Gerrymandering: A Rant

First off, foundationally, districts are reconfigured within a US state once a decade, after the most recent census. Doing it at any other time, for any other reason than "we now have better data on how many people live where," is inherently illegitimate.

Which, of course, is why Texas Republicans are doing it - they've never seen a naked power grab they didn't like. If it spreads, and lots of states do it as well, that will be yet another breakdown of norms, another signpost that the US is speed-running through the Collapsing-Democracy Playbook. So that is bad, obviously.

But there's a lot of talk essentially assuming gerrymandering is magic - that just drawing the boundaries some secret way ensures the people drawing them will win. And that's not the case. 

The other incorrect assumption is that gerrymandering creates "safer" districts: ones more ideologically committed to the governing party. That it tends to reinforce the echo-chamber effect, to lock in ideologically extreme candidates. Again, that's not true.

Gerrymandering - as we're discussing it right now, meaning an effort to maximize the number of districts in a state that are favorable to your party - tends to make districts less safe, on purpose, to make more districts that a particular party has a solid chance of winning.

The opposite strategy is to make districts where your party can't possibly lose, where the voters break for your party overwhelmingly. Democrats have tended, over the past few decades, to create that kind of district, at least in some cases - usually as "majority-minority." (And, yes, that will and has tended to dilute their overall statewide voting power - yet another example of how Dems will always bring a flower to a knife fight. Also, yes, there are other voting systems besides first-past-the-post, and it's really nice that you support them, but you do realize Texas is never, ever going to spring for approval voting, right?)

Especially in larger states, both strategies can be in play - a governing party can "pack" a few districts with their opponents, maybe also "pack" one or two on their side to protect specific incumbents, and then "crack" the rest of the map into districts that are mildly in their favor.

But remember that, no matter what you do in a gerrymander, there's still the same number of voters overall - what gerrymandering does is turn a state with (to make up numbers) twenty districts from this evenly balanced list:

District	Partisan Lean
1	R + 10
2	R + 10
3	R + 10
4	R + 10
5	R + 10
6	R + 10
7	R + 10
8	R + 10
9	R + 10
10	R + 10
11	D + 10
12	D + 10
13	D + 10
14	D + 10
15	D + 10
16	D + 10
17	D + 10
18	D + 10
19	D + 10
20	D + 10

to this list, where one party is dominant in more districts:

District	Partisan Lean
1	R + 10
2	R + 5
3	R + 5
4	R + 5
5	R + 5
6	R + 5
7	R + 5
8	R + 5
9	R + 5
10	R + 5
11	R + 5
12	R + 5
13	R + 5
14	D + 10
15	D + 10
16	D + 10
17	D + 10
18	D + 10
19	D + 10
20	D + 10

But note that the totals - my example uses partisan lean as the metric; in the real world it's actually the number of voters, and gets very data-wonkish very quickly with race/gender/propensity overlays - are the same in both cases. Gerrymandering does not invent voters, it moves them to be more efficient for the party in charge.

Gerrymandering is a bet - that you'll take a somewhat smaller chance of winning each of a larger number of districts, and that you can do so while keeping the partisan lean higher than the potential swing in any given election.

Because, in the state above, if "partisan lean" has a 10-point error bar, every district could potentially have been a toss-up in Scenario 1, and Scenario 2 would give the R team a chance in any given election to shoot themselves really badly in the foot.

But if the error bar is more like 3 or 4 points, a +5 district is pretty much optimal for your side. You'll win those nearly every time, and any higher lean in your direction is "wasted."

(Note: I am not a data scientist and this is not my area of expertise. I make no claims about what the typical error bar is, or the partisan lean of existing or proposed districts in any state. I do expect the experts know these things, and make their plans based on decent data and reasonable assumptions.)

The more aggressive you go in gerrymandering, the more likely you make it that any given election - possibly the very next one - will shift enough in the direction of your opponents that you will lose power.

This nuance tends to get forgotten in discussions of gerrymandering: that the more you push it, the higher the chances it will go wrong. Yes, we do have really powerful computers, robust data models, and all kinds of insights, but it all still relies on what a large number of people will do on a specific day in the future, so wave elections - and we've had a succession of wave elections for more than a decade now - can be enhanced by an aggressive gerrymander.

Now, Texas Republicans have other tools besides gerrymandering, of course - have we mentioned intimidation and voter suppression lately? - so I'm not trying to say it's sunshine and roses. They do intend to make it harder for groups they think will vote against them to get to the polls, and shifting districts is good cover to do that. (If the gerrymander goes through, expect polling places to tend to move toward red areas and mysteriously disappear or lose hours in blue areas.) And if those ICE raids sweep up citizens, or make citizens less willing to put their necks out, that's good for their side as well. It is, and I don't want to minimize this, a comprehensive "flood the zone with shit" plan, with multiple levels of bad actions.

All I wanted to point out is that gerrymandering, itself, is just one piece of that plan, and that basic arithmetic applies to gerrymandering. It doesn't break the laws of physics; it doesn't invent voters. And doing it really aggressively because one fairly stupid and narcissistic guy insists does not necessarily mean they will win all of those districts in the next election.

