Category Archives: Blog

Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance

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I just saw this 1974 film. It’s a sequel to the first Lady Snowblood film, which I haven’t seen, and it’s very different from the comic book version. The comic, as I noted, has Lady Snowblood willing to do anything to anybody to further her vengeance — and there was a nationalist subtext as well, with a loathing of degeneracy and western decadence which felt really fascist.

This, though, has a much more comfortable and familiar morality. Anarchist heroes joining together with the poor to fight the power — it doesn’t get more bourgeois than that. Even the exploitation here is sedate; the one sex scene is between a married couple, for goodness sake. Lady Snowblood splits her time between regretting her past acts of violence and perpetrating carnage on behalf of the downtrodden.

There are certainly some good scenes — Snowblood’s method of fighting is to just sort of walk slowly forward, as dozens of guards launch themselves at her and are dispatched one by one, and that’s entertaining to watch. But overall, and though I hate to say it, the fascist, gratuitous, morally despicable comic is probably better than this right-minded movie. Sometimes the devil does have better tunes.

I do hope to see the original Lady Snowblood movie at some point…though I think netflix doesn’t have it, so it may take a while.

Update: No, scratch that. They do have Lady Snowblood. Why’d I see this one first rather than the original? Got me….

Trig and his awful mother

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Reactions to Sarah Palin’s decision to resign the governorship of Alaska have been a reminder of her unmatched ability to elicit strong emotions from friend and foe alike. We know some of the reasons why. It’s her evangelical Christianity and her folksy manner. It’s her small-town roots and her “new feminism.”

Yeah, if you don’t like Palin it’s because you’re a bigot. It’s not that you think being mayor of Wassilla isn’t enough to prepare someone to run the country. You just hate small towns. Come to think of it, a lot of Palin haters liked Bill Clinton just fine, and he was awfully folksy. But Palin is also ignorant and intellectually feeble, and she tries to fake her way thru difficult situations by desperately bullshitting whoever’s in range. And for her a difficult situation is a question, such as “How about that economy?” or “So why did you quit being governor?” She says nasty, untrue things about political opponents (“read terrorists their rights”) and whines whenever anybody hits back. So, of course, yeah, what we dislike about her is her “new feminism.”
Obviously, I just got triggered by a Christian Right op-ed piece. It’s by Gary Bauer, a longtime CR panjandrum, and Daniel Allott, a fellow he employs to help with the words. It got such a rise out of me because it says I despise a one-year-old kid who has Down syndrome: 

Palin gave birth to her youngest son, Trig, who has Down syndrome. Since then, mother and son have become objects of the left’s unrelenting scorn and the right’s unflinching fidelity.

Well, fuck you, Gary Bauer. You have three pieces of evidence for your claim: a reader’s diary entry at Talking Points Memo, a post at an antifundamentalist humor site (the post’s writer just quit), and a quote by a libertarian nutball at a place called the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism. The first two items weren’t directed at Trig, just at the idea that Down syndrome might be something the world needs more of (because of Palin’s comment “The world needs more Trigs”). The third item is just a libertarian being crazy: “it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with the Down syndrome.” If you don’t like what the guy said, talk to him at the next CPAC. But leave “the left” out of it.

Trig is a reminder of our fierce ambivalence over disability. Every mention of his name is a pinprick to our conscience. Every photo of mother and son is a reminder of concepts — vulnerability, dependency and suffering — our culture no longer tolerates, as well as virtues, such as humility, dignity and self-sacrifice, it no longer extols.

The left doesn’t believe in “vulnerability, dependency and suffering.” Well, that’s a new one. Furthermore, Sarah Palin embodies “humility, dignity and self-sacrifice.” Sure. All you have to do is redefine every word involved and the idea works perfectly.
You can see that Gary Bauer is after some big game here. He thinks the medical profession and society as a whole are pressuring people to abort genetically handicapped children. I think he’s got matters the wrong way around. Raising an afflicted child is an admirable choice, but it’s not one I would force on anybody. And you’d have to force people because being born with a severe handicap — being retarded, being born without a spine — is an onerous condition, one that imposes suffering on the child and requires great sacrifice from everyone in the child’s family. Given a choice, most parents won’t have such a child.
Gary Bauer figures that’s the result of some far-reaching propaganda campaign. No, it’s just people being allowed to do what they want. Bauer doesn’t see it that way, but he sees none too clearly. Just ask him what he thinks about Sarah Palin.

Barstool embarrassments

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Milton, one of my cafe buddies, claims he heard the following at the Bifteck, our local bar. A fellow was trying to pick up a girl. He told her about how he was an actor, mainly, but he did some work as a shoe salesman too.

Girl:   “Isn’t that frustrating? I mean, you being an actor but having to sell shoes.”
Guy:   “No, no, not really. There are a lot of parallels, kind of a strong connection really. Because when you’re selling, you’re performing. I mean, from my perspective, it’s essentially retail theater.” 
Milton claims that the man, at this point, lifted both hands to make the air quotes gesture. That sounds too perfect, but Milton swears by it. The man went on to use the “retail theater” phrase four or five times before the girl excused herself to visit the ladies room and then disappear.

Tales Designed To

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My review of Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle collection is up at the Chicago Reader:

The lurch from comic-book supervillain cliche to boob-tube homage nicely encapsulates Kupperman’s methods and influences. While alt-comics creators try to cadge some credibility by putting on literary airs and their mainstream peers pray for a movie deal, Kupperman has other burgers to flip. On the one hand, he’s steeped in the conventions of comics past—barmy sales pitches (“Men! Is your penis a urine-leaking, chronically unreliable threat to your mental well-being?”), breathless pulp-adventure titles (I Bothered a Big Fish!), and doofy superheroes (e.g., Underpants-on-His-Head Man). But his essential rhythms seem to be borrowed from another medium entirely. The way he turns narratives into advertisements, ends stories with some wacko randomly barging through a window, and abruptly drops gags only to pick them up and drop them again suggests that Kupperman takes his cues from the surreality of the small screen—especially Monty Python’s Flying Circus and its animated heirs on the Cartoon Network.

