The mood I’m in—
He shrugged gracefully, rolling his beard between two fingers. “I’ve had a local reputation for a long time as a sort of knowledgeable nut. People invite me to their history classes, and I give them demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl.”
Farrell was startled to feel his own skin stir with the words. Hamid said easily, “Well, you make them real edgy, John. This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don’t know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you’re like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real.” The round eyes seemed to flick without closing, as parrot’s eyes do.
“A dinosaur. You think so?” John Erne laughed—a rattle of the nostrils, no more. “This is my time.” He leaned forward and patted Farrell’s knee hard. “This is the time of weapons. It isn’t so much the fact that everyone has a gun—everyone wants to be one. People want to turn themselves into guns, knives, plastic bombs, big dogs. This is the time when ten new karate studios open every day, when they teach you Kung Fu in the third grade, and Whistler’s mother has a black belt in aikido. I know one fellow on a little side street who’s making a fortune with savate, that French kick-boxing.” Farrell watched the combat master’s face, still trying to determine how old he was. He appeared most youthful when he moved or spoke, oldest when he smiled.
“The myriad arts of self-defense,” John Erne said. “They’re all just in it because of the muggers, you understand, or the police, or the Zen of it all. But no new weapon ever goes unused for long. Pretty soon the streets will be charged with people, millions of them, all loaded and cocked and frantically waiting for somebody to pull their trigger. And one man will do it—bump into another man or look at him sideways and set it all off.” He opened one hand and blew across his palm as if he were scattering dandelion fluff. “The air will be so full of killer reflexes and ancient disabling techniques there’ll be a blue haze over everything. You won’t hear a single sound, except the entire population of the United States chopping at one another with the edges of their hands.”
Farrell asked quietly, “Where does that leave chivalry?”
—Folk of the Air, Peter S. Beagle
I don’t know; I don’t know. It’s September, and last week the weather slowly began to turn with a great creak into aumumn. It’ll yet flutter into summery heat now and again, but we’re sleeping under heavy blankets now, and we dress in layers, and I really should be losing this urge to grab half the country by the collar and scream myself hoarse about how mind-bogglingly stupid they are, how blind, how irresponsible.
A blue haze over everything, of invective and two-minute hate.
(Don’t mistake this as a plea for reason and moderation. Can’t we all just get along? Be decent, to one another? —Some of us sure as fuck can’t, but there’s not much we can do about that without persuasion, and it’s hard to persuade somebody when you’re screaming in their face.)
It’s been a week. Alex Lencicki can tell you. He was there, and I wasn’t, and while maybe now that the freak show has packed up its narrow tents there’s maybe something of a catharsis, still, like the summer breaking, it isn’t enough.
And I don’t know now that there ever will be.
His life with the ghosts of Bush.
In the spirit of Roy Edroso’s unhealthy (but amusing; yea, amusing unto death) fixation on that perennial reactionary empowerment fantasy, “Life Among the Liberals,” I offer up this link to Rick Perlstein’s “The Church of Bush,” which I missed the first time out—despite the fact that he’s reporting on life among Portland conservatives. (Thanks to the Slacktivist for calling it to my attention.)
Elucidating the differences in approach is perhaps best left as an exercise for the reader. Wouldn’t want to spoil all your fun.
—Bruce Broussard, by the way: most recently famous for suing to get Multnomah County to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Despite his righteous outrage, it was found he didn’t have standing. Just one more way activist judges and the liberal media and that darn fascist homosexual agenda are conspiring to oppress true Americans.
Forget 15%; try 90%.
And so I’m feeling shitty about the (yes, irrational) analogy that finishes off the rant below, which was on shaky ground to start off with, proceeded with some little rhetorical deftness to a point of questionable taste, and never got around to any sort of disclaimer or safety instructions; just chuck the whole thing before it gets out of hand, okay?
Because Barry points us to this New Yorker piece which reminds us all that squabbling over 3% here and 11% there has nothing to do with actually winning elections and everything to do with stoning apostates and kicking the exiles’ bread and salt into the ashes: makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something for about five minutes, and then what?
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
The at-once depressing and uplifting moral to take from all of this is simply to realize: voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also the least important thing we can do, politically.
Your blind item for the day.
X can’t say that because he evidently does not believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. He and his handlers portray him as virtually perfect in the past and omniscient in the present. In and of itself, that’s also not unusual: it’s so hard for a presidential candidate not to get puffed up when laudatory remarks follow him as closely as Secret Service agents. But do we want a president who pretends that he can do no wrong and never has?
