Perhaps it is an offshoot of Hollywood’s success in turning comic-book superheroes into bankable screen stars, but major publishers seem to have fallen in love with the men behind all those costumed characters. The last few years have seen the publication of biographies of, among others, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the dynamic duo who, in the early 1960s, gave birth to an entire universe, whose inhabitants include the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and the X-Men.

Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones takes a somewhat broader view. Rather than focusing on just one creator, it sweeps across the decades and covers dozens of men who helped define one of America’s few indigenous art forms. Even so, the tale, as Jones tells it, has two centers of gravity around which all else revolves.

One is Jerry Siegel, half of the team who created Superman. The other is Harry Donenfeld and Jack Lebowitz, the publishers who would give Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creation to the masses, in the process setting the stage for their company to become part of a media empire.

Among comics fans, Siegel and Shuster’s tale is well known. In the late 1930s, two kids from Cleveland created a character that made millions of dollars for Donenfeld’s DC Comics and, much later, Time Warner. According to this version of the story, Siegel and Shuster received a pittance for their efforts, and it wasn’t until decades later that DC, shamed by Siegel and Shuster’s plight, gave each a sizable retirement package, which still represented a fraction of Superman’s worth.

How Siegel and Shuster got the shaft is part of the comic-book industry’s oral history. The story, with various embellishments, circulated for years before historians started to dig for the facts.

Jones appears to have a gift for digging, and his account of the great Superman controversy is more balanced than the received truth for his efforts. It is probably true that Donenfeld and DC’s financial wizard, Lebowitz, were cheating Siegel and Shuster out of royalties. Lebowitz was a socialist in his youth, so it isn’t surprising that his approach to business reflected the socialist stereotype of how a capitalist should behave. Superman may have been looking out for humanity, but his boss was Ebenezer Scrooge.

It is also true, however, that Siegel and Shuster were poor guardians of their own interests. Contrary to the urban legend, they were not mere kids when they sold Superman to Donenfeld for the first issue of Action Comics. They were in their 20s. But rather than hire a lawyer, as his friends suggested, Siegel stubbornly handled his own negotiations with Donenfeld and Lebowitz. Shuster, for his part, always seems to have deferred to his more outgoing partner.

Other young creators weren’t so foolish. Bob Kane, the creator of record of Batman, did hire a lawyer, and he negotiated a deal with Lebowitz that would make him wealthy and ensure that he would always be credited as Batman’s creator. In fact, however, Kane was running his own studio on the side. A writer named Bill Finger was as responsible for creating Batman as Kane was, and it wasn’t long before Kane handed the task of drawing Batman over to other artists.

William Moulton Marsden, the creator of Wonder Woman, negotiated arguably an even better deal than Kane’s. To this day, if DC should ever cease publishing Wonder Woman comics, the rights to the character would revert to Marsden’s estate.

By the time Siegel and Shuster finally sued DC Comics for creating Superboy, a character derived from their Superman, it was too late. That suit and others to come failed to win Siegel and Shuster back their Man of Steel.

Jones’ narrative is more sympathetic to Siegel and Shuster than this retelling indicates. It is plain that his heart is with the two boys from Ohio, even if the facts are more ambivalent.

Donenfeld and Lebowitz’s story has received much less attention over the years. In the 1920s, Donenfeld made his name as a publisher and distributor of pulp magazines. His output included fiction magazines like Spicy Mystery, Spicy Western and Spicy Detective, which hooked their mostly male readers with lurid covers depicting damsels in distress, and girlie magazines. The Spicy pulps eventually would lead Donenfeld to cross paths with New York City’s protector of public virtue, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who no doubt would be aghast to learn that far racier fare is now on sale in the airport that bears his name.

However, peddling porn was the least of Donenfeld’s transgressions. If you wanted to make anything of yourself during Prohibition in New York City, you almost had to be tied to the mob, and Donenfeld was. It was a perfectly rational arrangement when you think about it: Magazine publishers purchased their paper from mills in Canada. Whiskey and other spirits slipped across the boarder from Canada. It only made sense to hide whiskey shipments amid the rolls of paper Donenfeld needed for his publishing business and grease a few palms to make sure nobody looked closely at the cargo containers. Then as today, border security was mostly a nice theory.

With the repeal of Prohibition, Donenfeld’s mob ties became more of a liability than an asset, especially as far as Lebowitz was concerned. Fortunately, there was this new thing called the comic book that held promise, and there were these guys from Cleveland who were shopping around this strip about a man in tights who could bend steel with his bare hands.

No one could have predicted the overnight success of Superman. Soon other pulp publishers were entering the game. They needed their own superheroes, and they needed them fast and cheap. They subcontracted work out to studios like the one run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, which was the birthplace of the jungle queen Sheena and Eisner’s The Spirit. Even Siegel and Shuster were forced to hire help and open a studio to keep up with their workload.

Most of these young artists were Jewish, and with the exception of Siegel and Shuster, most lived in New York. There were a few exceptions, like Jack Cole, the troubled young artist from Pennsylvania who created Plastic Man and, in the process, turned out some of the most joyously bizarre comics of the 1940s. Cole would eventually leave comics and become one of Hugh Hefner’s favorite cartoonists at Playboy before taking his own life for reasons that will remain a mystery.

If you were a poor Jewish kid in New York and you had grown up reading pulp adventure magazines, the new superhero comics offered a way out the Lower East Side and into the Bronx, and then out of the Bronx and into the suburbs. Kane, Eisner and future DC Comics editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz all hailed from the Bronx, from the neighborhoods that, decades later, Lee and Steve Ditko would designate as Spider-Man’s home turf.

By 2003, Jewish contributions to the comics industry were the subject of magazine articles and art exhibits. Arie Kaplan’s article, "How the Jews created the Comic Book Industry" appeared in Reform Judaism, and Kane’s top ghost artist, Jerry Robinson, mounted an exhibition on superheroes at Atlanta’s William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum.

As the 1930s gave way to the 1940s, the comics were spoiling for war with Hitler’s Germany. Donenfeld and Lebowitz were careful to keep their characters out of the war in Europe before Pearl Harbor. They knew most Americans opposed getting dragged into another of the Old World’s wars and didn’t want to alienate their readers. But other publishers were itching for a fight.

The first to enter the fray was Lev Gleason, an avowed communist and the publisher of Crime Does Not Pay and Daredevil. The first issue of Daredevil, depicting its title hero and others fighting a giant Hitler, hit newsstands in the late spring of 1941, just as Hitler was turning on his ally Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union.

After Pearl Harbor, however, everyone got into the act. The most popular superhero of the war years wasn’t Superman but Captain Marvel. His comics circulated in the millions, in large part to GIs happy to see the Big Red Cheese, as he was known, fight the Axis. His younger counterpart, Captain Marvel Jr., even fought a Nazi supervillain, Captain Nazi. (No superhero, it seems, was ever an enlisted man.)

After World War II, Jones’ narrative skips along. He takes us from the collapse of superhero comics in the 1950s, when horror and romance comics were all the rage, to the rebirth of superheroes in the 1960s, when Marvel Comics gave America heroes for the Baby Boom generation u2014 heroes with angst. Oddly, he glosses over Schwartz’s contributions to reviving the genre, which included overseeing the revival of heroes like the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman, all reconfigured for the Space Age.

Marvel’s early heroes are all products of the Cold War. The Fantastic Four gained their powers while trying to beat the Russians into space, and Bruce Banner became the Hulk thanks to an act of Soviet sabotage. Still, when the war went hot in the jungles of Vietnam, they sat it out. There wouldn’t be a comic book showing Spider-Man landing a punch on Ho Chi Minh’s chin.

