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.

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?

Ghosts at Reagan's Banquet

Alexander Cockburn, who I first remember for trying to get at the truth of the 1980s and beyond, has a short, simple correction to all the aggrandizement of Ronald Reagan on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. If you're feeling less than moderate, there's a new book of Tim Kreider's cartoons, driving a stake through Reagan's dead black heart and putting his head on a pike, finally keeping those dead Guatemalans company in the history books.
The journalist Allan Nairn, who was there in Guatemala in 1980, says "I’m hearing about how Reagan is being celebrated, and I don’t know, I suspect that a lot of people in Central America when they hear about that, maybe feel the same way that a lot of Americans feel when they hear the stories about people in other countries wearing Osama bin Laden t-shirts."

The Return of the Comic Strip: Online

Video killed the radio star, but thirty years before, Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the McCarthy era killed the comic book's chance to evolve into a mature medium. The comic strip as objet d'art held on in the newspaper, with the Joycean wordplay of Walt Kelly's Pogo, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant (which survives, when you can find it, under Gary Gianni and Mark Schultz) and Frank Frazetta's underpaid work-for-hire on Li'l Abner. By the 1970's, newspapers had shrunk the panel size by half, which made panoramic vistas and pen-and-ink work like that shown here next to useless.

Doonesbury was moved to the editorial page so that no innocent might trip over an idea, Peanuts was treading water and collecting royalties, and wit and craft were replaced by odious pablum.
I don't know if anyone outside fandom has noticed yet, but webcomics have been quietly building a new golden era for the comic strip, although dignified people are still embarrassed by the form. True, New York wants us to call them "graphic novels" and constipate the reader with proper MFA nightmares like Chris Ware, the kind of comics they think they should enjoy (ooh, look! art deco borders!), like those end of the year Oscar-bait films that someone said "confuse pain with art".
But Get Your War On and This Modern World captured an era as well as anything in any medium, and Alison Bechtel's alt-family strip Dykes to Watch Out For is finishing up just as the format is finding its legs. It's telling that the newly corporate Village Voice tried to kill This Modern World, and that the people in Bechtel's strip look more like my friends and family than Hi and Lois ever did-- and at their most dysfunctional, they still aren't as annoying as Cathy.
Kalamazoo artist Jane Irwin is posting her historical fiction about clockwork automatons online, before it appears between covers.
Phil and Katja Foglio's all-ages steampunk adventure Girl Genius can be read online; and sometimes I gotta go for the profane, self-referential "Sweet Monkey Jesus!" humor of Neo-Monster Island (and if you've been waiting for Godzilla to stomp the Bush administration into chutney, here's your chance to get your kaiju on).
Of the big, corporate publishers, The New York Times, of all people, has the cleanest presentation, with online comics that scroll up and down, like this strip, "Snow Dope" by Dean Haspiel. They even had sense enough to get the stick out of their butt and run La Maggie la Loca, by my ongoing favorite, Jaimie Hernandez, in the Sunday magazine, though online it's a huge, unreadable mess; wait for the trade.

The online reader developed for DC's Zuda Comics travels from left to right, meant to approximate page turning, but I find it simply annoying, and Marvel's online reader is even clumsier. The panels are either too big or too small for the screen, and whether a comic is fast or slow, the software-- not the reader-- dictates the pace at which the eye scans story and art. When even a hardened addict like myself finds it too much trouble to read your comics online, you've got issues that need resolving bigger than Joe Quesada's problems with women. The majors (in this case, Marvel and DC) need to bite the bullet, reformat their scans, and go with a presentation similar to the reader's choice, 11" by 17" scroll used by the Times and the independents.

Terrorists

"A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?" -- While Raj from What's Happening looks on.

Hotsee Totsee, Another Little Nazi

"[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, [Sarah]Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. 'She asked the library how she could go about banning books,' he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. 'The librarian was aghast.' The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving 'full support' to the mayor."
(Time magazine)


And from the Anchorage Daily News:
"Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.
"According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and had to go.
"Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let Emmons keep her job.... In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her -- starting before she was sworn in -- about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose."

The list making the rounds that claims to be Palin's hit list is a fraud; at least two of the books on the list, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire weren't published until three years after Palin approached the librarian. Like the one false note in an otherwise true story that cost Dan Rather his position, I suspect the fake list of being a bit of Republican disinformation, an attempt to discredit the larger story with quibbling.
Circulating a falsehood is already being used by people like Michelle Malkin as a way to discredit the core truth-- Palin's attempt at banning books-- just as the one forgery in CBS' National Guard story was used to absolve Bush of going AWOL. But screw that; let's see Joe Biden ask Palin why she hates John Steinbeck and Twelfth Night.

McCain and His Wars: Just Tell Us the Part Where You're a Hero

A bit of truth slipped out of the mouth of Senator Jay Rockefeller, for which he immediately apologized. "McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet," he said. "He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues." There were cries of foul from the schoolyard. It isn't sporting; it isn't done, to bring up what John McCain was doing in the skies above Vietnam when those nasty torturing "gooks" caught and schooled him in sadism at close range.

