Love (or a Brief Dopamine Hit) for Sale, Summer of 2024

It's been years since I bothered updating this site. It was mentioned recently as part of my online "presence", and I therefore scratch this message, Arne Saknussemm-style. These items are on sale, available for picnics, lodge meetings, children's parties, bat mitzvahs, and smokers.

A short excerpt from POLL PIRATE, or, THE CONFESSIONS OF POLL FLANDERS: A (Mostly) True History of Piracy Being an Account of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, as told by One Poll Flanders, Who Sailed with Lawless Men, Buccaneers, Freebooters, Privateers, and Cutpurses, and Lived to One Hundred and Twenty Years of Age. Along with Digressions on Scurvy, the Pox, Loose Tongues, and the Horrors of a Lee Shore. For Such Moral Uplift as May Save Young Persons from a Sorry End, and Much Good May It Do Them. appears in THE BLACK BEACON BOOK OF PIRATE TALES, available from Amazon or your local bookseller. The full version of Poll's long life is a work in progress.

A much more tragic short story, BUDDY BOLDEN'S LAST STAND, appears in UNCOMMON MINDS: A COLLECTION OF AIs, DREAMWALKERS, AND OTHER PSYCHIC MYSTERIES. A minister visits Charles "Buddy" Bolden, the trumpeter who may have invented jazz music before his psychotic break in 1906. Brother Bolden's "last concert" in the asylum spins into a Dionysian frenzy until it collapses under the weight of his attempt to express more than can be heard.

If you are a community theater maven or school teacher, your dewy-eyed charges hunger for the cultural literacy available in TROJAN WAR CONFIDENTIAL. Ripped from the headlines of 1180 BC, TROJAN WAR CONFIDENTIAL tells all, from the Judgement of Paris to the fall of Troy. This play for students showcases a contest between three goddesses, the many mommy issues of Achilles, and a Trojan Horse that argues with itself. Available for theatrical production from Brooklyn Publishers, or for classroom use at Teachers Pay Teachers. More roleplay scripts for classroom use are at Teachers Pay Teachers, From the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the Greek and Persian Wars. A free preview-- the (much more accurate) story of the Spartans at Thermopylae-- is here for your dining pleasure.

Thomas Jefferson

Arguments with Dead Men, Number Eleventy-Something in a Series:

The more I learn about Thomas Jefferson, the more I have to concede what an utter shitheel he was.

I am not referring here to his keeping a slave as his concubine while advertising himself as a friend of Liberty. (A man with a reputed IQ of 200 ought to find any number of willing women, with his own charm and intelligence; was he that clumsy a seducer? Burr and Franklin would call this unmanly.)

I am speaking of his conduct while Secretary of State under Washington. His doubling-dealings behind Washington's back are bad enough; for the particulars, I recommend the second half of Ron Chernow's biography of Washington.

My complaint today is based on his support for the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Much is made on the right these days of Noam Chomsky's early "support" for the Khmer Rouge. So far as I can tell, Chomsky was never a supporter of Pol Pot, but was at first skeptical about reports of atrocities, after twenty years of lies about Southeast Asia. When it was clear that the rumors were true, Chomsky denounced the Khmer and all war crimes, right or left.

Not so Thomas Jefferson. Not only did he not believe the early reports about French atrocities, he didn't much care: "My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is." This, after thousands of men, women and children were murdered without trial. No wonder Tim McVeigh wore a Jefferson t-shirt when he was caught after blowing up a day-care center.

While Thomas Paine, pain-in-the-ass that he was, was on the scene in Paris and had been condemned to death for standing up to the Jacobins, Jefferson was safe at home munching pomme frites, flogging James Hubbard for trying to escape, endorsing the murder of innocents in France and shrugging at the Terror. A revolution is not a tea party-- unless you're Thomas Jefferson.

David Carr

 Last Thursday, David Carr died in the newsroom of The New York Times.  I'm going to miss him terribly.  His attitude was not the cozy-with-power-posturing of a Ben Bradlee, but a link to the Hecht and MacArthur wise guys in fedoras and the ink-stained wretches before them who knew where the bear shat in the buckwheat and were keen to tell you about it.  I expect he and his fellow hop-head, Samuel Coleridge, are already cranking out a radical journal with John Thelwall about goings-on in Heaven. Maybe they'll need a cartoonist, or a contributor to the children's activity page.

