All posts by Joel Schlosberg

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Voters Can’t Get Mad Enough to Get Happy

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Computer printout from the MAD compiler at the University of Michigan showing a character drawing of MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman and the phrase “What Me Worry” following an error, c. 1960. Public domain.

Larry Penner vouches that “the Democrats could run Mad magazine’s ‘What, Me Worry?’ Alfred E. Neuman for president and still carry the Empire State by a wide margin” (“True blue New York,” Queens Chronicle, August 27). That’s a harsh assessment … of Neuman. Unlike Democratic politicians in solidly blue states, or Republicans in their red-state counterparts, he had real rivals to contend with.

For decades, the dimwitted mascot of the irreverent humor institution risked losing customers to comparably foolish competitors, like Cracked magazine’s Sylvester P. Smythe and Sick magazine’s Huckleberry Fink. “Mad‘s Maddest Artist” Don Martin found gainful employment in becoming “Cracked‘s Crackedest Artist.” Fink’s “Why Try Harder?” is a more fitting slogan for political machines that have minimal incentive to serve their electors than the “What, Me Worry?” which obviously inspired it.

Cracked may have cracked jokes about how it had “a fan base primarily comprised of people who got to the store after MAD sold out.” Yet while it competed with Mad for the same pool of pocket money, customers who picked both, neither, yet another funnybook, or candy would get their choice. If they wound up wasting their time (and money), it would not be due to having to settle for a lesser-evil imposition.

Only reader loyalty could ensure the permanence of such perennial Mad features as the Fold-In or Spy vs. Spy (which long outlived the Cold War it originally satirized). Even a feature as mild as Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side Of …” did more to keep up with the times than politicians who yearn for a return to the staidness of the 1950s (minus such upstarts as the early Mad to skewer it).

Alfred E. Neuman For President mock campaigns have always had self-deprecating slogans like “He’ll keep all his promises because he promises nothing!” and “At least he’s honest about his idiocy!” But moving more of the scope of social interaction to the realm of free association and voluntary choice — and not only, but especially, activities far more serious and consequential than gag magazines — would be a very smart thing to do.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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Anarchists Didn’t Start the Fire

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"Anatomy of an Anarchist HackerSpace." Photo by Rek2. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
“Anatomy of an Anarchist HackerSpace.” Photo by Rek2. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

When Joe Biden declared that “arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted” at a campaign speech in Wilmington, Delaware on July 28, he echoed his archrival Donald Trump. The Democratic candidate’s words could have come from a recent tweet by the  incumbent, who conflated “arsonists, looters, criminals, and anarchists” on June 4.

When Biden asserted in the same breath that “peaceful protesters should be protected,” he wasn’t just showing that he hadn’t noticed the multitude of anarchists among the peace protests while he was busy enacting wars. And when he implied that such anarchists are devoted to “violence or destruction of property,” he ignored that real anarchists have uncovered how the nation-state’s ultimatum of force drives rather than resolves conflicts.

Anarchists have understood how “government is civil war” since Anselme Bellegarrigue originated that phrase in one of the earliest anarchist manifestos 170 years ago. Four decades later, Voltairine de Cleyre observed that appealing to “a representative of that power which has robbed you of the earth, of the right of free contract of the means of exchange” to stop theft is to “institute a wholesale robber to protect us from petty larceny.”

Bellegarrigue’s insistence that “anarchy is order” wasn’t entirely alien to the liberalism of Thomas Paine, who saw how a “great part of that order” in society “is not the effect of government” but “existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government is abolished.” Thomas Jefferson admitted that it was “not clear in my mind” that society is not best off “without government.”

By the turn of the twentieth century, the US government was passing legislation to exclude such skeptics. Emma Goldman noted that “too late did the lukewarm liberals realize the peril of this law to advanced thought,” with those “disbelieving in organized government” including such leading intellects of the time as Leo Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, and Edward Carpenter. Biden’s seemingly tepid twenty-first century ideology would handcuff linguist Noam Chomsky, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and anthropologist David Graeber.

“This impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic” has always been useful for “those in power,” as historian Howard Zinn noted, because “they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority” …  and no need for them. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee “did not wait for the government to give them a signal” to fight segregation, and in so doing “embodied the characteristics of anarchism.” Zinn recommended such efforts to push against injustice be built up outside of the formal political process, foreseeing that “if we have a movement strong enough, it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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Time to Drop Hamilton’s Economics

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Review of that other Broadway play about Hamilton in The Washington Times, September 10, 1917. Public domain.

The July 3 premiere of Hamilton on streaming service Disney+ marked the end of a five-year wait for audiences who hadn’t seen the hit musical on stage.

Alexander Hamilton’s rivals in Hamilton concede that he “doesn’t get enough credit for all the credit he gave us.” To the contrary, as Voltairine de Cleyre noted a century ago, Hamilton “devised a financial system of which we are the unlucky heritors,” an economic order designed “to puzzle the people and make public finance obscure to those that paid for it.”

Broadway stage performance might seem a retrograde medium for the likes of Hamilton and The Book of Mormon during the decade when web media went mainstream. To the latter’s co-creator Matt Stone, this merely shows that “if you tell good stories, the platforms are sort of beside the point. We made the most analog thing you can think of, a play at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, and it worked out as well as anything we have ever done.” But as Paul Goodman noted in People or Personnel, the capital-intensive, high-risk nature of Broadway (or Off Broadway aspiring to move off Off) “powerfully influences the choice of plays and style of acting and production.”

Skyrocketing rents in and around the Broadway theater district in midtown New York City — with access to real estate depending on political favors rather than business skill — restrict the space available to fresh talent. A production like Beetlejuice which reliably draws devoted crowds can be shuttered due to lack of available theater space. The Drama Book Shop, the space where Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda penned his previous Broadway show, In the Heights, was set to close until Miranda personally bailed it out.

For the fortunate shows that make it to Broadway, it can be lucrative to stay there. In the realm of what Goodman calls “un-free enterprise,” restricting supply reaps the benefit of stoked demand without the pressures of competition (while clamping the release valves of legal loopholes or ticket resellers). COVID-era theater shutdowns moved the filmed Hamilton premiere to the Internet instead of movie theaters. If the benefits of withholding had not been artificially inflated, it might have long been viewable via live broadcasting (a la  the Metropolitan Opera’s productions since 2006), research collections like the New York Public Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, or DVDs.

Hamilton arrives on an Internet video landscape well on its way to consolidation. Like Marvel Comics antagonist Galactus, compelled to continually devour entire worlds to survive, Disney has absorbed Pixar, Star Wars, the Muppets, Marvel itself, and even major-studio equal Fox into its vault. Those collections make it to home viewing missing words (including an expletive cut from Hamilton), visuals, or even entire episodes.

As de Cleyre understood, the creativity restricted by Hamiltonianism can best be unleashed by “the voluntary association of those interested in the management of matters of common concern, without coercion of the uninterested or the opposed.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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