Barack Obama and the Comic Book Time Machine, by Mike Gold

Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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3 Responses

  1. Vinnie Bartilucci says:

    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.

  2. Michael H. Price says:

    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.

  3. me says:

    what a fucked yp story