Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Roots.

I need to talk to my folks more at some point or another about this stuff; I trust vaguely that notes have been gathered and compiled in loose files somewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most of the family lore is in the memories stored in one head or another and yet to be written down in any but the most cursory form. (My father’s been on a geneological kick off and on—he tracked down a church in the Czech republic in a village where one branch or another of the ur-Manleys springs from—but my father’s office is, to put it charitably, a godawful mess.)

—And it’s families lore, isn’t it. Not “family lore.” Looking back into one’s ancestry is like looking upriver at all the many and various tributaries—rivers, riverlets, streams, creeks, cricks, branches, springs, trickles, washes and wets—that all could have been the proximate source of this or that molecule of water floating past you. You can pretend to follow one main track back in time, say this is the river, and the rest feed into it, but that’s a construct. It privileges one set at the expense of others. It’s families, not family. Bloodlines a-plenty, not a single, magisterial bloodline stretching back in time like the Mississippi.

But I digress.

Roots on my father’s side: mostly on the western and more hardscrabble edge of the Appalachians: Alabama, western Georgia. I know we had some folks in Winston County, who voted to secede from the Confederacy when the Confederacy seceded from the Union; Dad likes to say that folks in Winston County were too poor to own slaves and didn’t give a good God damn about states’ rights and just wanted to be left alone with their moonshine, so. —Of course, there’s also a Cherokee (or half-Cherokee) who served in the Confederate Army as a scout.

Which, apparently, qualifies me for this.

Though—aside from my own personal misgivings (which are legion), there’s the small matter of the Wiggin on my mother’s side who served with Sherman on his famous March. We have his cavalry saber somewhere in one of the closets of my parents’ house. That Wiggin unpacked his carpet bags and married into a family (families) come down in time and station from the mighty Middletons—genuine Southern plantation aristocracy of the rice variety, there on the South Carolina coast, where Gullah is still spoken by basket-weaving women on the street corners of Charleston, where society matrons still archly refer to “The Late, Great Unpleasantness.” (“War Between the States” being a vulgar term, you see.) We’ve visited the plantation, which is now a carefully maintained park; we had a feast of steamed oysters and pork in the old kitchen and heard ghost stories about the family crypt. —One of the Middletons, as is often pointed out, signed the Declaration of Independence. His grandson signed the Ordinance of Secession.

I was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and after about six months was moved to Richmond, Virginia, where I laid down my first memories. (The first one I can date with any assurance: in the car, pulling up the driveway of the smaller house, as someone on the radio noted it was the one-year anniversary of the Watergate break-ins. I have earlier memories, but none I can place with such precision.) When I was—five? six?—we moved to Arak, Iran, where I spent a year and a half in the small American school for the families of engineers working on a couple of projects for the Shah, reading Tintin comics and Boys’ Own Adventure stories from Britain. By 1976 we were back in the States, in North Carolina; in 1978, I saw Las Guerras de las Galaxias in Caracas, long, agonizing months after all my friends back in the States had seen it. When I went to the Breckenridge County Spelling Bee in Kentucky (sixth grade), I lost on the first round because I spelled parlor p-a-r-l-o-u-r.

All those British adventure stories, you see. (My brother-in-law, who’s from somewhere south of London and who gets asked from time to time—no lie—if he was in that band, is a professor of history who specializes with a kind of grim glee in the antebellum South. Go figure.)

I was born in the South, and did a lot of growing up there, but if you tried to cram my roots into a box conveniently labelled Southerner, it would be a hard fit. I’d be a hard fit. I don’t talk Southern. (Though I’m noticing more and more of my father’s turns of phrase popping up in my conversation. Shorn of the accent, but.) I don’t write Southern. (Though it’s a fine enough business for them that do.) I didn’t grow up thinking Southern. (Then, who does?) —Yet I am a Southerner.

What else could I be?

For all that I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a time south of the Mason-Dixon since 1985.

Getting on the bus last night, there was, at the back, a tall man in a long black trenchcoat and a black leather cowboy hat. On the hat in the middle was a buckle: the Confederate battle flag in all its starry, barry glory.

You see them, from time to time, here in Portland (one of the whitest major cities in America). Mostly in the windows of pickup trucks, or muddied SUVs. (Do they think like pickup truck people? Like people who go off-roading?) For all that this is the furthest north I’ve ever lived.

Seeing that flag makes me think of a lot of things: alternate histories (those damn cigars!) and the romance of vanishing chivalry and brutal, dehumanizing hatred and appalling, sugar-coated ignorance and The Dukes of Hazard and a satisfyingly juvenile fuck you! to the powers that be and gun racks and cowboy hats and For Us By Us and redneck frat boys and my brother driving carriages in the background of the upcoming Cold Mountain movie and red dirt and pine needles and the Smokey Mountains at dawn (Bat Cave, North Carolina and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee) and hey, remember that guy who clocked me outside of the pool where I worked as a lifeguard? I’d kicked him out for roughhousing, six foot mumble, two hundred some odd pounds, me a skinny white sophomore in high school, and when I was climbing into the car of the friend who was driving me home this guy comes out of nowhere and grabs me and yells and punches me, and Shark, my boss (a hair under six feet but more of it muscle), pulls him off, and we went to the police, and it turned out he had a number of previous convictions for assault (also battery), enough so that when I stood in front of a judge and swore that yes, this man attacked me, and he stood up and said he had, and he was sorry, when they led him away, a black man two or three years older than me with a kid (possibly two, the cops were unsure) out of wedlock (as they say), it was to a jail outside of Columbia for a six-month sentence; I think of that, too, and I also think of the basket women in Charleston pretending to hide from tourists’ cameras as if their souls would be stolen (until you offer them five bucks, or ten) and I think of what Gullah sounds like and how much I enjoyed those steamed oysters. And maybe in one way or another that flag “stands for” all of these things, for me if not for every Southerner; this is, after all, my heritage. Or some small part of it.

But the flag also stands for this. It always has.

And whether the guy in the back of the bus wants it to or not, it always will.

—Filed 8353 days ago to Indulgences; Comments.

Ludafisk.

If you give a man a Fisk, you’re an insufferable asshole, but if you teach a man to Fisk, you’ve created a whole new asshole.

—Roger Ailes

I suppose this was the immediate impetus, but I’m shall we say reluctant to ascribe to the piece any recognition beyond that which it’s already gotten, and anyway, it’s merely a catalyst which has set off a chain reaction prompting me to try and synthesize some half-formed, vague ideas kicked loose by Barry’s discussion thread on pornography and some (very) recent reading on Russian magic and some speculatin’ on the nature of Gödel’s Theorem, which I’ll doubtless take as far out of context as poor old Schrödinger’s Cat . (Someone keep Professor Hawking away from the gun cabinet, please?)

