BARACK-NID

Time for another edition of my infrequently recurring feature "Weird-Ass Old Comics." This time, we're looking at...

...The Amazing Spider-Man, issue #583, from March of 2009. This is a much more latter-day vintage of comic than I would normally collect; obviously it was the presence of President (then President-Elect) Barack Obama, sharing the cover with Spidey, that made me pick it up. But I had never gotten around to reading it.

Last week Obama was the guest of Stephen Colbert in a prerecorded interview from the Obama Presidential Center, slated to open on June 19th in Chicago. The comic was shown on display at the Center--Colbert teased Obama about having been featured on a Spider-Man cover before Obama was (issue #573, November of 2008)--so I dug out my copy and read it.

Obama doesn't appear in the comic's main story, a sweet feature about Peter Parker's long-suffering office pal Betty Brant. Betty is weary of Petey's tendency to stand her up or be late, little knowing that he's off battling villains while she's waiting.

According to an editorial note, the brief "Bonus Back-Up Feature" about Obama, scripted by Zach Wells and drawn by Todd Nauck, was a last-minute add after the Marvel folks learned from an interview in The Telegraph that Obama was a fan of the webslinger. In the Colbert interview, Obama mentioned his superheroes of choice as a kid were Spider-Man and Batman, which made me swell with pride; same two for me.

In the short saga "Spidey Meets the President!" Petey, in D.C. to photograph the inauguration, switches into Spider-Man to prevent The Chameleon from impersonating Obama and becoming President 44. When Obama realizes that, his Secret Service detail notwithstanding, Spidey is the right man for the job and gives him the green light to take action, Spidey delivers the tale's best line: "Ya hear that Chameleon? The President-Elect here just appointed me...SECRETARY OF SHUTTIN' YOU UP!"

It was poignant to see the Obama interview last week, even though I'm not a 44 fanboy. I've always liked him, but he was never anywhere near as boldly progressive as I wanted him to be, or as I think he could have been, especially if he had acted decisively early on. I'm not at all sure Biden, doddering but clear-eyed and out of  f*cks, wasn't more decisive. Even so I think that, graded on the curve of what he accomplished versus what he was up against, Obama was likely the best American President of my lifetime.

But when you see a man of Obama's poise and grace and reflective intelligence and plain decency in contrast to what we have now, it's both terrifying and mortifying. If The Chameleon had successfully impersonated Obama's successor, we might well be better off.

HEADS OF HEADS OF STATE

As far back as Your Humble Narrator can remember, I've loved PEZ. What's not to love, after all? It's a delicious candy--you may recall that Vern, in Stand By Me, had no doubt that he could subsist on nothing but cherry flavored PEZ for the rest of his life--and it's a toy. It's a toy that gives you candy.

Invented in Austria in the 1920s and originally marketed to adults as a substitute for tobacco, PEZ--the word is a compression of the German pfefferminz, or peppermint--began to sell dispensers with character heads for children in the 1950s and became an international brand. Of the many PEZ dispensers I had as a kid, I particularly prized the Halloweeny skulls and ogres, so I was delighted when The Wife found these Halloween mini-dispensers...

...to hand out for trick-or-treat this year.

As an adult, the first item I ever bid on and won on eBay was an old-school PEZ Easter Bunny with a curiously grave and sober expression; I've always referred to him as "Frowny Bunny," and he still lives on my desk...

This coming Friday, October 21, a documentary called The PEZ Outlaw, chronicling a particularly strange episode in the history of PEZ collecting, debuts on VOD; it's also slated to play at the Alice Gill-Sheldon Theatre in Sedona starting Friday, October 28.

More on that remarkable film in a later post, but with all this PEZ-iness on my mind, the time has come to discuss my monument.

That's right, my monument.

A few years ago, in the depths of the previous Presidential administration, I hit upon an inspiration one day for a piece of public art. Not little piece, a big piece. An epic piece. A monument, carved into the side of a mountain. I'm not saying it would have needed to be on the scale of South Dakota's Mount Rushmore, but maybe one third the size, or one fifth. Maybe poor North Dakota could find a hillside somewhere, and offer an alternative to tourists.

Then one day, haunting a junkshop, I found something that made me revise my grandiose plans. Why allow a modern-day Gutzon Borglum to vandalize another perfectly lovely natural rockface, after all, and spend millions of public dollars and many years, when I could realize my idea on my own, for a few lousy bucks worth of PEZ?

