The Four Color Media Monitor

Frank Miller does more to make everybody happy, with a very impressive podcast on NPR. Here's the transcript:

Morning Edition, September 11, 2006. I was just a boy in the 1960s. My adolescence wasn't infused with the civil rights struggle or the sexual revolution or the Vietnam War, but with their aftermath. My high school teachers were ex-hippies and Vietnam vets. People who protested the war and people who served as soldiers. I was taught more about John Lennon than I was about Thomas Jefferson. Both of my parents were World War II veterans. FDR-era patriots. And I was exactly the age to rebel against them. It all fit together rather neatly. I could never stomach the flower-child twaddle of the '60s crowd and I was ready to believe that our flag was just an old piece of cloth and that patriotism was just some quaint relic, best left behind us. It was all about the ideas. I schooled myself in the writings of Madison and Franklin and Adams and Jefferson. I came to love those noble, indestructible ideas. They were ideas, to my young mind, of rebellion and independence, not of idolatry. But not that piece of old cloth. To me, that stood for unthinking patriotism. It meant about as much to me as that insipid peace sign that was everywhere I looked: just another symbol of a generation's sentimentality, of its narcissistic worship of its own past glories. Then came that sunny September morning when airplanes crashed into towers a very few miles from my home and thousands of my neighbors were ruthlessly incinerated -- reduced to ash. Now, I draw and write comic books. One thing my job involves is making up bad guys. Imagining human villainy in all its forms. Now the real thing had shown up. The real thing murdered my neighbors. In my city. In my country. Breathing in that awful, chalky crap that filled up the lungs of every New Yorker, then coughing it right out, not knowing what I was coughing up. For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years. Patriotism, I now believe, isn't some sentimental, old conceit. It's self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation's survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don't all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back. So you've got to do what you can to help your country survive. That's if you think your country is worth a damn. Warts and all. So I've gotten rather fond of that old piece of cloth. Now, when I look at it, I see something precious. I see something perishable.

With this, I'm looking forward to his Batman graphic novel even more, in which the Masked Manhunter takes on the al Qaeda. And, the next time I'm at my local comics stores, I'm going to be looking for his Marvel Visionaries compilations with Daredevil. Miller is the kind of guy we need more of in comic books. Because, as he shows here, he understands what patriotism is, and that it's what even superheros are. Here's more from Comic Book Resources, Ace of Spades, Ms Underestimated, CHUD, Reverse-Vampyr, The World According to Carl, Featherston Blog, Scenes from a Hat, Conservative Blog Therapy, BelchSpeak, My Own Thoughts, Cuanas.

Labels: good writers, politics