In the Toonopedia Forum the other day, the topic happened to come up (in a thread titled "The Real Reason") of partisan politics impinging on Al Capp's Li'l Abner. Newspaper editors are collectively accused of having dropped the strip for attacking their "sacred cows", causing premature (two years before Capp's own death) cancellation of the strip itself.

Apparently, the poster was thinking of this alleged "sacred cow" attack as an example of "Liberal Media", a phenonenon widely used as a metaphor for the Fourth Estate's natural (tho these days, unfortunately mild) anti-Establishment bias, in an era during which the Establishment tends to identify itself more-and-more with a repeatedly re-defined and increasingly idiosyncratic form of "conservatism".

With modern American conservatism bearing so little resemblance to its namesake of yore, it's hard to be sure what "liberal" means. Complicating this question is the fervor with which the media jumped on the anti-Clinton banwagon back in the '90s. Whether you loved or loathed Bill Clinton, it's hard to reconcile a supposed liberal bias with their acts and attitudes toward a politician generally perceived as "liberal".

I suspect the current meaning of "liberal" is the approximate meaning of "fascist", another word related to world politics, which had a specific meaning as recently as a few years before I was born (1947). Both words now seem to mean "one whose political views the speaker finds abhorrent".

Even so, it's hard to fit this "sacred cow" accusation with with the widely-known direction of Al Capp's political drift over the years. The consensus seems to be that he was rabidly liberal in the 1930s, when Abner started, but got conservative in middle age, getting rabidly that way by the 1960s and '70s. So much so, his politics got in the way of the humor. Too strident to be laughed at anymore, Li'l Abner was put out of its misery in 1977.

That's the consensus, but it's not the way I see it. I don't think Capp changed his views, so much as the world changed. He was always, from beginning to end, a gleeful basher of stupidity and hypocrisy, wherever he found them. In the early days of Abner, he found them on the political right, so that's where his ridicule was aimed. But later, he found it elsewhere.

The so-called "New Left" is what changed it. Traditional liberalism gave way to such an exaggerated, extreme set of views. it became almost a parody of itself. Capp didn's necessarily change his views. He just changed his targets, because the political left is where he found stupidity and hypocrisy.

And who would be his targets if he were alive today? My guess is the rightward equivalent of the "New Left" is "Neoconservatism". In English, "New Conservatism", is where the self parody among political types lies. Of course, old-style conservatives contend that there ain't nothin' new and there ain't nothin' conservative about "Neoconservatism". Anyway, I'm guessing that's where Al Capp would be aiming his most painful barbs.

Too bad he wasn't able to retain that painful sense of humor into old age.

— DDM