Okay: who’s X? And what color is the sky in the writer’s world?
Answers not so much below the fold as over yonder, in your Talking Points Memo.
Portland is a small town, except when it isn’t.
It’s pretty much a truism, once you’ve been here longer than, say, six months: you go to a party here in Portland, you’re going to meet somebody you know from a context other than the one which occasioned the party. (Someone who actually knows network theory help me out: your supposedly discrete nets overlap in ways you don’t expect. Two degrees of separation recursing back to yourself. Or something.) Anyway: Portland’s a small town, is my point; maybe the largest I’ve ever lived in, and it’s a small town in part because it’s easy to curl up with your own ontogroups of choice and let the rest of the world go hang, until you’re at a party and see somebody you know that you’d never have expected in that context.
So it’s nice to pick up the Mercury and read an article on the local comics scene and realize I only know one of the cartoonists mentioned. (Though if I’d been paying attention, I would have remembered most of the rest from Team Alternative. Did I tell you Team Alternative totally rigged the scoring? Had some people up on top of this closet that boomed when you kicked it. Plus they had foam fingers. On the merits, trust me, Mainstream kicked their scrawny indie butts. —Did I tell you I was cheering for Team Mainstream? —Did I tell you the most mainstream team Portland could field was three out of four self-publishers, who’ve dabbled in the capecapades trade? Portland. Small town.)
Dispatches from the War on Common Sense.
Apparently, any protestor who breaks the law during the Republican National Convention in New York City should be treated as a terrorist, and prosecuted accordingly.
Update! These terrorist acts will include releasing swarms of mice, giving false directions to “little blue hair ladies from Kansas,” throwing pies, and encouraging prostitutes with AIDS to seduce Republicans without condoms.
Man, I miss New York.
On the other hand:
Now that I’ve snarled and snapped, I’ve got to tell you: ain’t nothin’ in comics lately that’s filled me with that shivery oh boy! Comics! glee like We3. Except maybe Whedon and Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men, which keeps getting better with every issue.
Oh, and Flight is finally out on the shelves, but I’ve raved about that enough already. Go, get yourselves a copy, if you haven’t yet.
Every single one a youse can just go straight to hell.
Yeah, I know. It’s irrational. Maybe I’m tapped; maybe all my moonlight’s drained away. Normally I’m as waffly as they come, if by “they” you mean terminally indecisive eldest children who in their zeal to make nice between all the various factions that tug and push their lives end up seeing the merit to every possible point of view and never really finding some floor for their own feet that stays safe and stable for long. I mean, there’s no way under the sea or over it that I’m going to vote for Nader this year, but I’m not about to apologize for having done so in every election since 1992, and if I can recognize there’s something sky-pied arrogant about the whole enterprise of third parties in American politics, well, still: something’s got to be done, right? If the Democratic party is assured of my vote no matter what, because where else am I gonna go, well, why should they ever listen to me? (When was the last time I ever tried to tell them something?) And if there’s more than a little irrationality and nose-slicing spite in the vituperative hatred of Nader players that gets to strut down the Democratic catwalk with depressing regularity, well, the comfort I take in knowing that my Nader votes did nothing to steal electoral votes from the Democrats I was trying to message is a cold and hollow comfort, indeed. (I’ve got little enough time as it is for the things I need to do to keep my own life on track. How else can I help steer the ship of state?)
And if my sudden flirtation with the lesser of two evils has more to do with where we all are now than any yawning gap between 1992-me and 2004-me, well, 1992-me is still pissed. Every election is a crisis. It’s always never the right time to rock the boat. That this election is demonstrably the most critical of my voting life, if not the past 50 years, if not the past 100—that the boat has already fucking capsized, and we’re all paddling about, doing our best to right it in heavy seas—it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. 1992-me still wants his fuck-you vote. And if you maybe think 1992-me is as spoiled and wrong-headed as he is idealistic and righteously frustrated, well, I’d probably agree with you; then again, you don’t have to live with him.
