Wednesday April 30 2003

Comparisons are odious

My buddy Nate recently wrote me and mentioned that the current Administration is starting to stink of hypocrisy as badly as the previous Administration did.

Now, I'm not a Bill Clinton fan at all, although I have a sneaking admiration for his wife... intelligent, capable women have always been one of my weak points. But Clinton was not a liberal and he didn't keep his most important promises to me and he dismantled my social safety net and he also left us with a godawful foreign policy mess that is currently being horribly exacerbated by the idiots we've got running the ship at the moment.

Nonetheless, I vastly preferred the annoyingly inept kind of half assedly conservative/moderate jack ups and dick arounds of Bill Clinton, who at worst was only uncontrollably horny, congenitally unable to offend a wealthy corporate donor, and never actively evil, to the fucking directives of undeniable darkness and policies of sheer, raw, pulsating evil that are presently emanating from a hijacked Oval Office, and wherever Herr Gruppenfuhrer Cheney happens to be hiding at any given moment.

But that's very much by the side of the road; this one ain’t about politics. It's just that Nate's comments stirred up a thought that had occurred to me a few weeks ago, and which is, of course, a dreadfully unfair comparison, but I thought I'd make it anyway:

Anyone want to do dueling GPA's of Presidential offspring? Chelsea vs. the Bush brats? Competitive academic honors? Rap sheets and win, place or show in drunken wet t-shirt contests don't count, mind. Although if it came to that, I'd pay good money for Polaroids of really really wasted Bushettes tongue kissing each other on a bar during Spring Break somewhere.

Hmmm. My better judgement is telling me that last line is very mean spirited and I should delete it. But hey. At least it's not a picture of Hillary Clinton with a dick.

I wish God were alive to see this

I used the above quote from a recent Simpsons as a subject line in a couple of emails recently, and Nate the Great also indicated to me that he didn't find it at all amusing. It makes me sad. Nate likes The Tick cartoons and will quote from them at length, or he used to, back when it was trendy to do so, and they're just as subversive as The Simpsons has ever been. But he won't watch The Simpsons.

Or maybe he will and I'm thinking of someone else.

I know my mom won't watch The Simpsons. I asked her about it once and she said she didn't need bratty little non-role models like Bart Simpson modeling bad behavior for children. How Bart's modeling of bad behavior affects my mom, whose kids are all grown up and gone, I couldn't tell you. I thought at the time that this pretty much stank of an 'echo' opinion... one of those that one person picks up from someone else they trust, or a media source, and simply reiterates without thinking about it at all.

We're all guilty of it. I do it, too, if I'm not careful. I'll read a Doonsesbury or This Modern World strip, or hear something that someone I generally respect tells me about something, and if I'm feeling kind of tired or apathetic at the time, or for some reason I'm especially receptive to liberal agit-prop (which, let's be honest, is what Doonesbury and This Modern World are) at that moment, I'll often find those views simply incorporated unthinkingly into my current mindset. It's sneaky and insidious. You have to fight against it all the time.

My brother Paul, for example, once told me that Buffy was a program he couldn't watch, because it was immoral. He stated it was too violent for its time slot, and he also felt its violence was egregious, gratuitous, and shown in an irresponsible context, and there was too much sex on the show, too. Now, this startled me considerably, because (a) it sounded like the kind of opinion that I might voice about something, assuming the something I was talking about actually was egregiously, gratutiously, and immorally violent, which Buffy certainly isn't, and (b) my brother Paul, while I love him dearly, is nothing remotely like the kind of intellectual heavyweight he'd have to be to formulate this kind of opinion on his own.

Obviously, this was another 'echo' opinion, and when I asked Paul if he'd ever actually watched Buffy, he did that thing that people do when they're blustering their way through a detailed, negative opinion of something they have no actual knowledge of... he kind of waved dismissively and said something like "well, I've watched a couple of episodes..." and on closer questioning, admitted that he'd watched like five minutes of three separate episodes at different people's houses, while not paying that much attention to it.

Hey, I'm not condemning Paul for refusing to watch a TV show with little or no actual basis for that refusal. I've never watched Crossing Jordan or Law & Order: CSI or Third Watch and I don't feel obligated to. The promos for the shows generally tell me everything I need to know, and in this case, what they tell me is the shows are badly written, formulaic, and relentlessly stupid. However, that opinion is based on the fact that in the probable hundreds of minutes of Third Watch dialogue and interactions and plot tid bits I've seen displayed in promos for the show while watching better NBC programs, I've yet to see anything remotely approaching an original storyline, an interesting characterization, or a distant relative to a witty piece of dialogue. And while I certainly don't insist on absolute lifelike accuracy in my melodramatic entertainment, I need something a little more credible than the delectable babelike Jill Hennessy's leather jacket clad action heroine of a coroner, who, from the promos I've seen, seems to run into yet another ex boyfriend, whose feelings for her are still smouldering under the surface, every other week, while she's out in the field diligently and defiantly investigating yet another accidental death that somehow, in some way she can't pin down, just doesn't smell right to her.

