Long ago a fellow named Donald McGill turned out cheeky cartoon postcards for the British public. I did an image Google of his name to honor George Orwell’s essay “The Art of Donald McGill.” The fellow is still remembered and his work is easy to come by on the Web. I also learned that, in discussing his work, British papers will use the same approach as our own “Bang! Pow! Not for Kids Anymore,” as in the Yorkshire Post‘s “Ooh Er, Missus! Saucy Seaside Postcards Still Go for Bust.”
Author Archives: Tom Crippen
Pop Star Michael Jackson, 50, Reported Undead
UPDATE: Not entirely an original idea, as it turns out; they even used the same picture. In the Internet age you have to be quick if you want to be a jerk.
UPDAte 2: CNN (for Christ’s sake) shows how it’s done. Its headline about the various post-death Internet outages:
Jackson Dies, Almost Takes Internet with Him
I don’t think that’s true
It should be, but it isn’t:
If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
From Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” The fact is that a lot of simple, vivid, expressive political language is stupid and dishonest. Sarah Palin on the campaign trail last October:
You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they don’t really make a whole lot of sense and sometimes dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.
Could you get any simpler? But apparently genetics research often involves fruit flies. If you want to help humanity, a good thing to do is give some competent scientists the money to play with bugs. Don’t ask me any more about the subject, because I don’t know. Neither does Gov. Palin, of course. But she didn’t have to hide her ignorance from herself by using cloudy language. When you’re dealing with technical subjects, ignorance often presents itself as common sense; it needs no language to hide behind. And most public subjects are technical, from global warming to the procedures for drafting and passing a bill. If you assume that you’re right, or if you don’t care, you can tell far-fetched lies in simple language and never break a sweat.
Orwell’s targets were euphemism and latinate obfuscation (“liquidate” for kill, and so on), and there’s no doubt they’ve done harm. But I think he was being a bit intellectual about it all. He was working out a theory about how people could lose their intellectual honesty step by step, until finally they could not even choose their words for themselves; 1984 and newspeak mark the furthest development of his ideas. But people can just refuse to think; they can assume all those facts and figures are a lot of argle-bargle. Or they can figure their principles are good and the main thing is to advance their side, regardless of truthfulness on individual issues. Or they may not care either way and go with whoever gives them the biggest paychecks.
update, Billjac in comments says the particular research project Gov. Palin referred to involved the combatting of pests that trouble California’s olive crops. I found a Salon article that gives a good rundown of what Palin had to say. The article’s language is a bit troubling because it implies, truthfully I think, that I have less scientific knowledge than a competently educated 5th grader.
Billjac says the Palin statement is “bullshit” in the technical sense advanced by Harry G. Frankfurt a few years back. The idea, I think, is that a statement is bullshit when the person making it doesn’t care whether the statement is true or false. Sounds plausible in Palin’s case, but I can’t read her mind. Maybe when she read about the olive pest research she said to herself, “Well, how do you like that? Just like those jokers. Here they are complaining about my per diems and meanwhile Uncle Sam is shoveling out money on,” etc., etc. (UPDATE: A relevant data point here.)
Anyway, here’s a link to an extract from Frankfurt’s book, if you’re interested. Apparently he followed On Bullshit with a book called On Truth, which sounds like a classic case of sequelitis.
About sums it up
… if there’s one thing comic-book fans hate, it’s comic-book creators. Superhero fans, especially, see their favorite characters as independent entities who exist apart from human interference; the artists and writers are just jerks who try to get between Spider-Man and his fans and mess stuff up.
Shaenon K. Garrity speaks a fundamental truth while dissing the various message boards. Her post is from last Friday, so maybe you know about it.
Her passage about Comicon doesn’t mention Larson, who has his faults but is still one of the funnier people you’ll find commenting. [update, no it’s Lawson, “w” and not “r,” but she still doesn’t mention him.]
On TCJ’s board: “No one ever posts about the content of the magazine itself, proving that not even the most hardcore fans of The Comics Journal read The Comics Journal.” No! People complained about my Gerber obit and about the short story where I described meeting a douchebag at a convention even though the douchebag didn’t exist.