There are topics in every culture that cannot be discussed, like a sore tooth that we learn to avoid. Evidently it is now taboo to suggest that acts of war are immoral. We are all supposed to pretend that all American soldiers in every war are either just trying to do their job, answering their "call to service", or hapless dupes in the thrall of wicked politicians, with no moral responsibility of their own.

A senator isn't allowed to talk that way, so I'll say it. I have no trouble with killing someone; this is where Gandhi and I part ways. I can imagine situations in which it may be necessary, even commendable. I do have a problem with signing my conscience over to someone else for the duration. It is moral abdication of the worst sort to let someone else tell you who must live and who must die. There is no guarantee that the person making those decisions will be another Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, or someone as silly as G.W. Bush-- or a war lover like McCain's Teddy Roosevelt, who came to the peace table only after the death of his gentle son Kermit. I am offended by the naivety of anyone who signs up for a war, discovers too late what General Sherman tried to tell them, and then comes back with their feelings hurt, their comrades dead and their balls blown off. (A tear welled up in the President's eye last week as he granted the Medal of Honor to a dead Navy Seal who threw his own body onto a grenade to save his comrades. What did the President think would happen in war? Oh, right, bad things happen to other people. The grieving family should have slapped his face.)

In today's America one cannot say "the war in Iraq was a stupid idea" without adding the qualifier, "but we DID remove Saddam and Uday Hussein and the threat of their nut sack shocker. Saddam Hussein was a BAD man." It's like the invocation in a religious ceremony. Our taboo, the thing that cannot be said in polite society is that we have killed thousands of bystanders in the process of removing a couple of Stalin wannabes. Oops.

Apparently the only part of John McCain's war service open for discussion is the suffering he endured as a torture victim and prisoner of war from October of 1967 to March of 1973. What cannot be discussed-- on television, anyway-- is what he was doing when he was captured by the Vietnamese. He was flying his 23rd combat mission over Vietnam. Not his first, not his second, his twenty-third. The photo, from the Library of Congress , shows McCain being captured by civilians in Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi. What kind of reception was expected on the ground? Oh, right, Geneva Convention, unqualified condemnation of torture... Do we lack the imagination to wonder what it was like to be a non-combatant underneath his silver wings? If John McCain must have "war hero" added to his name, let it be with an asterisk.

I have a tendency to see suffering as redemptive. This might have made John McCain a better, broader-minded man, who came to realize that his war was of a different nature than the anti-imperialist wars his father and grandfather fought. Alas, McCain is preoccupied with not losing the misbegotten war in Iraq to the detriment of all else, and he insists that we join him.

What I'm Reading: Clive James Cultural Amnesia

Came back Sunday night from the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, much too over-stimulated and inspired by many meetings to give a coherant account of the experience: I saw this one, heard that one, developed a little crush on another, bumped into this one or saw such-and-so a mighty one from a distance drinking overpriced scotch in the hotel bar. I expect the anecdotes and insights will come dribbling out bit by bit as I have time to process them.

Here is one such: the comic book artist Matthew Dow Smith and I had an informal gripe session about why some "superstar" artists who shall remain nameless turn into shitheels. I compared notes from my own experience watching medieval graduate students evolve into professors and my own brief encounters with the famous (in my experience, famous persons most deserving of reknown have been the least pretentious, and showed the most curiosity about the world around them.) It costs so little-- seconds really-- to show noblesse oblige to someone farther down the ladder than yourself, and pays off down the road by spreading good will. He was interested in my ideas about the "poison mentor", the false friend and father figure who uses the apprentice instead of teaching them, a type who causes at least as much damage in society as the overly-analyzed "devouring mother".

All this is prologue to saying that Cultural Amnesia is a very generous book, by which I mean Mr. James has crammed so much good thought and bonhomie into this collection, you can browse just one or two of the essays and come away with passages that will keep your wheels turning for a week. Cultural Amnesia is a collection of original essays concerning the violence of the past century, a handful of people who did their best to stave off the darkness, and favorite writers off Mr. James' shelves. I plan on giving it to my more thoughtful former students as a friendly introduction to the larger world of humanistic thought and why it matters, as generous a gift as the Durants' Story of Civilization. A long time ago, a casual recommendation by a professor when I was a teen led me to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and the works of Joseph Campbell, and when I came across them years later, took me miles from where I started. Cultural Amnesia is that kind of resource. This is how we are nutured by those who have gone before, rather than exploited.



Slate magazine has a selection of some of the essays here, enough perhaps to make you buy a copy and keep it on your shelf for reading with your morning coffee. I got mine as a birthday present and read it through the summer, starting with characters I was already familiar with, and then more slowly from A-Z. Someone in the old Whole Earth News recommended this approach when reading new reference books: start by reading the entries on a subject you already know something about, and if it's good, start working your way in deeper.

