Operation Zipless Cakewalk.
TBogg points us to this interview with Tony Kushner, which (among many other things it’s good to hear being said) has added “his zipless little war” to my lexicon. —Also, he’s working on a musical.
Bandwagons of April fish.
I’d like to think of something to add to the Cheney-bashing that’s merrily (if obscenely) celebrating our Creator-endowed right to pursue happiness by indulging our Madison-crafted right to invite those calling shrilly for the piking forthwith of the heads of fifth columnists to take their alien and sedition acts, fold ’em till they’re all sharp corners, and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine. (I excuse the portmanteau nature of that sentence, collapsing as it is under the weight of a number of issues in the popular consciousness this side of the continental divide, by noting that the title of this post does refer to bandwagons.) —But I flip through my Cheney files and stumble over this choice piece by Joshua Micah Marshall and I’m reminded, once again, that Dick Cheney, who selected himself as Bush’s ideal veep, is a sheltered idiot, an incompetent executive, a scowling shill whose only skill is working the old boy network, and a prime candidate for architect of a great many of our current woes; and suddenly, oddly, I’m no longer in the mood.
And anyway, the Spouse is being held as a material witness.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
Alienated and seditious.
Even moderate liberal Kevin Drum agrees: in fact, he’s said it himself: “Bush has gone a step beyond the Imperial Presidency and is now conducting something like a Papal Presidency: he does nothing in public except make speeches ex cathedra and then wait for his friends in the press to fawn over his commanding presence.” —And maybe I’ll just let the “even the liberal” joke (good-natured, I’ll have you note) stand as my comment on the radical/extremist/moderate/centrist debate, as others have said what I’d want to say much better than I’d ever get around to saying it myself.
But! I was talking about papal presidencies, which, if you Google it, brings up all manner of creepy conspiracy-think of the them-Papists-and-their-Jews variety, which I may well trawl for nuggets of this and that the next time I’m feeling up to playing with creepy conspiracy-think. (Not so fun, these days.) —Teresa Nielsen Hayden calls to our attention another manifestation of the presidex maximus:
Thousands of marines have been given a pamphlet called “A Christian’s Duty,” a mini prayer book which includes a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging [that] the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush.
“I have committed to pray for you, your family, your staff and our troops during this time of uncertainty and tumult. May God’s peace be your guide,” says the pledge, according to a journalist embedded with coalition forces.
Kevin Moore points us to another, more secular:
Republican-led legislatures in five states believe they have found a way to ease the budget crunch: eliminate the 2004 presidential primaries.
President Bush is unlikely to face serious opposition in the Republican run-up to the election, so any budget-driven change to the primary would affect the growing field of Democratic candidates.
I feel like the government just took a shit on my chest again, to paraphrase Jon Stewart. Perhaps now’s a good time to bring up what Becca overheard at work?
It’s not that I don’t trust God. I just don’t trust Bush. I don’t think he’s talking to God, or letting God talk through him. And I find that very, very disturbing.
And aside from this, I got nothin’. So maybe we’ll close with a joke: see, there was a brief cessation in the rain this weekend, so we all up and down our street came out and mowed grass and weeded and did gardening things and got caught up, since when it’s raining no one’s ever out working in the yard. Our neighbor on the south side is the street’s designated crank: mumblety-mumble years old, fighting feuds with half the street whose origins no one can at this point remember (barking dogs, a car bumper an inch too close to a driveway, garbage cans clattering at 2 in the morning and now he crosses the street when he sees you coming, that sort of thing); he also knits stocking caps for homeless Navajos and has what is perhaps the Western Seaboard’s largest collection of jazz recorded on 78s and wax cylinders in private hands. Plus the Victrola and the Edison to play them on. Loudly. Very loudly. At nine in the morning. On a Saturday. Which is okay, really, because the rain’s stopped and you’ve got to get up and go mow the grass anyway…
“You Republicans?” he asks us, this particular Saturday, after advising our neighbors to the north as to the possible provenance of a couple of interloping lillies on their streetside strip. (He is also a gardener of some note, this crank.) —And you’d have to look at us, me, and our neighbors to the north, to see why, exactly, we all burst into laughter at that. “Well,” he says, chuckling, “I am. Anyway. I got a joke for you.
“See, the president, George Bush, he was having a dream. And in this dream he wanders along”—the writer in me is tempted for no especial reason to set it in Disney’s animatronic Hall of Presidents, but our cranky neighbor did not, and so I won’t—“and he meets George Washington. And Washington says, well, hello, Mister President. Now, I don’t want to poke or pry, but I’ve got to tell you: things are looking a little rough for America right now.