But I'll tell you, there are a lot of things I'd do before I'd condemn either Third Watch or Crossing Jordan as egregiously and violently immoral, and one of those things is, I'd watch a few of the episodes all the way through. That's a pretty specific and damning indictment, and while I'm perfectly capable of making it... go look up my Matrix article if you don't believe me... I would have to have watched either program a great deal more than I have, or than Paul had watched Buffy, before I'd trot out that opinion.

And leaving all that aside, Paul was simply flat out wrong. Buffy is a lot of things... lately, badly written is definitely among them... but irresponsible in its depiction of violence is not on the list. Joss Whedon went to enormous pains when he set up the show to keep the violence almost entirely contained in a human vs. monsters subtext. Human on human violence is a huge thing on the show; it rarely happens, and when it does, it has realistic consequences... real people get bruised, battered, broken, and even killed, and there is real grief, and real legal consequences. Whedon has a policy very strictly limiting the amount of guns that get shown on both Buffy and Angel; even when it's ridiculously unrealistic that vampire killers and monster hunters, or even the recurring bad guys, don't carry firearms, they generally still don't, because the show doesn't want to model bad behavior in front of its predominantly young audience. As to the sex, well, on Buffy sex is never promiscuous, it always takes place within the context of a meaningful relationship of some sort, and while the Undead getting skippy with living chickie poos is something that troubles me greatly simply from a consistent physics/biology point of view (they're DEAD, Jim... how the hell are they popping chubbies?), nobody on the Buffy franchise has ever had casual, guilt free, no consequences recreational sex without an emotional context or consequences that I can recall.

Now, I explained all this to Paul, and then I loaned him some of my Buffy tapes, and now he's an avid fan, according to cuz in law Melanie... which just goes to show how non-discerning my baby brother is, since he's an avid fan of the worst two seasons in the show's history.

It's hard to think for yourself. And not very rewarding, when the losing candidate just steals the election anyway.

The Man In The High Tower

Come with me now, beyond the boundaries of mundane time and space, to a world where America withdrew from the United Nations in the late 1980s.

Any fanatical conservative isolationists who may read this are now hurling their camouflage military caps in the air and shouting 'huzzah', but not so fast there, skippy. You see, without America's veto on the U.N. Security Council, in 1992 on this particular timeline, the U.N. issued a resolution requiring that America promptly and unilaterally disarm itself of all weapons of mass destruction, for the sake of global security and world peace.

This is, by the way, not the most unlikely scenario in the world, should any American government ever be so aggressivenly and egregiously stupid as to actually withdraw from the United Nations.

Now, class, raise your hands if you think America would comply under any imaginable circumstances. Anyone? Anyone? Okay, let's move on.

China, seeing a chance to flex its muscles and teach those arrogant Yankees a badly needed lesson, begins agitating for a U.N. military enforcement mission, a nice euphemism for a military invasion of America by an international coalition, which would naturally be spearheaded by Chinese troops. Not being completely insane, most of the rest of the U.N. Security Council decides this is pretty much the most comprehensively idiotic plan they've ever heard, not to mention being morally questionable and probably illegal under nearly every international covenant, and staunchly refuses to go along with China's nakedly aggressive imperialism, insisting on continuing to work with economic sanctions and through diplomatic channels to enforce the disarmament resolution.

China claims the U.S. will never voluntarily comply and disarm (no kiddin', Jack) and if the U.N. hasn't the strength of moral will to enforce its own directives, well, China will simply take care of this problem on its own. After all, Chinese security is directly threatened by America's capitalist warmongering and her haughty refusal to give up her capacity to destroy the entire Earth thirty times over. Furthermore, the current American President has not been legitimately elected and is, in fact, an illegal tyrant who has devoted a great deal of effort to dismantling basic civil guarantees for the American people. In the name of liberty and democracy and fundamental human rights, the Chinese premiere announces, the American President and Vice President must immediately resign and leave the country, and America must immediately allow Chinese inspectors and Chinese troops into their country to begin a comprehensive disarmament program, as well as to implement a new form of 'free' and 'open' and 'democratic' government.

Once more, show of hands on everyone who thinks the Bush and Cheney of this particular timeline would hop on a plane, and whoever succeeded them would throw open the borders to those helpful Red Commie bastard yellow peril chinks who have been so historically helpful to America prior to this.

Anyone? Anyone?

So, here we are, at war. Chinese missiles are flattening much of New York City and Washington D.C. Chinese bombers are dropping enormous amounts of ordinance on those same cities every night. Chinese troops are slogging their way down from Canada, grinding irresistably towards Washington. American forces, vastly overmatched due to years of economic sanctions that have kept them from upgrading their obsolete weaponry, or even feeding themselves adequately, are taking massive casualties, while the Chinese forces have sustained losses barely into the double digits. And yet, still, the Americans are doing a great deal better than anyone expected.

The world press largely condemns China and sides with America. The Chinese defense minister who masterminded the invasion plan, overriding his own uniformed generals and staff often, now begins to publically state his fervent support of and confidence in 'General Byuzing's battle plan'. The Chinese media provides beautifully orchestrated coverage of the 'heroic' Chinese troops invading America, slants their coverage of Chinese and world peace protests to make the protesters look deranged and insignificant, and plays up every excessively violent American response, calling the American media's broadcast of captured Chinese POWs on American television 'barbaric', and warning the American military that they will be held responsible for the ethical treatment of captured invaders.

