Barack Obama and the Comic Book Time Machine, by Mike Gold
I have always been a major league comic book fan. Always. As a child, whenever my parents dragged me out of town I would make them stop at every possible drug store, newsstand and dime store so I could check out the comics stock. In those days we had no forewarning of what was coming out when, and few outlets carried every title. Some even ignored entire publishing lines.
So when I think back on those trips, I can date them by the comic books I had seen along the way. For example, I encountered Lois Lane #1 at a roadside inn on the road between Gary and Indianapolis Indiana, since replaced by Interstate 65. Ergo, that trip was at the very beginning of 1958. I was seven years old.
In the corner behind the comics rack, I encountered separate drinking fountains: one said, “Whites” and the other said, “Colored.” That confused me, and I asked my father why they needed two. “Because some people are damn idiots,” Dad replied in undisguised disgust.
We were in central Indiana, a place that just a few decades earlier had been the focal point of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, mind, you, if not for the Ku Klux Klan I wouldn’t be alive today.
Born in Chicago, my father grew up in Indianapolis. When he was about 11 years old – with would be 1927 or 1928 – he and his father were in the center of town running errands. The Klan was having one of its massive parades, with hundreds if not thousands of members in full pointy-headed costume marching down the main drag. My grandfather declined to take off his hat as the Klan’s colors passed. A friendly neighbor pointed out his fau pax; he still refused to doff his hat. He and my later-to-be father went about their business.
That night, a number of pointy-heads dropped by their house – such as it was, without plumbing or electricity. They burned a cross in front of the house. The house caught fire.
My grandfather looked at his frightened wife and three children and decided to return to Chicago. Eight years later my father got married and, 14 years after that, I was born. Thank you, Ku Klux Klan.
After my grandfather died in the mid-50s, my grandmother moved from Chicago to Gary Indiana to stay with her daughter Rose and her family. Down the block and across the street was an awesome drug store with two of the largest comic book spinner racks I had ever seen, so I rarely bitched about the long, boring drive. Gary was in better shape in those days, but, even then, it was hardly the sort of place you’d find David, Ricky and the Bev.
Ironically, in 1986 I moved from Chicago to Connecticut and, in that first year, I was exploring my new digs by driving alongside the Housatonic River. When I got to Shelton, the street was blocked by a Ku Klux Klan rally. By then the group’s Grand Imperial Klingon was a New Englander. Go figure. Sadly, fashions had changed – due to our first Catholic president (another irony) so I had no hat not to duff. But I had a middle finger. Two, in fact.
Sure, times have changed since the 1920s, but we need to remember how they’ve changed, and how much change is yet to come. Last week, Barack Obama got over 49% of the vote in Indiana’s Democratic Primary. Generally considered a “red state,” Indiana has been known to elect a Democrat or two, including the Bayh family… the latest of which was on Hillary Clinton’s very short list of vice presidential fantasies. It’s largely a rural state, and southern Indiana remains, by northern standards, quite, quite southern. And Barack Obama, a black man, got over 49% of the vote.
When the results came in, I thought of my grandfather. And I smiled.
Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.
As far as I'm concerned, the question "Is American ready for a black President?" was answered as soon as Obama won a primary in a state with a small black population. The same is true for Hilary and the woman president question.You may still hear about cases of racism in this town or that, and you may still hear the occasional person cast on aspersions on certain demographic groups, but that "institutional racism" argument is as dead as dead can be. Some people may still be racist, but People, as a whole, are not. And when those cases But since there are political points to be made, we will see very little credit given to the American people for that progress. This is one of those "Untill it's 100% gone for a long time, nothing has changed" types of arguments. The same all or nothing attitude clouds the environmentalism issue, education, indeed most hot button topics. The argument is straightforward; if you give credit to the progress made in an area, some people will assume that's enough, and slack off. We're quite good at that in this country; a lot of people think the homeless problem is solved because we had a few telethons and some laws were passed. It's the same tactic some teachers used in school – hammer home the negatives get the students to keep working until they got ALL the questions right. Some students did well under that method, a lot just said "He'll never be happy, why bother" and blew it off.Any human resources or sales expert today will tell you people respond best to a little bit of praise, and then spending some time on the "issues" (we don't have problems anymore, we have "issues" or "challenges") that still need fixing. Seems to me that if that model was used by more in the government, we might see more of the half-done jobs get closer to all-done.
America's readiness for change has been asserting itself through all manner of upheavals over the long haul — rock 'n' roll as a summons to integration, for example. A theater-operator uncle of mine in Northwest Texas put an end to segregated moviegoing at his picture palaces during the 1950s, defying corporate headquarters in Dallas until the improved box-office returns from Amarillo, Texas, caused the brass to see things in a new light. Whether cause-and-effect or whatever, the downtown-area stores near those theaters started scrapping their "white" and "colored" water-fountain signage around this same time.I always felt uncomfortable visiting stores that fostered such discrimination — c'mon in and spend your money, but remember your "place" — but the Woolworth and Kress variety stores, prime offenders in that realm, also made themselves irresistible with well-stocked comic-book racks and phonograph-record departments to match. Yes, and those comics-kiosk impressions are real time-travel touchstones, here, too. My household moved in 1959 to a suburban neighborhood, far from the center of Amarillo, and so I had to modify the comics-hunting route accordingly. Three brand-new Rexall drugstores within bicycling range filled the bill agreeably, and these augmented the familiar downtown and cross-town patterns. Two downtown newsstands differed considerably in their comics lineups, and so much for one-stop shopping.One of those new-for-1959 drugstore buildings is still standing — long since become a medical-supplies outlet, adjoining a plumbing warehouse that used to be a grocery store and a Dollar General that used to be a Sprouse-Reitz five-and-dime. Dropped by there on a recent visit to Amarillo and found the original fixtures intact: The display racks where I used to snag ARCHIEs and BRAVE & BOLDs as a matter of routine are now crammed with blood-pressure measuring units and quart bottles of Oil of Camphor. A Time Machine, stripped of its mechanisms and left immobilized on blocks. Yeah, well, but we'll always have FLASH OF TWO WORLDS.
what a fucked yp story