“And Bush, he nods, he says, well, President Washington, it maybe isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. Could I maybe trouble you for some advice? As to how to be a good president?
“And Washington says, well, the thing that worked for me is honesty. Tell the truth, Mister President. Always tell the truth.
And Bush nods at that, and walks on. And he comes across Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson, he says, you know, Mister President, I’ve been keeping an eye on things, and I’ve got to tell you: it looks a bit precarious at the moment, what with that and that.
“And Bush, maybe he quibbles at precarious and maybe he doesn’t, you know, but he does say, President Jefferson, sir, I was wondering: do you have any advice you might offer me? As to how to be a good president? Even a great one?
“Jefferson, he looks thoughtful for a moment, and then he says, well, the American people, Mister President. Take care of them first and foremost, keep their concerns always in your mind. You can do no wrong if you act for them.
“Bush nods at that, and he walks on. And this being a dream, of course, he runs into a third president. President Lincoln, this time. And Lincoln nods sagely and he says to Bush, Mister President, you have yourself a tough row to hoe.
“And Bush, he nods and he says, well sir, I’ve met President Washington already, and I’ve met President Jefferson. And they seemed to agree that maybe things aren’t as rosy as they could be. And I firmly believe that, as the president, it is my duty, my responsibility, to lead America to that rosy future. So. I’ll ask you, sir, what I asked them: what advice might you give me, one president to another, as to how I could be a good president of these United States of America?
“And Lincoln, he strokes his beard a moment. And then he says, well, Mister President, you could start by taking in a play.”
Thank you! I’m here all week.
(Our cranky neighbor, he then says, “I’m a Republican, yes. And I wouldn’t vote for George W. Bush if he was the last dam’ Republican on the planet.”)
Yes. Cats.
Oh, I know. And if you know me personally, you’ve probably already seen these pictures. But it’s Friday, which (according to the mighty CalPundit) is Cat Blogging Day, and so: Our cats.
The dot-com war.
Tracking a meme from my own rather limited point of view: Jon Meltzer was the first I saw to say it, this morning, over in the comments to this post at Making Light. —Five minutes of browsing later, and here’s Sullywatch making a more detailed case. (Although—thinking about it—George Soros wrote an op-ed a week or so ago about the Bush Hubris Bubble…) —The dot-com war. —This one has legs, I think.
Sweating the small stuff.
It’s hardly surprising that nothing’s going according to plan (or is it?) when we can’t even get the uniforms right.
Military leaders insist that the shortage of desert BDUs will not affect the safety of American soldiers. They point out that Iraq’s terrain is not entirely Sahara-like, and that green camouflage may actually work better near the banks of the Euphrates River, where vegetation and mud are present.
Oh. Never mind, then.
Keeping it simple.
There’s a stark beauty to this:
To: president@whitehouse.gov (President George W. Bush)
From: k@metameat.net (Paul Kerschen)
Subject: The cost of the Iraq war
Dear Mr. President:
Yesterday the media reported that you have made a supplemental budget request to Congress of $74.7 billion to pay for the current war in Iraq. Your budget for fiscal year 2003 assumes total federal receipts of $2,048.1 billion. My personal income tax accounts for .000000040% of that figure. Applying this percentage to the amount of funding you have requested from Congress, I find that I personally have been asked to pay $29.94 for the Iraq war.
The Mercy Corps, a charitable organization with which you may be familiar, has established an Iraq Emergency Fund to help alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe that the war has already caused, and which will only worsen in coming weeks. Lack of food, clean water, power, and medical supplies will place millions of people at risk of hunger and disease, and a refugee crisis of massive proportions is assured. I have made a charitable donation to this fund in the amount of $199.62. As I am in the fifteen-percent tax bracket, this will reduce my federal tax liability for the next year by the precise amount which you have charged me for your war.
I oppose this invasion in the strongest possible terms. Neither my belief that America must be protected from unconventional threats, nor my immense respect for the American men and women who are currently risking their lives on your orders, alter my conviction that you and your advisers have conceived this war recklessly, in bad faith, with insufficient thought given to possible consequences, insufficient support given to diplomatic alternatives, and appallingly little regard for the sanctity of human life. You will not wage it in my name, and you will not wage it with my financial support.
Sincerely yours,
Paul Kerschen
I needed to run the numbers on our taxes anyway. (Thanks, Juliet.)
Anecdotal.
John points us to this anecdotal LiveJournal post:
Remember Ali, the Iraqi student I wrote about a few weeks before leaving for Italy when telling about going to the antiwar rally?
He’s gone. Disappeared.