Satan Broads of TittField

If you're trying to translate a title like "Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!", you might as go all in. Or all out, as the case may be.

The 12 Billion Dollar Misunderstanding

"There were mistakes made in Iraq." Jeb Bush

Here's my personal favorite, a grifter's dream as no direct violence was involved, just a gym bag and a straight face: How the US Sent $12bn in Cash to Iraq, and Watched It Vanish

Blinded on the Right-- and the Left

Mass psychology time: I'm starting to understand the selective vision on the right as a funhouse mirror of old leftists who smelled Hitler coming, but somehow couldn't recognize Stalin and Mao for what they were. A key anecdote from Ronald Perlstein's Invisible Bridge: “Reagan is on the radio [during the fall of Saigon], talking about the USS Midway rescuing widows and orphans on the high seas in Vietnam. And you can almost hear it and you can almost hear yourself say, ‘Oh. That’s what the USS Midway was doing in Southeast Asia in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was rescuing widows and orphans.”

The More Fool I

Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created the Sentinels and the zealot Bolivar Trask when I was ten years old. Then I outgrew simple "comic book morality". I scoffed at scenarios about religious fanatics seizing power in the United States, of corporations replacing sovereign nations, of killer drones, of disasters manufactured for media consumption. I may have been more naive at twenty than I was at ten.

    

Syrial Killers

Dear Sir,

I would like very much to contribute to the purchase of 96 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a cost of 1.2 million dollars each, but oh dear, I’ve already spent that money on something else. And I would like very much to send in Wonder Woman to precisely target the pursed lips of Bashar Hafez al-Assad and those who obey his orders, but we. Just. Can’t. Afford it.

I am enough of an amateur historian to believe something must be done when civilians are gassed, but perhaps the Arab League or United Nations might get off their ass if you weren’t so quick to insist on being the only one who can wipe up any mess…?

The blood and treasure in our account are seriously overdrawn. This is the price you pay for having followed the boy who cried wolf in Iraq, the movie star who did nothing when another regime, an “ally”, used chemical weapons on civilian targets, the glad-hander who still feels awful about Rwanda. So do I. I feel awful I can’t kick in the 96 million, but I just don’t have it; maybe next week?

And how many fucking times will my society have to put up with fucking soldiers signing up for another fucking war to be sent by their commanders to do horrible fucking things with a song in their hearts, because that’s the logic of war (as inevitable as gravity, even for those honestly fighting for a noble fucking cause) and then come back and cry “Boo Hoo, I did horrible things because my mean lieutenant sent me to the wrong fucking house”, hoping their therapy circle will tell them it wasn’t their fault when, God damn you, it is.

It’s not as if there isn’t information out there telling us what war is, what war does, what a baby looks like after a stray bullet and what a woman’s face looks like when contorted by a scream. Your Commander-in-Chief is not Abraham Lincoln or King Arthur and the Enemy of the Week (fill in the blank) is not Adolf fucking Hitler. No, I say no, you don’t get to turn in your conscience like your grandfathers did. It does not dishonor the military to say there is a qualitative difference between Little Round Top or the beaches of Normandy and My Lai or Wounded Knee.

There is no get out of Hell free card because the American public is afraid to call you anything but “heroes”. The engineers who created those weapons for you killer apes because they thought it was a nifty “problem” to solve will be screaming in the cell next to yours. And your dear grandmother, five thousand miles away from your next High Value Target, should take that flag magnet off her car, fold it into corners, and stick it up her ass.

Many Are Called, Some Are Chosen, Maybe There's a Reason So Many Are Assholes

There's terra incognita here for research into the social class distinctions among lawyers, doctors, politician/bureaucrats, and teachers.

There's certainly a culture gap between public teachers and professors, and among public teachers, a class struggle between those who love their subject, those who wanted to "teach" as an excuse to coach, and those who were intellectually lazy enough to major in "Education" and get summers off.

We all encounter medical people who followed the path of altruism or scientific interest, versus those who became doctors because that's one does in their family circle. The past isn't dead, it isn't even past, and Faulkner might have added, the family mythology shapes us more than some care to admit.

