A recipe from the great Alana Hurley.

From The Superficial:

Correction of Paula Abdul Story

November 16th, 2011

I’ve been reasonably critical of DC’s company-wide relaunch, but three months in I’m softening slightly. For all the stuff DC has done wrong here, they’ve also done a few things right.

* The Detective Comics Batman is pretty interesting. Very much an old-school Batman story with roots in the kind of Strange Tales horror stories we had before the Comics Code. I continue to enjoy Wonder Woman, which gives us an entirely new–and altogether superior–version of the character, rooted in Greek mythology. And I’ve even fallen a little bit for Gail Simone’s Batgirl. As much as I liked Barbara Gordon’s Oracle, as Batgirl again she’s definitely a fourth-tier hero. And it’s kind of charming. She’s a little like the goody-goody version of Jessica Jones: always a step behind, slightly crippled by self-doubt. But clever, in her own way.

* I don’t actually like Grant Morrison’s Action Comics. Or the new Justice League. But I haven’t jumped ship on them. Yet.

* The single smartest thing about the new DC universe is that it does not appear to be a coherent universe. So far as I can tell, there’s no character continuity. Not just in events, but even in how they’re written. The Batman of Justice League is tonally very different from the Batman of Detective Comics, who is almost a different character than the Batman in the plain-vanilla Batman title. A Darkseid invasion in one book does not seem to have bearing on stories in any of the other books.

What this does is free up the writers to simply tell stories. Detailed continuity has really crippled both Marvel and DC over the last couple decades–especially when it comes to the yearly event books, which then push their tendrils into the publishers’ full line, interrupting normal storytelling and forcing the entire company to deal with the same central topic. It’s not an accident that over the last 10 years or so, some of the best storytelling from the two big houses has come in runs that were deliberately out-of-continuity: The early Ultimate books; Alias; Gotham Central; The New Frontier; Wonder Woman: Hiketeia, Joker.

I’m not sure DC had to reboot it’s entire line to do escape the narrative confines of continuity, but it’s probably good that they did, whatever the route they took.

* At the end of the day, no matter now much I’ve complained about the New 52, the central fact is this: After three months, I’m following maybe a half-dozen DC books. In the three years prior to the relaunch, that number was a consistent zero.

Galley Hero Andy Ferguson has a fabulous piece up about George Harrison’s spiritual life. It’s awesome.

So awesome, in fact, that in addition to everything else, it contains one of the greatest Easter Eggs ever to appear in The Weekly Standard. Galley Friend X spotted it first, and anyone else who finds it is a real Beatles Super Fan.

You should hunt for it yourself, but for the lazy, I’ll put it in invisotext below, from X:

Note the little “Easter egg” that Ferguson included with this line:  “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more.”

From Galley Reader W.T.: Very well-done stuff.

So that nothing which follows gets misunderstood, let’s start with first things. (1) Joe Paterno failed a slew of innocent children, his institution, and his calling by not doing more about Jerry Sandusky. (2) The minute the Sandusky case broke, Paterno should have resigned. (3) Because he did not step down, Penn State was absolutely right to fire him.

With that out of the way, though, I’d suggest that there’s something troubling about the righteous indignation we’re seeing about Paterno. I’m not sure where it comes from. Maybe it’s just the inchoate rage which follows when a monster like Sandusky is discovered. But it strikes me as wrong-headed because it misses something important. The lesson of Paterno’s fall isn’t that Joe Paterno is a bad man and a hypocrite. It’s that this world is so fallen that even good men–and Paterno is, by nearly every measure, a very good man–can fail the tests Providence puts before them.

Tom Boswell gets at this question nicely in his column from earlier this week:

Everybody has weak spots in their character, fault lines in their personality where the right earthquake at the wrong time can lead to personal catastrophe. Most of us are fortunate that our worst experience doesn’t hit us with its biggest jolt in exactly the area where our flaws or poor judgment or vanity is most dangerously in play. It’s part good luck if we don’t disgrace ourselves.

But when it does happen, as appears to be the case with Joe Paterno, that’s when we witness personal disasters that seem so painful and, in the context of a well-lived life, so unfair that we feel deep sadness even as we simultaneously recognize that the person at the center of the storm can never avoid full accountability.

I’m not trying to excuse Paterno when I suggest that had he gone to the authorities when he was told about Sandusky–and not just to the AD–then I suspect the ensuing firestorm would have cost him his job then, too. He was in his early 70s. He would have been a liability for the university even if he was blameless. My guess is that it would have meant the end for him and that he knew it. So an old man already facing mortality was given the choice of doing the right thing and sacrificing his life’s work, or turning a semi-blind eye to preserve his career.

He made the wrong choice. It was, in the very Greek sense of the work, tragedy.

What’s worth reflecting on is that these kinds of choices are more common than you think. And it isn’t just the wicked who fail them.

