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The Utne Reader and the Decline of the American Left By Tony Smith One recent lazy Sunday, I made the big mistake of picking up The Utne Reader. Now, I know what to expect from this lefty version of Reader's Digest: articles about the beauty of child-birth, the vast spirituality of a simple wooden spoon or how to build environmentally-friendly houses (or yurts, if you're really into this stuff). Fairly easy to chuckle at, and once in a great while, mildly interesting. But what caught my eye was a story about a cartoonist named Peter Sinclair, and how the Internet might just save his comic strip, "Alex's Restaurant." Sinclair is just the sort of person you'd expect to see profiled in Utne, with salt-and-pepper hair cropped close enough that it makes him look non-threatening and permanently tousled, a neatly-trimmed beard and mustache, and an earnest, slightly-amused expression on his face. "Alex's Restaurant" is a comic strip about a couple who, as Sinclair's website tells it: "escaped from the downsizing corporate world to open their own alternative cyber-cafe« in the sleepy middle-American town of Grassy Knoll, Wisconsin. Having taken over Sam'n'Ella's, the local greasy spoon cafe, they have converted it into a crunchy, granola, vegetarian Cyber-Cafe. These are their continuing adventures on the frontiers of the Culture War..." The cafe« is the regular hangout of such characters as a spiritually connected Native American, a Reagan-Democrat redneck (who has guiltily admitted to himself that he enjoys cafe lattˇs), and even a clone of the gingko biloba-touting Dr. Andrew Weil, author of such alternative medicine bestsellers as Spontaneous Healing. I was having trouble getting an idea of this comic strip from The Utne Reader description. The concept and the characters did not seem like prodigious fonts of knee-slapping, pee-in-your-pants humor. So I checked out www.alexsrestaurant.com, the Internet site that is supposed to save this rare American satirical treasure from obscurity. The humor was definitely right for the Utne Reader crowd: bland little zingers about how we all seem so busy and overworked these days, or how it's so hard to get bankers to finance crunchy cyber-cafe«s. So it's unsurprising (yet quite pleasing) that the Detroit Free Press dropped "Alex's Restaurant" from its comics page in 1990, only eight weeks after its debut. Readers had ranked it the most disliked cartoon on the page. So why does Peter Sinclair still have high hopes for Alex? Why should even the vaunted Internet be able to save this droopy pooch of a comic strip? Because he believes he is on the pulse of a cultural sea-change. Apparently, demographers have identified an expanding group of Americans who are "transcend[ing] traditional political ideology in favor of a path that embraces spirituality, ecology, and holistic health." They call this bunch the "cultural creatives." And it strikes me that the demographers are right. Why else would we be able to buy organic mango-flavored breakfast cereal laced with St. John's Wort (in case you didn't know, that's the herbal equivalent of Prozac) in the supermarket? The best way to find the political significance of the rise of cultural creatives is to ponder what has happened to the American Left since the 1980s. Doesn't it seem like there's suddenly a lot of middle-aged people out there who spend inordinate amounts of time tending their vegetable gardens, buying herbal supplements and doing tai chi? Why are these people so soft-headed? They have abandoned the gritty, steel-jawed rhetoric of Marx, the IWW, and even Michael Dukakis for organic coffee, a touch of marketing, and the alterno-narcissicism of constantly searching for healthier foods and more holistic healing methods. It's as if they've collectively decided that changing the world is too difficult. Instead, they will consume alternative products and think alternative thoughts. Perhaps the most politically troubling thing about the cultural creatives is that they are utterly afraid of offending people. I once saw an article about a new-age healer who used the endorfin-producing effects of laughter as therapy. He would get together groups of people for the express purpose of laughing. Of course, he had decided not to rely on jokes to get his clients giggling, because it was hard to come up with any sort of humor that would be guaranteed not to offend anyone. So his therapy groups would laugh on command, and then become amused by the fact that they were laughing at nothing at all. Which is why I hope that Garry Trudeau, Lloyd Dangle and Tom Tomorrow bump into Peter Sinclair in a dark alley before we all are forced to read Alex's Restaurant over our Crispy Mango-Prozac Flakes. Tony Smith is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania's City and Regional Planning School.
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