Saalon Muyo

I have a question for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  It’s about this quote:

“I do agree that fundamentally America has an economy that is strong,” he said. “America’s great strength is its diversity, its hard work, its good financial statements, its broad capital markets,its enormous natural resources” and its work ethic, he said at an afternoon press conference devoted to reassuring New Yorkers that the city’s finances and its economy are intact.

I get what you’re saying, and you have some valid points.  But, in all seriousness, wouldn’t you call our banking system one of the fundamentals of the U.S. Economy?  Because I’m hearing it’s not doing too well.

We’re having one of those stupid campaign arguments where we bicker of the exact meaning of a sentence.  I’m talking about McCain’s oft repeated claim that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong, a statement he made again yesterday in Jacksonville as the Dow plunged 500 points.  If the point he was trying to make was that things suck but we’re still better off than, say, Mexico, I concede that point.  I’m just curious what possible weight that kind of point is supposed to carry.

When a politician stands in front of a bunch of working family and says “The fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong,” he’s not making a nuanced point, regardless of what spin you hear later.  That’s big-word speak for “Things don’t actually suck.”  Senator McCain has a vested interest in you believing that, because as someone allied with the sitting President, saying “Things really suck” is akin to saying “Don’t vote for me.”

The spin is now that Senator McCain was talking about American workers when he said “fundamentals,” and that we, the workers, are strong and innovative and because of that we have nothing to worry about.  I hope this isn’t what he meant, unless he intends to explain how that matters when the number of strong, innovative fundamental workers who aren’t working is at a 5 year high.

Senator Obama’s campaign has been using the quote to pain Senator McCain as out of touch, and Senator McCain’s spin simply backs them up.  Is the economy about to mimic the Great Depression?  I don’t know.  I hope not.  But suggesting that the economic conditions in this country are even remotely tied to its workforce demonstrates a lack of understanding that frightens me.

When a major corporation tanks due to, say, shoddy mortgage lending practices, what happens?  Well, the workers prepare to be laid off and go on unemployment.   Shareholders, many of whom own stock through retirement funds, watch their investments evaporate.  Meanwhile, the executives don’t get punished, but instead get, say, a $22 million package on their way out the door.  A failed CEO gets more for being fired than most of us will make our entire lives, even as the shareholders of that company lose money due to his failure.

That’s what Senator Obama means when he calls his opponent out of touch.  The fundamentals of our economy are strong.  If you’re already rich.  There are no consequences for failure if you’re at the top of the heap.  But the workers - the innovative, tenacious workers McCain is praising - lose their jobs, their homes and their futures.

I need to repeat my earlier question.  If the housing market, the banks, the credit system and average family wages aren’t fundamental parts of the U.S. economy, what are?  If my home is losing value, I’ve lost your job, I can’t get a loan and my 401k just lost a third of its value, where’s this upside that I’m missing?

Oh wait.  You’re going to fight earmarks.  Never mind, we’re all good.

Maybe we really do live in a country of fools.  I’ve been arguing against it for years.  Every time President Bush said something idiotic and polling showed that we didn’t mind, I gave America a pass and blamed the media for its abdication of its journalistic duties.  When people began to equate education with elitism I did my best to pass it off as the baggage of choosing poor candidates.  And when people continued to call Senator John McCain a “maverick” without any apparent idea of what that word actually means, I assumed that they just needed a little bit more information to hop onto the Reality Express.

It’s possible my naivety had gotten the better of me.  I’m honestly, truly worried that we are just as stupid, lazy and unwilling to think as every dumb American joke has made us out to be, and it depresses the hell out of me.  I know the media is a big part of it.  I do.  The past few decades have given us a journalistic corp battered by their parent corporations’ unquenchable desire for higher profit margins and corrupted by a public that rewards sensationalism over journalism.  We have a news media that prints campaign press releases as headlines without so much as fact checking them first.

