Getting Closer
I know, it still looks pretty anemic, but I'm trying to repair the last site
to bring up a fully operational battle-blog (apologies to The Emperor).
Harper's has some pretty good stuff this month. The feature article
is by Art Spiegelman of
Maus fame, and reviews outrageous cartoon from the past 300 years.
The most interesting of them are the horrifically anti-Semitic cartoon that
regularly show up in the Middle East, many of them depicting the Holocaust as a
fraud in one way or another. Ben Metcalf has taken over Lewis Lapham's
editorial with On Simple Human Decency in which he discusses the history
(and lunacy) of "presidential threat" laws passed early in the last century, and
then proceeds to walk the line with statements like "Am I allowed to write that
I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States,
and kill him with my bare hands?" New Library of Congress subject headings
introduced last year include "Fear of death in literature", "Motion picture
theatre etiquette", and "Video Wrestling Games". There's a fascinating
excerpt from Sergeant Jonathan Trowern-Trend's Birding Babylon, in which
his bird sightings are interspersed with descriptions of battles in the Iraqi
War. A sidebar article quotes a portion of a lecture by Hassan Bolkhari,
cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry, wherein he explains how
Jerry of Tom and Jerry fame is the end result of a Jewish conspiracy to
link Jews to mice, and then make them seem clever and dominant. Kevin
Baker relates 75 years of the right-wing's program to ascribe all military
failures to enemies within (the media, the academics, the nattering nabobs), and
predicts we'll see it again with Iraq. An amazing article that follows
Stevie Wonder's troupe around during Super Bowl XL, but ultimately demonstrates
the monstrous scope of Super Bowl preparation and execution, which involves tens
of thousands of people and as many dollars. The Annotation section reports
graphically on Hugo Chávez's attempt to have
Venezuela's oil reserves quadrupled (based upon difficult-to-reach tar-oil),
thus displacing the House of Saud on OPEC — the interesting (or perhaps scary)
thing is that at these prices, the vast quantities of hard-to-extract oil in
Canada and Venezuela may yet make them the largest producers on earth. A
sad and hilarious article on the planeloads of American men who come to
interview and possibly wed Ukrainian brides-to-be. From Harper's Index:
Number of illegal Irish immigrants in the US: 25,000; Price for which
China will rent out Beijing's Great Hall of the People: $12,000;
Chances that an American says he or she uses the word "fuck": 2 in 3.