Sports Is Hell by Ben Passmore

Somewhere there is a Super Bowl, between the Birds and Big White. Those seem to be the actual team names, not nicknames - this is a world where everything is a little more obvious, more extreme.

This is also a world where the Super Bowl is apparently played at the home team's stadium, because we see both the stadium with the game and the fans pouring out of it to riot in the streets, as of course sports fans must do when their teams win or lose.

At the same time -- on the evening of the Super Bowl? in the same town? -- there is also a big BLM protest, where at least some participants are looking forward to violence and burning down as much of the city as possible.

(I should say, before I go much farther, that I'm the wrong audience for this book in several ways: I don't care that much about sports, and my political leanings are not that close to creator Ben Passmore's burn-everything-down stance.)

The game ends, apparently with a win for the Birds, whose fans, at least as we see them here, are mostly Black. But there was a flag on that final play, and a blackout immediately hits this city - it's not clear why, but here are a couple of pages of big BOOM!s all around the neighborhood, so I'm going to guess some combination of incompetency on the part of authorities and bloodthirstiness on the part of random revolutionaries. (Both of those things are always fair bets in Passmore's work.)

And of course there's a riot, which we see raging across this business/sports district. (The action of Sports Is Hell doesn't take place in residential areas, except at the beginning to set up characters.)

All of this is narrated, off and on, by two sports announcers, presumably the guys broadcasting the game and who then just segued into doing the same for the ensuing battles of more-or-less organized militias and other armed groups of murderous thugs who claim to be sports fans. They have a lot of death and destruction to talk through, in best play-by-play fashion. They do not explicitly call it a race war, but Passmore possibly would: an awful lot of those militias, maybe even all of them, are aligned by race.

We follow a bunch of different people, all of whom are horrible in one way or another: clueless white would-be-protestors, a Black protestor devoted to nonviolence (which in Passmore's world is the sign of an idiot), a couple of Black anarchists, and a more organized and better armed Black militia group. Many of them die horribly over the course of the book, as do dozens of others - from the narration, it's pretty clear at least hundreds and possible thousands or tens of thousands are getting killed, mostly by gunfire from these various militias, over the course of this night. 

I don't think Sports Is Hell is meant to be a nihilistic book, but that's what I took away from it: that people are horrible and evil, only one minor moment away from mass murder, every last one of them. I do think Passmore intended to connect the violence in the streets with the violence of a football game, but it didn't really click for me. The game happens almost entirely off-page; the story is about non-athletes, who mostly seem to want to kill each other. The sports feels arbitrary and unnecessary: these people would kill each other for less, or nothing.

So, yeah, maybe sports is hell. But in Passmore's comics, as far as I've seen, everything is hell, so I'm not quite clear on the distinction here.

Save It For Later by Nate Powell

The personal is political. It always was, and always will be. When someone's identity is a reason to suppress or attack them, from "will not replace us" to bathroom bills, it's never just personal. 

There's a meme I've seen a number of times, about what is political - that arguments about taxes and land development and budgets are, but arguments about whether someone should be allowed to live are not. I want to agree with that, but, in the real world, arguments about people's lives and existence are aligned with partisan politics. The people trying to de-humanize huge swaths of humanity know what they're doing, and aren't going to stop because the other side makes clever memes.

Nate Powell understands all of that. (Better than I do, I expect.) His 2021 book Save It For Later is explicitly about confronting the rising tide of fascism, authoritarianism, leader-principle, and white nationalism in the USA, placing those concerns in a parenting context: how do you talk to your children about fascists? How do you think about fascists to focus on what you can do, especially as one family in a deep-red state? And how do you survive when you're surrounded by horrible, mean, vindictive people? (Who may not actually be fascists themselves, but are perfectly happy in their smug self-satisfaction to sign up for every last fascist ideal.)

My children were much older at the 2016 election: eighteen and fifteen. I was lucky: I didn't need to explain that this was bad, that, as Powell put it, "the bad guy won." Powell seems to have two kids like I do, but they were much younger - I think the older one was five on that horrible night. So the parenting piece was much larger for him.

He'd also just come off a big non-fiction graphic novel series with Congressman John Lewis, explicitly about protest and fighting against white supremacy. It's called March: you may have heard of it. So this was important to Powell, and central to how he saw his life and work, in a way that it isn't for most Americans.

Save It For Later collects seven essays in comics form, all on that same cluster of topics, created during 2019 and 2020. I've seen at least one of them before - I think on The Nib - so it's possible they all appeared elsewhere first. But they clearly were designed to work together; they circle the same concerns and thoughts in a consistent way.

I've always loved Powell's work, since I first saw his magisterial fiction graphic novel Swallow Me Whole. He particularly has a knack for black-background pages, with hand-lettered white type and splashes of light color for vignettes of activity. His comics pages often seem to be on the verge of apocalypse, personal or societal - that darkness sweeping in and inundating the pages, his energetic lettering, especially on sound effects, the tone of concern and fear and distress.