It's like a really good buffet from a generous host. This morning I dipped into "Hegel" and "Keats" and found enough in there to have me muttering to myself the rest of the day. Here are a few bites from James' essay on Adolf Hitler:

"Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever.... a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture, no matter how widely diffused."

"It may seem unfair to condemn intellectuals who conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favor of a refined dream for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller was only one among many. But there were too many: That was the point. Too many well- read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature."

If that doesn't take the piss out of the neo-conservative "intellectuals", the Podhoretzs, Kristols and Abrams who have enabled Bush the past several years, who are now foisting Rudolph Guliani on us, nothing will-- their self-love is adamantine.

What I'm Reading: Clive James' Cultural Amnesia

Came back Sunday night from the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, much too over-stimulated and inspired by many meetings to give a coherant account of the experience: I saw this one, heard that one, developed a little crush on another, bumped into this one or saw such-and-so a mighty one from a distance drinking overpriiced scotch in the hotel bar. I expect the anecdotes and insights will come dribbling out bit by bit as I have time to process them.

Here is one such: the comic book artist Matthew Dow Smith and I had an informal gripe session about why some "superstar" artists who shall remain nameless turn into shitheels. I compared notes from my own experience watching medieval graduate students evolve into professors and my own brief encounters with the famous (in my experience, famous persons most deserving of reknown have been the least pretentious, and showed the most curiosity about the world around them.) It costs so little-- seconds really-- to show noblesse oblige to someone farther down the ladder than yourself, and pays off down the road by spreading good will. He was interested in my ideas about the "poison mentor", the false friend and father figure who uses the apprentice instead of teaching them, a type who causes at least as much damage in society as the overly-analyzed "devouring mother".

All this is prologue to saying that Cultural Amnesia is a very generous book, by which I mean Mr. James has crammed so much good thought and bonhomie into this collection, you can browse just one or two of the essays and come away with passages that will keep your wheels turning for a week. Cultural Amnesia is a collection of original essays concerning the violence of the past century, a handful of people who did their best to stave off the darkness, and favorite writers off Mr. James' shelves. I plan on giving it to my more thoughtful former students as a friendly introduction to the larger world of humanistic thought and why it matters, as generous a gift as the Durants' Story of Civilization. A long time ago, a casual recommendation by a professor when I was a teen led me to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and the works of Joseph Campbell, and when I came across them years later, took me miles from where I started. Cultural Amnesia is that kind of resource. This is how we are nutured by those who have gone before, rather than exploited.



Slate magazine has a selection of some of the essays here, enough perhaps to make you buy a copy and keep it on your shelf for reading with your morning coffee. I got mine as a birthday present and read it through the summer, starting with characters I was already familiar with, and then more slowly from A-Z. Someone in the old Whole Earth News recommended this approach when reading new reference books: start by reading the entries on a subject you already know something about, and if it's good, start working your way in deeper.

It's like a really good buffet from a generous host. This morning I dipped into "Hegel" and "Keats" and found enough in there to have me muttering to myself the rest of the day. Here are a few bites from the essay on Adolf Hitler:

"Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever."

"... a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture, no matter how widely diffused."

"It may seem unfair to condemn intellectuals who conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favor of a refined dream for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller was only one among many. But there were too many: That was the point. Too many well- read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature."

If that doesn't take the piss out of the neo-conservative "intellectuals", the Podhoretzs, Kristols and Abrams who have enabled Bush the past several years, now foisting Rudolph Guliani on us, nothing will-- their self-love is adamantine.

Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake and Descents into Darkness

I found Theresa Duncan's blog of cultural criticism, The Wit of the Staircase while doing a search for the spelling of the phrase esprit d'escalier, "the wisdom of the staircase", meaning the things you wish you'd said after an argument, after slamming the door, on your way down the stairs or a couple of blocks down the street. Being cursed with fierce memory means that I have to make a conscious decision to pack away and dismiss other's (minor) faults and my own (major) sins, or else carry them around with me all day and night. This makes a phrase that describes regret more sympathetically than "coulda shoulda woulda" a useful thing to have.

Now I find out from New York magazine that Theresa Duncan killed herself, that her lover Jeremy Blake followed a week after. At first I was just going to move her link next to Molly Ivins', in memorium, still worth reading, with regrets for another intelligent stranger that shouldn't be dead, but is. People that make the world a better place in small or large ways keep dropping like flies, while shitheels go on crawling like roaches, leaking juices and polluting the world for days, even after being squashed. It must be a part of that plan for the world that says at any given time there are only thirty six tzadikkum, just and righteous people, who hold the world together with masking tape and mud and never know the value of their labor. Poisonous assholes, great and small, never get tired, while nature apparently puts a load limit on virtue.

