John Holbo

Sometimes I try to deny my nature, but then Chris goes and posts about a conversation in which someone says something silly. And it turns out I used the silly bit as a major premise myself just last week. Oy.

Ross Douthat on the great Reagan race-baiting debate. Douthat’s take: “Yes, that part was shameful, but that’s not the complete picture.” The ‘complete picture’ is more like: the great Goldwater-to-Reagan Republican realignment is “a story of liberal misgovernment on an epic scale, in which race played an important but ultimately subsidiary role.” [click to continue…]

The most entertaining cape-and-tights comic of the past several years might be Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory[amazon]. It’s getting to be a bit of a cliché, admittedly: toss a bunch of mismatched B-list heroes in the pot and mix it for has-been, coulda-been, struggling actor-syndrome support-group ‘well, how did I get here?’ irony. But the Klarion the Witch Boy [read the first four pages here] and Newsboy Army subplots are just so damn brilliant. Belle wants a Klarion T-shirt or, possibly, coffee mug for Thanksgiving. (Seasonally speaking, he is a Halloween-to-Thanksgiving sort of Goth-pilgrim hero.) I think it should say either "Mother, this is no time for hysteria," or, possibly, "I’ll send a monster made of 250 children to your aid."

Of course, knowing me, I’m reading vol. 1[amazon] of the Golden Age, original Seven Soldiers of Victory.The original seven were: the Vigilante; Green Arrow and Speedy (the only ones who hit the big-time); The Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy (unusual duo, the adult is the sidekick); The Crimson Avenger and Wing (a ‘thank you velly much’ sidekick); and the Shining Knight and his flying horse, Winged Victory. There are six soldiers on the cover and either five (counting sidekicks out) or eight in the book (if you count them in, excepting horses); nine if you include the horse. In fact, the answer is: Winged Victory doesn’t count because he’s a horse, and Wing doesn’t count because he’s Chinese. (I’m not kidding. He never gets to attend any meetings either.) So there are Seven Soldiers of Victory. Their ‘slogan’: "Woe to all workers of evil!"

Why read this sort of thing? [Moves pipe to other corner of mouth.] Because in every one of these Golden Age collections, the quintessentially Young Visiteerish quality of plot and dialogue …

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Josh Glenn has a great little slideshow for you, in the Boston Globe. His worthy theme: Winsor McCay’s classic early comic strip, “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend” [1904-1913]. (McCay is more famous for Little Nemo. You’ve certainly heard of that one.) The occasion: a lavish new edition, The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, all the strips reprinted for the first time at full size; edited and annotated by some fanatic by the name of Ullrich Merkl. Here’s the book page. You can download substantial samples (PDF). Looks nice, though pricey. (Older editions [amazon] are in print as well.)

As I was saying: Josh’s little slideshow – with voiceover – documents the influence of “Rarebit Fiend” on five later films: L’Age D’Or, King Kong, Dumbo, Mary Poppins, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I guess Glenn is taking his cue from Merkl’s work. I deem it well worth 3 minutes and 31 seconds of your time.

Speaking of the shift from print cartooning to film, Winsor McCay, if you don’t know, is pretty much the God-Grandfather of the animated cartoon. He was one of the very first (the very first?), and hand-drew every damn frame, apparently. (With an occasional assistant.) And he did these vaudeville tours in which he lectured and interacted with the films. Obviously the joke is to synchronize your patter with the film itself. YouTube has it all: “Little Nemo” (1911) (but you have to wait until, like, 8:30 minutes in for the actual animation to start.) “Gertie the Dinosaur” (1914); and “Gertie on Tour” (1921); “How a Mosquito Operates” (1912); and some other stuff, too. Gertie the Dinosaur has the distinction of being the first made-for-animation character, I believe.

Last but not least, Josh Glenn himself has a fun new book out: Taking Things Seriously [amazon] – I’ll get around to reviewing that one. Basically, he invited people to submit their objects. And so they did.