A friend who did time in a monastery found layers of class distinction between those who excelled at pastoral care, and those who excelled at climbing the ladder of advancement in the church. How much of this is due to the personalities attracted to the profession? This goes a long way towards explaining Vatican politics. We need only look to how John Paul II scorned liberation theology in South America because his lenses were fogged over by Stalinism in Europe. Anywhere he smelled "communism" or impudent women, out came the scourge. After two papacies spent punishing the foot soldiers, we might have a new pope who turns towards the ambiguities of parish work. "Who am I to judge?", he asks. Let's hope this extends to the church women who rather than sit down and shut up, ought to take a fire house to the burrows in Vatican City.

These distinctions might be most apparent among judges. Chief Justice Roberts being the very model of a country club boy who became a judge, and that background shaping his decisions. In my scant experience, I have met judges who vary from the most humane to the least human of officials. And there are shades of diversity in this; if I can't have a Mandela, a Darrow or a pro bono saint in my corner, I'd find it easier to deal with an honestly rapacious Saul Goodman than a sanctimonious pharisee.

Bullies

Just once, I'd like to see someone on the Right "take a courageous stand" against someone who has more money and more power than they do. (Yelling at a president who won't or can't hit you back is not the same.)

Andrew Shirvell, former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Michigan, was ordered to pay 4.5 million dollars to Chris Armstrong for "defamation" after repeatedly libeling and indeed, stalking Armstrong on campus.

Shirvell (a name worthy of Dickens) calls the decision "a clear violation of my first amendment rights", although the harassment occurred while Shirvell was an Assistant Attorney General and the person he persecuted was a student council president. It seems to my untutored eye that Armstrong was the one whose rights of speech and assembly were being breached by this self-appointed Javert.

On the other side of the world, the power of the Russian state is sending Pussy Riot up the Volga for two years-- hard time for women with small kids. "Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" was the charge, although the BBC says it was a protest against Putin and the Russian government. Religious hatred was indeed the motive for Shirvell's crimes here: homophobia inspired abuse of government power, bearing false witness, and stalking twinks without a license.

I don't know why the performance artists staged their protest in a church. I'm guessing that Russians have a... complicated relationship with the Orthodox Church; sometimes the church shelters the people, sometimes the church licks the ass of the powerful. Their reasons are above my pay grade.

I doubt that orders came down from the top to punish these upstarts. More likely, somebody decided that Vladimir the First would be displeased, naysayers must be punished and loyalists will be rewarded. Maybe Putin will issue the girls a pardon in a couple of months: a wink from a crocodile, his whispered "I could hurt you but I won't."

The two cases are funhouse mirrors. The Russians are still acting out the psychodrama of a culture that jumped from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution with no Enlightenment in between. Here, a bigot on the government payroll was told to sit his silly ass down, and he refused to listen.

The recent flood of complaint about a gay / liberal / feminist / immigrant / socialist / elitist/ (who's left?) agenda is nothing more than the complaint of an entrenched bully squalling because someone slapped back. The right is going to whinge that the Shirvell decision makes us worse than Russia, but here, it was the person in power that was told to back off.

Jack Benny, the X-Men, and Continuity in Comics

Re-reading Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men led me again to its sequel, Joss Whedon's Astonishing--

and I now proclaim to the anxious masses that Torn (Astonishing X-Men Volume III) is best read in tandem with Morrison's Imperial (New X-Men Volume II). Jack Benny is supposed to have gotten the biggest laugh in radio history when an armed robber snarls, "Your money or your life!" Benny doesn't say anything. The audience explodes. He waits (the power of the pause) and lets them subside before he answers, "I'm thinking about it." The joke works because the audience knew Benny's comedic persona, and knew that he would need time before such a "difficult" choice. Just so with Whedon's "Torn", in which Cassandra Nova tries to escape by planting herself in Emma Frost's subconscious, then using Frost's manipulative ability to paralyze her captors. Scott is frozen by his deepest anxiety. Henry "devolves" into a feral carnivore. Logan reverts to his Little Lord Fauntleroy childhood.

Logan's "turn into Percy Dovetonsils" works because of the character's backstory; it wouldn't be so funny if the audience wasn't in on the joke.

The first time I read this story, the attack by Emma's psychic avatars was confusing (as it's meant to be) but I shrugged it off and went along for the ride. Read immediately after the Morrison stories and I realized how poignant they were, manifestations of Emma's own guilt and fear. Cassandra Nova personifies Emma's pain at surviving the Genosha genocide; Sebastian Shaw represents Emma's self-loathing in her longest-lasting relationship. I didn't recognize Negasonic Teenage Warhead ("Boy, we really have run out names," Kitty says) until this second or third reading:

She's one of Emma's murdered students, seen for only a few panels in Morrison. The last manifestation, "Perfection" is an early version of Emma herself as the White Queen, dominatrix from Hell. Kitty's reaction matches the readers, as we all thought she'd already left Emma trapped in a cave.