Franklin Harris [send him e-mail] is a columnist and online editor for The Decatur (Ala.) Daily. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net.

My previous LewRockwell.com column on Japanese animation elicited an e-mail telling me, in effect, to get a life.

Oh, well. Too late for that.

Libertarian writer Todd Seavey sees anti-capitalism at the heart Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones. He notes that the titular villains of Attack of the Clones are the Trade Federation, the Banking Guild and other groups associated with commerce. And he writes that their leader, Nute Gunray, is "an arch-capitalist, tax-protesting, trade-loving, quasi-Japanese villain."

Even Nute Gunray’s name seems to be an anti-capitalist pun, recalling the names of Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan.

Of course, libertarians know that neither Gingrich nor Reagan was much of a capitalist. Both increased the size and scope of government, despite popular perceptions otherwise. However, their mastery of free-market rhetoric made them obvious targets for those who want to attack capitalism and limited government.

But is Nute Gunray, whatever the origin of his name, a capitalist?

Economist Mark Thornton writes that Gunray and the Trade Federation are really mercantilists, and the evidence in both Attack of the Clones and Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace seems overwhelming. Names like "Trade Federation" and "Banking Guild" recall the days of government-granted monopolies (have they ever really left us?).

And if Seavey is right that Gunray is "quasi-Japanese," for the past decade Japan has been a textbook case of mercantilism in decline.

But there is also some evidence that Star Wars creator George Lucas may have intended the Trade Federation to represent "evil" big businesses that don’t pay their "fair share" of taxes.

In his novelization of The Phantom Menace, Terry Brooks writes that the Trade Federation’s blockade of the planet Naboo is in response to the Republic’s taxation of Federation-controlled trade routes.

But Brooks’ version of events doesn’t make sense. If the Trade Federation is protesting taxation, it gains nothing by initiating a blockade around a small planet on the outskirts of the Republic.

A blockade only makes sense if the Federation is the group doing the taxing.

In Episode I, representatives of the Republic threaten to revoke the Federation’s trade franchise. The franchise could be simply a license to conduct business, in keeping with the Brooks/Seavey explanation. But it might also give the Federation the authority to place excise fees on all trade conducted within its jurisdiction.

If Naboo objected to these fees, that would be provocation for the Federation to blockade the planet, forcing the Naboo to submit to taxation rather than have no trade at all.

But for all the illogic of Brooks’ explanation, it could be the one Lucas intended. Illogic, after all, has never deterred anti-capitalists before, and plot holes are common in modern cinema.

Of course, it could as easily be that Brooks’ explanation isn’t the same as Lucas’.

Lucas has always said that the various Star Wars books, including the movie novelizations, aren’t necessarily canon, and he has contradicted them on numerous occasions.

In the movies, Lucas leaves the exact nature of the tax dispute unclear. So, maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt and go with the explanation that makes sense, rather than the one Brooks offers.

In an interview with Time magazine, Lucas says, "All democracies turn into dictatorships — but not by coup. The people give their democracy to the dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolph Hitler."

That is a damning charge, and one with which libertarians can sympathize. Most libertarians agree with H.L. Mencken’s remark that "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

But Attack of the Clones raises questions about how radical Lucas’ critique of democracy is. The political dialogue in the movie has more in common with a John McCain speech than with Lucas’ absolutist statement to Time.

Early in Episode II, Lucas gives Obi-Wan Kenobi a line about how senators are more interested in rewarding those who "fund their campaigns" than in promoting the common good.

That makes it sound as if all the Republic needed to do to avoid becoming the Empire was enact a few more campaign-finance laws.

But is Obi-Wan acting as Lucas’ mouthpiece, or is he being naïve?

There is evidence for the latter. After all, in Episode I and Episode II, it is a running theme that the Jedi are unaware of the real threat they face.

It isn’t that the special interests of the Star Wars universe are corrupting the politicians, but that a politician, Chancellor Palpatine, is manipulating groups like the Trade Federation for his own gain. He tricks them into starting wars so that he can consolidate his power.

So, is Lucas being inconsistent, or is he being clever? Is he just a John McCain-style neoliberal, or is he something else?

Maybe after Episode III the evidence will be conclusive.

Or maybe I should stop worrying about all this and go watch Yoda and Count Dooku’s lightsaber duel again.

Franklin Harris [send him e-mail] is a columnist and online editor for The Decatur (Ala.) Daily. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net.

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The most obvious examples, as far as most Americans are concerned, are the Godzilla films, in which a giant, radioactive monster serves as a constant reminder of the horrors of atomic warfare. (I’m ignoring the goofy Godzilla-is-a-friend-to-all-children movies of the late ’60s, as do most other Godzilla fans.)

But there is more to it than movies starring men in rubber monster suits.

Unlike in America, where animated cartoons are seen as mere children’s entertainment, in Japan there are animated films and television programs for every age group and spanning every genre.

Japanese animation, called anime, is now one of Japan’s most successful exports to the West. Anime videos and DVDs are found in most every American video store. Television channels like Cartoon Network and the Encore Action Channel devote several hours each week to anime programming.

What was once a cult phenomenon in America has gone mainstream, attracting the attention and praise even of establishment film critics like Roger Ebert.

The most popular Japanese imports so far have been the martial-arts adventure series Dragonball Z, Pokémon and numerous Pokémon clones, including Digimon, Monster Rancher and Yu Gi Oh.

If your kids are anime fans, chances are you know what I’m talking about. (And you’re probably willing to offer me a good price on some used Pokémon cards now that the Pokémon bubble has burst.)

But for my purposes, the most important anime TV series is one that has played a central role in the development of Japanese animation since 1979: Mobile Suit Gundam, which is available on home video and DVD and airs periodically on Cartoon Network.

The Gundam saga is full of warfare. Mobile Suit Gundam, the first of a long line of Gundam TV series and movies, perfected the "giant robot" genre, in which warring factions try to obliterate each other, and huge, humanoid robots are the primary weapons of mass destruction.

Superficially, giant robots are simply "cool" entertainment for youngsters, but the subtext of most giant-robot anime, especially in the case of Gundam, is that war is a terrible thing that should be avoided at virtually any cost.

One of the more recent Gundam-related programs is Gundam Wing. The heroes of the series are five young Gundam pilots, sent from Earth’s space colonies to strike at the oppressive military junta that has taken control of Earth’s government.

Some critics have described the pilots as terrorists, but the boys attack only military targets. As military historian and novelist Caleb Carr defines it in his book The Lessons of Terror, terrorism is "warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying their will to support either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable."

By that succinct and sensible definition, the boys in Gundam Wing are not terrorists, but many governments are. How else would one describe America’s war of sanctions against Iraq, intended to "encourage" the Iraqi people overthrow Saddam Hussein?

Used as pawns by both sides in the conflict, the boys eventually join forces with a princess devoted to military disarmament and pacifism.

The villain of the series, on the other hand, is devoted to a martial philosophy. He believes that human nature can express itself only through combat. And while he is portrayed sympathetically, he ultimately faces the fatal consequences of his beliefs.

Gundam also takes up the issue of secession.

The original Gundam series, Mobile Suit Gundam, chronicles the One Year War, in which Earth battles a secessionist colony called the Principality of Zeon.

In this series, the secessionists are the villains, ruled by a corrupt and fascistic royal family. But in subsequent series, our sympathies change.

In the first sequel, Zeta Gundam, the main characters from both sides of the One Year War join forces to oppose Earth, which has become tyrannical in its zeal to wipe out its remaining opposition. The space colonies become the victims, justified in seeking greater autonomy.