Like I said: irrational. I mean, very little good can come of the white-hot rage that lights up my skull and leaks out of my eyeballs when I read something like this in a recent poll of registered voters:
Can I repeat that? —In the here and now, this current situation, with a choice between—
- a manifestly incompetent boob who’s crashed the country, looted our treasury, smeared our reputation with blood and shit, done his damndest to restrict our speech and our freedom of association—not out of any actual desire to keep us actually safe, but merely to score feel-good points in the polls; who sees no fault at all in claiming to be above the law, and has seized upon the most craven and dishonest means to keep us all split and squabbling, at each other’s throats, so that his outnumbered and outgunned faction can hold onto power just that much longer, squeeze that much more money from our pockets to his—
- and John Kerry—
15% of all registered Democrats are seriously considering the boob. Margin of error somewhere just north of plus or minus three percent, but hey: line up seven random registered Democrats. Chances are good that one of them is planning on voting for Bush. (Back in 2000, when Democrats were suffering Clinton fatigue, and hated wooden, beta-male, earth-toned Gore, who lied about the internet and lied about Love Canal [and Story], back when we weren’t all seized with knee-jerk treasonous Bush-hatred, Bush scored 11% of the Democratic vote. And maybe that’s a good argument for taking this LA Times poll as a sport, a freak, an outlier, and maybe tomorrow I’ll feel like grasping this slender reed, but right now I’ve got a head of steam on, so siddown and shaddap.)
But that white-hot rage is fucking irrational. What do I want, unswerving, unthinking party loyalty? (Well, a crushing landslide defeat, with all of us on the one side, and the five percent of those wealthy enough to benefit from Bush on the other—minus those human enough to feel guilty about their perks; plus a smattering of white men so stupefied by the creeping loss of what they see as their due that they can’t vote their own self-interest. Three percent of Republicans are considering Kerry, by the way. Plus or minus something slightly north of three percent.) —I mean, tag the Democrats themselves for this? They’d just panic and go haring after that mythical rightward nudge, the fatted calf to sacrifice that would bring all those chimerical NASCAR dads and soccer moms back into the fold. Which is beyond stupid: the problem isn’t that we’re too far left, for God’s sake. On every single issue you care to name, from abortion to child care to health care to education to the Wars on Drugs and Terra, we win. Our positions are the positions the majority wants; our direction is where the country wants to be heading. (What “we,” kemo sabe?) —But that’s not the choice people think they’re making. They think they’ve got these two options, this guy, and that other guy. And if one of the guys seems a little rank to them, what with the French and the yacht and the ketchup and the stuff about how maybe he lied but it’s all so confusing and it happened thirty years ago so who knows, fair and balanced, remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt he waffles, you know, and so, gee, I don’t know, I guess what’s left then is this other guy, and hey, steady leadership, right? Times of change?
Tacking right doesn’t do a goddamn thing except amp up the talk about waffling.
There’s a rule of thumb about schizophrenia and psychosis that I heard somewhere, and while I have no idea how actually useful it is, it stuck with me: psychosis can be seen, largely, as atypical, abnormal reactions to normal, present stimuli; schizophrenia, on the other hand, is (again, largely) reacting normally and typically to stimuli that just aren’t there, or don’t map reality in a terribly accurate fashion. And while there’s a lot of psychotic “I’d never vote for a guy who said we committed atrocities in Vietnam” (when we did, and anyway, your other choice is a deserter who lied about serving in the US Air Force) or “I’m not voting for a guy who’s going to raise my taxes” (when he won’t if you’re with about 95% of the country, and you’re going to pay the other guy’s tax bill in more ways than you can possibly imagine)—what I want to believe, what I hope, what must be true is most of that 15% (that 11%, that 49%, that 47) is schizophrenic: making the best choice you can from a field of factoids and stories and opinions that have little to nothing to do with what’s really going on, what you really want, life as it’s actually lived, and governing as it’s actually done. Because, while the psychosis makes me want to leave the country, the schizophrenia we can do something about. With a lot of hard work and deft argument and careful organizing and speaking clearly and openly and honestly and without a lot of rancor and spite and anger about where we are now and where we ought to be going and how it is we think we’re going to get there: offering new opinions, new stories, facts instead of factoids. The odds are against us, but the world as it is is for us, and we can get it done, and a lot of bitching and moaning and white-hot recriminating rancor doesn’t help. It’s irrational.
Still.
15.
Anybody sneers about Nader spoilers anytime soon, I’m gonna give ’em such the smack.
(And then promptly apologize, I’m sure. Gah!)
Hot or Nazi?
Oh, go read Barry’s latest. If you manage not to spit coffee over the keyboard at his favorite quote, I’ll give you a dollar.
No actual dollars will be exchanged. Offer expires soon enough. Void where prohibited by law, and Oregon.
Doubleplus sprezzatura.
Here’s how it all went down:
I was blitzing through my Bloglines feeds and tripped over this entry by Atrios, which, and it’s not really his fault, reminded me of the existence of that odious little troll reactionary young pundit, Ben Shapiro. What’s Ben up to? I asked myself.