If you haven’t read Malcolm Nance’s Small Wars Journal essay, “Waterboarding is Torture … Period” – well, you should. It is a clear, cogent, forceful statement of the anti-torture position. At the bottom of that page you also get a long list of links and trackbacks, and a comment box. Here, for example, is a helpful explanation of why all the anti-torture complaints about ticking time bomb scenarios miss the point:

One need not imagine a ticking nuclear bomb, by the way. One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter. In other words, the life of the innocent need not be in direct or immediate danger, nor must there be a high number of innocents in danger. A single innocent babe in danger of being subjected to such inhuman cruelty deserves to be protected by any means necessary, provided one is certain they have collared a member of the ring. I would never ever be able to forgive myself for allowing my daughter to be degraded in that way, and believe I would sleep well and without guilty conscious should I subject such a man to the minimum force possible to rescue her.

Jesus wept. Meanwhile, another commenter earnestly wonders whether the reason there is so much resistance to torture is that leftists have been watching too much TV.

Then you get Alan “for it even while I was against it” Dershowitz. And Blackfive, on ‘the virtues of waterboarding and secret prisons’: “The reason that character is so important in choosing a President is that the Commander in Chief powers are almost unchecked.”

Sigh.

I don’t have original ideas to contribute to the ‘debate’. I’m against torture. Maybe this would have some rhetorical effect: you can’t waterboard your way to winning hearts and minds. Giving up our country’s longstanding commitments against torture means giving up any hope of winning any War on Terror we might think we are fighting.

I hereby add my humble voice to the chorus of indignation at the sorry sight of the Mukasey confirmation. What follows are my stray, semi-formulated musings about how we got to hell in this handbasket [click to continue…]

I’m reading The Conservatives Have No Clothes [amazon], by Greg Anrig. Pretty good so far, but:

It is difficult to overstate the impact of the Heritage Foundation – along with the much broader network of conservative think tanks, foundations, university-based programs, activist organizations and media affiliates – on U.S. public policy and debates over the role of government in recent years. (p. 2)

Phrases like ‘it would be difficult to overstate’ are a delicate way of saying it would be difficult to state. But it’s a lot. But Anrig’s thesis hinges on how much:

The philosophies of the leading individuals who financed movement conservatism are far outside the mainstream. (David H. Koch ran as a vice presidential candidate on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, receiving just over 1 percent of the vote – a typical showing for libertarians running for public office even today.) But the institutions receiving their largesse needed to concoct strategies for simultaneously keeping those founders happy while also building a broad political coalition.

The real wonder of the conservative enterprise has been its ability to transform the rudimendary desire of a handful of wealthy families to gut the government into a set of public policy ideas that would help to accomplish that goal while sounding appetizing enough to attract large numbers of voters. Rather ingeniously, the simple, easy-to-understand ideas they developed are largely consistent with each other and elegantly link to a broader story line that the conservative movement has effectively sold with remarkable sophistication. That’s how the right won the war of ideas. It’s also the underlying reason why those ideas are failing. (p. 11)

One should, of course, read the book before judging; but I expect a lot of skeptics would fire back promptly that this is shaping up to be a too-easy false consciousness thesis. The whole ‘appetizing enough to attract lots of voters’ bit doesn’t sit easily with the ‘far outside the mainstream’. (Why did Ron Paul raise 4 mill. from 40,000 individual contributors in a single day? Obviously he’s still polling at the traditional, libertarian 1%. But there’s something a bit more going on, surely.) I’m actually pretty sympathetic to Anrig’s overall case, but what is precisely difficult is rigorously refraining from overstating the degree to which his basically plausible, coherent narrative is accurate. Just how influential has Heritage been?

Commentary hosts a symposium on Podhoretz’ World War IV. Their question: “What Kind of War Are We Fighting, And Can We Win It?” I like this bit from Max Boot:

By publishing World War IV, Norman Podhoretz has performed yet another important public service, showing once again why he was such a worthy recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At a time when our political leaders are split over whether we are actually at war with terrorists, when opposition to the war effort in Iraq is growing, and when apathy and complacency appear to be settling in among the public, he lucidly and compellingly explains why we are fighting, how we can prevail, and why we must do so.