For me, Paterno’s fall calls to mind two people, with two choices. The first is Cardinal Bernard Law, a holy man who failed both God and his flock in ways reminiscent of Paterno. The other is Cassie Bernall, the junior at Columbine High School who was was asked, at the pain of death, “Do you believe in God.” She answered, “Yes.”

When good men like Paterno fail their test, I’d argue that they deserve not scorn, but pity.

Their example should make us pray that such a cup is never put before us. And that if it is, we are given the strength to be better than ourselves.

Was that ugly, or what? I’ve been trying to think of a worse debate moment and the only thing that comes close is Bentsen-Quayle. There’s no telling what structural damage it inflicted, but my guess would be more rather than less.

That said, the entire episode is instructive of how unpredictable electoral politics can be. A few thoughts:

(1) There were plenty of Perry skeptics from the beginning. (I was not one of them.) But it turned out that none of the weaknesses they noticed actually hurt him. Remember, the argument against Perry was that he was prone to shooting from the hip; too bible-thumpin’ conservative; and would remind voters too much of W.

But what really damaged Perry was (a) He was too liberal on immigration; and (b) He had two debate moments (his attempted flip-flop attack on Romney and the Lost Third Agency) in which he looked old and doddering and lost.

The other thing that hurt Perry is that he emerged prepared to counter attacks from Romney, but was totally blind-sided when Santorum, Paul, Bachmann, et al took after him like he was a spliced hybrid of Nelson Rockefeller and Saul Alinsky. (This was not an unreasonable assumption on his part, since this group had given Romney a pass for several months.)

(2) Debates have never played as important a role in the primaries as they have this cycle. It’s unclear whether this is an aberration or a new reality. But try to remember a single moment from any primary debates since 1999. The only thing I come up with is “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” The gang-tackle of Perry in his early debates clearly crippled his candidacy–I’d argue more so than his one-on-one jousts with Romney.

(3) Is it fair that Herman Cain gets to say that China doesn’t have nuclear weapons and that he’s for-and-against abortion and that he’d trade hostages with terrorists, but that Perry doesn’t get to have a couple of brain blanks? Nope.

But fair’s got nothing to do with it.

(4) Unless the conversation changes between now and the convention, it would seem that immigration has replaced abortion as the key ideological litmus test in the Republican party. Now, maybe that’s just a function of the candidates needing a club to beat Perry with and immigration being the best-available weapon. But maybe it’s a more foundational shift. If the latter is the case, then this is a real tragedy for conservatism. A few reasons:

* Illegal immigration causes very real problems, but those problems tend to be economic. (Though some of them certainly have a cultural aspect.) Economic problems can be fixed more easily than cultural problems.

* The argument over abortion is–at least to pro-abortion forces–about a lot more than just the killing of babies. It’s about an absolute, iron-clad right to consequence-free sex. Which is, if you think about it, probably the single biggest legacy of the 1960s. If the left holds to anything at all, it’s that sex must never have negative consequences–no unwanted pregnancies, no diseases, no moral disapproval from third parties. That’s why the AIDS campaign was such a vital left-wing cause in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s the root of liberal support for same-sex marriage. It’s behind the idiotic claims that “love can never be wrong.”

All of this is why the only liberal cause Bill Clinton wasn’t willing to sell out for political gain was abortion. He vetoed the partial-birth ban at some real cost. But ingrained in liberal boomers is that this first principle is the cornerstone for the entire structure of sexual “freedom.” Admit that abortion (even in some cases) is wrong and you undermine a continent-sized chunk of liberal ideology and a huge portion of what has become our dominant cultural mores.

* For a host of complicated reasons (I go into this at some length in the book), illegal immigration is likely to significantly decrease in America during the next 20 years–no matter what policies we pursue. (Short version: As fertility rates go sub-replacement, a country’s outmigration dries up, as it has, for example, with Puerto Rico. Nearly all of Central and South America will be sub-replacement within 20 years.)

So debates over, say, building a fence or giving in-state tuition to illegals are more about ideological purity than actual consequence. Unlike abortion, where 50 million lives have been taken since 1973, with no end in sight.

Boy, how about that press conference. Herman Cain was using the third-person in reference to Herman Cain before the end of the first paragraph of his remarks. Also–and I may have misunderstood him, I’ll need to look at the transcript–but I think he might have suggested that some women have sexually harassed him.

But the most interesting moment, for my money, was when Cain was asked about Romney’s remarks on the situation. (He called the allegations troubling or some such.) Keep in mind, Cain is the guy who jumped all over Perry when the Washington Post tried to tar him for being racists. So what did Cain do? He alibied Romney and explained that Romney didn’t mean it the way the reporter–and everyone else in America–took it. Because Romney is a man of immense “integrity.”

I’m not quite sure what the moment meant, but it was pretty interesting.