Americans, largely disarmed, technologically overwhelmed, with pretty much no hope whatsoever of winning this war or ever ejecting this grossly illegal invasion, resort to desperation tactics such as suicide bombing. In response to one particularly successful suicide bombing by an American partisan posing as a taxi driver that kills 4 Chinese soldiers at a check point, the American President orders military benefits amounting to $47,000 be paid to the taxi driver's surviving family, while China orders its troops to fire on any American, in uniform or out, on foot or in a vehicle, that attempts to approach any checkpoint without heeding orders to stop.

Almost immediately, a family of 16 Americans from Levittown, NY, fleeing the indiscriminate bombing of large areas around New York City, misunderstands an order given them by Chinese troops at a checkpoint near Albany and continues to drive towards them. The Chinese troops open fire, killing 11 people in the car, half of them innocent American children under the age of 10.

CHAPTER QUESTIONS:

These are essay questions; not multiple choice. Students must explain their answers at length and be prepared to defend them vigorously against opposing viewpoints.

Now, it's a good thing nothing like this has ever happened in our particular timeline. I mean, my God, what a nightmare that would be.

A little punishment

I seem to be being smacked a little. Oh, I understand that once the plug Emily nicely gave me on her blog cycled down and off her front page, the hit counter on my page was going to slow down considerably. But I’ve left my last two daily entries up for 48 hours each and gotten virtually nothing on any of them… and really nothing at all, other than from my sister in law Erica and my cuz in law Mel, whom I adore wholeheartedly.

It would seem that the lesson I’m meant to gather, here, is that when you describe desultory comments in your chat threads as ‘desultory’, and when you describe slogging around the blogosphere on a slow computer as ‘slogging’, and then a couple of Liberated Power Womyn who do not particularly appreciate the way you exercise your freedom of speech on your own damn blog bitch slap you for doing so, you apologize. Immediately. Or, you stop getting nice little spikes of attention.

Oh, well.

Since it seems to be up to me (as usual) to be the mature one in my relationships, I’m just going to do a quote from Emma Goldman’s fine blog, Notes On The Atrocities (link over to your right), and then reprint my response in her chat thread, in which, I hope people will note, I did not take her to task or in any way indicate that I was at all offended by her choice of words. And I’m going to urge everyone to check out Emma’s fine blog, and for that matter, the fine, fine blog of Elayne Riggs, too. And I’ll also note that according to Elayne, I pretty much jump started her comments section… prior to me showing up and posting stuff on her comment threads (according to Elayne, anyway) she wasn’t getting much in the way of comments. And far be it from me to also mention here that Elayne told me that in an email, and she hasn’t mentioned it… or me… or my blog… in any way, on her blog, where, you know, it might send some of the hundreds of hits she gets every day over in my direction.

But I’m not bitter, I’m not upset. Why should I be? Slide your eyes a bit to the right and quite a ways up. See all those links under ‘Archives’? Now skip down over my blogroll. See all those links under ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Articles of Note’, and 'Brown Eyed Handsome Fiction' and, you know, various other bullet points along those lines? The discerning eye may perceive that from that the list scrolls on down for many, many entries. And I admit, it’s not complete. If you were to go to, say, the ‘Martian Vision’ link, you’d find 40 other articles by me, most of them quite lengthy. And there’s quite a bit of my blogging not archived here, too. All told, there’s probably 40 meg of my writing on the other side of those links, not to mention a good 5 to 10 meg of my artwork.

Who’s read any of that? Who’s commented to me on it in any kind of cogent way? Who’s paid me for any of it? Say, while we're kind of on the subject, who bothered to say ‘ha ha, that was funny’ or even ‘thank you, it was sweet of you to make the effort to cheer me up even if it wasn’t very funny’ when I did a comic strip just for her, at the top of this blog, last week?

Oh, it’s a trick question, of course. The answer is, absolutely, ‘not anyone whose blogs I've ever hung comments on.’ Hell, if it weren’t for Nate Clark and Hartmut Schumacher and Steve Tice, the answer to all of them would probably be pretty much ‘nobody’.

Now, I’m not saying any of that stuff on the other end of those links is particularly good, because, well, I’m the author/artist/creator and I can’t render an unbiased judgement. I am saying, I’ve done one helluva lot of work for absolutely nothing, and the very few people who have reviewed it have told me I’m a guy with some talent, and you know, I believe I’m a guy with some talent, and nobody is reading my stuff, and nobody is putting comments on this weblog or sending me email.

And that’s leaving aside all the stuff I try to do, and the gestures of appreciation I try to make, here on this weblog and on other people’s weblogs and through email, to folks I like and appreciate.

Now, I could go a bit further and spell things out, with little phrases like “not feelin’ the love in the room right now” or just plain, simple, “unappreciated”, but, you know, I prefer to be more subtle than that.

Now. A few days back, Emma said, on her blog (and sharp, cogent stuff like this is why you should be reading her blog):