The “artwork” is by J.J. Sempe, a New Yorker contributor since 1978, and is called “Future Memories.”

Future Memories. Yeah, of false nostalgia blotted with sentimental Thomas-Kincade idealism. The image shows two adults roasting what can only be marshmallows over a campfire on a beach as seventeen ankle biters sit around enraptured by the fire’s glow and the sky’s sparkling expanse.

But certainly there will also be future memories of the bugs, the smell, the noise, the homesickness, the bad food, the annoying kids, the bed wetter, the crier, the stealer, the itches, the sickness, the sweat, and the discomfort.

At a time of war, grave athletic duels, and economic crises, I cannot fathom why such a distinguished publication as The New Yorker would resort to such escapist fantasy.

Is this what we want our children exposed to?

The ostriches at The New Yorker predictably resorted to a Frenchman for this drivel.

J.J. Sempe, born in the disreputable and ramshackle town of Bordeaux, is the author of “Sempe: A Little Bit of France.”

Buy it and the terrorists win.

Posted by: James on August 13th, 2008 at 8:00 am

Filed under: Covers, Politics, news
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Michael Swaim, writing at Cracked.com, has a magnificent rant on the homophobia of Orson Scott Card.

Do enjoy, but some highlights:

“The Mormon guy who wrote all those books about the innocence of a child winning out over war and hatred wants us to raise arms against any queers who feel like expressing their love legally. I mean, I understand a devout Mormon having some issues with gayness, but when your brain tells you that it’s an important enough issue to divide the country in a bloody coup, it’s time to get a new brain.”

“What the hell does it matter to you if two hot lesbians want to settle down and be respectable (which isn’t the way I like my hot lesbians either, believe me)? Until such a time as they bring down your property values with raging lesbian drug orgies, you’ve got nothing legitimate to complain about, and even then, I’ll trade houses with you.”

“You’ve spent your life imagining diverse races and cultures, and doing a hell of a good job. Yet your inability to imagine true love manifesting between two members of the same sex almost classifies you as retarded in my mind. It’s not even a moral issue. You’re just an idiot to me.”

“I know it’s pointless to ask you to change your mind; bigots armed with the intransigence of religion are rarely swayed. But hopefully some of those reading this post will be forewarned that Orson Scott Card has become a poison-spouting lunatic.”

Posted by: James on August 12th, 2008 at 6:18 pm

Filed under: Politics, Writers, news
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Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation is what would happen if David Sedaris wrote The Devil in the White City.

Now I know that we’re supposed to lump the likes of David Rakoff, Sarah Vowell, and David Sedaris into a category of humor or essays or some other less-than-serious class, but Assassination Vacation is an important book.

And I mean that in the traditional, classic sense. So I’ll say it again. Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell is an important book.

AV belongs up on the eye-level shelf or right on the nightstand with all the other tattered, well-read, really good paperbacks like To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, etc, etc, et al.

You see, Vowell embarks on an adventure to satisfy a macabre personal fascination with presidential assassinations, but does so with a grace and wit and piercing intellect that reveals an entertainingly enormous amount of relevant US history. Her book is equal parts well written, informative, and funny. While she’ll gently remind us that the dedication of Lincoln’s Memorial in 1922 was segregated, and that our use of the “water cure” during the Spanish-American War predated our current use of “water boarding,” she’ll also describe the McKinley National Memorial in Canton as “a gray granite nipple on a fresh green breast of grass.”

Sarah Vowell should write and edit textbooks. Our schoolchildren would be smarter, and our country a lot better off. And I mean that. Sarah, please edit high school textbooks. You could single handedly eliminate Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

But whether you have ADHD or not, you’ll find Assassination Vacation a damn readable brew of dry humor and understated intelligence that makes important slivers of our country’s history relevant, approachable, understandable, worth knowing, and most of all, entertaining.

Posted by: James on August 6th, 2008 at 4:28 pm

Filed under: Books, Politics, Reviews
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You know the times are getting tough when bums start asking for “a couple of bucks” instead of “spare change.”

This is the situation we’re in folks, it is not pretty, and it’s the situation I was in a few days ago right before I came home to find a piece of atrocious mail on my foyer, having been shoved through the mail slot by some schoolboy prank punks. Or a disgruntled postal worker.

You know the times are getting tough when disgruntled postal workers start shoving New Yorkers through your mail slot instead of raking their places of employ with bullets from an automatic assault rifle.