One anime that built upon the success of Gundam is Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

Macross starts with a solidly anti-war premise: War and civilization are incompatible.

In Macross, humans face an extraterrestrial enemy, the Zentradi, a genetically engineered race that knows only war. The Zentradi have no conception of culture and don’t know how to react when faced with something so seemingly innocuous as a pop song or a man and woman kissing.

Although vastly outgunned, the human heroes are able to use culture as a weapon for sorts, literally bombarding the Zentradi with love songs.

Eventually, after much hardship, a remnant of humanity prevails and joins with surviving Zentradi defectors to spread human civilization throughout the galaxy.

The message is clear: Culture, art and civilization mean peace.

Macross, more than any other anime, demonstrates the libertarian insight, best expressed by philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe, that there is a fundamental dichotomy between communication and force.

Anime also casts a withering eye upon military occupation.

Leiji Matsomoto is one of Japan’s most respected manga (comic book) artists. Among his most famous creations is the space pirate Captain Harlock, who has appeared in several anime TV series and feature films.

Harlock’s tale serves as a metaphor for America’s military occupation of Japan following the war and continuing even today, much to the displeasure of the Okinawans.

In the film Arcadia of My Youth, Harlock starts out as captain of a military starship. But following Earth’s defeat and subsequent occupation, he is forced to become a "space pirate." Harlock states explicitly that his Jolly Roger emblem is a symbol of freedom. When the law becomes the tool of an occupying force, one has no choice but to become an outlaw. Frederic Bastiat would sympathize.

But Harlock is fatalistic. He may fight tirelessly to liberate Earth, but he has lost both an eye and the woman he loves to the cause. He knows the price of war is always too high.

Even when there isn’t a war on, the military is something not to be trusted, especially the U.S. military.

The bad guys in the recent animated feature Spriggan are part of a top-secret U.S. military unit, sent to recover a dangerous artifact for the Pentagon. The good guys are a private organization.

And in the anime classic Akira, a group of military leaders and scientists unleash destruction upon Tokyo not once but twice. It is probably no coincidence that the chief scientist in the film bears a strong resemblance to Albert Einstein, whose theories paved the way to the atomic bomb, which was also the joint creation of scientists and the military.

Lastly, there is the anime film that is probably the greatest anti-war movie ever made, animated or live-action.

Director Isao Takahata’s masterful Grave of the Fireflies is the disturbing tale of two Japanese children orphaned by the American firebombing of Kobe in 1945.

Takahata lets us know in the opening minutes that young Seita and his sister Setsuko are destined to perish, and then he dares us to watch. He wants us to know that, above all else, war is the failure of humanity to perform its most important task — protect its innocents.

At present, the United States is pushing Japan to take a more active role in our "War on Terror," and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, unfortunately, seems eager to oblige.

Fortunately, Koizumi has several generations of anti-war feelings to overcome, which may make his task impossible.

Meanwhile, as American youngsters are increasingly exposed to Japanese culture through anime, they will hopefully absorb some of that same anti-war sentiment.

Unfortunately, they will have several older generations to overcome, too.

Franklin Harris [send him e-mail] is a columnist and online editor for The Decatur (Ala.) Daily. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net.

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Mention Lincoln in an unflattering (i.e., truthful) way, and Alan Keyes, already a wide-eyed kook, practically froths at the mouth.

According to the orthodox theology, Lincoln is “Honest Abe,” the man who fulfilled the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the saint who saved the Union and freed the slaves. He is a martyr to freedom.

It is no wonder that Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s new book, “The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda and an Unnecessary War,” fell under attack even before it was published. DiLorenzo is an economist at Loyola College in Maryland, and like any good economist, DiLorenzo follows the money.

Lincoln’s ambivalence toward slavery is well documented. As most know, Lincoln said that if he could save the Union without freeing a single slave he would do so. So, DiLorenzo searches Lincoln’s speeches, looking for Lincoln’s real motive for refusing to let the South go its own way.

The trail leads to Lincoln’s political hero, Henry Clay, who envisioned what he called the “American System.”

The American System, the core of the Whig Party’s political agenda, was based on high protective tariffs, a centralized banking system and “internal improvements,” the last being what we now call “corporate welfare.”

Like most Republicans of his day, Lincoln began his career as a Whig, and he was an enthusiastic supporter of Clay’s program.

“When the Whig Party imploded in the mid-1850s, Lincoln switched to the Republican Party,” writes DiLorenzo, “but assured his Illinois constituents that there was no difference between the two.”

As a lawyer, Lincoln represented railroad companies, prime recipients of government support under the Whig program. Lincoln was, in modern terminology, a lobbyist.

When Lincoln finally attained the presidency, he was at last in a position to reward the interests that had backed his political career.

Unfortunately, such subsidies were an expensive proposition, especially for the small federal government of the day. Lincoln needed all of the tax revenue he could get, and Southern secession was a threat to that revenue stream.

“[B]y 1860 the Southern states were paying in excess of 80 percent of all tariffs,” writes DiLorenzo. And although Lincoln did enact the first (unconstitutional) income tax during the war, prior to the war, the tariff was virtually the only source of income for the federal government. Without the Southern ports that received most of the country’s imports, Lincoln could not possibly mount his campaign for a larger federal government, handing out subsidies to industrial interests.

But what of secession? If the South did not have the right to leave the Union, if the Confederate leaders were all traitors, then Lincoln’s motivations may not be relevant.

Unlike some apologists for the Confederacy, DiLorenzo does not fall into the trap of romanticizing the Old South or making excuses for slavery. The evil of slavery is unquestionable. For DiLorenzo, it is simply a matter of showing that the South had the right to secede, for good or ill.

With an array of sources, he demonstrates that the South did have the right to leave. Indeed, until Lincoln came along, the right of secession was something upheld in both the South and the North.

In the early 1800s, New England secessionists threatened to dissolve the Union over issues ranging from the Louisiana Purchase to the War of 1812.

But what of slavery? Wasn’t the war necessary to end its evil?

“Dozens of countries,” writes DiLorenzo, “including possessions of the British, French and Spanish empires, ended slavery peacefully during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only in the United States was warfare associated with emancipation.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Violence on the level of slave uprisings (as in Haiti) did occur, but not warfare on the scale of the Civil War, which set the standard for total warfare, from which not even noncombatants are safe.

Terrorizing civilians (including slaves) was common practice for the Union army, DiLorenzo shows. He quotes Union Colonel John Beatty: “Every time the telegraph wire was cut we would burn a house; every time a train was fired upon we would hang a man; and we would continue to do this until every house was burned and every man hanged between Decatur and Bridgeport.”

Walk through the historic district of Decatur, Ala., and you will find it dominated by Victorian architecture. There is a reason for that.

DiLorenzo makes a persuasive case that Lincoln’s heroic reputation is undeserved. Lincoln is the father of the centralized state, the architect of unrestricted warfare and the president who, more than any other, helped bring to an end the republic of the Founding Fathers.

Franklin Harris [send him e-mail] is a newspaper reporter and columnist in Alabama. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net

A version of this review appeared originally in The Decatur (Ala.) Daily.

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All John Walker Lindh can do is sit in his jail cell and wait for his obligatory show trial: lights, camera, conviction!

I’m not particularly inclined to defend the so-called American Taliban. He enthusiastically embraced an authoritarian theology, and one might say he is simply getting a small taste of the same "justice" his friends enforced in Afghanistan. Either that, or he really is the incredibly stupid and impressionable young man his parents and lawyers claim he is, and I hate being in the position of defending either authoritarians or idiots.

But I digress.

No, the blatant injustice of Lindh’s situation is disturbing because we never know who may fall victim to it next.