When the McCain campaign cited the fire martial of Fairfax county as a source for their supposedly record-breaking crowd of 23,000, every paper just printed it as fact first, and called the fire martial to discover they don’t record those statistics afterwards.  Out of laziness or lack of resources the news media printed an unqualified marketing statistic that benefited one campaign because they couldn’t be bothered to make a phone call.

Can we only blame the media, though? Is that just a way of letting an uninformed electorate continue to evolve into moronic sloths without repudiation?  When I hear people say that they think Senator Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, I have to wonder if they’re even living on the same planet as I am.  When people say they want to vote for a candidate because they’re “just like me,” I have to fight back violent urges.  The basis of a representative democracy is to elect leaders who will do a better job governing than the average person would.  If you want a government run by people with average intelligence and poor knowledge of economic and foreign policy you’d be better served with an appointment by lottery than an election.

We live in a nation where, with utter seriousness, we ask our electorate which candidate seems like more fun at a cookout.  Then we analyze those results on national television and criticize candidates for not portraying enough of a regular guy image.  Sarah Palin not knowing a lick about the Bush Doctrine is more easily excused than one of our presidential nominees’ choice of vacation spots.  If you don’t remember that one, it was when Senator Obama went to Hawaii and analysts referred to it as too “foreign” and “exotic” for normal people to relate to.  We’ve now begun calling our own states foreign if it means muddying the political waters.

We’re in a war.  Multiple major financial institutions are collapsing.  Average, working-age family income has dropped $2,000 over the past 8 years.  Yet we wallow in our own narcissistic desire to see someone as uninformed and unqualified as ourselves become president.  We hold our candidates only to the standard of what we ourselves know, not how much more the leader of the richest country on the planet should grasp.  We allow our media to print unchallenged hyperbole, like when Senator McCain had the gall to claim that Sarah Palin knows more about energy than anyone else in the country.  We feel our hearts swell at any mention of “small town values” and look suspiciously at urban “elitists” when 79% of the United States population is urban.

I’m forced to ask myself this:  If this nation truly cannot see the mountains of bullshit surrounding the Republican candidates at this point, have we crossed the point of no return?  Is Mike Judge’s satire Idiocracy really where we’re headed?  This is not a nuanced election.  We are literally being told that a man who supported almost every major policy of the sitting president can also be an agent of change and a free thinker because he said it in a speech at the Republican National Convention.  And we’re buying it.  We can be shown a picture of a woman wearing a sweatshirt supporting the infamous “bridge to nowhere” and yet still believe that she was always against it because she tells us so.  We allow the myth that the candidate who supports the troops most is the one who voted against an increase in their benefits to live on, unchallenged.

I have to believe, at least for the next 50 days, that this isn’t true.  I need to give the people of this nation one last chance to prove that they still care about something enough to see through the obvious falsehoods they are sold every day.  I need to hold our hope that, if nothing else, we can grasp the seemingly simple fact that a long-time member of the existing establishment who says they are likely to change that establishment is either out of their mind or an unrepentant liar.

I won’t lie.  It’s getting harder every day.

This is one of those things that’s Brennen’s fault.  I’m pretty sure I found out about Dresden Codak from his LinkDump, and if I’m remembering correctly, it was a link to the Childhood’s End strip near the end of the “Hob” plotline that just wrapped up.

Dresden Codak is a webcomic, and so that I’m starting off with the positive, I should note that it’s a fairly unique webcomic.  Unfortunately, my ability to describe it ends there.  I’d say what it’s about, but it’s not really about anything.  I could mention that it’s a fusion of very academic scientific ideas with occasionally whimsical humor, but there are a lot of times where that fusion is not a positive thing.  For the first half of its run it was a disconnected series of single shot strips.  It eventually developed a recurring cast, but just barely.