Ordinarily, I dislike comics fans' worship of continuity. It's the inside baseball that drives readers away from serial story telling because some Asberger's/fashion victim just broke into your adult conversation with the news that Squirrel Green Lantern only wore the Star Sapphire costume for three issues in 1967, and he, the fanboy, really likes the second version of Empire Strikes Back but the third one makes no sense. Yes, great artists build up layers upon layers of meaning, allusion and reference in their work, but continuity is not the same as depth. So what did we (I) learn here today? When writers use continuity in the way that Jack Benny did, the reader's prior knowledge adds layers of pleasure. Used as barbed wire to keep the gentiles away, continuity is a disease. One more reason to promise me you'll never pay money for a comic with Cable on the cover or the word "Crisis" in its title.

Should Oracle Stay in Her Wheelchair?

It seemed to me the character of Barbara Gordon was more interesting (and important to the fictional universe) as Oracle than as Batgirl. The editorial reasoning seems to be if comic book science can heal Batman's spinal cord, it's silly to keep Barbara in a wheelchair.

Why not have both? If they'da asked ME, I would have given her a cybernetic body, like a drone plane, that she could inhabit as Batgirl, while still living day-to-day as chair-bound Oracle. And Barbara as a wounded vet, so to speak, of the "war" that started in Crime Alley has more resonance, more skin in the game for the reader.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Your American Taliban

Rick Perry and the New Apostolic Reformation have downgraded all non-Republicans to soulless demon status. They are not speaking metaphorically. This makes anything they do to achieve power justifiable, as those who oppose them are not even human.



Their "Seven Mountains Mandate" calls for religious control of business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, the family and religion. They believe that God, or their idea of God, must take "dominion" over the political and legal structures of the United States.

Welcome again to Weimar America, land of Glorious Godfrey.

Commonplace Book: Readings, August 2011

“The plague of publishing these days is to mistake ubiquity for significance.”
-- Arts and Letters Daily and Alexander Nazaryan on Knotted: How the Necktie Changed the World. and other such titles

***
“I was turning 40 and thinking, Oh dear, I'm probably going to have one of those midlife crisis things which always just bore the hell out of everybody. So it would probably be better if, rather than just having a midlife crisis, I just went completely screaming mad and declared myself to be a magician. That would, at least, be more colorful. So, I announced, on the night of my 40th birthday party — probably after more beers than I should have had — that, ''from this point on, I'm going to become a magician.'' And then the next morning you have to think, Oh, what have I said now? Are we going to have to go through with this? So I had to go about finding out what a magician was and what they did.
.... The mystics all seem to want to go straight to the Godhead; the magicians tend to be more curious. They want to explore all of the other aspects of the universe. For me, there is very little difference between magic and art. To me, the ultimate act of magic is to create something from nothing: It's like when the stage magician pulls the rabbit from the hat. And then you can turn that idea into a film, a book, a painting, a piece of music, something that other people can experience. That in itself is stunning. And I suppose this is one of the reasons I got into magic, because I was tired of ducking that question that people always ask writers, which is, '’Where do you get your ideas from?’''

-- Alan Moore

***
“my family use to go see him [“Macho Man” Randy Savage] in his early career at hazard ky. my aunt loved leaping lenny. they wrested one time and the loser had to painted yellow.of couse macho man won.my aunt jumped up and ran to the ring.she was half way under the bottom ring where lenny was laying so she grabbed hold of him.she was calling macho names.he said come on old woman.she ended up with yellow paint all over her and two police officers had her by the legs trying to pull her out of the ring. everybody there was dying laughing at her. she almost went to jail, but macho man talked to the police to keep her from going to jail, so he was a good man.”
-- comment by msireta on news of Randy (Poffo) Savage’s death by natural causes

***
“Just by virtue of walking into a theater to see a movie called Transformers, I'm fully agreeing with just dispensing with a the laws of physics and accepting that nobody can tell which $200,000 car is a Transformer, for the same reason that James Bond is a secret agent who tells everyone his full name and drives around in the flashiest car he can. The problem is that it doesn't stop there. The movie brings things up as major plot points that are immediately contradicted, and even the internal logic of a movie about giant robots from space isn't consistent. ... You can make every allowance for it, you can talk about how it's about giant robots so it doesn't have to have logic or how it's for kids and they're dumb anyway, and you're still left with the core problem. Nothing makes sense, even from one scene to the next, and everyone's an asshole, so there's no reason to be interested or to care who lives or who dies.”