—Using a template with badly specced code and no permalinks, for one thing.
Scroll down to Thursday, 5 August, for his list of a few good books that are out, including Michelle Malkin’s fascinating read on Japanese internment camps, Michael Barone’s intriguing and incisive look at hard and soft Americas, and Hugh Hewitt’s important book on how to crush the opposition while maintaining friendship and civility across party lines. Also recommended: Brad Miner’s book, an insightful and witty look at how men should ideally act.
So I went after The Compleat Gentleman, and was rewarded pretty much right out of the gate:
According to Miner, an executive editor at Bookspan, former literary editor of National Review and author of The Concise Conservative Encyclopedia, a true gentleman is a master of the art of sprezzatura. The term, as used by the Renaissance writer Castiglione, refers to a way of life characterized by discretion and decorum, nonchalance and gracefulness—or, as Miner defines it, the cool exemplified by the men in first class on the Titanic who went bravely to their deaths in evening clothes. Underneath this unflappable quality, which [he] says is not determined by birth or class…
Why not? After all, Leonardo DiCaprio proved anybody could worm their way into first class on the Titanic, so long as they had enough pluck, and a suit of evening clothes.
At least Bracy Bersnak over at Brainwash realizes the inherent problem in trying to appropriate all the exclusive advantages of an always-already dying breed without also owning up to the very real price one must pay for that exclusivity:
A later section of the book on the difficulty of being a gentleman in a democratic age fails to resolve the problematic relationship between the exclusive nature of gentlemanly ideals and social equality. Instead of addressing this issue, Miner characteristically wants to be on both sides of it. On the one hand, he contends that a gentleman must have a discriminating intellect and taste. On the other hand, he is unwilling to say what precludes one from becoming a gentleman. While the idea of the gentleman has always been relatively democratic, being based more on individual merit than noble lineage, it has never been inclusive. It has always been easier to say who manifestly is not a gentleman than to point to someone who manifestly is. Discrimination between who is a man of honor and who is not, between whose word and reputation are considered beyond reproach and whose are not, and between who has decent manners and who has not, have always been essential components of gentlemanly identity.
There is something rather perfectly disingenuous about writing a book that insists lording it over everyone else is within the reach of us all. (And I can’t resist quoting this next bit: “Since he does not apply gentlemanly principles to thorny problems of modern manners, it is no wonder that Miner has a difficult time finding model gentlemen in contemporary culture. When Miner searches for a model gentleman found in popular culture, the example he offers is… Superman.”) —Bersnak goes on rather tiresomely to blame the death of the gentleman on deconstructionism and feminism (you expected maybe the butler?), stooping perilously close to Ryan Thompson’s “positions on why females are ‘special’ in a moral sense” with a lament for the death of the lady, this “finest fruit of civilization,” “turned to rot beneath the withering contempt of feminism.” Presumably, had she never wasted away, gentlemen would still be a dime a dozen in the first class compartments of the western world. But Bersnak (much less Miner) never gets around to telling us when exactly it was that the gentleman wasn’t a rara avis, thin on the ground—for the proper response to “You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman” has always been “And there are damn few of us left.” Nor does Bersnak seem to realize that the gentleman is as sexy and popular as ever.
In some quarters.
Count Ludovico, a fictional character, explains the contradictory grace of sprezzatura thusly: “It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it….obvious effort is the antithesis of grace.” And maybe that makes you think of Zen; me, I’m thinking of cool—specifically, Donnel Alexander’s essay “Cool Like Me” from Might magazine, back in 1997. I only read it the one time, and haven’t seen it since; the internet couldn’t save Might, it seems. (Then, it couldn’t keep Suck alive, and Suck was already in here.) But it stuck with me, and what luck! There’s a review of Street Sk8er on the Electric Playground, which quotes a significant chunk of one of the passages that wouldn’t stop echoing in the back of my brain:
…cool was born out of that inclination to make something out of nothing, to devise from being dumped on and then to make that something special. […]
…music from cast-off Civil War marching-band instruments (jazz); physical exercise turned to spectacle by powerful, balletic enterprise (sports); and streetlife styling, from the pimp’s silky handshake to the crack dealer’s sag… Cool is about trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents… Cool is about turning desire into deed with a surplus of ease… It’s about completing the task of living with enough ease to splurge it on bystanders, to share with others working through their travails a little of your bonus life. In other words, you can give value to your life just by observing me.