This is a book for an immediate moment. I hope it will seem strident or ridiculous in five years. (I bet Powell would, too.) It probably won't, though: fascism doesn't go away that quickly or that easily, and the "will not replace us" crowd is loud and central and has captured most of one of America's major parties. What any one person can do during that moment is small and feels inadequate: vote, speak up, model good behavior, deflect as much anger from more vulnerable people as you can. And, most of all, think about those vulnerable people first: who are the fascists trying to hurt? How can you help to foil or counter or even just slow down those efforts?

Because the fascists are always out there. And they're always focused on hurting people.

Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists edited by Ted Rall

Any book with "new" in the title will age really badly: it's just inherent. If what it's trying to do is present something fresh and immediate, that will just be less compelling fifteen years later. No one can do anything about that effect.

So it's a pretty quixotic thing to read Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists in 2021, since it's a book from 2006 about a world that was fast-moving at that point and has only sped up since then. Attitude 3 was the last of the series -- the first Attitude profiled new political cartoonists and the second one new "alternative" cartoonists" (primarily those of the weekly newspapers that flourished in the '90s, I think), and all of them were edited by Ted Rall, at a moment in his career when he seemed to be working more as a connector than he looks to be doing now.

(Parenthetically, Rall - as the sourest, most uncompromising and most ideologically leftist cartoonist in the US - now looks like an odd person to do something this broad and inclusive, but, again, fifteen years can change people and worlds and industries. Early-Aughts Rall is not the same person he is today; none of us are.)

So Attitude 3 interviews and profiles twenty-one relatively prominent webcartoonists of the time, mostly focusing on political/personal cartoons - things closer to the editorial end of the world, or gag-a-day in some cases, rather than the kind of webcomics that are basically long serialized stories formatted as comic-book pages presented in electronic form. Some of them will be familiar, some of them will be lost to the mists of time. (Well, they were for me; you might be intimately familiar with every single one of these and know exactly what they've all done in the fifteen years since. If so, you are creepy and I am unobtrusively moving away from you.)

Cartoonists I recognize/follow/enjoy include Richard Stevens of Diesel Sweeties, Matt Bors (more recently of The Nib), Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl, Nicholas Gurewitch of Perry Bible Fellowship, and Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. A couple of others - Mark Fiore in particular - are names I've seen since then. But the majority of the book was made up of cartoons and creators I'd never seen before and hadn't heard of: my guess is that some of them are still going, in their own corners of the Internet, and some have moved on to other art-adjacent things, and most have moved on to work that's nothing like making pictures on the WWW.

Each cartoonist has five or six pages, including a decent selection of cartoons in black-and-white - this is an issue for some, since most were in color on the 'net, for obvious reasons - and the interview with Rall. It's all professional and well-done and informative, but it does feel like a moment frozen in amber this many years later.

I think we're at the wrong time to look at a book like this again. One the one hand, it's too long for most of these people to still be doing the same work, though a few are. On the other, they were all very young then (mostly mid-twenties) and so now are mostly in the middle of their careers - so it's too early for this to be useful as parallax to evaluate anything like their whole oeuvre.

Still, it's a moderately heroic book, trying to gather a vast, massively-distributed world and get it between two covers for posterity. It is a serious accomplishment, and it will be there for that re-evaluation in another thirty years or so, if any of us are there to look at it again.

American Nomad by Steve Erickson

In a better world, there would be more books like American Nomad -- it's the "sequel" to Leap Year, with novelist Steve Erickson following the 1996 US presidential race in a kaleidoscopic fashion once again. If he'd done that every eight years since (it would be horrible to have to experience every Presidential election that way), we'd have books for 2004 and 2012 and he'd be working on one for this year.

Of course, in an even better world, the US wouldn't be so screwed up that we'd need books like Erickson's to explicate it, but I'm wishing for things in the realm of possibility here.

American Nomad is deeply out of print and mostly forgotten, maybe even more so than Leap Year. I expect only fans of Erickson's novels even know it exists, or have ever read it. It never had a paperback edition. The cover I'm showing here is, as far as I know, the only one it ever had: deeply '90s in all of the good and bad ways.

And that's too bad, because in his visionary way, Erickson saw more clearly what America was, and all the ways it was tearing itself into pieces, almost twenty-five years ago, than most of us can on any given day.

Look, I posted the opening sentences here as a "Quote of the Week" last year -- go read that and come right back.

See what I mean? That's not 2016 -- it was 1996. It was true since 1980, but it took someone like Erickson to make it so clear.

American Nomad is not a book of reportage: one strand of it is Erickson's flameout as Rolling Stone's reporter on the race, hired to provide a unique novelistic take and then immediately subject to publisher Jann Wenner's mercurial demands, most of which were to be more like a reporter. (There's also a cutting quote, from some other reporter, to the effect that Wenner's not sure if he wants to publish great journalism or get invited to the White House after the election.) And that's probably the most factual strand of the book.