My major disagreement with him is pretty minor. It concerns what to call this conflict. Labeling it World War IV assumes that the cold war was World War III, but almost nobody calls it that. Maybe they should, but they don’t. As a matter of purely historical accuracy, moreover, the cold war should be called World War V, since the first world war was really the Seven Years’ War, known in North America as the French and Indian War, while the second was the Napoleonic War. If we follow this logic, we would relabel the 1914-18 conflict World War III and the 1939-45 conflict World War IV, in the same way that George Lucas relabeled his first Star Wars film “Episode IV” after producing three “prequels.”

But merely to advance this argument is to reveal its impracticality.

I think the way to deal with this is to renumber W.W. I as 10 and W.W. II as 20. This will allow for the retroactive insertion of new World Wars, before and between the old ones, if necessary.

Please feel free to discuss the various contributions by the participants.

We recently moved and I now have a long commute. I’ve discovered that I greatly enjoy expending enforced bus-time, listening to audiobooks. I’ve also discovered that Librivox is a rich source of free listening material. They are slouching toward the 1000 title mark, with 1000 volunteer readers doing the work. All the products are released into the public domain. I just finished the second half of Dracula – which was, I must say, touch and go in some chapters. A few of the readers were quite good; the lady with the Indian accent did not – as I feared – make van Helsing sound like Apu. She was quite good. (But there were some terrible van Helsings in the bunch, all the same. I could add to Henry’s post about bad accents, but it seems cruel to mock earnest volunteers, as opposed to overpaid Hollywood actors.)

Modeling myself on the aurally self-improving Mr. Boffin, I’ve started in on Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. (Belle, like Mrs. Boffin, is more a ‘high-flier in fashion’, you understand, and correspondingly less inclined to listen to audiobooks.) I have got up to chapter 9, and the quality of the readers so far has ranged from commendably adequate to downright excellent. (Someone named Alan Chant is doing Boffin as Wallace, from Wallace and Gromit. Which works just fine.)

Does anyone have any special recommendations, audiobook-wise? I’m not averse to paying for good stuff, although so far I am gratified by the availability of high-quality free stuff.

In other late Saturday night news, the 3-year old certifies this as the funniest video in the world. It is pretty funny.

We’ve got a new MacBook, after our 7 year old iBook finally gave up the ghost. (I figure that’s a pretty good run for a portable computer.) I have gotten a baffling amount of frankly contradictory advice about battery conditioning from a number of sources. (Weirdly, the documentation says nothing about this. Doesn’t even tell you to charge it fully the first time.) The only thing everyone I’ve asked agrees on is charging fully the first time. But then some people say you are supposed to let it run down fully. Then charge it again fully. Others say it is bad to do that. You are supposed to make sure it retains a middling sort of charge and that the old ions are jostled regularly. Or whatever. Is there any actual knowledge in the world (I would settle for true belief, honestly) concerning how to maintain a mac battery for maximum power and life?

Tim Lambert has some good, clean fun with Mark Steyn’s strange notions about Hollywood hygiene. (via Yglesias.) But then I flip to the NY Times and read that the bidet is finally coming to the US:

Although Americans have long shied away from conventional bidets, which are common in other countries, and the newer bidet seats, at least two major companies, Kohler and Toto, expect the seat to overcome that resistance eventually.

Proving once again that you can’t spell commodity fetishism without the ‘commode’. This calls out for something – not as beat your head against the basin stupid as Steyn; a microtrendy David Brooks column. Something wise and telling about bidet liberals vs. flyover country, do-it-yourself sons of the soil; of left-coasters who like sipping lattes, hands free, while “a remote-controlled retractable wand that spouts oscillating jets of well-aimed aerated water and a dryer that emits warm air” do the necessary. Some sort of ceramic sequel to Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Something faintly superior, yet self-deprecatingly alarmist, possibly involving clever yet oddly meaningless puns on ‘day’.

Quiet around here. I’ll try to amuse you.

