The Poppermost?

I was looking at some early '60s Pop Weekly magazines, a magazine which started up before The Beatles were even nationally known. It's interesting how in the bag of the solo singer/pin-up things were in England, and to a lesser extent in the U.S., at this time. This is the climate where the Beatles were told by Decca in early 1962 that groups were not very popular, and other than mainly instrumental groups like The Shadows, The Tornados (their Telstar instro was crowned in America before the Fabs invaded), The Ventures, that was mostly true. The Springfields might be considered a group but while they were airplay in Australia and the U.S. they weren't too successful in England. Peter Jay And The Jaywalkers (a bit like an early '60s Madness) and Sounds Incorporated were draws live for dancing and also backing all the solo singers, but their records weren't moving a lot of copies usually.

So page after page there's all these mostly now forgotten singers featured... all with perfect hair and the latest clothes, and to me mostly indistinguishable...some late '50s leftovers from the stage name stable too, and as often as not covering a U.S. hit generally in a too clean Pat Boone style. It makes me wonder if The Beatles hadn't come along (first mention in a November 1962 issue) if this publisher would've survived on the cooling Elvis fan base and the Buddy Holly memorial society brigade? Buddy was if anything bigger in England than anywhere, unlike the big E he'd toured there, and even posthumously most of the releases were top sellers and hits, only the Everly Brothers as any real competition. Cliff Richard had some decent songs now and then but they had begun to smooth him out like all the rest. Just before The Beatles broke things open for groups his B-side Bachelor Boy was his best side in months if not years, and it was more of a sing-a-long than a rocker at all.

Yes, things were pretty clean and smooth before those four long hairs, inspired a little by Buddy Holly without imitating (like Mike Berry or Tommy Roe obviously were), crept in through the back of those NEMS shops and that mostly novelty and comedy discs label Parlophone. In their first photo appearance in Pop Weekly they are in a junk yard and referred to as looking related to The Temperance Seven (one of those more novelty act groups), and this was after Brian Epstein had given them a good scrubbing and make-over! It's fun to see Love Me Do making the bottom of the singles chart, going away one week, creeping back in and not exceeding number 25. Then comes Please Please Me and before too much longer they and the Merseybeat group sound are the hot new thing and all the Bobbys and Marks and Adams are yesterdays news.

The instrumentalists are who I believe kept the rock & roll flame alive to get to them though. Add in The Champs, The Wailers (no, not the Jamaican guys), Johnny And the Hurricanes, Sweden's Spotnicks... and even Santo & Johnny and Dwayne Eddy should to be mentioned as well, and the fields were well ready for seeding with groups having vocal chops. The folk scene was alive and well if not top of the pops, and it represented, like the skiffle boom that brought John and Paul together in the first place, that there was genuine life out there in the U.K.

So often 1959-1963 is pictured as a dark age, but really it was a new dawn. The business may have been trying hard to push personalities that were models more than interesting singers, but the fans knew what was what the real deal just like The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and others had. There was no going back after Please Please Me pleased a nation looking for something original with life and roots to it. Enter Bob Dylan, stage left!

What do we have now if not a lot of models packaged as singers-entertainers as if stamped from some mode in a formula? Pushed to the best seller list before publication, because a couple international corporations control at least 80% of everything? Slap the auto-tune on ever thicker, lyrics that are about nothing in an a known person's life, instrumental backing from studio perfectionists if not actual machines... always darkest before the next dawn? We sure seem to need something now that even 'gangsta' rap is over forty years old (this should be grandparents' music, exactly like mentioning liking Al Jolson or Rudy Vallee to Mick Jagger in 1964).

The best thing that could happen is for the top heavy, coke snorting, yet still lumbering, dinosaur, that was the music industry should completely die and all the little b.s. corporation controlled content hypers and deliverers combined to go with it. What might follow i can't imagine, but that would be much of the fun!

We need a whole lot more Spider-Man, and a lot less of...

 Why is it so perennially popular with some to 'destroy an enemy'? It's like some sort of inhuman strain of anti-diversity, anti-competition as a road to some perfection that of course never comes. In practice it's like that cartoon where Elmer Fudd has killed 'da wabbit' in a Bugs Bunny opera cartoon, or in the real world more like a lot of miserable people trying desperately to not be a square peg or even think original thoughts under some 'strong man' at the top. It's been noted that in U.S. politics things somehow went from a Republican president Reagan and a Democratic speaker Tip O'Neil working together, to the present of, well, genuine personal physical violence threats in the same building today from some of the most extreme of one party against the other (with some proudly displaying a photo of that same 'great communicator' Reagan on the wall as if their great cause's hero)! Of course if one party did destroy the other in a two party democracy guess what you can't have anymore? A democracy! Generations of people voting and quoting in lockstep is hardly a good foundation for one, but forthrighteously dedicated to wiping a party and democracy out no matter what the lowest means required? That's a revolution devoutly not to be wisht.