Webster’s defines Fisking as—well, no, it doesn’t, not yet. But definitions are out there; most seem to cite the Volokh Conspiracy, so let’s do the same (by way of the Neo-libertarian News Portal):

The term refers to Robert Fisk, a journalist who wrote some rather foolish anti-war stuff, and who in particular wrote a story in which he (1) recounted how he was beaten by some anti-American Afghan refugees, and (2) thought they were morally right for doing so. Hence many pro-war blogs — most famously, InstaPundit—often use the term “Fisking” figuratively to mean a thorough and forceful verbal beating of an anti-war, possibly anti-American, commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words. Good Fisking tends to be (or at least aim[s] to be) quite logical, and often quotes the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article’s text.

A thorough, forceful (if figurative) beating, then, that tends to or at least aims to be logical, administered to someone for something they said. And I like my humor neck-snappingly bleak, so it is with a small grim smile that I appreciate the aptness of taking one’s inspiration from an account of a thorough, forceful, illogical beating administered by an angry mob to someone erroneously assumed to be an agent or a symbol of that which is evil or bad or harmful—or at the very least of that which is pissing them off that particular day. —And, like Fisk, I am not without my sympathy. Even as I scratch my head at trying to parse the “logic” in refuting a citation of Gandhi’s life’s work by pointing out the man was assassinated. (“And look what happened to him.” “Oh! Jolly good show! ’it ’im again! ’it ’im again!”)

But I come not to Fisk a Fisking. —Not because I think Fisking is wrong, no. Not because I curl my lip in a disdainful sneer at figurative beatings, or recoil from the taste of blood on my rhetorical jackboots. Nor because I’m tired, and think it’s a futile endeavor, akin to Canute spitting into the oncoming tide—I am, and I do, but that’s not why I’m not Fisking a Fisking today. No.

It’s because it’s so damned easy.

My Christmas present to myself this year was The Bathhouse at Midnight, W.F. Ryan’s monumentally descriptive survey of (as the subtitle puts it) magic in Russia. In his introduction, he lays out the intended scope of the book (which, as noted, is monumental), discussing the problems one encounters when one sets out to write about the history of magic in Russia, and one must figure out what it is one means when one says “history,” “magic,” and “Russia.” How does one account for the differences between written and oral traditions—especially when the border is as permeable as it is in Russian history? What bits of all those many and varied regions stretching across 11 time zones that we (or some of us) have at one point or another called “Russia” do you include, and what do you leave out? What is magic? How do you know it when you see it? How can you differentiate it from assumptions of divine intervention, or folkloric tradition, or religious ceremony? (Do you need such differentiations in the first place?) —The most interesting of these definitional problems is figuring out what magic is, of course, or at least coming to a vague agreement as to the particulars of what we’ll call magic for the course of the book. Ryan never quite comes out and offers a firm definition of his own (beyond the general impression that he’ll be more inclusive than not—a fine and worthy goal, in this case), but he does summarize some interesting definitions along the way: Magic is an alternative to religion, the other side of its coin, a corruption of it, parasitic to religion, a deviation from spiritual or social norms, or (charitably) a semiotic system of oppositions to religion. That form of religious deviance whereby individual or social goals are sought by means alternate to those normally sanctioned by the dominant religious institution. Magic’s goals are overwhelmingly the expression of personal desires for sex, power, wealth, revenge, relief from sickness or protection from harm; religions usually have social, ethical, spiritual, and numinous aspects that transcend individual ambition. But as Ryan puts it (and I’ll quote directly now, rather than tightly paraphrase): “Most attempts to come to terms with the sameness or distinctness of concepts of magic and religion suffer to some extent… almost all can be made to fit the evidence at most points, and almost all break down at some points in specific cases.” Each definition is a useful enough tool in and of itself, for doing what it is it does, but each breaks down somewhere or another. The tool is to be used when needed and set aside when not; definitions should always (strive to) be descriptive, not prescriptive. The map is not the thing mapped. This is important to keep in mind, because, to quote Gábor Klaniczay (and to drag this digression back onto the ostensible topic of Fisking):

The wide array of theoretical explanatory tools and comparative sets stands in puzzling contrast to the ease with which each general proposition can be contradicted.

Call it Klaniczay’s Corollary to Gödel’s Theorem and keep it in mind; we’re off on another digression.

—Samuel Delany has written (most notably in “Politics of Paraliterary Criticism” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, and thank God John still has my copy, or I’d start quoting at length and we’d never get out of here) that one of the central problems with sympathetic attempts to seriously critique paraliterary stuff like comics or SF is that they almost always start with an attempt to define the thing to be critiqued. Delany’s point is that genres are impossible to define, because they are social constructs, highly permeable categories highly fluid both from day to day and person to person. One can never delineate with any degree of precision the necessary and sufficient conditions that make SF SF, or comics comics; therefore, attempting to define them is futile from the start. Also, it lends a déclassé air of pseudo-science to one’s criticism, as if one has such a distrust of one’s material that one must appeal to a nominally neutral definition as an argument from authority. (Webster’s defines SF as…) So quit stinkin’ up the joint, kid; you’re embarrassing me.

Which is not to say I agree wholly with Delany, or that there’s never a need for definitional thinking. Criticism can be cheekily likened to one of those blind folks with the elephant discoursing at length about what it is they’ve experienced, the immense fan-like quality of it (or the peculiarly prehensile, ropey nature, or the way it calls to mind thick, gnarled tree trunks), how that quality compares with what Foucault says about how it’s really a wall, and the thoughts set in motion by contemplating the differences and similarities of the ways we each perceive this thing we call “elephant.” It helps in this circumstance to articulate what you think you’ve experienced, and how, and why; it helps to say right off the bat what it is you think an “elephant” is. —But to mistake this articulation for a definition is to mistake a description for a prescription, a tool for a law, the map for the thing mapped. It is to believe you’re really talking about a fan, a rope, a tree trunk, a wall, and to forget we’re all trying to figure out what this thing called “elephant” is.

There’s another reason to eschew the definition in criticism (or polemicism): because definitions are by nature imperfect, theoretical explanatory tools that can with puzzling ease be contradicted in one or another of their particulars, because for any given axiomatic system there exists propositions that are either undecidable, or the axiomatic system itself is incomplete, well, it’s all too easy to poke holes in definitions. And it’s all too easy to mistake poking a hole in a definition for refuting someone’s argument; to say, “The tool you made that house with is imperfect, therefore the house is not worth my consideration.” (Which, no, is not what Audre Lorde meant.) —And even if the debate is entered into in good fun and good faith, it’s all too easy to get sidetracked arguing about the words one chooses to define the thing instead of coming to grips with the thing itself.

And Fisking is little more than poking holes in someone else’s definitions.

Each statement of the anti-war, anti-American speech to be Fisked is parsed as if it were a definition: of the speakers’ credo, his or her intentions, worldview, as a statement of what anti-war anti-Americans in general think. Any contradiction that can then be pulled from what the Fisker takes to be that credo or worldview, or those intentions, or any action from anyone counted as anti-war or anti-American, is then held aloft, trumpeted, crowed over as a critical flaw in the thinking of one’s target. See? A contradiction! See? The tool is imperfect! See? We don’t have to pay any attention to the house! —When in doubt, point out that Gandhi practiced non-violence. So did Martin Luther King, Jr. And they both got assassinated! See? Quod erat fuckin’ demonstrandum.

