The Legion of Doom Redux

As you know, I generally refer to our age as the post-dialectic, but I’m coming to like the idea I’ve been nursing of referring to our times instead as post-contemporary, or poco for short. After you’ve run out of modern ideas, and then postmodern ideas, you are ready for post-contemporary ideas. If you’re reading this blog, you are poco to the core.

I have in the past talked about personal issues, most recently what I think of as a generational disappointment with sf that informs much baby boomer angst. Subsequent generations had Star Wars and Star Trek untarnished by William Shatner, but we had The Thing with Two Heads. It just wasn’t fair.

Still, even given their surfeit of quality sf entertainment, the poco generation does lack imagination. Or at least they are treated as if they lack imagination. Today, if you buy a Mr. Potato Head (or, as it is known in France, Monsieur Le Tete aux Pommes de Terre), you get a plastic potato in which to insert the features and appendages. The mouth goes into the mouth hole. The eyes go into the eye holes. The ears go into the ear holes. The only conceivable imaginative play open to the proud possessor of Mr. P. H. is to put the nose into one of the ear holes, assuming that this is even possible. Other than that, I guess you treat Mr. P. H. (or as the French would have it, M. L. T. A. P. D. T.) like a grotesque Barbie doll (and there’s a pleonasm if there ever was one), putting it to bed at night and taking it for a walk and whatever else one does with dolls. Doesn’t sound like much fun to me.

In my day, the pre-poco era, it was different. The point of Mr. P.H. was that you would get yourself the various features and appendages (including the now taboo pipe so that himself could read the evening papers while enjoying a bit of Borkum Riff and maybe a martini or something) and then stick them into an actual potato. Kids were tough back then. And creative. Give a baby boomer a couple of ears and a nose and a spud, and before you could say Walter Winchell, you had yourself an anthropomorphic tater. No wonder the world is that way it is today.

But I have to explain further. There’s a personal story here. You see, Mr. Potato Head was sold with, not a plastic potato, but a chunk of Styrofoam sort of shaped like a potato. And when young Jim sat down to enjoy a few solid hours of Potato Head entertainment, he was told by his mother that he could not have a real potato to play with. Stick with the Styrofoam, I was told. You think potatoes grow on trees?

Thus I learned that potatoes did not grow on trees. I was young at the time.

So I played with Mr. Styrofoam Head, but it wasn’t the same. I had this vision of other kids in the neighborhood, the lucky kids, the ones whose parents loved them, playing with real potatoes. Their rooms were filled to overflowing with handsome Idaho spuds overlooking their every fun-filled moment. They tossed the Styrofoam directly into the trash and headed for the produce bin for the real deal. And when the potato gave up the ghost, as it must if it has been poked and prodded with ears and legs and pipes and hats for too long, they simply mashed up and ate the old one and got their mothers to give them a shiny new one. Or at least as shiny and new a potato as a potato could get. I, on the other hand, watched my Styrofoam slowly degenerate. This stuff can take only so much abuse. Eventually my sturdy faux-Idaho was reduced to a new potato, then a fingerling, and finally a mere skin of its former self. And then all the features and appendages went back into the box, Styrofoamless, never to touch real spud, and never to rise from again from an inchoate jumble of plastic parts.

If I had a therapist, much, obviously, would be made of this.

And what does this have to do with the Legion of Doom, you might ask? Well, think of this as an extemp piece. Every extemp piece, as we explained last night to LPW, begins with an anecdote. Then you go on to the meat. But first you take a couple of steps to the right: the extemp two-step.

One. Two.

So they’re having some sort of Legion election, and I was nominated, and my first instinct was to shrug it off, but then I figured, VBD, so I’m running for whatever it is I was nominated for (and I’m not being cute; I’m really not sure). I scratched out a quick platform (“More Potato Heads, Fewer Meatheads”) and there you are.

Vote for me, because I’m always right and I never lie.

And I’m sure Mr. Potato Head would do so, if he only could, in his sad and lonely little box…