Just look back at U.S. commercial comic books of a different time, way back in 1992 (October dated comics), and a few comments by hype master Stan Lee...

    It's time to correct a mistaken notion! We often get letters from loyal Marvelites gloating over the fact that some of our books may be outselling the competition, and wishing us well in our mission to conquer the comic book world by defeating our rivals!
    And therein lies the mistake! The last thing we want to do is conquer anything or defeat anyone! Sure, we have competitors, but just between us, most of them are friends of ours.

Stan got it! I think this wasn't the first time he made the point in his soapbox feature either. He was doing his small part. So how did so many people get so far off the rails, often becoming more corrupt than that they wish to expose the corruption of? To go back to the controversial Ronald Reagan, I think he was right in calling the soviet union of socialist republics an "evil empire". It was the kind of thing you could point to as an example of what a democracy isn't. Only a generation and half in politics later and the same people who crudely link any socialism to the worst horrors of communist fascism, who proudly display their Ronnie photos, are willfully oblivious to the left overs of that CCCP with a top KGB agent pulling the strings, lapping up disinformation the CIA links directly to that land that gave us Lenin and Stalin. Talk about weakness inviting attack! They were living it and enabling it, thinking they benefited somehow, while rotting away the structure of their own home of the free!

The rhetoric of violence and absolutes is not for a nation of human beings. Calls to 'destroy destroy destroy' are not only bad for business they are bad for the whole enjoyment of life. Christianity teaches to love your neighbor, to not cast the first stone, to look first to the timber in your own eye rather than focusing solely on the mote in anothers! Again, the worst of the zealots will pose with the Christian bible while breaking it's most central tenets... or do they really need it spelled out literalist style not to gas thine citizens for yonder photo op at the house of the Lord? 

Now a word to the wise...

...from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. These are words I believe I was living by before they were said; to not provoke unnecessarily, to not incite or to manufacture outrage. There is neither excuse in it for atrocity, nor for provocation, because two wrongs never make a right.

"We will always defend freedom of expression, but freedom of expression is not without limits. We owe it to ourselves to act with respect for others and to seek not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet. We do not have the right for example to shout fire in a movie theatre crowded with people, there are always limits. In a pluralist, diverse and respectful society like ours, we owe it to ourselves to be aware of the impact of our words, of our actions on others, particularly these communities and populations who still experience a great deal of discrimination."

In light of the recent events the world has witnessed which are the result of violent rhetoric, and distributing simplistic extreme political commentary, I would like to say... yes, you Classic Comics Forum... allowed an erstwhile Trump-supporter to post violent rhetoric about people being swine and animals, to be gutted and shot... some of your moderators 'liked' these posts. Yes you... moderator 'cheese thief' posted a blatant anti-PM of Canada rant about him being with terrorists, simply for advocating people choose their words more thoughtfully. Yes you 'white guardian'... right before Christmas, but a little after Trump began calling for supporters to come to Washington on January 6th, subjected me to a warning, who did nothing as egregious against your rules but posted the above words, who provably in fact tried other times to balance and calm potential 'situations', to be reasonable and adult and even apologize where I had not lived up to my own standards... you warned me to take a more "nuetral" tone then refused to explain what I wrote that would've brought this to be reported or be any kind of an issue.

Do you still pretend I was causing a problem but then say nobody complained? Can you say you hold yourselves to a high standard when you break your own rules? I will confess... I did write one thing political in my last few months there, in the lowest case of type, I did make one small reference about a former mayor of New York City, the one called by fools a 'hero' of an extremely horrible day, an election day there when he was not running because he was such an embarrassment as a human being. I did not name him, the intelligent and informed would know this could only mean one Mr. Giuliani. While so many real heroes lost their lives, he has, and maybe still has, the hubris to be referred to as 'the hero of 9/11'. The man made New Yorkers sick before that day, and now this past Wednesday morning, when it was Mr. Giuliani inciting a crowd of pro-Trump thugs and bullies, name-callers with plastic zip ties and hit lists, to storm the Capitol building in a "trail by combat". They who murdered a police officer doing his job there, like the police offers of NYC who were doing their jobs the day Rudy became a real 'hero'. If that small word to the wise was the real trigger for cautioning me I will now wear that with pride, and whoever, moderator or reporting member, who took umbrage has branded themselves forever a loser with it. Forgive me Classic Comics Forum for being absolutely bang on target with that infinitesimal slight to your Rudy? It was probably just because I have paid attention to the world around us, not covered my ears and hummed or set up long 'see no evil' ignore lists to wish loud mouths away. I have my own thoughts, and I almost always put a lot of thought into what I share from them, and I own them, I don't hide behind multiple 'screen names'. I have a weakness for only taking so much hypocrisy before calling it out; be it from a falsely glorified mayor or dudes  running a comic book chat. Excuse me for knowing that careless promotion of violence can precede the real thing? For finding tolerance of that repellent, not likable in the least?