’it ’im again.

When we talk about—anything, at length, our own experiences, what we think those mean, morally, ethically, politically, critically, when we talk about the camps of feminism or vampire slaying television programs or whether or not we should go to Iraq to demonstrate a commitment to something as ridiculous as peace and as ludicrous as respect for human life, over beers at the bar or in our blogs or in peer-reviewed journals, we are, in a sense, describing our piece of the elephant. Comparing it with what other people have said about that elephant. And we can keep in mind the shortcomings of definitions (or decide that what I’ve laid out here is utter hogwash), but we can’t help but speak in them; and whenever we try to define what it is we mean when we talk about the elephant (whether it’s the one in the living room or the one that just did the loop-the-loop under the big top), we can’t help but define ourselves. Debate based on respect does its best to reach past those definitions, to look from the tools to the thing being built with them, to leap from the map to the thing mapped. It may miss, it may disagree, it may get it wrong, but it makes the attempt. And this takes work. It doesn’t come easy. (That’s why it’s usually a mark of respect.)

On the other hand, anyone at all can trumpet a contradiction. Anyone at all can complain about a tool. Anyone at all can kick, can lay into someone with the boots and fists of an angry mob, can crack open a cheek with a thrown rock. —Whether they aimed it logically or not.

Anyone can Fisk.

And that’s why I don’t. It’s déclassé.

—Filed 8354 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [6].

Currently appearing elsewhere.

I should probably point out that this entry of Barry’s has generated a rather lively and puckish discussion, in which I take part (I do some of the puckish bits. You’ll have to click on the comments link at the bottom of the item yourself to get there, since it needs Java-whatsit to work). I should probably also point out that I should maybe go ahead and try to smack those various inchoate comments of mine into a more coherent screed for posting here (I style myself a freelance critic of the paraliterary; pornography is, like comics, like role-playing games, like cookbooks, like genre’d prose, like legal briefs, like cancelled SF-Western television shows—excuse me, televisual texts—paraliterary. So I should maybe write about this rather long story which all too often is given too short a pier)—but pontificating about anything without providing specific, personal examples is worse than useless, and getting into specific, personal examples when one’s topic is pornography is, well. Revelatory and embarrassing.

So.

(Yes, yes. Honesty and candor; candor and honesty. The irony is richly appreciated.)

—Filed 8355 days ago to Poprocks; Comments [3].

What I have in common with Dylan Meconis.

We both, apparently, have a thing for unmitigated evil. —Or so says this.

—Who, you ask, is Dylan Meconis? Why, only one of the Four-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking, recently added to the radar screen of Scott McCloud’s inestimably powerful links page: that’d be Vera Brosgol, Jen Wang, Erika Moen, and, well, Dylan; four scarily talented cartoonists just out of high school and looking for trouble—lock up your sons and daughters and step away from the Wacom Tablet.

The trouble with the whole Four-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking shtick (Fwoombuneffel?) is that there’s really six. Or that’s how I think of them, anyway: the Mostly Acquisitions crowd, the six cartoonists who with this 24-page $2.00 ashcan had put together maybe the neatest thing (aside from the Junko Mizuno postcards and the Eddie Campbell original) we’d picked up at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con: Brosgol and Moen and Meconis and Wang, yes, but also Bill Mudron and Kevin Hanna.

People at the con couldn’t stop talking about Mostly Acquisitions: “Have you seen the minicomic with the story about the girl who buys a vibrator?” they’d say. They were talking about Vera Brosgol’s story, “Babeland,” which is, well, a piece about a girl buying her first vibrator: marvellously expressive cartooning with a slyly subversive political kick. But they were all being lazy, referencing the the memorable high-concept hook, and giving unforgiveably short shrift to the rest. There’s Bill Mudron’s loopily obsessive pencil work (check out those plaids!), like one of Al Columbia’s apocryphal Merrie Melodies kicked loose in time. Erika Moen manages to channel Ellen Forney with cheeky assurance (for all that she was seven in ’90, not ’75. Added bonus: I now know what a GeoSafari is. The heart bleeds). Kevin Hanna’s appealing characters with their skinny lines and grey toning and expressive body language manage the neat trick of finding something compelling in the oeuvre of Michael Bay. And Dylan Meconis rounds it all off more than nicely with a beautifully oblique tone poem of hands and words. (There’s not enough poetry in comics, I think. Or is it vice versa? Maybe it’s vice versa.) (Jen Wang did the cover, which just means you have to go spend extra time yourself oohing and ahhing at her impressive command of spacing and timing, which are of course in comics the same thing.) —And this is not to say that there aren’t rough patches and places where an informed critic might suck his teeth and make That Face and say gently chiding things that can’t help but come across as patronizing, but that’s not important now, and that’s not what I’m on about here. (Of course, the fact that an informed critic might choose to gloss over these rough patches could itself be construed as patronizing, so let me just reiterate that it’s not important now and it’s not what I’m on about here.) It’s the joy this Kinko’d minicomic was steeped in, the sheer love of the medium radiating from it, a palpable zing that (with no small amount of craft) reached out and grabbed your collar and kicked you in the pants and goaded you in the ribs. Who the hell were these people? you asked yourself, because you had to. And more importantly: where the hell did they come from, out of nowhere like that?

Well, right here. Mostly. Head back to the Mostly Acquisitions homepage and scroll down to the list of contributors and note how each and every one of them has a LiveJournal. Now follow the various links and note how interconnected they’ve been, across dozens of states and thousands of miles: trading links and tips and posting art for critiquing (or just oohing and aahing) and arranging con trips and sharing their various audiences—hell, having and building audiences of their own by having a way to cheaply and quickly distribute their work far and wide, by the dozen or the thousand, next door or overseas…

Kids these days. —Let’s back up a decade or so. In and around Boston and Amherst (and New York City and northern New Jersey, the Monmouth County area), there’s four cartoonists who are ten years younger than they are right now, and when they go to cons in the New York area they usually end up hanging with Scott McCloud (ten years ditto), who’s doing a funky little black and white comic called Zot! After trawling for back issues of Byrne/Claremont X-Men and Star Wars (Marvel, not Dark Horse; y’all remember that funky green rabbit?) they’d all join Scott at a table at McDonald’s and he’d let fall extemporaneously a chunk of the science inside his head that would eventually become Understanding Comics. (Scott would demonstrate his passion for Naming Things for Easier Linking by dubbing this clique as variously the McDonald’s Club, the McDonald’s Supper Club, or [for obscure reasons] the Haberdashery.) —Heady times, heady times. They all had the religion, then, because Scott is a mighty evangelist for comics, and they did their own minicomics and traded them at cons and through the mail (this was before you had to differentiate it as snail-mail), and whenever they got together (at a con, or at someone or another’s apartment for a massive chips-and-funky-salsas party, say), the sketchbooks would come out and be passed around. Ooh, that’s nice, you maybe should have tried this, look, here’s how I did that. And they did 24-hour comics and collaborated on the occasional anthology and even put together some proposals and shipped them around, but the black-and-white boom they’d come of age with had blown away, and Eclipse was dead and Fantagraphics wasn’t biting and not one of the four of them was interested in doing the sort of chromium-plated super crap that passed for hot comics in those days, and it’s hard, doing your art when no one but your friends is looking (and them only now and again, when you can get together); harder when it’s something as laborious as comics, and as marginalized. And so one by one they slipped away, and Paul went back to music, and Amy went on to collage, and Barry went sort of sideways and eventually into political cartooning, and the only real evidence of this flurry of comics from back in the day is in a couple of boxes in this basement or that attic or underneath the bed.