Erickson was always a visionary writer rather than a plotty one -- things happen in his book, and are always inevitable in their bizarre glory, but they happen due to buried rules of deeply unknowable universes and secret underground connections and the pure force of human desire. In his novels, they happen to characters that he invents and that live lives separate from their author. In Leap Year, they happened largely to a fictionalized, out-of-time version of Sally Hemings, who was Erickson's conscience or guide or muse.

American Nomad has only Erickson: it's a book taking place in his head, as he travels across America covering the race, or wonders what to do after being fired from covering the race, or half-assedly covering the race anyway without press credentials, or just blasting out full-force Ericksonisms about the way the world really is.

And, like Leap Year, 1996 turned out to be much less of a race than anyone expected, or any of the political reporters Erickson ran with wanted: it was another snoozer, the ending never in doubt. So what Erickson had for American Nomad was the contents of his own head: luckily, those were brilliant.

If you want to understand the buried politics of America, you could do far worse than to read Leap Year and American Nomad. You will likely disagree with lots of Erickson's thoughts -- I did, and I wouldn't be surprised if he did, too, now or even at the time. But he gets the apocalyptic fervor of American politics, the burn-the-whole-damn-thing-down energy from both ends of the spectrum, better than anyone more factual, and brings that to imaginative life on every page.

Book-A-Day 2018 #320: Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me by Peter Bagge

In the first decade of this century, Peter Bagge did a lot of cartooning for Reason magazine. (He might still do so; I don't know. As far as I know this book doesn't have a sequel, so I vaguely guess that he moved on.) It was all more-or-less topical stuff, since Reason was a topical magazine with a Libertarian slant, and eventually there was enough of it to make a book.

This is that book: Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me, collected those Reason strips (single-pagers and longer pieces) in 2009, organized into a number of thematic chapters about the general kind of thing that Bagge is complaining about there.

Now, don't get me wrong: Bagge may be a libertarian, but he's not a crank. Well, not fully. My guess is that he's lived in liberal-wonderland Seattle for so long that he had to react to that somehow, and standard conservatism came with things like god, guns, and war-mongering that he never was interested in. And Libertarianism is one of those beautiful political philosophies, like Communism, that devotees can both argue the permutations of endlessly and claim that it's never been tried in practice, so it will obviously be perfect if we would only try it.

Bagge is also not always clear about exactly what he does believe in. He's clearly annoyed by the "libertarians don't like roads" ideas, but...libertarians often do say that all activity now run by the government (fire and police protection, ensuring safe food and water, the military, social programs, and, yes, roads and infrastructure) should instead be done only by private industry. Maybe Bagge isn't that kind of libertarian, but it's a little like saying you're a Communist and then complaining when people bring up Karl Marx.

Anyway, Bagge hated the Gulf War, bans on contraception (though he was also skeeved out by reporting on swingers), modern art, Christian rock, malls, the kind of people who he finds in casinos (though, as a libertarian, he's fine with gambling being legal), Seattle's monorail project, public funding for sports stadiums, Amtrak, the war on drugs, the hard-core homeless (he calls them "bums"), and, of course, politicians, particularly the liberal ones running for President in 2008.

In general, he's against governments spending money on things, or any taxes he has to pay, or anything else that might interrupt his life or make him think about things he doesn't care about. Libertarianism tends to be a philosophy of selfishness at the best of times, but Bagge really leans into it.

He generally avoids grumpy-old-man mode in the stories here, partly because he's of the my-opinions-are-so-nuanced-it-will-take-several-pages-of-text-heavy-panels-to-explicate-them and partially because he still has a lurking tropism to want to let people kick out the jams and go crazy. (Potential topic for discussion: young punks turn into old libertarians.)

This book is very topical, and all of these topics have moved on from where they were in 2001-2008. So reading it today can be quaint -- oh, how precious that he thought that worrying about healthcare was absurd! And some of those politicians were not always completely truthful when they carefully answered reporter's questions! Oh, shock, let us all clutch our pearls.

The world has gotten vastly more stupid since this book came out. You can't blame Bagge (or libertarians) for the stupidity, though it is more-or-less his end of the political spectrum that has blown up everything in American society for no good reason and with no actual solutions.

But at least we can keep complaining about the government spending money on people we don't like!

Stupid Arguments

I'm in the middle of writing about Peter Bagge's 2009 book Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me, and I have to hive off this thought, because it is completely separate from a general view of the book. And this is not meant as an insult to Bagge, since I've seen versions of this argument many places.

But it is a deeply stupid argument.

Anyway, at the top of page 16, Bagge writes:

My folks wisely refused to buy me a gun of my own, and I can't believe anyone would leave a real gun within a child's reach. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Total bullshit from the ground up. Let me demonstrate.

