Friday, July 25, 2003

Programming Note for Scott Shaw!

Tuesday night on Dog Eat Dog (NBC): People throwing fish at each other. Set your VCR.

(The reference is to the fact that Scott, in his wonderful Oddball Comics series, sometimes showcases "fish-in-the-face" covers. These are comic books where some editor or artist thought it would be really commercial to show someone on the cover being hit in the face with a fish. You'd be amazed how many of these there have been. Here's an example Scott posted on his page about a year ago.)

(While I've got you here: I should mention that if you go to Scott's site, you'll see that he's just completed a week featuring issues of Herbie, a wonderfully silly comic that is lovingly remembered by anyone who ever read an issue. I have cut down my visits to the parent website, Comic Book Resources, because of extremely-annoying pop-up ads and a couple of even-more-annoying folks on the message boards. But Scott's page is worth navigating through both kinds of obstacles.)

• Posted at 11:42 PM · LINK

The Return of Bill Bennett

William Bennett has made a lot of money lecturing us on his version of morality. It is, to me, a very inconsistent, self-serving one, condemning almost every sin or near-sin committed by the poor or non-white, and overlooking or rationalizing almost every sin or near-sin that helps rich white guys get richer. He has also lost a lot of that money placing sucker bets in Las Vegas. Reports put it at eight million, a figure Bennett denies. Since he won't specify the real amount, I'm guessing it's not a lot below eight million.

Anyway, Bennett is starting his Image Rehabilitation Tour this weekend on Tim Russert, and a transcript is up at NBC's press site. It's full of wonderful typos and homonyms and misunderstandings by the transcriber. Note that in the part I'm quoting below, "dissent" is replaced with "descent," which is a much more appropriate word in the context. In fact, read all of this brief excerpt and then I have a point to make...

TIM RUSSERT: The United States Supreme Court ruled that a Texas law against sodomy should be struck down. That sex between consenting adults of the same sex should not be illegal. Canada now says that gay couples should be married. Is gay marriage in the United States of America inevitable?

BILL BENNETT: Good question. I don't know if it's inevitable. This was quite a decision from the Supreme Court. I agreed with Justice Thomas in descent, he said, "I would not have enforced this Texas law." And this Texas law the constable came and arrested these two guys. I wouldn't arrest people for that. But that's a different question from whether you validate and bless what it is homosexuals are doing, their sexual activity and their intimacy by calling it marriage or something like marriage. And I would be opposed to that. Is it — is it coming? I don't know.

"I would not have enforced this Texas law?" Huh? Isn't this the same William Bennett who, during the impeachment hearings, couldn't utter a sentence without the words "rule of law" in it? I thought the Republican/conservative position was that if a law is on the books, it should either be enforced by the authorities or removed via due process. That was, I thought, one of the great fibs of that whole nastiness...the notion that the law is the law and that all alleged violations must be vigorously pursued. We all know that every prosecutor in the country routinely dismisses a large percentage of the cases he or she could haul into court, either because the evidence seems insufficient or because resources are limited and it makes sense to press the cases that most impact the public good. Until the recent Supreme Court decision pretty much buried them, there were laws in some states against even heterosexual oral sex between married partners. No District Attorney enforced them because no District Attorney wanted the public to drag him into the street and beat him to death.

What Bennett wanted in this case was to have it both ways: He wanted the law to condemn sodomy and homosexual relations. But he also knew that the more middle-of-the-road Americans have seen gays prosecuted and persecuted, the more they've moved towards the position that such persecution is wrong. The only way to keep anti-gay laws on the books, Bennett knew for years, was to not enforce "the rule of law," or at least to not enforce it too visibly. He's lost that battle but he's giving up. As you'll see if you read the interview, he's still trying to convince people that homosexuality can be regarded as a choice; that gays can and will turn straight if we just lecture them enough, pass enough laws and force the Bible on them. I don't think very many people who oppose gay rights really believe that...but they don't know what else to say.

• Posted at 11:22 PM · LINK

Recommended Viewing

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart remains the sharpest comedy show I've seen in years...and Mr. Stewart is a much better interviewer of folks in the news than just about anyone around. including all so-called professional newsfolks. The other day, he did a long conversation with Joseph Wilson, who is the diplomat who was dispatched to Africa to investigate reports that Iraq was purchasing yellowcake uranium with which it might nuke us. Wilson reported back that the story was not true but someone somewhere decided it was and kept it in some (not all) of the White House's briefs about why we needed to go to war. I don't know that anyone else has interviewed Mr. Wilson but I doubt they could have done a better job than Stewart did.

From what I can tell, this episode reruns twice during the day on Monday — once in the morning, once in the afternoon or early evening, both on Comedy Central. If and when the interview gets posted to the Comedy Central website, I'll alert you. But you might want to set the TiVo for it now...or better still, get a season pass to the smartest show on television.

• Posted at 6:33 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Two articles over on Slate analyze and parse the new Congressional report on how our intelligence system failed to anticipate the 9/11 tragedies. The report runs 900 pages (some of them, redacted) and since you're not going to read it, you might want to read Fred Kaplan and Timothy Noah. The bottom line seems to be that there were a few screw-ups in the past and that appallingly little has been done to improve the situation.

• Posted at 5:51 PM · LINK

What's It Costing Us?

This is the war in Iraq we're asking about. Here's the current dollar figure. And of course, there's also the little matter of Americans dying.

• Posted at 10:10 AM · LINK

Check It Out

Paul Dini's comely Christmas chorine, Jingle Belle, goes to the Comic-Con. Right here.

• Posted at 12:05 AM · LINK

Latest Locus

The current issue of Locus, the science fiction news magazine, is a special issue guest-edited by master illustrator Charles Vess. The topic is graphic novels, and there's an interview with Alan Moore, articles by Neil Gaiman, Richard Pini, Harlan Ellison and others, plus other fun stuff. Here's a link to a page that will tell you the full contents and if you navigate around, you can probably find a way to order a copy. I've been around fandom long enough to recall a time when science-fiction fans acted as if they were way up on the food chain compared to us funnybook fanciers.

Back then, Locus would rather have ceased publication than write about the comic book field, and now they've gone and done this very nice issue about graphic novels. How far we've come.

• Posted at 12:04 AM · LINK