His parents’ phone number is disconnected.
His mother cannot be reached at work.
His father disappeared first… and now, one of our babies is gone!
His counselor said to me this afternoon: “Either the parents have been called in by the government for questioning, or else they’ve all fled.”
Further anecdotes, to give you an idea of what it’s like to flee:
Like millions of immigrants, the Ahmeds had lived and worked in the United States illegally—but undisturbed—for years. That changed this year, when Pakistan became the latest country whose citizens are required to register with immigration officials in the United States, or face detention or deportation.
Immigrants who entered the country illegally, or whose visas expired, can be deported or detained when they register.
The registration, which includes people from 24 Middle Eastern countries plus North Korea, is causing an upheaval in Muslim immigrant communities across the nation as many decide to seek refuge in Canada.
It has turned border cities in New York, Michigan and Vermont into unlikely refugee camps for hundreds waiting to get into Canada before the March 21 registration deadline for Pakistanis. Aid workers estimate that 2,500 Pakistanis have left the United States for Canada, and another 1,000 are waiting to leave.
The numbers of people fleeing will grow, they predict, as more countries are added to the list and as Canada prepares to shut its doors this year to foreign refugees coming from the United States.
Anecdotes about what it’s like to stay:
“Everybody is stressed out. The FBI has assured us that they will do everything necessary to ensure our safety… but not everything raises to the level of a crime that you can report,” notes Basha, chairman of the American Muslim Council.
The ugliness has been sporadic so far: four women wearing the Muslim head-dress or hijab were verbally abused in a Venice, California restaurant in the past week, according to CAIR, an Islamic advocacy group that monitors hate crimes against the Muslim community.
In the Midwestern United States, a Muslim man and his son were refused service in a Michigan store, while in neighbouring Illinois, one mosque received a bomb threat, and worshippers at another were spooked when projectiles shattered a window during evening prayers.
Some anecdotes as to why they might be staying here in the first place:
“Which one of you would like to see Saddam removed?” An Iraqi immigrant asks this question in Arabic of fellow immigrants. All raised their hands.
“Saddam’s people shoot him and he lost his finger,” said the translator, pointing at the hand of one immigrant.
Man after man after man at a Shiite Muslim community center showed the scars of the Iraqi regime – physical and emotional.
“How many of you lost somebody because of Saddam?” the translator continued asking.
“Two brothers,” said one.
“Five brothers,” said another.
It’s obvious why so many here want Saddam toppled. But it’s how he’s being toppled that is causing some concern.
“Nobody would be happy to see his country being demolished and bombed. It’s a mixed feeling of doubt, fear and hope,” said Iman Husham Al-Husainy of the Karbalaa Islamic Center.
The federal government is declining to specify, however. So anecdotes on that score are rather, as they say, thin on the ground.
A plague on this House, at any rate.
Via Atrios—
Recognizing the public need for fasting and prayer in order to secure the blessings and protection of Providence for the people of the United States and our Armed Forces during the conflict in Iraq and under the threat of terrorism at home.
WHEREAS the United States is currently engaged in a war on terrorism in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001;
WHEREAS the Armed Forces of the United States are currently engaged in a campaign to disarm the regime of Saddam Hussein and liberate the people of Iraq;
WHEREAS, on June 1, 1774, the Virginia House of Burgesses called for a day of fasting and prayer as an expression of solidarity with the people of Boston who were under siege by the enemy;
WHEREAS, on March 16, 1776, the Continental Congress, recognizing that the “Liberties of America are imminently endangered” and the need “to acknowledge the overruling Providence of God,” called for a day of “Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer”;
WHEREAS, on June 28, 1787, during the debate of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin, convinced of God’s intimate involvement in human affairs, implored the Congress to seek the assistance of Heaven in all its dealings;
WHEREAS, on March 30, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, at the bequest of the Senate, and himself recognizing the need of the Nation to humble itself before God in repentance for its national sins, proclaimed a day of fasting, prayer and humiliation;
WHEREAS all of the various faiths of the people of the United States have recognized, in our religious traditions, the need for fasting and humble supplication before Providence;
WHEREAS humility, fasting, and prayer in times of danger have long been rooted in our essential national convictions and have been a means of producing unity and solidarity among all the diverse people of this Nation as well as procuring the enduring grace and benevolence of God;
WHEREAS, through prayer, fasting, and self-reflection, we may better recognize our own faults and shortcomings and submit to the wisdom and love of God in order that we may have guidance and strength in those daily actions and decisions we must take; and
WHEREAS dangers and threats to our Nation persist and, in this time of peril, it is appropriate that the people of the United States, leaders and citizens alike, seek guidance, strength, and resolve through prayer and fasting: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the President should issue a proclamation—
- designating a day for humility, prayer, and fasting for all people of the United States; and
- calling on all people of the United States—
- A) to observe the day as a time of prayer and fasting;
- B) to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities; and
- C) to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our Nation.