Then, in January 2007, Aaron Diaz began a longer story called “Hob.”  Like most webcomics, it promised a weekly schedule it not only did not meet but might as well have thrown out the window.  The finished story, running 25 chapters, took a year and nine months to reach its conclusion.  A schedule of approximately a page a month is neither good for the audience nor the author.

I was frustrated with Codak the first time I read it, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.  I reread the full run a couple of times since July, when I followed the link from Brennen’s site, and every time came away strangely put off by the whole thing.  The art was beautiful, and I liked the ideas fueling the story, but each page felt so disconnected from what came before and after that I kept worrying I had accidentally skipped a section.

It was the disconnection that ate at me.  Every page was so packed with scientific musings that there was often very little room for characterization.  Then, the next page would jump to another idea in such a way that whatever minor character work had been done was lost as I tried to reorient myself in the next bit.  This got especially bad near the end, as Kimiko is seemingly killed before resurrecting as the man/machine “Mother” that we’ve been hearing about for most of the story.  Huge developments take place with no examination whatsoever.  At the moment I needed to be caring, I don’t even know what I was supposed to care about.

It clicked for me this morning.  The Big Ideas are good enough, and the art is great, but Dresden Codak uses its characters very poorly.  The main character, Kimiko, gets a lot of screen time, but most of that is spent explaining wormhole theory.  Her friends step on long enough to use cool powers and drop that Kimiko’s lack of compassion for humanity is scary, but two pages later have been captured by villains and a page later have been saved.  All of that last stuff without saying more than a line.  It’s like being given Cliff Notes for a Philip K. Dick novel.  Without reading it the actual work, it just looks pointlessly weird.

Then I found a quote from an interview with the creator:

I really don’t want to have a comic that’s appealing mainly because of its cast. There’s nothing wrong with that, people do it, but I’m always afraid people will come back only out of continuity and “what are the characters doing this week?” Even with this big story, I wanted to make sure that the universe itself and the ideas presented are kind of the star of the show. It’s helpful to balance.

So I was right.  To be fair to Codak, based on the quote above, it’s obvious he was actively avoiding a lot of characterization.  The problem - and I know this is my opinion - is that this is sort of the wrong way to tell a story.  The ideas presented can be and are the star of non-fiction, but the story is the star of a fictional work.   A story about the gestation of the Earth-Fetus is a pretty cool idea, but there needs to be a character, even if its not a human character.  It can be the earth itself, but even then we need to get some sense of causality resulting from the character’s actions.  “Hob” comes across as 25 random snapshots of a larger story, one in which I’m not sure what I’m supposed to care about.

These are problems I can see in the earlier strips as well, where more time is given to dissertation than it is to giving me a sense of who these people are.  The artist is clearly very, very smart, but I can’t help but think his intelligence and interest in vast topics isn’t a detriment to his storytelling.  I’d be very interested in a non-fiction webcomic about his ideas, like Scott McCloud has been doing for the past decade or so.  But I see a bunch of characters on screen and I expect…I don’t know, something from them besides pedantic dialog.

This is something I can only imagine is exacerbated by his posting schedule. Having been there myself, I can confirm that time away from actively writing a story separates you from the heart of it.  You get back and you remember the skeleton, but you’ve lost the vital fluids.  I wonder if that’s what’s happened to “Hob.”  If in his head he had found a balance for the story, but was unable to maintain it over the on and off schedule he maintained.

Still, I’m scratching my head at the quote above much as I scratched my head at the story itself.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen an author say that he didn’t want people coming back for his characters or for continuity.  I suppose that’s a bold, experimental thing to say on one level, but as a writer I find it perplexing.  Why would you write characters with whom you don’t want your audience to connect?

All that aside, you should check it out.  It’s definite its own thing, and unique work should never be ignored.  Something like Dresden Codak challenges you to respond to it, which is perhaps the most successful part about it.  A good challenge is nothing to sneeze at.

Former President Reagan political director and campaign director of Mike Huckabee’s failed presidential primary bid is telling us that we made a mistake in not picking Hilary Clinton as the VP nominee! Clearly, we should listen.