Murder:
I've never killed anybody, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Drunk Driving:
I've never killed anyone while driving drunk, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Rape:
I've never forced anybody into sex, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Toxic Waste:
I've never released industrial waste into a source of drinking water, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Animal Cruelty:
I've never tortured an animal, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Bribery:
I've never killed accepted money from Russian oligarchs to do their bidding after I became President, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

This argument can be used for literally any human activity, and it is an argument that all law is useless. No one who makes this argument actually believes that; they just want to dismiss the possibility of controlling a facet of human activity they want to remain uncontrolled for other reasons.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, and utterly transparent. Do not make this argument; do not allow others to make it in your presence. It is an argument for anarchy.

In fact, if you're really ballsy, punch people in the face when they try to lay this one on you and then say "How can you regulate such stupidity? Answer: you can't."

And then go to jail for battery because, surprise!, we do regulate all of that shit.

Book-A-Day 2018 #285: High Society by Dave Sim

I don't have an accurate record of when Dave Sim first said Cerebus would run for 300 issues. But my guess is that his plans became real during this storyline.

The first volume of Cerebus, which I covered last month, saw Sim moving rapidly from an amusing Thomas/Smith Conan parody with an oddly funny-animal main character to something more detailed and particular, and those twenty-five issues moved from standalone stories to trilogies and ongoing continuous plotlines.

No one expected Sim would then embark on a new story that would be as long as all of Cerebus to date. My guess is that not even Sim knew, when he was writing and drawing issue #26, "High Society," that that would be the title for a much longer story. Somewhere in those first few High Society issues, though, it clicked: he wasn't just making a somewhat longer story: his narrative would stick around the city-state of Iest for more than two years of serial comics, over five hundred pages, and more political machinations than anyone had ever seen on the comics page.

So it became High Society. And a storyline many times longer than the previous ones posed a problem to Sim in the mid-80s. He was already a pioneer in reprinting his comics in permanent book editions, with the Swords of Cerebus series. But the sixth volume of that was already longer than the previous ones, reprinting five issues instead of four. Swords of Cerebus Seven would either be five times as long as the previous book or would break in the middle of the story.

Obviously it didn't. Instead, Sim invented the "phone book" format -- one little-used by other creators since, mostly because very few comics-makers have series with multiple five-hundred-page long plotlines to begin with. (He also annoyed the comics distribution network by going entirely direct-to-consumer for the High Society first printing, an innovation that made him money immediately but caused hassles for a while afterward.)

We tend to forget all of the business things Sim pioneered in independent comics, but there's no Image without Sim, without that model of doing your comics your way, and then collecting them permanently. And this is the era when Sim was still exciting and vital and fizzy and Zeitgest-y, telling his own story and making sarcastic comments on the current comics scene at the same time.

High Society is probably the single highest point of Cerebus: a graphic novel that can stand alone and that a new reader can come into cold. Cerebus is this guy arriving in a new city, and then stuff happens to him: you don't need to know more than that, and the first page tells you that much.

"Stuff happens" gets very baroque very quickly: Cerebus is caught up in other people's schemes, as had been more and more central as the comic Cerebus went on the early '80s, and the ultimate mover of those schemes was Sim's brilliant re-imagining of Groucho Marx as Lord Julius, ruler of Palnu. [1]

High Society is a story about money and power, and particularly the power of money. Palnu is the only fiscally sound city-state in the entire Feldwar valley; every other country is running massive deficits and getting further and further in debt to Julius. Cerebus is the perfect counterweight to Palnu's soft power, since he's instinctively a creature of hard power: he knows armies and mercenaries and war tactics deeply, and his first instinct in any situation is to find and army and conquer something.

(This is not a good impulse in a modern world, obviously. But that raises the question of how modern Cerebus's world is. Is it modern enough that wars of conquest primarily smash economic activity and leave everyone poorer, or is it still medieval enough that conquest can be lasting and profitable?)

So Cerebus is first the Ranking Diplomatic Representative of Palnu to Iest, named as such without his knowledge. And then there's a confusing plot where he's running to keep that title, even though it's pretty obviously a role that is going to always be in the direct remit of the ruler of the sending country. (How could it be otherwise?)

But that campaign ends up being the warm-up for the real one: Cerebus runs for Prime Minister of Iest, a job that has first slowly and then suddenly transformed from being a minor adjunct to a theocracy to being the center of secular power in the city-state. And that "suddenly" is because of Cerebus personally, in the sideways complicated manner common to Cerebus plots.

Like the best Cerebus plots, High Society is a one-damn-thing-after-another story. Cerebus is always his own worst enemy; he's never satisfied with what he has and is the epitome of the guy who hits on sixteen every damn time. And Sim was notably never on Cerebus's side, which is rare for a creator so closely identified with a single character. Cerebus is a horrible person in a whole host of ways, and was like that right from the beginning: Sim made him that way, and kept putting him in plots that exploited his flaws and worst tendencies. For about the first half of his adventures, Cerebus is the greatest anti-hero in comics.

Alongside all of the politics and plotting is Sim's characteristic humor: he was the most consistently funny comics humorist of the early '80s, and this volume has a string of his greatest hits. Sure, a lot of that humor was odd adaptations of other people's characters -- every funny character in Cerebus is based on a comedian or outside source -- but Sim turned it all into comics, made it all work in his specific invented world, and gave all of those characters new, setting-appropriate jokes to tell. It's hugely idiosyncratic, but it works amazingly well.