Federal prosecutors have admitted that they really don’t have much of a case against Lindh. All they have are Lindh’s statements to a CNN camera crew, given while he was doped up on more painkillers than Chevy Chase after a pratfall.

But never mind that. Here comes a federal judge to the rescue.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III ruled last week that prosecutors do not have to prove that Lindh conspired to kill Americans for Lindh to be guilty of conspiring to kill Americans. So there.

All prosecutors would love having to meet such a burden of proof.

Furthermore, the judge denied a request from defense attorneys for access to evidence that might show whether the Afghan camps Lindh attended were used for military training or for terrorist training.

If Lindh was involved in terrorist training, it is reasonable to think that he was training to kill Americans. But if he was involved only in military training, he most likely thought he would be fighting the Afghan northern alliance. How was he to know the U.S. Army would show up?

Every man is entitled to a fair and impartial conviction, it seems.

Even if Lindh is guilty of a real crime, we’ll never know, because he is never going to get a real trial.

He may, however, get some company.

Yasser Esam Hamdi is the second "American Taliban" to crop up. As soon as U.S. authorities realized Hamdi might be an American citizen, they whisked him away from his holding cell in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It seems the feds were worried that any U.S. citizen held at "Camp X-ray" might be able to mount a legal challenge to the conditions there, which, Pentagon officials assure us, are nevertheless consistent with the Geneva Convention.

Hamdi, it appears, was born in Louisiana to Saudi parents.

Federal officials also made certain that Hamdi touched down at Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia, rather than at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. That places Hamdi within the jurisdiction of the same federal court handling Lindh’s case.

Now, Hamdi awaits his day before the hanging judge, should the State Department determine that Hamdi is, in fact, still a U.S. citizen.

Of course, assuming either Lindh or Hamdi is guilty of any crime, that crime is certainly not treason.

The great libertarian legal theorist Lysander Spooner put treason in its place back in 1867.

The ever-sensible Spooner said that charges of treason should only apply to those who have explicitly pledged to uphold the U.S. Constitution, which would mean that treason is relevant only to those government officials and military personnel who violate their oaths.

If anyone is guilty of treason, it is those politicians who pass blatantly unconstitutional laws and plunge us into to unconstitutional, undeclared wars.

Politicians never try to hide their real crimes; they celebrate them during Rose Garden signing ceremonies.

Looking for traitors? You might start with every congressman who voted for the USA PATRIOT Act.

Sound harsh? Don’t worry. If John Walker Lindh is a traitor, then clearly being a traitor isn’t what it used to be.

Franklin Harris [send him e-mail] is a newspaper reporter and columnist in Alabama. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net.

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Fortunately, the War on Terror isn’t a real war; it is a “new kind of war,” otherwise its critics might find themselves in jail, as did critics of Lincoln’s and Wilson’s wars, never mind that pesky First Amendment.

Yet the chilling effect is real, so real that when Gore Vidal, America’s greatest living man of letters, weighed in on the War on Terror, not even his friends at The Nation would publish him.

Vidal holds a view that is beyond the pale, or so the Conventional Wisdom would have us believe. He believes that the United States may actually have done something to provoke the hatred of the Islamic world.

He explores that possibility in fine detail in his new book, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated, a slim but substantial collection of essays, including the one that The Nation wouldn’t touch.

His central (and reasonable) thesis is that, contrary to what President Bush told a joint session of Congress, the Islamic world doesn’t hate us because of our freedoms. Rather, it hates us for exactly the reasons Osama bin Laden himself claimed: our military presence in Saudi Arabia, our continuing war of sanctions against Iraq and our “unconditional” support of Israel.

Vidal writes, “Since V-J Day 1945…, we have been engaged in what historian Charles A. Beard called ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace.’ I have occasionally referred to our ‘enemy of the month club’: each month we are confronted with a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us.”

Saddam Hussein’s longevity has made him the “enemy of the month” for a decade, replaced only temporarily by the Serbs.

Ironically, we bombed the Serbs into submission, in part, for their war against the very same Islamic terrorists we now face.

Our friend today is our enemy tomorrow and vice versa, and both are our enemies the day after that. Saddam was our ally against Iran. Then, briefly, Iran was our ally against Saddam. Now, both are two-thirds of the Axis of Evil, and the North Koreans are as perplexed as anyone.

Vidal also provides a “scoreboard” of American military adventures, many of which are ongoing “even though many of us have forgotten about them.”

Of course, our leaders tell us that these military engagements are all justified. However, those bearing the brunt of our bombs don’t necessarily see it that way. Nor should the American taxpayer, who is paying to a vast arsenal and getting even less security in exchange.

Ultimately, it is hard to imagine that Islamic terrorists spend much time worrying about the freedom Americans enjoy to eat at McDonald’s or watch MTV.

As it is, Americans are losing their freedoms, Vidal writes.

Following 9-11, Congress passed and the president signed so-called anti-terrorist legislation that gives the federal government sweeping new police powers.

The perception that the United States is becoming a police state breeds hatred on the home front, too. So, Vidal moves on to the case of our indigenous terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, who was forged in the fires of the Gulf War, where so many of our recent troubles began.

McVeigh, a decorated veteran, became a mass murderer in order to retaliate against what he saw as the federal government’s own acts of murder, directed at the Branch Davidians and others.

Vidal maintains that McVeigh’s concerns were justified, although his actions were not.

But those who approve of America’s current foreign and domestic policies like to wave bin Laden and McVeigh like bloody shirts, implying, and sometimes saying flat out, that to criticize American policies is to take the side of the terrorists. This guilt by association is meant to keep critics silent.

But just because bin Laden is evil doesn’t mean that the United States’ policies toward the Arab world are justified, nor does McVeigh’s evil mean that America should become the police state he feared.

Hopefully, Vidal’s little book will prompt more of us to reflect upon our country’s role in the world.

It was, after all, no less than George Washington who warned us of the dangers of overseas entanglements.

Franklin Harris [send him e-mail] is a newspaper reporter and columnist in Alabama. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net. A version of this column appeared originally in The Decatur (Ala.) Daily.

For
the most part, Hollywood persists in promoting the fiction that
the states of the former Confederacy are stuck in a time warp, somewhere
between 1865 and 1968. How many films produced in the last 20 years
and set in the South can you name that don't have race relations
at their core? Even a brilliant film like Joel and Ethan Coen's
"O
Brother, Where Art Thou?" can't avoid dredging up the Klan,
although, refreshingly, the Coen brothers link the Klan to Progressive
Era "reformers."

However,
it is a surprise to see a mainstream newspaper take note
of Hollywood's anti-Southern myopia.

In
the Friday, Feb. 8, edition of USA Today, writer Scott Bowles
takes
on the issue with surprising directness.

Bowles
quotes Marc Smirnoff, editor of Oxford American magazine,
who correctly recognizes that the South is the last remaining target
for vicious stereotyping. You can insult Southerners with impunity,
while everyone else is off limits.

"If
studios portrayed ethnic groups this way," Smirnoff tells Bowles,
"they'd burn down the Hollywood sign."

I
guess Hollywood should just be happy that we Southerners have learned
some restraint since the days of the Fire-Eaters and the Sumner-Brooks
Debate.

Independent
filmmaker Gary Hawkins goes further, telling Bowles that Hollywood
sees the South as "a foreign, frightening, funny place"
that is "easy to demonize… for dramatic purposes."

The
latest offender is the Oscar-nominated film "Monster's Ball,"
starring Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton.

Central
to the film is an interracial love story. That is something that
could be controversial anywhere in America (see, for instance, Spike
Lee's film "Jungle
Fever"). In this case, however, it is an excuse for trotting
out the usual Southern bigots, straight from central casting.

