- (audience applause

- Thank you, I think. I've come this afternoon to bring you some news about satire, there really isn't any such thing. It's really all in the eye of the beholder, and to prove my point, I brought along an example. The example is a cartoon that I did for the newspapers several months ago. And then I would like to read a letter which I got pertaining to the cartoon. The cartoon is simply the outline of a son talking to his mother. They're in profile, and there are no backs of heads, because I hate to draw backs of heads. And the son is saying, "Mother, when I first married Irene, "you said you didn't want to interfere, "you just wanted to walk by our window "once a month and wave. "Mother, after three months of waving, "you said you didn't want to get in the way, "but as long as you are going by our window every day, "Irene might just once invite you to dinner. "Mother, after four months of dinner, "you said you didn't want to run our lives, "but in order to not get home so late every night, "Irene might just once invite you to stay over. "Mother, after years of living with us "Irene said "if you didn't let her do some of the cooking, cleaning, "and shopping, you'd have to move out. "Mother, I spoke to Irene yesterday, "and she wants to come back." And the mother says, "Not in my house." The letter, humor written by man about good natured and understanding father is, how dominating and overbearing mother is, how demonic and spoiled the kiddies are. Or humor written by women about how helpless and bumbling father is, how put upon, but persevering mother is, how demonic and spoiled the kiddies are. The kiddies, being too young to write family humor for the Ladies Home Journal and McCall's, must wait until they grew up when they can hit back by writing sensitive novellas about their misunderstood childhoods, and sell them to The New Yorker. The marvelous thing about being sensitive is that it improves the quality of one's market. And when our humor doesn't see American marriage as a Dagwood and Blondie, it sees it as the Thurber man and the Thurber woman, which is about as accurate as seeing Mary Worth or Ann Landers as symbols of eternal love. And, with all that attention focused upon it, one fine point is always studiously avoided, the attraction that brought father and mother together in the first place, sex. I've always found it interesting that while a wife's emasculation of her husband is considered a good, clean subject, suitable for lot of laughs, sex is not. In the regulation school of marriage humor, mother and father are either really mother and son, or just good buddies, practically two men really. Or friendly acquaintances who kiss twice a day, in the morning to say, "Goodbye, dear," and in the evening to say, "Hello, dear." In the clean school of humor, sex is handled with leers, winks, double entendres, secret guffaws, and the poking of elbows. Only in dirty jokes does it appear out in the open. And our political humor is no less evasive. My problem with politics is that I've never been able to separate it from anything else. From the way Bernard or the rest of us make out with our girlfriends, or the way my other characters, or the rest of us, make out with our wives or husbands. Or the way each of us loves or hates his mother, his teacher, his Sargent, his boss, or those many other things, small and large, that set the pace and style of all our days. A style that remains operative in smoke-filled rooms or bedrooms. Whether one is being disappointed by his girlfriend or his government, his reaction will be born out of what he is used to in both situations, and all situations join. There is nothing so blasé or innocent now, society, that is not, in the end, political. Dagwood and Blondie are political in that they further the stereotype, which we make serve as a masquerade for ourselves. Elsewhere on the comic page are the Cold War comic strips, as political as you can get, in that they make the idea of World War III not only feasible, but really enjoyable. Not just Little Orphan Annie, but Buz Sawyer, Terry and the Pirates, Johnny Hazard, Smilin' Jack, Steve Canyon, Dan Flags, and other heroes of our harmless entertainment, have been fighting the Russians, and Cubans, and the Red Chinese for years. Seemingly, their only objection to World War III is the loss in newspaper circulation that might mean for them. Oops, there goes New York and Washington, how many papers does that leave me? The first use of nausea gas, by the way, was not by our real troops, but by our comic book troops in Jungle War Stories, a Dell publication, that came out a month before we used the gas in Vietnam. I mention this is a footnote, in case you've been wondering where McNamara and Russ get their policy ideas. At the time the United States became the most powerful democracy in the world, it also became the most repressed democracy in the world. The second part of the Truman years, and the entire eight Eisenhower years saw the suppression of the radical left, the neutralization of the radical right, and the elevation to permanent power of a new group far more dangerous than the other two, the radical middle. I've written and drawn some about the radicle middle over the last few years, but I've never made clear exactly what I think it is, I'll try to do that now. The radical middle is a conspiracy, a subversive underground facsimile of traditional American ethics and morality, which basks in its lack of notoriety, drawing deep satisfaction from its list of publicly acknowledged pseudonyms, middle-of-the-roader being one, responsible moderate being another. Thank you. It is, in fact, neither of these. The radical middle spends most of its time in the role of morrow mathematician. It will find the extremes in any debate, and locate itself equidistant between them. However, this is only the beginning of the radical middle's political role. If it did no more than choose between currently existing extremes, it could be of no conceivable danger to the state. The threat of the radical middle lays in the fact that it invents and makes popular those extremes over which it chooses a middle position. Through its powerful role in government and mass media, it creates respectable extremes, extremes that are allowable in family discussion or television debate. Through a process of erosion, the radical middle continually chips away at extremes of right and left so that they draw closer together, even while being publicized as opposites. An extreme of today is not nearly so extreme. Criticism I don't need now. An extreme of today is not nearly so extreme as the extreme of 50 years ago. Today's extremes are moderate extremes. 50 years ago, whether on issues of public ownership, civil liberties, isolationism, imperialism, fiscal policy, or practically...

- Around that, here I am, my purpose and joy. We're in this. I won't make any comment because we're all about to get away. I'm saving up my energy for tomorrow night to use at AmeriCorps. But, as your mentioned, Reed, you mentioned our bag boy association, this is one thing we both have in common. I'm sorry to say this, but the according to your history while working so long...