So. Those Titanic gentlemen, so inspirational to Brad Miner, going discretely into that good night in their evening clothes? All I have to say to them is this:
Dying is easy. It’s completing the task of living that’s hard.
—And I do hope we’ve also put paid to Nick Confessore’s charmingly silly idea of reforming the military by recruiting liberal gentlemen to the officer corps, which is what Atrios was on about in the first place?
¡Viva Dirk Deppey!
You know, he was wrong about DK2 (God, that comic blew), but one small stain doesn’t wipe out a legacy of some of the finest comics blogging the Islets of Bloggerhans have ever seen. Still: eons ago (way back in February) Dirk Deppey abandoned the Islets for finer pastures, up there in the High Country, where paper-bound dinosaurs graze. —Given the time lag endemic to the nervous systems of those vast, lumbering beasts, it’s only now we’re starting to see the fruits of that devolutionary step. And fine, fine fruit it is: a linked pair of essays writing around Grant Morrison’s recently(ish) concluded Nantucket sleigh ride on Marvel’s X-Men, looking at some of the industry backstory that led up to “NuMarvel” and leafing through the comics that are not so much following in his footsteps as, well, not. He nails the at-once powerful appeal and, yes, limitation of Whedon’s just-commenced run with the same characters:
Wisely sidestepping the futuristic pop-culture snap that Morrison injected into the longrunning mutant soap opera—an act one suspects he probably couldn’t have matched—Whedon instead wanders amiably amongst the collected memories of an army of longtime fans, concentrating on emblems and tropes that have worked for decades and making them shine with the skill of a master children’s novelist.
On the nose. —The problem, of course, is I’m going to hit the bookmark tomorrow morning and there won’t be anything new to read! Curse you, dinosaur!
But viva Deppey, nonetheless.
How you can tell our media isn’t “liberal.” (#7,536,062 in an ongoing series.)
Fred Clark doesn’t write a weekly column for the New York Times.
How do you do. Welcome to the human race. You’re a mess.
Better bloggers than I have ripped into the Washington Post’s shockingly deficient mea culpa for cheerleading us into an invasion of Iraq—but there’s this one bit that just won’t leave me alone:
Across the country, “the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones,” [Executive Editor Leonard] Downie [Jr.] said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to the minority.”
You know what I have to say to that?
This is what I have to say to that.
500,000 in New York City.
100,000 in Seattle.
30,000 in Los Angeles.
10,000 in Philadelphia.
200,000 in Washington, DC.
200,000 in San Francisco.
20,000 in Portland.
3,000 in Chicago.
To say nothing of Akron and Amarillo, Anapolis Royal, Antigonish, Arcata , Armidale, Asheville, Ashland, Athens, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Barrie, Beavercreek, Bellingham, Billings, Biloxi, Binghamton, Birmingham, Bisbee, Blacksburg, Bloomington, Boise, Boulder, Brampton, Brandon, Burlington, Butler, Calexico, Calgary, Canmore, Canton, Cape Cod, Cape Girardeau, Capt. Cook, Carbondale, Castlegar, Cedar Rapids, Charleston, Charlotte, Charlottetown, Charlottesville, Chatanooga, Chico, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Coburg, Colorado Springs, Columbia (Missouri and South Carolina), Columbus, Comox Valley, Concord, Cornwall, Corpus Christi, Cortez, Corvallis, Croton-on-Hudson, Cowichan, Cumberland, Dallas, Dayton, Daytona Beach, Deland, Denton, Detroit, Dubuque, Durango, Ellensburg, Elkins, Encino, Erie, Eugene, Fairbanks, Farmington, Fayetteville, Fillmore, Findlay, Flagstaff, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Smith, Fort Wayne, Fredricton, Fresno, Gainesville, Galesburg, Galveston, Geneva, Grand Junction, Grand Prarie, Grand Rapids, Hadely, Hilo, Holland, Honolulu, Houston, Hull, Huntington, Huntsville, Indianapolis, Ithaca, Jasper, Jefferson City, Jersey City, Johnston, Juneau, Kamloops, Kansas City, Kelowna, Kezar Falls, Kingston, Knoxville, Lafeyette, Lancaster, Lansing, Las Cruces, Las Vegas, Lawrence, Leavinsworth, Lethbridge, Lexington, Lilloet, Lincoln, Little Rock, Long Beach, Louisville, Macomb, Madison, McAllen, Meadville, Medicine Hat, Medford, Melbourne, Memphis, Minneapolis, Miami, Midland, Milwaukee, Minden, Mobile, Moncton, Montpelier, Mount Vernon, Nanaimo, Naples, Nashville, Nelson, New Orleans, Newark, Niagra, Norfolk, North Bay, Olympia, Orange, Orangeville, Orillia, Orlando, Ottawa, Palm Desert, Parker