On fans, once again: “Of course, all comics fans think the comics they read when they were twelve are the greatest comics ever made.” No! I much prefer the comics that I read in my late 20s and early 30s.
On John Byrne: “Byrne once posted that using the term ‘word bubbles’ when you mean ‘word balloons’ is equivalent to a racial or ethnic slur. Ever since, I’ve been calling them ‘word wops’ in his honor.” Fuck, that’s funny. I’d laugh even harder if I were Italian and could get away with it.
A “hopelessly impossible situation of love”
That’s kind of beautiful; anyway, not bad for a governor. (Mark Sanford’s full email here.)
UPDATE: This is good too. The New Republic flagged it:
Got back an hour ago to civilization and am now in Columbia after what was for me a glorious break from reality down at the farm. … this morning woke at 4:30, I guess since my body knew it was the last day, and I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up. To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the back ground, the tranquillity that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds …
Maybe he flamed out because he was tired of being a politician. Can’t say I blame him.
UPDATE 2: Keith Olbermann is being snotty about the emails. Well, that’s his problem. Did he ever deny that “For this relief much thanks” story?
This just in: The New Yorker says there’s a book called Confessions of a Slacker Mom by a person called Muffy Mead-Ferro. Nothing to do with anything, just kind of awful and crazy. Muffy Mead-Ferro. She also wrote Confessions of a Slacker Wife! Good-looking, though.
UPDATE 3: “Yes, but I’ve had to work extremely hard to find my way back to my humanity.” Man, what a clunker, and that’s in the second minute. I don’t think I’m going to like TrueBlood.
Black-woman character: “Ummm. You smell nasty and nice, all at the same time.” Oy.
UPDATE 4: “Don’t you try to flirt with me! They told me to pay special attention to the fact there’s a drag queen in the basement.” I think I misheard that one.
UPDATE 5: “What the hell you think you doin’, snappin’ the American flag in two like some kind of Muslim Buffy with a dick?” Much to respect there, though the line is a bit context dependent.
UPDATE 6: My confession. I pronounce Buenos Aires “Bway-nos Ah-eer-aze.” Very much in the undergraduate would-be world-traveler style.
Sign of the times
I was sitting and reading the paper with the two pages held out in front of me. I wanted to know what time it was, so I looked at the top of the right-hand page and wondered why it only gave the date. Then I realized the paper wasn’t my laptop.
Tact, gorgeous tact
Tapes Reveal Nixon’s View of Abortion
That’s the New York Times headline for the article about the latest batch of released tapes from the Nixon White House. The tact is all on the part of the Times, not Nixon.
Nixon:
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white.”
Beautiful. He said stuff about Jews too:
“It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”
That’s in the article’s next-to-last paragraph. Context: Billy Graham had been saying that the Jews were chapping his butt about what the NYT calls “efforts to promote evangelical Christianity.”
In other revelations, a National Security Council brief discussed Israel’s secret nuclear program, and Nixon aides said Reagan was really happy about Nixon’s firing of the fellow who was looking into Watergate. Good old Reagan.
UPDATE: The headline The New Republic used: “Nixon: Abort Interracial Babies.”
UPDATE 2: I’m listening to the tape (available here) while I type changes into my Alan Moore column. A lot of murk and buzzing, but phrases surface here and there: “a black and a white” and “Stick it to the goddamn Left.” Horribly, it’s such a pleasure to hear his voice again. I guess that’s the power of nostalgia.
UPDATE 3: It turns out there are good Jews and bad Jews. The bad kind put out pornography and are known as the “Synagogue of Satan” (also the name of a biker gang — it gives Hebrew lessons in the afternoon, after regular school). The good kind are “God’s Timepiece” (also the title of a book that attempts to reconcile young Christians to the existence of earth’s fossil record).
I missed all that, but it’s what Billy Graham had to say when he and the President were talking. He was responding to this thought voiced by Nixon:
… this anti-Semitism is [???] strongly than we think, you know. It’s unfortunate, but this has happened to the Jews, it happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it’s happening—now it’s going to happen in America if these people don’t start behaving.
Start behaving, you people. (Via Atrios at A Tiny Revolution.)