I love Daniel Pinkwater. I feel there is something lost in all this playlisted, Netflixed, on-demand hoo-ha you call Modernity. There needs to be an element of randomized, cinematic, B-listiness. So I bought all these sketchy multi-DVD sets and, every couple weeks, Belle and I ‘snark out’, picking a disc literally at random. (First a random cartoon.) Mostly it’s worked out, until we actually drew Wild Women of Wongo from the deck. We’re too old for that stuff. Now, mostly, we go for SnarkPlatinum or SnarkSelect options (but I won’t bore you with my elaborate randomization system.)

Last week’s pick was "Illegal" (1955), starring Edward G. Robinson, plus bonus DeForest Kelley, Jayne Mansfield, and Henry Kulky action. The tag is simply false: " He was a guy who marked 100 men for death – until a blonde called ‘Angel’ O’Hara marked him for life!" Nothing of the sort happens.

I like the way they used to use quotation marks in the title itself.

But wait. If the title is "Illegal", shouldn’t I have to refer to it as "’Illegal’"?

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From Michael Medved’s latest column, “Six Inconvenient Truths About the U.S. And Slavery”:

Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.

So the ‘inconvenient truth’ is that the slave traders were the real moral sufferers, in this situation. (OK, you’re so smart. What do you think he meant to say?) Let’s read on.

By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse. Here, the popular, facile comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass death, not profit or productivity.

But since the most morally ‘horrifying aspect’ of the Middle Passage was, by hypothesis, the element that is missing in the Nazi case – the element that breaks the analogy: the heartrending spectacle afforded by frustrated profit motive – I take it Medved has just proved the slave trade was worse than the Holocaust?

So we don’t need to feel guilty about slavery, after all?

Oh, never mind. (Honestly, don’t these people have a Moveon ad to complain about?)

Via Sadly, no! (whose discerning discussion of the whole column is worthy of your attention.)

UPDATE: In comments it has been pointed out that my reading is not plausible. Yes, I noticed. In all seriousness, what do you think he meant to say?

Here are some follow-up thoughts to my long story arc TV post. Let me step back and take in the bigger picture. Seasonality. It’s pretty weird that it makes sense to try to deduce what is going on in a war from long-term seasonal trends. This is one way in which TV and foreign policy differ. In the TV case it is perfectly fine – good, even – to indulge in long arc story-telling. Things don’t always have to make a bit of damn sense, episode by episode, so long as there there is a satisfying up and down, up and down, in the long term. But foreign policy seems different. [click to continue…]

By general acclaim, it’s a fairly Golden age for TV. Thanks to HBO, but also for other reasons. Mostly it has to do with improved story-telling, due to whole season or multi-season story arcs, made possible largely by the DVD market, I suppose. Shows are being made to be sold as season-length packages. The effect on quality is salutary, but there are two risks. First, the show runs too long. A good story is undone – the early promise retroactively debased – by writers forced to drag it out; keep the golden goose laying past her prime. Second, a good show may be canceled, leaving the audience unable to finish the damn story.

Example: Invasion (2005) – which I’m considering buying for the typical Holbonic reason that it’s marked down 60%. (As a purchaser, I am indifferent – swayed neither in favor or against – by the consideration that it is written/produced by former teen idol Shaun Cassidy.) Who here has watched it? Any good? It seems to have won a solid fan-base, but not enough to stave off cancellation – supposedly due to a slow start, and being about a hurricane at the time of Katrina.

I like a good SF yarn. I don’t really like the thought of a cliffhanger with no resolution. But these sorts of no-end productions are actually becoming more common – the Edwin Droodification of TV, if you will. Which reminds me. I happened to catch a bit of a memorable Doctor Who episode a year ago – which I now learn is “The Unquiet Dead”. Charles Dickens is in it, and – inspired by the creepy, gaseous Gelth he has met – he promises to finish Drood, making the murderer a ‘blue elemental’. Maybe it could turn out, conversely, that there is a somewhat hypocritical family of Victorian snobs from Cloisterham under the water (!). Or something.

Let us discuss the state of TV, the long story arc, the advantages and risks that accrue thereto.