To give you an example: for leftists who remember Nixon as a president, the prospect of an unchallenged essential President-for-Life Nixon is utterly terrifying. I can sort of sense why that would be, but keep in mind my first experience with Nixon was a picture book of American presidents I read when I was six, and my parents pointed out on the Nixon page that he was a very bad man whom everyone in our family hated. Later, my experiences with Nixon imagery came solely through films like Dick and Frost/Nixon, and, less directly, in his spoofed image on shows like The Simpsons and Futurama. Currently, the strongest image of Nixon in my mind is the head of Nixon attached to a monolithic robotic body terrorizing Earth after winning the year 3000 election in Futurama. That’s a depressing thought to those who followed Watergate, but an almost inevitable one among the generation who didn’t; I’m sure the number of people who have the same primary image of Nixon in their brain is larger than you’d think.
But even if I were to study every piece of newsreel footage and objective documentary on Nixon with the same fervor I consumed The Simpsons, the effect would essentially be the same; Nixon would not be a danger to my life, he’d just be an intellectual curiosity — a relic from the past that seems baffling to me today. The imagery that comes from the culture wars is no less absurd to viewers of my age: Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Patty Hearst, and Stokely Carmichael seem too ridiculous to believe. As Adam Sternberg noted in his point-perfect rebuttal of David Denby’s Snark, the real generational issue is not the tone our generation takes, but the fact that the people we see on TV seem completely preposterous and insincere, and the popularity of The Daily Show and Wonkette display a growing appreciation of the undressing of the punditry’s façade.
Watchmen is probably more popular today than it ever was. The core audience of the film is not people who appreciated the comic upon its 1986 release, but those in their 20s who read the comic in high school. For some, inevitably, the main appeal of the comic is the Nietzchean nihilism expressed either with The Comedian’s Bill Hicks-like sense of humor or Rorschach’s humorless vigilantism. The view of the world as a dark, senselessly violent, hopeless enterprise with no God to save it has attracted millions of adolescents over the past century, and a few legitimate fascists as well.
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