Of course, there were four. Jenn stuck it out. Which is not to say that the other three were fools or cowards or lacked some Bill Bennett morality-play virtue. This isn’t a parable, and Paul’s music is vivid and funky and beautiful and Amy’s collages are stunning and boggle the mind and Barry is pretty much a Jules Feiffer for our time. (Yes. I am well aware that Barry almost always uses the central technique of comics—juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence—to finesse the timing of his monologual political strips, so he is, indeed, doing comics; don’t muck up my lovely rhetorical point with niggling little facts, okay?) —But what Jenn really wanted to do could only be done in comics; comics was all she really wanted to do; and so she soldiered on (off and on) for ten years or so: ditching her color symbolism off the bat, because what publisher would spring for a color SF comic about female space hobos? Working on her inking, despite the ways in which it wrestled with her more textured, illustrative style. Trimming or padding each installment to fit the 24 pages mandated by the current market and 4-page printer’s signatures. Writing the first issue through four times over to make it fit and drawing it start to finish twice (and a couple more aborted attempts) and all of it in isolation. “The fact that Jenn Manley Lee isn’t making comics professionally today is proof positive that this industry is screwed up beyond repair,” said Scott McCloud once, but who knew? Who cared? Who else could see the work? Fantagraphics still wasn’t biting, and Dark Horse wouldn’t have been interested in the first place. Making copies down at the Kinko’s yourself is expensive, and lugging a portfolio full of artboard from one reader to the next gets tiring, after a while.

But on the web, none of this is a problem. Color? As easy and inexpensive to display as line art, or grayscale. Story or chapter or episode length? Whatever you can get away with. Content? Whatever you like: vampires and the French Revolution, or autobiographically contemplating life after high school over coffee, or reincarnating Anne Frank to fight vicious Moon Nazis, or creepily synchronous letters appearing out of nowhere in a creepy apartment, or the Chinese Zodiac come to life, or pop culture deconstruction and sexual angst. (Or, well, hobos in outer space. That are women.) Whatever you want: write it, draw it, scan it and upload it, then cheaply and quickly distribute it far and wide, by the dozen or the thousand, next door or overseas…

—The more astute among you will have noticed you can do much the same thing with collages and music and political cartoons.

Whatever my purpose in setting these various tops spinning, it isn’t to state that the web is the be-all and end-all, the Omega point, the One True Medium. Paper is still king. For all their LiveJournal notoriety, after all, it was Mostly Acquisitions—6 pieces of 8 1/2” x 11” paper xeroxed on both sides and folded in half and saddle stapled twice—that got them noticed at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con. (Of course, Jenn and I knew to be on the lookout for Mostly Acquisitions thanks to online links and email correspondence, but life is full of little ironies.) Nor is it to state that without the web, comics would soon enough have lost the sparks of the Six-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking (Swoombuneffel. I think we’re on to something with that—); comics is a harsh mistress, after all, and there’s still plenty of time for one or another or most of them to go back or onwards or sideways and eventually into something else: Vera Brosgol to the harsher and even more demanding mistress of animation, say, or Bill Mudron to the relative respectability of online film (and genre television) criticism; Jen Wang could chuck it all tomorrow for film school and a groundbreaking series of diet soda commercials; Kevin Hanna could become a behind-the-scenes player in Big Content; Erika Moen could renounce the frivolity of comics for a lifetime of committed political activism; there’s still time for Dylan Meconis to become an ambitious multi-hyphenate with a knack for interesting new neuroses. Life is terribly contingent, especially for the (harrumph harrumph) young, and having done comics on the web and done them well doesn’t necessarily doom you to a life of juxtaposing pictorial and other images in deliberate, even narrative, sequences. (And it isn’t even the web necessarily that got them where they are; it’s also having come of age in comics at a time when Understanding Comics and the conversations it spawned are still ringing in the air, when the range of what comics are and can be is far richer than the spectrum from Claremont/Byrne X-Men to Marvel’s Star Wars, when Time has a comics critic and Dan Clowes has a movie. —The industry may be ailing, but the medium’s never been better, and yes, that has a lot to do with it, too.)

But—

I pick up Mostly Acquisitions and get that eat-my-dust oldtimers zing off it, the potential that tingles my fingers and makes me grin—

And I go online and look at how they’ve been able to share their work, and what they’ve said about it, the fanbases they’ve built and the names they’ve checked and the links they’ve shared, and I trace the network from Pittsburgh to Seattle to San Francisco to New York to mishmow to artstrumpet to fartsofire to covielle—

And I can’t help but wonder: what kind of comics would they have made, ten years ago, Paul and Jenn and Barry and Amy? If there’d been a world-wide web? —Also, cheap color scanners.

And I can’t help but ask: what kind of comics might they be making now?

But Christ, I’m nattering like it’s 1997 and Mondo 2000 and instant communities and gift economies and paradigm shifts and the paperless fucking office. The web? Change anything? You give people a way to talk to each other cheaply and easily and they’ll figure out the darndest things to do with it. This is news?

I mean, we all know what the web is really for: Who’s Your Secret Hogwarts Lover quizzes. ’Fess up, y’all.

—Filed 8356 days ago to Sequentualities; Comments [11].

Boxing Day.

There’s this guy in Canada who insists that the perfect gift for Jenn would be for me to announce that I am giving up pornography. Instead, I think I’ll share some of my meager traffic with her, by pointing out that now that she’s got Movable Type up and running, I can link to her wonderful post about the last time she went to a strip club. (It was coincidentally enough my first. I got to find out what’s the cruellest song for anyone—male or female—to strip to: “Eleanor Rigby.” Ouch.)

In other Boxing Day news—but I should maybe first tell you about an email my mother sent me, several years ago. Back about ’95 or ’96, I think, when we had one email account for an entire household of college drop-outs (and a couple of graduates, yes yes) and I still remembered how to use Tin and Pine and whatnot. It was a simple email message: a hyperlink, and the words, “Oh really?” or something to that effect. The link was to an entry in the archive Oberlin had maintained of posts made to its intramural bulletin board, a limited Usenet-like forum called Infosys. Some bright young thing had put the archive on the web in those heady, early days, so that by clicking on this simple hyperlink, one was taken almost instantaneously to a post I’d made in—what, 1988? Thereabouts, anyway—about the best places on campus to have sex.

