Inappropriate Content: 50 in 05©

#24
1602
By Neil Gaiman

The year is 1602. Queen Elizabeth is an old woman, watching as strange things begin to happen in her court, her country, and her world. Things that bear a startling similarity to the things that happened in the Marvel Universe.

Gee-whiz, we're supposed to think. There's Dr. Strange, the Queen's new court physician. There's Otto Von Doom, literally a count in a castle. There's Magneto, as the High Inquisitor in charge of burning mutants—I mean, witchbloods. Xavier is now Javier, heh, heh. And your friendly neighborhood Spiderman? Peter Parquerh. That's right, Parquerh. I am not making this up.

Oh, well, one must not be too harsh. Gaiman is at home with characters like Queen Elizabeth and James I. (Inaccurately, the boyfriend-historian informs me. He is not an admirer of the Virgin Queen.) In between the geekerific "guess who this is" moments, he justifies the craziness with a time-space distortion, just like Star Trek justifies shrinking people or Quark in Roswell or whatever they're doing next week: it is a comic book, after all. It doesn't hurt that the Elizabethan version of Archangel, X-Men's first openly gay character, gets quite a bit of page space, much of it scantily clad.

It's entertaining enough, and more importantly, it's worth reading a trade paperback to see the words "Captain America fights the President-For-Life" written without irony.

#25
Losing America
By Sen. Robert C. Byrd

When lefties make fun of President Bush's youthful indiscretions (a useful phrase that can cover everything from sneaking into an R-rated move to dealing cocaine) the President's supporters can turn around and say, "So the President was in a frat, big deal! Robert Byrd was in the Ku Klux Klan!"

And they have a point. Both George W. Bush and Robert C. Byrd have pasts they are rightly ashamed of. Neither can be respected without admitting that stupid young men do grow out of it and mature.

The difference, of course, is that while George W. Bush has matured from a college frat boy into a man with the mindset, intelligence, and class of a mildly successful used car salesman, Robert C. Byrd has matured into something of a statesman. Certainly he is aging with a bit more dignity than Zell Miller. History will look on Senator Byrd rather more kindly than the late Strom Thurmond, whose record as longest-serving senator Byrd may well live long enough to break.

Byrd slides between two separate styles in his book. Most of the time, he tries to be one of the great Roman statesmen, with much talk of institutions and constitutions, and the occasional biblical reference for garnish. Critics dismiss Byrd because he is pretending to be a great statesman, but what his critics don't mention is that he does quite a good job with his act. (Of course his critics are often cable network pundits who can barely impersonate themselves, let alone Cato. That's right, Bill, I mean you.) At the risk of falling victim to the soft bigotry of low expectations, it's frankly so thrilling we still have a senator capable of writing an entire book that complaining he's not as good as Marcus Aurelius is just whiny.

And no, Byrd did not use a ghost writer. Then again, neither did Rick Santorum.

In the end, though, it's not the highfalutin stuff that's the most interesting. Now and again, Byrd slips from Roman Senator to U.S. Senator; he begins speaking in congressional short-hand, a mix of copious statistics, DC jargon, and personal anecdote that is a very good reflection of the sausage-making aspects of lawmaking. This is the fascinating part of the book, and it's also where the books most important insight is from: Byrd's dislike of the President isn't personal; he's not a Bush-hater.

At their root, Byrd the Statesman's complaints that the Bush administration doesn't respect the historic authority and constutional role of the Senate isn't the real source of his animosity. Really, it's Byrd the Appropriations Master's gut-level disgust at Bush's incompetence. A badly planned war, bungling the creation of DHS, deficit spending, tapping the Social Security trust, massive regressive tax cuts—all these things that so often seem like just the talking points of people who hate the President—well, they actually mean something to a man who's been a United States Senator for half a century.

And they should mean something to the rest of us, too.