US politics

Joe Sacco: too controversial for the middlebrow Atlantic

Comix, US politics
Published on 2 Comments on Joe Sacco: too controversial for the middlebrow Atlantic

Here’s what The Atlantic gave me as a birthday gift last week, an utterly dull and middlebrow list of “10 Masterpieces of Graphic Nonfiction”. The complete list:

  • The Beats – Harvey Pekar et all: a history/biography of the Beats writers
  • Edible Secrets – Mia Partlow, Michael Hoerger and Nate Powell: food based extracts from the CIA files
  • A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge – Josh Neufeld: Hurricane Katrina
  • The 14th Dalai Lama – Tetsu Saiwai: the authorised manga biography of the Dalai Lama
  • The Stuff of Life – Mark Schultz, Zander Cannon, Kevin Cannon: a biology textbook
  • Smarter Comics Business Books – no idea: all the same sort of tedious business books now in comics format
  • The Influencing Machine – Brooke Gladstone & Josh Neufeld: why we mistrust news media, written by an NPR commentator
  • The Photographer – Didier Lefèvre & Emmanuel Guibert: a photographer’s journey through war torn Afghanistan, set in 1986
  • Burma Chronicles – Guy Delisle: potted history of Burma and its dictatorship
  • The Elements of Style Illustrated – Strunk and White, adapted by Maira Kalman: that pernicious old style guide illustrated

So these are the finest examples of “comic books as journalism” The Atlantic can think off: adaptations of prose books, some treatments of not too controversial current affairs/political/historical issues, pop science and biographies of people everybody knows. Nothing too outre stylistically speaking either, all these books can be picked up and read easily by people not familiar with comics with no problems. It’s all safely middlebrow in both subject matter and execution, kinda dull.

The worst thing about this list is that this insipidness is a feature, not a bug. As the writer herself acknowledges in a comment, she has deliberately left out certain authors and books for fear of being controversial:

You guys are right–I almost included Footnotes in Gaza but chickened out at the last moment because the topic is so polarizing. I was already expecting heat from rank-and-file fanboys/girls about the overall list and didn’t want to brave the Palestine question as well.

That’s what you call self censorship. It’s not just that Joe Sacco is one of the best and most influential non-fiction cartoonists around, somebody who should not be left off any such top ten list, but as opposed to the majority of people on The Atlantic‘s list, he has actually done comics journalism. He went to the West Bank, Gaza, Bosnia, talked to people there, tried and confirm their stories, then distilled them into a coherent narrative, just as a prose journalist would do. Nobody mentioned above comes close to doing this. He’s not the only high profile creator missing: there’s no trace either of Larry Gonick, who with Jaxon, another missing giant, pioneered the idea of doing long form comics history. Also missing: Ted Rall’s account of his journey to Afghanistan, which happened not when it was the Soviets bombing the shit out of that country, but Uncle Sam. I would like to think its omission on this list was just ignorance, but I suspect it was political…

So yeah, that’s The Atlantic in a nutshell: bland, boring, politically constrained, trying to be “hip” but failing miserably.

Carefully not using the i-word

Liberalism, US politics
Published on

Henry Farrell’s impassionate attack on Matty Yglesias’ bloodless technocracy sure does read like, erm, bloodless technocracy:

But equally obviously, they are not the whole of politics nor anywhere near it. Policy is not made, in the US or anywhere else, through value-neutral debate among technocrats about the relative efficiency of different proposed schemes. Hence, the need for a theory of politics – that is, a theory of how policy proposals can be guided through the political process, and implemented without being completely undermined. And this is all the more important, because (on most plausible theories of politics) there are interaction effects between policy choices at time a and politics at time a+1. The policy choices you make now may have broad political consequences in the future. Obvious examples include policies on campaign spending, or union organization, which directly affect the ability of political actors to mobilize in the future.

This remains a debate on policy implementation taking place within a narrow band of acceptable political opinion, with the difference between Yglesias and Farrell being that the first is a policy wonk, the latter more of a politics wonk, but neither seems comfortable contronting the more fundamental question of ideology, nor are the commenters.

Smug gits

Activism, US politics
Published on

What Would Optimus Prime Do?

It took this photoseries to crystalise for me what was nagging me about Jon Steward’s Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear. The signs featured are clever, geeky, ironic, somewhat smug, but apolitical. It’s protesting as performance art, bloodless and meaningless. Well intentioned, I’m sure, but meaningless. Seeing the rally on the news and reading about it on the internet I could not help but think that this was what all those well meaning, smart centrists and war apologists wanted the anti-war demonstrations to be back in 2001-2003. Polite, cheerful and ineffective.

Zeitgeist

Law in action, Natural World, Science, UK politics, US politics, wingnuts
Published on

Drive your rightwing friends even more batty: Nixon was worried about climate change:

Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public’s attention.

And again: Reagan was kind of a wuss compared to the wingnut fantasy version of him:

In fact, Reagan was terrified of war. He took office eager to vanquish Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and its rebel allies in El Salvador, both of which were backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. But at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion “scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan,” according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley. “Those sons of bitches won’t be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua,” Reagan told chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein near the end of his presidency, “and I’m not going to do it.”

Continuing our theme, the epic tale of when Terry Savage met a free lemonade stand shows that when it comes to political correctness even the most uptight liberal leftwinger has nothing on the wingnut right:

“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

Imagine having to live this way, of having to determine of anything you do whether or not it’s properly capitalist or backsliding deviantism and worse, having to do this not just for yourself, but for anybody you meet?

Some quick links to end the day:

Your Happening World (10)

geekdom, Life under Capitalism, Numpties, US politics, Your Happening World
Published on

Stuff worth mentioning: