Voter, Beware
by Jeffrey Toobin March 2, 2009
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Keywords
Voting Rights Act;
Supreme Court;
Civil Rights;
Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder;
Justice Department;
(Pres.) Barack Obama;
Nathaniel Persily
The Voting Rights Act, whic passed in 1965, stands as on of the great monuments to civi rights in American history. Th Fifteenth Amendment, ratified i 1870, purported to give American the right to vote regardless of “race color, or previous condition o servitude,” but it was not until century later, with the passage o the act, that the right was enforced and Southern blacks were finall free to cast a ballot. Over the years an ideologically diverse group o Supreme Court Justices ha reviewed and approved th constitutionality of the act man times. But, in a case to be argue before the Court this spring, th current conservative majority has chance to undo this signa achievement of America democracy
Section 5 of the act, which is at issue in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, is what gave the legislation teeth. That provision singles out by name those states and counties with especially notorious histories of discriminating against African-Americans, through such mechanisms as literacy tests, character tests, and poll taxes. The law not only eradicated these obstacles; it went a crucial step further. It decreed that if the “covered jurisdictions” wanted to change their voting procedures in any way—from redrawing district lines in the state legislature to moving the location of a solitary polling place—they first had to obtain permission from the Justice Department. (Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006, and in the process expanded its coverage to include several Western states with histories of discriminating against Hispanic and Native American voters.) The process of review by the Justice Department, which is known as “preclearance,” has been remarkably effective.
And that is the point of the lawsuit. Some of the jurisdictions covered by Section 5 now want to be released from this form of federal receivership. As the lower court in the case put it, the plaintiffs argue that the preclearance provision should be found unconstitutional “because Congress ‘irrationally and incongruously’ chose to continue imposing ‘disproportionate’ burdens and a ‘badge of shame’ on covered jurisdictions on the basis of an ‘ancient formula’ and ‘conditions that existed thirty or more years ago but have long since been remedied.’ ” What is the proof? The plaintiffs stated it in the first line of their brief: “The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African-American president is far different than when Section Five was first enacted in 1965.”
To paraphrase the President: Yes it is. The formula for determining which jurisdictions are covered is largely based on election results from 1964, a time that is nearly a half century, and a world, away from our own. Almost all of Virginia and much of North Carolina are covered jurisdictions under Section 5, and Obama won both states. Moreover, the Justice Department has for some time been approving ninety-nine per cent of the electoral changes submitted by covered jurisdictions. As Representative Lynn Westmoreland, a Georgia Republican, put it in arguing against the most recent reauthorization of the law, “Congress is declaring from on high that states with voting problems forty years ago can simply never be forgiven—that Georgians must eternally wear the scarlet letter because of the actions of their grandparents and great-grandparents. We have repented and we have reformed, and now, as Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ ” There is something unseemly, to say the least, about conservatives who have opposed the Voting Rights Act now toasting its success, particularly as that success is incomplete.
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Barack Obama won the Presidency, but voting patterns in the Deep South suggest that race remains a major factor in American political life. As part of a brief in the Northwest Austin case, Professor Nathaniel Persily, of Columbia Law School, shows how poorly Obama did with white Democrats in those states. According to Persily’s analysis of the 2008 returns, Obama received forty-seven per cent of the white vote in states that are not covered under Section 5 but won only twenty-six per cent of the white vote in covered states. “Barack Obama actually did worse among whites than John Kerry in several of the covered jurisdictions, despite the nationwide Democratic swing,” Persily writes. Race seems like the best explanation for this difference. The fact that other African-American candidates have failed so often and for so long with white voters in the South indicates that no one should be in a hurry to declare the United States a “post-racial” society.
What recent electoral history shows is that voting requires broader, not narrower, protection. In many parts of the country, the voting rights of poor and minority citizens are treated with not so benign neglect. In the 2000 election, African-American voters in Florida suffered disproportionately from that state’s shoddy practices, such as inadequately maintained registration lists and inferior technology; in 2004, many minority voters in Ohio endured long lines waiting for balky, and too few, voting machines. Across the nation, laws that remove the franchise from those with criminal convictions hit minorities especially hard. More directly, the Republican Party has made an institutional commitment to eradicate the nonexistent problem of voter fraud by imposing identification requirements that are obviously aimed at limiting the numbers of voters from demographic groups that favor Democrats. But neither Florida nor Ohio is a covered jurisdiction under Section 5, and the act is not written to address new techniques of suppression. Three years ago, Congress ducked the problem by simply reauthorizing the old law and giving it a fatuous new name, the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. For the legislators, this was heroism by association, not heroism in fact.
Viewing Obama’s election as an opportunity to tidy up the nation’s historical accounts is tempting but ultimately wrong. Yet even if the Court’s conservatives succeed in taking out Section 5 they cannot reverse the course of a changed and changing nation. In the Court’s great affirmative-action case of 2003, in which it upheld racial preference in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion suggested that by 2028 such measures should no longer be necessary. The Voting Rights Act expires in 2031. Thanks in part to the election of Barack Obama, it is now plausible to believe that the day will come when the act, too, will no longer be necessary. ♦
Saturday, February 21, 2009
WE GET LETTERS
I believe some of your language condemned me intemperately and angrily if not hysterically. You must see that you can and do dish out, which is probably a major reason you sometimes find me dishing it back to your discomfort and woe. You must learn to talk nicely to me as well as vice versa. You are not perfect and not always the exquisite gentleman in your behavior, although quick to blame me for flaws that you yourself are not devoid of. You certainly have regularly accused me of abusing you, and all abuse on either side must stop, even if we have to tiptoe for awhile to get used to kind behavior. "What in the world are you thinking?" for example is a challenging, inflammatory phase of the sort that picks fights. All this must cease. If we can't talk about something without such accusatory language, we must drop the subject at least temporarily.
Dan, you're just not always right and I always wrong. Please get over it and be a friend, not a combatant. If there are any apologies due in this round, it's from you to me.
Dan, you're just not always right and I always wrong. Please get over it and be a friend, not a combatant. If there are any apologies due in this round, it's from you to me.
JUSTIFICATION AND COVERUP.
That engenders quiet rage in me that finally erupts in responses that you find hurtful.
THAT'S THE WORST PART OF THIS. THE REVELATION OF JUSTIFICATION AND COVERUP, BASIC DISHONESTY. I THINK THE GUY IS DISHONEST BY NATURE. SOME PEOPLE ARE LLIKE THAT. PSYCHOPATHIC LIARS FOR EXAMPLE. THERE IS SUCH A THING. THIS IS A MILD CASE, BUT IT'S THE TRUTH.
HE IS A LIAR. ONLY A LLIAR COULD COME UP WITH THAT STORY ABOUT PEOPLE DESPISING ME. IT'S TRUE. HE'S A LIAR.
AND DISLOYAL. LOOK AT HIS TAKE ON RICK. NO WONDER YOU'RE ANGRY. AND THE PROBLEM WITH ME, IS I JUST CAN'T BELIEVE THE OBVIOUS TRUTH. THE GUY IS A BLOWHARD, A LIAR, AND DISLOYAL. A DISLOYAL, LYING BLOWHARD. SOMEONE WHO WILL SAY ANYTHING IF IT SOUNDS GOOD.
That engenders quiet rage in me that finally erupts in responses that you find hurtful.
THIS IS RIDICULOUS. ENGENDERING QUIET RAGE, ALL JUSTIFIED OF COURSE.
AND IT FINALLY ERUPTS IN, GET THIS, NOT HURTFUL RESPONSES, BUT RESPONSES THAT YOU FIND HURTFUL.
ALWAYS THE COVERUP. ALWAYS THE BULLSHIT.
THAT'S SOMETHING A NORMAL PERSON WOULD NEVER SAY, BECAUSE ITS A COVERUP. ITS A FALSE DESCRIPTION.
RESPONSES THAT YOU FIND HURTFUL. FIND HURTFUL.
LIKE SOMEHOW THAT'S BECAUSE I'M THIN-SKINNED. THEY ARE NOT REALLY HURTFUL. ITS ALL RELATIVE.
HE KNOWS BETTER, BUT THAT STUPID BOURGEOIS NONSENSE COMES OUT. WHAT A JERK. THAT YOU FIND HURTFUL.
AND SOMEHOW JUSTIFYING ENGENDERING QUIET RAGE. ALLOWING A FELT WRONG TO FESTER. JUST BEING QUIET, AND THEN ALLOWING IT TO BUILD UP.
AND HE JUSTIFIES THAT.
AM I RIGHT.
CAN I GET A FUCKING WITNESS.
THE GUY'S THOUGHTS AND SPEECH BE LACED WITH THIS KIND OF GARBAGE. LACED WITH JUSTIFICATION AND COVERUP.
THAT'S THE WORST PART OF THIS. THE REVELATION OF JUSTIFICATION AND COVERUP, BASIC DISHONESTY. I THINK THE GUY IS DISHONEST BY NATURE. SOME PEOPLE ARE LLIKE THAT. PSYCHOPATHIC LIARS FOR EXAMPLE. THERE IS SUCH A THING. THIS IS A MILD CASE, BUT IT'S THE TRUTH.
HE IS A LIAR. ONLY A LLIAR COULD COME UP WITH THAT STORY ABOUT PEOPLE DESPISING ME. IT'S TRUE. HE'S A LIAR.
AND DISLOYAL. LOOK AT HIS TAKE ON RICK. NO WONDER YOU'RE ANGRY. AND THE PROBLEM WITH ME, IS I JUST CAN'T BELIEVE THE OBVIOUS TRUTH. THE GUY IS A BLOWHARD, A LIAR, AND DISLOYAL. A DISLOYAL, LYING BLOWHARD. SOMEONE WHO WILL SAY ANYTHING IF IT SOUNDS GOOD.
That engenders quiet rage in me that finally erupts in responses that you find hurtful.
THIS IS RIDICULOUS. ENGENDERING QUIET RAGE, ALL JUSTIFIED OF COURSE.
AND IT FINALLY ERUPTS IN, GET THIS, NOT HURTFUL RESPONSES, BUT RESPONSES THAT YOU FIND HURTFUL.
ALWAYS THE COVERUP. ALWAYS THE BULLSHIT.
THAT'S SOMETHING A NORMAL PERSON WOULD NEVER SAY, BECAUSE ITS A COVERUP. ITS A FALSE DESCRIPTION.
RESPONSES THAT YOU FIND HURTFUL. FIND HURTFUL.
LIKE SOMEHOW THAT'S BECAUSE I'M THIN-SKINNED. THEY ARE NOT REALLY HURTFUL. ITS ALL RELATIVE.
HE KNOWS BETTER, BUT THAT STUPID BOURGEOIS NONSENSE COMES OUT. WHAT A JERK. THAT YOU FIND HURTFUL.
AND SOMEHOW JUSTIFYING ENGENDERING QUIET RAGE. ALLOWING A FELT WRONG TO FESTER. JUST BEING QUIET, AND THEN ALLOWING IT TO BUILD UP.
AND HE JUSTIFIES THAT.
AM I RIGHT.
CAN I GET A FUCKING WITNESS.
THE GUY'S THOUGHTS AND SPEECH BE LACED WITH THIS KIND OF GARBAGE. LACED WITH JUSTIFICATION AND COVERUP.
TURKEY
I suggest we talk civilly in a month or two and you use the time to contemplate the SINGLE INCIDENT of your blase' response to my pouring my professional guts out to you--dismissive, oh that, I've known that since I was 22. And you expect me to evince "passion" for your hobby horses relating to HTML?? If you treat me as you did when I poured out my LIFE PASSION to you, you can't expect any interest on my part in your cause of the moment that doesn't especially engage my passions. You need to realize that relationship is a two-way street and you spend altogether two much time blaming me and excusing yourself. That engenders quiet rage in me that finally erupts in responses that you find hurtful. ALL THIS IS NOT TENABLE. For us to relate productively, you need to become open to alternative modes of interacting that are kinder and mutual and sympathetic and civil, rather than, yes, truculent.
a nation of cowards
is still blind to its uphill climb, is still afraid of itself.Americans who count at least one black friend has jumped 25 percent since 1973. But what about two black friends? Real friends? (Barack Obama doesn’t count.“This is truly sad.” He spoke, with a tinge of bitterness, of the “polite, restrained mixing that now passes as meaningful interaction but that accomplishes little.” Sure, blacks and whites mingle at the workplace or in the marketplace, on the subway or in line at the deli, but voluntary segregation, he assured his listeners, is still rampant.Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” he said, “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. We chewed over Barack Obama’s biraciality, his cleanliness and articulatenessHolder's conclusion, that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have” sounds the alarm: America is still segregated, is still blind to its uphill climb, is still afraid of itself.
Eric Holder’s confrontational speech
Eric Holder’s confrontational speech to members of the Justice Department on Wednesday spoke plainly and bluntly about the level of racial discourse in America. “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” he said, “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” However equivocal his windup, Holder’s line was a punch in the face to America. As top cop of the United States, it’s his job to play the disciplinarian—but the lengthy admonition, given in honor of Black History Month, by the first African American attorney general, was the verbal equivalent to shock and awe.
"On Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago,” Holder said. “This is truly sad.” He spoke, with a tinge of bitterness, of the “polite, restrained mixing that now passes as meaningful interaction but that accomplishes little.” Sure, blacks and whites mingle at the workplace or in the marketplace, on the subway or in line at the deli, but voluntary segregation, he assured his listeners, is still rampant.
America talked a lot about race during the 2008 campaign. We chewed over Barack Obama’s biraciality, his cleanliness and articulateness, the question of whether he'd be black enough, the reluctance of older blacks to back him, Michelle Obama’s American-ness and her collegiate views on race relations, the role of the Hispanic vote in sending western swing states into the blue column, and the maelstrom of commentary that followed the “revelation” that when it comes to race, Pastor Jeremiah Wright is not, in fact, a big fan of the United States.
But we never really went there. Not like Eric Holder did. Obama's March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, "A More Perfect Union," was greeted with a sense of collective relief in America. "This was his kairos moment," said one black minister at the time, using the Greek word for "destiny." I agree. Amen. Tell it, brother. Obama for America capitalized on the positive reception of the disquisition—selling $12 DVDs of “A More Perfect Union” and almost daring rival campaigns to bring up Wright or race again. They did not. The final analysis: case closed.
Holder, in lawyerly fashion, cracked the case back open. There is, of course, the argument that Obama was running for president, while Holder has his job sewn up. Or that Obama’s speech as given by a man forced to talk about race in America, and Holder’s was given by a man who chose to. But that’s too simple. Obama, by all accounts, had been chomping at the bit to give a speech on race during the campaign. Advisers gave the OK, but the 45-minute oration wasn’t written in three days. The words were the worry beads Obama had been clacking about in his head for months, years even—the same thoughts that clack about the heads of most people of color.
So why did Holder’s words seem so confrontational, so angry, so “un-Obama”? Most notable was Holder’s unequivocal habitation of the black perspective. Obama’s careful speech was eager to embrace many sides: the worker who feels maligned, the old preacher who feels burned by the American dream. Holder offered no such accommodation: “The history of the United States in the nineteenth century revolves around a resolution of the question of how America was going to deal with its black inhabitants,” he said. “The fight for black equality came first and helped to shape the way in which other groups of people came to think of themselves and to raise their desire for equal treatment.”
Should Holder's message come as such a surpise? Polls suggest that the percentage of Americans who count at least one black friend has jumped 25 percent since 1973. But what about two black friends? Real friends? (Barack Obama doesn’t count.) Little current data exist, but now that the bar for “post-racial” interaction has been raised, American failures become more obvious. So Holder decried “electronically padlocked suburbs” alongside “race protected cocoons,” and also lamented the caging of race-based topics that are not to be brought up in mixed company—which, as Obama’s speech pointed out, “find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table” instead of being aired in plain view. Holder's conclusion, that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have” sounds the alarm: America is still segregated, is still blind to its uphill climb, is still afraid of itself.
"On Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago,” Holder said. “This is truly sad.” He spoke, with a tinge of bitterness, of the “polite, restrained mixing that now passes as meaningful interaction but that accomplishes little.” Sure, blacks and whites mingle at the workplace or in the marketplace, on the subway or in line at the deli, but voluntary segregation, he assured his listeners, is still rampant.
America talked a lot about race during the 2008 campaign. We chewed over Barack Obama’s biraciality, his cleanliness and articulateness, the question of whether he'd be black enough, the reluctance of older blacks to back him, Michelle Obama’s American-ness and her collegiate views on race relations, the role of the Hispanic vote in sending western swing states into the blue column, and the maelstrom of commentary that followed the “revelation” that when it comes to race, Pastor Jeremiah Wright is not, in fact, a big fan of the United States.
But we never really went there. Not like Eric Holder did. Obama's March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, "A More Perfect Union," was greeted with a sense of collective relief in America. "This was his kairos moment," said one black minister at the time, using the Greek word for "destiny." I agree. Amen. Tell it, brother. Obama for America capitalized on the positive reception of the disquisition—selling $12 DVDs of “A More Perfect Union” and almost daring rival campaigns to bring up Wright or race again. They did not. The final analysis: case closed.
Holder, in lawyerly fashion, cracked the case back open. There is, of course, the argument that Obama was running for president, while Holder has his job sewn up. Or that Obama’s speech as given by a man forced to talk about race in America, and Holder’s was given by a man who chose to. But that’s too simple. Obama, by all accounts, had been chomping at the bit to give a speech on race during the campaign. Advisers gave the OK, but the 45-minute oration wasn’t written in three days. The words were the worry beads Obama had been clacking about in his head for months, years even—the same thoughts that clack about the heads of most people of color.
So why did Holder’s words seem so confrontational, so angry, so “un-Obama”? Most notable was Holder’s unequivocal habitation of the black perspective. Obama’s careful speech was eager to embrace many sides: the worker who feels maligned, the old preacher who feels burned by the American dream. Holder offered no such accommodation: “The history of the United States in the nineteenth century revolves around a resolution of the question of how America was going to deal with its black inhabitants,” he said. “The fight for black equality came first and helped to shape the way in which other groups of people came to think of themselves and to raise their desire for equal treatment.”
Should Holder's message come as such a surpise? Polls suggest that the percentage of Americans who count at least one black friend has jumped 25 percent since 1973. But what about two black friends? Real friends? (Barack Obama doesn’t count.) Little current data exist, but now that the bar for “post-racial” interaction has been raised, American failures become more obvious. So Holder decried “electronically padlocked suburbs” alongside “race protected cocoons,” and also lamented the caging of race-based topics that are not to be brought up in mixed company—which, as Obama’s speech pointed out, “find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table” instead of being aired in plain view. Holder's conclusion, that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have” sounds the alarm: America is still segregated, is still blind to its uphill climb, is still afraid of itself.
Investigating Bush's Crimes
Investigating Bush's Crimes
By Scott Horton
This article appeared in the March 9, 2009 edition of The Nation.
February 18, 2009
JANNA BROWER
When the Obama transition team opened a questions referendum on its popular change.gov website in December, one issue quickly soared to the top. "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald) to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?" And when Obama stepped to the microphone at his first presidential press conference, the question came again, this time with reference to a Congressional call for a truth commission. Obama's response: "My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen; but that generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards." The answer was a slight variation on the theme he has struck consistently since the final days of his campaign. But what does it mean with respect to the criminal accountability of Bush-era policy-makers? Many are inclined to hear confirmation of their hopes--Republicans eager to see the disastrous Bush years passed over without more fuss will stress the intention not to "look back," while Obama supporters who embraced his strong criticism of Bush's torture and surveillance policies will emphasize his observation that "nobody is above the law." Others are displeased with the ambiguity and press for a conclusive decision on the question.
But these exchanges give us the essence of the "no drama Obama" style: he builds support with lofty rhetoric, giving some sense of his policy objectives, but he consciously avoids committing himself to any particular resolution. Obama is not being coy, I think. He means precisely what he says. Accountability is not a part of his affirmative agenda, least of all for his first hundred days, on which the long-term success or failure of his presidential term may hang. An economic stimulus package, healthcare initiatives and a series of foreign policy challenges occupy center stage. Even in the Justice Department, Obama's first objectives involve restoring the institution's self-confidence and resurrecting its historical role in civil rights and voting rights enforcement. It's not that Obama and his senior advisers see the accountability issue as inherently unimportant--on the contrary, they readily admit that it may be the key to long-term resolution of a series of questions surrounding the abusive extension of presidential power. But it is clearly a back-burner issue for them, something better addressed near the end of his first term or, better still, during a second term.
Obama's problem is that a growing number of Americans are concerned about what the Bush administration did and are eager to press the issue. The extent of public concern has been reflected in several recent public opinion polls, including one in February by USA Today showing that nearly two-thirds of Americans support investigations of the Bush administration's use of torture and warrantless wiretapping; roughly 40 percent support criminal investigations.
And the shift in public opinion is not the only thing transforming the environment in Washington on this issue. Susan Crawford, a Cheney protégée and the senior Bush administration official responsible for the military commissions in Guantánamo, told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward that she refused to approve the charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani because he had been tortured. Torture is, of course, a felony under US law, and if multiple figures are involved, it might well be "conspiracy to torture," a separate crime. As ABC News reported and President Bush later confirmed, the full book of proposed techniques to which Qahtani was subjected had been approved by the National Security Council, headed by Bush. A senior Obama Justice figure remarked after reading the Crawford interview that it would be "impossible to sweep the matter under the carpet." That's a view that seems to be shared by US allies and United Nations officials, who, pointing to Crawford's admissions, are asking why the United States has failed to introduce a criminal inquiry into how torture came to be practiced as a matter of US policy. Articles 4 and 5 of the Convention Against Torture require the United States to prohibit torture under domestic criminal law and to investigate and prosecute incidents in which it is practiced. The failure even to begin criminal investigations has placed the United States in breach of its obligations under the treaty, a point that even torture apologists like University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner freely concede.
President Bush was widely expected to issue blanket pardons to those involved in his interrogations and surveillance programs, but he did not do so. Moreover, the Bush administration's tenuous claim to legality for its torture programs was ended immediately after Obama assumed office, when he directed a reassessment of interrogation policies and revoked all of the relevant Bush-era Justice Department opinions with the stroke of a pen.
Obama has been careful to avoid any suggestion that he or his senior officers are directing a criminal investigation or prosecution of the Bush-era torture enablers. He is right to do so. The criminal justice system of a democratic state should not operate like a well-oiled military machine taking its cue from the commander in chief. It requires professional prosecutors who operate with critical detachment from political officials when they pursue criminal investigations. Moreover, the painful circumstances of the torture and surveillance programs, particularly the fact that senior Justice Department officials were complicit in their implementation at almost every step, make it an ethically doubtful proposition for the Justice Department even to take up the matter.
Up to this point, political influence has been used to block accountability. Investigations are still under way at the Justice Department and other agencies that touch on important aspects of the Bush administration's detainee policy. One probe is looking into the mysterious destruction of evidence of interrogations using highly coercive techniques that was sought in pending criminal cases. Another probe, nearly complete, is examining the circumstances behind the crafting of the notorious torture memos in the black hole of the Bush Justice Department, the Office of Legal Counsel. Under the Bush administration, these and other investigations were often bottled up, as senior officials refused to cooperate and the White House--which functioned as the nerve center for Justice Department political operations--refused to turn over documents. On occasion, they were shut down directly by order of President Bush. One criminal investigation launched by FBI agents at Guantánamo was ordered closed by the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, Alice Fisher, who may herself emerge as a target of a criminal investigation. Under the transparency policies Obama announced during his first week, and under the detainee policies he is busily putting in place, the administration will unblock internal probes and mandate that federal employees, including White House employees, cooperate with them. Realization that this was in the works may have given rise to President Bush's January 16 "gag letters" issued to Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten, instructing them to keep quiet in the face of a Congressional probe about their dealings with the Justice Department.
Leading Congressional Democrats are proposing a way forward. In January House Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers announced a blue-ribbon panel to be appointed to conduct an investigation. He is also proposing that the statute of limitations be modified to take the time pressure off potential criminal investigators. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy put forth a proposal of his own a few weeks later in a presentation at Georgetown University. Leahy pressed the idea of a "truth commission," similar to the approach used in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime. Bush administration officials who come forward and offer a full accounting of their deeds could get immunity for their testimony; those who keep silent or give false statements could face prosecution. The Leahy and Conyers approaches share a number of elements, including the notion that the commission would consist of eminent people who are "above the political fray," would get subpoena power and would be fully staffed and resourced. Both Conyers and Leahy cite the 9/11 Commission as a model--a Congressionally authorized commission backed by presidential authority, a hybrid model that would eliminate some of the potential legal challenges that a purely Congressional commission might face. Conyers is, however, far more concerned about building a solid record that can form the basis of prosecutions, whereas Leahy offers immunity as a reward for candor.
There are unmistakable signs of momentum in support of a commission approach in Washington. Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic Congressional leaders who once sang in the "let's forgive and forget" choir are now signaling their support for a commission. But what about the Obama White House? Following a meeting between Leahy and Greg Craig, Obama's White House counsel, the White House was committed only to an ongoing discussion.
But the commission approach may, depending on some critical details, offer the best solution to the impasse. Moreover, it may well suit Obama's needs for the commission to be the creation and initiative of Congress rather than of his administration. It would allow a comprehensive investigation without embroiling the White House in the process. A commission would be in a position to put to rest some persistent questions, particularly regarding how torture came to be embraced as a matter of policy and whether the administration ever got actionable intelligence from tortured suspects that could conceivably offset the immense damage that torture has done to the moral authority of the United States around the world. Most significant, if a commission recommended a criminal investigation to the Attorney General, and if it recommended appointment of a special prosecutor, that would deflect suggestions that the process was "political."
On the other hand, investigative commissions do not actually do justice. They cannot bring charges, and in the process of granting immunity for testimony they can muddy the waters for a later prosecutor. Any commission would need the advice and guidance of professional prosecutors, who could help to assure that it would prudently exercise the right to grant immunity and would avoid damaging future prosecutions.
Criminal investigations and prosecutions might be avoided under the Leahy approach and might be delayed under the Conyers approach. But whatever approach is finally settled upon, it seems increasingly clear that there will be multiple investigations: a commission of some sort, Congressional hearings (which are promised in any event) and internal probes within the government, which will likely be pursued delicately and quietly.
Though the wheels of justice grind slowly, they grind exceeding small. One year from today, it is likely that a large number of the secret documents that form the backbone of Bush detention policy will be public and many of their authors will have been publicly interrogated about them. We will have a better sense of how torture crept into the American interrogations system and whose authority was invoked to ram it through in the face of legal hurdles once thought insurmountable. And one year from today, we will probably still be asking whether any of the authors of this national tragedy will or should be prosecuted. That outcome is not likely to satisfy either side of the debate. But it may well be consistent with the interests of justice, which demands a complete exploration of the facts before anyone is held to account. That outcome fully reflects the Obama style.
By Scott Horton
This article appeared in the March 9, 2009 edition of The Nation.
February 18, 2009
JANNA BROWER
When the Obama transition team opened a questions referendum on its popular change.gov website in December, one issue quickly soared to the top. "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald) to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?" And when Obama stepped to the microphone at his first presidential press conference, the question came again, this time with reference to a Congressional call for a truth commission. Obama's response: "My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen; but that generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards." The answer was a slight variation on the theme he has struck consistently since the final days of his campaign. But what does it mean with respect to the criminal accountability of Bush-era policy-makers? Many are inclined to hear confirmation of their hopes--Republicans eager to see the disastrous Bush years passed over without more fuss will stress the intention not to "look back," while Obama supporters who embraced his strong criticism of Bush's torture and surveillance policies will emphasize his observation that "nobody is above the law." Others are displeased with the ambiguity and press for a conclusive decision on the question.
But these exchanges give us the essence of the "no drama Obama" style: he builds support with lofty rhetoric, giving some sense of his policy objectives, but he consciously avoids committing himself to any particular resolution. Obama is not being coy, I think. He means precisely what he says. Accountability is not a part of his affirmative agenda, least of all for his first hundred days, on which the long-term success or failure of his presidential term may hang. An economic stimulus package, healthcare initiatives and a series of foreign policy challenges occupy center stage. Even in the Justice Department, Obama's first objectives involve restoring the institution's self-confidence and resurrecting its historical role in civil rights and voting rights enforcement. It's not that Obama and his senior advisers see the accountability issue as inherently unimportant--on the contrary, they readily admit that it may be the key to long-term resolution of a series of questions surrounding the abusive extension of presidential power. But it is clearly a back-burner issue for them, something better addressed near the end of his first term or, better still, during a second term.
Obama's problem is that a growing number of Americans are concerned about what the Bush administration did and are eager to press the issue. The extent of public concern has been reflected in several recent public opinion polls, including one in February by USA Today showing that nearly two-thirds of Americans support investigations of the Bush administration's use of torture and warrantless wiretapping; roughly 40 percent support criminal investigations.
And the shift in public opinion is not the only thing transforming the environment in Washington on this issue. Susan Crawford, a Cheney protégée and the senior Bush administration official responsible for the military commissions in Guantánamo, told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward that she refused to approve the charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani because he had been tortured. Torture is, of course, a felony under US law, and if multiple figures are involved, it might well be "conspiracy to torture," a separate crime. As ABC News reported and President Bush later confirmed, the full book of proposed techniques to which Qahtani was subjected had been approved by the National Security Council, headed by Bush. A senior Obama Justice figure remarked after reading the Crawford interview that it would be "impossible to sweep the matter under the carpet." That's a view that seems to be shared by US allies and United Nations officials, who, pointing to Crawford's admissions, are asking why the United States has failed to introduce a criminal inquiry into how torture came to be practiced as a matter of US policy. Articles 4 and 5 of the Convention Against Torture require the United States to prohibit torture under domestic criminal law and to investigate and prosecute incidents in which it is practiced. The failure even to begin criminal investigations has placed the United States in breach of its obligations under the treaty, a point that even torture apologists like University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner freely concede.
President Bush was widely expected to issue blanket pardons to those involved in his interrogations and surveillance programs, but he did not do so. Moreover, the Bush administration's tenuous claim to legality for its torture programs was ended immediately after Obama assumed office, when he directed a reassessment of interrogation policies and revoked all of the relevant Bush-era Justice Department opinions with the stroke of a pen.
Obama has been careful to avoid any suggestion that he or his senior officers are directing a criminal investigation or prosecution of the Bush-era torture enablers. He is right to do so. The criminal justice system of a democratic state should not operate like a well-oiled military machine taking its cue from the commander in chief. It requires professional prosecutors who operate with critical detachment from political officials when they pursue criminal investigations. Moreover, the painful circumstances of the torture and surveillance programs, particularly the fact that senior Justice Department officials were complicit in their implementation at almost every step, make it an ethically doubtful proposition for the Justice Department even to take up the matter.
Up to this point, political influence has been used to block accountability. Investigations are still under way at the Justice Department and other agencies that touch on important aspects of the Bush administration's detainee policy. One probe is looking into the mysterious destruction of evidence of interrogations using highly coercive techniques that was sought in pending criminal cases. Another probe, nearly complete, is examining the circumstances behind the crafting of the notorious torture memos in the black hole of the Bush Justice Department, the Office of Legal Counsel. Under the Bush administration, these and other investigations were often bottled up, as senior officials refused to cooperate and the White House--which functioned as the nerve center for Justice Department political operations--refused to turn over documents. On occasion, they were shut down directly by order of President Bush. One criminal investigation launched by FBI agents at Guantánamo was ordered closed by the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, Alice Fisher, who may herself emerge as a target of a criminal investigation. Under the transparency policies Obama announced during his first week, and under the detainee policies he is busily putting in place, the administration will unblock internal probes and mandate that federal employees, including White House employees, cooperate with them. Realization that this was in the works may have given rise to President Bush's January 16 "gag letters" issued to Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten, instructing them to keep quiet in the face of a Congressional probe about their dealings with the Justice Department.
Leading Congressional Democrats are proposing a way forward. In January House Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers announced a blue-ribbon panel to be appointed to conduct an investigation. He is also proposing that the statute of limitations be modified to take the time pressure off potential criminal investigators. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy put forth a proposal of his own a few weeks later in a presentation at Georgetown University. Leahy pressed the idea of a "truth commission," similar to the approach used in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime. Bush administration officials who come forward and offer a full accounting of their deeds could get immunity for their testimony; those who keep silent or give false statements could face prosecution. The Leahy and Conyers approaches share a number of elements, including the notion that the commission would consist of eminent people who are "above the political fray," would get subpoena power and would be fully staffed and resourced. Both Conyers and Leahy cite the 9/11 Commission as a model--a Congressionally authorized commission backed by presidential authority, a hybrid model that would eliminate some of the potential legal challenges that a purely Congressional commission might face. Conyers is, however, far more concerned about building a solid record that can form the basis of prosecutions, whereas Leahy offers immunity as a reward for candor.
There are unmistakable signs of momentum in support of a commission approach in Washington. Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic Congressional leaders who once sang in the "let's forgive and forget" choir are now signaling their support for a commission. But what about the Obama White House? Following a meeting between Leahy and Greg Craig, Obama's White House counsel, the White House was committed only to an ongoing discussion.
But the commission approach may, depending on some critical details, offer the best solution to the impasse. Moreover, it may well suit Obama's needs for the commission to be the creation and initiative of Congress rather than of his administration. It would allow a comprehensive investigation without embroiling the White House in the process. A commission would be in a position to put to rest some persistent questions, particularly regarding how torture came to be embraced as a matter of policy and whether the administration ever got actionable intelligence from tortured suspects that could conceivably offset the immense damage that torture has done to the moral authority of the United States around the world. Most significant, if a commission recommended a criminal investigation to the Attorney General, and if it recommended appointment of a special prosecutor, that would deflect suggestions that the process was "political."
On the other hand, investigative commissions do not actually do justice. They cannot bring charges, and in the process of granting immunity for testimony they can muddy the waters for a later prosecutor. Any commission would need the advice and guidance of professional prosecutors, who could help to assure that it would prudently exercise the right to grant immunity and would avoid damaging future prosecutions.
Criminal investigations and prosecutions might be avoided under the Leahy approach and might be delayed under the Conyers approach. But whatever approach is finally settled upon, it seems increasingly clear that there will be multiple investigations: a commission of some sort, Congressional hearings (which are promised in any event) and internal probes within the government, which will likely be pursued delicately and quietly.
Though the wheels of justice grind slowly, they grind exceeding small. One year from today, it is likely that a large number of the secret documents that form the backbone of Bush detention policy will be public and many of their authors will have been publicly interrogated about them. We will have a better sense of how torture crept into the American interrogations system and whose authority was invoked to ram it through in the face of legal hurdles once thought insurmountable. And one year from today, we will probably still be asking whether any of the authors of this national tragedy will or should be prosecuted. That outcome is not likely to satisfy either side of the debate. But it may well be consistent with the interests of justice, which demands a complete exploration of the facts before anyone is held to account. That outcome fully reflects the Obama style.
Stimulus: Good Money After Bad
Stimulus: Good Money After Bad
By Robert Scheer
February 18, 2009
Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig, where this article originally appeared. His latest book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America(Twelve).
The Republican-engineered controversy around the stimulus is a phony. The stimulus package that President Obama signed into law Tuesday is a modest effort, actually too modest, at arresting the free fall of the American economy.
It's just not that expensive in light of the dimensions of the economic crisis, most of it is quite conservatively aimed at tax cuts for a suffering public and bailouts for beleaguered state programs, and it pales in comparison with the trillions wasted on the bloated military budget during the Bush years.
Furthermore, it is obscene that the Republicans who created this mess dare question the cost of a stimulus package directed at meeting a crisis that their radical deregulation of the financial markets created. While it is true that too many Democrats went along with the Republican deregulatory zealots, it is the prime legacy of the GOP going back to the Reagan Revolution that has been called into question.
The decisive deregulation that opened the door for the Wall Street swindlers was pushed through Congress by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican. He was rabidly backed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whose support of deregulation dates back to his interventions on behalf of the savings and loan hustlers whose shenanigans foreshadowed the current Wall Street scandals. Yet McCain now faults Obama for acting boldly to deal with a similar but far larger mess. It is a tribute to Obama's leadership that he was able to get a much-needed bill passed in record time, thereby giving the millions of Americans now hurting a shot at recovery.
Key Republican governors, from Florida to California, know this, which is why they and many other governors who actually must address the needs of constituents have rallied to the president's side. "It really is a matter of perspective," Florida's Republican Gov. Charlie Crist noted recently after appearing with Obama in support of the stimulus plan, because it "helps us meet the needs of the people in a very difficult economic time."
Congressional Republicans, with the exception of that embarrassingly shrunken contingent of three moderates, will rue their legacy of deep indifference at a time of true national emergency, one that makes George W. Bush's far more costly war on terror now seem an absurdly irrelevant exercise. The financial impact on Wall Street from Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks is small compared with the damage done by the bankers whom the Bush administration coddled and who laid waste to the entire financial system.
The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy combined with the trillions wasted on unnecessary military spending dwarf the costs of the Obama stimulus package. The money wasted in Iraq, a misguided nation-building effort that had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was supported uncritically by the same Republicans who now heap such scorn on efforts to rebuild our own nation.