My mother, ladies and gentlemen. —The archive has since (thank God) vanished, a victim of limited bandwidth, perhaps, but the peculiar mixture of embarrassment (aw, geeze, Mom, close the door!) and sudden joy (she read something! That I wrote!) has stayed with me. (By the way: mostly braggadoccio and hearsay. In case you were wondering. Honest! It was!)

Now, we have our differences politically and otherwise that probably are not as great as we imagine (and our similarities, ditto) and we maybe don’t talk about them as much as we ought. Family. You know. So while I knew she knew about this blogthing (the link’s in my email sig, after all, shameless self-promoter that I am), I didn’t really know what she thought of it. Or even if she read it. Until I opened one of my packages from The Folks: The Tipping Point. And said to myself, “Aw, geeze, Mom, you read that mawkish thing?” and “She reads it! Wow!” all at once.

My father—you know, I think I will have some Utah Phillips waiting for him when he gets back from Spain. (See above re: differences, as well as similarities.)

And: I now have a lovely example of Arabic calligraphy (the alphabet, cunningly matted and framed) to add to my astrolabe, thanks to the Spouse; also, my mother-in-law (the lovely and talented Kathy Lee—take a bow) got me a cashmere sweater. “It’s the in thing, apparently,” she said. “Snuggly and comforting, since it was such a hard year for everyone.” She got Jenn one, too. —It’s the first cashmere sweater I’ve ever worn: it’s at once the lightest and the warmest sweater I have, and from now on I insist that all my winter garments be woven of the stuff.

Assuming, of course, that 2003 turns out somewhat less hard than 2002.

—Filed 8358 days ago to Indulgences; Comments [3].

Apparently, pregnancy is a fact of life these days.

Granted, it’s a glaring example of that scourge of sound-bite journalism, the Ill-Defined Antecedent. Nonetheless, this quote from this article is instructive:

“As long as Midge is married, I don’t have a problem with it,” said Kristin Morris from Newport News. “It’s a fact of life these days.”

Since the first “it” is a reference to Midge’s (inexplicably controversial) pregnancy, and reading the second “it” as referring only to that specific blessed event (“Midge’s pregnancy is a fact of life these days”) is a wee bit psychotic, one is left with the assumption that what Kristin Morris of Newport News (who doesn’t, we should repeat, have a problem with married dolls having children) wanted to say was, “Pregnancy is a fact of life these days.” —One could, perhaps, make a further assumption or two: perhaps she meant “Children aged six and up being aware of pregnancy as a concept is a fact of life these days.”

Nonetheless: doesn’t it make you want to grab one of these upset parents, these frowningly concerned ministers, grab them by the shoulder, perhaps (not too threateningly), look them in the eyes, and say, quite forcefully, “You know—your generation did not invent sex.”

—via Ignatz

—Filed 8358 days ago to Poprocks; .

Chickenhawks of the kulturkampf.

Remember the Cairo Pledges?

Back in 1994, in Cairo, the International Conference on Population and Development outlined a not-uncontroversial agenda to limit population growth by providing family planning services throughout the world. In 1999 (Y6B, apparently; I vaguely remember the news we’d passed 6 billion people, but never saw “Y6B” until just now. —Like “Y2K,” get it? How quaint), there was some evaluation and re-evaluation and negotiations (but no renegotiations) and meetings with names like the Hague Forum were held, and the impact of the ICPD’s Programme of Action were assessed, and how well countries had held up their various ends of the various bargains (the US had only ponied up about half the money it had promised, typically)—and you should maybe insert your own joke about lies, damn lies, and statistics that take several months of argument to phrase properly. Still. The report that was finally issued “outlined some of the progress that has been made in the five years since the 1994 conference and proposed further steps that should be taken around the world to promote development, gender equality, women’s empowerment and reproductive health.” Maybe there wasn’t enough money, but there never is; good work was still being done. “All but a few nations had accepted the essentials of the Cairo agenda; expanding access to reproductive health services is no longer a controversial issue; and the challenges of implementing the ambitious goals of the Programme of Action are now in the forefront.”

But that was 1999, and this is 2002, and George W. Bush is in the White House. So. What happens at the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference, when more than 40 countries meet to discuss the current state of the Cairo Pledges and reaffirm their commitments? Let’s ask Eugene Dewey, the US assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration:

“We have made some efforts to improve the language of the text. This has been interpreted as pulling away from the ICPD,” he added. “We are not trying to overturn anything.”

As it stands, the 22-page plan of action has large chunks of bracketed paragraphs, indicating the language in the document that Washington’s negotiators are disputing.

Among the sections with language that the U.S. is objecting to are those on “Gender Equality, Equity and Empowerment of Women,” “Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health,” “Adolescent Reproductive Health” and “HIV/AIDS.”

The Cairo Pledges as affirmed in 1999 state that “where there is a gap between contraceptive use and the proportion of individuals expressing a desire to space or limit their families, countries should attempt to close this gap by at least 50% by 2005, 75% by 2010 and 100% by 2050.” —We are against that, now.

The Cairo Pledges as affirmed in 1999 state that adolescents have a right to information that will “enable them to make responsible and informed choices and decisions regarding their sexual and reproductive health needs….” —We are against that, now. And the bit that insisted “that at least 90%, and by 2010 at least 95%, of young men and women aged 15-24 have access to the information, education and services necessary to develop the life skills required to reduce their vulnerability to HIV infection.” We can’t have that, can we?

The Cairo Pledges as affirmed in 1999 assert a need to provide treatment to women who have suffered from illegal abortions, and “in circumstances where abortion is not against the law, health systems should train and equip health-service providers and should take other measures to ensure that such abortion is safe and accessible.” Emphasis added, but even so: this sort of language could be used to support abortion rights, and so it is too much, and so it must go.

There were controversies in 1994, and in 1999, too. As “The Bumpy Road from Cairo to Now” puts it, “the Holy See and a small number of allied delegations sought to have the document reflect their conservative views.” Those “allied delegations” included variously Argentina, Libya, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Syria. Never the US, no; we, in fact, brokered a number of compromises on language that left intact the original Cairo Pledges (which, remember, were not to be renegotiated) while preserving some rhetorical wiggle room around such controversial topics as adolescent sexuality, women’s empowerment, and abortion.

But that was 1999, and this is 2002, and George W. Bush is in the White House. And we stand alone.

The US delegation called for a vote on the plan [17 December], an almost unprecedented move at a United Nations (UN) conference, which normally make decision by consensus. The US was the only dissenter in votes to remove the phrases and insert a stronger focus on abstinence in the section of the plan dealing with adolescent sexual activity, according to Agence France Presse.

Iran was one of the participants at this Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference. Iran thought we were going too far. Iran voted us down.