Peter
Boyle, as the Thornton character's father, plays the embodiment
of the stereotypical redneck racist.

All
of this goes against history. Since the 1960s, race relations in
the South have been far better than in the North. Even during the
worst of the Civil Rights Era, the South never had riots to match
those of Los Angeles, Detroit or Chicago, as historian Richard Lawson
tells Bowles. (But Southerners already knew that.)

When
so-called Civil Rights organizations have nothing better to do than
attack Confederate monuments and drive barbecue baron Maurice
Bessinger to the brink of bankruptcy, you know there are no
real race problems left in the South.

But
that doesn't matter in Hollywood.

Sometimes,
even when a film isn't set in the South, the bad guys are Southerners.
This includes a couple of films that are favorites of mine, in spite
of their reflexive use of Southerners as villains.

The
Bruce Willis sci-fi epic "The
Fifth Element" is set in the far future, as removed from
the Old South as you can get. But the villain, played by Gary Oldman,
has a drawl that would put Fannie Flagg to shame.

Then
there is Quentin Tarantino's crime film, "Pulp
Fiction," set in California.

Like
any good crime story, "Pulp Fiction" is full of unsavory
characters. But when Tarantino needs someone truly reprehensible
to contrast to his protagonists, he turns to a bunch of Southern
rednecks.

To drive the point home, the rednecks run a gun shop where they
proudly display a Confederate battle flag. And to think that I was
unaware that Los Angeles was home to so many flag-waving gun dealers
from Dixie.

When
a filmmaker does get the South right, he often has to apologize
for it.

Ang
Lee's "Ride
With the Devil" is a masterful tale of Civil War brutality.
It plays fair with both sides and includes a wonderful speech in
which a Southerner explains why the South cannot win the war. (It
boils down to the North's puritanical impulse to "improve"
the world, never mind what those to be improved may think. Against
that, the South's desire merely to be left alone is no match.)

In
interviews after the film's release, Lee had to defend
himself against the charge of romanticizing the South.

I
should note that it took a Taiwanese-born director to do the South
justice. Perhaps Lee sees some symmetry between the Confederacy's
struggle against the North and his country's relationship with mainland
China. Or maybe it just helps not to have been subjected to American
public schools.

Bowles
quotes actor Robert Duvall: "If you want to make a movie about
the real South, I wouldn't hire a director north of the Mason-Dixon
line."

Amen.

February
18, 2002

Franklin
Harris [send
him e-mail] is
a newspaper reporter and columnist in Alabama. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net.

LRC
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They are vigilantes.
They wouldn't have to do what they do if the government were at
all successful in protecting the innocent from the bad guys.

And more than
a few of them are wealthy entrepreneurs. You have to be a billionaire
industrialist like Tony Stark if you are going to create the high-tech
arsenal necessary to be Iron
Man. And it takes the wealth of Bruce Wayne to keep the Batcave
properly equipped.

But some of
them are more explicitly libertarian.

Steve
Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man,
dreamed up the first explicitly libertarian hero, The Question,
during his stint at Charlton Comics in the '60s.

In the '80s,
DC Comics purchased the rights to Ditko's Charlton characters, but
subsequent writers have purged them of any hint of Ditko's philosophy,
which was basically Ayn Rand's Objectivism minus the sexual hang-ups.

In fact, some
superhero comics have become decidedly Left Wing during the past
decade, thanks largely to an influx of British writers, who happily
cash their American paychecks while complaining that the United
States needs to be more like pre-Thatcher England.

One comic book,
"The
Authority," features a team of Left Wing superheroes who,
in authoritarian fashion, force their vision of a "better world"
upon everyone else. (Exactly how ironic this is, and how like the
manner in which real Leftists behave, seems lost on the book's current
writer.)

But one hero
seems to stand against the tide of Left Wing fascism.

In the '80s,
writer/artist Frank Miller satirized the feel-good militarism of
Reagan's America in his mini-series "Batman:
The Dark Knight Returns." Now, Miller is back. And he is
taking aim at the feel-good fascism of the Clinton/Bush years with
a three-issue series, "The
Dark Knight Strikes Again," commonly referred to as DK2.

In interviews,
Miller describes his Batman as an “idealistic anarchist.” And certainly
the world order Miller's Batman inhabits is in desperate need of
being overthrown.

It is a world
where no one cares about trifling things like civil liberties and
individual rights, as long as the Dow Jones continues onward and
upward.

Sound familiar?

To drive his
point home, Miller resurrects The Question, who is back to his old
Randian self.

The Question
keeps tabs on the government and writes down what he sees:

"The world
spins mad. The people are so intoxicated by luxury they forget everything
that makes us more than house pets. Reason. Truth. Justice. Freedom.
The human spirit is a shattered pane of glass – wrapped in
soft velvet and soaked in sugary poison. Evil has seduced mankind.
And mankind has shown all the chastity of a three-dollar whore."

But, like Rand,
The Question is in no position to act. He can only write. Miller
leaves the action to Batman, who must start by taking down the symbol
of the political establishment, Superman.

It seems strange
to think of Superman as the bad guy, but the Man of Steel has always
been a tool of the powers that be.

In the 1940s,
he was a New Deal propagandist. He is always the superhero the president
calls in times of need.

So, naturally,
when the government is corrupted, Superman is corrupted along with
it, no matter how much lip service he may give to defending "truth,
justice and the American way."

At the end
of "The Dark Knight Returns," Batman uses his wits and
some teamwork to defeat Superman. By the end of only the first issue
of DK2, Batman does so again.

In
the two issues yet to come, perhaps Miller will give Superman a
way to redeem himself – a way which will almost certainly involve
taking down the status quo.

If only things
in the real world were as easy as they are in the comics.

January
21, 2002

Franklin
Harris [send
him e-mail] is
a columnist and online editor for The
Decatur Daily.
His Web site is www.pulpculture.net.

LRC
needs your support. Please donate.

If
I were of a conspiratorial mindset, I'd be inclined to think that
the punditocracy – which is now cheerleading for an even wider
"war on terrorism" – was attempting to disarm anti-war
critics before the bombs started to fall.

That
couldn't be right, could it?

Of
course, if anything is now obvious, it is that the war on terrorism
is stinking ripe with irony.

"In
irony, even in the large derived sense of the word, there is a kind
of malice," wrote
Lionel Trilling in 1954. "The ironist has the intention
of practicing upon the misplaced confidence of the literal mind,
of disappointing comfortable expectation."

Certainly,
our leaders would love for us to fall asleep amid our comfortable
expectations and not ask bothersome, ironic questions.

For
instance, if this is a war on terrorism, why are we so busy bombing
the Taliban's front lines, not to mention hundreds of innocent civilians?
U.S. planes have bombed the Red Cross at least three times so far.

The
day after bombs fell on the Red Cross for the second time, Red Cross
President Bernadine Healy announced her resignation from the group.

Too
bad irony is dead. I can see the headline in The
Onion now: "Red Cross chief surrenders after second day
of bombing."

So
far, the terrorists with whom we are supposedly at war remain unfazed,
which is unsurprising as we are bombing everyone except Osama
bin Laden's al-Queda terrorist group.

Granted,
the Taliban are not nice people, but the argument that we must eliminate
them because they are harboring terrorists doesn't stand up. The
Taliban aren't sheltering bin Laden; bin Laden is propping up the
Taliban. Without bin Laden's contacts, resources and money, the
Taliban are just a bunch of 10th Century goat herders.
They are dangerous only when defending their own land from invaders.