Ford, Parry Sound, Pensacola, Peoria, Peterborough, Phoenix, Pittsboro, Plattsburg, Portland (Maine), Port Perry, Portsmouth, Qualicum Beach, Racine, Raleigh, Richland Center, Riverview, Rockford, Rolla, Sackville, St. Augustine, St. Catherines, St. Charles, St. Joeseph, St. Louis, St. Paul, St. Petersburg, Salem, Salt Lake City, Saltspring Island, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, Sandpoint, San Jose, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Santa Monica, Sarasota, Sault Ste. Marie, Savannah, Sherbrooke, Silver City, Sioux Falls, Sitka, Sonora, South Bend, South Haven, Spokane, Springfield, Starkville, St. John’s, Sudbury, Summertown, Tacoma, Tallahassee, Taos, Tehachapi, Temple, Thornbury, Tofino, Truro, Tulsa, Tucson, Valdosta, Vallejo, Vancouver, Watertown, Wausau, West Palm Beach, Wilkes-Barre, Williamsburg, Williamsport, Williamstown, Wilmington, Yakima, Yarmouth, York, and Youngstown.
Or 25,000 in Vancouver, Canada. 100,000 in Montreal. 10,000 in Toronto. A million in London. Two million in Rome. A million and change in Barcelona. 100,000 in Paris. 500,000 in Berlin. 100,000 in Dublin (30,000 in Belfast). 35,000 in Stockholm. 150,000 in Melbourne. 100,000 in Sydney. 200,000 in Damascus. 10,000 in Beirut. 100 in Mostar, Bosnia. 25,000 in Baghdad.
Eleven million, around the world. That’s what I have to say to that.
Here’s something else:
Good journalism—in a newspaper or magazine, on television, radio or the Internet—enriches Americans by giving them both useful information for their daily lives and a sense of participation in the wider world. Good journalism makes possible the cooperation among citizens that is critical to a civilized society. Citizens cannot function together as a community unless they share a common body of information about their surroundings, their neighbors, their governing bodies, their sports teams, even their weather. Those are all the stuff of the news. The best journalism digs into it, makes sense of it and makes it accessible to everyone.
Only I didn’t say it, of course.
Leonard Downie Jr. said it. The aforementioned Executive Editor of the Washington Post.
There’s a whole wide world out here, Mr. Downie, and we sure could use some help making sense of it all.
Do let us know when you come out into it.
Here in the United States, for many months it was considered anti-social if not unpatriotic to even broach one’s disagreement with the administration during these troubled times. I believe that yesterday began to fundamentally change all that. Despite some of the unintentionally hilarious commentary by reporters and pundits, who appeared to be gobsmacked by the realization that Junior is not as universally beloved by “normal” Americans as he is by Sally Quinn’s email web ring, it is now quite obvious that Bush is not perceived by one and all as a heroic figure of Churchillian proportions, here or around the world. The sheer numbers of the protesters have given people permission to dissent without the threat of broad social opprobrium and if nothing else we are free of the notion that it is unpatriotic to criticize the President.
What’s next? The war with Iraq is a done deal and who knows what the aftermath will be. But, the real issue is this notion of aggressive American hegemony and the pathetic inability of the current administration to explain their goals in a believable fashion, bring our historical allies along or re-evaluate policies in light of changing circumstances. They have failed the test of a decent civilized superpower and they must go.
—digby, 16 February 2003
Satire closed on Saturday night.
Intelligence, of course, is just another instrument of war. And intelligence, like force, can only be used to a certain extent in any given situation. But a show of intelligence will instill an absolute dread of one’s investigatory powers in the terrorist mind. So while Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan could only accomplish so much as an actual source of hard intelligence—perhaps breaking up a terrorist cell here, exposing a plot there, assisting in the capture of bin Laden lieutenants there—as a show of intelligence, exposed and outed as an intelligence source, Khan is far more valuable—terrorizing the terrorists themselves. The Medium Lobster would not be surprised if Osama bin Laden himself were trembling in some dark cave, marveling at the well-oiled efficiency of the American intelligence apparatus, wondering how many other theoretical Khans were out there waiting to inform on him.
—the Medium Lobster, “A Show of Intelligence,” Fafblog!