This is the situation we’re in folks, it is not pretty, and it’s the situation I was in a few days ago as I came home, having fended off a wobbling vagrant asking me for “a couple of bucks” instead of “spare change,” and found the single most disgusting piece of art I have ever seen in my life, “Night Cap” by Kim DeMarco:

You know the times are getting tough when American publications have to resort to silly puns and plays on words to sell us their pulp. In the good old days of yellow journalism they’d start wars, now they just smear some sloppily thrown together, half-baked image of a swimmer at night wearing a swim cap and call the drivel “Night Cap.”

Oh how clever.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

This is the situation we’re in folks, it is not pretty, and it’s the situation I was in a few days ago as I came home to be insulted by this mindless humor. When will American publications be brave enough to engage in some serious satire and culturally relevant commentary on the world we live in?

When?

I know what a nightcap is. It’s a drink; a libation one imbibes prior to retiring to the bedchamber.

You know the times are getting tough when American publications have to resort to weak homonyms.

It’s as if Obama is treading water? Is that what you’re saying?

The 2008 Olympics are such a contrived spectacle of disappointment and corruption and since no one cares about them, they might as well be held at night? Is that what you’re saying?

The fervor over the Olympics and the Obama campaign has been so intense that everyone needs to just chill and have a nightcap? Is that what you’re saying?

Posted by: James on August 3rd, 2008 at 1:04 pm

Filed under: Covers, Politics, news
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I am outraged by the most recent New Yorker cover.

Gutless savages feasting on innocent animals. Torturing them in boiling water. This is water boarding gone bad! Those poor shellfish. You carnivorous cowards! Gargling on your Pinot Grigio, laughing in selfish oblivion like a bunch of demented beasts in a Ralph Steadman drawing. If only he had visited a clambake instead of the Kentucky Derby! Or a crawfish boil! Fish Fry!

What does the New Yorker think it is with this pretentious, caddy New England humor? Will next week bring a culturally relevant pictorial on the satiric elements of clam chowder? And what, no bibs? The Red Lobster should sue your pants off, New Yorker. This kind of glib image is an insult to all that makes America great. And all that makes greatness American.

But what is really offensive about the most recent New Yorker issue is that for the first time that I’ve noticed, they moved the movie criticism before the book criticism. And this after the Los Angeles Times has pulled its stand-alone book reviews in order to slop them in with the detritus of entertainment and home improvement advice.

Posted by: James on July 30th, 2008 at 8:47 am

Filed under: Covers, Politics, news
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Barack Obama is my guy.

Understanding that any politician who was perfectly aligned on the issues I value would be unelectable, he’s got my vote.

Understanding that I am in agreement with Hunter S. Thompson when he said, “And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?” Barack is my lesser of two evils in the 2008 election freak show.

A lot can, and has, been said of Obama’s faults. All that rhetoric without substance. All that inexperience. Sure, inexperience. Voting for the inexperienced will get us either a Bill Clinton or a George W. Bush. Not just a double-downer sideshow, but a roulette wheel on a geopolitical scale. With nuclear warheads instead of chips.

And for all of the books I read, I am constantly, stubbornly (call it hope, optimism) flabbergasted by world leader’s oblivion to fundamental devices such as irony.

And so it was with great disappointment that i was dumbfounded by the Obama Camp’s reaction to The New Yorker’s latest cover satirizing the Conservative Right’s ignorant and racist portrayal of Barack Obama and his wife. (Fox News called her a “baby’s mama,” and referred to her preference for bumping fists in casual greeting as a “terrorist fist jab.”)

I had such high hopes of Obama transcending his predecessors almost-laughable ignorance to things like Irony and Satire. I expected the intolerant, fear-mongering, puritanical evangelical/conservative/right to lash out at such an image, but Obama had to jump right into that mob and declare the cartoon “tasteless and offensive.”

No.

No, I’m sorry Barack Obama Camp (Barack Obama, spokespersons, advisers, gurus, speech writers, strategists, supporters, and the majority of my country who seem to be bothered by this), this is America, we are Americans, and that is just a cartoon. We have weathered The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, South Park, and Beavis and Butthead, and a plethora of bad art and amateurish imitators. We will not get caught up in senseless rioting and murder over a cartoon. We understand art and we understand things like irony and satire and sarcasm and The Freedom of Speech!

We have values, we have ethics, and we will stand up for what we believe in. But this? This is a cartoon! There are many tasteless things out there to be offended about, but this is just not one of them.

Shame on you Mr. Obama for such a crude and misguided response. Stop pandering! Stop groveling to the center!

I may have to vote for Ralph Nader.

