A man, identified later as Sheldon Odell Stewart, was lying on the bed and appeared to have been stabbed twice in the back. 

Newnan investigators said Martin entered the home through a basement window in the back of the residence. 

A man was sleeping in the basement at the time, Copeland said. Martin got zip ties from a tool bag near the window and tied him up, according to police.

Then, he got two knives, headed upstairs and came across a woman watching TV in the living room, Copeland said. Investigators said he forced her to go downstairs at knifepoint. 

Somehow, the man who had been tied up in the basement got free and ran to a nearby bathroom, according to police. Martin allegedly chased him and started stabbing the bathroom door “in an attempt to assault him,” Copeland said. When Martin couldn’t get into the bathroom, he ran upstairs into the bedroom where Stewart and his girlfriend were asleep. 

Copeland said Martin crawled over the girlfriend and started stabbing his sleeping half-brother. Then, he turned and choked the girlfriend and held a knife to her throat, according to police. 

The other people in the house heard the girlfriend screaming and ran into the room to pull Martin off her, Copeland said. The girlfriend then got a cellphone and called police. 

Stewart was taken to a hospital, where he died of his injuries.

Police said Stewart’s girlfriend was previously in a relationship with Martin. The couple dated for more than two years and had broken up within the past two months, officials said. 

Martin was arrested on multiple charges, including murder, kidnapping and home invasion, Copeland said.

Do not date your brothers sweetheart!

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.