Although I didn't vote for his Liberal party in the last two Canadian federal elections, Justin Trudeau is still my Prime Minister, and I would say more intelligent, more thoughtful, than the people who 'liked' one moderator's extreme and very political post about how he was with the terrorists based on the speech I quote above. In fact Mr. Trudeau was doing his job as a real leader does; defending a diverse and hopefully not so divided Canada, en Francais, and I stand behind everything he said even in translation. This so outraged a countryman, although no doubt manipulated by what we allow of slanted media in Canada? Someone who would later then take a role in banning the 2019 best new member and the 2020 friendliest member? Well, je ne c'est pas Charlie Hebdo! Because two wrongs do not make a right. I was not for George Bush Jr. when he demanded everyone was either with 'us' or with terrorists after 9/11 any more than for cartoonists deliberately being provocative and ugly; I was very much, very gladly, with Jean Chretien, Liberal PM then, who had the integrity and maturity to stand alone and kept us out of an Iraq invasion based on totally false WMD 'evidence' while other weak as water 'leaders' bent into moral pretzels by the will of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and probably like weak willed Bush Jr. himself (unlike his father who resisted those exact same hawks who had never seen combat themselves in dealing with Iraq after the Kuwait invasion).

So long as that woman under any name is still protected and 'liked' there, with her vapid self-absorption and pro-violence stupidity, it's not a forum worth being on to talk about anything, even comic books. Not If the moderator who lectured me on my lack of "neutrality" is still warning others, or if the one who turned on his own Prime Minister and fellow Quebecer with misinformation of reactionary reductionist name-calling is still a moderator, nor if the one who 'liked' a gutted like swine post by the erstwhile female Trump defender can still hold his high standards up for admiration... I could only say, j'accuse. Keep the false "friendliness" for those who fall into line in fear of excommunication and look the other way at power-tripping hypocrites using intimidation. Sadly I've been made ashamed I was ever there. Almost as ashamed as when I started seeing extreme fascistic violent lunatics with huge guns and muscles take over comic books in the late '80s (and the Rambo pajamas for little boys and paraphernalia with the Confederate flags on it being hawked to southern U.S. teenagers) and stopped reading many comics at all. You could never make me half as sick as you have made yourselves however. These are horrible times for people who want a healthy and strong U.S.A., or non-rare multi variant cover fantasy comic books read by actual readers, not violent porn for utter losers pretending they are adults, nor pretend investment objects to be preserved for future profits. Even banned people can still read your post pages via Google caches by the way, and when I said I would not post again I meant it, all you've really done is axed the lines of private communication between me and others there. I wonder why? Well, maybe a message like this would be why. Perhaps your high standards couldn't begin to respond or explain?

"Gut them like swine"?

Until recently I participated in a forum of generally older and fairly internationally based comic book readers. It had a small area for politics even, which was already a bit of a rarity in the early days of a U.S. president Trump, a bit dominated by the left so you did get some of that rhetoric and then the opposing talking points back from a couple who would express the fashionable victimization as a minority there decorated somewhat with killer comics characters posing with guns. But feelings apparently got hard, many of my posts were centrist and informational, and I don't think very much at all would've been over me. I like anywhere I can post my thoughts which are my thoughts, or information from an outside established source against any slanted half-truth. I probably more bored folks being long-winded, or as I might think of it, comprehensive, whereas the usual style lately has been provoking or even manufacturing outrage.

So that had to go and in a place about comic books that seems logical enough, I have real people in my life to discuss political stuff with and even another comic book centric forum that has always allowed it (even if there are some ignore-feature happy types who make big shows of who they are not 'listening' to nah-nah-nah can't hear that person). I petitioned however that there should be some slack in the moderation, 'politics' can be very real and have a direct effect on people and they should be given some leeway to express themselves generally. Take the bizarre anti-masks during a pandemic 'movement'. I felt okay about posting informational encouragement for mask wearing, it really isn't political but about protecting all human beings, like my parents in their late 70s whom I worry about a lot.

Unfortunately there is one poster that comes and goes, I don't know if they get banned and allowed back or what goes on, their ID name changes as well; she was a one of a tiny number of pro-Trump posters in the closed politics area, so maybe felt hard-done by there (they called news reporters names and generally championed Trump as a great guy). Post politics they described Black Lives Matter stuff in the streets as animals who should be shot. I tried the ignore feature finally rather than leave myself, complained to one moderator. I admit, I don't feel good putting anybody on ignore and I took her off it (and anyway, when not signed in you see everything anyway). I'm trying to be careful about getting 'political' in anything, I avoid some obvious bait from either 'wing', I take my share of slack though when I really want to reference or balance something with more context. For example, again post the decision to have no politics, one of the moderators, who is a fellow Canadian, gets worked up about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying something he sees as being with terrorists and against people in France. Most people, even myself in Western Canada, aren't getting much of this in their news, a lot of them are supportive against Trudeau (who I didn't happen to vote for in the last election), I try and find the speech in question. It was in French but there is a translation in a reputable long-running Asian newspaper and I post that for context.

