At the end of 1990, American servicemembers began to build up in Saudi Arabia, along the border that country shared with Kuwait. This action, Operation Desert Shield, was precipitated by the fact that Kuwait had been invaded by its larger neighbor to the North, Iraq. While these events were front-page news across the globe, they had an immediate, direct impact on my life, as I was a teenager growing up in Baumholder, an Army post in Germany.
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I wanted to be a scientist when I was a boy. To be an astronaut was even better: they were scientists who got to go into space! Of course, I had other dreams as well: writer, teacher, even becoming a priest… well, at least until I discovered girls. The desire to someday become a father outweighed the boyhood interest in the priesthood and its accompanying celibacy. All these dreams had a unifying pattern: they were all professions of highly intelligent people that I respected and admired.
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I’m falling behind on updates for this blog. I need to rededicate myself to this project, as well as to others. Mostly, though, it’s just because I’m so damned busy. Between working 30 hours per week at two jobs and taking a full-time courseload of 12 credits of upper-division history classes, I don’t have a whole lot of extra time left over for, well, anything, and most of what little free time I do have gets eaten up by playing video games. (Star Trek Online is, in fact, a key offender in that area.)
Recently, I found an old book I’ve had since middle school. This book is kind of special to me, partly because it was autographed “To Jeffrey” by the author when I met him, but also because it reminded me of one of the first pieces of fiction I’d ever written (well, that I can recall, at least).
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As I sit here, basking in the glow of my computer screen, munching on Edamame, it’s time to reflect on the past two weeks. It’s been a busy time, with the start of my summer classes, and I’ve had little time to pause and write. I’ve posted to Twitter, Facebook, and the new Google+ account I’ve started, but those have all been fairly quick hits, and most of the writing that I’ve been doing in that time has been for my classes.
This summer, I’m taking two classes: History 300B, Historical Writing, and History 394, American Civil War. As a History major, there’s a lot of writing involved, and these classes are certainly no exception, as there have already been four major writing assignments in the two weeks of class, and in the case of my 300B class, all of these assignments are working toward a final paper, which will be 15 pages long on a topic of our choice; in fact, this weekend I’ll be working on another paper for that class: a five-to-six-page assignment, summarizing my goals and sources for the final paper in proposal form.
The class has been given the framework of “crime and punishment” to work within for our papers, and my professor was very interested in my desire to write a paper about the Anti-Comics crusade of the mid-1950s. I was surprised to discover that there has actually been very little secondary scholarship written on the topic, nearly all of which has been published within the past decade, and few people that I’ve spoken to were even aware that it ever took place. Given the fact that it involved book burnings, Congressional hearings, and events that nearly caused the destruction of the entire comic book industry, I found this surprising.
Since there has been so little secondary scholarship on the subject, my professor waived the requirement that I have 8-10 secondary sources and a single primary source, particularly in light of the fact that I’m using nearly two dozen primary sources and four or five secondary sources. Unlike my peers in the class, much of the onus of synthesizing the information is on me, rather than a more recent source to which I can refer. Based solely on my verbal accounts of my progress and my existing knowledge of the subject, however, even before I’ve written the proposal, I’ve already been urged to submit the final paper for publication in the department’s annual journal of student research papers.
I’m excited for the opportunity, and have spent a great deal of time over the past two weeks in the library, where I’ve been researching the events. I’m even attempting to get into contact with Stan Lee for a firsthand account of the events of the era, as he was working as a writer for Timely Comics (which would later become Marvel Comics) in the 1940s and 50s, and I feel the perspective of a man who has spent nearly seven decades working in the comics industry would be an invaluable addition to my work.
The Anti-Comics Crusade was a seminal point in the history of American comic books, as it led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, a form of self-censorship that crippled the industry just as it was beginning to grow. The events that led to that were tumultuous and exciting, and I hope that my paper will do them justice.
The first year after my parents separated and we’d moved from California to Wisconsin was, relatively, uneventful. My mother told me that, at the time, she took us all to see a counselor to help us deal with the feelings brought on by the separation and divorce, but I don’t remember that; my memories from this young age are fleeting. I was in preschool that year, and one of the few clear memories I still have of that time was my first, colossal mistake.
We lived in a small duplex apartment near the end of a road in Madison, Wisconsin. At the end, the road circled around a small, grassy island with a single large tree planted at its center. There was a wooded area behind the houses, where older boys once showed me a stash of hidden Playboys, stuffed into a box under a discarded seat from the back of a car; at five years old, I was a bit perplexed about pictures of naked women. I’m not sure where my mother was working at the time, but I don’t think that she wasn’t going to school again just yet. She made enough to pay the rent and keep us fed and clothed, at least.
One day, I was playing with the neighbor children while my mother was inside their house; I think she was there for a Tupperware party. Eventually, we started playing inside the car, pretending that we were driving. After a few minutes, not realizing what the consequences of playing with the buttons and levers inside of a car could be, I released the emergency brake. The car was parked on a hill in the driveway, which opened onto the traffic circle at the end of the road. The car started moving slowly backward, picking up speed as the seconds passed. I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew it had to be my fault—something I did was what had caused the car to start moving. I panicked, trying to undo whatever it was that I had done. Within seconds, the car was at the end of the driveway, into the street, jumping the curb, and slamming trunk-first into the tree.
I jumped out of the car, hoping to avoid the blame for what had just happened. My mom and the neighbors came running outside. I tried to tell my mom that the car had “just started rolling by itself,” but even at that young age, I knew she didn’t believe me. I was terrified of getting into trouble, of earning her wrath and disapproval. But I didn’t get into trouble, at least not at first. She was too worried that I’d hurt myself to think about punishing me for being a precocious little boy.
So I was driving to Dice House for an afternoon of gaming when a guy on a motorcycle really pissed me off. I was merging into traffic on the freeway, and checked my rear-view mirrors. I saw a motorcycle about three or four car lengths back, but no other traffic, so I started to move into the lane to my left. Before I could even finish moving into the lane, in the space of about five seconds, the bike is zooming past me, and the guy’s flipping me off.
Say what? Just because you have the ability to go 150 miles per hour on your crotch rocket doesn’t mean you have to, nor does it mean you have the right to ignore traffic laws. If somebody four car lengths ahead of you is merging into your lane, you don’t speed up to try to race past them, and you don’t have any right to get pissed off because the laws of physics keep you from approaching warp speed before you intersect the truck that has the audacity to be on the same stretch of freeway as you.
Get over yourself, asshole, and take your own advice to “share the road.”
I’ve always been interested in my family history. I know my paternal grandmother has been researching the family tree for the past 15 years; I’d seen the book she’d produced when I visited, and she’d share her discoveries with me from time to time, but I never really had the time to just sit down and pore through the book when I’d visit.
That changed this Christmas. My grandmother made copies of the book and gave them out as Christmas gifts. I don’t know how my relatives felt about this, as I haven’t spoken to any of them aside from my siblings, but my brother, sister and I were all justifiably excited by this treasure trove of genealogical gold we’d received.
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