-- Chris Sims

***


Guillermo del Toro: In the next 10 years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform "story engine." The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It's going to rewrite the rules of fiction.

Wired: It sounds like you're talking about an entirely new form of storytelling.
Guillermo del Toro:Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.

Wired: How is that interactivity going to change Hollywood—and the way directors like you make movies?
Guillermo del Toro: [Legendary B-movie producer] Samuel Arkoff once told me there are only 10 great stories. That's where the engine and promiscuity come in. Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages—only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don't think so.

-- Guillermo del Toro in Wired

***


“Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian's paradise. The region as a whole is a low-tax utopia....Rather than unleashing entrepreneurship, this low rate of taxation means that basic public services like health, education, and pothole filling are starved of funding. The physical infrastructure on which a modern economy rests like roads, courts and the police are missing....people are free to protect their own families, and indeed they are forced to.”

-- Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order

Favorite Authors and Favorite Artists

(Lady Macbeth, by Steven Pugh)

The author of the website Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time! asks comic artists for sketches of their own favorite authors or literary characters. The collection has grown enough since 1998 to be written up in the Los Angeles Times. There are some small treasures that may someday be regarded as the definitive portrait of their subject.

There's an ongoing tradition in fandom of collecting sketches by favorite artists. Some of the more interesting collectors bring their own sketchpad and collect different artists' interpretation of a particular character. (And some unscrupulous "collectors" auction them off on ebay, getting hundreds of dollars of a sketch that cost them ten to fifty dollars.) This is the collection I've seen that has interest beyond the world of fanboy/art class freaks like me.

Here is Colleen Coover's (Small Favors, Banana Sunday) take on Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice:


... And Jill Thompson's sketch of Carson McCullers (Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter):

Eric Canete's Truman Capote...


... And Gene Colan's sketch of the great Bill Mauldin:


David Hahn's Yossarian...


And Jeeves and Wooster by Roger Lanridge.


More literary-artsy goodness here; the artists and subjects are listed along the right-hand column.

Womanthology and Raising Funds on Kickstarter

Christina Rosetti, Robinson Jeffers, Revenge, Public Shame and Private Justice

"Saints are ready to receive all sinners: all sinners are not ready to receive saints."
-- Christina Rossetti, “The Face of the Deep”

***
“...This gig requires a highly developed sense of irony. Say you're doing a story (as Gladstone did last fall) about the fact that the press will come down harder on a politician who lies about himself than on a candidate who lies about his opponent, and that it's much easier to get away with misrepresenting policy than with fibbing about personal matters. As a result, slandering your opponent's position on healthcare reform causes less of a fuss than claiming you dodged sniper fire on a diplomatic mission to Bosnia when you didn't.
Interviewing the analyst who made these observations (Paul Waldman of The American Prospect), Gladstone summarized one of his explanations thus: "The media have less expertise to evaluate a policy charge, and anyone is an expert when it comes to personal matters." When Waldman argued that reporters should instead pay closer attention to the veracity of claims that directly pertain to what the candidate might do in office, Gladstone remarked, "You're asking them to focus on the relevant" -- in a tone that was tantamount to a raised eyebrow. Then both of them laughed, because there are times when you have to laugh to keep from weeping or screaming.”
-- Laura Miller, in a review of The Influencing Machine
by Josh Neufeld,Brooke Gladstone