What I had come across, you see, were a few random PEZ dispensers that I didn't know existed, depicting the Presidents of the United States. They were from a "PEZ Education Series" launched about a decade ago, issued in sets of five POTUS Dispensers at a time, starting with Washington and culminating with Obama (Obama's successor, mercifully, has not been officially PEZzed at this writing). So between that original haul and a bit of eBaying, over a few months I was able to obtain:

Franklin Pierce (served 1853-1857); who opposed the Abolitionist movement, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, made a failed attempt to annex Cuba; the first and to date the only elected incumbent President not re-nominated by his own party...

James Buchanan (1857-1861); who continued Pierce's bungling and opposition to Abolition (despite claiming he was personally opposed to slavery), leading to the Secession of the southern states and making the Civil War inevitable...

Warren Gamaliel Harding (1921-1923); who filled his administration with crooked cronies that were implicated in multiple scandals, most famously the Teapot Dome oil lease affair which resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall...

...and our own era's George W. Bush (2001-2009); who ignored security warnings about terrorist attacks before 9/11 and lied us into interminable wasteful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in that tragedy's wake...

My fellow Americans, I give you...

MOUNT RUSHMORE COMPARED TO 45!

Dismal as they were, any of these four men, and any number of other Presidential hacks and bums and paranoids, would have been preferable to President 45. Decidedly preferable. Harding's offenses, most of them possibly unwitting on his part and only revealed after his untimely death in office, seem particularly quaint by 45's standards.

Thus my MRCT45 Monument stands tall--albeit only about 5 inches tall, and only on my desk--in symbolic tribute to all those who, though they may be inept clowns or moral cowards or shady creeps, still have some consideration, some tiny modicum of regard, some vague sense of responsibility, for their country, for the world, or for any human being other than themselves. It's a (dimly) shining memorial to the barest minimum in human decency.

Just so there's no misunderstanding, I should hasten to note that when I say these guys would be preferable, I mean that they would be preferable, as men. I'm not remotely suggesting, of course, that the social conditions and norms of the times in which they served would be preferable to the social conditions and norms of our times.

The toughest of these dispensers to find, by the way, was W. Bush; perhaps because he was part of the same set as Obama, and I wasn't willing to pay the upwards of $100 that this set goes for online. Finally I hunted him up, along with the other two non-Obama members of that set, presumably from a split-up set on eBay (the fifth dispenser in that box is of the Presidential Seal).

While scrounging to complete my grand vision, I did also accumulate a good bench of other Presidential mediocrities and rascals. I'd still like a Nixon, in case anybody wants to know what to get me for Christmas. But I have scored William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Herbert Hoover (a close also-ran for Harding's spot), Bill Clinton and W. Bush's Dad H. W. Bush...

Compared to 45, I need hardly say, they all seem monument-worthy...

HE SHUTTERS TO THINK

Opening today at Harkins Shea; coming October 16 to MSNBC:

The Way I See It--This documentary is about a fly who decides it's time to come down from his place on the wall. Pete Souza was an official White House photographer, first during the Reagan administration and then for all eight years of the Obama presidency, capturing light-saturated, emotionally charged images of heartbreak and happiness.

Discretion and partisan neutrality would clearly seem like a becoming standard for a person in Souza's position. But, relatively apolitical at least when he started, Souza came to feel, in light of the subsequent occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that whatever one thought of Obama's policies, he behaved the way a President should.

Souza was so struck by the contrast between how Obama comported himself in office and how his successor does that he felt the need to step out from behind the camera. In response to the current President's childish tweets, Souza began posting his photos, showing infinitely more dignified, empathetic behavior by Obama. Eventually he began pairing these images with snarky quips, and was informed by youth that he was "throwing shade," a term with which he says he was unfamiliar.

Directed by Dawn Porter, The Way I See It follows Souza on tour as he signs his book of these images, titled Shade, and tells audiences, and us, the story of his time photographing Obama, his family and his staff.  Despite at least one too many corny montages to inspirational songs, the movie is an absorbing chronicle, drawing much of its power from the potency of Souza's epic yet intimately observed pictures. The man has some eye.

I've never been comfortable, however, with a fanboy attitude toward toward our 44th President. I say this as somebody who voted for him twice and who has come to believe that, graded on a quotient of what he achieved divided by the deranged opposition to him, and taking account of all disappointments and shortfalls, Barack Obama is the best U.S. President of my lifetime. But his excellence can't be captured photographically. Don't get me wrong, Obama's glamor is undeniable, as is that of his First Lady, especially when you look at Souza's photos. But glamor isn't virtue, and the fact that he's absurdly photogenic doesn't prove anything by itself.

Or so I would have thought, during Obama's time in office. Souza's images, seen retroactively, go beyond glamor and, in contrast to our current nightmare, demonstrate something like grace in their subject. This movie, and the photos it presents, suggest that there is something more profound than policy to the Presidency, and that when it comes to showing it, a picture is worth well over a thousand tweeted words.