Posted by: James on July 14th, 2008 at 4:32 pm

Filed under: Covers, Politics, news
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There was a media furor yesterday over a book.

Yes, a book.

By media furor I mean that the cable news channels and Internet had something to talk about.

Normally I’d be as surprised as you that a book would have such an impact, but this isn’t just any book and any author.

This is What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception by former George W. Bush White House Spokesman Scott McClellan.

The 341-page book is evidently a scathing damnation of Bush’s War in Iraq, outing of Valerie Plame, handling of Hurricane Katrina, and probably pretty much everything our president has done in the past seven years.

Honestly, Scott. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

9 out of 10 people in this country could have written this book at this point, Scott. George W. Bush and his war-mongering aides did bad, nasty things?

9 out of 10 people in this country, Scott, are muttering underneath their breath to you, “No shit, Sherlock.”

Why didn’t Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine have this kind of impact? Again: The Lucky Get Kevlar. The Rest Get Prayer Beads.

And why didn’t Scott McClellan do something about this when he was working for the administration?

I think Scott McClellan is a coward. McClellan says that he wrote this book because he has a loyalty to the truth. He didn’t have an allegiance to the truth when working in the White House? Clearly not. There are far too many former White House staffers coming out of this administration to only cry foul after the fact.

But I guess it’s not a bad plan for otherwise untalented and spineless hack aspiring writers looking to make a buck on a book deal: get a job as a crony for a corrupt, incompetent, and morally depraved administration and write a tell-all bestseller.

After the damage has been done. After people’s lives have been ruined and lost. After its too late.

Posted by: James on May 30th, 2008 at 6:50 am

Filed under: Books, Politics, news
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Author of The World is Flat and a New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman was recently viciously attacked by two brutal assailants armed with creamy green pies who disagree with Friedman.

Friedman is only the most recent in a storied history of pie targets. It’s an honorable thing, to a throw a pie at someone you disagree with.

I don’t know if I should shrug, cock my head, smirk, or squint. It’s a silly world. It, the world, would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.

Link

Posted by: James on April 24th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

Filed under: Politics, Writers, news
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President Ahab’s proposed 2009 budget “eliminates all the funding for Reading Is Fundamental’s book distribution program that has, since 1966, provided more than 325 million books to more than 30 million underprivileged children.”

This is sour news. Especially since President Ahab’s mother and wife have both served on Reading is Fundamental’s board in the past. And his daughter, Jenna, is a published author.

I cringe at George W. Bush’s reckless buffoonery as much as the next Patriot, but what has  consistently amazed me is his utter oblivion to irony. It’s as if he hasn’t read enough books to properly appreciate the rhetorical device. Irony and World Leaders. Irony is just not something that heads of state seem to grasp very well. Something about history repeating…

But this kind of news is to be expected in the American Age of Unreason where Everything Bad is Good For You and our modern robber barons like Steve Jobs proudly and profitably proclaim that no one reads.

An Assault on Reason indeed.

Yes. The book is about as appealing as a Ball and Cup when we are mesmerized by gadgets like the iPod and hypnotized by gimmicks like Shock and Awe.

Because the right people aren’t doing enough to make reading sexy.

Posted by: James on April 21st, 2008 at 3:34 pm

Filed under: Books, Politics, news
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In a recent interview for Newsweek, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz weighed in on the immigration debate, the war in Iraq, terrorism, and George W. Bush.

Writers always have the best metaphors:

“…we’re in the fifth year of the most expensive war in human history. We’re devouring an entire generation of our young people, both directly in the war or with the long-term consequences, and yet the country wants to get obsessed with immigration. Like this is the exact right time to have this conversation? I wonder if we’re not trying to distract ourselves. You know, I love that image from “Moby Dick,” because we’re like the ship. We’re the Pequod. We’re this nation on this ship, and we’re on this insane quest being directed by a madman. But what’s really interesting is that Captain Ahab wasn’t taking his foreign workers and making them walk the plank. He understood the value of diversity through his dream. We’re even crazier than Ahab. We’re chasing this white whale called terrorism, but our captain is saying, “You know what, I don’t think some of us really belong here. They should walk the plank.” I never thought there would be a day where the United States would be crazier than its metaphor, the Pequod. But we’re there. We’re there. Ahab is now a moderate.”

America is the Pequod.  George W. Bush is Captain Ahab. Terrorism is the white whale.

Yeah. I think that works pretty well.

Posted by: James on April 13th, 2008 at 7:31 am

Filed under: Books, Politics, Writers, news
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