If Obama had done the smart thing, he would have picked Sen. Hillary Clinton for vice president. If he had, he would have united his party for sure and energized his base.

Because, in a war, you should take the critique of generals on the other side.  They always have your best interest at heart.  There’s no way they could be saying these things to convince your supporters you were wrong for their own benefit, nor could they be trying to demoralize you before the battle.  This advice is just good, old-fashioned politeness.

Something the Democratic Party needs to learn, and learn fast, is to beware of Greeks bearing gifts.  Every election cycle I watch Republican strategists informing the Democrats which of their candidates is more electable.  And every election cycle, I watch the Democrats listen, worrying that the side who will not vote for you both knows which of your candidates is best for your party and is willing to let you in on the information to keep the fight fair.

This advice should be especially suspect when it comes from campaign managers of failed candidacies who are looking for someone to continue paying them for their opinion.   Let’s assume, for a second, that Ed Rollins really does have the best interest of the Democratic Party in mind.  Are we even sure he knows what he’s talking about?  It looks like he hasn’t won a national campaign since the early 1990’s.

I’m not saying he, or anyone who’s run a campaign that lost, doesn’t have valid opinions.  You can lose a campaign for any number of reasons.  But concerning yourself with the opinion of a member of a party who has something to gain by your failure and who hasn’t had a winning record in 15 years might not be in your best interest.

In fact, I’ll make a bet with you.  If anyone creates a device through which we can visit parallel worlds, we can go to the one where Obama picked Clinton as a running mate and search CNN.Com.  In it, I wager you will find an article from Ed Rollins saying that by picking such a divisive choice for VP he’s energized his base at the expense of the middle and swing votes on the other side.  In fact, he may even say he should have picked Biden.

Indeed.

“She was so down-to-earth, a regular person,” says Peters. “She hasn’t been in politics her whole life, so she isn’t jaded or tainted. And I love that she’s a mom. Yes, I disagree with some of her positions, but that’s what this country is about.”

Yes.  What this country is about is voting for a politician because they’ve spent little time in their position and share the act of procreation with you, even though you disagree with the things they say they will do as a politician.

Common debate: Has the Surge been successful or hasn’t it?

Uncommon response: This is the wrong debate.

Perhaps it’s just the oversimplification of the way we discuss things in this country, but I’m dismayed at how misguided the entire Iraq troop surge argument has become.  The question has been boiled down to the simplest possible terms.  Did adding more troops crush the terrorists, or was it simply a coincidence?  The fact is, neither of those choices are the right one.  Adding more troops is not a reliable way to crush a guerrilla insurgency, as has been proven in multiple wars throughout this century.  Yet, following the influx of American soldiers, violence did decline in Iraq.  So what happened?

Both sides in the debate about the Surge seem to assume that the addition of troops was the only variable introduced into the violent morass that Iraq had descended into.  Understanding what effect the troop surge had on the violence requires looking at more than this one change in the game.  If all we had done was add in troops and stirred, maybe asking “Did it work?” would make sense.  But that isn’t all we did.  In fact, it’s very likely that the surge merely supported another initiative that had far more to do with the reduction in violence than new combat brigades.

In short, we paid them to stop killing us and to start killing our enemies.

The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq’s central government.

If you don’t read an awful lot of foreign policy rags, you may not have even heard of this.  Even when it’s mentioned, it’s glossed over as unimportant or irrelevant.  Even my candidate of choice, Barack Obama, talks about the surge in purely military terms.  Don’t you think the fact that we’re giving people money and weapons to convince them not to kill us is an important detail?  Don’t you think that might have something to do with the reduction in violence?