If you've never read Cerebus, and you're willing to give Dave Sim one shot, this is the shot to take. Some parts of it are more meaningful, or funnier, if you've read the stories in the first collection, but I don't think anything will be incomprehensible or particularly obscure. This is a great story about a grumpy, self-destructive guy who falls into politics in the worst way, in a vaguely late-medieval world where parts are rapidly modernizing, and has a masterful mix of humor and seriousness. If any of that sounds appealing, give it a try.


[1] Julius would make an interesting contrast to Terry Pratchett's Patrician: both rule completely and capriciously, and both are shown to be master manipulators who always come out on top. But the Patrician works by extreme clarity and veiled threats, while Julius is his world's master obfuscator and equivocator and either is the most Machiavellian planner of all time or just extremely good at thinking on his feet.

Book-A-Day 2018 #39: Sh*t My President Says by Shannon Wheeler

Sh*t My President Says has an uncredited co-author, but I'm going to try not to mention his name at all here. (It's probably visible on the book jacket anyway, in case the title didn't clue you in.)

Shannon Wheeler has taken a number of Tweets from a very prominent celebrity author -- one very fond of using that platform to insult others and declare himself such superlatives as "a very stable genius" -- and has illustrated them, puckishly or directly, to show what the author might have meant, or what he's implying. There's generally one Tweet to a page, with only an occasional string -- this author is not known for sustained, careful thought -- accompanied by Wheeler's drawing.

It's to Wheeler's credit that Sh*t My President Says isn't as soul-destroying and horrible as just reading the man's words directly: it proves that, sometimes, context really can make things that little bit better. Oh, they're still badly-informed, wrong-headed, self-aggrandizing and regularly disconnected from consensus reality -- nothing can change that. But Wheeler finds ways to make those flaws funny, as if Our Author is just some grumpy old grampa, hanging an onion on his belt and yelling at clouds.

Wheeler's buried lesson is that the old adage is exactly backwards: the universe starts with farce (like Shit My Dad Says) and then repeats as tragedy. Because this is nothing else. But a tragedy in real life can't be avoided -- so we might as well laugh at it, while we still can.

This book exists because this person is saying shit. Over and over and over again. Vile, factually-wrong shit that shows what a horrible human being he is. The very least we can do is be honest about that shit. Wheeler does us the service of that honesty, and wraps it in a little funny bow, to make some of that shit slightly less horrible.

I wish this book wasn't necessary. But it was, because shitty people decided they really wanted a massively shitty leader. Perhaps they will choke on that shit and die. Perhaps they will realize the error of their ways and turn from shittiness. Perhaps the rest of us will find a way to encapsulate their shittiness, like some kind of metaphorical septic tank, so it doesn't spew over the rest of the neighborhood. Any of those would be fine -- the shitty people can decide which they want. But we can't live with this shit forever.

(I note that Wheeler, unlike his model, is reticent to actually use the word "shit" in his title. If that gets this book shown and sold in more places, that's a reasonable trade-off. You don't need to say the word to recognize the stench.)

How The Hell Did This Happen? by P.J. O'Rourke

You goddamn asshole, P.J. O'Rourke. You, of all people, have the unmitigated gall to title a book How The Hell Did This Happen? and then collect two hundred pages of your writings showing how it happened?

You did it, you fuckhead. You and a hundred other Republican pundits and a thousand Republican elected officials. You've systematically destroyed the ability of government to function, denigrated the character and skills of everyone who actually tried to make government function, and aggrandized an endless series of ever-more-reactionary lunatic slimeballs.

And now you're surprised that the greatest lunatic slimeball has succeeded, after you've been laying the ground for him for three decades? That dog won't hunt, Pat. You own this. This shitstorm has your fingerprints all over it, and trying to slither out by pretending you're a libertarian asshole, so you want to burn down the parts of the government that even the Republicans intend to keep...well, that's no excuse. You're standing there with a book of matches, shrugging your shoulders while the Republic burns? Fuck you.

O'Rourke's books have been getting lazier and more phoned-in for this entire century, if not longer, and How The Hell is solidly in that tradition: it's a fix-up of the political articles he wrote during the nearly two years of the 2016 campaign, edited a bit because the guy from O'Rourke's party won, and that turned out to be the worst possible outcome. (Oops!)

This allows him to edit out any predictions or ideas that turned out to be wrong, but he still engages in endless reams of partisan political bullshit. Just the most egregious example: Bernie Sanders is not a "socialist," and the O'Rourke of 1990 would have known that. I no longer trust that the contemporary one does; he's been drinking too much Kool-Aid for too long. And it's not like the Sanders platform wasn't built on rainbows and unicorn farts to begin with: there was plenty there for a self-professed libertarian to criticize if he wasn't lazily wasting all his time making second-coming-of-Stalin jokes.

Enough. How the Hell Did This Happen? is self-answering, for anyone even vaguely self-aware. He did it. He might even know he did it, on some level. But fuck if the prick will admit it.

