Monthly Archives: August 2009

Snark

Books,

Illustration from The Hunting of the Snark

For such a short book, David Denby’s Snark is awfully unfocused. Even the normally useless Amazon customer reviews noticed; given the number of Amazon customers willing to hand five star reviews to any book that didn’t make them physically ill, this book has a peculiarly sparse constellation. (Mind you, some reviews seem to be from the right-wingers who slap one-star reviews on any book whose author isn’t politically correct enough for them. “Why won’t Barack Obama apologize for this horrible book Denby has written?” writes one reviewer, who I hope is kidding.)

Denby can’t keep straight what he’s writing about. “Snark,” it is true, has no single definition. This is not a problem for writers who take care to define their terms. Denby could have written a book titled Woozle-Wozzle: Threat or Menace? and as long as he’d told us what a Woozle-Wozzle was, he’d be okay.

But Denby doesn’t know, and maybe doesn’t care about, the definition of snark. Continue reading Snark →

A New Standard in Calm

News and Politics

Shouty People

Comics aside, I can no longer pay attention to the health care “debate.” I’m too sad and too tired and it’s hard to pretend there’s an honest debate going on when one side comes to the table from a place of unhinged lunacy, total disconnection from the real world, or just plain depraved indifference.

I knew I’d had enough after a New York Times article about the “calmer, more reasoned voices” of Bob and Susan Collier. (Go. Read it. Then come back.) “The cameras may linger on those at the extremes,” pontificates the Times, “but it is the parade of respectful questioners, those expressing discomfiting fears and legitimate concerns, that may ultimately have more impact.”

Bob Collier drove an hour to tell his representative that a public health plan “may mean the end of our country as we know it.”

Continue reading A New Standard in Calm →

Comics for Health Care!

Comics, News and Politics, , ,

I’ve linked to these in blog comments elsewhere, but haven’t yet done so on my own blog.

First, Kevin Huizenga discovered Superman plugging universal health care in a 1952 issue of The Adventures of Bob Hope. (Isn’t it amazing that there was once a comic called The Adventures of Bob Hope? Today, Bob Hope would be a gritty, morally questionable comedian whose kid sidekick died violently at the hands of Dorothy Lamour, and he’d get killed off by an evil Bob Hope from an alternate universe and be replaced by Bing Crosby and then come back to life as a zombie.)

Second, here’s a pro-health-care Steve Canyon strip from… I can’t quite read the copyright… it looks like 1949. Steve Canyon was cold war propaganda and Milton Caniff wasn’t exactly a hippie. So it’s interesting that, in extolling the virtues of the Free World, Caniff is proudest of exactly the things modern conservatives decry as “socialism.”