Before
the bombing began, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us
that the Afghan campaign would not be an exercise in "nation
building." Nearly a month later, it is only an exercise
in nation building. Clearly, replacing the Taliban has overtaken
rooting out terrorism as the Bush Administration's primary war aim.

Here
is another ironic question: If America is really united, why do
the politicians and their media co-conspirators have to keep telling
us that America is united?

Careful
ironic analysis reveals the "America united" mantra to
be a rhetorical ploy, designed not to highlight a lack of dissent
but to strangle dissent in its crib. It is peer pressure for adults:
What? You are against the war, you say? Well, what is wrong with
you? Don't you see that the rest of America is united? Why don't
you just go to Afghanistan?

Even
taking the war at face value, there is plenty of irony to go around.

President
Bush is sending young people, mostly from rural America, off to
die to defend people under attack in urban America. Rural Americans
overwhelmingly supported Bush during the 2000 election, while those
in the nation's metropolitan centers did not. Tell me this isn't
ironic.

For
something that is dead, irony is pretty busy.

Last
week, we learned that CNN is going to "balance" its war
coverage. Supposedly, CNN is devoting too much time to covering
the victims of "collateral damage" in Afghanistan and
not enough time to spreading Defense Department propaganda.

Are
we talking about the same CNN that keeps former NATO butcher Wesley
Clark on its payroll?

Speaking
of former Gen. Clark, why was it wrong for the Serbs to fight Muslim
terrorists invading their own country, but it is O.K. for the United
States to fight Muslim terrorists a world away?

And
if this is a war to protect our freedoms, why is it that Congress'
first wartime action was to gut what little is left of Bill of Rights?
And why did President Bush create the Office of Homeland Security,
which has a Stalinist ring to it if ever anything did?

Irony
may well be dead. But as long as there is government, its ghost
will be alive and well.

November
5, 2001

Franklin
Harris [send
him e-mail] is a newspaper reporter and columnist in
Alabama.

The
Truth Needs Your Support
Please
make a donation to help us tell it,
no matter what nefarious plans Leviathan has.

This
is the fallout of US meddling in the Middle East, our continued
war of sanctions against the civilians of Iraq, our blind support
of Israel's ethnic cleansing in the "occupied territories,"
and our active support of Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan
during the Cold War.

These
foreign-policy sins, of course, do not excuse the unforgivable acts
of mass murder unleashed on America. Nor do they diminish the acts
of heroism we have seen from those who died trying to save the victims
and trying to prevent more deaths.

But
we cannot forget that all this never would have happened had the
United States minded its own business. If we do not learn this lesson,
we can expect the war in which we are now engaged to continue with
no end in sight.

The
first casualty in war is the truth, and this war is no different.

The
same individuals and groups in the United States who have been spoiling
for a war – any war – since the fall of the Soviet Union have turned
their propaganda engines on full.

The
neoconservative Fox News Channel aired a report that purported to
answer the one question no one else dared ask: Why does the Arab
world hate us so? Unfortunately, the "answer" delivered
was nothing more than a thinly veiled justification for genocide.

We
are told that Muslim fundamentalists hate us because we are rich,
free, and, by their standards, "decadent." But this is
sophistry.

By
Islamic standards, there are many countries that should qualify
for such hatred. But only the US and Israel face terrorist threats.
And when Muslim extremists do attack targets in other countries,
Americans and American property are invariably the targets.

Japan
is almost as rich as America. Its consumer culture is arguably even
more "decadent" than ours is. Logically speaking, Muslim
extremists should hate Japan's dominant, non-theistic religion even
more than they hate Christianity. But Japan doesn't fear Islamic
terrorism. The Japanese, in fact, need only fear homegrown terrorists,
like those who launched a poison gas attack several years ago.

The
difference between America and Japan is that America is a global
empire, while Japan is, to use that old smear, "isolationist."

It
is simply arrogance on our part to think that the Arab world hates
us for our virtues – freedom and capitalism. You would have to be
a fool or a contributor to the Ayn Rand Institute to believe such
nonsense.

That
kind of thinking, however, is what warmongers like Bill Kristol
and Sen. John McCain want and encourage. Because if America is hated
for its virtues, then America has no choice but to wage Total War
until the Arab world is brought to its knees and made nothing more
than an American protectorate. After all, we can't very well sacrifice
our virtues, can we?

No
doubt, Muslim fundamentalists do hate the values our Founding Fathers
tried to instill in us, but that isn't the kind of hatred that drives
people to sacrifice themselves in kamikaze attacks. The kind of
hatred that drives people to murder and die requires more tangible
inspiration.

Every
time an innocent child dies in Iraq because of the American-backed
embargo, the Arab world finds another tangible reason to hate America.
And the same can be said every time an American-funded bulldozer
in Israel demolishes some Palestinian family's home.

It
isn't our virtues that got us into this mess – it is our sins. America
has become an empire. Through its attempts to dictate to the rest
of the world, it has created many enemies, and not only among the
Arabs and Muslims. And until we give up our empire and return to
our republican roots, we cannot expect peace.

The
escalation has only just begun.

We
will retaliate. We will drop bombs, and we will probably kill more
innocent civilians than died on Sept. 11. The terrorists will respond
in their own way. They may use biological or even nuclear weapons.
All it takes is a boat sailing into some American port city and
a detonation, and we will have tens if not hundreds of times the
casualties we have already seen.

America
will then retaliate again. And so on.

The
president is right. We are at war. We are at war with fanatics who
will not surrender, who have no territory to take and hold. And
many of our own leaders have global designs.

This
is war, all right. It is war without end.

September
17, 2001

Franklin
Harris [send
him e-mail] is a newspaper reporter and columnist in
Alabama.

The
Japanese cooking show has become one of Food
Network's biggest hits – even drawing more viewers on
occasion than the seemingly omnipresent Emeril
Lagasse.

The
shorthand description of "Iron Chef" is that it is Julia
Child meets the World Wrestling Federation. Each episode features
a challenger taking on one of four Iron Chefs, each of whom specializes
in one style of cuisine (Japanese, Chinese, French and Italian).
The combatants have one hour to prepare their dishes, all utilizing
a theme ingredient, which is announced at the start the contest.

Theme
ingredients can range from the mundane (bananas)
to the bizarre (anglerfish),
and the chefs utilize expensive delicacies like caviar, truffles
and foie gras with abandon.

Americans
seem attracted to the show's inherent campiness, for while the Japanese
take "Iron Chef" very seriously (one half expects some
defeated chefs to commit seppuku), there is little on Japanese TV
that doesn't seem campy to American eyes.

But
"Iron Chef" also revels in political incorrectness.

The
most popular "Iron Chef" episode, according
to Food Network viewers, is the Octopus Battle, which features
live octopuses squirming for their lives as Iron Chef Italian Masahiko
Kobe and challenger Hiromichi Yoneda try to beat them into submission.

People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the whacko "animal rights"
group that doesn't want you to drink milk, tried to protest the
Octopus Battle,
not that anyone really noticed or cared.

The
Japanese are unfazed by criticism from the likes of PETA and carry
on with their contests. (Although "Iron Chef" is no longer
in regular production, Fuji TV still produces occasional specials,
like the recent 21st
Century Battle co-produced with Food Network.)

Each
battle is a showcase of classical virtues like honor and determination.
And, ultimately, it's all about winning. Occasional ties are settled
by brutal 30-minute cookoffs. This isn't a show for soccer moms.
They couldn't handle the pressure.

Already
enthralled with "Iron Chef," I was pleasantly surprised
to stumble across the Web site of one of the show's regular food
tasters.

