How to Read DD

[deckerd@agcs.com]

> This turned up on an alternative comix mailing list that I am on.  I
> naturally thought the members of this list would be interested in reading it.

Hmm...this has been floating around for quite a while. Dana Gabbard sent
me a copy several years ago when the book came up for discussion. I'm not
sure where my copy is now, so I was glad to see it again.  It's highly
revealing in a personal sense: Kunzle letting his good sense, his 
knowledge of art and culture, be overwhelmed by solidarity with Marxist
hard-liners and the necessity to push a party line whether it's objectively
true or not. Events in the real world of the past few years make all this
look like a relic of another age.

> But it was three veteran Marxists
> (including two whose steel had been hardened in the fire of
> revolutionary struggle) against one wobbly neophyte Marxist, who
> didn't mind if his bourgeois slip was showing.

> I had sunk my ego in the higher
> political purpose; maybe this was a true revolutionary self-
> denial, true Marxist self-discipline.

Gads, listen to this stuff! Do real people in the real world talk like
this?! No wonder Marxism is headed for the scrapheap of history! This
is thought control, this is Kunzle denying his individuality and
everything that makes him human! Maybe he can sink his ego in a higher
political purpose, but the usual word for that is slavery.

I recall that one of the horrible examples cited in the book was a
panel in the Square Eggs story. In the American original, the line
was something to the effect of HD&L announcing they were going to
teach square dancing to the natives (in keeping with the square motif).
In the Chilean translation, translated back from Spanish to English,
it came out as teaching the natives to stand at attention or some
such thing.  "Ooo...fascist!  Ooo...militaristic!  Ooo...evil!"
Turns out, though, that square dancing isn't called that in Spanish,
but there's an idiom for standing at attention that literally means
something on the order of "square up." (I'm doing this from memory,
so the details may only be approximate.) The translator was trying to
come up with an equivalent joke but the Mickey Marxists saw an Evil
Message Being Sent. If fascism means having to stand at attention
and follow orders, it looks to me like Kunzle got a pretty good dose
of it himself from his comrade revolutionaries.

So why does anybody still take that wretched book seriously?!

--Dwight Decker