MICHAEL H. PRICE: Moe Lester and the Persistenence of Absurditude
(Continued from our July 15 Installment)
Only on occasion nowadays do I revisit at any length the bizarre Southwestern region whose Dominant Culture gave rise to the chronic-to-acute exploits of Konstable Moe Lester. I use the word character facetiously, for in all his years of published misadventures (whether small-press or nearer some nebulous mainstream) and privately circulated gag strips, Moe has never been anything more than a facile caricature, a “type” embodying and exaggerating traits, mannerisms, and attitudes that prevail amongst the denizens of West Texas’ so-called Panhandle region.
Now, I feel a profound and abiding nostalgia for that territory, having grown up there and having spent the first decade-and-a-half of my career touring those Panhandle backroads as both a rock-band musician and a reporter for a centrally located daily newspaper. But nostalgia must be acknowledged as an ailment before it can be dealt with on any practical level: When its pangs of homesickness intrude upon my mostly idyllic self-exile to a more nearly metropolitan base of operations, Moe Lester simply rears his ugly proboscis as a reminder of why I had put that sprawling Panhandle country behind me, in the first place.
Once a lusty land, the Texas Panhandle slouches into the 21st century as a scattering of dying hamlets – Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, writ large. The long-gone corporate land-grab barons, whose minions (bureaucratic, military, religious) subdued the native tribal culture, left behind an empire of once-vast ranches, once-thriving railroads, and once-monumental oil-and-gas production outfits that in scarcely the span of five generations have given way to an economy driven by speed traps, Dairy Queen cuisine, prison-system boondoggles and bureaucracies-within-bureaucracies, and the occasional Wal-Mart – bane of the independent small merchant. New methods of petroleum reclamation (drilling at a slant to tap the resources beyond the reach of old-school vertical methods) yield wealth and environmental hazards galore; the citified corporate interests get the wealth, and the countryside gets the hazards. You get the picture.
This is Moe Lester Country, and welcome to it. “The land of the living dead,” as Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard characterized the region in an all-but-epic narrative poem of 1986 called “Brownsville Girl.” Where the more progressive restaurants divide themselves into two sections: one for smoking, one for chain-smoking. Where reciprocal bigotries endure despite superficial desegregation of the ethnicities, and where law enforcement practices a policy of intimidation as a stop-gap against (if not a prelude to) harsher measures. Moe Lester is the emblematic intolerant rustic-with-a-badge.
But of course the Texas backwaters are scarcely the sole domain of rampant Yahooism, and I don’t mean the Other Google. I’ve heard readers and colleagues from Maine to Alabama to Orange County (thank you, Barry Goldberg) remark that they’ve met a Moe Lester or two in their own localized ramblings. And yes, Moe’s patently shallow characterization manages to ignore the benevolence and common decency that remain to be found in such provinces. If one looks hard enough, anyhow.
Because benevolence and common decency aren’t particularly funny. And self-important ignorance is the very stuff of lowbrow, big-nose/big-foot humor. Besides, we all talk funny down yonder in the boondocks.
Yes, well, and many’s the time I’ve dismissed the Moe Lester comics as “those stupid ‘cop’ cartoons,” but all the same they have been a constant in a career whose more artistically earnest endeavors have proved fleeting or erratic. I’ve been putting this character – I mean, facile caricature – through his paces for long enough to know that there must be some reason greater than the mere urge or economic need to see one’s words and pictures in cold print.
Moe didn’t even see generalized publication until my senior year in college – 1969-70 – when as new editor of the campus newspaper at West Texas State University I drafted him into the service of lampooning an oppressive administration and its bullying uniformed security force.
Not quite nine years of age, and already the author of a Banned Book. Over Mrs. Jenkins’ shrieks of outrage, Principal Howard Amick prevailed with somewhat a saner voice: He found the pages worth a chuckle but, even so, pronounced them a Waste of Talent. Damnation by faint praise, in other words, within a public-school system whose elementary art curriculum consisted of finger-painting and construction-paper cut-outs.
My home-base city of Fort Worth, Texas, has since the 1950s, complicated its countrified essence with a set of class-and-culture bearings that range from the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition – America’s “So, there!” riposte to Khruschev and/or Tchaikowsky, dating from a peak-period of the Cold War – to four heavy-duty art museums of international appeal and influence. The local-boosterism flacks crow about “Cowboys ’n’ Culture!” at every opportunity, with or without provocation. But apart from the self-evident truths that Old Money (oil ’n’ cattle) fuels the high-cultural impulse and that the cow-honker sector finds chronic solace in the Amon Carter and Sid Richardson museums’ arrays of works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, these communities seldom cross paths with one another.
People and events of consequence cast their shadows before them, never behind. Oklahoma-born and Texas-reared Gordon “Boody” Rogers (1904 – 1996) owns one of those forward-lurching shadows – an unlikely mass-market cartoonist whose oddball creations anticipated the rise of underground comics, or comix, and whose command of dream-state narrative logic and language-mangling dialogue remains unnerving and uproarious in about equal measure.
