Every GI needs a potato peeler

by David Benjamin

“Mothers of River City!/ Heed that warning before it’s too late!/ Watch for the tell-tale signs of corruption!/ The minute your son leaves the house/ Does he re-buckle his knickerbockers below the knee?/ Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?/ A dime novel hidden in the corn crib?/ Is he starting to memorize jokes from Cap’n Billy’s Whiz Bang?” — Prof. Harold Hill, The Music Man

MADISON, Wis.—My brain was destined to rot right down to its stem by the time I was twelve. Crusading author Sterling North of Edgerton, Wisconsin, forecast the “graphic insanity” that would putrefy my mind—and ruin millions of other kids—by pumping it full of “superman heroics, voluptuous females in scanty attire, blazing machine guns, hooded ‘justice’ and cheap political propaganda” packaged for my innocent consumption in the colorful pages of ten-cent comic books.

This mental meltdown was further foreshadowed at the home of Rosie, my big sister Peg’s best friend, when Rosie’s brothers introduced me to MAD magazine and its iconic moron, Alfred E. Neuman.

Now, some years later, I boldly contend that my brain either survived or somehow regenerated. More likely, I just outgrew comic books. The latter conclusion was reinforced in an essay by Maxi Heltmayer in the New York Times. Heltmayer began provocatively: “Every decade or so, adults discover that young people are consuming media that corrupts their minds—and a moral panic ensues. Comic books were going to produce a generation of delinquents. Television would make children into couch potatoes. Video games and rap music would inspire them to do violent stuff. The internet would keep them shut away in the basement, typing in chat rooms to dangerous strangers.”

He goes on, “Now the panic surrounds ‘brain rot’—the state of being entranced by an infinite stream of nonsensical TikToks and Instagram reels.”

Intuiting my pre-teen comic-book addiction, Heltmayer diagnoses both syndrome and salvation—“a fogged-out, low-selectivity state” in which I consumed “whatever appears.” He’s right. Even before I began to scout the comic-book spinner at Miller’s Walgreen, I was a funny-pages junkie, poring through the daily escapades of the Katzenjammer Kids, Alley Oop, Snuffy Smith, Dagwood and Blondie, Beetle Bailey. To my credit, I skipped soap-operas strips like Mary Worth and Rex Morgan, M.D. because they were never, ever funny. I appreciated the artistry of strips like Prince Valiant and Tarzan but wearied of the endless narrative. I believed “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” implicitly, to the point where I was haunted by the plight of a man who suffered from hiccups all his life—for seventy years! I trembled with dread every time my breath caught in my throat.

The funnies, of course, steered me—and millions of my impressionable fellow kids (J. Edgar Hoover called us a “lost generation”)—toward comic books, which I began to buy willy-nilly, a dime at a time, from Nancy and Sluggo to Dennis the Menace, “Gasoline Alley” and Casper the Friendly Ghost. I learned about my future as a draftee in “Sad Sack” adventures. Based on that hero’s almost permanent assignment to K.P., I decided that the one thing I had to take with me when I became a GI was a potato peeler. Of course, I feasted on DC Comics’ brain-rot giants, Superman and Batman.

However, unbeknownst to my consciousness, the silver lining in my dearth of discrimination was that it was universal. By the time I’d graduated from “Dick and Jane,” I wanted to read every legible thing in sight, from cereal boxes to Jules Verne. I scoured the Tomah Public Library. I read every Landmark biography from Thomas Jefferson to Bob Hope. I collected Walt Disney True Life Adventures from the Milwaukee Sentinel and devoured dozens of Big Little Books.

All this input had an effect invisible to J. Edgar Hoover but recorded two thousand years earlier in First Corinthians. “When I was a child,” Paul wrote, “I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

This evolution, as we all discover, is gradual. But it emerged in my comic-strip loyalties. The ones with wit, depth and the sort of irony that my father passed on to me in a flow of offhand jibes were the strips I not only read, but studied. I knew their authors. Charles Schultz drew “Peanuts” and Walt Kelly “Pogo” (We have met the enemy, and he is us.”). The supreme satirist of the funny pages was Al Capp., who drew “L’il Abner” I stumbled onto Don Marquis’ incomparable cockroach/cat comedy team, “archy and mehitabel.” By and by, I could distinguish the mere slapstick of Disney characters like Goofy and Pluto from the shadowy allegory of Scrooge McDuck, who was drawn by the extraordinary Carl Barks.

All this ambiguity led me, inevitably, to MAD. I recognized it immediately and eagerly, as an “adult” comic book, spoofing without mercy every Batson D. Belfry in U.S. politics, every popular delusion and complacent shibboleth in American culture. I was outgrowing Richie Rich and Mighty Mouse, slouching toward Mr. Natural and Little Annie Fanny.

By the time I reached high school, I was hitting the funnies selectively, but spending more time on the op-ed pages with Russell Baker, Drew Pearson and Mike Royko. I’d ceased squandering my dimes on comic books because pulp paperbacks of Ray Bradbury, George Orwell and Joseph Heller only cost a little more—and they lasted forever in my apparently still rot-free brain.

I was fourteen when I wrote my first formal essay, a scathing adolescent critique of “Sgt. Rock,” a comic-book hero who charged bullet-proof through hails of ordnance that went “bang,” “pow,” “vip” and “bwee” in a glorious World War II that would have been unrecognizable to the real cartoon heroes of that vast tragedy, Bill Mauldin’s downtrodden, wisecracking, ill-shaven GIs, Willie and Joe.

I’ve never entirely outgrown comic strips. If I had gone cold turkey, I would have missed flashes of intelligent comic relief that filtered through the news cycle in “The Far Side” and “Garfield,” “Doonesbury”, “Calvin and Hobbes,” Berke Breathed’s “Bloom County” and Wiley Miller’s sardonic “Non Sequitur.”

But these strips, only two of them still active, are the exception that proves the rule. Nowadays, I glimpse the strips despondently, largely because I have, indeed, outgrown them but also because the funnies ain’t funny no more. A few years ago, the newspaper chain that owned my local daily banned “Non Sequitur” because one of Wiley’s panels was deemed politically incorrect by a habitually offended minority of cranks. But cranks rule now. Syndicates are cowardly, media chains are wellsprings of mediocrity. “Non Sequitur” was gone, replaced by comics not comical, recycling old jokes with bad art and stock characters.

I still want funny stuff in my life, but I look for it elsewhere and tuck away the best parts. Likewise, my son, who spent his teens absorbed in video games, eventually, naturally, slipped their grip. Although I think he’s still drawn to fantasy and adventure, he no longer needs to confine himself to a dark room with a joystick and a screen. He put away childish things.

So, as I ride the Paris subway, looking over the shoulder of a twenty-something who’s busy scrolling—almost frantically—from video to video on her hypno-screen, I sense a desperation foreshadowing ennui. As Paul preached and Maxi Haltmayer explained, the stupid stuff we consume when we’re kids—inciting panic among moralists and church ladies—doesn’t rot our brains. It just arrests our development gently, for the sake of sanity and fun, until we outgrow it.

Preposterous though it seems, there is hope for Gen-Z.