Shinichiro
Kurimoto is a semi-regular judge on "Iron Chef," having
tasted more dishes than anyone except food critic Asako Kishi. He
is also a member of Japan's Lower Diet, representing Tokyo's 3rd
District.

A
former member of the Liberal Democratic Party, Kurimoto bolted in
1999. He is now a member of the oddly named Internet Breakthrough
Party of Japan.

If
the few broken-English-language articles on Kurimoto's
Web site are any indication, Kurimoto is a believer in what
Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo
calls "market
nationalism." It's an ideology that combines a belief in
free markets with opposition to the American Empire.

For
instance, almost alone among Japan's politicos, Kurimoto seems to
grasp the roots of his country's continued financial troubles.

This
passage from one of Kurimoto's essays reads as if it could have
been written by Ludwig von Mises
or Murray
Rothbard:

Most
of the times, our (economic) therapy was a Kamikaze-style patchwork.
During the bubble economy in the 80s, the financial institutions
were so exhilarated that they kept making loans indiscriminately,
knowing that most of such loans would be bad assets in the future.

And:

I
don't think that Mr. Greenspan is able to wield much effective
influence over the American economy as a whole. What he could
do is not much more than a lip-service maneuvering of the market.
Of course, there is no one in Japan comparable even with a mini-Greenspan.
When it comes to the financial and stock markets, the problem
is far more fundamental and even fatal. In short, there is too
much, far too much money circulating out there. I would like to
invite your attention to the fact that it takes 2,000 trillion
yen to buy up all the stocks of the world, while the money circulating
around the world at any one moment amounts to 5,000 trillion yen.

A
monetary explanation for inflation and boom-bust cycles? Kurimoto-san
could teach a lot of American economists a thing or two.

Like
Japan's new prime minister, Junichero Koizumi, Kurimoto has declared
war on the entrenched, socialist Japanese bureaucracy.

Kurimoto
writes:

Japan's
politics during the period between its economic growth including
the bubble era and its collapse was, in a sense, a kind of socialism,
in which regulatory control was tightened and loosened as bureaucrats
and politicians considered necessary. The bureaucracy preferred
to regulate business, and the conservative politicians were their
cronies. The corrupt relations between the two, however, did not
come to surface as the country's economic vitality was so powerful
that the political system managed to hide its inherent flaws.

But
it was a completely different story after the Administration forced
the bubble economy to burst. They were too slow in deregulation,
thereby wearing out the private sector's vitality to a great degree.
And because of that, Japan fell behind its competitors in the
development of telecommunication technology. It was relegated
to a second class position among the G5 nations. It happened to
be the time when those powerful financial captains started their
voracious speculations on the stock markets worldwide for gigantic
gains in the middle of a global money glut.

Kurimoto
is also steadfastly against American imperialism. He blames the
United States (rightly) for encouraging bad economic policies in
Japan. Those policies drove interest rates to zero, exacerbating
the real problems. And he has no use for American militarism:

I
visited Iraq this September to find the country suffering from
an extremely cruel economic bashing imposed by the United States
in the name of "U.N. resolutions."

There
is much more on Kurimoto's Web site, but it's all in Japanese. So,
I don't know if his libertarian-sounding remarks are typical or
not. (The English part of his web site is also out of date, so there
is nothing on what he thinks about the new prime minister.)

But
the next time I'm enjoying "Iron Chef," I'll nevertheless
take pleasure in knowing that the dapper food taster in the tux
just might be one of us.

June
11, 2001

Franklin
Harris [send him e-mail]
writes for
The Decatur (Ala.) Daily and frequently covers Japanese animation
(anime) and comics (manga) in his weekly entertainment column. His
Web site is www.pulpculture.net.

He
would like to thank Stephanie Masumura (a.k.a. IronSteph), whose
wonderful Iron Chef Compendium
made this article possible.

It
was once a given among libertarians that the South was in the right
during the so-called American Civil War. The evil of slavery isn't
arguable, but that issue has nothing to do with whether or not the
Confederacy had a right to exist as a nation apart from the United
States. It has nothing to do with the fact that the South, in many
ways, is occupied territory even today.

Abolitionist
libertarian Lysander Spooner agreed that the South had a right to
go its own way, as did libertarian journalist H.L. Mencken, who,
in other instances was no friend of the South.

Only
recently have some libertarians abandoned the South and its symbols,
the Confederate Battle Flag in particular, and embraced the centralized
state of Abraham Lincoln.

(I
wince when recalling a Reason cover story of some years back
that praised our most bloodthirsty chief executive.)

On
her Web site, Dynamist.com,
Postrel alludes to the anti-freedom policies of the Old South. She
writes, “Rockwell et al. are just against the government that ended
state-supported slavery and Jim Crow,” and thus, implicitly, not
against statism in general.

It
is an absurd assertion, but that is beside the point.

What
about the anti-freedom policies of the government Postrel so loves
– policies born directly of the Civil War? If not for the sainted
Lincoln's military buildup, there would have been no U.S. Army capable
of conducting a genocidal campaign against the American Indians.

The
facts have not changed, only the attitudes of Beltway libertarians
like Boaz and Postrel.

Yes,
I know Postrel doesn't live or work in Washington, D.C., but she
is there in spirit, which is exactly my point.

“Establishment”
libertarians like Postrel and Boaz, working in well-funded think
tanks, seem to care more about “respectability” than principle.

Unfortunately,
such respectability means being the token opposition, the darlings
of the neoconservative statists and Left-leaning media types infesting
the Washington-New York axis. It is the kind of respectability that
gets you column inches in the New York Times, invitations
to cocktail parties and guest spots on “Crossfire,” but that is
about all it does.

Both
Postrel and Boaz, in fact, are Southerners. Postrel hails from South
Carolina, the birthplace of secession, while Boaz is originally
from Kentucky and went to school at Vanderbilt University. I am
inclined to think that both know their Southern history better than
one would suspect just from reading their attacks on the South and
its symbols.

So,
I can only come to one conclusion: They are selling out.

Like
the scalawags of Reconstruction, Postrel and Boaz are betraying
their birthplaces in order to gain the favor of the Powers That
Be. That way they can “prove” that libertarians are “enlightened.”

The
object of the game is to make libertarianism seem respectable to
people who will never respect it, no matter what. Obviously, it
is a game destined to fail. No matter how “socially tolerant” Boaz
and Postrel may seem, they will never get the Establishment to go
for any shrink-the-government policies they may propose.

(And,
come to think of it, they are proposing fewer and fewer. So, all
this cozying up to the Beltway elites seems to have resulted in
osmosis in the wrong direction.)

Do
all libertarians have to love the South? Of course not. This is
not about loving or hating the South or the Confederacy. It is simply
about not denigrating people for loving the land of their birth.

May
7, 2001

Franklin
Harris [send him mail]
writes for The Decatur Daily in Decatur, Alabama. His Web site is
www.pulpculture.net.

They
went to such trouble to get their neoconservative brothers into
positions of power within the Bush Administration, and yet they
still can't get war with China.

Our
24 spies are home, the American people are happy the whole mess
is over, and President Bush looks (for now) like the embodiment
to reason and restraint.

It
is no surprise then that the crown princes of the War Establishment,
Bill
Kristol and Robert Kagan, are apoplectic. These two chicken
hawks, who think boot camp is just a reality show on Fox, are always
eager to send young Americans to die for “National Greatness,” their
current euphemism for Empire.

Only
slightly more surprising are the bellicose statements coming from
the lunatic fringe: the unreconstructed followers of novelist Ayn
Rand.

From
the statements coming out of the Ayn
Rand Institute, you would think the Randians are petitioning
the neocons for readmittance into the conservative movement, from
which William F. Buckley exiled them decades ago. If anything, the
Randians are more eager to drop bombs (on China, on anyone)
than even the Weekly Standard crowd.

