The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by rm:

On Ronnie and his hearing aid: There's a story of him not recognizing his own son at a school graduation, where parents went down a line shaking the graduates' hands.

This story makes more sense when you read that he was half-blind and mostly deaf, and refused to use glasses or hearing aids much of the time. Mr. Magoo was the president.

This also brings up the problem of blaming particular administrations on the particular craziness of Nixon, Reagan, Cheney, and Bush. If it were only the dark insanity of the leader, you wouldn't see what and who we see coming back again and again like political zombies. They would have changed course with each new leader.

Avram, Nick resorted to some illegitimate rhetorical moves. He violated the principle of charity, which in rhetoric means that you take your opponent seriously.

He posed a challenge rather than asking for clarification. He set himself up as the judge. He shot down responses instead of responding thoughtfully. He berated others for not meeting his standards. He moved the goalposts. He began to sound self-righteous. He was more than brusque, he was dismissive and insulting. He failed to consider any charitable reading of responses he got. He spoke of someone's mama.

BEFORE he set up that challenge, I though he said a number of things I could agree with, and some things I could think about while disagreeing. He seemed respectful. Something changed.

Clicking on his blog, I don't see anything objectionable. But he seems to have gotten caught up in the desire to win, to be right, instead of to converse. Oh, well.

. . . has been ill done . . .

Abi, I must join the chorus of reassurance. As a card-carrying, credentialed, tenured Piled-Higher-and-Deeper in the field, I am qualified to assure you that the bully's arguments abused logic as well as audience. Not only did you not invite or deserve the tone, you were also right on the substance. Whoever said he was "moving goalposts" was right on the money.

The only New Yorker stories I remember are one about ten years ago by Edwidge Danticat, which I remember because it was good (she is always worthwhile), but especially because it was good in ways that aren't easily stereotyped as a New Yorker story, and one very recently that was mentioned on Making Light, the one about the changeling who dies in the hospital, and his uncomprehending fairy parents. Because it was just like what I'd read in SFF contexts. Surely that author would acknowledge the story was Genre.

I feel guilty for #29 because it follows my #25, which totally reads like I was going after her on looks. That's not what I wanted to say, as I explained in #48; however, I know enough about the intentional fallacy to know I can't protest if someone acts on the obvious reading of what I wrote.

And, now I have a new vocabulary word from #29, thanks to the Urban Dictionary. What is this, Unfogged?

Yikes, if we are being read From The Outside, I want to make it clear I did not intend the double-entendre about Jenna, above. I'd like the world to knock if off with the jokes about presidential kids, and am sorry I started one.

What I am is appalled, horrified, disgusted with the exec producer's stupid rationalization. What does he mean by this jargon that a performance "pops"? -- I guess, we all sit around and agree we are going to like something with no good reason, so we can rationalize a transparently corrupt hire that we've been ordered to make.

Years ago, I had a friend who got his start producing local TV news. He said he threw up every night in disgust at himself. It seems to me that those who thrive in that moral atmosphere go on to produce "Today" and its ilk.

I don't know if we can have a democracy with this media.

Oh, sorry . . . here they are.

Chris, it's really helpful to be reminded of that dynamic. I'll try to avoid sending that unintentional message.

And I just remembered to say, The Car is awesome. Period.

(But periods are followed by other sentences.) In my memory -- no telling if it's in the movie -- they kill the demonic car by collapsing a cliff on it . . . ?

And as it dies, it takes the form of several mythological monsters . . . ?

And if my memory is at all accurate, couldn't some analytical terms like mythology, archetype, allusion, and so on be, like, not only helpful but pleasurable to discuss . . . ?

(Favorite IMDB discussion post: "How did they come up with the title?")

Would you like them on the beach?
Would you like them with a peach?
Can you apply them to The Car?
Try them, try them, here they are!

I'm sure the executive producer, and whoever else hires, were extremely skeptical, and all like, "why is an elementary school teacher with 2 years' experience or whatever qualified to be a national reporter, and we are definitely not going to hire her, this is a meritocracy" until, of course, she demonstrated her superhuman reportorial competence, which is evidenced by how she "sort of popped" as a screen presence. I'm sure she popped.

When a trojan virus takes over Lisa Spangenburg's computer, and it floods the internet with meretricious emails promising to share an ill-gotten fortune, the email sender will be "Lisa Spamgenburg."

Fragano @48 -- you mean Don Quixote, right? Just checking.

I had to skip ahead at around #50, sorry. . . . On review, I don't think I could keep up with the kink/top/bottom metaphor . . . rewind a bit?

But I had to say:

I am an academic, and most of the academics I know read everything, and enjoy it too.

I am an English teacher, and most of us know better than to tell anyone to stop liking things. We have a harder time refraining from trying to convince people they should like certain great (. . . really, try it! Would you like it at the beach? Would you like it with a peach?) old books.

There are, of course, some English teachers who are literary snobs and bullies, and they are ruining our collective reputation, dash it all.

There are critics and critics . . . serious criticism can be found in magazines, newspapers, blogs, fanzines, etc., and another, very different kind of criticism can be found in academic journals, which is seldom about "my" enjoyment (though it might be about "the reader's" experience) and is instead focused, narrow, incremental, little readings that involve a lot of research.

I think it is all valuable (speaking of the two kinds of criticism . . . not to defend any individual article). For its different purposes.

The Lev Grossman thing reminds me of the kind of broad context-setting statement one gives while teaching a lit-survey class so the students have some basic frame of reference before they read.