The military strategy employed by General Petraeus was certainly a sound one.  Mixing troops with the civilian population to a greater degree and emphasizing the protection of those civilians was something we should have done from day one.  One of the primary causes of the later Iraqi violence was the madness that overtakes groups that have been allowed to kill each other unimpeded.  From the day we stormed Baghdad, we allowed looting and violence to continue so long as it didn’t affect our military objectives.  The bitterness that gives rise to in the hearts of the everyday person is hard to quell.  Using troops to block further violence against civilians was the right move.

Still, that only works if the civilians you’re defending aren’t also killing you, and for a long time that was happening.  It’s what occurs any time you use the military to become a long term police force in hostile territory.  You stand still amongst your enemies at your own peril.  Unfortunately we forget that, given enough time and regardless of intent, an occupying force will become the enemy of the people of that nation.   To be protected those citizens needed to stop strapping on the bombs themselves.

The payments we began making to the Sunnis in the Anbar Province were intended to do exactly that.  The fear and bitterness of the Sunni population had led them to support al Qaeda in Iraq.  It was desperation.  It was all that could protect them from Shiite violence.  To root out al Qaeda in Iraq, we had to separate the desperate from the truly converted.  The firearms we supplied the Sunnis came with a pricetag: point them at al Qaeda.  Two foreign forces were trying to occupy the same land and angering the Sunni citizens.  We just turned out to offer better benefits than the other guys.

The reason the ignorance of this situation bothers me is that it undermines our ability to move forward.  A military victory is a very different thing than a peace sustained by monthly payments.  What happens when we fall behind on the mortgage with these militias?  If their loyalty and discipline are largely or even partially the result of a pay to play contract, what will they do with the goods and training we’ve given them when the contract ends?

These are not cowardly liberal rantings against the war.  These are real, potentially dangerous problems that could hurt us if we’re not careful.  If you don’t believe me, go look at what happened to the people who inadvertently provided the venture capital for the Taliban.  That would be us.

At the time, we decided we needed those Afghani rebels to battle our mutual enemies, the Russians.  Honestly, we were probably right.  In assuming that we could just stop payments and move on with our lives, though, we left an unfriendly force armed with our weapons and funded with our money to do whatever they wanted for the next twenty years.  Eventually, they did this:

Let’s not kid ourselves and allow ourselves to believe that just because violence is down that it’s through the awesome might and cunning intelligence we posesses.  We gave a lot of people monetary incentive to stop killing us and our friends.  It worked, because people are greedy and will happily accept your money to not punch you in the face.  What it does not do is convince them they do not want to punch you in the face.  Lunch money today does not a beating tomorrow avoid.

We can use the fruits of our bribes and payments to enact real change in Iraq if we don’t, as we did in Afghanistan, blow the end game.  That can only happen with a serious, complete analysis of what happened, what worked and what didn’t.  Treating the Surge itself as if it occurred within a vacuum will just lead us away from the peace we all desire.

Conventions - any conventions - are strange affairs.  They’re little bubbles of groupthink, bringing out the most extreme tendencies of whatever niche has found hotels and rooms  to hold them.  No one convention is weirder than the other.  It’s all just a matter of perspective.  I watched a bunch of Texas delegates do this awkward, phony hat raising thing at the Republican National Convention and thought “Freaks,” even though, two days before, I watched a bunch of people dress as Harry Potter puppets and sing that Mysterious Ticking Noise song and was totally into it.

What I’m getting at is that I spent the weekend at DragonCon, and it was a heck of a thing.  I’ve been to cons before, most notably Otakon, but they all seem to have their own vibe.  Otakon is much more of an Organized Convention, while DragonCon seemed like a big, fan-run party.  There were a lot more people hanging around the hotels, drinking and smoking and hanging out in their outlandish costumes.  It was pretty cool, actually.  In the way that is not cool to the majority of the outside world.  Of course.

There were too many Boba Fetts.  Too many Jack Sparrows.  Too many Stormtroopers.  Too many whoeevers from Assasin’s Creed.  Too many Darth Vaders.  And, in purely technical terms, too many Leia Slave Bikinis; though from my perspective this was not a problem in the least.