According to the article, Duncan had been frustrated in her efforts to become an independent filmaker, which if you'd asked me, I coulda told you, Henry Slesar's description of "success in Hollywood" being enough for me. Add to that what Jim Harrison said: that a successful career in the arts faces about the same odds as an unlucky combat platoon, or a retirement community in Florida, with a few survivors breaking through and then attributing their success to inherent virtue and hard work instead of the vagaries of fate. Garrison Keillor wisely sneered at religious pundits who talk about Faith without ever really having to dig for it: "there's no one knows more about faith than an undiscovered artist." There's no one waiting for your next outburst, you have to feel energized enough to do the work, but not so energized you don't want to stay in your seat, you have to and believe that a project's worth finishing even if no one ever sees it, its value to the world roughly less than that fallen sumac tree that no one heard.

As connected as Theresa Duncan was in New York, even after her big break when her animated film The History of Glamour got national attention, it just wasn't enough to get a film made. I knew a guy who had the "option" picked up for a comedy script he wrote, thousands of dollars-- but six years later he was still waiting tables. Filmmaking, if you'da ast me (which you didn't), is art-by-committee: you need a lot of hands and a lot of money, and all kinds of trouble I don't need-- whereas when the power was out in Kalamazoo for more than three days, we managed somehow with a pencil and a flashlight. Theresa Duncan had at least one editor telling her to give up on film for now, and move into prose full time... but it tasked her. Zero Mostel, after he was blacklisted, just said Screw It and went on painting until the wheel turned around again. Worried about that day the Right finally transforms the United States into Chile, and we're all locked up with three hots and a cot in Guantanamo...? I'm the guy muttering, "Finally, I can get some work done."

Apparently for Duncan and Blake, their frustrations started turning into conspiracy theories about Scientologists who didn't want them to succeed. The natural process of finding out Who Your True Friends Are degenerated into making lists of Who Was Loyal and Who Was Part of the Conspiracy. No one can follow from the outside all the dark and lonely convolutions that lead a person to suicide, and according to New York, no one knows exactly when this beautiful couple drove off the main road until they were lost from sight.

Yeah, yeah, I was young and beautiful and doomed once, too. And yet, and yet, as I read on, I was surprised to find out that Theresa Duncan was a sister under the skin, another smart and literate kid from a small town (Lapeer, in her case) in Michigan, another talented writer unable to break into the world dominated by million dollar contracts for celebrity authors, which, in case you haven't figured out, means more than a thousand talented writers who will never be published at all because the corporation blew the budget on Sonnee Tufts' tell-all. She didn't want to be a fly-over, when silly people with much less to say are lionized in the cultural centers of New York and Los Angeles. We are mute, emasculated, unheard, drowned out by the shouting from Madison Avenue until we find some way to break a crack in the rock so the living water can flow through to bring water to the owls and the dragons. Add in chemical, genetic and situational depression, suicidal impulses, the frustration of having one eye in a kingdom of the blind (for example, I see from the papers that Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure by Depaul for getting into a pissing match with the Israeli lobby, his apparent sin being speaking truth to someone who buys ink by the barrellful). Add in the chronic anguish that can drive someone to a hasty decision simply to escape, baby, my credentials are on file. These are the things that Hamlet puts on his list of daily insults to the brain, next to the law's delay and the proud man's contumely.

There's a conversation in Long Day's Journey into Night between the compromised father and the ambitious son:
James: Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right
Edmund: The makings of a poet. I'm like a bum who asks for a cigarette: he doesn’t have the makings, he's only got the habit. I could never touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered.

I've been luckier than poor Theresa Duncan (would she have chased those pills with whiskey if she'd known Jeremy Blake would follow her in? Was it an poorly thought-out impulse?) I was lucky enough to have a friend nearby who could warn me when I started to sound like a danger to myself. Non-depressives sometimes forget the nature of the disease: when you're down in a hole (hence, "depression") the only reality you can see is the side of the hole, with the patch of sunlight up above being something reserved for "winners" instead of "losers" like yourself. Reality is filtered through a delusion that even the most despicable human beings-- telemarketers, torturers, dog fight promoters-- are winners in the eyes of the world, while the most noble depressive is unworthy of life. The depressive appears lucid, even cheerful-- how many of us are full of jokes!-- but when those chemicals are acting up, there's a distortion of subjective reality that would make a schizophrenic call us crazy.

So include a little prayer for Thersa Duncan and Jeremy Blake and sad people everywhere, even, reportedly, the actor Owen Wilson, and for all the wayfarers looking for the soul of the world, the hobos Kerouac described as wearing two watches, the sun on one wrist and the moon on the other. Some of the very best people are exiles from the culture at large; you'll eat canned beans with the likes of Diogenes and Chu Yuan. But it's like all those times when you were maybe too drunk to drive but you made it home anyway, or went home with the wrong person but you managed not to drive your life into a ditch. If making a success as an artist requires the happiest of chances, so does being rescued from suicide, encountering this person instead of that, turning left instead of right on some dark corner on one dark night. I can remember a night when a photograph of Isak Dinesen's ancient face saved my life: I said, "she looks like I feel", and with nothing left but curiosity, I went home and read the only story by Dinesen I had in the house, and by chance it was a tale that had a particular blessing for me, and so I was saved. I've been rescued too many times by the luck of floating branches in the rushing current to ever sneer at someone else's nemesis.