However, two days later, another Reuters article allowed that maybe the leak wasn’t the tremendous screw-up the wire service had previously reported. “Terrorism experts,” the piece noted, “said the reasons for the release of Khan’s name could range from a judgment error to a sophisticated ploy designed to put al Qaeda on edge about the extent to which the network has been infiltrated by moles.”
—Lee Smith, “Does the US press know we’re at war?” Slate
Elevenses.
The meme is this: Steve Lieber wants you to list eleven comics works that libraries ought to shelve—and what Steve wants, Steve gets. Of course, being late to the party means you have to dig a little deeper: my own belovéd Spouse beat me to three of the choicest plums left untouched on the table, and can I pause for a moment to weep at the state of the world, when no one else has yet bothered to list Zot! and Stuck Rubber Baby and Hicksville?
The which done:
- Pickle. No, I’m not trying to ride the Hicksville bandwagon. You really do need the ten issues that make up Pickle (and most of Hicksville) to get a clear picture of what Hicksville was, and what happened to it on its way to somewhere else. Pickle was a delirious anthology comic that slowly but surely began to collapse on itself, as individual strips encompassed the characters of other strips, as you began to realize the whole thing was the work of one Dylan Horrocks, and as it finally accreted into the best comic about comics ever. Hicksville is a lovely book, and fully deserves its space on any short shelf, but it lost something when it was rendered down to one big story. (Then, it’s finished; Pickle—sadly—just stops. Of course, looming over both of them are the shadows of Island of Venus and Atlas...)
- Wendel All Together. Okay, I am trying to ride the Stuck Rubber Baby bandwagon on this one, but honestly, folks, if you’re going to point to the Great American Graphic Novel, the one that gets in the ring with prose and kicks up some serious dust, Baby is it. (Jim Ottaviani gets half a point for listing it with his also-rans.) Cruse’s ability to layer his narrative, moving deftly through time and memory, is unparalleled, and shows us all a toolbox crammed with goodies comics hasn’t used nearly often enough. So I’ll add Wendel All Together to my list: it’s a light-hearted sitcom, yes, but it’s a damn good one, and a slice of gay history to boot.
- Alec MacGarry, wherever you might find him. Okay, so it’s not a title; still, it can be hard to sort him out. These are the quasi-mostly-autobiographical comics Eddie Campbell has done about his alter-ego, Alec MacGarry, and if I’m unwilling to give up the form I know them in—the Acme and Eclipse “Complete” Alec—I’d better, since it’s a long ways out of print. So start yourself off with The King Canute Crowd, then move on to the gobsmacking brilliance of Grafitti Kitchen (it’s a third of the Three-Piece Suit), and finish up (or not) with How to Be an Artist, Campbell’s graphic novel about the rise and fall of the graphic novel.
- Elektra: Assassin. There’s Dark Knight; there’s Ronin; there’s Watchmen; there’s American Flagg. (Oh, hell, we could add Buck Godot to the list, if we were feeling silly.) You can keep ’em all; for my money, this is kick-ass take-no-prisoners hell-and-back superhero breakout of the mad old, bad old ’80s. Miller’s neo-pulp poetry, before it staggered off and collapsed into self-parody; Sienkiewicz’ eye-popping you-won’t-believe-he-got-away-with-it cartooning—and the astonishing charge of watching them dare each other to giddy new heights on almost every page. (Added timely bonus: the Reaganesque president is eerily similar to our current incumbent, and you won’t watch a Kerry-Edwards commercial the same way again after “Not Wind like a watch, but Wind—like the air…”)
- Flex Mentallo. Grant Morrison’s masterwork. Sad but true: everything he’s done since this four-issue miniseries has come close in one way or another to the mark he made, but none of it has surpassed this astonishing one-two punch of despair and hope that comes as close as anyone can to explaining why it is that superheroes wear their underwear on the outside. (It doesn’t hurt he was working with Frank Quitely, who fits him like a glove.) —The good news, of course, is he’s got plenty of time and opportunities to keep trying. (Newsflash: I’ve just discovered why the trade paperback is so hard to find: it was never published. Charles Atlas threatened to sue for trademark infringement. Jesus fucking wept.)
- Through the Habitrails. Oh, this one will be hard to find. Jeff Nicholson did these creepy short pieces for Taboo back in the day, and though it was clear they were coming together into a larger piece, a surreal horror story about slaving away the best hours of the best days of the best years of your life in a horrid, soulless cubicle farm, Taboo was irregular enough to make following it difficult, and folded before it could ever come to an end. Nicholson gathered the strips together into a single, self-published volume in 1994, and we were lucky enough to stumble over one in somebody’s half-off bin somewhere. (Maybe it was in St. Marks?) —But it’s your lucky day: Top Shelf picked up a batch of them to re-sell, and Nicholson might even have some copies of an earlier printing left.
- Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons. The quirkily simple philosophizin’ is going to come off as neohippy if you’re not in the right mood. Stick it out: it’ll slip some knives in when you’ve think you’ve got it sussed. Lovely humane minicomics, where the words and simple, scratchy cartooning blend until you can’t tell the one from the other, and you’re reading melancholic tone poems and silly superhero slacker stories and in the middle a gorgeously lonely travelogue through Finland that all somehow end up being about Abraham Rat, a delightfully poor stand-in for cartoonist Glenn Dakin. I keep coming back to it, so onto the list it goes.
- Same Difference. Derek Kirk Kim is a goddamn supernova rock star, and Same Difference deserves every award it’s won. It’s pretty much that simple.
- Cages. Oh, God, yes. It’s pretentious as all hell. It’s art about art. It’s got a Disaffected, Blocked Young Man, the Love of the Woman who Saves Him, the Cranky Old Man who Must Rediscover the Meaning of Life, a Cat, a Magical Negro, and Dottily Wise Homeless Folk. It’s also got some breathtaking cartooning: real people walk through these pages, and they somehow against all odds ground all these clichés and (yet) launch the whole thing into the air. I wish to high heaven Dave McKean would put away his book covers and his art installations and his computer animation and sit back down at the drafting table and draw—his next big work in comics would be better than this, and that would be something to see.
- Nausicäa of the Valley of Wind. There’s a reason all the kids these days doodle dumpy little Miyazaki critters in the margins of their sketchbooks when they aren’t thinking much of anything else. In Nausicäa, Miyazaki does for comics what he’s been doing for animation: reminds us all why we got into this mess in the first place, with a deceptively simple story full of wonder, set in a gorgeously detailed, lived-in world. The penciled artwork is beautiful, and the more European panel layouts will help those who think they’re allergic to manga. Oh, and the story will snap your heart like a twig.
- Bruno. It’s the best daily strip on the web. It’s one of the best daily strips being done, period. Eight years of Bruno’s life, bound up in eight essential volumes. Chris may get a little wordy at times, but let him; he’s earned it. The crazy-beautiful cross-hatching sets every stage with grace and witty verisimilitude, and the ups and downs of Bruno’s life are things you know in your bones. (Even the time when the circus camped out in the living room.) —Browse through the entire run online for a taste, and bookmark the main page for your future daily hits.
The crueler version of this game, of course, is easier to play: what’s on the short shelf in Kupe’s lighthouse, where the comics that ought to have been but never ended up are kept? Big Numbers, for sure. Starstruck, I’d add. THB, though that’s been rumbling lately. Beanworld, yes; oh, yes. Though much further down this path lies heartache and despair.
So, instead, a question: we’ve got all these Best American® collections that Houghton Mifflin puts out every year, with the Best American® Essays and the Best American® Sports Writing and the Best American® Short Stories and the Best American® Travel Writing and the Best American® Non-Required Reading and the like. Where the fuck are the Best American® Comics collections? I want a nice, classy anthology, where every year the best shorts are gathered together: someplace for Dan Clowes’ “Caricature” to rub shoulders with David Mazzuchelli’s “Discovering America,” say. Somebody get on that, would you?
Just who the hell is on monitor duty around here?
Eight million comics bloggers in the naked blogosphere, and I have to randomly surf through Grand Text Auto to find out about the Cartünnel?
(Actually, EGON was on the case. It’s the rest of you I’m looking at. Yeah, you.)
Doing my own part: those of you who remember oubapo, but who are as disappointed as I am that indymagazine’s domain name oblivion took Matt Madden’s Exercises in Style offline, will be pleased to note that he’s got a book of them coming out. —Ooh! And with a little Google work, I discover he put those exercises online himself, so hey. Go have a look.
The important thing is, I beat them by about two hours.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, live, from the City of Roses, the Town of Stumps, those crusty concatenators of Comic-Con coverage, those redoubtable relayers of restive reportage, those illuminated impresarios of insider information, the admirable, the pleasurable, the ink-stained—the one, the only, the 2004 San Diego Comic-Con International Report with Parker and Lieber!
(And I wasn’t even mentioned in it. How generous am I? Huh? C’mon, you can tell me.)