The US delegation, led by Assistant Secretary of State Gene Dewey, argued that reaffirming the Cairo plan would “violate [US] principles” and “constitute endorsement of abortion” in a speech at the conference on Monday, according to the Jakarta Post. Dewey further stated that “the United States supports the sanctity of life from conception to natural death,” according to the New York Times.

The Philippines, the largest Catholic country in attendance, did not agree with us. The Philippines voted us down.

We did end up joining the consensus in reaffirming the Cairo Pledges, submitting a non-binding document outlining our various objections to teaching adolescents what they need to have healthy sex lives and to empowering women to choose where and when and if they will have a family and to ensuring that contraceptives and abortions are available on demand and without apology. —But the Bush Administration was threatening to back out of the Cairo Pledges entirely back in November, to take our ball and hold our breath until we turn blue if we didn’t get our way. Consensus, schmonsensus; given our contemptuous (and contemptible) track record of late as regards multilateralism and keeping our word, I think it’s safe to say that the pledged Programme of Action won’t be getting the $6.1 billion total budget the world thought it would need by 2005.

In 1999, while world governments and NGOs were hammering their way through the Hague Forum to reaffirm the work of the Cairo Pledges, then-candidate George Bush gave a speech to the Council For National Policy. No press was in attendance, but the speech was caught on a tape that few have heard:

The media and center-left activist groups urged the group and Bush’s presidential campaign to release the tape of his remarks. The CNP, citing its bylaws that restrict access to speeches, declined. So did the Bush campaign, citing the CNP.

Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership.

The two events might not be connected. But since none of the participants would say what Bush said, the CNP’s kingmaking role mushroomed in the mind’s eye, at least to the Democratic National Committee, which urged release of the tapes.

“Partly because so little was known about CNP, the hubbub died down,” says that ABC piece. Well, crank up the hubbub. The Mighty Casio has dug up some ugly dirt: a decent plot of links, CNP tax returns, and evidence of links with Christian Reconstructionists and with electronic voting machine manufacturers. —Plus, their friends and fellow travelers.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the chickenhawks of the kulturkampf. They meet in secret and conduct high-level debates that they never talk about and they refuse to discuss their intents and purposes. They hold firm to their beliefs, like the segregationists and the neo-Confederates, but—like the segregationists and the neo-Confederates, and their reprehensible ideas regarding race—they realize their “nativism, xenophobia, theories of racial superiority, sexism, homophobia, authoritarianism, militarism, reaction and in some cases outright neo-fascism” won’t find much acceptance in the general culture. (Of course, the general culture has been seduced by a liberal media run by New York and Hollywood.) They know their idea of what God and Judeo-Christian morality ordains for us does not square with scientific research and reason and public opinion. (Of course, scientists are all secular humanists who lie and dissemble to deny God’s word.) They know that if they fight openly for what they believe, they will lose.

And so, like access capitalists and safety-net entrepreneurs, they do deals in back alleys and smoke-filled rooms. Like the chickenhawks in the war against Iraq, they lie and distort and propagandize and ignore or dismiss the dire warnings of experts in the field. And—as with the segregationists and the neo-Confederates—the Republicans pander to them, speak at their functions and funnel money their way, and in return for votes in primaries and get-out-the-vote efforts in general elections, the kulturkampf chickenhawks get their agenda imposed by fiat, circumventing public debate and the democratic process. Vital health information is removed from the public sphere. Scientists are replaced by theocrats who allow agendas to dictate facts. Churches are allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion in their use of federal money. Money is withheld and promises are broken for the most spurious of reasons. And we turn our backs on the rest of the world and walk away from hard-fought incremental but nonetheless valuable gains in the fight for health and individual autonomy and education and population control.

Promises were made in 1999. Our delegates sent to reaffirm the Cairo Pledges and move forward on its Programme of Action promised to fulfill our commitments to family planning and reproductive health services, and, as Hilary Clinton stated in her keynote address to the Hague Forum, to recognize that we “are called upon to make investments in the human and economic development of people, particularly girls and women.”

But it’s 2002, and George W. Bush is in the White House. We do not know what promises he made in 1999 to the CNP, or implied, to secure the imprimatur of conservative solons; the speech is secret. There is no text to quote, no public record of his words.

His actions, though, speak loudly enough. And so will the consequences. —We know what promises he’s keeping.

—Filed 8362 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments.

Straw; camel’s back—

InstaPundit links to this quiz. You can go look at it if you like, but you already know what all the questions are about, and what all the answers to the questions are.

Now. Do you want to go tell these insultingly obscurantist cracker-ass fuckwits where all those “Democrats” fled to? Or do you want to keep watching them screw this up, over and over and over again? (It’s okay. I’m from Alabama. I can say “cracker-ass.”)

—Filed 8364 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Good news.

Somewhat and sort of. Via Barry: Thanks to massive protests and lawsuits filed, they’re starting to let the detainees go.

Or, if you feel like blaming the victim, you can quote the INS party line:

“Our objective was to hold people only until we had completed confirmation of records checks,” the I.N.S. official said. “But a staggering number of people showed up on the last day and we couldn’t keep up.”

To be fair, we shouldn’t blame the INS (wholly):

An agency official in Southern California said that Justice Department officials in Washington dictated the rules of the program and gave local authorities little leeway to determine who should be detained or released. As a result, hundreds of men with minor visa violations were handcuffed and locked up for days while officials sorted through mountains of paperwork and bail applications.

Ladies and gentlemen: again, John Ashcroft.

—Filed 8364 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Hug your local librarian.

Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) held a press conference a couple of hours ago, apparently, to announce plans for legislation that would appeal some portions of the USA PATRIOT Act that “undermine Americans’ constitutionally protected right to read and to access information without government interference”; legislation prompted by a letter from the Vermont Library Association. Nothing on Google News about it yet (as of 11ses PST on a brightening Friday), but I’m sure it’ll be top-of-the-fold on cnn.com as soon as they stop wrangling about whether the homphobic bigot or the soulless corprocrat will take over from the unintentional racist, who quit just in time to secure a committee chair. (Will he keep his promises? Let’s watch and find out!)

But this was supposed to be a brightening Friday. The count is up to 20, now, and the Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee reports some concrete progress with the City Council; yay, team. (I should maybe go sign the petition, already.) Inch by inch by whatever means at hand.

In the meanwhile, check to see if your local library is sporting these signs. Inch by inch…

—Filed 8364 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Neimöller time.

Shut the fuck up. Don’t tell me I’m overreacting and don’t tell me it’s hyperbole and don’t tell me I’m dishonoring the memory of thus-and-so. And don’t you dare tell me it was illegal and they were just following the letter of the law, or I’ll pull Nuremberg out, too, and smack you silly. At a time like this, when somebody does something this monumentally stupid and it’s purportedly in my name and in yours, you damn well better believe I’m going to get purple in the face and pull all the rhetorical tricks I can muster out from up my sleeve and speak up. We are all going to speak up, dammit.