Killer Apes and Mental Illness: the Sons of Abel Versus the Sons of Cain

There are millions of people kept in prison because their behavior is seen as threatening to social order and safety-- and yet the primates that threaten the most lives, even show blatant disregard for innnocent bystanders, are not only free to roam the streets, but lionized by their peers. Because Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ayman al-Zawahiri are seen as enacting the wishes of a group, they surround themselves with armed guards and issue orders that will murder or maim thousands of people who never voted for them, never met them, and wouldn't like them if they did.

Like it or not, we have to share a planet with these gangsters and have to find a way to remove them from power without turning into one of them. If human's outer appearance matched their internal demons, the problem would take care of itself in a few generations: no sane person would want to have sex with them, and the species would die out. But the killer chimps among us are breeding as rapidly as the peaceful bonobos, and the chimps don't mind cooking the books by killing a few thousand bonobos to make the world safer for their bloodthirsty kind. It may be time to talk about the genetic elephant in the room: why are some of us Abel, happy in our own garden, and too many of us worshippers of Cain?

If we can agree that the brain and the nervous system are electro-chemical, that our perception of reality-- and our response to it-- depends on a certain balance of dopamine, serotonin and all their building blocks... And within a given population, there are bound to be variations of that chemical balance in individuals, making (to borrow the ancient personality types) this one choleric, that one sanguine, this one melancholic and occasionally choleric. And just as variations in the pancreas or the thyroid gland can cause life-threatening illness, imbalance outside the normal range in brain chemistry can bring on mania, depression, delusions and hallucinations of the five senses. We've known since at least World War One that not just physical trauma, but repeated emotional trauma can carve channels in the mind that induce post traumatic stress disorder, multiple personalities, and many other illnesses. It may be that the tragedies of schizophrenia and autism might be traced back to a virus.

If all this is so, might there be an unpleasant secret hidden in plain sight: that within a given population, there will be highly organized indiduals who seek power over others and then use that power to wage war on neighboring tribes? That just as humanity wars tribe against tribe, there is an undeclared war in every community between the sons of Cain and the children of Abel?

There are horrible ironies in this relationship. A peace-loving but curious primate named Einstein followed a line of inquiry that made it possible for a desperate, threatened group of his peers to deliver a terrible weapon into the hands of the killer apes. Archimedes of Syracus was killed by a Roman soldier while lost in thought over a problem he had drawn in the sand. Marcellus, the Roman general in charge of the expedition, had given direct orders that Archimedes was not to be harmed-- but as many a commander has learned since then, you can't turn a thousand soldiers loose in a foreign country without a few bad apples and some collateral damage.

The peaceful ape can be provoked to violence, just as any animal can. Many a Cincinnatus has been called from his plow to fight savagely for hearth and home, but then-- the reason the name Cinncinatus is immortal-- when the threat is over, the peace-lover returns to his plow and turns his back on any temptation to power. But the goodwill of a thousand citizen soldiers can be undone in a second by a few rapists, torturers and murderers and the commanders who enable them.

How does a peace-loving soul contain-- or, terribly, eradicate-- his violent brother and his friends? If we were still a small band living in the trees, it would be evident that the violent mobs are scratching each other to death, and endangering our peace-loving children. The political question of the 20th century will look to Mandela and Havel and other martyrs who survived to wield power themselves. We must rescue hostages to fortune, take the dangerous toys away from the violent boys, and discourage our daughters from joining in and breeding with them.

Apparently, There ARE Some Things That Even a Maggot Will Gag At

Before we congratulate Rupert Murdoch for stepping in and cancelling the O.J. Simpson bookdeal, let us remember that this was not done in a fit of good taste but as an economic decision, disaster control after the universal outrage started to outpoll any potential profit.

And again, it underscores my argument that the factions in the "Culture Wars" are aiming at the wrong target. It is not liberalism or atheism that has vugarzed popular culture, it is capitalism and the profit incentive. And neither side, not the religious right or the limousine liberals is simply not ready to reject teh assumptions of capitalism. Much easier to blame an amorphous "they" for the murder as entertainment on television, tabloid news instead of detailed stories, and smarmy sitcoms as afterschool babysitters.

UPDATE: Judith Regan, who brokered the deal, was fired from Harper Collins December 15th, no doubt with a severance package that will let her go on to better things.