No, actually it reminds me of the horrendously oversimplified and shallow distortion of your already over-generalized broad contextualization that you sometimes get back from the C student who doesn't really want to be taking this class, but who feels that regurgitating your points back to you in cartoon form will cause you to give an A instead of recoil in horrified recognition of your own teacherly sins (particularly, sloth and vanity).

they’ve taken the line about how “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is†a little further than even life in this vale of tears really requires

Speaking of Calvinism above, I live among people who feel that it's Godly to accept whatever you are given by life. Only prayer can get you anything better. The deduction they make from these principles is that "if it seems good at all, reject it" because anything the powers of this world (i.e. government) can give you is either secretly bad, or, if good, is an ungodly attempt to take the place of God. That's why Bush's hostility to public services made sense to them -- only churches should be helping the needy. If only that dastardly government would stop helping people, churches would step up and really start taking care of needs -- it's the government's fault they don't.

So, in response to Dena at #33, any argument aimed at such people is going to have to be congruent with their basic view of the world. I'm not sure how to do that, and I live among them. Maybe pointing out how many government services they already take for granted would help some, but it's not the whole argument.

This can only hurt Zappo's, which is a great, great place to buy shoes (as long as you know your size -- as the owner of my own Brannock Device (you know, the thing which restructures the matter of a dead planet into a giant shoe store) and dad of some EEEE-width kids, I know sizes (y'know, when they make soccer cleats they assume everyone has little narrow feet, and the feet of everyone at Nike must look like little skis)).

We really like Zappo's in my family (it helps that we are a short distance from a distribution center, so the shoes come in less than 24 hours).

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Perhaps Zappo's will act like yeast in the massive loaf of Amazon and improve them. Sure.

Collectivism leads to communism and the death of markets which leads to environmentalism and One World Government, which leads to the Antichrist. We don't want to start down that slippery slope by cooperating in any way, shape, or form, nosirree.

Just as the rugged individualist myth hides the need for cooperation on the frontier, the stereotype of the wild libertarian West hides the fact that the settlement of the West was totally a Federally subsidized thing. Those railroad companies didn't go out there without taxpayer help and land grants. The rightful owners of the land weren't driven off by families in covered wagons -- the Army had to do the killing first. And so on.

I guess what I'm saying is, any kind of national myth is okay, but it should be true.

(And when the loner comes into town, he stands in the doorway illuminated from behind by a light . . . the wilderness is bright behind him, civilization is inside. He won't stay long.)

Chris @90, coming fresh off of teaching slave narratives, I think it's a true statement that the only enduringly effective answer the slaves came up with was to treat American exceptionalism as an unfulfilled promise, or what King later called the blank check, or Hughes the demand to "let America be America again." Revolution, acquiescence, unorganized moral persuasion, not so effective.

I know you know this, just saying that while you are totally right, it's also probably necessary to say "this is not America," even if it's true that "America never was America."

Because I'm pretty sick of "the same old stupid plan." No permanent solutions, sure, but there damn well better be some temporary improvement.

PJ @ 75, while I'm glad to know that Earl was kidding, remember that the wingnuts will, in fact, consider those as great offenses when committed by a Democrat.

I mean, we're being told that past presidents never shook a bad guy's hand before, and there are photographs to show otherwise. It's not like it has to make sense.

On literary analogues . . .

WASHINGTON, 2009

Flannery, honey, you should be with us now:
America could use you. It's a mess
Of brackish water: church and state and press,
The promised birth of freedom, people's power,
We've given up for rainmakers' showers
Of borrowed dollars, suddenly worthless;
Oh! call us out, make us feel that we're less
Than good, help us repent in this last hour.
Your soul was like a gun that kept us good:
You had a voice that sounded just like truth;
Pure and caustic, holy, free and ruthless,
That's how you came up through a hard life's trials,
With cheer and care but giving your heart's blood
To draw large, startling figures for weak eyes.

Best I could do.
And, this

I confess that the acronym BOINC, plus the Particle about precision-hacking the TIME 100 online poll which emerges from a subculture alien enough to me that I have trouble crediting it as real, made me suspicious. I checked to see if it's April 1st again. But I suppose that these are phenomena of the real world, which only seem like particularly parodistic sf scenarios.

Erik @ 279: Yes.

I am truly proud.

That'll be $100.00.

Also, I just remembered something I thought years ago, but forgot -- that the name "the Comedian" is surely a Graham Greene reference. In The Comedians some comically inadequate reformers, revolutionaries, and weirdos imagine they can save Haiti from the grip of the Duvaliers, never realizing that this is the way of the world, and ain't nothing changing.

The only way I can read it is that Bernard (the newsman), Bernard (the comic book kid), and Dr. Whathisname, the unrealistically naive prison psychiatrist, are the heroes of the story. They are the ones who struggle with the real moral questions of life -- how to love others, how to do well in the world. Well, the younger Bernard mostly struggles with the storyline of his comic book, but he's likeable.

And Hollis Mason, the only hero whose motivation is to do good.

It seems to me the Tales of the Black Freighter diagnoses the problem of all the other "heroes." Take it upon yourself to save the world and become a monster, the abyss gazes also, etc. Richard Nixon and Ozymandias are really making the same decisions, using the same reasoning. But Ozy's action doesn't cause radioactive fallout.

I think Rorshach has a redemptive arc, symbolized by his taking the mask off before he dies. As a kid he writes in defends of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings using precisely Ozymandias's logic, and in the beginning he despises the people of New York. But in the end he rejects that kind of action and dies in solidarity with the people who were killed. Maybe the psychiatrist helped him after all.

The Comedian might have some kind of redemptive arc like that too; hard to tell. He understands that Ozy's joke is his own joke writ large, and sees how awful it is.

Ozymandias has been eaten by the abyss, and Dan and Laurie remain vigilantes who resemble the Comedian more and more.

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