by Roman Sympos

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Bill Griffith's "Zippy the Pinhead" entered this world in the debut issue of Real Pulp Comics, published in March 1971. Real Pulp's publisher, Print Mint, was the brain-child of Don and Alice Schenker, who still owned a framing and poster-reproduction shop on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley CA when my wife and I, then barely of legal drinking age, arrived there in 1972 and moved into a one-bedroom apartment on Blake Street, just around the corner.

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It was an exciting time to be a graduate student in English, especially at UC Berkeley, where popular culture was just beginning to attain academic respectability. The Pacific Film Archive, housed in the university's new Brutalist art museum, had just opened two years before. Among my degree electives I included a course taught by Don Ault, a William Blake scholar, dedicated (not surprisingly, if you know Blake's work) to image and word in two pop media: comic books and film. The class focused on the Donald Duck comics of Carl Barks, a Pinko hiding in the story department of Disney Studios, and the movies of Charlie Chaplin, a Pinko hiding in plain sight.

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Zippy's absurdist non-sequiturs, verbatim citations of pop and advert jargon, and favorite avocations (e.g., watching clothes spin in a dryer) captured the spirit of late-capitalism well before Fredric Jameson claimed the brand. L-C's covert aim, unlike that of old-fashioned Capitalism, was to produce, not goods and services to meet demand, but wants disguised as needs to goose demand.

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Central to this project was the triangulation of desire—aka "commodity fetishism" (Marx), "conspicuous consumption" (Veblen), "keeping up with the Joneses" (the Smiths)--which had been disguising value as status since hominids started wearing clothes. Under late-capitalism, however, status finally broke free of scarce luxury goods, like gold or kingfisher feathers, and began to adhere to easily affordable polyester blends. The mass marketing of commodities as status symbols made them cheap and affordable and, thus, impermanent, but easily replaced. Once status became commodified as fashion and "taste," it could be sustained only through the constant production and circulation of its totems. Planned obsolescence got a shoeshine.

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Which brings us back to Zippy's dryer and its media analog, TV. What do we watch when we watch that screen on the wall? The circulation of commodities. And we are encouraged to believe we can acquire what they stand for just by opening the looking-glass door of retail.

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Why do we watch? We think it's fun.

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Is it? Was it?

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"Are we having fun yet?" asks Zippy, giving voice to the most famous interrogative in pulp comic history.

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If you have to ask, then the answer is, "No."

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But you've already lost your innocence: Why ask a question unless you aren't sure of the answer?

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In Bill Griffith's world, the "no" is never uttered. It's eternally suspended in hopeful anticipation of a never-arriving "yes." The true gratification of desire is repeatedly delayed to leave room for the hollowed-out taste of late-capitalism's empty calories. Your pleasure is never yours, never owned, always borrowed. It's on loan from the phantasms, those endlessly fascinating uninhabited shirts and blouses and socks and underwear tumbling around in the front-loaded dryer of your media-compromised imagination.

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In the earliest stages of late-capitalism, however, Americans could still persuade themselves that the answer to Zippy's question (should anyone dare to pose it) was "Yes, finally! We are having fun!" The beginning of the end of late-capitalism's Grand Illusion occurred in the aftermath of World War Two. That's when the Boomers appeared on the scene. Like me.

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The America I came of age in ruled a world lying in ruins and waiting, like Lazarus, to be resurrected and made whole: free, happy, and above all, a productive trading partner. The Marshall Plan became Capitalism's chief weapon against its arch-enemy, Communism, and the Cold War became a bipolar, Manichean struggle between Good and Evil that could have been cribbed from an Action Comics storyboard.

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When, in 1956, Krushchev told Western ambassadors in Moscow "We will bury you," he wasn't talking about nukes. He was talking, among other things, about consumer goods. (Look it up.) "We will outproduce you—and outlast you."

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Ever since, from the Vietnam War ("guns and butter," promised LBJ) to 9/11 ("get down to Disney World," urged Dubya) to MAGA border policy ("they're stealing your jobs!" roared DT), the response to every blowback against American hegemony was to keep Capitalism from smothering in its own ashes by tossing on the accelerant.

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Death Rays and Kryptonite make way! Behold the Edsel and the Pet Rock!

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And the Edsels and the Pet Rocks won.

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The battle. The war against the American Way of Life, like the Energizer Bunny, just kept going, and going, and going. And for good reason.

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Capitalism, we are coming to realize (too late) was never what would save us, because to do so it would have to defeat itself. "We have met the enemy and he is us," declared another prescient and beloved comics character of the Cold War, Walt Kelley's Pogo the Possum. This was in 1970, on a poster Kelley designed for the first ever Earth Day.

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There is much to hate about us Boomers, but perhaps our worst sin (after leaving the world so much worse than we found it) was teaching all the younger generations that followed us—the X's and Y's and Z's and, now, the A's--how to have fun after grabbing all the toys and refusing to share them.

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But it's not because our retirement accounts and pensions and social security payments have sucked all the money out of the national Money Bin (cf: Barks's Uncle Scrooge McDuck) that girls et. al. can no longer have fun. It's because even if the Money Bin were still filled to overflowing, the act of buying anything today cannot avoid hurting someone or something somewhere in the world. Or, for that matter, everyone and everything everywhere in the world.

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Knowing what we know now, conscience doth make cowerers of us all.

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"Are we having fun yet?" If your answer is "Yes," you just aren't paying attention.

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Here's an example, carefully unpacked, of the damage that we now know you're doing whenever you do more than breathe:

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Eating: depleting the food resources of the planet in general and immiserating countless living creatures, including our fellow homo sapiens, not to mention (as we age) ourselves.

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To wit:

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Eating meat: cow farts and belches contribute majorly to global warming, pig farms pollute our rivers and streams, overcrowded chickens are cruelly debeaked and lead lives of quiet desperation.

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Eating any seafood (other than farmed salmon or seaweed): depleting, etc. (see above) and poisoning yourself and your children with mercury.

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Eating vegetables: encouraging the runoff of agribusiness phosphates into our rivers and streams and stimulating algae blooms that are killing our oceans. Also, polluting your own body with carcinogens.

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Eating free-range animals and organic vegetables: enabling the White and well-off to exploit the wealth disparities endemic to capitalism in their efforts to mitigate (or pretend to mitigate) the catastrophic impacts of the system that benefits them, all without lifting a finger to change it in any fundamental way.

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Choose any category of what used to be fun and start digging. You'll soon find yourself in an ossuary. From bats to boat refugees to the human race itself, these are the remains of Capitalism's victims. On some remote shelf down here you'll find a space reserved for your bones, too.

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Travel (air pollution), recreation (do you know how much water it takes to keep a golf course green?), clothing (child labor in Bangladesh), AI (the grid! the grid!), video games (plastics), a child's sand pail (plastics), coffee-makers (plastics). How about surfboards? Poly-this and poly-that, but not a single particle of "board." That wave you're riding is chock full of the microplastics to which your Puddle Jumper made its modest contribution on the assembly line.

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The evil we do is now systemic, endemic, and all-embracing. You can't avoid contributing to it, no matter how hard you try. The arc of human history, as long as history remains human, bends henceforth toward extinction, not justice.

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That leaves sex, I guess, as long as it's consensual. Taken according to directions, it's entirely conscience-and-consequence-free, isn't it?

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But where does "consensual" begin shading into "transactional," and "transactional" into "contractual"? You scratch my itch and I'll scratch yours, but first we have to get to "yes," as they taught us in business school. And we have to say it out loud. That's how we'll know our fun is real.

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"Are we having fun yet?"

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If you have to ask . . . .