They came for the Muslims whose papers weren’t in order.

The ones who came to this country because they like it. The ones who came over to our side from that “Islamofascism” we are supposedly in a death struggle with. The ones who are trying to play by the arcane and convoluted and outdated rules. The ones you shot at and spat at and smeared in your newspaper columns, the ones you berated over and over again because they didn’t immediately apologize for something they did not do and could not imagine and would never condone. —And with the dying gasp of our INS, the first breath of our nascent Department of Homeland Security, right on the cusp of a war most of us do not want, these Muslims from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria are rounded up in mass arrests and detained—in your name, in my name—for paperwork violations. (They started to round up the Armenians, too. Then someone remembered that Armenians have some political clout and they stopped.)

Atrios is all over this one; if you know of any defense funds being raised to help these folks, please pass the word along. —And among the other links I swiped, Atrios is recommending this piece by eRiposte; read it. Now.

All I can add is outmoded history, but if you’ve read this far and you still aren’t incensed (and yet, you’re still reading), then maybe you need a refresher course in how badly the INS has handled stuff like this on a routine basis. The executive summary, from the lead article:

In a four-month investigation, The Oregonian found that the INS:

• Holds 20,000 people in a secretive and poorly monitored network of prisons and county jails that often subjects them to abuse, loses track of them and sends them from jail to jail—often far from their families and lawyers.
• Jails youthful victims of sexual abuse and other vulnerable children alongside criminal offenders—violating legal agreements to move them to safer, less restrictive facilities.
• Breaks up families by jailing or deporting relatives of U.S. citizens for minor offenses or decades-old crimes.
• Mistreats some asylum seekers, who flee persecution in their homelands only to be jailed in the United States or sent back to life-threatening situations without regard for the dangers that await.
• Tolerates racism and sexual abuse in its ranks and has one of the highest rates of misconduct among federal law-enforcement agencies.
• Allows district directors and sector chiefs such as Portland’s Beebe to run their 57 jurisdictions as fiefdoms, applying the law unevenly.
• Overworks its employees, whose low pay, grueling work conditions and difficult mission demoralize officers and invite abuse.
• Bungles immigration cases, including those of U.S. citizens who are wrongly deported and imprisoned.

And: the Oregonian’s Pulitzer notwithstanding, the Mercury would like humbly to remind you they were on the case months earlier.

Now. All this happened two years ago. The aforementioned Director David Beebe resigned after an uproar over the strip-search and detention of Chinese citizen Guo Liming, who’d been flying through Portland on a business trip. And reforms—some sparked by the Oregonian and its dam’ Pulitzer—have been attempted both locally and nationally. Though they’re rather on the back burner thanks to 911 and the birth pangs of Homeland Security. —The lesson to take from all this, then?

Speaking out works. Sort of. Provisionally. You have to keep doing it, for it to have any effect. And reforming a giant bureaucracy is hard work even if you ice a figurehead or two. But!

They came for the Muslims whose papers weren’t in order, and we spoke up, and they backed off and stopped their idiocies and remembered what it is about this country that’s supposedly so great, and if they tried a bit too hard to spin their retreat as a win-win, well, we decided not to hold it against them. Though we kept our eyes peeled for the next un-American power grab.

—Hmm. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, somehow. Nonetheless: Email. Fax. Call. Get this on the news and get people talking about it. Spread the word. Go!

—Filed 8364 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [5].

An interesting wrinkle,<br /> <em>or,</em> Again with the posse.

So Norah Vincent riffs on an old Jackson Browne lyric uncredited and Charles Pierce emails James Capozzolla pointing this out and Capozzolla decides to rib Vincent about it and posts Pierce’s email in its entirety with the headline or rather subhead “Norah Vincent: Jackson Browne Fan—And Plagiarist?” and now Vincent is tut-tutting over the outrageous slings and arrows that are let fly at established Fourth Estaters from the unwashed, the unpoliced, the unshackled. (Yes, I know blogtopia is self-policed by a fairly neat and effective smart-mob mechanism. But “self-washed, self-policed, self-shackled” just doesn’t have the same ring.)

—For the record, and not that anyone asked: I don’t think what Vincent did to Jackson Browne was plagiarism. Then, I live for the oddball allusion and the kick that the echo of a half-remembered snippet of something else can add to a piece. Nothing new under the sun and Fair Use and Devil take the hindmost or hang the consequences or whatever. Capozzolla was if a wee bit disingenuous still quite right to put that question mark after “Plagiarist?” But! Were someone to tag me for, oh, I dunno, stealing a parenthetical aside from Delany (it was just sitting there, honest, so plump and digressive), well, I’d cheerfully own up to it. And on we go to the next. —Not obsessively stew over it with conflicting rationales for a couple of days and then drag it back into the spotlight when online Wall Street Journal content is successfully held liable for libel in Australia. Dirty pool, that is, and we’re not even taking into account her refusal thus far to name those she accuses of the smearage.

So Capozzolla is right to take the incident apart in a fine and mighty dudgeon, and Vincent’s editor would do well to maybe take his phone calls on the matter.

(Psst. Mr. Capozzolla? Not to get all pedantic or nothin’, but it’s never “the hoi polloi.” Just “hoi polloi.” Verb. sap. and all. Not that anyone asked. But.)

—Filed 8365 days ago to Paralitticisms; .

Round up a posse and head ’em off at the pass.

David Brin has written about how we’re on the cusp of another age of amateurs: how coming advances in technology and information management (and coming variations on current technology and information management) will make it easier and cheaper and better for impassioned amateurs than detached professionals to do whatever it is you want to get done. And we’re seeing that already to be sure in fields such as music distribution, where the RIAA is busily trying to prevent impassioned amateurs from muscling in on their market. (Yes, that’s a heavily slanted and opinionated assessment of the situation. So sue me.)

More interesting, I think, at the moment, is what’s happening in the field of news and reporting and punditry. To put it bluntly: the amateur schmoes are cleaning the pros’ clocks.

We’ve seen the handwriting on the wall rendered loud and clear in the Trent Lott Imbroglio, and now we’re seeing a curious side effect in its aftermath, as various pros scratch their heads and ask each other, “Who was that masked man?” They’re trying to pin this scalp on one of the pros, moonlighting as the pseudonymous Atrios over at the Mighty Middle C, because the alternative is (as yet) unthinkable: that, as Mr. Capozzolla says in that Rittenhouse Review piece, “a man with a full-time job and career aside from his weblog—i.e., Atrios—has done so much to outshine the purported ‘professionals’ of our punditocracy.” —And as for the job the pros themselves are doing: well. The Daily Howler is as usual doing an incomparable job of showing just how far below the fold they’re falling, these days. (To name but one example.)