None of this killed the fun.  If anything, it just led to lots of “We should challenge every Boba Fett here to a fight!” sorts of conversations.  This is what you do when you’re walking around a bunch of people in geek costumes.  You compensate by acting like a bigger geek.

Some thoughts.  Michael Rosenbaum from Smallville was hilarious.  I’ve never watched the show, and may never do so, but I can’t deny it.  The guy was a blast.  Nathan Fillion from Firefly was also awesome, but that was less of a surprise.  I’ve seen him on behind the scenes stuff and I knew he was a Christmas ham.  He didn’t disappoint.

I hopped on an elevator with James Callis from Battlestar Galactica and about lost my damn mind.  Good to know my star struck geek nerves are still so sensitive to simply standing next to someone from a show I watch.  Not embarrassing at all.

It may seem counter intuitive if you have a geek stereotype in your head, but there are lots of attractive people in very little clothing running around for much of the con.  I was more interested in the women, but there was, for instance, an extremely ripped dude dressed as God of War which, I’m sure, made some people very happy.  For me, though, it came down to girls dressed as, say,  Aeon Flux.  I’ve got my buttons, what I can say?

I also did some role playing, which was as hit-or-miss as you’d expect if you thought through what sitting down with 6 random people at one of these conventions might be like.  The first table was a complete disaster, ruined by a host of drunken thirty year olds cosplaying as twenty year old frat boys.  Only the DM, who wisely turned it into a drinking game for them, kept things amusing.

Finally, there was karaoke.  We went to get a drink in the hotel bar on Saturday night to discover the Atlanta Hilton’s geek hoard had descended on the karaoke machine, with the apparent intent of giving normal karaoke enthusiasts a reason to feel better about themselves.  I walked in, first, to see someone singing Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” while half the room awkwardly did the robot.  My thought: Ha!  Then, somehow, the thing turned around on me.  I watched a room full of disparate fanboys and fangirls, dressed in their own wacky costume of choice, supporting each other and cheering and dancing no matter how awful the song was.  Trekkies next to girls in gypsy/belly dancing costumes next to people in latex singlets all on the same page.  It made my heart swell a bit.  It was kind of awesome.

Still.  Next year we’re totally taking down the guy dressed in that Sauron costume, just so we can shout “Rule that, bitch!”

I apparantly have Ursula on the brain today.  Her quiet but passionate response to Ghibli’s adaptation of her Earthsea novels is worth the read, even if you’ve read or seen neither.  An excerpt to prove my point:

The moral sense of the books becomes confused in the film. For example: Arren’s murder of his father in the film is unmotivated, arbitrary: the explanation of it as committed by a dark shadow or alter-ego comes late, and is not convincing. Why is the boy split in two? We have no clue. The idea is taken from A Wizard of Earthsea, but in that book we know how Ged came to have a shadow following him, and we know why, and in the end, we know who that shadow is. The darkness within us can’t be done away with by swinging a magic sword.

I thought this was sort of interesting:

Le Guin has claimed that she doesn’t feel Rowling “ripped her off”, but that she felt that the books were overpraised for supposed originality, and that Rowling “could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn’t one of them. That hurt.”

I’m not sure how many of you got to watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog when it hit a couple of months ago, but if you didn’t you should make the time and check it out.  It’s 45 minutes long and it’s just a blast.  I mean, it’s co-written by Joss Whedon.  What else do you want?  Plus: Music!

If you have seen it, you should be informed immediately that the soundtrack is now available on iTunes.  Its geek prowess is so great that it’s currently the #2 album there, and your purchase may help push it to #1!  Not that you should buy it for that reason, but you maybe could pretend that getting it over the hump will cause confetti to rain down like you’re the millionth customer.  Fun, right?

Seriously, though, the music is pretty good and how often are you going to see a musical about comic book characters?