—House Resolution 153, referred to the Committee on Government Reform by Todd Akin (R-MO).
Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: “Can’t you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism… every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you’re supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp.
“Why would you think I’d want anything else? Humans don’t need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other—you’ve been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!” God said. “The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?
“I’m talking to all of you, here!” continued God, His voice rising to a shout. “Do you hear Me? I don’t want you to kill anybody. I’m against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore—ever! I’m fucking serious!”
Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God’s shoulders began to shake, and He wept.
—“God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule,” The Onion, 26 September 2001.
I want my country back!
I don’t want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore!
—Howard Dean, 15 March 2003.
SB 742.
Bump and update, as they say. Oregon State Sen. John Minnis (R-Fairview) had proposed SB 742, which would nebulously define terrorism and impose a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years without parole for said nebulous terrorists. It looks doomed to failure, but doomed like Jason or Freddie Kreuger or the Terminator: it’ll be back.
Minnis said he will rewrite portions of the bill in an attempt to address concerns about the broad language and role Oregon police agencies would have in federal terror investigations. No additional hearings have been scheduled on the bill.
“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of hysteria associated with some of the original language” of the bill, he said. “I will bring something back and see if it works.”
Forget the definition of terrorism that’s been the bill’s contentious flashpoint—
SECTION 1. A person commits the crime of terrorism if the person knowingly plans, participates in or carries out any act that is intended, by at least one of its participants, to disrupt:
(a) The free and orderly assembly of the inhabitants of the State of Oregon;
(b) Commerce or the transportation systems of the State of Oregon; or
(c) The educational or governmental institutions of the State of Oregon or its inhabitants.
Keep your eye on what Minnis does to get the real meat of the bill passed. Again, from the Statesman-Journal:
Representatives of racial and ethnic minorities said they are troubled by two other aspects of the bill.
One would require local police to cooperate with any state or federal agency investigating terrorism.
Critics said it would call into question a 1987 state law that bars local police from aiding enforcement of federal immigration laws. The functions of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service have been split within the new Department of Homeland Security.
“It is a known fact that if immigrant victims of crimes feel that the INS will be involved or called, then crimes will go unreported and immigrants will not feel safe giving information to police to help them investigate crimes,” said Ramon Ramirez, president of the farmworkers’ union PCUN, based in Woodburn.
Minnis said he proposed the change so there would be no repeat of what happened in 2001, when Portland and several other police agencies declined to assist the FBI with interviews of Middle Eastern men.
The other would allow police to keep records of terrorism investigations — although records of a joint task force on terrorism could end up in federal hands outside state law.
George Hara, a retired Portland physician, said that could lead to political surveillance and what happened to him and thousands of others during World War II.
Keep in mind that what Minnis doesn’t want to repeat was one of the very first stumbling blocks cast before Attorney General Ashcroft’s Big Brother blitzkrieg. Remember what political surveillance looks like, why it is anathema to a free society, and why Oregon passed laws against it in the first place.
Forget putting protestors in jail for 25 years; that’s dead in the water. This is the stuff to watch out for. Keep an eye on Sen. John Minnis and his HUACkian aspirations.
I swear, it’s enough to make you think of moving to New Mexico...
Dream is dead.
(Here at Long story; short pier we continue our exhumation of the corpse of one Anodyne magazine [1996 – 1999, requiescat in pace]. Why? Damned if I know. An attempt to distract myself, perhaps. —Tonight, spurred mostly by an email from a friend idly wondering in what order, exactly, one ought to read it, we present my review of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman written on the event of its completion, back in November 1996. It’s impossible to overstate the impact Sandman has had on comics, but even as I type that sentence I realize I have no idea how it’s regarded in the here and now. History moves fast, these days; even faster in a world at once as fickle and monomaniacal as comics. People still know it, yes; people still read it; editors and publishers still fling together er-you-dite UK writers and this or that upstart cartoonist and a mishmosh of julienned Bullfinch’s and double-handfuls of Golden Age continuity in the hopes of bottling that much lightning again. But—but. Comics is also still enthralled [though there’s hope for the first time in years] to the longjohn [pervert-suit] superhero set, to a bewildering degree. Insular tropes that make no sense to readers not steeped in their mysteries derail the highest of concepts, while the stupid exigencies of 22-pages-a-month like [gummy] clockworks that dictate industrial cartooning pretty much put the kibosh on consistency in art and storytelling over any long haul. —All this, you see, is what makes good comics so miraculous to the embittered fan. [Imagine, say, what might have happened to the vital American prose short story, if it had squandered its rich variety of genre and marketplace by focusing tightly on, oh, closely observed, naturalistically quotidian epiphanics, produced to the increasingly bewildering dicta of insular journals and dwindling grants programs.]