SO, SO SILVER AGE, a Literary Blog Worth Reading

"So, So Silver Age" is consistently one of the best written literary blogs; their insights have much to say about the rest of the world and not just to the sealed atmosphere of Otaku Land. Pay them a visit HERE.
This comment from me may be of wider interest to my fellow soldiers in the Culture Wars:
"As a lifelong Marvel guy I here publicly confess that DC has become the better company. Over the past couple of years, the tone of Marvel's flagship titles have become more and more vile, from the swiftboating of Gwen Stacy to the obscenity of "Marvel Zombies". The creators at Marvel seem intent on inflicting their own neuroses on the rest of us, no matter what it does to their bottom line-- "Emma Frost" in paperback is a HUGE hit with the high school girls, but I couldn't give the original away because of the cheesecake covers that had no relevence to the material inside."

COMMONPLACE BOOK, Current Extracts and Quotations of Interest

"I have no problem with the demonstration, but this is a business. Couldn't they have protested in the morning before work? Couldn't they have protested in their hearts?"
CHARLEY BOHLEY, a restaurant owner who fired 10 workers after they attended an immigration rally, quoted in the NYT April 15, 2006

***
Gwenda Bond, “Fantasy Goes Literary”, article at PublishersWeekly.com:
"Great writers have been incorporating fantasy, science fiction and horror in their fiction for a very long time," says Tina Pohlman, editorial director of Harcourt's Harvest imprint. But she concedes, "I realize that the contemporary literary world tends to equate literary fiction with narrative realism, so maybe there is something in the air."
.... "It's more of an aberration," says Brockmeier, "that those elements were stripped out of literary fiction in the first place. No one is rejecting realism, but there is a greater openness to accepting fantastic fiction as a form of literature."
....Kastenmeier, however, does view these latest developments as a sea change. "What is unique to our times is the fluidity of the borders between genres," he says. "There's always been fantasy in literature, and children's literature was accepted as literature, but now we're seeing people incorporate fantasy aspects into mainstream literature without being marginalized."

***
Jane Smiley, “Notes for Converts” in The Huffington Post:
“Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him, bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own experience to a sense of entitlement.”

***

***
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” -- Gustav Mahler

***
“I’ve long resisted the idea that the modern limitated-liability corporation, considered as an “individual” (as it is, under American law) is in fact—no matter how good and kind the people inside it—a sociopath. But the older I get and the more I see, the more I suspect that’s essentially the case.” – Patrick Hayden
***
“An Easter Turducken consists of one Cadbury Cream Egg, surrounded by marshmallow Peep, crammed deep inside the body of a hollow chocolate bunny. "It is my policy to avoid ingesting foods that contain the letter sequence 'turd,'" says one commenter...” – Xeni Jardin, at BoingBoing

***
“... The cartoon generated so many positive responses that [Stephanie] McMillan decided to auction it off on eBay and donate the proceeds to help keep abortion safe and legal in South Dakota. The bidding started at 99 cents, but by the time the auction closed on April 5, it had jumped to $2,201. McMillan is splitting the proceeds evenly between Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Oglala Sioux President Cecilia Fire Thunder recently confirmed plans to build a women’s reproductive health clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the South Dakota state government has no jurisdiction.

[Stephanie McMillan says] “.... Once the thought occurred to me, and I found his numbers on the Web site of the South Dakota legislature, there wasn’t any question-- I had to do it....His recent comments about rape are so offensive that many people are appalled that someone like him is attempting to control women’s lives. After his creepy detailed description of rape, I suspect that his sensibilities are not very delicate-- he can probably handle rough language. His righteous indignation sounds like a put-on. What’s really obscene is his effort to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, even if they’re victims of rape or incest, even at the risk of their health, regardless of their desires or circumstances.... The funniest [question] that someone told me she asked was: Tampons or pads?”

***

“To be a member of the ‘Comics As Literature’ canon, a work has to fit two of three descriptions, other than being a work of sequential art:
1. boring and/or incomprehensible
2. autobiographical, semi-autobiographical, or featuring a character with the same name as the author
3. about genocide or mass murder”
-- Franny Howe at “So, So Silver Age”
***
“In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay's office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas' largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan. Tan had to settle a US Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book "The Hammer" by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is forbidding women to work when they are pregnant, thus leading to a high abortion rate.
“Evidently, DeLay didn't have time to look into such allegations, since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor, sponsored by Tan's holding company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.
"’Stand firm,’ he added. ‘Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator.’ He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.” -- Molly Ivins

***
".... our study found that more young people reported self-harm before, rather than after, becoming a goth. This suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the goth subculture," says Robert Young, who led the study.
"Rather than posing a risk, it's also possible that by belonging to the goth subculture, young people are gaining valuable social and emotional support from their peers." But he cautions: "However, the study was based on small numbers and replication is needed to confirm our results." Only 25 participants felt strongly associated with goth culture. – Gaia Vince, New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8996&feedId=online-news_rss20

