Sublime

tagline: “Kill defectives, save the nation, and see The Black Stork.”

Life magazine made My Lai famous.80 My Lai, they did—but first of all, note the timing: it’s a year and a half after it happened, a year and a half after corporate America turned against the war. And the reporting was falsified. See, My Lai was presented as if it was a bunch of crazy grunts who got out of control because they were being directed by

They are, for the most part, politically liberal, preferring that government rather than private associations (such as intact families or the churches they left behind) address social concerns. They remain puritanical and highly judgmental, at least about health, and like all Puritans they are willing to use law to compel behavior they think right.

Here was the New Right platform in concrete terms: a normative, regulatory state endorsing individual freedom only insofar as behavior remained within the strictures of traditionally accepted moral behavior. Rational Economic Man was entitled to pursue his whims in the market, but not in the bedroom.

Despite such contestation, the attack on comics continued in the early 1950s. State and local legislation proliferated, coinciding with the delivery of Wertham’s 1954 magnum opus, Seduction of the Innocent.

As a replacement for liberalism and its infinitely expanding universe of spoiled consumers and bureaucrats, he sought inspiration in the lower-middle-class ethos of the American populist tradition, with its emphasis on the community-centered, “heroic” morality of small-scale producers—artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers. Lasch called for a renewal