(—That bit of savage irony riffed shamelessly off of Michael Chabon’s semi-coherent, ill-reasoned, and doubtless mistaken but nonetheless delightful introduction to McSweeney’s No. 10, a mixed bag—which was, one imagines, rather the point.
(I’d thought of a weblog for myself as a way of getting back into comics criticism [among other things]. This was back when I was thinking of calling it something else, like Blue Elephant Gun. Like a lot of other things, that’s been sidetracked. [I’m still tickled to see this blog-thing listed under “political sites” or the equivalent on this or that blogroll.] So maybe this is also a way to get back into the harness a little; toss the pill in the backyard with the old man or something. There’s a lot going on in webcomics, you know, and a lot to be said about it—a lot of people are linking today to Patrick Farley’s “Our Leader Speaks,” and more power to ’em, but fewer are clicking into the site itself to read [say] the richly strange and [now] bleakly haunting road-not-taken, “The Spiders” to note the amazing metatextual games he’s playing with Salon mockups and message board debates; fewer still would get any Colin Upton references I’d make regarding it.
(I should maybe get out of my own way, except to note that I was mad not to list A Game of You as among the best of the “books” of Sandman, and that some little credit for “surviv[ing] the debilitating collaborative process” is due to Karen Berger, without whom, I do not doubt. And one last note: for more old Anodyne comics fun, I can’t let pass an opportunity to recommend Barry’s Pre-Structuralist Funnies. Go, see what he was like back in the day.)
Neil Gaiman is not God. We’d best get that out of the way up front.
Not that this claim has (yet) been made in print, but some have come awfully damn close—like Mikal Gilmore, who writes, “To read The Sandman is to read something more than an imaginative new comic; it is to read a powerful new literature, fresh with the resonance of timeless myths.” (One imagines he had not yet read the wooden “Orpheus” issue.)
Or Frank McConnell, who claims that “Gaiman has invented, out of whole cloth, a mythology not just of comics but of storytelling itself.” (Really. This patchwork of pastiche and Shakespearean reference and obscure etymologies was invented out of whole cloth? I don’t think we were reading the same thing.)
So when one encounters something so bald-faced as Peter Straub’s assertion that, “If this isn’t literature, nothing is,” the temptation to do a little debunking becomes overwhelming.
But that would be the easy way out. Gaiman isn’t responsible for what people say about him or his work, merely the work itself: The Sandman, the comic he’s been writing for eight years, which just came to an end with its 75th and final issue. I gathered together the disparate volumes which collect the entirety (Preludes & Nocturnes, The Doll’s House, Dream Country, Season of Mists, Fables & Reflections, A Game of You, Brief Lives, Worlds’ End, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake) and sat down to read them all in one fell swoop. I went in intending to poke some holes in this grandly gloomy balloon I turned the last page feeling immensely satisfied, sated, full—the sort of feeling you get after finishing a good, meaty novel, and feel so rarely when reading comics.
One could state impishly that the moral of the story is, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Sandman is about Dream, the anthropomorphic incarnation of dreams and stories, one of the seven Endless—Destiny, Death, Dream, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Destruction—who are patterns, ideas, echoes of things older than gods. They have their realms and their responsibilities, and they touch the lives of every living thing.
Which doesn’t make them nice people. Dream, for instance, is a cold, unfeeling bastard, who takes his responsibilities far more seriously than the lives and feelings of the people around him—or seems to: “What does it mean to you?” asks Delirium once, when Dream mutters one too many times about his responsibilities. “The things we do make echoes,” she tells him. “Our existence deforms the universe. That’s a responsibility.” But Dream is so callous that he once condemned a pickpocket to spend the rest of his life dreaming of the gallows-tree. Nada, a queen in prehistoric Africa, once spurned his affections; he damned her to ten thousand years in Hell, and three black women die during the course of the comic, in falling buildings and in fires, echoing the destruction of her city and her damnation. Dream never notices.
Or rather, Dream was. The story begins with his imprisonment for almost seventy years by a Crowleyesque mage; when he escapes and begins to reclaim his realm, it slowly becomes apparent that something changed, somewhere. When he gets his hands on Dee, the rather silly villain of the first few issues, who has perverted one of Dream’s own tools and driven the world mad for a night, Dream merely returns him to the asylum and tucks him into bed. Not quite the epicly petty revenge one might have expected.
Dream spends much of the rest of the comic coming to terms with who he is, and not liking what he sees; two important stories revolve around his attempts to set right something he had thoughtlessly done in the past. “You’ve changed,” he is told more than once by friends and acquaintances. “I doubt it,” is his response. He is one of the Endless, after all, who are merely ideas, patterns, echoes; echoes can’t change, can they? This seeming paradox—that he does not like what he is, but feels he cannot change—ultimately drives Dream to destroy himself, to obliterate his own existence, his “puh-point of view,” so that another Dream, a different Dream, can take his place. A better Dream.
“I don’t know if it’s good,” Gaiman is fond of saying about Sandman, “but I do know that it’s long.” Which is precisely why it’s good. The length, the space, the luxury of two thousand pages of comics give Gaiman room to explore, play, to set up echoes of his own: Lucifer, who retires from Hell and becomes a night-club piano player; Haroun al-Raschid, who gives up his magical city of Baghdad to Dream to keep it safe from history; Shakespeare, who lays down his pen for the last time upon writing The Tempest (a play, of course, about a magician who sets aside his magic forever) to try to live life instead of merely writing about it. He has the space to do something like Worlds’ End, a collection of travelers’ tales of happy endings, narrow escapes, destinies averted; a tantalizing glimpse of roads not taken before turning down The Kindly Ones, the final act of Dream’s tragedy. He has room for not one, but three elegiac epilogues, three last shimmering echoes of the story to savor before closing the book for good.
Sure, the beginning is weak. There is an air of self-indulgence about much of the comic. The art, in places, sucks (Dick Giordano inking Colleen Doran with what looks like a scratchy ball-point pen, or Robbie Busch’s colors, at once muddy and garish). But there are beautiful moments, in both writing and art—Charles Vess’s issues, or John J. Muth’s, or the gorgeous Erté-esque designs and colors of Marc Hempel and Daniel Vozzo; “Sunday Mourning” or “The Golden Boy,” Brief Lives or The Kindly Ones as wholes. I understand the adulatory impulse which drove those reviewers to such giddy excesses: comics require more labor, and of more intensity, than just about any other medium. The fact that something as long and as structured and as cohesive as Sandman survived the debilitating collaborative process of today’s industrial comics is startling enough; the fact that it is good seems miraculous. But to refer to this story as “among the most extraordinary of all time in any medium” (Gene Wolfe, but he was writing an introduction, and so we will forgive him) is silly—and more than a tad defensive.
Gaiman isn’t God. He just wrote a good comic book.
Which is enough.
More than a thousand words.
My mother, Tina Manley, writes to let me know her photos of the people of Iraq will be exhibited in Tokyo in April. Here’s her statement that will accompany them:
The Middle East has always fascinated me. I lived in Iran in the 1970s and traveled throughout the area. The people and the countryside are among the most beautiful in the world. The Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and then the Gulf War seemed to put that part of the world off-limits for years. In 1991 the Gulf War had been over for 6 months and the UN Sanctions had been in place for over a year. Travel to Iraq by US citizens was forbidden by United States State Department to all but pre-approved groups of journalists.
The Iraqi Businessmen’s Association of Washington, DC, hoping to bring publicity to the plight of the Iraqi people, commissioned a group of seven photographers to go to Baghdad and photograph what effect the UN Sanctions were having on the people of Iraq. The group made it as far as Amman, Jordan, where we were to pick up our visas for Iraq. The Iraqi embassy knew nothing about our arrangements and refused to give us visas. We stayed in Amman for two weeks, repeatedly appealing for the visas which were finally granted to only two of us. The rest of the group returned to the US and the other photographer and I rented a taxi and traveled through the desert to Baghdad.
Once we arrived, we were required to stay in Al Rashid Hotel. Whenever we left the hotel, we had to have a government minder with us. We were allowed to photograph anything we requested as long as we gave our minder a list before we left the hotel. We were not allowed to change our minds or photograph anything spontaneously. I was mainly interested in the children and requested permission to photograph children at work, in school, in hospitals. My government minder also wanted to show me all of the bombed buildings, bridges, and homes.