They draw the line at a stimulus bill that funnels $135 billion directly to the bankrupted state governments to help pay for Medicaid, education and infrastructure. Yet they cannot account for the far larger sums wasted in their support of the terminally corrupt governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was just peachy to run up immense deficits pursuing irrational foreign adventures, but efforts to create jobs at home are viewed through a lens of criticism.
Bill Clinton said in a CNN interview: "I find it amazing that the Republicans, who doubled the debt of the country in eight years and produced no new jobs doing it, [and] gave us an economic record that was totally bereft of any productive result, are now criticizing him [Obama] for spending money."
The irony is that the Congressional Republicans, who at the end of the Bush presidency authored the much more expensive banking bailout that eventually will throw trillions at Wall Street, oppose a much smaller stimulus package that comes to the assistance of ordinary Americans. While approving of $125 billion in payouts to AIG and tens of billions more to each of the top banks, they question spending far smaller amounts to aid the victims of bankers' greed; $2 billion to redevelop abandoned and foreclosed homes, $2.1 billion for Head Start programs for poor kids, $1.2 billion to construct and repair veterans hospitals and cemeteries and a miserly $555 million to help defense employees sell their homes.
The only valid criticism to be made of the stimulus bill that Obama signed Tuesday with deserved pride of authorship is that it is too small for the enormous problem at hand. But if it had been up to the Republicans, we wouldn't be doing anything at all.
About Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (Twelve) and Playing President (Akashic Books). He is author, with Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (Akashic Books and Seven Stories Press.) His weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in the San Francisco Chronicle. more...
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
By Robert Scheer
February 18, 2009
Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig, where this article originally appeared. His latest book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America(Twelve).
The Republican-engineered controversy around the stimulus is a phony. The stimulus package that President Obama signed into law Tuesday is a modest effort, actually too modest, at arresting the free fall of the American economy.
It's just not that expensive in light of the dimensions of the economic crisis, most of it is quite conservatively aimed at tax cuts for a suffering public and bailouts for beleaguered state programs, and it pales in comparison with the trillions wasted on the bloated military budget during the Bush years.
Furthermore, it is obscene that the Republicans who created this mess dare question the cost of a stimulus package directed at meeting a crisis that their radical deregulation of the financial markets created. While it is true that too many Democrats went along with the Republican deregulatory zealots, it is the prime legacy of the GOP going back to the Reagan Revolution that has been called into question.
The decisive deregulation that opened the door for the Wall Street swindlers was pushed through Congress by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican. He was rabidly backed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whose support of deregulation dates back to his interventions on behalf of the savings and loan hustlers whose shenanigans foreshadowed the current Wall Street scandals. Yet McCain now faults Obama for acting boldly to deal with a similar but far larger mess. It is a tribute to Obama's leadership that he was able to get a much-needed bill passed in record time, thereby giving the millions of Americans now hurting a shot at recovery.
Key Republican governors, from Florida to California, know this, which is why they and many other governors who actually must address the needs of constituents have rallied to the president's side. "It really is a matter of perspective," Florida's Republican Gov. Charlie Crist noted recently after appearing with Obama in support of the stimulus plan, because it "helps us meet the needs of the people in a very difficult economic time."
Congressional Republicans, with the exception of that embarrassingly shrunken contingent of three moderates, will rue their legacy of deep indifference at a time of true national emergency, one that makes George W. Bush's far more costly war on terror now seem an absurdly irrelevant exercise. The financial impact on Wall Street from Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks is small compared with the damage done by the bankers whom the Bush administration coddled and who laid waste to the entire financial system.
The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy combined with the trillions wasted on unnecessary military spending dwarf the costs of the Obama stimulus package. The money wasted in Iraq, a misguided nation-building effort that had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was supported uncritically by the same Republicans who now heap such scorn on efforts to rebuild our own nation.
They draw the line at a stimulus bill that funnels $135 billion directly to the bankrupted state governments to help pay for Medicaid, education and infrastructure. Yet they cannot account for the far larger sums wasted in their support of the terminally corrupt governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was just peachy to run up immense deficits pursuing irrational foreign adventures, but efforts to create jobs at home are viewed through a lens of criticism.
Bill Clinton said in a CNN interview: "I find it amazing that the Republicans, who doubled the debt of the country in eight years and produced no new jobs doing it, [and] gave us an economic record that was totally bereft of any productive result, are now criticizing him [Obama] for spending money."
The irony is that the Congressional Republicans, who at the end of the Bush presidency authored the much more expensive banking bailout that eventually will throw trillions at Wall Street, oppose a much smaller stimulus package that comes to the assistance of ordinary Americans. While approving of $125 billion in payouts to AIG and tens of billions more to each of the top banks, they question spending far smaller amounts to aid the victims of bankers' greed; $2 billion to redevelop abandoned and foreclosed homes, $2.1 billion for Head Start programs for poor kids, $1.2 billion to construct and repair veterans hospitals and cemeteries and a miserly $555 million to help defense employees sell their homes.
The only valid criticism to be made of the stimulus bill that Obama signed Tuesday with deserved pride of authorship is that it is too small for the enormous problem at hand. But if it had been up to the Republicans, we wouldn't be doing anything at all.
About Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (Twelve) and Playing President (Akashic Books). He is author, with Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (Akashic Books and Seven Stories Press.) His weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in the San Francisco Chronicle. more...
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
next Israeli government
Waltzing Alone
Comment
By Liel Leibovitz
February 19, 2009
View a Nation Slide Show of excerpts of the graphic novel, Waltz with Bashir here.
A disclaimer: A decade ago, while serving in the Israel Defense Forces, a bit of my behind was blown off in Lebanon. When it comes to war, then, and to that particular country, I'm not exactly objective.
But stepping out of a screening of Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman's masterful film, a few weeks ago, and immediately reaching for my iPhone to look up the latest news from Gaza, I felt a deep, seething anger lock arms with terrible despair and march defiantly down my throat. The movie, I thought, just taught me an awful lesson about my native country.
It wasn't anything having to do with the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Shatila, the focus of the film's final, ghoulish scenes. It wasn't the needless loss of life. It wasn't even the war.
What made me sick was the realization, simple and searing, that the Israeli public that heaped praise on Waltz with Bashir and selected it, in a recent survey, as the third most-favorite Israeli film of all time, the very same public--71 percent, according to a recent survey by the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz--was ignoring every one of the film's harrowing lessons and once again unequivocally supporting an aimless military campaign, its goals unclear and its potential for rapid and incontrollable escalation vast.
Anyone seeking some insight into Israeli society's reactions to the newfangled war against Hamas, however, would be well advised to examine Israel's previous violent escapade, the one that echoed the events portrayed in Waltz with Bashir so eerily that it instantly earned the moniker "Lebanon II."
In September 2006, slightly more than a month after that war finally died down, along with nearly 1,800 Lebanese and more than 160 Israelis, public opinion polls asked Israelis to ascertain whether or not they were satisfied with Ehud Olmert; 68 percent responded that they were unhappy with the prime minister's conduct.
This, in and of itself, made perfect sense: surely the same people who praised Waltz with Bashir for its courageous and unremitting examination of Israel's bumbled, senseless and morally repugnant entanglement in Lebanon in 1982 would disapprove of any leader who orchestrated a similarly flawed and inexcusable excursion in 2006. And surely the same people, when asked today whom they would rather see at the state's helm, would pine for a responsible, levelheaded and moderate politician, one who could guarantee that no similar violent escapades lay on the horizon. Surely.
But, casting their ballots earlier this month in the elections to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, the people gave an overwhelming number of votes to right-of-center parties, making it nearly inevitable that the next Israeli government will be led by Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu. Put another way, the very same Israelis who elected Bashir as their third-favorite film also elected Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) as their third-favorite political party, proving the soaring popularity of its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, the former director-general of the Prime Minister's Office under Netanyahu and a rising star in Israeli politics whose ambitious plans include the forceful deportation of Israeli Arabs, the bombing of Palestinian civilian and business centers, and the drowning of Palestinian prisoners.
What did Olmert in when he attacked Lebanon in 2006, then, wasn't his willingness to embark on a careless war that, far from achieving its goals, bolstered Hezbollah and dealt a blow to Israel's future deterrence capabilities. What earned him the public's scorn was that he wasn't willing to go far enough. Asked the very same question by the very same pollsters on August 11, 2006, just days before the ceasefire took hold, 60 percent of Israelis said they thought Olmert was doing a fine job.
How, then, to explain this dissonance? How to analyze a nation willing to embrace a smart and sensitive work of art that digs deep into the collective memory and pleads softly and beautifully for recovery and repentance, while at the very same time cheering as the Israel Air Force assassinates hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, a significant portion of whom were civilians, and the Israeli army once again marches into the embattled Strip?
As is the case with most complex questions, there is no single, elegant answer. All I have is an explanation bordering on a hunch, a dark and disconcerting feeling put together, like a mental mosaic, over years of conversations and observations and frustrations. Here it is, in brief: for the most part, Israelis have become adept at using art as a mantle, a colorful cloth under which they can hide from the harrowing implications of the policies they support. Once a living, dangerous demon, Israeli art is now a gargoyle, perched high above the street, casting its reproachful look at us all, powerless and grotesque.
There was a time--I remember it well--in the late 1980s, before the peace process, when Israeli artists produced morally serious, politically agitating works, and when establishment types, from commanders to cultural commissars, decried these works as malignant and repugnant. Rock albums, novels and films dared to question the country's prevalent ethos of glory and sacrifice and point out its dangerous proximity to a kitschy cult of death. The country seemed poised for a real moment of rupture; there were mass demonstrations, movements, a whole vibrant scene.
I remember myself at 14, taking to the streets after a pop song decrying the occupation was banned from broadcast by the government, which at the time still controlled the entirety of the airwaves. Happily, a few hundred of us, none older than 25, congregated in one of Tel Aviv's central squares, pumped our fists in the air and screamed out the song as loud as we could, turning the rather inane tune into a powerful anthem of protest.
And then came the 1990s, and Yitzhak Rabin, and the Oslo Accords, and in the peace-minded euphoria that engulfed us all, that raw political energy somehow lost its vivacity. Sure, Israel was still occupying Palestinian territories, settlements were still being built and there was still a massive Israeli military force in southern Lebanon, but none of that mattered. By electing Rabin and embarking on Oslo, we convinced ourselves that we were the good guys, and reassured ourselves that whatever terrible transgressions we committed were to be forgotten at once because, after all, our true aim, clearly, was reconciliation.
According to this logic, we were finally free to enjoy works of art that shed light on some of our darkest national undertakings. Now that we were en route to peace, any creative act of political protest was to be interpreted solely as further proof of our enlightenment: what other country, my friends often asked me, would produce such a steady stream of critical, insightful films, records and novels, especially while still facing major threats? Can you imagine, they inquired rhetorically, any similar works being created on the Palestinian side or, even better, in Syria? To them--and, I suspect, to a majority of Israelis--making movies and waging war balanced each other out, proving beyond doubt that ours was the kind of thoughtful, responsible and soul-searching society that only resorted to violence when the very core of its existence was under attack.
Reality, however, is far less prosaic: in many cases, art has become almost an excuse, something to be immensely proud of while pursuing the very same policies to which Israel's artists, for the most part, vehemently object and which they continually decry in their art.
How else to explain the fact that Israelis watching Beirut circa 1982 in Folman's film are no longer shocked to the core, nor do they realize that they are still fighting the very same dumb and deadly war that so deeply traumatized the director and his friends? How else to explain their continuing support for brutal operations with little lasting strategic value, their continuing calls for increasingly bloody vendettas, their continuing endorsement of political candidates who promise tougher and more violent measures against anyone attacking Israel in any way?
This, to be sure, has little to do with any existential threats. Let's be honest: these simply do not exist, certainly not from Hamas. The current operation in Gaza was launched in retaliation for more than 10,000 rockets launched by Hamas militants on southern Israel over the past seven years; these attacks, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, killed eighteen people. In an average year, nearly twenty-five times as many Israelis die in car crashes alone. And yet, the majority of Israelis believe that Hamas's behavior is reason enough to launch a massive military assault on a densely populated urban environment, killing hundreds and achieving no discernible long-term strategic goal.
It is, of course, the right of the Israeli people to choose whomever they want as their leader. It is the privilege of the Israeli public to pursue whatever policy it sees fit. But let us not pretend for a moment: Waltz with Bashir is not in any way the product of a thoughtful society moral and mature enough to examine its own conscience and correct its ways. Rather, it is the work of a brilliant filmmaker operating, sadly, in a cultural and political landscape eager to provide him and others like him with ample material for future tragedies, a landscape free of introspection and devoid of meaningful action, a landscape given to vacuously praising sublime art while simultaneously endorsing the most hideous of human behaviors.
As I stepped out of the cinema, rubbing my scarred butt and looking at the images of the dead in Gaza - images that looked just like the terrible real-life footage of Palestinian victims in Lebanon Folman inserted at the end of his film--I muttered a silent rant, to no one in particular. Let them wage war, I thought. And let them make movies. But let them never pretend that the two have anything in common, or originate from a common mental space that is fundamentally just and contemplative and resorts to arms only when inevitable.
Israel of today is not Ari Folman's. It is Avigdor Lieberman's and Benjamin Netanyahu's, the country of the countless men and women crying out for revenge. As we root for Waltz with Bashir, if we want to truly honor that film's message, let us never forget that. Otherwise, all we have is just a pretty animated film.
About Liel Leibovitz
Liel Leibovitz is the author, most recently, of Lili Marlene: The Soldiers' Song of World War II. more...
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
Comment
By Liel Leibovitz
February 19, 2009
View a Nation Slide Show of excerpts of the graphic novel, Waltz with Bashir here.
A disclaimer: A decade ago, while serving in the Israel Defense Forces, a bit of my behind was blown off in Lebanon. When it comes to war, then, and to that particular country, I'm not exactly objective.
But stepping out of a screening of Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman's masterful film, a few weeks ago, and immediately reaching for my iPhone to look up the latest news from Gaza, I felt a deep, seething anger lock arms with terrible despair and march defiantly down my throat. The movie, I thought, just taught me an awful lesson about my native country.
It wasn't anything having to do with the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Shatila, the focus of the film's final, ghoulish scenes. It wasn't the needless loss of life. It wasn't even the war.
What made me sick was the realization, simple and searing, that the Israeli public that heaped praise on Waltz with Bashir and selected it, in a recent survey, as the third most-favorite Israeli film of all time, the very same public--71 percent, according to a recent survey by the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz--was ignoring every one of the film's harrowing lessons and once again unequivocally supporting an aimless military campaign, its goals unclear and its potential for rapid and incontrollable escalation vast.
Anyone seeking some insight into Israeli society's reactions to the newfangled war against Hamas, however, would be well advised to examine Israel's previous violent escapade, the one that echoed the events portrayed in Waltz with Bashir so eerily that it instantly earned the moniker "Lebanon II."
In September 2006, slightly more than a month after that war finally died down, along with nearly 1,800 Lebanese and more than 160 Israelis, public opinion polls asked Israelis to ascertain whether or not they were satisfied with Ehud Olmert; 68 percent responded that they were unhappy with the prime minister's conduct.
This, in and of itself, made perfect sense: surely the same people who praised Waltz with Bashir for its courageous and unremitting examination of Israel's bumbled, senseless and morally repugnant entanglement in Lebanon in 1982 would disapprove of any leader who orchestrated a similarly flawed and inexcusable excursion in 2006. And surely the same people, when asked today whom they would rather see at the state's helm, would pine for a responsible, levelheaded and moderate politician, one who could guarantee that no similar violent escapades lay on the horizon. Surely.
But, casting their ballots earlier this month in the elections to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, the people gave an overwhelming number of votes to right-of-center parties, making it nearly inevitable that the next Israeli government will be led by Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu. Put another way, the very same Israelis who elected Bashir as their third-favorite film also elected Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) as their third-favorite political party, proving the soaring popularity of its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, the former director-general of the Prime Minister's Office under Netanyahu and a rising star in Israeli politics whose ambitious plans include the forceful deportation of Israeli Arabs, the bombing of Palestinian civilian and business centers, and the drowning of Palestinian prisoners.
What did Olmert in when he attacked Lebanon in 2006, then, wasn't his willingness to embark on a careless war that, far from achieving its goals, bolstered Hezbollah and dealt a blow to Israel's future deterrence capabilities. What earned him the public's scorn was that he wasn't willing to go far enough. Asked the very same question by the very same pollsters on August 11, 2006, just days before the ceasefire took hold, 60 percent of Israelis said they thought Olmert was doing a fine job.
How, then, to explain this dissonance? How to analyze a nation willing to embrace a smart and sensitive work of art that digs deep into the collective memory and pleads softly and beautifully for recovery and repentance, while at the very same time cheering as the Israel Air Force assassinates hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, a significant portion of whom were civilians, and the Israeli army once again marches into the embattled Strip?
As is the case with most complex questions, there is no single, elegant answer. All I have is an explanation bordering on a hunch, a dark and disconcerting feeling put together, like a mental mosaic, over years of conversations and observations and frustrations. Here it is, in brief: for the most part, Israelis have become adept at using art as a mantle, a colorful cloth under which they can hide from the harrowing implications of the policies they support. Once a living, dangerous demon, Israeli art is now a gargoyle, perched high above the street, casting its reproachful look at us all, powerless and grotesque.
There was a time--I remember it well--in the late 1980s, before the peace process, when Israeli artists produced morally serious, politically agitating works, and when establishment types, from commanders to cultural commissars, decried these works as malignant and repugnant. Rock albums, novels and films dared to question the country's prevalent ethos of glory and sacrifice and point out its dangerous proximity to a kitschy cult of death. The country seemed poised for a real moment of rupture; there were mass demonstrations, movements, a whole vibrant scene.
I remember myself at 14, taking to the streets after a pop song decrying the occupation was banned from broadcast by the government, which at the time still controlled the entirety of the airwaves. Happily, a few hundred of us, none older than 25, congregated in one of Tel Aviv's central squares, pumped our fists in the air and screamed out the song as loud as we could, turning the rather inane tune into a powerful anthem of protest.
And then came the 1990s, and Yitzhak Rabin, and the Oslo Accords, and in the peace-minded euphoria that engulfed us all, that raw political energy somehow lost its vivacity. Sure, Israel was still occupying Palestinian territories, settlements were still being built and there was still a massive Israeli military force in southern Lebanon, but none of that mattered. By electing Rabin and embarking on Oslo, we convinced ourselves that we were the good guys, and reassured ourselves that whatever terrible transgressions we committed were to be forgotten at once because, after all, our true aim, clearly, was reconciliation.
