John Holbo

So, about that Obama-in-Berlin poster.

No, I’m not going to make fun of the small handful of right-wing blogs that got fake-alarmist about it, hinting that it kinda sorta looked Fascist. My question is related, however. Being a sensible and knowledgeable sort of person, as opposed to some sort of crazed wingnut, when I look at the poster I see not Fascist art but an homage to German modernist styles of the 1910’s and 20’s. Being the sort of person who futzes with fonts, I also see an example of art that would have been actually illegal under the Nazis. Quoting from German Modern, by Steven Heller and Louise Fili [amazon]: [click to continue…]

“Mr. Marks, by mandate of the District of Columbia Prepardon Division, I’m placing you under acquittal for the future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald Dubin that was to take place today, April 22 at 0800 hours and four minutes.”

I like the way in which, thanks to Bush, Republican government inevitably entangles us in serious moral dilemmas: “Wait—can a president really pardon someone who hasn’t even been charged with a crime?”

And you thought that Republican science fiction was all about Intelligent Design.

UPDATE: In my defense, I didn’t really think this could work. I just wanted to call the post that.

Matthew Yglesias was kind enough to link to my Necrotrends post. In comments over there I explained that, in all false modesty, I actually hadn’t worked out whether I thought it was a seance story or a zombie story. Is it Mark Penn as the kid in “Sixth Sense” – ‘I poll dead people’. Or is it William McKinley stashed in a shed like the former roommate at the end of “Shaun of the Dead”? Unclear, is all I can conclude. (One commenter suggested BOTH: si se puede! Fair enough.) But mostly I bring this up because Bruce Bartlett showed up in comements over there. As there was considerable speculation in comments to my original post as to whether the man could say such things with a straight face … I report, you decide: [click to continue…]

Bruce Bartlett has a piece in the WSJ. His thesis statement: “Historically speaking, the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats.” Here’s the antidote. You can guess how this sort of thing is going to go:

In 1900 (under President McKinley) and again in 1922 (under Harding), Republicans tried to enact an antilynching law. Coolidge asked for legislation again in his 1923 State of the Union message. Unfortunately, Southern Democrats in the Senate routinely filibustered every Republican effort to aid African-Americans.

Thus: “[McCain] should explain that African-Americans will be much better off in the long run if they are receptive to candidates of both parties instead of being virtual captives of only one, which is then free to take them for granted.”

But surely if African-Americans feel the need to be specifically receptive to long-dead candidates of not just one but both parties, then a oijia board, not a ballot box, is the appropriate medium.

It would be kind of fun to flip this Bartlett logic over and sort of cross it with Mark Penn microtrends. You could have necrotrends: McCain needs to reach out to recently deceased left-handed soccer moms. Or: Obama needs to be sensitive to the concerns of long-dead jai alai dads. So forth. So long as political considerations are divorced from concerns about biological vivification, the possibilities are endless. If some politician is caught with a ballot box stuffed with the names of the deceased, he could defend himself on the grounds that only letting the living vote is sheer ‘animism’.

Bartlett does not even claim, in the op-ed, that there are living Republicans who deserve the support of African-Americans, due to their support for civil rights. The most recent instance he cites is Richard Nixon, who supported affirmative action as a way of busting racist unions. He is, apparently, seriously arguing that African-Americans should consider voting for dead people.

In short: these attempts to argue that McCain can’t be running for Bush’s third term because he’s running for McKinley’s second are getting a bit far-fetched.

This line is nice (paging Rick Perlstein): “Richard Nixon is said to have developed a “Southern strategy” of using racial code words like “law and order” to gain votes in the South.” Yes, that certainly is said.

UPDATE: I almost forgot. I sort of wrote this post two weeks ago, reviewing a Michael Swanwick story about democracy among the undead. “Salem Toussaint stood in the doorway, eyes rolled up in his head so far that only the whites showed. He held up a hand and in a hollow voice said, ‘One of my constituents is in trouble.'”

PZ Myers has a hilarious post about an I.D’er who failed to understand a particular scientific paper because, apparently, he thought ‘eponymous’ was the name of a particular class of bones.

OK, lemme follow up on my Talking Heads thread, in which I was fairly decisively refuted. [click to continue…]

Quiet around here so I’ll keep up the weekend nonsense posts.

I really like Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch”. It’s a great single and a fun video. However, it is disconcerting to me, on some level, that the song is basically a cross between Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” all runway cold and post-electropunk. I think that a mash-up of those three songs would be great, if anyone wanted to go to the trouble.

Furthermore, I would like to inquire: what do you think of The Talking Heads? I’ve been listening to a lot of old Heads and I’m puzzled. The first big concert I ever went to was the Heads on the Stop Making Sense tour. It was very early in the tour and Byrne didn’t even have the big suit yet. I would sort of like to be able to claim that this very influential band somehow defined a musical moment, and I was there. But, on reflection, they don’t seem to have had all that much lasting influence. It seems like they matured from a spare, NY-style art rock outfit into a pretty good disco band, sound-wise, with Byrne as flamboyant nerd-showman. But there’s only one David Byrne, so it’s not as though subsequent bands have copied that. And it’s not as though indie music subsequently went the pretty good disco band route. So they were, oddly, an evolutionary dead-end. Am I just talking nonsense?