The people were very willing to be photographed and asked me to tell the people of America that they needed help. The hospitals had no food, no medicines, and no electricity. The water treatment plant had been bombed and many children were sick with dysentery. Every bed in every hospital I visited was full. I saw children who were dying of leukemia because the chemicals used to treat leukemia could also be used for chemical warfare and were not allowed in by sanctions. I photographed children with kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency disease never before seen in Iraq. I saw badly burned children and children who had appendectomies with no anesthesia. Some medicines were being kept from the hospitals even though they were allowed in by the sanctions. At times I was crying so hard I could not focus the camera. The temperature in the hospitals was over 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Mothers had to stay in the wards with their children to bring them food and care for them.
Whenever I asked anyone what they thought about Saddam Hussein, they would pretend that I had not even asked the question and would not look at me. Even the government minder seemed very nervous and motioned for me not to mention Saddam Hussein’s name.
I visited a Koran school in a mosque and I photographed boys working in the streets to support their families. The photographs have been used by many organizations to inform people about the conditions in Iraq.
I don’t have any answers to the situation in Iraq, but I hope when you look at the photographs you will feel like you know the people of Iraq and know that we are all more alike than we are different.
The show abides.
INT. STUDEBAKER. DAY.
KERMIT
Why are you jumping up and down?
GONZO
I’m hoping mad!
KERMIT
Guy’s got a sense of humour.
FOZZIE
Hey, why don’t you join us?
GONZO
Where are you going?
FOZZIE
We’re going to follow our dream!
GONZO
Really? I have a dream too… but you’ll think it’s stupid.
ALL
No, no! Tell us!
GONZO
Well, I wanna go to Bombay, India and become a movie star.
FOZZIE
You don’t go to Bombay to become a movie star! You go where we’re going, Hollywood!
GONZO
Sure, if you wanna do it the easy way.
The next time it’s getting to be a bit, well. Remember the International Channel. Especially at 9 o’clock on a Sunday night when Showbiz India is on. Not just for the impossibly cheerful and preposterously joyous clips of song-and-dance numbers from mass-produced Bollywood musicals (where Michael Jackson’s old choreographers must be lauded like those old Beijing Opera fighting masters on the sets of Hollywood action movies), though that’s what lifts the heart and crooks the grin in the first place. —It’s also because you get to hear a long rambling interview with Gurinder Chadha, who was born in Kenya and grew up in England, and whose new film, Bend it Like Beckham, is sparking girls’ soccer leagues like wildfires across India. You get to hear her talk about casting her aunt in a background role and having relatives call from Australia to crow about seeing Auntie on the telly in a movie and you remember once again how big and wide and unexpected the world is and yet people somehow manage to crisscross it with something approaching grace (Jane puts down in New York a newspaper picked up in Australia; she can replace it with another copy from the kiosk on the corner)—and somehow it manages not to unravel in total chaos except.
Except.
—But at least these days it’s easy enough; we can all be superstars of Bollywood. (Each in one’s own unique idiom, of course.) Lots of bhangra and Najma and Vijaya Anand to be played at work this week. Talvin Singh, too. —Especially the stuff he did with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, except we’re getting rather far afield from Bollywood. But why not? Bring along some Muslimgauze, too, and Sif Safaa—except. Except.
The dark time was roasted by hailstones and flames.
The bright time was wiped out by a shadow.
There’s nothing I can do; there’s nothing I can do. Checking the news every five minutes does no one any good. Ripping off Robyn Hitchcock lyrics does no one any good. Giggling madly at slips of the lip in a global gamble with 10-million-people-at-risk-of-starvation chips does no one any good. Listening to the news choppers circle downtown and wondering acidly if the Burnside Free State will rise again tonight does no one any good. Grandly proclaiming that having lost what mattered to very real people we have won what matters to dreams and ideals is doing no one any good. —At least, it’s not doing me any good. Juliet, quoting a 4,000-year-old lament for the fall of Sumer and Urim? I don’t know if it did her any good. I don’t know if it’s doing me any good, though in a way I am—what? Grateful?
Such a little word.
There’s too much history in the air. Twelve years, three presidential terms ago, give or take a couple of months, we were all huddled around a TV in an unheated room in a big old Boston house, watching the bombs drop.There’s a mad sketch we all did, passing a big black sketchbook back and forth, watching that one guy, the human CNN guy, shocked and awed and scared out of his mind, reporting from downtown Baghdad. He went away after a day or so and was summarily replaced by a smug, blowdried little toad with an utterly improbable name. We laughed at him, because it was either that or scream at the phlegmatic silver-haired stentorians insisting, you know, that they just don’t value human life the way we do. And another turn about the widening gyre and here we are again. Deja vu, jamais vu. I know this place, though I have never been here before. I do not know this place, though I have been here many times. (This time? This time, will we finally fall from the lip of one interpenetrating, whirling cone to the apex of the other?)
Hunger filled the city like water, it would not cease.