According to this logic, we were finally free to enjoy works of art that shed light on some of our darkest national undertakings. Now that we were en route to peace, any creative act of political protest was to be interpreted solely as further proof of our enlightenment: what other country, my friends often asked me, would produce such a steady stream of critical, insightful films, records and novels, especially while still facing major threats? Can you imagine, they inquired rhetorically, any similar works being created on the Palestinian side or, even better, in Syria? To them--and, I suspect, to a majority of Israelis--making movies and waging war balanced each other out, proving beyond doubt that ours was the kind of thoughtful, responsible and soul-searching society that only resorted to violence when the very core of its existence was under attack.
Reality, however, is far less prosaic: in many cases, art has become almost an excuse, something to be immensely proud of while pursuing the very same policies to which Israel's artists, for the most part, vehemently object and which they continually decry in their art.
How else to explain the fact that Israelis watching Beirut circa 1982 in Folman's film are no longer shocked to the core, nor do they realize that they are still fighting the very same dumb and deadly war that so deeply traumatized the director and his friends? How else to explain their continuing support for brutal operations with little lasting strategic value, their continuing calls for increasingly bloody vendettas, their continuing endorsement of political candidates who promise tougher and more violent measures against anyone attacking Israel in any way?
This, to be sure, has little to do with any existential threats. Let's be honest: these simply do not exist, certainly not from Hamas. The current operation in Gaza was launched in retaliation for more than 10,000 rockets launched by Hamas militants on southern Israel over the past seven years; these attacks, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, killed eighteen people. In an average year, nearly twenty-five times as many Israelis die in car crashes alone. And yet, the majority of Israelis believe that Hamas's behavior is reason enough to launch a massive military assault on a densely populated urban environment, killing hundreds and achieving no discernible long-term strategic goal.
It is, of course, the right of the Israeli people to choose whomever they want as their leader. It is the privilege of the Israeli public to pursue whatever policy it sees fit. But let us not pretend for a moment: Waltz with Bashir is not in any way the product of a thoughtful society moral and mature enough to examine its own conscience and correct its ways. Rather, it is the work of a brilliant filmmaker operating, sadly, in a cultural and political landscape eager to provide him and others like him with ample material for future tragedies, a landscape free of introspection and devoid of meaningful action, a landscape given to vacuously praising sublime art while simultaneously endorsing the most hideous of human behaviors.
As I stepped out of the cinema, rubbing my scarred butt and looking at the images of the dead in Gaza - images that looked just like the terrible real-life footage of Palestinian victims in Lebanon Folman inserted at the end of his film--I muttered a silent rant, to no one in particular. Let them wage war, I thought. And let them make movies. But let them never pretend that the two have anything in common, or originate from a common mental space that is fundamentally just and contemplative and resorts to arms only when inevitable.
Israel of today is not Ari Folman's. It is Avigdor Lieberman's and Benjamin Netanyahu's, the country of the countless men and women crying out for revenge. As we root for Waltz with Bashir, if we want to truly honor that film's message, let us never forget that. Otherwise, all we have is just a pretty animated film.
About Liel Leibovitz
Liel Leibovitz is the author, most recently, of Lili Marlene: The Soldiers' Song of World War II. more...
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman
The influence of “Peanuts” pervades one variety of graphic novel, th influence of the early MAD magazine another. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan astutely called MAD, which first appeared in 1952, “a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness.” Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, and the magazine’s other inventors counterattacked the manipulative forms and messages of mass culture with a none too subtle parodic wit that was angry at its root. It fed a furious, slightly scared cynicism in its readers that was born of perceptions of falseness in advertising, certainly, and in perhaps, well, everything with which “they” presumed to know and affect our thoughts. What “they” imagined we must be like, to swallow it all, was caricatured in the sunnily moronic countenance of Alfred E. Neuman. MAD was almost as significant a cultural depth charge of the nineteen-fifties as Elvis was. (I came across my first issue in 1956 or so and immediately phoned two friends. All they heard on the line, before they hung up, was convulsive laughter.) Blending with the popularization of Beat literature and the comedy of Lenny Bruce, MAD’s attitude entered into the great generational joke of the sixties: feigned idiocy, faux innocence, the put-on, camp. (Cogito: people over thirty don’t get it, therefore I am.) Cartooning acquired a new, prevalently drug-enhanced function configuring madness as entertainment. Its new paragon—a writer-artist whose greatness still defies conventional description—was R. Crumb, who inaugurated “Zap Comix” in 1968 in San Francisco, at the center of a countercultural circus that was going rancid around the edges. Crumb regrounded comics in the experience of aging youths who, having embraced lives of antic alienation, were stuck with them.
Even full-on, Crumb’s drawings tend to have an up-from-under feel. The fat shoes of the striding character in his iconic “Keep on Truckin’ ” image suggest a ground-level viewpoint, as does the physiognomy of his feminine ideal: girlish above the waist, rolling thunder below. (His unedifying sexual penchants and frankly jerkish attitudes are inseparable from the truths he tells, unfortunately.) Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact. It’s a small matter of emphasis with big correlatives, ushering comics from stylized backgrounds for fantasy to projections of tactile space. The effect needn’t entail anything like realism. Its precedents include, in comics history, the topography of Coconino County, in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (1910-44). In that pocket immensity, as indifferent as the universe, a mouse might hit a cat with a brick, and a cat might enjoy it though a dog objects. After Crumb, a widespread rediscovery of Herriman became crucial to several styles of the nascent graphic novel, in particular that of Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1986, Pantheon). The Jewish mice, German cats, and Polish pigs of that extraordinary epic live their fates in surroundings that not only contain but witness and reflect on the action: the kitchen in which Spiegelman interviews his father, a setting of safety in the here and now, emotionally frames the all but unbelievable ghastliness of the there and then. To become novelistic, comics needed capacious structures of space and time in which their characters could come and go.
Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification tha makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism, in the writing n less than in the reading. Why arduously muster the persona of a Charlie Brown o a Jimmy Corrigan when your own fascinating self is right at hand? A problem fo the autobiographical graphic novel is that its author’s life experience may consis mainly in compulsive cartooning. But the trailblazer of this mode, Harvey Pekar is not a cartoonist at all, barely a writer, and well past adolescence, at leas chronologically. Pekar, a lumpish Cleveland file clerk, came to public notice i several appearances on the David Letterman show, in the mid-nineteen-eighties and was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in
Even full-on, Crumb’s drawings tend to have an up-from-under feel. The fat shoes of the striding character in his iconic “Keep on Truckin’ ” image suggest a ground-level viewpoint, as does the physiognomy of his feminine ideal: girlish above the waist, rolling thunder below. (His unedifying sexual penchants and frankly jerkish attitudes are inseparable from the truths he tells, unfortunately.) Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact. It’s a small matter of emphasis with big correlatives, ushering comics from stylized backgrounds for fantasy to projections of tactile space. The effect needn’t entail anything like realism. Its precedents include, in comics history, the topography of Coconino County, in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (1910-44). In that pocket immensity, as indifferent as the universe, a mouse might hit a cat with a brick, and a cat might enjoy it though a dog objects. After Crumb, a widespread rediscovery of Herriman became crucial to several styles of the nascent graphic novel, in particular that of Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1986, Pantheon). The Jewish mice, German cats, and Polish pigs of that extraordinary epic live their fates in surroundings that not only contain but witness and reflect on the action: the kitchen in which Spiegelman interviews his father, a setting of safety in the here and now, emotionally frames the all but unbelievable ghastliness of the there and then. To become novelistic, comics needed capacious structures of space and time in which their characters could come and go.
Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification tha makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism, in the writing n less than in the reading. Why arduously muster the persona of a Charlie Brown o a Jimmy Corrigan when your own fascinating self is right at hand? A problem fo the autobiographical graphic novel is that its author’s life experience may consis mainly in compulsive cartooning. But the trailblazer of this mode, Harvey Pekar is not a cartoonist at all, barely a writer, and well past adolescence, at leas chronologically. Pekar, a lumpish Cleveland file clerk, came to public notice i several appearances on the David Letterman show, in the mid-nineteen-eighties and was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in
MAD Magazine
MAD Magazine;
R. Crumb
You can tell the graphic-novels section in bookstore from afar, by the young bodie sprawled around it like casualties of a localize disaster. There were about a dozen of them at th Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recen afternoon, in a broad aisle between graphic novel and poetry. Not one was reading poetry, but th proximity of the old ragged-right-margine medium piqued me. Graphic novels—pumped-u comics—are to many in their teens and twentie what poetry once was, before bare words lost thei cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poe types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eightie imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing pens. Like life-changin poetry of yore, graphic novels are a youn person’s art, demanding and rewarding menta flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between th incommensurable functions of reading an looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potentia audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but tha is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, “The Waste Land”—b which a rising generation exploits its biological advantages, of animal health an superabundant brain cells, to confound the galling wisdom and demoralize th obnoxious sovereignty of age
Start with Chris Ware, the thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile. Set aside, for now, the graphic novelists you probably most like, if you like only a few: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes. Their peculiar literary qualities are distracting. The same goes for Robert Crumb, for whom there is the added problem of a historical significance: he is the father of art comics. Keep lightly in mind the ever-teeming regions of genre: superhero, action, horror, goth-girl. Give a respectful but wide berth to Japanese manga, which occupy most of the shelf space allotted to graphic novels in bookstores, their bindings as uniform as lined-up vials of generic, obviously addictive pharmaceuticals. Dutifully paging, right to left, through a score or so of translated manga, I register the buzz of platter-eyed characters engaged in well-designed, pointless violence. I pause at frames in which, amid suddenly silent ruins, some liquid or another drips with a sound that is invariably rendered plp plp plp. It’s not that styles of sheer sensation are contemptible, but once you’ve said “Wow,” you are close to having exhausted the subject. It is even a point of honor with action comics—as with action movies and action anything, like roller coasters—to leave us with only a suffusive, endorphin glow. As for the dizzying byways of shojo, kinky romance manga for girls, I throw up my hands in Caucasian senior-male bewilderment.
from the issue
cartoon bank
e-mail this
“Jimmy Corriga ” tells of a potato-headed, hypersensiti e office worker—“a lonel , emotionally-impair d human castaway,” t e author terms him—w o lacks any notable person l resource except a limitle s capacity for ment l suffering. Sever l interlocking stories, ma y of which involve t e miserable eighteen-nineti s childhood of Jimmy s doppelgänger grandfathe , center on Jimmy’s fir t meeting, at the age f thirty-six, with his absent e father, a figure of crushi g banality. (Jimmy’s mothe , who lives in a retirement home, is a monster of self-absorption.) Ware’s visu l style recalls the clean-lined perfectionism of “Tintin,” the classic adventure str p by the Belgian Hergé (Georges Rémi, 1907-83), whose book-length stori s qualify as graphic novel avant la lettre, but it is far more varied in design, with densely rhythmic layouts of small and large panels and of close-up and long views, and it is subtler in color, with moody, volatile pastels. Ware exercises an encyclopedic command of literary and cinematic tactics—stream of consciousness, montage—with tropes that are peculiar to graphic art: often effects of stillness, such as a character’s blank takes, in which you sense mental wheels turning (never to any very propitious end, in this case), and landscapes and cityscapes infused with a droning dailiness. He speeds and slows time, stops it, and can even seem to run it backward, revisiting and revising recent events, or sideways, incorporating alternative accounts of what’s happening. All this is done with utmost precision. Reading “Jimmy Corrigan” is like operating an intricate machine whose function is not immediately apparent. Gradually, meanings emerge and emotions crystallize. None gladden. Let one gross example stand for the book’s innumerable bummers: Jimmy wanders outdoors, struggling to compose, in his mind, his first-ever letter to his father. (“Dear Dad, Hi! How are you? I’m your son . . .” “Dear Dad, Hi! My name is Jimmy. You might not remember me, but . . .”) A mail truck makes its rounds in the background. Jimmy sees deer behind a gas station across the street. After trying to remember whether deer bite, and assuring himself that they’re harmless, he steps toward them, happily. The mail truck hits him.
The masochistic tenor of “Jimmy Corrigan,” while extreme, is typical of serious graphic novels and, in fact, of most of the modern comic strips that influence graphic novelists, at least of the male kind. Comics heroines, from Little Orphan Annie to Wonder Woman, are as a rule resiliently upbeat, however beset. (In a preface to “Jimmy Corrigan,” Ware issues a questionnaire that’s meant to gauge the relative grimness of the reader’s childhood. It begins, “1. You are a. male. b. female. If b, you may stop . . .”) A painfully humiliated hero is essential even—or especially—to “Superman” and its vast spawn. Disregarded Clark Kent is the figure readers identify with; his transformation into the Man of Steel nurses the hopes and fulfills the rage of all underestimated boys, but it can’t cure his loneliness. “Spider-Man” twists the knife by making Peter Parker’s superpowers an added torment to him: he’d rather be an ordinary guy. The theme of a publicly misjudged character’s private anguish has grown, in comics history, to dominate the form. Who today still relishes the pure ridicule of “Li’l Abner,” or the convivial folk wisdom (brilliant wordplay aside) of “Pogo”? Both were immensely popular before the ascendance of “Peanuts,” the most important comic strip of the past half century. Charlie Brown is Clark Kent without the colorful underwear, and with all the possibly compensatory qualities split off and given to other characters, mainly Snoopy. Jimmy Corrigan, in turn, is Charlie Brown without the eternal childhood in an Arcadian neighborhood. Ware teases out a nightmarish aspect of “Peanuts” that Charles Schulz cushioned in whimsy: Charlie Brown is incorrigibly mediocre, incapable of satisfactory relationships or achievements, doomed to obloquy. His generous and trusting heart sets him up for mishap and betrayal—which, in his little four-panelled world, where nothing changes, he meets with a sigh. Jimmy’s world is big—Chicago’s Sears Tower looms in misty silhouette outside his window—and events in it have consequences. They give him nosebleeds. They make him cry.
The influence of “Peanuts” pervades one variety of graphic novel, th influence of the early MAD magazine another. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan astutely called MAD, which first appeared in 1952, “a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness.” Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, and the magazine’s other inventors counterattacked the manipulative forms and messages of mass culture with a none too subtle parodic wit that was angry at its root. It fed a furious, slightly scared cynicism in its readers that was born of perceptions of falseness in advertising, certainly, and in perhaps, well, everything with which “they” presumed to know and affect our thoughts. What “they” imagined we must be like, to swallow it all, was caricatured in the sunnily moronic countenance of Alfred E. Neuman. MAD was almost as significant a cultural depth charge of the nineteen-fifties as Elvis was. (I came across my first issue in 1956 or so and immediately phoned two friends. All they heard on the line, before they hung up, was convulsive laughter.) Blending with the popularization of Beat literature and the comedy of Lenny Bruce, MAD’s attitude entered into the great generational joke of the sixties: feigned idiocy, faux innocence, the put-on, camp. (Cogito: people over thirty don’t get it, therefore I am.) Cartooning acquired a new, prevalently drug-enhanced function configuring madness as entertainment. Its new paragon—a writer-artist whose greatness still defies conventional description—was R. Crumb, who inaugurated “Zap Comix” in 1968 in San Francisco, at the center of a countercultural circus that was going rancid around the edges. Crumb regrounded comics in the experience of aging youths who, having embraced lives of antic alienation, were stuck with them.
Even full-on, Crumb’s drawings tend to have an up-from-under feel. The fat shoes of the striding character in his iconic “Keep on Truckin’ ” image suggest a ground-level viewpoint, as does the physiognomy of his feminine ideal: girlish above the waist, rolling thunder below. (His unedifying sexual penchants and frankly jerkish attitudes are inseparable from the truths he tells, unfortunately.) Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact. It’s a small matter of emphasis with big correlatives, ushering comics from stylized backgrounds for fantasy to projections of tactile space. The effect needn’t entail anything like realism. Its precedents include, in comics history, the topography of Coconino County, in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (1910-44). In that pocket immensity, as indifferent as the universe, a mouse might hit a cat with a brick, and a cat might enjoy it though a dog objects. After Crumb, a widespread rediscovery of Herriman became crucial to several styles of the nascent graphic novel, in particular that of Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1986, Pantheon). The Jewish mice, German cats, and Polish pigs of that extraordinary epic live their fates in surroundings that not only contain but witness and reflect on the action: the kitchen in which Spiegelman interviews his father, a setting of safety in the here and now, emotionally frames the all but unbelievable ghastliness of the there and then. To become novelistic, comics needed capacious structures of space and time in which their characters could come and go.
Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification tha makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism, in the writing n less than in the reading. Why arduously muster the persona of a Charlie Brown o a Jimmy Corrigan when your own fascinating self is right at hand? A problem fo the autobiographical graphic novel is that its author’s life experience may consis mainly in compulsive cartooning. But the trailblazer of this mode, Harvey Pekar is not a cartoonist at all, barely a writer, and well past adolescence, at leas chronologically. Pekar, a lumpish Cleveland file clerk, came to public notice i several appearances on the David Letterman show, in the mid-nineteen-eighties and was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in “American Splendor” (2003), a movi based on comics that Pekar wrote and others drew. A jazz and comics buff blesse with a connoisseur’s taste and remarkable powers of persuasion, Pekar met Crum in Cleveland in the sixties and enlisted him to illustrate long, grumpy monologue that told the story of his shambling existence. (Desultory personal content in bravura visual form quickly became fashionable among younger artists, most of i quite bad.) Pekar has since dragooned several other cartoonists to his exquisitel tedious ends. The latest is Dean Haspiel, who performs with virtuoso flair in “Th Quitter” (2005, DC Comics/Vertigo), relaying Pekar’s confessions as a working-class dude who grew up with little in his favor except a knack for beating u other dudes. Pekar reviews the futilities of his life with humorless fixation an zero insight. He is the accidental minimalist of the graphic novel
R. Crumb
You can tell the graphic-novels section in bookstore from afar, by the young bodie sprawled around it like casualties of a localize disaster. There were about a dozen of them at th Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recen afternoon, in a broad aisle between graphic novel and poetry. Not one was reading poetry, but th proximity of the old ragged-right-margine medium piqued me. Graphic novels—pumped-u comics—are to many in their teens and twentie what poetry once was, before bare words lost thei cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poe types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eightie imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing pens. Like life-changin poetry of yore, graphic novels are a youn person’s art, demanding and rewarding menta flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between th incommensurable functions of reading an looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potentia audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but tha is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, “The Waste Land”—b which a rising generation exploits its biological advantages, of animal health an superabundant brain cells, to confound the galling wisdom and demoralize th obnoxious sovereignty of age
Start with Chris Ware, the thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile. Set aside, for now, the graphic novelists you probably most like, if you like only a few: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes. Their peculiar literary qualities are distracting. The same goes for Robert Crumb, for whom there is the added problem of a historical significance: he is the father of art comics. Keep lightly in mind the ever-teeming regions of genre: superhero, action, horror, goth-girl. Give a respectful but wide berth to Japanese manga, which occupy most of the shelf space allotted to graphic novels in bookstores, their bindings as uniform as lined-up vials of generic, obviously addictive pharmaceuticals. Dutifully paging, right to left, through a score or so of translated manga, I register the buzz of platter-eyed characters engaged in well-designed, pointless violence. I pause at frames in which, amid suddenly silent ruins, some liquid or another drips with a sound that is invariably rendered plp plp plp. It’s not that styles of sheer sensation are contemptible, but once you’ve said “Wow,” you are close to having exhausted the subject. It is even a point of honor with action comics—as with action movies and action anything, like roller coasters—to leave us with only a suffusive, endorphin glow. As for the dizzying byways of shojo, kinky romance manga for girls, I throw up my hands in Caucasian senior-male bewilderment.
from the issue
cartoon bank
e-mail this
“Jimmy Corriga ” tells of a potato-headed, hypersensiti e office worker—“a lonel , emotionally-impair d human castaway,” t e author terms him—w o lacks any notable person l resource except a limitle s capacity for ment l suffering. Sever l interlocking stories, ma y of which involve t e miserable eighteen-nineti s childhood of Jimmy s doppelgänger grandfathe , center on Jimmy’s fir t meeting, at the age f thirty-six, with his absent e father, a figure of crushi g banality. (Jimmy’s mothe , who lives in a retirement home, is a monster of self-absorption.) Ware’s visu l style recalls the clean-lined perfectionism of “Tintin,” the classic adventure str p by the Belgian Hergé (Georges Rémi, 1907-83), whose book-length stori s qualify as graphic novel avant la lettre, but it is far more varied in design, with densely rhythmic layouts of small and large panels and of close-up and long views, and it is subtler in color, with moody, volatile pastels. Ware exercises an encyclopedic command of literary and cinematic tactics—stream of consciousness, montage—with tropes that are peculiar to graphic art: often effects of stillness, such as a character’s blank takes, in which you sense mental wheels turning (never to any very propitious end, in this case), and landscapes and cityscapes infused with a droning dailiness. He speeds and slows time, stops it, and can even seem to run it backward, revisiting and revising recent events, or sideways, incorporating alternative accounts of what’s happening. All this is done with utmost precision. Reading “Jimmy Corrigan” is like operating an intricate machine whose function is not immediately apparent. Gradually, meanings emerge and emotions crystallize. None gladden. Let one gross example stand for the book’s innumerable bummers: Jimmy wanders outdoors, struggling to compose, in his mind, his first-ever letter to his father. (“Dear Dad, Hi! How are you? I’m your son . . .” “Dear Dad, Hi! My name is Jimmy. You might not remember me, but . . .”) A mail truck makes its rounds in the background. Jimmy sees deer behind a gas station across the street. After trying to remember whether deer bite, and assuring himself that they’re harmless, he steps toward them, happily. The mail truck hits him.
The masochistic tenor of “Jimmy Corrigan,” while extreme, is typical of serious graphic novels and, in fact, of most of the modern comic strips that influence graphic novelists, at least of the male kind. Comics heroines, from Little Orphan Annie to Wonder Woman, are as a rule resiliently upbeat, however beset. (In a preface to “Jimmy Corrigan,” Ware issues a questionnaire that’s meant to gauge the relative grimness of the reader’s childhood. It begins, “1. You are a. male. b. female. If b, you may stop . . .”) A painfully humiliated hero is essential even—or especially—to “Superman” and its vast spawn. Disregarded Clark Kent is the figure readers identify with; his transformation into the Man of Steel nurses the hopes and fulfills the rage of all underestimated boys, but it can’t cure his loneliness. “Spider-Man” twists the knife by making Peter Parker’s superpowers an added torment to him: he’d rather be an ordinary guy. The theme of a publicly misjudged character’s private anguish has grown, in comics history, to dominate the form. Who today still relishes the pure ridicule of “Li’l Abner,” or the convivial folk wisdom (brilliant wordplay aside) of “Pogo”? Both were immensely popular before the ascendance of “Peanuts,” the most important comic strip of the past half century. Charlie Brown is Clark Kent without the colorful underwear, and with all the possibly compensatory qualities split off and given to other characters, mainly Snoopy. Jimmy Corrigan, in turn, is Charlie Brown without the eternal childhood in an Arcadian neighborhood. Ware teases out a nightmarish aspect of “Peanuts” that Charles Schulz cushioned in whimsy: Charlie Brown is incorrigibly mediocre, incapable of satisfactory relationships or achievements, doomed to obloquy. His generous and trusting heart sets him up for mishap and betrayal—which, in his little four-panelled world, where nothing changes, he meets with a sigh. Jimmy’s world is big—Chicago’s Sears Tower looms in misty silhouette outside his window—and events in it have consequences. They give him nosebleeds. They make him cry.
The influence of “Peanuts” pervades one variety of graphic novel, th influence of the early MAD magazine another. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan astutely called MAD, which first appeared in 1952, “a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness.” Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, and the magazine’s other inventors counterattacked the manipulative forms and messages of mass culture with a none too subtle parodic wit that was angry at its root. It fed a furious, slightly scared cynicism in its readers that was born of perceptions of falseness in advertising, certainly, and in perhaps, well, everything with which “they” presumed to know and affect our thoughts. What “they” imagined we must be like, to swallow it all, was caricatured in the sunnily moronic countenance of Alfred E. Neuman. MAD was almost as significant a cultural depth charge of the nineteen-fifties as Elvis was. (I came across my first issue in 1956 or so and immediately phoned two friends. All they heard on the line, before they hung up, was convulsive laughter.) Blending with the popularization of Beat literature and the comedy of Lenny Bruce, MAD’s attitude entered into the great generational joke of the sixties: feigned idiocy, faux innocence, the put-on, camp. (Cogito: people over thirty don’t get it, therefore I am.) Cartooning acquired a new, prevalently drug-enhanced function configuring madness as entertainment. Its new paragon—a writer-artist whose greatness still defies conventional description—was R. Crumb, who inaugurated “Zap Comix” in 1968 in San Francisco, at the center of a countercultural circus that was going rancid around the edges. Crumb regrounded comics in the experience of aging youths who, having embraced lives of antic alienation, were stuck with them.
Even full-on, Crumb’s drawings tend to have an up-from-under feel. The fat shoes of the striding character in his iconic “Keep on Truckin’ ” image suggest a ground-level viewpoint, as does the physiognomy of his feminine ideal: girlish above the waist, rolling thunder below. (His unedifying sexual penchants and frankly jerkish attitudes are inseparable from the truths he tells, unfortunately.) Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact. It’s a small matter of emphasis with big correlatives, ushering comics from stylized backgrounds for fantasy to projections of tactile space. The effect needn’t entail anything like realism. Its precedents include, in comics history, the topography of Coconino County, in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (1910-44). In that pocket immensity, as indifferent as the universe, a mouse might hit a cat with a brick, and a cat might enjoy it though a dog objects. After Crumb, a widespread rediscovery of Herriman became crucial to several styles of the nascent graphic novel, in particular that of Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1986, Pantheon). The Jewish mice, German cats, and Polish pigs of that extraordinary epic live their fates in surroundings that not only contain but witness and reflect on the action: the kitchen in which Spiegelman interviews his father, a setting of safety in the here and now, emotionally frames the all but unbelievable ghastliness of the there and then. To become novelistic, comics needed capacious structures of space and time in which their characters could come and go.
Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification tha makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism, in the writing n less than in the reading. Why arduously muster the persona of a Charlie Brown o a Jimmy Corrigan when your own fascinating self is right at hand? A problem fo the autobiographical graphic novel is that its author’s life experience may consis mainly in compulsive cartooning. But the trailblazer of this mode, Harvey Pekar is not a cartoonist at all, barely a writer, and well past adolescence, at leas chronologically. Pekar, a lumpish Cleveland file clerk, came to public notice i several appearances on the David Letterman show, in the mid-nineteen-eighties and was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in “American Splendor” (2003), a movi based on comics that Pekar wrote and others drew. A jazz and comics buff blesse with a connoisseur’s taste and remarkable powers of persuasion, Pekar met Crum in Cleveland in the sixties and enlisted him to illustrate long, grumpy monologue that told the story of his shambling existence. (Desultory personal content in bravura visual form quickly became fashionable among younger artists, most of i quite bad.) Pekar has since dragooned several other cartoonists to his exquisitel tedious ends. The latest is Dean Haspiel, who performs with virtuoso flair in “Th Quitter” (2005, DC Comics/Vertigo), relaying Pekar’s confessions as a working-class dude who grew up with little in his favor except a knack for beating u other dudes. Pekar reviews the futilities of his life with humorless fixation an zero insight. He is the accidental minimalist of the graphic novel
Graphic Novelists;
MAD Magazine;
R. Crumb
You can tell the graphic-novels section in bookstore from afar, by the young bodie sprawled around it like casualties of a localize disaster. There were about a dozen of them at th Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recen afternoon, in a broad aisle between graphic novel and poetry. Not one was reading poetry, but th proximity of the old ragged-right-margine medium piqued me. Graphic novels—pumped-u comics—are to many in their teens and twentie what poetry once was, before bare words lost thei cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poe types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eightie imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing pens. Like life-changin poetry of yore, graphic novels are a youn person’s art, demanding and rewarding menta flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between th incommensurable functions of reading an looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potentia audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but tha is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, “The Waste Land”—b which a rising generation exploits its biological advantages, of animal health an superabundant brain cells, to confound the galling wisdom and demoralize th obnoxious sovereignty of age
Start with Chris Ware, the thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile. Set aside, for now, the graphic novelists you probably most like, if you like only a few: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes. Their peculiar literary qualities are distracting. The same goes for Robert Crumb, for whom there is the added problem of a historical significance: he is the father of art comics. Keep lightly in mind the ever-teeming regions of genre: superhero, action, horror, goth-girl. Give a respectful but wide berth to Japanese manga, which occupy most of the shelf space allotted to graphic novels in bookstores, their bindings as uniform as lined-up vials of generic, obviously addictive pharmaceuticals. Dutifully paging, right to left, through a score or so of translated manga, I register the buzz of platter-eyed characters engaged in well-designed, pointless violence. I pause at frames in which, amid suddenly silent ruins, some liquid or another drips with a sound that is invariably rendered plp plp plp. It’s not that styles of sheer sensation are contemptible, but once you’ve said “Wow,” you are close to having exhausted the subject. It is even a point of honor with action comics—as with action movies and action anything, like roller coasters—to leave us with only a suffusive, endorphin glow. As for the dizzying byways of shojo, kinky romance manga for girls, I throw up my hands in Caucasian senior-male bewilderment.
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“Jimmy Corriga ” tells of a potato-headed, hypersensiti e office worker—“a lonel , emotionally-impair d human castaway,” t e author terms him—w o lacks any notable person l resource except a limitle s capacity for ment l suffering. Sever l interlocking stories, ma y of which involve t e miserable eighteen-nineti s childhood of Jimmy s doppelgänger grandfathe , center on Jimmy’s fir t meeting, at the age f thirty-six, with his absent e father, a figure of crushi g banality. (Jimmy’s mothe , who lives in a retirement home, is a monster of self-absorption.) Ware’s visu l style recalls the clean-lined perfectionism of “Tintin,” the classic adventure str p by the Belgian Hergé (Georges Rémi, 1907-83), whose book-length stori s qualify as graphic novel avant la lettre, but it is far more varied in design, with densely rhythmic layouts of small and large panels and of close-up and long views, and it is subtler in color, with moody, volatile pastels. Ware exercises an encyclopedic command of literary and cinematic tactics—stream of consciousness, montage—with tropes that are peculiar to graphic art: often effects of stillness, such as a character’s blank takes, in which you sense mental wheels turning (never to any very propitious end, in this case), and landscapes and cityscapes infused with a droning dailiness. He speeds and slows time, stops it, and can even seem to run it backward, revisiting and revising recent events, or sideways, incorporating alternative accounts of what’s happening. All this is done with utmost precision. Reading “Jimmy Corrigan” is like operating an intricate machine whose function is not immediately apparent. Gradually, meanings emerge and emotions crystallize. None gladden. Let one gross example stand for the book’s innumerable bummers: Jimmy wanders outdoors, struggling to compose, in his mind, his first-ever letter to his father. (“Dear Dad, Hi! How are you? I’m your son . . .” “Dear Dad, Hi! My name is Jimmy. You might not remember me, but . . .”) A mail truck makes its rounds in the background. Jimmy sees deer behind a gas station across the street. After trying to remember whether deer bite, and assuring himself that they’re harmless, he steps toward them, happily. The mail truck hits him.
The masochistic tenor of “Jimmy Corrigan,” while extreme, is typical of serious graphic novels and, in fact, of most of the modern comic strips that influence graphic novelists, at least of the male kind. Comics heroines, from Little Orphan Annie to Wonder Woman, are as a rule resiliently upbeat, however beset. (In a preface to “Jimmy Corrigan,” Ware issues a questionnaire that’s meant to gauge the relative grimness of the reader’s childhood. It begins, “1. You are a. male. b. female. If b, you may stop . . .”) A painfully humiliated hero is essential even—or especially—to “Superman” and its vast spawn. Disregarded Clark Kent is the figure readers identify with; his transformation into the Man of Steel nurses the hopes and fulfills the rage of all underestimated boys, but it can’t cure his loneliness. “Spider-Man” twists the knife by making Peter Parker’s superpowers an added torment to him: he’d rather be an ordinary guy. The theme of a publicly misjudged character’s private anguish has grown, in comics history, to dominate the form. Who today still relishes the pure ridicule of “Li’l Abner,” or the convivial folk wisdom (brilliant wordplay aside) of “Pogo”? Both were immensely popular before the ascendance of “Peanuts,” the most important comic strip of the past half century. Charlie Brown is Clark Kent without the colorful underwear, and with all the possibly compensatory qualities split off and given to other characters, mainly Snoopy. Jimmy Corrigan, in turn, is Charlie Brown without the eternal childhood in an Arcadian neighborhood. Ware teases out a nightmarish aspect of “Peanuts” that Charles Schulz cushioned in whimsy: Charlie Brown is incorrigibly mediocre, incapable of satisfactory relationships or achievements, doomed to obloquy. His generous and trusting heart sets him up for mishap and betrayal—which, in his little four-panelled world, where nothing changes, he meets with a sigh. Jimmy’s world is big—Chicago’s Sears Tower looms in misty silhouette outside his window—and events in it have consequences. They give him nosebleeds. They make him cry.
The influence of “Peanuts” pervades one variety of graphic novel, th influence of the early MAD magazine another. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan astutely called MAD, which first appeared in 1952, “a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness.” Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, and the magazine’s other inventors counterattacked the manipulative forms and messages of mass culture with a none too subtle parodic wit that was angry at its root. It fed a furious, slightly scared cynicism in its readers that was born of perceptions of falseness in advertising, certainly, and in perhaps, well, everything with which “they” presumed to know and affect our thoughts. What “they” imagined we must be like, to swallow it all, was caricatured in the sunnily moronic countenance of Alfred E. Neuman. MAD was almost as significant a cultural depth charge of the nineteen-fifties as Elvis was. (I came across my first issue in 1956 or so and immediately phoned two friends. All they heard on the line, before they hung up, was convulsive laughter.) Blending with the popularization of Beat literature and the comedy of Lenny Bruce, MAD’s attitude entered into the great generational joke of the sixties: feigned idiocy, faux innocence, the put-on, camp. (Cogito: people over thirty don’t get it, therefore I am.) Cartooning acquired a new, prevalently drug-enhanced function configuring madness as entertainment. Its new paragon—a writer-artist whose greatness still defies conventional description—was R. Crumb, who inaugurated “Zap Comix” in 1968 in San Francisco, at the center of a countercultural circus that was going rancid around the edges. Crumb regrounded comics in the experience of aging youths who, having embraced lives of antic alienation, were stuck with them.
Even full-on, Crumb’s drawings tend to have an up-from-under feel. The fat shoes of the striding character in his iconic “Keep on Truckin’ ” image suggest a ground-level viewpoint, as does the physiognomy of his feminine ideal: girlish above the waist, rolling thunder below. (His unedifying sexual penchants and frankly jerkish attitudes are inseparable from the truths he tells, unfortunately.) Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact. It’s a small matter of emphasis with big correlatives, ushering comics from stylized backgrounds for fantasy to projections of tactile space. The effect needn’t entail anything like realism. Its precedents include, in comics history, the topography of Coconino County, in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (1910-44). In that pocket immensity, as indifferent as the universe, a mouse might hit a cat with a brick, and a cat might enjoy it though a dog objects. After Crumb, a widespread rediscovery of Herriman became crucial to several styles of the nascent graphic novel, in particular that of Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1986, Pantheon). The Jewish mice, German cats, and Polish pigs of that extraordinary epic live their fates in surroundings that not only contain but witness and reflect on the action: the kitchen in which Spiegelman interviews his father, a setting of safety in the here and now, emotionally frames the all but unbelievable ghastliness of the there and then. To become novelistic, comics needed capacious structures of space and time in which their characters could come and go.
Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification tha makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism, in the writing n less than in the reading. Why arduously muster the persona of a Charlie Brown o a Jimmy Corrigan when your own fascinating self is right at hand? A problem fo the autobiographical graphic novel is that its author’s life experience may consis mainly in compulsive cartooning. But the trailblazer of this mode, Harvey Pekar is not a cartoonist at all, barely a writer, and well past adolescence, at leas chronologically. Pekar, a lumpish Cleveland file clerk, came to public notice i several appearances on the David Letterman show, in the mid-nineteen-eighties and was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in “American Splendor” (2003), a movi based on comics that Pekar wrote and others drew. A jazz and comics buff blesse with a connoisseur’s taste and remarkable powers of persuasion, Pekar met Crum in Cleveland in the sixties and enlisted him to illustrate long, grumpy monologue that told the story of his shambling existence. (Desultory personal content in bravura visual form quickly became fashionable among younger artists, most of i quite bad.) Pekar has since dragooned several other cartoonists to his exquisitel tedious ends. The latest is Dean Haspiel, who performs with virtuoso flair in “Th Quitter” (2005, DC Comics/Vertigo), relaying Pekar’s confessions as a working-class dude who grew up with little in his favor except a knack for beating u other dudes. Pekar reviews the futilities of his life with humorless fixation an zero insight. He is the accidental minimalist of the graphic novel
The best first-person graphic novel to date, “Persepolis” (2003), and the second-best, “Persepolis 2” (2004, both Pantheon), are by a woman, Marjane Satrapi. They suggest a number of rules for the form: have a compelling life, remember everything, tell it straight, and be very brave. “Persepolis” is about Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War. “Persepolis 2” follows her to school in Vienna, then back to Iran, and again to Europe, perhaps for good. Her parents are upper-middle-class Marxists, whose extensive family and social connections and political involvement exposed her to the full tumult of the times. Her uncanny way of incorporating exposition, with nary a stumble in her pell-mell narrative momentum, immerses us in the lore of Iranian history and culture. Drawn in an inky and crude visual style that is as direct as a slap, the books track her imaginings and her passions, which are wonderfully responsive, though usually inadequate to the realities of the situation. It’s a comic strategy that maintains buoyancy even in the face of the oppression, torture, and death of people dear to her, without for a moment treating the ordeals of others as secondary to her own. Satrapi’s unforced empathy contrasts with the self-pitying tendencies that are common to first-person comics written by men. Her stubborn ingenuousness may cloy (she has said, “Instead of putting all this money to create arms, I think countries should invest in scholarships for kids to study abroad”), but we don’t go to graphic novels for political philosophy.