***
Theoretically we have lots of technology to teach people [fill in the blank, prioritize as you like] whatever. But more often every day I get the terrifying impression that it's just not sticking. And I live in the Northeast surrounded by colleges and college towns. I know it's Allentown and not Princeton, but still. Then I start projecting outward. Planet population of what, 7 billion? What percentage of that number is below the age of 30? Below 20? Below 10? Forget Atlas Shrugged fantasies and religious apocalypse scenarios. We're not birds or fish who get most of what we need to survive and thrive hardwired into us. Our quality of life is predicated on a certain percentage of the population being around and able to pass knowledge on to the next generation in sufficient quantity to sustain and expand and enrich that culture. ... I really hope I'm wrong and I'm just beginning to lapse into "hey you kids, get off my lawn!" mode. That would be ok. Not fun, but tolerable. But if we're literally going to drown in our own uneducated, well then Dan doesn't have to be right about much before things are going to start sucking pretty hard and most of the time.

- Barney Dannelke
***
“The Republicans will probably win again. Good luck to them. Who wants Democrats to get in, just to run a better police state, the way Blair and New Labour have in Britain, where, last time I looked, the government was planning togas every badger from Lands End to Cape Wrath?
“Who wants Democrats to get to run a better Empire? In the Bush years Latin America is seeing a new dawn, with Hugo Chavez publicly deriding our Commander in Chief as a drunkard and sending cheap heating oil to the poor in the Northeast. In the Bush years two professors, from Harvard and the University of Chicago, have published an eighty-three-page paper outlining exactly why slavish deference to the Israel lobby is hurting America. I don’t think that would have happened in Clinton’s time. At some level, there’s a lot to be said for having morons in charge—at least until the sort of people I was talking to last Saturday can organize a party to take over, and start the long process of returning the country to sanity. Feingold should make a break for it now, split like LaFollette and really stir things up. God knows, we need it.

-- Alexander Cockburn in The Nation

See Also: Why am I being played by a 16-year-old lipgloss model?,
"He was like a murderer annoyed at being called a shoplifter",
"I've had far more sex than I've had fights on water towers against guys with super powers"

THE HICKERBILLY ANTICHRIST: Bush and His Accidental Religious Dictatorship in America

UPDATE: Kevin Phillips, the Nixon conservative who draws a clear picture of the roots of the poisoned Bush family tree in American Dynasty, has just released American Theocracy, describing the rise of the asforementioned Religious Dictatorship in the United States. Bush as Antichrist, anyone?

I can tell you from my own experience that these emergent "evangelical Christians" are anything but Christ-like. They spend a good deal of time defining who is, and is not, a "Christian". It will amuse my friends to hear that I am not a Christian, and apparently hate Christians. This means that I am not THEIR kind of "Christian", and never will be.

Will there one day be a "Night of the Long Knives", in which they separate the wheat from the chaff and send the Catholics and the Quakers into exile with the pagans and the Buddhists and the homo-sexuals? Unlike the evangelicals, I'm don't pretend to know who's in and who's out, but I do know who gives the best parties.

Suggestion: When someone asks you if you're "born again", tell them you're still in labor. I used that on a childhood friend who had become an evangelical, and it shut him up.

This answer has the unusual virtue of being true; as a sort of Graham Greene Catholic, I'm always going to be wrestling like Jacob, squealing like Job, avoiding responsibility like Jonah and complaining about the Pharisees of the established church, the only Christ-like trait in my repertoire. The spiritual quest is not for sissies who need pat answers and reassurances, and that omits radicals, evangelicals and jihadists. I know there is more divinity in a woman's naked mound of Venus than in Jerry Falwell's smile, more warmth in a Beltaine fire than in George Bush's America, more awe in the revelations of science than in the stupidity of the Kansas school board, more joy in the muscles of a leaping cat than in any of Dr. Mengele Frist's grotesque experiments. Maybe instead of "What Would Jesus Do", we should ask "Who Would Jesus Rather Hang Out With?"

UPDATE ON AN UPDATE:
This week Bush was speaking in Ohio, and he got that animal-in-the-headlights-look again when a woman asked an unrehearsed question about Kevin Phillips' book, which "makes the point that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe this? And if not, why not?"
Bush: "Hmmm." [Long pauses; this answer took perhaps 70+ seconds] "Uhh, hah -- ummm -- I, the answer is -- I haven't really thought of it that way, heh, heh. Heh. Here's how I think of it. Ummm -- heh heh. First I've heard of that, by the way, I, ah -- uhh -- the, uhh -- I, I guess I'm more of a practical fella. Uhh. I vowed after September the 11th that I would do everything I could to protect the American people. And, uhh -- my attitude, of course, was affected by the attacks. I knew we were at a war. I knew that the enemy, obviously, had to be sophisticated, and lethal, to fly hijacked airplanes, uhh, into -- facilities that would, we would, killing thousands of people, innocent people, doin' nothing, just sittin' there goin' to work."
One would hope that the President of the United States would immediately assure us that our dear little babies are not going to be swept up to Heaven or cast into Eternal Fire anytime soon. Throw us a bone here, Mr. President Ya Crack-Ass Cracker, Sir! (Respect the office, if not the man). Maybe this isn't Heinlein's theocracy or Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, but Bush as Greg Stillson in Stephen King's Dead Zone.