It’s hardly as simple as that (it never is); some of the amateurs are also pros and some of the pros are acting like amateurs and as far as the Affaire d’Lott goes, everyone who is in a position to know where it all began agrees that The Note kicked it all off with their squib on Thurmond’s birthday. But in an age that sees ethics burnished by a century or so of professional journalism rapidly brushed aside in the name of higher ratings and bigger market shares and headlines that don’t “impact” the bottom line, you’re going to have to depend more and more on the unpoliced, unwashed, unshackled schmoes to kick up the ruckuses that need kicking. (Rucki?) —Certainly, if anyone ends up claiming this scalp, I’m betting it’ll be some part-time “amateur” like Hesiod or Dwight Meredith, and not a member of our once-proud, ever-more-compromised Fourth Estate.

—Filed 8366 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Fort Disconnect.

“Eighty-seven thousand dollars?” says Valerie. She has the office next door and two kids and a house out over the hills and a husband who also works full-time. She’s talking about this. (Really, it’s $87,510. If you live in Virginia, the state government will pick up an additional $3,937.95 in sales tax. There’s no shipping and handling, but it’ll take 12 weeks or so to make arrangements with the artisan to have it built on your property. So you’ve pretty much missed the holiday deadline, if you were hoping otherwise.) And before we get too much further, I should probably make it clear that I have nothing against said artisan or people who have the wherewithal to pay $2,870 for a credenza or $8,980 for a trundle bed or $15,492.50 for a toy Range Rover or even people who spend more than my good friend Amy blew on a house for a backyard fort. (Amy works full-time for the county. Her housemate and swiggee is getting a law practice off the ground. No kids, but two cats, and we all know how cats are.) And I don’t have anything against the people who are trying to make a buck off selling the most extraordinary children’s furnishings in the world. (Aside from perhaps a lingering resentment at yet another attempt to provide “an unparalleled on-line shopping experience.”) —I’m as eat-the-rich as the next guy, but let’s face it: when you’re projecting $3 million in annual sales, you’re not moving too many toy Range Rovers or backyard fortilaces or probably not even $2,100 Silver Stream prams. Those are showpieces, wowpieces, beautiful chimeræ that you can order, yeah, sure, but are really just there to build buzz and get the punters in the door, lending a burnish of class and elegance (with a soupçon of crass consumerism) so they feel a sympathetic shiver as they pony up for $136 lamps and $30 backpacks and $60 rugs. So: no potshots at Posh Tots.

I have an altogether other purpose.

Go back to Posh Tot’s front page and note with what pride they spotlight the items ordered through them that grace the baby nook of Rachel and Ross’s apartment on Friends. The Black Toile Adult Glider, the Classic Changing Chest, the Retro Crib, the Silver Cross Ascot Stroller, the (handpainted) Princess Wallhanging, the Sir Lance-a-Trot, Jr. Ruminate for a moment on this: an untenured professor of pæleontology and a middle manager in purchasing for a large clothing concern—or is she still with Ralph Lauren? I don’t follow the show that religiously—these two middle class low-rent bobos are spending $3,598 on six classy, high-ticket items for baby Emma. (Even with the rent on their spacious West Village apartment.)

I’m a project manager for a small legal database firm these days (apparently, I’m also something of a paralegal now, or something); I also freelance as a designer and a writer (I swear, Brett, I’m working on it! Honest!). The Spouse is in addition to being a world-renowned cartoonist (and you know what that pays) is a production designer for an industrial design firm. We have two cats and too much house. We’re middle class low-rent bobos, and when people ask us these days when we’re going to have a kid we kind of shrug and say well, we’re no longer trying not to. We’re not taking temperatures and eyeing calendars and scheduling nookie, but we’ve given it some thought and crunched some numbers and shrugged and said we can do it, if. It won’t be a drunken accident that catches us utterly by surprise and totally throws our lives and finances out of whack for the entertainment of millions of viewers each week.

Even so, I gotta tell you: no way in hell can we even begin to think of dropping $3,598 on a stroller and a rocking horse and a toile glider and a crib and a changing chest and a handpainted original one-of-a-kind wallhanging.

(Of course, Rachel is in purchasing. Maybe she cut a deal.)

We live much better on TV and in the movies than we do in real life. Delany made a point somewhere or other that I’d quote if I hadn’t loaned my copy of Shorter Views to John that almost all forms of storytelling deriving from the 19th century European tradition (I’m on a limb on that on; I’m remembering the vague boundaries of the class he referred to, and not how he articulated it) take great if unconscious pains to make the protagonist’s class and level of income at least vaguely clear within the first few pages. (Try it out yourself: pick up a book in any genre and watch for the telltale clues. It’s interesting. Now try to imagine telling a story that doesn’t.) —In television, and in the movies, it’s more insidious; the narrative clues of job and responsibility and finances are divorced from their visual cues, dissolved in a general haze of meticulous art direction and product placement. (Think of all the offices on TV workplace sitcoms, which look like the net bubble never burst with their exposed brickwork and Aeron chairs and iMacs—hell, remember the G4 Cube? There were more of those on TV shows than ever actually got sold, I think.) It’s a false image, an eidolon, a fevre dream that can’t stand up to the real: a haze of upper middle class accoutrements with no clear accounting of how they were acquired (we got that easy chair and the sleeper sofa as an apartment warming gift from Jenn’s mother, who anyway wanted somewhere to sleep when she visited us; those bookshelves—the two black ones we bought on sale at Office Depot, but the other two we got in the “divorce” from the household, after carting them around Massachusetts and across the country; the TV set is almost 20 years old; the Fiestaware we registered for our wedding, and Jenn’s grandmother got us most of it; the masks there on the wall were a gift from my parents; the brass table was $20 at a yardsale, helluva find); workplace comedies filled with people whose home lives we never see—where they spend the money they make, or how (or how much), though they always have choice clothes; utter disconnections between the jobs they nominally hold and the wacky situations their impulsive purchases land them in (that untenured professor of pæleontology snapping up an apothecary’s table at Pottery Barn, say). It’s a different world, a disjointed world, and when a show takes a step out of it—even a tiny one—it’s news, it’s a hook, it’s Roseanne or Drew Carey and not much else. (Okay. Malcolm in the Middle.)

But there’s reasons for this and there’s escapism and people aren’t blind sheep working themselves into an early grave for material comforts that will never be enough—they are, but that’s not really where I’m trying to go with this, either, any more than the eat the rich bit. It’s that image of another world, it’s the glass screen between them that I want you to keep in mind. Because when the folks inside the Beltway say that Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) is from another world, I think it’s because they’re in the mediated one. The one where you can buy apothecary’s tables on a whim and $600 bed linens for your 6-year-old daughter, no sweat. It’s not so much thinking that everyone is rich as it is having trouble imagining what not being rich looks like and feels like. Those $12,000 per annum lucky duckies have everything they could ever need, right? They look so happy on TV…

And Kaptur, of course, is from ours. We are the other world.

(Oh, hell. What am I saying? Of course it’s fucking obscene to spend $87,000 on a backyard fort. Jesus. Eighty-seven thousand dollars. Off with their heads.)

—Filed 8367 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [4].

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