If you're #NeverTrump and still a Republican -- which is harder and harder to do for anyone who can and does read, these days -- this book may validate your suffering. But it's really designed for the old white men like P.J.: the kind of rich assholes who are libertarian because that means lower taxes for them and they can pretend that slashing billions of dollars that help people less fortunate than them won't have any effect at all. The willfully blind, in short.

O'Rourke, you and your people did this. And you and your people are the only ones who can fix it right now. There is a mechanism to get rid of that turd in the punchbowl, an entirely Constitutional one, and it's well within the purview of your elected buddies. Don't come back until you've developed enough of a spine to admit your guilt and a willingness to call for the obvious solution.

Belated Notes on the Milo Yiannopoulos Boycott

This has probably all already been said elsewhere. But it's been annoying me for several days now, so here goes...

Noted right-wing asshole [1] Milo Yiannopoulos has signed a book deal with the Simon & Schuster imprint Threshold Editions, for a reported $250,000. The book will be called Dangerous, and it will go on sale in March. Yiannopoulos previously was most famous for being banned from Twitter for harassing actress Leslie Jones and for proving that a gay man can indeed be homophobic, but he's still young: he has many years of assholishness ahead of him and will likely top them.

Many people who are not right-wing assholes are deeply unhappy with this, and right-wing assholes are ecstatic. (And, like everything else in this world, the vast majority doesn't really care.) A collection of non-assholes have called for a boycott of Simon & Schuster in retaliation.

First Point: I don't recall any similar boycotts of the publishers of books by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, who actually lied this country into war and arguably committed war crimes along the way. Perhaps being an asshole on the Internet is just worse behavior than that?

Slightly less snarkily, where have you people been? This is what the right-wing imprints do -- they put out quick fatuous books by currently popular right-wing assholes (Sarah Palin, that fake plumber guy) with deliberately incendiary titles and themes to grab the money of angry old white men (of various ages, races, and genders). I find it hard to believe that Yiannopoulos is clearly worse than the dreck that has been pouring out of that sector of publishing for the last couple of decades.

Second Point: You know that S&S is just a mid-rank link in the corporate chain, right? The actual decision-maker for the Yiannopoulos book was presumably Louise Burke, the publisher of the group of imprints that Threshold is part of. If you want to target the actual people connected to this book, boycott Gallery and Pocket as well as S&S mass-market paperbacks. The rest of S&S is run by other people who weren't part of this decision. (Anyone thinking about joining this boycott isn't going to buy any Threshold books in the first place, of course.)

Alternatively, if you want to punish the actual larger company, that isn't S&S. S&S is just a division of the CBS Corporation. So your boycott should include Showtime, The CW, Stephen Colbert, 60 Minutes, and so on.

But Andy! you say, those things aren't books! I want to boycott books!

Well, then head your time-machine back to 1969, because big publishers these days are firmly ensconced in large global media companies as part of a deliberate multi-media strategy. Books are one revenue stream of many, as part of a synergy strategy for continued incremental growth in major markets, among other bullshit buzz terms. They are not a separate thing from other media.

So: your choices are:

• boycott books from Threshold, Gallery, Pocket, and S&S mass-market
• boycott the entirety of CBS
• whine online but not get around to doing anything
• be an idiot and boycott some slightly larger piece of a big media company

Seriously, this is like boycotting ESPN but not ESPN 2, because you want to keep watching soccer. Or boycotting PTI but nothing else because you want to watch the playoffs.

And perhaps...just maybe...you might want to find some kind of positive message to rally behind, and not just "fuck everyone associated with this asshole." Because the world is full of assholes, and the next four years are going to bring that home over and over. You're quickly going to run out of ability to boycott if you start out like this.



[1] Not exactly his job description, but pretty much what he does for a living: he's an asshole to various people (mostly minorities of one kind or another) in public for the entertainment of others. He's also an instigating asshole: his thing is inciting virtual hate mobs.

A Song for Millennials

On the way in to work this morning, I realized this song is very appropriate -- both in my country and the UK, sadly -- for the generation seeing their parents turn to xenophobia, racism, and fear-mongering. (Me? I'm the generation in between. Gen X has never been large enough to be more than a media blip; we're the pause between the boom and echo. My parents are late war-babies and my kids are probably whatever we'll call the bunch that comes after millennials.)

The video itself goes in a different direction, but the lyrics are very appropriate as "leaders" in both countries try to figure out how to actually deliver the frightening things they've promised:

There Is Another Ted

Across this fine nation, millions are despondent -- they desperately wanted a president named "Ted," and he's left the race.

But there is another Ted running for president in 2016. A Ted of the Internet, of '80s nostalgia, of staring out the window and trying to remember what job he has, of all of the fallibility and looniness available.

A better Ted. A nicer Ted. A Ted we can all get behind and ask, "what was the deal with Jem and the Holograms, anyway?"

All he needs now is your vote. 
 



































(I was trying to grab just one of these, but apparently the whole thing is one image.)