If that’s just not quite enough of my prose, the Reader has also HTMLified some of my older essays (earlier available only as PDFs). There’s one about James Loewen’s Sundown Towns and one about Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains now available.

From Palin’s bathroom mirror to the Weekly Standard’s cover

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The problem wasn’t so much Palin as it was Alaska. She had become too big for her home state.


That’s one way of putting it. Put in the right pronouns and you can imagine Palin speaking to her bathroom mirror: “It’s not my fault! It’s … Alaska’s. They’re all jealous.” But the quote is from Matthew Continetti’s piece in the Weekly Standard giving the troops the rundown on why their hero fled. The article is a case of third-person narcissism: the writer’s engaging in borderline personality disorder on behalf of another party.

The reasons given for Palin’s quitting are 1) nobody would govern with her, 2) people say mean things about her, and 3) she’s already done everything any governor could hope to do in office. Point 1 is blamed on the national Democratic Party, which supposedly bosses around the legislators in individual states (wish it could get Congress in line). For point 2 it’s treated as a given that every charge against Palin has been refuted. Point 3 is voiced by Palin herself: “I know that we’ve accomplished more in our two years in office than most governors could hope to accomplish in two terms. And that’s because I hired the right people.”  So it’s okay for her to quit because she’s just way, way better than any ordinary governor. And you know it’s true because she says so.

Of course she also said once that she was a pitbull. Continetti sidles gently up to the sad fact that this claim was a charade:

The accusations affected Palin emotionally. A rare and necessary talent for a great politician is the capacity to ignore or laugh off the critics’ most vicious assaults. FDR had it. So did Reagan. When Palin spoke at the 2008 Republican convention, it seemed as though she had it, too. Her commanding performance gave the impression that the previous week’s falsehoods, exaggerations, myths, insults, and smears did not matter to her. Not one bit.

This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, however. Over time, the attacks on Palin–on her character, intellect, appearance, femininity, and family–clearly got to her. 


But he can’t let go of the idea that, somehow, she really is tough. Palin “knows how to win a political knife-fight,” he says after paragraphs spent lamenting that the poor lady had to deal with mean legislators and harsh words. In fact the whole “knife-fight” passage is interesting for its incoherence:

… she is a newcomer to the national arena. The bulk of her career has been at the local and state level, where the stakes and the tempers are low compared with the rock ’em, sock ’em dramas that play out inside the Beltway and on the cable channels and blogs. “Everyone else in ’08 had been in the game for decades,” John Coale said. “They all had been there. This was somebody playing for the first time.” For Palin, the hostility directed at her was novel and shocking. Because she prides herself on her unconventionality, and because she knows how to win a political knife-fight, she decided to fight back.


 So, for one thing, it turns out that Palin really was too inexperienced for the big time, even though the Standard and its buddies had been saying the opposite all along. For another, we’re told that Alaska is quite a tranquil place politically, although the rest of the piece says the state has become ungovernable because of the nasty vendettas against the governor.

A last point: in the fall we were told about Palin’s vital executive experience. Now we find out it really doesn’t matter who commands the Alaska National Guard. The point of a governor turns out to be entirely legislative: if the governor has passed, or claims to have passed, all the laws she had in mind, then there’s nothing left for her to do but twiddle her thumbs. It’s not like there are any floods for her to deal with or a state administration that needs to be run properly.

In America, we elect our executives to fixed terms on the understanding that they have day-to-day duties to fulfill and that these duties remain no matter what the legislature is up to. That would especially be the case in Alaska, where the legislature meets for a few weeks but the governor is on duty all year round. Unless she finds something better to do.

“The job had become demanding and unpleasant,” Continetti writes. Is there any other politician anywhere who would get a sympathetic hearing for that argument? Not that she could get such a hearing from just anybody. Alaska may not understand Sarah Palin, but the Weekly Standard does.

This just in: Nicole Wallace is a jerk

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The “pals around with terrorists” line came straight from the McCain high command, according to reporters Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Marc Ambinder summarizes:

an e-mail from campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace [was] sent to Palin on the morning of October 4rd, with an attached New York Times article about Obama’s relationship with Ayers.
Turns out that the McCain campaign was a week away from running an ad linking Obama to Ayers. The e-mail from Wallace, according to Balz and Johnson, reads as follows: “Governor and Team: rick [Davis], Steve [Schmidt] and I suggest the following attack from the new york times. If you are comfortable, please deliver the attack as written. Please do not make any changes to the below without approval from steve or myself because precision is crucial in our ability to introduce this.” 
McCain HQ had suggested the following line: “This is not a man who sees American as you and I do — as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.”

When complaining about what a diva Palin was, McCain’s people would cite the very line the campaign had given her. They claimed she had “gone rogue” and delivered the line all on her own. Well no, looks like that wasn’t the case. (Assuming the email is genuine. Ambinder’s post doesn’t say where the fellows got ahold of it.)
Does this mean that Palin isn’t a diva and whack job? I doubt it. She has a trail of bitter ex-allies from Wasilla to Juneau to wherever Republican high command is now bunkered. My guess is that the McCain people 1) wanted to keep their distance from an especially nasty attack, and 2) wanted another stone to throw at the Gal.
The “pals” revelation brings up the same lesson taught by the great post-“pitbull” letdown: never trust a story sourced to Republican political operatives.