Three unique books by Taro Gomi (that’s a link to the author’s site): Squiggles: A Really Giant Drawing and Painting Book [amazon]. Then click around to find the companion volumes, entitled Scribbles and Doodles. Each page gives the kid a partial, starter-scribble and an assignment. ‘Draw the flag of the bunnies’. Or ‘add water’ to a picture of a bunch of fire fighters. Or ‘add some leaves’ to a page of bare trees. Or a simple line of stairs with ‘draw people walking down, some of them falling!’ The books are big – 350+ pages. Not expensive. Good for trips. (I just sent my kids state-side with Belle, each armed with a Gomi book.)

The books do a great job of providing lots of great ideas for kid art without the instructions becoming bossy and boring, a happy balance struck in virtue of the author/illustrator’s talent for whimsical, back-to-basics simplicity.

Gomi is author of the immortal Everybody Poops

I just experienced a peculiar computer problem. My mac is peacefully sleeping when suddenly its fan starts whirring at perilously high speed. Obviously the poor thing is having a nightmare, I thinks to me. I’ll wake it up and tell it everything is all right. So I hammer on the keyboard and eventually command-q has the desired effect. But now my mouse does not work. Diagnostics (that’s fancy talk for: trying stuff) indicate it is not the mouse. Rather, both USB ports on the keyboard have died. So now I get to plug my mouse into the back of the machine itself forevermore. Oh joy.

What could my computer have been dreaming about that was frightening enough to fry two USB ports in its sleep?

Oh wait. Restarting it did nothing to fix the problem. But shutting down, then starting up, has allowed me to plug my mouse back into the keyboard, with effect.

Thank you for your interest and attention. This has been a test of the my minor emergency network. Had there been an emergency involving you, you would have had to figure out what to do.

So I’m listening to this Peter Beinart/Jonah Goldberg bloggingheads exchange on patriotism and, round about minute 8:00 Goldberg grumbles about the rhetoric of progress and ‘parliament of man’ and all that. Then:

Barack Obama talks about making America better by remaking it, by reinventing it. The aesthetics of his campaign are about a revolution. Well, it seems to me that if you believe this country needs a revolution, if you believe that it needs to be remade, then your love for it isn’t that profound.

Has the man never celebrated the 4th of July? What does he think the fireworks are supposed to represent? His mom told him it’s just a pretty light show (she didn’t want her young son to think revolution is a good thing) and he never thought to ask again when he grew up?

Why did the founding fathers hate America? [click to continue…]

I’m organizing a book event for Doug Wolk’s Reading Comics [amazon], which is now out in paperback. The event will be nominally hosted at the Valve. I got to know Doug on the strength of mocking him with my masterful New Skrullicism post of yore. Then I read this great book of his, which only made me like him more. I posted about it here. Anyway, this post is mostly a heads-up that the event is going to happen round aboutish July 10. I’ve already got participants lined up, but several people are going to participate just by posting on their own blogs so you are welcome to show up in the usual ‘I’ve got a blog too’ way.

In other news: I’ve really been enjoying a lot of music by people named Finn. The two albums currently on heavy rotation are The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive (lead singer Craig Finn) and Liam Finn’s I’ll Be Lightning. A couple YouTube links: Liam Finn’s “Second Chance” and The Hold Steady’s “Little Hoodrat Friend” and “The Swish”. But the one you really need to listen to and watch is “Stuck Between Stations”. Bruce Springsteen wishes he was as awesome as vaguely Randy Newmanesque Craig Finn. Who is apparently starved for groupies. I’m not really eligible myself.

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” You’ve all heard that. It’s A.N. Whitehead. At some point I read something which suggested that the thought continues: ‘because he had the foresight to write out all the heresies in advance.’ Or words to that effect. I thought that was rather witty. Now I bother to look at the original source, Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Amazon has an edition you can search inside.) And apparently the witty, heretical sting in the tail isn’t there. Curious. Does anyone know what’s going on? I’d sort of like to go one quoting the thing. I’ve done so informally on a few occasions. I didn’t think of it. Did someone else famous say it?

I have also discovered that if you Google Whitehead you get sponsored ads that promise: “No More Whiteheads! Whitehead Removal for under $25 Satisfaction Guaranteed.” Ha! You could never do that to Plato.

So I got up this morning and, reading the pages of the venerable “Atlantic Monthly” over coffee, learned that – some hours earlier – my young daughters, ages 6 and 4, half a world away, had said something amusing.

Ain’t it just the 21st Century, though?

(In my defense: I figured Belle was going to be way too busy to update the blog, so I didn’t check there first, before firing up Talking Points Memo and Matthew Yglesias – always my first reads. I did check iChat, but Belle wasn’t on.)

In fact, this is more a case of small world than future world, since Belle and I know Matthew Y. Anyway. What strange and futuristic experience have you had recently?

Some good reads. The Locus Award winners have been announced.

Michael Chabon won for Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I thought it was ok – fun – a bit of a disappointment after Kavalier and Clay. What did you think? OK, I’ll write a short review to finish this post out. Now, on down the list.

Terry Pratchett, Making Money. Very funny, as usual, but sort of by-the-numbers.

I haven’t read Miéville’s Un Lun Dun or Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box. (Put them on the to-read list.)

Cory Doctorow’s “After The Siege” is magnificent. It’s a harrowing tale. It will definitely give you that ghastly, crazy, infowar siege of neverland feeling. I listened to it as a podcast, read by the author himself. I see that someone else has re-recorded it. Throw it on the iPod.

“Witch’s Headstone”, by Neil Gaiman. Haven’t read it.

“A Small Room in Koboldtown”, by Michael Swanwick. You can download it as a free PDF. (And here’s a podcast.) I guess I’m a bit surprised it won. It’s a funny genre mash-up. Hardboiled detective fiction, locked-room murder mystery, meets … well, I’ll quote the first paragraph: [click to continue…]