At least one artist, however, raises hopes for the graphic novel as a vehicle of political journalism. The Maltese-born Seattle resident Joe Sacco’s much lauded “Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-95” (2000) and “Palestine” (2001, both Fantagraphics) are personalized explorations of those terrible imbroglios, packed with illuminating information and peopled with hurting, raging, sometimes hilarious denizens. The raucous, tumbling visuals commandeer the reader’s attention; we’re along for the ride, and we hang on tight. But Sacco’s success in combining the nerve and the savvy of war correspondence with the infectious rhetoric of comics may be not only inimitable but sui generis. In the new “Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea,” by Guy Delisle (2005, Drawn & Quarterly), the French-Canadian cartoonist describes, in a twee drawing style without a whisper of emotional force, a recent two-month stint during which he supervised animators of children’s cartoons in the world’s most disheartening capital city. Confined to an office and a nearly deserted hotel, and shadowed by taciturn guides and interpreters, Delisle adds only topical highlights to what might otherwise serve as a standard account of an unusually boring work assignment anywhere. Steve Mumford’s “Baghdad Journal: An Artist in Occupied Iraq” (2005, Drawn & Quarterly) disappoints in another way: it offers realist watercolors that are accomplished but no more expressive than photographs, and the writing that accompanies them is pedestrian and prolix. If it weren’t for Sacco, the lately alluring idea of fully engaged and engaging illustrated reportage would be a chimera.
Will Eisner’s “A Contract with God,” a book of stories finished in 1978, i regularly termed “the first graphic novel,” at the instigation of the autho himself, who died this year at the age of eighty-seven. Eisner created a masked-crime-fighter comic book, “The Spirit,” in his youth; he was not a modest man but legions of admirers forgave him that, as they forgive his work’s cornbal histrionics. Rooted in German Expressionism but more reminiscent of MAD-type burlesque than of George Grosz, his characters rub their hands, tear their hair, and, if they happen to fancy something, slaver. Next month, “A Contract with God” will be reissued with two other collections—“A Life Force” and “Dropsie Avenue”—as “The Contract with God Trilogy” (Norton). All the tales, which take place on a single block of the fictional Dropsie Avenue, in the Bronx, concern mostly Jewish characters and are set largely in the Depression era. The title story tells of a Russian immigrant, Frimme Hersh, who promises God a life of service in return for his favor. He is a beloved member of his synagogue community until the death of his adopted daughter embitters him, whereupon he curses God and becomes a rapacious real-estate tycoon. Heartsick in old age, he asks the rabbis to write a new contract, committing him to philanthropy. That night, Hersh dies, and lightning immediately strikes Dropsie Avenue—never leaving well enough alone is apparently a principle for Eisner. Over-the-topness is endemic to the comics, of course—an industry standard for popular action and horror titles, as well as for manga, and the default setting for Crumb’s work. But it is ill suited to serious subjects, especially those that incorporate authentic social history.
Comics used to inhabit a world separate from that of grownup cartooning (a specialty of this magazine), which exploits the clownish and melodramatic proclivities of comics in reverse, and with studied understatement Daniel Clowes closes the gap. To winkle out meaning from indirect or muted expression flatters and delights our intelligence; it is a cynosure of urbanity. Clowes extends it to realms of middle-class comedy, set in small cities, with admixtures of the surreal and the gaudily neurotic—“Peanuts” with grievous tics. His “Ghost World” (1998, Fantagraphics)—transposed to the screen by Terry Zwigoff, in 2001, with flat compositions and an all but affectless acting style faithful to the original—is about the coming of age of two high-school girlfriends, in glum and often sinister circumstances, and involves a good deal of snappy patter, considerable cruelty, and an ultimate betrayal that would make you feel like a sucker if you hadn’t observed the author’s abundant warnings not to identify too poignantly with the heroines. Clowes plays crisp, bland cartooning, at times reminiscent of the old “Can You Draw This?” matchbook ads, against stealthily nuanced writing; reading him, it’s as if someone or something, nonchalant and a trifle bored, had invaded the control room of my thoughts and feelings, and were flipping switches. The short but replete “Ice Haven” (2005, Pantheon), a pageant of twisty characters and subplots, tells of what seems to be a murder along the lines of Leopold and Loeb but isn’t, although there’s plenty of psychological collateral damage to all.
One character, a “comic book critic,” ruminates over his breakfast cereal, “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness . . .” Well put, though it’s rubbish. (Clowes’s critic is a figure of fun.) If the true nature of human consciousness were replicable, the art form that succeeded in doing it would crowd out all others. The true nature of human consciousness—in the time that can be spared from the quest for food, sex, and whatnot—is to enjoy itself by every means possible, an aim enhanced by aesthetic inventions from the “Ring” cycle to Cracker Jack prizes.
A certain theoretical frenzy about comics today is understandable, as it has been in other art forms in periods of their rapid development—think of the debates about painting that roiled Renaissance Italy. But such intellectual arousal rarely precedes creative glory. On the contrary, it commonly indicates that an artistic breakthrough, having been made and recognized, is over, and that a process of increasingly strained emulation and diminishing returns has set in. Nearly all art movements are launched by work that, when the dust clears, turns out to have been their definitive, peak contribution. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” looms over the busy ramifications of Cubism as “The Waste Land” looms over the modern poetry that it inspired. Accordingly, there may never be another graphic novel as good as “Jimmy Corrigan,” even by Ware himself—whose current serial in the Times Magazine, though tangy, bespeaks a style on cruise control. But if the major discoveries of the graphic novel’s new world of the imagination have already been accomplished, its colonizing of the territory, like its threat to foot traffic in bookstore aisles, has only just begun. ♦
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MAD Magazine;
R. Crumb
You can tell the graphic-novels section in bookstore from afar, by the young bodie sprawled around it like casualties of a localize disaster. There were about a dozen of them at th Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recen afternoon, in a broad aisle between graphic novel and poetry. Not one was reading poetry, but th proximity of the old ragged-right-margine medium piqued me. Graphic novels—pumped-u comics—are to many in their teens and twentie what poetry once was, before bare words lost thei cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poe types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eightie imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing pens. Like life-changin poetry of yore, graphic novels are a youn person’s art, demanding and rewarding menta flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between th incommensurable functions of reading an looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potentia audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but tha is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, “The Waste Land”—b which a rising generation exploits its biological advantages, of animal health an superabundant brain cells, to confound the galling wisdom and demoralize th obnoxious sovereignty of age
Start with Chris Ware, the thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile. Set aside, for now, the graphic novelists you probably most like, if you like only a few: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes. Their peculiar literary qualities are distracting. The same goes for Robert Crumb, for whom there is the added problem of a historical significance: he is the father of art comics. Keep lightly in mind the ever-teeming regions of genre: superhero, action, horror, goth-girl. Give a respectful but wide berth to Japanese manga, which occupy most of the shelf space allotted to graphic novels in bookstores, their bindings as uniform as lined-up vials of generic, obviously addictive pharmaceuticals. Dutifully paging, right to left, through a score or so of translated manga, I register the buzz of platter-eyed characters engaged in well-designed, pointless violence. I pause at frames in which, amid suddenly silent ruins, some liquid or another drips with a sound that is invariably rendered plp plp plp. It’s not that styles of sheer sensation are contemptible, but once you’ve said “Wow,” you are close to having exhausted the subject. It is even a point of honor with action comics—as with action movies and action anything, like roller coasters—to leave us with only a suffusive, endorphin glow. As for the dizzying byways of shojo, kinky romance manga for girls, I throw up my hands in Caucasian senior-male bewilderment.
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“Jimmy Corriga ” tells of a potato-headed, hypersensiti e office worker—“a lonel , emotionally-impair d human castaway,” t e author terms him—w o lacks any notable person l resource except a limitle s capacity for ment l suffering. Sever l interlocking stories, ma y of which involve t e miserable eighteen-nineti s childhood of Jimmy s doppelgänger grandfathe , center on Jimmy’s fir t meeting, at the age f thirty-six, with his absent e father, a figure of crushi g banality. (Jimmy’s mothe , who lives in a retirement home, is a monster of self-absorption.) Ware’s visu l style recalls the clean-lined perfectionism of “Tintin,” the classic adventure str p by the Belgian Hergé (Georges Rémi, 1907-83), whose book-length stori s qualify as graphic novel avant la lettre, but it is far more varied in design, with densely rhythmic layouts of small and large panels and of close-up and long views, and it is subtler in color, with moody, volatile pastels. Ware exercises an encyclopedic command of literary and cinematic tactics—stream of consciousness, montage—with tropes that are peculiar to graphic art: often effects of stillness, such as a character’s blank takes, in which you sense mental wheels turning (never to any very propitious end, in this case), and landscapes and cityscapes infused with a droning dailiness. He speeds and slows time, stops it, and can even seem to run it backward, revisiting and revising recent events, or sideways, incorporating alternative accounts of what’s happening. All this is done with utmost precision. Reading “Jimmy Corrigan” is like operating an intricate machine whose function is not immediately apparent. Gradually, meanings emerge and emotions crystallize. None gladden. Let one gross example stand for the book’s innumerable bummers: Jimmy wanders outdoors, struggling to compose, in his mind, his first-ever letter to his father. (“Dear Dad, Hi! How are you? I’m your son . . .” “Dear Dad, Hi! My name is Jimmy. You might not remember me, but . . .”) A mail truck makes its rounds in the background. Jimmy sees deer behind a gas station across the street. After trying to remember whether deer bite, and assuring himself that they’re harmless, he steps toward them, happily. The mail truck hits him.
The masochistic tenor of “Jimmy Corrigan,” while extreme, is typical of serious graphic novels and, in fact, of most of the modern comic strips that influence graphic novelists, at least of the male kind. Comics heroines, from Little Orphan Annie to Wonder Woman, are as a rule resiliently upbeat, however beset. (In a preface to “Jimmy Corrigan,” Ware issues a questionnaire that’s meant to gauge the relative grimness of the reader’s childhood. It begins, “1. You are a. male. b. female. If b, you may stop . . .”) A painfully humiliated hero is essential even—or especially—to “Superman” and its vast spawn. Disregarded Clark Kent is the figure readers identify with; his transformation into the Man of Steel nurses the hopes and fulfills the rage of all underestimated boys, but it can’t cure his loneliness. “Spider-Man” twists the knife by making Peter Parker’s superpowers an added torment to him: he’d rather be an ordinary guy. The theme of a publicly misjudged character’s private anguish has grown, in comics history, to dominate the form. Who today still relishes the pure ridicule of “Li’l Abner,” or the convivial folk wisdom (brilliant wordplay aside) of “Pogo”? Both were immensely popular before the ascendance of “Peanuts,” the most important comic strip of the past half century. Charlie Brown is Clark Kent without the colorful underwear, and with all the possibly compensatory qualities split off and given to other characters, mainly Snoopy. Jimmy Corrigan, in turn, is Charlie Brown without the eternal childhood in an Arcadian neighborhood. Ware teases out a nightmarish aspect of “Peanuts” that Charles Schulz cushioned in whimsy: Charlie Brown is incorrigibly mediocre, incapable of satisfactory relationships or achievements, doomed to obloquy. His generous and trusting heart sets him up for mishap and betrayal—which, in his little four-panelled world, where nothing changes, he meets with a sigh. Jimmy’s world is big—Chicago’s Sears Tower looms in misty silhouette outside his window—and events in it have consequences. They give him nosebleeds. They make him cry.
The influence of “Peanuts” pervades one variety of graphic novel, th influence of the early MAD magazine another. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan astutely called MAD, which first appeared in 1952, “a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness.” Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, and the magazine’s other inventors counterattacked the manipulative forms and messages of mass culture with a none too subtle parodic wit that was angry at its root. It fed a furious, slightly scared cynicism in its readers that was born of perceptions of falseness in advertising, certainly, and in perhaps, well, everything with which “they” presumed to know and affect our thoughts. What “they” imagined we must be like, to swallow it all, was caricatured in the sunnily moronic countenance of Alfred E. Neuman. MAD was almost as significant a cultural depth charge of the nineteen-fifties as Elvis was. (I came across my first issue in 1956 or so and immediately phoned two friends. All they heard on the line, before they hung up, was convulsive laughter.) Blending with the popularization of Beat literature and the comedy of Lenny Bruce, MAD’s attitude entered into the great generational joke of the sixties: feigned idiocy, faux innocence, the put-on, camp. (Cogito: people over thirty don’t get it, therefore I am.) Cartooning acquired a new, prevalently drug-enhanced function configuring madness as entertainment. Its new paragon—a writer-artist whose greatness still defies conventional description—was R. Crumb, who inaugurated “Zap Comix” in 1968 in San Francisco, at the center of a countercultural circus that was going rancid around the edges. Crumb regrounded comics in the experience of aging youths who, having embraced lives of antic alienation, were stuck with them.
Even full-on, Crumb’s drawings tend to have an up-from-under feel. The fat shoes of the striding character in his iconic “Keep on Truckin’ ” image suggest a ground-level viewpoint, as does the physiognomy of his feminine ideal: girlish above the waist, rolling thunder below. (His unedifying sexual penchants and frankly jerkish attitudes are inseparable from the truths he tells, unfortunately.) Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact. It’s a small matter of emphasis with big correlatives, ushering comics from stylized backgrounds for fantasy to projections of tactile space. The effect needn’t entail anything like realism. Its precedents include, in comics history, the topography of Coconino County, in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (1910-44). In that pocket immensity, as indifferent as the universe, a mouse might hit a cat with a brick, and a cat might enjoy it though a dog objects. After Crumb, a widespread rediscovery of Herriman became crucial to several styles of the nascent graphic novel, in particular that of Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1986, Pantheon). The Jewish mice, German cats, and Polish pigs of that extraordinary epic live their fates in surroundings that not only contain but witness and reflect on the action: the kitchen in which Spiegelman interviews his father, a setting of safety in the here and now, emotionally frames the all but unbelievable ghastliness of the there and then. To become novelistic, comics needed capacious structures of space and time in which their characters could come and go.
Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification tha makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism, in the writing n less than in the reading. Why arduously muster the persona of a Charlie Brown o a Jimmy Corrigan when your own fascinating self is right at hand? A problem fo the autobiographical graphic novel is that its author’s life experience may consis mainly in compulsive cartooning. But the trailblazer of this mode, Harvey Pekar is not a cartoonist at all, barely a writer, and well past adolescence, at leas chronologically. Pekar, a lumpish Cleveland file clerk, came to public notice i several appearances on the David Letterman show, in the mid-nineteen-eighties and was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in “American Splendor” (2003), a movi based on comics that Pekar wrote and others drew. A jazz and comics buff blesse with a connoisseur’s taste and remarkable powers of persuasion, Pekar met Crum in Cleveland in the sixties and enlisted him to illustrate long, grumpy monologue that told the story of his shambling existence. (Desultory personal content in bravura visual form quickly became fashionable among younger artists, most of i quite bad.) Pekar has since dragooned several other cartoonists to his exquisitel tedious ends. The latest is Dean Haspiel, who performs with virtuoso flair in “Th Quitter” (2005, DC Comics/Vertigo), relaying Pekar’s confessions as a working-class dude who grew up with little in his favor except a knack for beating u other dudes. Pekar reviews the futilities of his life with humorless fixation an zero insight. He is the accidental minimalist of the graphic novel
The best first-person graphic novel to date, “Persepolis” (2003), and the second-best, “Persepolis 2” (2004, both Pantheon), are by a woman, Marjane Satrapi. They suggest a number of rules for the form: have a compelling life, remember everything, tell it straight, and be very brave. “Persepolis” is about Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War. “Persepolis 2” follows her to school in Vienna, then back to Iran, and again to Europe, perhaps for good. Her parents are upper-middle-class Marxists, whose extensive family and social connections and political involvement exposed her to the full tumult of the times. Her uncanny way of incorporating exposition, with nary a stumble in her pell-mell narrative momentum, immerses us in the lore of Iranian history and culture. Drawn in an inky and crude visual style that is as direct as a slap, the books track her imaginings and her passions, which are wonderfully responsive, though usually inadequate to the realities of the situation. It’s a comic strategy that maintains buoyancy even in the face of the oppression, torture, and death of people dear to her, without for a moment treating the ordeals of others as secondary to her own. Satrapi’s unforced empathy contrasts with the self-pitying tendencies that are common to first-person comics written by men. Her stubborn ingenuousness may cloy (she has said, “Instead of putting all this money to create arms, I think countries should invest in scholarships for kids to study abroad”), but we don’t go to graphic novels for political philosophy.
At least one artist, however, raises hopes for the graphic novel as a vehicle of political journalism. The Maltese-born Seattle resident Joe Sacco’s much lauded “Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-95” (2000) and “Palestine” (2001, both Fantagraphics) are personalized explorations of those terrible imbroglios, packed with illuminating information and peopled with hurting, raging, sometimes hilarious denizens. The raucous, tumbling visuals commandeer the reader’s attention; we’re along for the ride, and we hang on tight. But Sacco’s success in combining the nerve and the savvy of war correspondence with the infectious rhetoric of comics may be not only inimitable but sui generis. In the new “Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea,” by Guy Delisle (2005, Drawn & Quarterly), the French-Canadian cartoonist describes, in a twee drawing style without a whisper of emotional force, a recent two-month stint during which he supervised animators of children’s cartoons in the world’s most disheartening capital city. Confined to an office and a nearly deserted hotel, and shadowed by taciturn guides and interpreters, Delisle adds only topical highlights to what might otherwise serve as a standard account of an unusually boring work assignment anywhere. Steve Mumford’s “Baghdad Journal: An Artist in Occupied Iraq” (2005, Drawn & Quarterly) disappoints in another way: it offers realist watercolors that are accomplished but no more expressive than photographs, and the writing that accompanies them is pedestrian and prolix. If it weren’t for Sacco, the lately alluring idea of fully engaged and engaging illustrated reportage would be a chimera.