Not to belabor that topic, I mention it as an example of a moderator certainly not taking a neutral tone. They are entitled to feel betrayed by Canada and communicate about it with some passion. I gave extra context, that it was a two wrongs don't make a right situation to me, not judging one as equal to the other; both people got their say. In early December the previously described woman for Trump, now maybe not so much for, returns to the violent rhetoric, current poisoner of countries, with a comment that a group be gutted like swine. Here we go again, different group, same extreme simplistic reactionary junk, but it gets support from a couple of the moderators! In my world you never say something like that about any people. Not good. Certainly not good if you don't want heated 'political' eruptions that supposedly were bad in the past causing people to leave. Well, unusually people don't take issue with it, it seems more ignored, except I feel the need to balance and post information in light of the revelation that a policy paper stating "we want them infected" was circulating in the White House people like this woman installed and empowers. The silence from the majority, most people being careful, seems like we've gotten through this latest extremist outrage zinger down two moderators who 'liked' it, and I let it lie hoping perhaps people might google the "we want them infected" quote for further info.

Then unfortunately, just before Christmas I get a message to be more "neutral" in tone from a moderator I haven't heard from before. I reply in private admitting how I can make mistakes and that I like to correct them if I have, please show me the post in question someone found objectionable. Response is, it is just a "friendly" reminder. So out of the blue as far as I can tell, and still don't know of who or what triggered this cautioning, nobody complaining, I am lectured to tiptoe even more carefully. Beyond festive mood killer this! I guess I'll never know who, or over what, there was an issue. I'm pretty much fed up with the being oh so careful lest some extreme minority be upset. I, voted once best new member, once friendliest member, post a 'that's it, I'm gone, this is how I'm treated while others doing much more deliberately here are supported'. There is a you can't quit we ban you rule breaker punctuation mark as the whole site is now righteously blocked to me. I have no idea how this might be viewed by people I was on good terms with there other than a few I know outside it. I did have voices taking my side and I appreciate it, but I only want to say I left, and I left because I didn't want to become an ignore list type of person, nor a report button pusher type, but most of all I am not going to be involved in coddling known problem people. That woman caused problems many times with various members, instigated, really posted not all that much about comics other than what she bought or hot new item flipped for a big profit, hardly ever about reading the things in other words. There are loads of places for those comic book 'fans'. Didn't really add very much and was pretty much always centered on her and reflecting what was hot or a desirable grade of key issue.

I lose a place where people read and talk about what they read, they lose whatever I brought that at least some expressed they valued, over three moderators, including one Canadian, one English who decided to be the latest victim of the make a majority bend to the blowhard wind of the extreme fringe. It makes me ill to be around the stuff, it is what is making nations ill and handicapped, sometimes at very critical moments. I felt no choice but to give up on the forum because submitting, or pretending to, to vague rules of conduct I didn't earn being lectured about makes me feel sick. I am sickened when those who flout the professed neutrality conduct requirement with actual extremes are supported, and even protected, from the actual majority of balanced, centrist, even the now apolitical givers up, who wanted to share a genuine love of comic books. The iron gate comes down and we are separated for their own good. Troublemaker me who couldn't take a "friendly" word from above, but never believe themselves to have higher standards, they are only a couple or so more hypocrites in a modern parade of them, crossing paths with someone who simply has to live to certain standard. I never needed the warning, it was the timber in your own eye, not the mote I always have admitted can be in mine. I simply had no choice given me, ultimately or inevitably, other than to leave.

Long-winded me, a tempest in a teapot... banning of politics is a style of the times but like so many of these styles it really doesn't work in practice where everything even protective masks never mind skin color one is born with are somehow politicized. We can only submit or refuse. I will not, maybe cannot, tiptoe around chosen extremes more than I had been, and if that's 'not good enough' then in fact it's better than! And I'm still at the comics forum I was in before finding this other one sealed off for nobody's protection. Still able to post political thoughts if I want. A ton of bricks was piled on top of the "friendliest member" at the other place, in contrast to forgiveness and even support for violent rhetoric and echoed misinformation talking points. It was never I who manufactured outrage, who told half-truths, or echoed simplistic misinformation from dubious websites, but I have been emotional... definitely. I'll accept the blame for that one; emotional but minus the hate. Despite putting in at least as much positive as I hoped to get back, that one forum became most definitely not for me and it's just sad. 

R.I.P. beccabear67 at Classic Comics Forum a.k.a. CCF