The Hack Freighter

Jonah Goldberg, for those lucky enough to need a primer, is a contributing editor and columnist at National Review whose specialty is phrasing nonsensical pseudointellectual arguments in the style of a nerdy frat boy. Recently seen arguing that The Wire is right-wing, Goldberg also gave the world Liberal Fascism, a book that attempted to challenge the scholarly consensus on fascism despite its author's total non-fluency in German, Italian or Spanish. And now, at the new Zhdanovite culture warrior base Big Hollywood, Jonah argues that Watchmen is really an allegory about good Democrats being usurped by evil Republicans: "This exposes one of the problems with Moore’s political vision: he seems to think the Cold War was a purely Reaganite phenomena that descended on America like a dark curtain thanks in part to the death of JFK...The real problem with Moore’s anti-Reaganite vision is that it places the blame for the omnipresent climate of fear on Reagan himself."

Aside from this unintentionally hilarious portrayal of committed anarchist Alan Moore as a starry-eyed Camelot bobby soxer, there's also the small issue that Reagan doesn't actually appear in Watchmen, not even as an incidental background character like, um, JFK. But that's OK, Goldberg hurriedly clarifies, because his "stand-in" Nixon does! Plus Moore's a self-hating pinko so there: "the miasma of conspiratorial phobias that hangs over Watchmen’s universe is one that suggests Western governments were not only to blame for Cold War tensions, but that Western governments were actually the real villains." I could quote some Reagan administration statements about Central America here, but anyone who thinks that Watchmen is all about blaming "the West" alone for the Cold War - or who fails to notice that the book's right-wing vigilantes are disarmingly, uncharacteristically sympathetic - is simply a fucking idiot. And this flatters Goldberg's coherence: the last graf (where he claims that Reagan's vision triumphed in transcendence while Moore's resembles "'80s kitsch") really begs for a close reading, in the same way that Jeff Goldblum pleads for a quick headshot at the end of The Fly.

But it gets better: Bill Willingham shows up in the comments!

I see the book as a chronicle of the wonderful but tragic genius hero who saw the way to save the world, and was the only one willing to do all of the horrible things needed to bring that about — just like all of those poor souls who had and will have to die horribly in order to bring about the glorious communist utopia that will come, if only the superior geniuses of the left are willing to break enough eggs to accomplish it.

Uh, well, I'm down with reader-response criticism, but even Stanley Fish would struggle to wring that meaning from the book. I guess the Black Freighter mise en abyme was written in a trance after Moore's subconscious conscience wrested control from his raging commie id.