Chuck Jones, American Genius
By Crispin Sartwell

Some folks blame the long-haired, anti-authoritarian, free-love, new left sixties on Allen Ginsburg or Jack Kerouac. Some blame the Beatles and the Stones. Some blame prosperity and the GI Bill. Some blame lysergic acid diethylamide.

I blame Chuck Jones, who died February 22 at the age of 89. Chuck had a hand in creating Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Road Runner: animated cultural icons that easily reached the level of celebrity of John Lennon, Robert F. Kennedy, or Timothy Leary.

Chuck was an artist, a poet, a philosopher, and an American. All of his creations were extreme anti-authoritarians: yippie cross-dressers who delighted in out-talking, outwitting, and finally dropping anvils on the authorities (represented by such foils as Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig).

Bugs and Daffy were literally anarchists; they threw the classic round black bombs, and though these never killed you, they might scorch you pretty severely or make it hard to re-assemble yourself out of your component body parts.

If you tried to shoot them (during rabbit or duck season), Bugs and Daffy would stick their fingers into your shotgun so you blew yourself up yet again. And if they couldn't blow you up, they'd hit you with a baby grand piano released from a window on an upper floor.

They were, in short, violent advocates of total liberation. In the fifties, when the baby boomers were kids, Bugs and Daffy achieved an incredible cultural penetration. They were everywhere all the time. And by the time the sixties got late, these kids were Abbie Hoffman, Country Joe and the Fish, the Weather Underground.

To be absolutely honest, Daffy Duck is the only real hero and role model I ever had. I have tried to live my life the way Daffy did, merrily lobbing a stick of TNT at the pathetic idiots who thought they could control what I said or did. It's a difficult legacy to live up to; we can but try.

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as Chuck Jones drew and wrote them were freethinkers, radical individualists, and revolutionaries in the true American grain. They recalled the spirit of Tom Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Emma Goldman, and H.L. Mencken.

In a fairly typical example of our taste for self-congratulatory, nuance-free mythology, we regard the forties and fifties as eras of repression and our own era as liberated. But Chuck would have a tougher time selling now what was embraced so happily then.

Children's video in the seventies and eighties became an utter blank, a politically correct insipidity, a mindless parade of friendly tokens. The Care Bears, Sesame Street, and Barney taught moral lessons that no one could possibly disagree with, or else they muttered the numbers 1-10 thousands of time as if that were "educational." Even Bugs and Daffy mutated into harmless, cuddly non-entities and entered the world of mega-merchandising.

Little wonder that our era has also produced public figures of stupefying emptiness (Al Gore comes to mind), who say nothing, do nothing, and indeed are nothing. Chuck's Bugs would have dropped a baby grand on Barney or Al, and the world would be a better, cleaner place.

On the other hand, there has been a rebirth of the anarchic Chuck Jones spirit in children's shows such as Ren and Stimpy, Sponge Bob Square Pants, and Angela Anaconda. We can only hope that this heralds a rebirth, too, of the subversive, individualist American spirit that Chuck embodied so delightfully.