Bill Gaines, MAD Magazine, and Modern America

I remember MAD Magazine more and more fondly these days. It wasn’t just a funny magazine for kids. It tried to teach us something about modern America and to instill critical ways of thinking about the not-so brave new world we were growing up in. If cultivated, those ways of thinking served us well, especially over the last decade or two . . . or three. . . .

MAD was brought to the American public by Bill Gaines, a quirky chap who did a few years in the army during World War Two before launching a publishing business in the prosperous, self-congratulatory aftermath that made modern America. Gaines cautioned us kids that we were in a golden era of hucksterism and jingoism. We didn’t know what those words meant, but we got it nonetheless. He was like an eccentric uncle who told us what our parents wouldn’t. As someone later put it, “Look out, kid. They keep it all hid.” MAD knew what it was, where it was hid, and who hid it. I’ll bet little Bobby Zimmerman read MAD up there in Hibbing, Minnesota.

That stuff we so avidly watched on television? It was simple-minded if not moronic. (I might have learned the word “moron” from MAD, come to think of it. Don Martin?) Those depictions of the Old West, police departments, and modern life were as accurate as the grotesque reflections in a funhouse mirror. And those breathless descriptions of glitzy products placed before our wide-open mouths every ten minutes by smiling, nodding emcees? Well, think of them as carney pitches outside the tent mom and dad wouldn’t let you near. MAD wasn’t against carnivals. MAD liked carnivals. It just thought that we should be suspicious of anyone braying, “Step this way! Step right this way!” and that there were many truly wondrous attractions a little ways down the midway.

Politicians? Most of them invoked religion and patriotism at every opportunity but were egomaniacal, long-winded, corrupt, and sanctimonious mountebanks. It’s common knowledge today, but expressing it back then took nerve. The top-selling snake oil potion of the day was militarism – that time-honored elixir of romantic ideas of war that encourage you to look forward to dying for your country. “Drink this, my boy, and . . . well, step right this way!”

It was all part of cold war ideology and MAD saw the absurdity years before Dr Strangelove came out. (Remember “Spy vs. Spy”?) MAD once had a mock essay contest with the theme “Why the US should unleash Chiang Kai-shek,” with the winner getting a vacation on “the island paradises of Quemoy and Matsu.” Puzzled by the references, I asked my father. After laughing heartily, he explained that Sec of State John Foster Dulles periodically bellowed the “unleash Chiang” line in the hope of frightening Mao, and that Quemoy and Matsu were islands held by Chiang, which Mao shelled on a daily basis. Maybe there should have been a “Warlord vs. Warlord” in MAD.

By the late sixties, MAD had become harshly critical of the Vietnam War. Lighthearted comedy became bitter critique. Certain circumstances can effect that transition, and Vietnam, the culmination of much of what we had been warned of, was a certain circumstance. Now a lot of people had become critical of the war by then. It did not betoken any thought, commitment, or principle – it was just the thing to do. But maybe Bill Gaines was genuinely angered that so many of his pupils had grown up to be sent off into that war.

We stopped reading MAD at one age or another. It was for kids – and a few adults who caught on to what MAD was saying and appreciated the nonconformity now and then. I leaf through it from time to time. Most of what we had been warned about has become ingrained in our lives. Hucksterism and jingoism still abound and most people don’t even notice them. Uncle Bill did his best.