In
a bloodthirsty press
release, Andrew Lewis, one of the nonentities on the ARI payroll,
writes: “China is the guilty party. The fact that China poses a
military danger to America is what makes our surveillance missions
necessary. It is China's status as a potential aggressor that created
the perilous situation in the first place.”

This
is the sort of loopy reasoning we used to get from Rand herself,
like when she hilariously declared big business America's “persecuted
minority.”

China
is no threat to the United States, and it won't be one for several
decades, if ever.

Like
all authoritarian countries, China is a threat to its own people,
but the only international threat on the scene today is the United
States.

Western
democracies, somewhat restrained from killing their own citizens,
are the countries forced to sate their bloodlust abroad.

It
isn't China, after all, that goes around dropping bombs on any country
that dares defy the U.S. State Department. China didn't wage an
air campaign on behalf of the Marxist Kosovo Liberation Army; we
did. They didn't bomb our embassy in Yugoslavia, but we did bomb
theirs.

Yes,
China does rattle its sabers with regard to Taiwan, which it regards
not as a sovereign nation but as a breakaway province. But what
would the United States do if, say, Alabama decided to break off
and go its own way?

Oh,
wait. We already know the answer to that question, don't we?

Of
course, Randians love Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, so maybe
they are just being consistent. After all, Rand's muddleheaded insistence
that there could be such as thing as “objective” government led
her to advocate giving the state a monopoly on the use of force,
as anti-freedom a doctrine as you could imagine, taken to its logical
conclusion.

Why
worry about what the Randians think? That's a good question. The
orthodox Randians, huddled around their stereos listing to taped
lectures from ARI, are just a small cadre of cultists, taken seriously
by no one.

But
many libertarians, myself included, became the anti-war activists
we are today after spending time in the Randian camp. It still shocks
us, although by now it shouldn't, when someone like Leonard Peikoff,
Rand's heir, goes on radio and calls for bombing the Middle East
back into the Stone Age just to get Osama Bin Laden.

Meanwhile,
Lewis' tirade descends further into madness.

He
complains that China “ruthlessly suppresses all dissent.” Now, excuse
me, but anyone from ARI who complains about anyone else stamping
out dissenting views is a hypocrite. I could list all of the people
purged from ARI's ranks for various thought crimes, but I'm not
interested in wearing my fingers down to nubs.

Of
course, China is repressive. So what? Lots of countries are repressive,
but that doesn't make any of them a threat to the United States.

Lewis
says the United State should recognize Taiwan as an independent
state and arm it to the teeth. He never considers that many in Taiwan
are skeptical of independence, which is a notion supported there
mostly by ethnic Japanese and Japanese-backed political hacks.

I
would like to think that this insane, warmongering talk is confined
to ARI, but actually it seems to carry the day in other, more moderate
neo-Randian enclaves as well.

The
Daily Objectivist published its own “letter of apology”
to the Chinese, containing this little gem:

“We
are very sorry that you are a totalitarian communist government
that oppresses its people and poses a continuing security threat
to other nations, including the United States of America. We are
very, very sorry and deeply regretful about the fact that we have
to waste so much money on flying surveillance missions and other
national defense measures thanks to outlaw nations like yours.”

Apart
from the fact that the folks at The Daily Objectivist don't know
the difference between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” – China
is not totalitarian, as the dissent within the Chinese government
over this whole spy-plane matter demonstrates – they continue to
spread the myth that China is a threat to the outside world. I await
the evidence.

China
managed to live in relative peace with the West under the murderous
Chairman Mao. It took a United Nations expeditionary force right
under Mao's nose to get China into the Korean War. So why should
China suddenly be a threat now that it is 100 times less repressive
than under the Gang of Four?

Some
relatively levelheaded Randians have been allies in the past when
it comes to defending freedom at home. But when it comes to restraining
the sprawling American Empire, they are the worst of the worst.
And it's time to stop being surprised by their bloodlust.

April
17, 2001

Franklin
Harris, a former Randian who is feeling much better now, writes
for THE DECATUR
DAILY in Decatur, Ala. When not worrying about politics,
he obsesses over sci-fi and horror movies at his Web site, www.pulpculture.net.

On
the one hand, the man's politics are simply odious. He is the poster
child for authoritarian globalism and the United Nations uber
alles.

On
the other, he is the media genius responsible for my favorite cable
channel, Cartoon Network. Twentysomething animation addicts like
me certainly owe the man a debt. If only our payments weren't going
to the U.N.

My
ambivalent feelings toward old Ted used to cause me concern. I doubted
my own libertarian ideological purity. That is, until I realized
that there are, in fact, two Ted Turners.

The
first is the one we all know and love to hate. The second is the
one who realizes, despite the first's globalist ambitions, that
regionalism matters.

I
know the second Ted exists because his newest cable TV channel is
something called Turner South.

In
part, Turner South exists to give Ted another outlet for Atlanta
Braves baseball games, but much of the channel's programming is
aimed at appealing to distinctly Southern sensibilities.

There
are shows about Southern cooking, shows about Southern music, shows
about Southern sports, and on and on.

Frankly,
much of it doesn't appeal to me. I've lived in the South my entire
life and, apart from owning my own Caribbean island, can't imagine
living anywhere else. But the appeal of country music and NASCAR
racing remains lost on me.

Nevertheless,
the South is also the birthplace of jazz and the blues. It was home
to William Faulkner, and it is still dotted with the grand, gothic
ruins of days past, despite the efforts of New South scalawags to
pave over the place.

More
to the point, we have fried catfish and barbecue, even if the folks
in South Carolina perversely slather mustard sauce on their pork
instead of good old Alabama vinegar sauce.

I'm
not certain if Ted No. 1 knows exactly what Ted No. 2 is up to.
While the first is trying to unite a world that dares cling to its
local customs and traditions, the second is reinforcing local cultures
and traditions. And not just any traditions, but those of the most
politically incorrect people on Earth, Southerners.

If
the folks in Hollywood and New York get wind of what Ted Mark II
is doing, they may have his head on a pike. After all, we know that
our bicoastal culture czars regard loving Dixie as very near a capital
offense. It's at least a hate crime.

There
are plenty of reasons to distrust former Sen. John Ashcroft, and
we'd all be better off if the Justice Department he is soon to lead
were boarded up or turned into squash courts. But the fact that
he dares show respect for heroes like Robert E. Lee isn't one of
them.

Now
here is Ted Turner, consciously or not, admitting that, no, the
South isn't just like the rest of the country. It's different. And
some of those differences are worth preserving and even celebrating.

Yes,
I know Ted puts the same "Beastmaster" movies on Turner
South that he puts on every other network bearing his name, but
you get my point.

And,
if the South's culture is different, why should anyone be surprised
to find its politics are different, too?

Now
I'm not saying its politics are perfect. It seems some strains of
Yankee Puritanism have taken deep root in Southern soil. Purtanism
is like Yankee kudzu. As a result, I can't buy Tennessee whiskey
on Sundays, and I have to drive 15 miles to another county to buy
it at all. But since this is exactly the sort of local outrage the
federal government doesn't seem interested in ending, I don't see
why I need the feds at all.

So,
the next time you're channel surfing, stop on Turner South and reflect
that at least half of Ted Turner's brain actually does work properly.

And
if you're lucky, Turner South won't be showing Patrick Swazye in
"Road House" for the billionth time.

January
22, 2001

Franklin
Harris is an Alabama native and a barbeque fiend. He writes for
The
Decatur (Ala.) Daily.

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