***
“More fundamentally, we have to thank Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who provided the mean-street-walking existential characters we willingly confused with the actors who played them. The new retro cool I wallowed in had Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade as its source: the hard men with soft, democratic centres, American Romantics tinged with the Founding Fathers and Melville’s melancholic sense of humanity, the people’s Lancelots, who were dragged, flinching with distaste, into the dirty underworld by good and bad men and women, and by their doomed vocation to set the world to rights. Private eyes, but really public defenders. Always disappointed but always trying, never letting love get in the way of justice or their own essential solitude, but expressing enough righteous anger and controlled violence to keep them more interesting than, say, Jesus at his gentlest and most mild. They were dream soldiers of fortune who never came into their fortune because they couldn’t help but look after the weak....
After the war, in books but most of all in old movies, these reluctant action heroes became perfect modern exemplars for the likes of Camus, who saw in them a stoic refusal to be held back by the status quo. Men who behaved as if there was a point in trying to right wrongs, even if they knew the world better than that... And maybe, later on, it was Marlowe and Spade who gave us the courage and foolheadedness to take to the streets. We were young and had energy to expend, so movies and books weren’t quite enough. We couldn’t all be private eyes. And the lurking socialism in Chandler and Hammett fitted well with a postwar generation’s fidgety need to blow holes in the self-sustaining establishment. I think they were part of the equation for the brief explosion of political and social activity.”
-- Jenny Diski, “A bout de Bogart”, in The London Review of Books

***
“Galbraith delighted in puncturing the self-importance of his profession. He was a satirist of economics almost as much as a practitioner of it... Other economists believed that consumers were rational, calculating actors, whose demands and tastes were deserving of the utmost deference. Galbraith saw people who were easily manipulated by savvy corporations and slick advertising campaigns, who had no real idea of what they wanted, or why.”
-- Kim Phillips-Fein on John Kenneth Galbraith in The Nation

***
"States and municipalities, for instance, have toughened criminal penalties and immigration laws at the behest of the private prison industry; empowered Wall Street banks to not only collect taxes but levy additional tax penalties; and allowed energy companies to exploit so-called forced pooling statutes, thereby creating what one Republican governor calls a new power of "private eminent domain." One state is now even considering making it a criminal act to share your Netflix password with friends and family, because that is cutting into Netflix revenues.
In Washington, D.C., the federal government just enacted a healthcare bill whose individual mandate forces citizens to purchase private insurance, and the Pentagon has developed a reliable pattern of using military power to occupy resource-rich countries -- and then to privatize those resources at the barrel of a gun.
This same government, which has granted corporations the rights of "personhood," has also used its power to let corporations avoid the responsibilities of personhood -- effectively using state power to create a new privileged status that is above the law. For instance, federal statutes have trampled the concept of "equal protection" by deliberately exempting corporate interests from the laws the rest of us live under -- laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act (which doesn't apply to natural gas drillers) and antitrust statutes (which still don't apply to private health insurers). Federal courts have used judicial power to limit corporations' legal and financial liability for fraud and lawbreaking."
-- David Sirota in Salon
***
That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn;
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.
Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.
You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante's feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.
Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

(Robinson Jeffers)

***
“For revenge loudly disputes the virtue of ‘winning’. It is by definition a loser’s weapon. Not even the avenger ‘wins’. If his revenge is to be pure, he must gain nothing from it but the satisfaction of payback. He usually pays a heavy price to even the score; in revenge drama he almost always dies.
Revenge subverts the ethical basis of a competitive society. It is also a revolution in miniature; it assumes that the existing state of affairs is insupportable, and it actively seeks to transform it... In this exciting analysis of English revenge drama at its Elizabethan and Jacobean zenith, Linda Woodbridge argues that early modern audiences and playwrights enjoyed and celebrated revenge, associating it with the pursuit of social and economic fairness. Revenge, she notes, is an evening of scores, a leveling. ...
Of course, Christianity nominally reserves revenge for God, and much revenge drama is driven by the tension between Christian ethics and the vengeful impulse... The virtues of forgiveness are preached by the victorious to the defeated, while their own vengeful desires are legitimized as universal morality: “what they desire they call, not retaliation, but ‘the triumph of justice’”.
.... The predominant critical strain presupposes that revenge is reprehensible. The inference, as Woodbridge puts it, is that “anyone with ethics . . . will oppose revenge”. This book powerfully demonstrates that this is not so. Its literary analyses are based on the rational and well-documented contention that audiences and playwrights admired, valued and relished revenge.
They enjoyed it because revenge satisfied an increasingly widespread fantasy of social equality.”
-- David Hawkes, The Times Literary Supplement

New Gods for Old; Women Who Work in Comics

Over at Comics Alliance, an essay by Chris Sims on why the archetypes running loose in Jack Kirby New Gods can trouble our thoughts thirty years after they first appeared. "[Darkseid's] actions are geared towards conditioning people to embrace and exploit their own base hatred and fear. That's how he wins and remakes the world in his own image... devoted not to death but to Anti-Life... a slavery that masquerades as freedom by allowing its victims to give in to the dark side of humanity. [Darkseid] is a villain who exploits the small selfishness that we all see, experience, and even commit on a daily basis and shows how it all adds up to towering evil, and that makes him one of the most genuinely terrifying villains in comics."