Will Eisner’s “A Contract with God,” a book of stories finished in 1978, i regularly termed “the first graphic novel,” at the instigation of the autho himself, who died this year at the age of eighty-seven. Eisner created a masked-crime-fighter comic book, “The Spirit,” in his youth; he was not a modest man but legions of admirers forgave him that, as they forgive his work’s cornbal histrionics. Rooted in German Expressionism but more reminiscent of MAD-type burlesque than of George Grosz, his characters rub their hands, tear their hair, and, if they happen to fancy something, slaver. Next month, “A Contract with God” will be reissued with two other collections—“A Life Force” and “Dropsie Avenue”—as “The Contract with God Trilogy” (Norton). All the tales, which take place on a single block of the fictional Dropsie Avenue, in the Bronx, concern mostly Jewish characters and are set largely in the Depression era. The title story tells of a Russian immigrant, Frimme Hersh, who promises God a life of service in return for his favor. He is a beloved member of his synagogue community until the death of his adopted daughter embitters him, whereupon he curses God and becomes a rapacious real-estate tycoon. Heartsick in old age, he asks the rabbis to write a new contract, committing him to philanthropy. That night, Hersh dies, and lightning immediately strikes Dropsie Avenue—never leaving well enough alone is apparently a principle for Eisner. Over-the-topness is endemic to the comics, of course—an industry standard for popular action and horror titles, as well as for manga, and the default setting for Crumb’s work. But it is ill suited to serious subjects, especially those that incorporate authentic social history.
Comics used to inhabit a world separate from that of grownup cartooning (a specialty of this magazine), which exploits the clownish and melodramatic proclivities of comics in reverse, and with studied understatement Daniel Clowes closes the gap. To winkle out meaning from indirect or muted expression flatters and delights our intelligence; it is a cynosure of urbanity. Clowes extends it to realms of middle-class comedy, set in small cities, with admixtures of the surreal and the gaudily neurotic—“Peanuts” with grievous tics. His “Ghost World” (1998, Fantagraphics)—transposed to the screen by Terry Zwigoff, in 2001, with flat compositions and an all but affectless acting style faithful to the original—is about the coming of age of two high-school girlfriends, in glum and often sinister circumstances, and involves a good deal of snappy patter, considerable cruelty, and an ultimate betrayal that would make you feel like a sucker if you hadn’t observed the author’s abundant warnings not to identify too poignantly with the heroines. Clowes plays crisp, bland cartooning, at times reminiscent of the old “Can You Draw This?” matchbook ads, against stealthily nuanced writing; reading him, it’s as if someone or something, nonchalant and a trifle bored, had invaded the control room of my thoughts and feelings, and were flipping switches. The short but replete “Ice Haven” (2005, Pantheon), a pageant of twisty characters and subplots, tells of what seems to be a murder along the lines of Leopold and Loeb but isn’t, although there’s plenty of psychological collateral damage to all.
One character, a “comic book critic,” ruminates over his breakfast cereal, “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness . . .” Well put, though it’s rubbish. (Clowes’s critic is a figure of fun.) If the true nature of human consciousness were replicable, the art form that succeeded in doing it would crowd out all others. The true nature of human consciousness—in the time that can be spared from the quest for food, sex, and whatnot—is to enjoy itself by every means possible, an aim enhanced by aesthetic inventions from the “Ring” cycle to Cracker Jack prizes.
A certain theoretical frenzy about comics today is understandable, as it has been in other art forms in periods of their rapid development—think of the debates about painting that roiled Renaissance Italy. But such intellectual arousal rarely precedes creative glory. On the contrary, it commonly indicates that an artistic breakthrough, having been made and recognized, is over, and that a process of increasingly strained emulation and diminishing returns has set in. Nearly all art movements are launched by work that, when the dust clears, turns out to have been their definitive, peak contribution. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” looms over the busy ramifications of Cubism as “The Waste Land” looms over the modern poetry that it inspired. Accordingly, there may never be another graphic novel as good as “Jimmy Corrigan,” even by Ware himself—whose current serial in the Times Magazine, though tangy, bespeaks a style on cruise control. But if the major discoveries of the graphic novel’s new world of the imagination have already been accomplished, its colonizing of the territory, like its threat to foot traffic in bookstore aisles, has only just begun. ♦
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OBAMA INAUGURATION TAKE DOWN
A return to these truths??? Who abandoned these truths? Hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism ... When were these abandoned??! How do we return to truths we never left??! It's empty rhetoric.
THESE STATEMENTS BY AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT ARE SHAMEFUL.
THESE STATEMENTS BY AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT ARE SHAMEFUL. DISHONEST. ALL MADE FOR ONE PURPOSE, THE STIRRING THRILL OF RHETORIC, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO REGARD FOR CONTENT.
standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions
TRUE ACCUSATIONS CAN'T BE MATCHED.
THAT IS JUST SUCH A STUPID IGNORANT THING TO SAY.
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE PRACTICING TO WRITE FOR OBAMA AND LAWRENCE TRIBE..
IF YOU LOOK AT THE ELOQUENT LIES IN THE INAUGURATION SPEECH, YOU CAN SEE WHAT I MEAN. YOU LIE WITH PONDEROUS ELOQUENCE, TO STIR UP FEELINGS. WITH UTTER DISREGARD TO WHAT YOU ARE SAYING.
LOOK AT THESE EXAMPLES. SEE IF THAT DOESN'T GIVE YOU "SOME INSIGHT".
TRUTH COMES BEFORE ELOQUENCE. THESE STATEMENTS BY AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT ARE SHAMEFUL. DISHONEST. ALL MADE FOR ONE PURPOSE, THE STIRRING THRILL OF RHETORIC, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO REGARD FOR CONTENT.
THEY ARE BLATANTLY UNTRUE, INSULTING. IDIOTIC.
But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed.
I DIDN;'T STAND PAT. I DIDN'T PROTECT NARROW INTERESTS OR PUT OFF UNPLEASANT DECISIONS. AND I CERTAINLY DO NOT NEED TO RETURN TO THE TRUTHS OF COURAGE AND FAIR PLAY, TOLERANCE AND CURIOSITY, LOYALTY AND HONESTY AND COURAGE. HOW CAN YOU SAY SUCH THINGS ABOUT AMERICANS, UNLESS YOU JUST MEAN THE BASTARDS THAT RUN THE COUNTRY. BUT I DON'T THINK YOU "MEANT:" ANYTHING. YOU JUST WANTED THE SOARING RHETORIC. FUCK WHO GETS INSULTED. THEY WON'T LISTEN TO THE WORDS OR THE MEANING OR THE INSULTING TONE.
JUST LIKE YOU CHUCK. ALL ELOQUENCE AND RHETORIC GRANDEUR, WHO CARES WHAT IT MEANS AS LONG AS IT SINGS.
CREEP.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.
hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. ARE YOU SAYING I HAVE STRAYED FROM HONESTY. I HAVE DONE NO SUCH THING. ARE YOU SAYING I AM A COWARD, AN UNFAIR PLAYER, INCURIOUS, INTOLERANT. AND LAZY??
IT SOUNDS LIKE THAT. YOU ARE SAYING I STRAYED FROM THESE TRUTHS FROM TOLERANCE AND CURIOSITY, LOYALTY AND COURAGE AND HARD WORK AND NEED TO RETURN TO THESE TRUTHS.
THAT IS A STUPID INSULT. YOU MIGHT AS WELL SAY I WOULD THROW STONES AT A BLIND MAN. IT IS AN INTOLERABLE AND VICIOUS SWIPE AT MY INTEGRITY. HARD WORK. HONESTY??
THAT IS JUST SUCH A STUPID IGNORANT THING TO SAY.
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE PRACTICING TO WRITE FOR OBAMA AND LAWRENCE TRIBE..
IF YOU LOOK AT THE ELOQUENT LIES IN THE INAUGURATION SPEECH, YOU CAN SEE WHAT I MEAN. YOU LIE WITH PONDEROUS ELOQUENCE, TO STIR UP FEELINGS. WITH UTTER DISREGARD TO WHAT YOU ARE SAYING.
LOOK AT THESE EXAMPLES. SEE IF THAT DOESN'T GIVE YOU "SOME INSIGHT".
TRUTH COMES BEFORE ELOQUENCE. THESE STATEMENTS BY AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT ARE SHAMEFUL. DISHONEST. ALL MADE FOR ONE PURPOSE, THE STIRRING THRILL OF RHETORIC, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO REGARD FOR CONTENT.
THEY ARE BLATANTLY UNTRUE, INSULTING. IDIOTIC.
But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed.
I DIDN;'T STAND PAT. I DIDN'T PROTECT NARROW INTERESTS OR PUT OFF UNPLEASANT DECISIONS. AND I CERTAINLY DO NOT NEED TO RETURN TO THE TRUTHS OF COURAGE AND FAIR PLAY, TOLERANCE AND CURIOSITY, LOYALTY AND HONESTY AND COURAGE. HOW CAN YOU SAY SUCH THINGS ABOUT AMERICANS, UNLESS YOU JUST MEAN THE BASTARDS THAT RUN THE COUNTRY. BUT I DON'T THINK YOU "MEANT:" ANYTHING. YOU JUST WANTED THE SOARING RHETORIC. FUCK WHO GETS INSULTED. THEY WON'T LISTEN TO THE WORDS OR THE MEANING OR THE INSULTING TONE.
JUST LIKE YOU CHUCK. ALL ELOQUENCE AND RHETORIC GRANDEUR, WHO CARES WHAT IT MEANS AS LONG AS IT SINGS.
CREEP.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.
hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. ARE YOU SAYING I HAVE STRAYED FROM HONESTY. I HAVE DONE NO SUCH THING. ARE YOU SAYING I AM A COWARD, AN UNFAIR PLAYER, INCURIOUS, INTOLERANT. AND LAZY??
IT SOUNDS LIKE THAT. YOU ARE SAYING I STRAYED FROM THESE TRUTHS FROM TOLERANCE AND CURIOSITY, LOYALTY AND COURAGE AND HARD WORK AND NEED TO RETURN TO THESE TRUTHS.
THAT IS A STUPID INSULT. YOU MIGHT AS WELL SAY I WOULD THROW STONES AT A BLIND MAN. IT IS AN INTOLERABLE AND VICIOUS SWIPE AT MY INTEGRITY. HARD WORK. HONESTY??
Abolish Taxes on Capital Gains.
“Government Can and Must Provide Opportunity, Not Smother It”
Government’s role, as Reagan understood it, was to give Americans real incentives to work hard, invest and create jobs -- incentives like keeping more of what we earn and the power to create and own our own businesses.
This is how Reagan put it in his first inaugural address:
“Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”
In the spirit of Ronald Reagan, 12 American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity puts its faith in the people, not the government.
Our plan isn’t more money for more government, more power for politicians and more make-work for bureaucrats.
It’s a clear and decisive alternative that creates jobs, rewards work and encourages savings and investment.
12 American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity
1. Payroll Tax Stimulus. With a temporary new tax credit to offset 50% of the payroll tax, every small business would have more money, and all Americans would take home more of what they earn.
2. Real Middle-Income Tax Relief. Reduce the marginal tax rate of 25% down to 15%, in effect establishing a flat-rate tax of 15% for close to 9 out of 10 American workers.
3. Reduce the Business Tax Rate. Match Ireland’s rate of 12.5% to keep more jobs in America.
4. Homeowner’s Assistance. Provide tax credit incentives to responsible home buyers so they can keep their homes.
5. Control Spending So We Can Move to a Balanced Budget. This begins with eliminating congressional earmarks and wasteful pork-barrel spending.
6. No State Aid Without Protection From Fraud. Require state governments to adopt anti-fraud and anti-theft policies before giving them more money.
7. More American Energy Now. Explore for more American oil and gas and invest in affordable energy for the future, including clean coal, ethanol, nuclear power and renewable fuels.
8. Abolish Taxes on Capital Gains. Match China, Singapore and many other competitors. More investment in America means more jobs in America.
9. Protect the Rights of American Workers. We must protect a worker’s right to decide by secret ballot whether to join a union, and the worker’s right to freely negotiate. Forced unionism will kill jobs in America at a time when we can’t afford to lose them.
10. Replace Sarbanes-Oxley. This failed law is crippling entrepreneurial startups. Replace it with affordable rules that help create jobs, not destroy them.
11. Abolish the Death Tax. Americans should work for their families, not for Washington.
12. Invest in Energy and Transportation Infrastructure. This includes a new, expanded electric power grid and a 21st Century air traffic control system that will reduce delays in air travel and save passengers, employees and airlines billions of dollars per year.
I’ve already heard from thousands of Americans who believe that this is the kind of change our economy needs right now.
I’d love to hear from you. Please send me your thoughts about 12 Americans Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity using the suggestion box at www.americansolutions.com/jobs.
It’s not too late to be a part of real change for America. When Washington’s latest big government gamble fails, we’ll be ready to put our money on a sure thing: Real solutions for the American people.
Government’s role, as Reagan understood it, was to give Americans real incentives to work hard, invest and create jobs -- incentives like keeping more of what we earn and the power to create and own our own businesses.
This is how Reagan put it in his first inaugural address:
“Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”
In the spirit of Ronald Reagan, 12 American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity puts its faith in the people, not the government.
Our plan isn’t more money for more government, more power for politicians and more make-work for bureaucrats.
It’s a clear and decisive alternative that creates jobs, rewards work and encourages savings and investment.
12 American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity
1. Payroll Tax Stimulus. With a temporary new tax credit to offset 50% of the payroll tax, every small business would have more money, and all Americans would take home more of what they earn.
2. Real Middle-Income Tax Relief. Reduce the marginal tax rate of 25% down to 15%, in effect establishing a flat-rate tax of 15% for close to 9 out of 10 American workers.
3. Reduce the Business Tax Rate. Match Ireland’s rate of 12.5% to keep more jobs in America.
4. Homeowner’s Assistance. Provide tax credit incentives to responsible home buyers so they can keep their homes.
5. Control Spending So We Can Move to a Balanced Budget. This begins with eliminating congressional earmarks and wasteful pork-barrel spending.
6. No State Aid Without Protection From Fraud. Require state governments to adopt anti-fraud and anti-theft policies before giving them more money.
7. More American Energy Now. Explore for more American oil and gas and invest in affordable energy for the future, including clean coal, ethanol, nuclear power and renewable fuels.
8. Abolish Taxes on Capital Gains. Match China, Singapore and many other competitors. More investment in America means more jobs in America.
9. Protect the Rights of American Workers. We must protect a worker’s right to decide by secret ballot whether to join a union, and the worker’s right to freely negotiate. Forced unionism will kill jobs in America at a time when we can’t afford to lose them.
10. Replace Sarbanes-Oxley. This failed law is crippling entrepreneurial startups. Replace it with affordable rules that help create jobs, not destroy them.
11. Abolish the Death Tax. Americans should work for their families, not for Washington.
12. Invest in Energy and Transportation Infrastructure. This includes a new, expanded electric power grid and a 21st Century air traffic control system that will reduce delays in air travel and save passengers, employees and airlines billions of dollars per year.
I’ve already heard from thousands of Americans who believe that this is the kind of change our economy needs right now.
I’d love to hear from you. Please send me your thoughts about 12 Americans Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity using the suggestion box at www.americansolutions.com/jobs.
It’s not too late to be a part of real change for America. When Washington’s latest big government gamble fails, we’ll be ready to put our money on a sure thing: Real solutions for the American people.
no bottom for world financial "collapse
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Renowned investor George Soros said on Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.
Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.
He said the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September marked a turning point in the functioning of the market system.
"We witnessed the collapse of the financial system," Soros said at a Columbia University dinner. "It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."
His comments echoed those made earlier at the same conference by Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman who is now a top adviser to President Barack Obama.
Volcker said industrial production around the world was declining even more rapidly than in the United States, which is itself under severe strain.
"I don't remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world," Volcker said.
(Reporting by Pedro Nicolaci da Cost
Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.
He said the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September marked a turning point in the functioning of the market system.
"We witnessed the collapse of the financial system," Soros said at a Columbia University dinner. "It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."
His comments echoed those made earlier at the same conference by Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman who is now a top adviser to President Barack Obama.
Volcker said industrial production around the world was declining even more rapidly than in the United States, which is itself under severe strain.
"I don't remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world," Volcker said.
(Reporting by Pedro Nicolaci da Cost
standing pat, of protecting narrow interests
But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions
Friday, February 20, 2009
when imagination is joined to common purpose
when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.
the time has come to set aside childish things.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.
WHAT CHILDISH THINGS. WHAT. WHAT ARE YOU SAYING. THAT IS CRAZY TALK.
THAT'S JUST PLAIN RUDE.
WHAT CHILDISH THINGS. WHAT. WHAT ARE YOU SAYING. THAT IS CRAZY TALK.
THAT'S JUST PLAIN RUDE.
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
SURE. THAT'S ME. LUCKY I WENT OUT AND VOTED AGAINST CONFLICT AND DISCORD. NOT FOR ME THAT FEAR. NO SIR GIVE ME HOPE OVER FEAR. BUT NOT HOPE OVER REALISM. I DID NOT CHOSE HOPE OVER REALISM.
WELL, YOU KNOW. IT'S THE SAME SHIT DIFFERENT DAY SYNDROME. I REALLY HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE.
WE GATHER,
EXCUSE ME.
ON THIS DAY. THAT'S SOARING RHETORIC FOR TOADY. WE GATHER BECAUSE WE HAVE CHOSEN HOPE OVER FEAR.
MCCAIN, THE CANDIDATE OF FEAR. ITS A DANGEROUS WORLD.
OBAMA, YES WE CAN.
SURE. THAT'S ME. LUCKY I WENT OUT AND VOTED AGAINST CONFLICT AND DISCORD. NOT FOR ME THAT FEAR. NO SIR GIVE ME HOPE OVER FEAR. BUT NOT HOPE OVER REALISM. I DID NOT CHOSE HOPE OVER REALISM.
WELL, YOU KNOW. IT'S THE SAME SHIT DIFFERENT DAY SYNDROME. I REALLY HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE.
WE GATHER,
EXCUSE ME.
ON THIS DAY. THAT'S SOARING RHETORIC FOR TOADY. WE GATHER BECAUSE WE HAVE CHOSEN HOPE OVER FEAR.