This hunger contorted people’s faces, twisted their muscles.
Its people were as if drowning in a pond,
they gasped for breath.
Its king breathed heavily in his palace, all alone.
Its people dropped their weapons,
their weapons hit the ground.
They struck their necks with their hands and cried.
They sought counsel with each other,
they searched for clarification:
“Alas, what can we say about it?
What more can we add to it?
How long until we are finished off by this catastrophe?”
I’m going to unplug this thing and kick it in the corner for a bit. Metaphorically, understand. I’ll just be over yonder a ways. Talk amongst yourselves.
The grownups are (still) in the house.
Further gackery, this time from the antic muse: a quick sneak peek inside some of what’s passed for diplomacy in the Bush foreign policy, courtesy the Daily Telegraph. Want to know why Colin Powell didn’t pull a James Baker and travel the world convincing the Coalition of the Willing to actually pony up? “Powell was so busy protecting his position in Washington that he did not travel,” says Unnamed Source, a senior British official. (I wonder if there’s any relation to everyone’s favorite Bush administration spokesperson?) But the money quote, as Ana Marie points out, is the one which maybe gets to the heart of all our French troubles:
A few days later, Mr Bush delivered his key address to the UN General Assembly.
Another senior British official said: “There was tremendous in-fighting in Washington. The drafts of the speech went back and forth. I think there were 28 versions before the final text was agreed.
“For us the key phrase was Bush’s commitment to seeking a new UN resolution to disarm Iraq. We were only sure we had it 24 hours before the speech.
“For some reason this was left out of the text on the teleprompter as Bush was reading it, and he had to improvise.
“He managed to ad-lib a sentence saying ‘we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions’. But instead of saying ‘resolution’ he said ‘resolutions’ in the plural. That’s how we got stuck with the French idea of two resolutions.”
Almost crazy enough to be true, isn’t it.
All I have to say is, once this is over, the Iraqi people better be the freest fucking people on the face of the earth. They better be freer than me. They better be so fucking free they can fly.
Men were executed, women bled
Beads and fish changed hands and
Children stayed up late
Uh huh—
Colored drums they stretched the night
There’s a taxidermist looking for a fight
But now he’s gone
Ah yeah, only the stones remain.
Girls were decked with flowers and violated while
Boys spat juice from out of their fresh young bulbs.
Soldiers crossed their hearts and died and
Pretty girls turned cold inside
But now they’re gone.
Only the stones remain
Oh they’re gone, yeah
Only the stones remain.
And the stones have forgotten them
The stones have forgotten them
They break your body and drain the life out of it.
It sinks into the soil while the soul flies up into the air above.
And when there’s no more tears to cry, there’s
Nothing left to do but laugh.
Stained glass elaborations collapse and candyfloss evaporates, honey.
Only the stones remain, here they go
Ah yeah, only the stones remain.
Now they’re gone
Ah yeah, only the stones remain.
Girls were decked with flowers and ovulated while
Colored drums expressed the night.
There’s a taxidermist grinnin’ with delight.
—Robyn Hitchcock. Title from Get Your War On.
Cry havoc and let slip the jackals of war.
I haven’t been watching the mid-40s on our television, where the Vast Left-wing Media Conspiracy hangs out. Atrios has:
Literally every broadcast “journalist” should be ashamed of him/herself. I never talked much about shock and awe here because I assumed it was probably a scare tactic—something we could do, but not something we would necessarily do. But the whores on TV are pissed. They were promised their shock and awe and they aren’t getting it. Literally every report wonders when it is going to happen.
Pathetic.
Which reminds me of something posted to National Philistine back in January:
I find myself here, today, in an impossible situation.
I must speak to you—the press—with you and through you, using your kind of sentences and leaps of reason, letting you sell me like a precious but marginal commodity, so I can say what everyone already knows but a few vaguely important people in this city are unwilling to admit: that no one wants a war; that an attack against Iraq is no attack against terrorism; that an attack will in fact make the United States less safe; that the Iraqi people do not want a war to liberate them because they will not live through the liberation; that as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, “if we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” I must convey all of this to you, sell it to you, all the while knowing that I find you despicable.
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
On the other hand, Raed abides; Christopher Allbritton isn’t on the ground yet; Kevin Sites still hasn’t updated. (One hopes it’s just more technical hell.) —Meanwhile, here in Portland, cops pulled guns on the drum circles of the Burnside Free State. Protestors turned highways into parking lots last night. And me, this morning, I just finished my coffee. It’s raining. Now I’m going to get on a bus and go downtown and spend the first day of spring helping one company sue another one.
