Unfair and unbalanced

So what else is new?

In an especially egregious display of chutzpah, cartoonist Lisa Benson gives her cross-eyed view of California's budget plight. Our state has, of course, suffered from the Great Recession brought on by the feckless policies of the Bush administration (and a bolder Obama administration should have pushed a larger and more effective stimulus in its initial recovery effort). In addition, the Golden State has been saddled with a Republican minority in both houses of the state legislature that knows only the word “no.” They are essentially useless obstructionists (like their counterparts in Washington).

Benson, however, persists in presenting the Republican elephant as the steady representative of fiscal sanity. Look at how he sits there on the budget teeter-totter, a modest “No New Taxes” valise by his side. In shocking contrast, the profligate Democratic donkey has loaded up his end of the seesaw with a huge steamer trunk of “Spending.” (Benson is blissfully untouched by the reality that state spending is and has been flat since the Bush recession took hold: $90.9 billion in General Fund expenditures in 2008-2009 and maybe $92.6 billion in General Fund expenditures in 2012-2013—a less than two percent increase in four years.)

How can such an unbalanced seesaw remain level despite such evident Democratic irresponsibility? Benson hastens to inform us that the California state budget is being supported by “Gimmicks” and “Borrowing” and “Programs.” Wait a minute? Programs? I guess Benson ran out of clever labels for the baggage that is supposedly propping up the state budget. (I thought Programs were part of Spending. Silly me!) This entry sets a new standard for inane cartoon commentary on the California political scene. Pure propaganda. One almost has to admire its audacity.

But I don't.

Wherein I fail

The Impostor Fantasy

My friends and acquaintances are very helpful in keeping my ego in check. They are ever ready to assure me, especially recently, that I am no good at false modesty. As someone who strives to excel in every endeavor he undertakes, it is understandably greatly disappointing that my self-deprecations are so unsuccessful. For some reason, friends and family do not accept my frank admission that I am a dilettante and poseur. It is a puzzlement. I ponder wearily how to remedy the situation, but inspiration fails me. I confess that I do not know what to do.

I felt like a fraud.
So I learned to fly an airplane.

When did this all begin? I am not certain. Perhaps the most recent spate of failures began when I told some friends I had stumbled into writing a novel. It was a purgative event, rendering the pent-up demons of old family feuds into a fictional form, exorcising ancient controversies by reducing them to narrative form. Much-told tales had been written down where others could see them and smile. Tragedy had been tamed into a tragi-comic story, which I shared with several friends.

At 50,000 feet I thought:
“A fraud is flying an airplane.”

I explained to people that I wasn't “really” a novelist—just someone who had written a novel-length manuscript. After all, I'm just a math teacher and not a littérateur. People scoffed. One particularly sly friend pointed out that using a word like “littérateur” was a dead giveaway. Clearly I fancied myself an author. In response, I confessed that I was an author: an author in the field of expository mathematics, with contributions enshrined in a number of texts and supplements and magazines—and a couple of writing awards to my credit—but not really a fiction writer.

So I crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat.
I docked at Cherbourg and thought: “A fraud has crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat.”

This was deemed evasive. Did I not intend to seek a publisher for my quasi-memoir? I confessed that I was interested in shopping it around. The first readers had been extravagant in their praise (of course, they were friends), raising my expectations and causing me to dare to think the story had commercial prospects. I had even sought an agent. This was, clearly, proof positive that I was now a fiction writer—and my biggest fiction was my pose that I was not.

So I took a space shot to the moon.
On the trip home I thought: “A fraud has circled the moon.”

I failed at finding an agent interested in my manuscript, but instead I found a university press that was eager to look at it. Several months passed while their reviewers read it, but eventually my novel was accepted for publication. When I met the professor who was the editor-in-chief, I ever-so-modestly mentioned that it was an extraordinary stroke of good fortune for a non-novelist—a math-teaching non-writer—like me to get his manuscript accepted. The good professor scoffed at my characterization: “You wrote a novel. It's being published. You are, by definition, a novelist. In fact, you should be thinking about future writing projects.”

I had to grin. A professor of foreign languages was lecturing a professor of mathematics about what is true “by definition.” He had me there.

So I took a full page ad in the newspaper and confessed to the world that I was a fraud!

One of my colleagues dimpled when I recounted my recent failures at modesty. “Oh, Zee,” she said. “Don't you know about ‘fishing for compliments’? You're just trying to get people to tell you how wonderful you are.” I would, of course, have denounced this vile calumny, but it seemed to hit pretty close to home. Yes, perhaps I protest just a little too much. If I'm really anxious about being a dilettante in foreign fields of endeavor (and risking embarrassing pratfalls), wouldn't it make more sense to stop drawing attention to it? If only I were a naturally taciturn person—

I read the ad and I thought: “A fraud is pretending to be honest.”

During the late seventies, I had a Jules Feiffer cartoon posted in my graduate student office. The “impostor fantasy” amused me greatly, as well as speaking to deep-seated fears. Naturally I was reminded of it and was pleasantly surprised to discover it still resided in my decades-old files. It gave me renewed inspiration:

I felt like a fraud, so I wrote a blog post...

Toons ahead of their time

Rocky & Bullwinkle & birthers

The longest running plot in the original Rocky & His Friends cartoon show was the 40-episode “Jet Fuel Formula” series, which involved a quest to find a mooseberry bush (to obtain the vital ingredient for rocket fuel). With the bush in hand, Rocky and his sidekick Bullwinkle face a dilemma. The moon men Gidney and Cloyd have helped the heroes obtain the mooseberries, which the lunar natives need to fuel their craft if they are ever to return home. Rocky and Bullwinkle, however, are agents of the U.S. government. The bush is supposed to go to Washington, D.C., and not to the moon men.

As the brains of the duo, it falls to Rocket J. Squirrel to come up with a clever plan: Since the U.S. government was itself planning to use the mooseberries to power a moon rocket, Gidney and Cloyd need only offer themselves as Americans willing to volunteer for the mission. A complication, however, arises in the form of Senator Fusmussen, chair of the Senate Citizenship Committee, who has introduced troublesome legislation:

Reporter: Just what does your new bill mean, Senator?
Sen. Fusmussen: Well, you see, right now it's entirely too easy to become an American. This bill's going to make it tougher.
Reporter: What do you mean, it's too easy?
Sen. Fusmussen: Well, all you got to do is be born here. This large loophole has got to be plugged up! Too many people are claiming to be Americans. Alaskans! Hawaiians! Californians! It's disgraceful!

What? Hawaiians and even Alaskans are claiming citizenship? Outrageous! Sen. Fusmussen's bill may already be too little, too late!

There is, inevitably, a happy ending. Gidney and Cloyd fail their citizenship exam and get deported—to the moon.

The conclusion of the “Jet Fuel Formula” epic was broadcast in 1960. Was it a prescient anticipation of today's absurdly hollow controversy over how one qualifies as a “natural-born citizen,” or simply an echo of previous instances of overwrought nativism? Perhaps it's both.

There was an enjoyable grace note to the happy return of Gidney and Cloyd to their homeland. Sen. Fusmussen, present at their deportation, accidentally gets launched with them. President Obama could take a lesson from this and should consider a renewed program of lunar missions. I have suggestions for some people we should shoot into space.

Orly? Your ticket is waiting.