MCCAIN, THE CANDIDATE OF FEAR. ITS A DANGEROUS WORLD.
OBAMA, YES WE CAN.
OUR COLLECTIVE FAILURE???
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
OUR COLLECTIVE WHAT? FAILURE?? I FAILED HOW?? I FAILED TO MAKE HARD CHOICES??? I WAS SUPPOSED TO PREPARE THE NATION FOR A NEW AGE, AND FAILED??
I HATE THIS GUY, HE'S CRAZY AND I HATE HIM.
OUR COLLECTIVE WHAT? FAILURE?? I FAILED HOW?? I FAILED TO MAKE HARD CHOICES??? I WAS SUPPOSED TO PREPARE THE NATION FOR A NEW AGE, AND FAILED??
I HATE THIS GUY, HE'S CRAZY AND I HATE HIM.
ANOTHER BULLSHIT ARTICLE ABOUT HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS
Friday, Feb. 13, 2009
Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?
NO.
WARNING. THIS ARTICLE IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME AND INCLUDES LIES. BY PEOPLE WHO PUBLISH BOOKS FOR MONEY AND FAME, BOOKS THAT ARE JUST SILLY AND ALL FILLER, AND A WASTE OF TIME. AND BASED ON LIES.
By John Cloud
Is it possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts — or, more urgently these days, another Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes?
How to produce genius is a very old question, one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. In the modern era, Immanuel Kant and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton wrote extensively about how genius occurs. Last year, pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell addressed the subject in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
BULLSHIT.
The latest, and possibly most comprehensive, entry into this genre is Dean Keith Simonton's new book Genius 101: Creators, Leaders, and Prodigies (Springer Publishing Co., 227 pages). Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, is one of the world's leading authorities on the intellectually eminent, whom he has studied since his Harvard grad-school days in the 1970s. (See pictures of Albert Einstein.)
For most of its history, the debate over what leads to genius has been dominated by a bitter, binary argument: is it nature or is it nurture — is genius genetically inherited, or are geniuses the products of stimulating and supportive homes? Simonton takes the reasonable position that geniuses are the result of both good genes and good surroundings.
WHICH SIMPLY MEANS THAT WITHOUT THE FIRST, RARE HIGH QUALITY GENES, GENIUS CANNOT OCCUR. BUT IT CAN BE SQUASHED. IS THAT ALL THEY CAN SAY AFTER ALL THAT DISCUSSION. PROBABLY.
HERE'S A BOOK. Genius 101: Creators, Leaders, and Prodigies... DON'T BOTHER READING IT. ITS JUST SIMPLE. A GENIUS IS BORN, IF THINGS GO WRONG, A LOT OF CONCUSSIONS, EARLY DEATH, ONLY KIDDING, THEN THE GENIUS WILL NOT FLOWER. DOES THE AUTHOR HAVE MORE TO ADD TO THAT?? HE WILL INSIST HE DOES, BUT THEY WILL BE WRONG. LOOK AT THIS DUMB QUOTATION.
Simonton tries, with this thorough, slightly ponderous, definition: Geniuses are those who "have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement" and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both "original and highly exemplary." IN OTHER WORDS. GENIUSES ARE THOSE WHO HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE TO MAKE ORIGINAL AND HIGHLY EXEMPLARY CONTRIBUTIONS . OBVIOUSLY IF THEY LACKED ENTHUSIASM AND ENDURANCE, THEY WOULD FAIL. UNLESS, LIKE CERTAIN DEPRESSED LAZY SONG WRITERS THEY FINISH THEIR YEARS OUTPUT IN A FIFTEEN HOUR PERIOD OR LESS.
THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT.
His middle-of-the-road stance sets him apart from more ideological proponents like Galton (the founder of eugenics) as well as revisionists like Gladwell who argue that dedication and practice, as opposed to raw intelligence, are the most crucial determinants of success.
AND WHAT ABOUT THIS CLOWN GLADWELL WHO ARGUES THAT DEDICATION AND PRACTICE ARE THE MOST CRUCIAL DETERMINANTS OF GENIUS. THAT WOULD BE, LIKE, SOMEBODY SAYING SOMETHING REALLY STUPID. I MEAN, SCARY. IT IS STUPID AND SCARY TO IMAGINE EVEN FOR A SPLIT SECOND THAT IF AN AVERAGE SHMUCK PRACTICES LONG ENOUGH HE'LL BE AS GOOD AS YO YO MA OR RANDY NEWMAN OR NORMAN FUCKING MAILER. REST ASSURED, ALL GENIUSES ARE EARLY BLOOMERS, PRODIGIES.
THIS IS A VERY SAD AND STUPID THING TO EVEN THINK ABOUT. ENTHUSIASM AND ENDURANCE. PRACTICE AND DEDICATION TRUMP RAW TALENT AND RAW INTELLIGENCE. AGAIN. IT IS THE ARGUMENT ABOUT FLYING PIGS. OR FAITH. BALONEY!!
Too often, writers don't nail down exactly what they mean by genius.
AS IF THEY HAVE TO. GENIUS IS THE GUY THAT DOES REALLY CREATIVE GREAT STUFF, AND JUST CAN'T HELP HIMSELF FROM MORE THAN ANYBODY ELSE IN HIS FIELD. MOZART WAS A GENIUS. AT AGE SIX. HE NEVER PRACTICED. HE WAS ENTHUSIASTIC, AND HE WOULD HAVE HAD TO BE A REALLY SICK MENTAL BASKET CASE NOT TO HAVE BEEN EXCITED AND ENTHUSIASTIC AT HIS PROSPECTS AND HIS ADVENTURES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND SUCCESSES.
THIS IS JUST A STUPID WASTE OF TIME.
Simonton tries, with this thorough, slightly ponderous, definition: Geniuses are those who "have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement" and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both "original and highly exemplary." (Read TIME's 2007 cover story, "Are We Failing Our Geniuses?")
Fine, now how do you determine whether artistic or scientific creations are original and exemplary? One method Simonton and others use is to add up the number of times an individual's publications are cited in professional literature — or, say, the number of times a composer's work is performed and recorded. Other investigators count encyclopedia references instead. Such methods may not be terribly sophisticated, but the answer they yield is at least a hard quantity.
Still, there's an echo-chamber quality to this technique: genius is what we all say it is. Is there a more objective method? There are IQ tests, of course, but not all IQ tests are the same, which leads to picking a minimum IQ and calling it genius-level. Also, estimates of the IQs of dead geniuses tend to be fun, but they are based on biographical information that can be highly uneven. (Read TIME's 1999 cover story about the "I.Q. Gene.")
So Simonton falls back on his "intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance" formulation. But what about accidental discoveries? Simonton mentions the case of biologist Alexander Fleming, who, in 1928, "noticed quite by chance that a culture of Staphylococcus had been contaminated by a blue-green mold. Around the mold was a halo." Bingo: penicillin. But what if you had been in Fleming's lab that day and noticed the halo first? Would you be the genius? THAT'S STUPID.
NO. OF COURSE NOT. NO MORE THAN PRESTIGE ACCRUES TO THE WINNER OF THE NEW YORK STATE LOTTERY. THIS IS A DUMB EXAMPLE.
Recently, the endurance and hard work part of the achievement equation has gotten a lot of attention, and the role of raw talent and intelligence has faded a bit.
IN YOUR DREAMS. DON'T BE RIDDICK.
The main reason for this shift in emphasis is the work of Anders Ericsson, a friendly rival of Simonton's who teaches psychology at Florida State University. Gladwell featured Ericsson's work prominently in Outliers. (See the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008.)
Ericsson has become famous for the 10-year rule: the notion that it takes at least 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of dedicated practice for people to master most complex endeavors. Ericsson didn't invent the 10-year rule (it was suggested as early as 1899), but he has conducted many studies confirming it. Gladwell is a believer. "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good," he writes. "It's the thing you do that makes you good." AND SAYING THINGS LIKE THAT IS WHAT MAKES YOU AN IDIOT.
Simonton rather dismissively calls this the "drudge theory." He thinks the real story is more complicated: deliberate practice, he says, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something. In a 2002 study, Simonton showed that the average IQ of 64 eminent scientists was around 150, fully 50 points higher than the average IQ for the general population. And most of the variation in IQs (about 80%, according to Simonton) is explained by genetics. (See pictures of Bobby Fischer, chess prodigy.)
WELL THAT'S ABOUT THAT ISN'T IT.
Personality traits also matter. Simonton writes that geniuses tend to be "open to experience, introverted, hostile, driven, and ambitious." These traits too are inherited — but only partly. They're also shaped by environment. AND TYPICAL OF PEOPLE WHOSE ACTIONS AND WORK IS DEEPLY ADMIRED AND ASTONISHINGLY IMPORTANT. THEY BECOME DRIVEN AND AMBITIOUS BECAUSE THEIR WORK IS MAGNIFICENT.
So what does this mean for people who want to encourage genius?
IT MEANS GIVING UP.
Gladwell concludes his book by saying the 10,000-hour rule shows that kids just need a chance to show how hard they can work; we need "a society that provides opportunities for all," he says. Well, sure. But he dismisses the idea that kids need higher IQs to achieve success, and that's just wishful thinking. As I argued here, we need to do more to recognize and not alienate high-IQ kids. Too often, principals hold them back with age-mates rather than letting them skip grades.
GIVE ME A BREAK. THATS ALWAYS WELL INTENTIONED, AND PROBABLY HAS NO EFFECT ON OUTPUT.
Still, genius can be very hard to discern, BULLSHIT. THAT'S FOR LOSERS.
and not just among the young. Simonton tells the story of a woman who was able to get fewer than a dozen of her poems published during her brief life. Her hard work availed her little — but the raw power of her imagery and metaphor lives on. Her name? Emily Dickinson.
WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT PROVE. NOTHING AT ALL. THIS ARTICLE IS A PIECE OF SHIT.
Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?
NO.
WARNING. THIS ARTICLE IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME AND INCLUDES LIES. BY PEOPLE WHO PUBLISH BOOKS FOR MONEY AND FAME, BOOKS THAT ARE JUST SILLY AND ALL FILLER, AND A WASTE OF TIME. AND BASED ON LIES.
By John Cloud
Is it possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts — or, more urgently these days, another Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes?
How to produce genius is a very old question, one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. In the modern era, Immanuel Kant and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton wrote extensively about how genius occurs. Last year, pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell addressed the subject in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
BULLSHIT.
The latest, and possibly most comprehensive, entry into this genre is Dean Keith Simonton's new book Genius 101: Creators, Leaders, and Prodigies (Springer Publishing Co., 227 pages). Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, is one of the world's leading authorities on the intellectually eminent, whom he has studied since his Harvard grad-school days in the 1970s. (See pictures of Albert Einstein.)
For most of its history, the debate over what leads to genius has been dominated by a bitter, binary argument: is it nature or is it nurture — is genius genetically inherited, or are geniuses the products of stimulating and supportive homes? Simonton takes the reasonable position that geniuses are the result of both good genes and good surroundings.
WHICH SIMPLY MEANS THAT WITHOUT THE FIRST, RARE HIGH QUALITY GENES, GENIUS CANNOT OCCUR. BUT IT CAN BE SQUASHED. IS THAT ALL THEY CAN SAY AFTER ALL THAT DISCUSSION. PROBABLY.
HERE'S A BOOK. Genius 101: Creators, Leaders, and Prodigies... DON'T BOTHER READING IT. ITS JUST SIMPLE. A GENIUS IS BORN, IF THINGS GO WRONG, A LOT OF CONCUSSIONS, EARLY DEATH, ONLY KIDDING, THEN THE GENIUS WILL NOT FLOWER. DOES THE AUTHOR HAVE MORE TO ADD TO THAT?? HE WILL INSIST HE DOES, BUT THEY WILL BE WRONG. LOOK AT THIS DUMB QUOTATION.
Simonton tries, with this thorough, slightly ponderous, definition: Geniuses are those who "have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement" and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both "original and highly exemplary." IN OTHER WORDS. GENIUSES ARE THOSE WHO HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE TO MAKE ORIGINAL AND HIGHLY EXEMPLARY CONTRIBUTIONS . OBVIOUSLY IF THEY LACKED ENTHUSIASM AND ENDURANCE, THEY WOULD FAIL. UNLESS, LIKE CERTAIN DEPRESSED LAZY SONG WRITERS THEY FINISH THEIR YEARS OUTPUT IN A FIFTEEN HOUR PERIOD OR LESS.
THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT.
His middle-of-the-road stance sets him apart from more ideological proponents like Galton (the founder of eugenics) as well as revisionists like Gladwell who argue that dedication and practice, as opposed to raw intelligence, are the most crucial determinants of success.
AND WHAT ABOUT THIS CLOWN GLADWELL WHO ARGUES THAT DEDICATION AND PRACTICE ARE THE MOST CRUCIAL DETERMINANTS OF GENIUS. THAT WOULD BE, LIKE, SOMEBODY SAYING SOMETHING REALLY STUPID. I MEAN, SCARY. IT IS STUPID AND SCARY TO IMAGINE EVEN FOR A SPLIT SECOND THAT IF AN AVERAGE SHMUCK PRACTICES LONG ENOUGH HE'LL BE AS GOOD AS YO YO MA OR RANDY NEWMAN OR NORMAN FUCKING MAILER. REST ASSURED, ALL GENIUSES ARE EARLY BLOOMERS, PRODIGIES.
THIS IS A VERY SAD AND STUPID THING TO EVEN THINK ABOUT. ENTHUSIASM AND ENDURANCE. PRACTICE AND DEDICATION TRUMP RAW TALENT AND RAW INTELLIGENCE. AGAIN. IT IS THE ARGUMENT ABOUT FLYING PIGS. OR FAITH. BALONEY!!
Too often, writers don't nail down exactly what they mean by genius.
AS IF THEY HAVE TO. GENIUS IS THE GUY THAT DOES REALLY CREATIVE GREAT STUFF, AND JUST CAN'T HELP HIMSELF FROM MORE THAN ANYBODY ELSE IN HIS FIELD. MOZART WAS A GENIUS. AT AGE SIX. HE NEVER PRACTICED. HE WAS ENTHUSIASTIC, AND HE WOULD HAVE HAD TO BE A REALLY SICK MENTAL BASKET CASE NOT TO HAVE BEEN EXCITED AND ENTHUSIASTIC AT HIS PROSPECTS AND HIS ADVENTURES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND SUCCESSES.
THIS IS JUST A STUPID WASTE OF TIME.
Simonton tries, with this thorough, slightly ponderous, definition: Geniuses are those who "have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement" and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both "original and highly exemplary." (Read TIME's 2007 cover story, "Are We Failing Our Geniuses?")
Fine, now how do you determine whether artistic or scientific creations are original and exemplary? One method Simonton and others use is to add up the number of times an individual's publications are cited in professional literature — or, say, the number of times a composer's work is performed and recorded. Other investigators count encyclopedia references instead. Such methods may not be terribly sophisticated, but the answer they yield is at least a hard quantity.
Still, there's an echo-chamber quality to this technique: genius is what we all say it is. Is there a more objective method? There are IQ tests, of course, but not all IQ tests are the same, which leads to picking a minimum IQ and calling it genius-level. Also, estimates of the IQs of dead geniuses tend to be fun, but they are based on biographical information that can be highly uneven. (Read TIME's 1999 cover story about the "I.Q. Gene.")
So Simonton falls back on his "intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance" formulation. But what about accidental discoveries? Simonton mentions the case of biologist Alexander Fleming, who, in 1928, "noticed quite by chance that a culture of Staphylococcus had been contaminated by a blue-green mold. Around the mold was a halo." Bingo: penicillin. But what if you had been in Fleming's lab that day and noticed the halo first? Would you be the genius? THAT'S STUPID.
NO. OF COURSE NOT. NO MORE THAN PRESTIGE ACCRUES TO THE WINNER OF THE NEW YORK STATE LOTTERY. THIS IS A DUMB EXAMPLE.
Recently, the endurance and hard work part of the achievement equation has gotten a lot of attention, and the role of raw talent and intelligence has faded a bit.
IN YOUR DREAMS. DON'T BE RIDDICK.
The main reason for this shift in emphasis is the work of Anders Ericsson, a friendly rival of Simonton's who teaches psychology at Florida State University. Gladwell featured Ericsson's work prominently in Outliers. (See the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008.)
Ericsson has become famous for the 10-year rule: the notion that it takes at least 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of dedicated practice for people to master most complex endeavors. Ericsson didn't invent the 10-year rule (it was suggested as early as 1899), but he has conducted many studies confirming it. Gladwell is a believer. "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good," he writes. "It's the thing you do that makes you good." AND SAYING THINGS LIKE THAT IS WHAT MAKES YOU AN IDIOT.
Simonton rather dismissively calls this the "drudge theory." He thinks the real story is more complicated: deliberate practice, he says, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something. In a 2002 study, Simonton showed that the average IQ of 64 eminent scientists was around 150, fully 50 points higher than the average IQ for the general population. And most of the variation in IQs (about 80%, according to Simonton) is explained by genetics. (See pictures of Bobby Fischer, chess prodigy.)
WELL THAT'S ABOUT THAT ISN'T IT.
Personality traits also matter. Simonton writes that geniuses tend to be "open to experience, introverted, hostile, driven, and ambitious." These traits too are inherited — but only partly. They're also shaped by environment. AND TYPICAL OF PEOPLE WHOSE ACTIONS AND WORK IS DEEPLY ADMIRED AND ASTONISHINGLY IMPORTANT. THEY BECOME DRIVEN AND AMBITIOUS BECAUSE THEIR WORK IS MAGNIFICENT.
So what does this mean for people who want to encourage genius?
IT MEANS GIVING UP.
Gladwell concludes his book by saying the 10,000-hour rule shows that kids just need a chance to show how hard they can work; we need "a society that provides opportunities for all," he says. Well, sure. But he dismisses the idea that kids need higher IQs to achieve success, and that's just wishful thinking. As I argued here, we need to do more to recognize and not alienate high-IQ kids. Too often, principals hold them back with age-mates rather than letting them skip grades.
GIVE ME A BREAK. THATS ALWAYS WELL INTENTIONED, AND PROBABLY HAS NO EFFECT ON OUTPUT.
Still, genius can be very hard to discern, BULLSHIT. THAT'S FOR LOSERS.
and not just among the young. Simonton tells the story of a woman who was able to get fewer than a dozen of her poems published during her brief life. Her hard work availed her little — but the raw power of her imagery and metaphor lives on. Her name? Emily Dickinson.
WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT PROVE. NOTHING AT ALL. THIS ARTICLE IS A PIECE OF SHIT.
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