See also: Remember When? , Christopher Hitchens and "The Case for Mocking Religion", Grateful Children with Missing Arms, Memo from Jesus to Torture Caucus, Cognitive Dissonance, others.

Remember When We Thought the Nuttiest Idea in Heinlein's Science Fiction Was His Loony Prediction of a Religious Dictatorship in the United States?

"Last December Peter Panse was suspended from his teaching job for apparently recommending that some of his advanced students consider taking figure drawing courses that included nude figure drawings.

"In his discussions with students Mr. Panse mentioned several options for advancing their figure drawing skills; the local community college, a nearby frame shop that sponsors art classes, and the prestigious New York Academy of Art. He also described pre-college figure drawing programs at several other New York City art schools, and a highly successful art college prep program called the Mill Street Loft.

"Panse was suspended from his teaching job pending hearings. Depending on the outcome of these hearings, he may be permanently fired, ending a 25-year teaching career. Panse is a National Board Certified Teacher (in Adolescent and Young Adult Art), the highest level of certification that a teacher can achieve in America. He is also one of only two National Board Certified Teachers in his New York District, and “is a trained Facilitator for helping teachers explore and pursue the requirements needed to achieve National Board Certification."

Links, with lots of comments, at Drawn! The Illustration Blog , a detailed account of the facts at Art Renewal, and an online petition HERE

SOME DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS BEHIND THE CARTOON WAR

So far, only the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio and some French smartasses have gotten the Danish cartoon story right: It seems that the cleric who first protested the cartoons in Denmark then reprinted them in a flyer that was distributed throughout the Muslim world... and he sort of, um, added a few even MORE offensive cartoons to juice up his case against the Danish newspaper.



The Americans, from Bill Clinton to Bush, have gone all mealy-mouthed and scold the newspapers to be more responsible. Coming from those two, "responsibility" is like Messalina calling for chastity. Apparently it's okay to order an air strike that kills hundreds of innocents in order to miss one terrorist target, but if your little ink spills piss somebody off, we never heard of you. Thanks for your strong defense of the Four Freedoms, guys. Vladimir Putin, known affectionately to the Russian mobsters as "KGB Lite", a man whose soul President Bush has gazed into, is first and always a true friend of censorship: "Any provocation in this area is absolutely unacceptable. One should think 100 times before publishing anything, doing anything or drawing anything." Shit, I'd never get ANYTHING done.

But Lor' bless 'em, the French satiric weekly 'Charlie Hebdo' reprinted all 12, along with a new cartoon on the cover entitled "Mohammed stressed out by the fundamentalists" showing the prophet holding his head in his hands uttering the words "It's hard to be loved by fools."

Phillipe Val, the editor of 'Charlie Hebdo', told the BBC: "Of course there has to be tolerance, there has to be respect to any community and any religious believers. But it is very much important for our whole society to show that we have firm principles on which democracy stands. This is an inviolable question of principle here in the land of Voltaire and Zola. We are willing to appear before the courts if some think the drawings go too far, but we are certainly not willing to give way to the desires of religious extremists."

Push comes to shove, these little cartoons are drawing fire in a just cause. Muslim mobs are using violence and intimidation against anyone who criticizes Islam, especially those who suggest that Islam embraces violence and intimidation. It took a couple hundred years for Christians to stop burning anyone who suggested that the Pope wasn't perfect. This may take a while longer; so long as Muslims view themselves as victims, they will feel justified in whatever atrocities they commit.

Something else is going unreported: someone is profiting from these riots. Can you say 'agent provocateur'? So long as the mobs are busy burning down Danish embassies, they're not thinking about what shitty governments they have in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran... If you don't like that scenario, then consider how much juice the imams are getting out of this: play ball with us, or we'll start a riot. Lastly, these hysterical screams for the blood of cartoonists will make the Americans and Israelis look reasonable by comparison. Thus the rioters and the politicians wash each others' hands. Everyone's a winner.

Except free thought, free speech, Danish tolerance, and a few mostly harmless ink-stained wretches.

UPDATE from the AP: Charlie-Hebdo sold out all 160,000 copies with the cartoons, 60,000 more than usual. France Soir, a daily, ran the drawings and sold 40 percent more-- "leading a battle for freedom of the press", their spokeswoman says, perhaps not cynically. Wouldn't it be funny if this insanity makes some hair sprout on the chest of the media? Wouldn't it be something if cartoonists rediscover their power to afflict the comfortable and ridicule villainy in the spirit of Hogarth and Goya, Daumier, Ben Shawn, George Grosz and Lautrec? Who are these monsters, that would turn cartoonists' ink into blood?