A Brief Descent into Politics

I love stuff that's data-driven, and that's (one of the things) what fascinates me about this:

The more slave-intensive a southern county was 150 years ago, the more conservative and Republican its contemporary white residents. The authors tested their findings against every plausible control factor—for instance, whether the results could be explained simply by population density—but the correlation held. Higher levels of slave ownership in 1860 made white Southerners more opposed to affirmative action, score higher on the anti-black-affect scale, and more hostile to Democrats.

From Jonathan Chait's article in the current New Yorker New York magazine about the tangled web of race and Obama and Republican attitudes to both of them. There's much more to it than this quote; it's pretty even-handed, I think.

Edit: Oops on the magazine name; thanks to Anon. for correcting me.

A Cheery Thought for a Sunday Afternoon

According to this here chart, the USA is already more than halfway down the slope to oligarchy, likely in the banana republic model.

Good thing most of our elected idiots don't believe in numbers!

A Fiendish Plan

If you wanted to implement a single-payer health care plan in the largest economy in the world, how would you do it? If you try to directly mandate it by law, the opposition party will stonewall and block it, as they do every one of your plans.

So what you do is: you take their plan, and implement it in a way that looks plausible. But, along the way, you let them sabotage it, so it won't work well -- mostly for the people who vote for them, which those voters probably won't notice, but your voters will. And you let them fulminate about how horrible your plan (which used to be their plan) is, and how they're going to replace it with something better, as soon as they can figure out what that is.

Let them stew for several years, as they flounder around looking for an alternative. They won't find one on their side of the political divide: you already did their best plan. So, eventually, they'll find a way to claim that single-payer is "efficient" and the "fiscally responsible" thing to do, and start demanding that.

You then act like you're trying to block them, but eventually you're "forced" to give in. And they triumphantly create the thing you wanted in the first place, and claim a huge victory over the now-tainted plan that has your name on it. You lose the name in the history books, but you win by getting what you really wanted all along.


Obama is not this sneaky -- probably no one in the world is this sneaky -- but I find it amusing.

Sad But True

"There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power."
 -- Josh Barro at Business Insider (that noted lefty rag)

And I say this as a guy who is still a registered Republican -- even though I pulled the lever for the Democrat in NJ's special Senate election last night and will probably pull levers for more D's in a couple of weeks. I want to vote for R's, but they need to be non-crazy to make that happen.

The scattered remnants of the Bush-era GOP establishment are discredited and completely unable to run on their appalling records. And the Tea Party is frankly an astrotruf campaign to destroy as much of the federal government as possible in pursuit of a Gilded Age-style laissez-faire hellhole for anyone who isn't a billionaire. And there doesn't seem to be anything else in the GOP than those two horrible poles.

 Some of them are stupid. Some of them are incompetent. (Many are both, particularly when it comes to basic math and science.) A great many of them seem to be either active liars or completely untethered from consensus reality.

It's a sad day when the best centrist Republican in the country is our Democratic president.

Identities

I'm not sure if this makes sense, but it's been bubbling up in my head, so let me try to put it into words. (And I actually started this on Wednesday, before the latest furor about Manning, if that matters. It was sparked by something entirely separate, a dismissive little circle-jerk of people complimenting each other on their correct attitudes about "yellowface" and similar things.)

If you're relatively modern and thoughtful about such things (which might require being relatively young, or relatively to the left side of the political spectrum), you generally believe that gender is not defined by birth -- that there are trans people, and intersex people, and various other permutations. That doesn't mean that a person can choose a gender, but instead a belief that gender is somewhat socially defined and to a large extent a matter of presentation. People thus present themselves as close to how they see themselves as they can, or as close as their society allows them. That may entail surgery, or clothing choices, or anything in between.

And so it's generally rude (at best) to insist that a transman is "really" a woman, or vice versa -- that person is the one to define that label, not any third party.

(And I broadly agree with that; it's not always that simple in real life, but treating someone as the kind of person they want to be and are trying to be is usually good manners.)

But people who believe that also seem to believe that race -- which is vastly less biologically defined than gender is, to the point of being entirely socially constructed, from the ground up -- is immutable, and "passing" as another race is one of the worst things an actor (for example) can do.

So there seems to be a weird mental disconnect -- a white man, for example, is much more "white" than he is "man," even though that's the precise opposite of the biological realities. I'd get it if the racial component were clearly political -- rooted in wanting some kind of authenticity, and demanding that -- but it seems to be reflexive, like a prejudice or the reaction to touching a hot stove.

My question is: if it's fine for a person of one gender (by birth or upbringing) to present or play or act as another gender, why is it wrong for the precisely parallel act when it comes to race?

Quote of the Week: Edjumicated

So far my interactions at the [Tax Day 2010 Tea Party] rally were only reinforcing my private theory -- I suppose you might call it a prejudice -- that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in the their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It's the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also accounts for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized -- Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just dig further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goods and ammo.

 - Tim Kreider, "When They're Not Assholes," p.63 in We Learn Nothing