Bucking The Comic Book Wisdom

Fielding Buck gets the point about the comic book Richard Nixon in "Watchmen," who talks as though he would be open to launching a nuclear war:

Now that, my friends, is not Nixon speaking. The real president is famous for improving diplomatic relations with China and negotiating nuclear arms control with the Soviet Union.

Who Watches "Watchmen"?

I'm over 20 years late with this assessment. "Watchmen" was published when I was working for RN in New York, practicing almost weekly counter-journalism on his behalf.

Missed this one, Mr. President. Got most of them.

Sadly, the graphic novel's alt.-Richard Nixon gets a raw deal. His high point comes in chapter IV, when he sends Dr. Manhattan, a blue superman with seemingly infinite powers, to defeat the Viet Cong (p. 20), enabling RN to ram through a constitutional amendment in 1975 that enables him to run for a third (and presumably a fourth and fifth) term (21).

From there, for Hannah Nixon's good Quaker son, it's downhill fast toward near-certain nuclear holocaust. I recognize that this is just a comic book, but author Alan Moore, although some kind of genius, misses or ignores that RN discerningly engaged the Soviets through his policy of detente, thus substantially decreasing East-West tensions. Moore might be saying that Nixon's policy, extrapolated into the 1980s, would've been too soft, resulting in the story's October 1985 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan -- which actually happened in 1979 under the dovish Jimmy Carter. And yet reviews of the "Watchmen" film make clear that among Moore's original targets was the hawkish Reagan administration.

If Nixon had really been in office, presumably the Soviets, in calculating the risks of aggression, would've remembered the tough measures he took in Vietnam (prior to sending the giant blue man, of course). When the alt.-Soviets nonetheless prepare to invade Pakistan, alt.-Nixon seems less than appalled at his advisers' estimation of the vast losses that would result from a nuclear exchange beginning with a U.S. first strike. "Losing the East Coast, we'd need to," he says. "I don't know...I'd always kind of hoped that the big decision would rest with somebody else. This is going to take some thinking about....I think we'll give it a week, gentlemen, before bringing out our big guns...After that, humanity is in the hands of a higher authority than mine. Let's just hope he's on our side." (III, 26-28)

Though each Cold War President no doubt dreaded having to make that decision, the distinct possibility of nuclear war shadowed three generations of Americans. For most of the era, the uneasy peace between the U.S. and Soviet Union was bolstered by the concept of mutually assured destruction. Both sides had enough nuclear firepower to be able to destroy the other, meaning that in a full-scale exchange, neither side could win. What altered the picture was the possibility that one side would have enough forces to destroy enough of the enemy's strategic nuclear missiles in a first strike that the attacker would stand a good chance of surviving as a functioning polity.

While the very idea of a survivable first strike was monstrous, it was the way strategists thought. "Watchmen" author Moore was deftly probing the weak link in the MAD armor, namely whether any leader, American or Soviet, would be ruthless, desperate, or unhinged enough to order the catastrophic first strike.

That's where Moore's choice of a guinea pig came in. His real-life 1985 commander in chief was Reagan, and the policy he was critiquing was Reagan's. When Reagan proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative in the early 1980s, as "Watchmen" was being envisioned and written, skeptics actually feared that Reagan was using it to create or enhance the U.S.'s first-strike capability. And yet for his madman, the monster actually willing to pull the trigger, Moore maneuvers poor Mr. Nixon back into office. To add insult to injury, he even has a character mutter about the privations of "Nixononmics." (VIII, 2) Near the end of the story, alt.-RN arrives at what looks like NORAD, clutching the nuclear football (it's actually a metal football, chained to his wrist), mumbles something about Mrs. Nixon being safe elsewhere, and then sits stoically, watching the big TV screens and waiting to give the order for a first strike if necessary. (X, 1-3)

Meanwhile, his actual Presidency was dedicated in large part to making sure no one would ever have to. Anti-Soviet hawks, including some proto-neocon Democrats, accused him and Henry Kissinger of degrading U.S. nuclear forces and even ceding a first-strike capability to Moscow. Pentagon generals were so nervous about RN's policies that they spied on him. Now that would make a great comic book.

Everyone Knows Nixon Served Until 1989!

One review after another of "Watchmen," including this one in England's prestigious Guardian, says that the movie's fictional Richard Nixon was serving a third term as President. Evidently reviewers are being thrown off by the opening titles, which show RN reelected in 1976 after a constitutional amendment permits him to seek a third term. But by 1985, when the action of the story occurs, he's on his fifth.

RN's luck's about to run out, though, because at the very end of the graphic novel (I'm not sure about the movie, which I haven't seen yet), a newspaper headline says that "RR" is considering running in 1988. Presumably the reader is expected to think Ronald Reagan. If so, the authors are teasing us. As we learn on "Watchmen"'s very last page, the candidate's actually another famous cowboy: Robert Redford.