Pursuant to an earlier conversation with friends, there's also a short list of prominent women working in comics-- my own favorites, like Amanda Conner, Gail Simone, Colleen Coover, a mention of Karen Berger's importance as an editor on Sandman-- and some I'd never heard of, like Emma Rios and Ramona Fradon. In the appendix of David Hajdu's The Ten Cent Plague, roughly half the artists who lost their jobs in the Wertham purge were women. The only one I knew as a child was Marie Severin on Dr. Strange; at least two generations have no idea the big studios used to cater to all readers, and they've never quite recovered.

Kirby and the splash page for the first episode of New Gods; Amanda Conner, one of my imaginary girlfriends, and her take on Supergirl and Power Girl; Colleen Coover on an unintended side-effect of four color printing.

Opinions are Like Assholes

Charles de Gaulle is supposed to have thrown up his hands and asked of the French,"How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?"
I'm starting to wonder about the United States-- how can you govern a country with 300 million opinions, half of those uninformed, half-baked or selfish-- but every single one of them convinced that they're righteous and deserving of the same respect?
During an NPR story on the Three Cups of Tea controversy, a woman called in to attack the expose because it came from "journalists, elitists and intellectuals" who only wanted to tear down someone who'd actually "done something" for girls in Afghanistan. It startled me, because she used the same malediction and emotional straw men you'd expect from a teabagger on a scooter.
When archeologists of the future sweep away the rubble of the American republic slash empire, will they find the same chemicals in the water supply that destroyed the Roman ruling class? There is learned speculation that the bizarre behavior at the top of the Roman social structure was caused by lead and mercury in the glazes used on aristocrats' tableware.
I don't think it's lead in the water supply that's making us stupid and mean-- we test for that, surely? Or is wickedness contagious, like the social breakdown observed in a crowded rat cage?

Commonplace Book for March 2011

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
-- Walter Benjamin

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." -- Sinclair Lewis

“Now that blind ambition no longer carries the slightest taint and the term "sell-out" holds no meaning, now that earnest young men sing not of love but of ‘want(ing) to be a billionaire so frickin' bad,’ now that narcissistic outbursts and trips to rehab are tantamount to self-promotion, now that, on blogs and Facebook and Twitter, millions of self-branding voices cry out and are never silenced, now that reaching for the stars is encountered less, by young people, as euphemism than high-priority action item, it may be time to question, at long last, the reigning ethos of super-sized individualism.... Warrior-speak is so much the common lexicon of reality TV that each on-camera confession could stand in for any other: She wants to win at all costs. He's not going to give up, no matter what. She doesn't care who has to eat dirt along the way. The parlance of high school football coaches and insurance salesman has become the native tongue of cable TV.”
-- Heather Havrilesky, in a review of Limitless, a film of Alan Glynn's novel The Dark Fields

Now I will tell Meader’s story; I have a moral in view.
He was pestered by a grizzly so bold and malicious
That he used to snatch caribou meat from the eaves of the cabin.
Not only that. He ignored men and was unafraid of fire.
One night he started battering the door
And broke the window with his paw, so they curled up
With their shotguns beside them, and waited for the dawn.
He came back in the evening, and Meader shot him at close range,
Under the left shoulder blade. Then it was jump and run,
A real storm of a run: a grizzly, Meader says,
Even when he’s been hit in the heart, will keep running
Until he falls down. Later, Meader found him
By following the trail – and then he understood
What lay behind the bear’s odd behavior:
Half of the beast’s jaw was eaten away by an abscess, and caries.
Toothache, for years. An ache without comprehensible reason,
Which often drives us to senseless action
And gives us blind courage. We have nothing to lose,
We come out of the forest, and not always with the hope
That we will be cured

-- Czeslaw Milosz


“Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.”
-- Joseph E. Stiglitz, ”Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%”

“You go to war with the liquor cabinet you have, not the liquor cabinet you wish you had.”
-- Memzilla, commenter on Wonkette