"As Good As Dead": Sermon For II Lent

Reading "Watchmen" (to catch up with a 20-year-old pop cultural phenomenon as well as plumb its Nixonian resonances), I started having apocalyptic dreams as the story's looming nuclear holocaust resonated with the world's real-life economic nightmare. Friends and fellow worshipers tell me they're feeling oppressed by dread that bad times will get even worse as well as by the private emergencies of sickness and alienation that plague the people of God irrespective of the Dow Jones average.

One friend told me that her limbs felt heavy and weak from constant worry over a problem at home. Because of the scripture readings for this week, her comment reminded me 100-year-old Abram (later Abraham). He and his wife Sarai had no heir. Everybody in town was no doubt gossiping about him. He was exhausted and disillusioned and probably didn't have a tooth in his head. In his letter to the Romans, Paul says Abram was "as good as dead." And yet on whom did God settle the responsibility for building a whole universe of faith? None other than Abraham, father of many nations.

In a riveting interview last week with Terry Gross, Donovan Campbell, who commanded a Marine platoon in Iraq in 2004, said the only way he could do his job was decide that he was already dead, a mind trick that freed him to make effective and indeed moral choices in the most chaotic, amoral environment possible. By the same token, Jesus counsels his followers to accept the inevitability of his death so his (and our) triumph over it (and over all deathly things, including dread) could be revealed.

We're all as good as dead. And yet God wants us to feel safe, free, and bracingly alive. Check out Campbell's book, Joker One. My Sunday sermon is here.

Easy, With A Giant Blue Superman On Your Side

They're wondering how RN got his five terms in "Watchmen." As usual, those who read the comic book have the edge.

Write What You Know

Panning the Washington Post's pan of "Watchmen," Matthew Yglesias suggests that newspapers, their resources dwindling, stick to hard news reporting and leave the commentary about relatively trivial cultural events (such as "Watchmen") to the Hackosphere. Sounds about right.

alt.-37 And Blue Man's Group

Reviewing "Watchmen" in the New York Times, as a public service A. O. Scott notes the use of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" during a sex scene and beseeches filmmakers:

[C]an we please have a moratorium on the use of this song in movies? Yes, I too have heard there was a secret chord that David played, and blah blah blah, but I don’t want to hear it again. Do you?

Amen and (with apologies to my Lenten brethren and sistren) alleluia.

Several "Watchmen" reviews, including Scott's, have persuaded me to watch for the DVD, if only to restrict the gushing blood, cracking bones, and exploding bodies to a smaller screen.

Having missed the graphic novel phenom entirely, I did buy a copy of the book and am about halfway through. Reading a comic book at 54, I feel self-conscious, even though it's strictly for research purposes. President Nixon, of course, is in his fifth term, having sent a big blue superman called Dr. Manhattan to defeat the Viet Cong, enabling the U.S. to win the war. That's alt.-37 above, anxiously contemplating the possible loss of the entire Eastern establishment in a hypothetical nuclear exchange. It's now the mid-1980s. The Soviets have invaded Afghanistan and plunged into Pakistan. But the blue man has broken up with his girlfriend and been accused of giving everyone cancer. He's gone to Mars to sulk and so isn't available to RN to blunt the invasion.

The reflections of another from "Watchman"'s band of troubled superheroes on the meaninglessness of the universe and the pivotal role played by chance in our lives reminded me of one of Woody Allen's best movies. A ring decides a character's fate in Allen's "Match Point," a broken watch in "Watchmen." The book has also been giving me weird dreams. Its looming apocalypse resonates discomfitingly with our all-too-real economic crisis.

Calling Frank Langella

Robert Wisden plays RN in "Watchmen."

Half Alternative

Richard Nixon and the movies these days -- whoa! There're now almost as many references to "Watchmen" as there were last month to "Frost/Nixon." From Canada's Globe and Mail:

Watchmen is set in an alternative 1985, in which the Cold War is still raging and Richard Nixon is still president.

Actually, the Cold War really was still raging in 1985.

RN Tops FDR

With all the attention paid to "Frost/Nixon," another Nixon-themed movie has sneaked up on us -- "Watchmen," based on the DC graphic novel, a phrase I wrote as though I'd heard of it before seeing the movie previews. Although I'm still mourning my mother giving away my Marvel and DC comics when I went off to school, that was back in the early Nixon administration. I missed the graphic novel phenomenon. Evidently the story picks up on the what if? of what might've happened if the U.S., while in the throes of Watergate, hadn't abandoned South Vietnam:

Brooding, dark and far too sincere for its own good (note extended voiceovers about heroism and loneliness, not to mention a whole counterfactual element in which the U.S. wins Vietnam and Richard Nixon is elected to five terms), what could have been a moral fable in superhero clothes (ie, the Dark Knight) is instead a sloppy stew of vigilante justice, techno-musings and pop social philosophy.