Quote of the Day comes from Radley Balko:

If I had kids, I would probably teach them not to smoke. But I'd also try to teach them not to grow up to be pissant, podunk, power-hungry small town city council members.

Comedy Is Not Pretty - April Fool.

Well, am I an asshole or what? In honor of the holiday I pretended to have changed my mind on a rather important matter and it generated quite a lot of reaction. The truth is, I still think superhero stories are a perfectly valid genre, whether you're or not you're getting laid.

Actually, it wasn't that one so much. Nor even the item where I, in contradiction of my long-held libertarian views, equated bureaucracy and society. It was that other one.

So I had in mind two objects of satire: hawkish "silver lining" rhetoric and the tropes of the "conversion narrative," as exemplified most recently by Anthony Gancarski. I took the title from among the more famous ones, by Collier and Horowitz. The satirical impulse got mixed up with the imperatives of the April Fool's joke itself, whose object is, after all, to trick people. I worried that there was no way I could sell something like "remote control bombs = a victory for the culture of life = the President's policy works" as an idea I or anyone else could seriously hold, especially given the holiday. I forgot that: deadpan I can do. I once had a buddy convinced, over the phone, that Harvard's Groombridge Astronomy Catalog took its name from a Charles River crossing point that figured prominently in the tradition of on-campus weddings. And he's no dummy.

Judging from my e-mail, a lot of people got the joke and appreciated it, a substantial number of people got snookered and a detectible minority got the joke but considered it to be in at least questionable taste. There was no particular pattern as to which group e-mailers and linkers fell into. Some hawks saw through it (Jeff Goldstein and Kathy Kinsley), some didn't. Some longtime readers took me at my word. Are there two bloggers I respect more than Diana Moon and BruceR of Flit? There are not. Both of them believed me for as long as it took to write about it. The bad taste position was well stated by Moshe Brandelwyn, who wrote

Assuming this is in fact an April Fool's joke, I have to say, Jimski, the humor is very, very dark, and in questionable taste. You'll undoubtedly get slammed for this one, and not entirely without justification.

And it was very dark. I'll plead yeah on the questionable taste part. "Humor black as a charred corpse hanging from a bridge" might be the new blog tag line if I were to make a habit of such items. Such defense I'll offer ranges from the fact that the calendar waits for no one to the tradition of savage satire, but my defense won't be universally persuasive.

As to the ethics of the thing, they are problematic. The April Fool's joke depends on a successful abuse of trust. The trust has to exist in the first place. Then there's the matter of time. The in-person April Fool's joke ends mercifully quickly. The in-print one doesn't offer the immediate relief of someone assuring you he was only joking after all. Ken MacLeod e-mailed his congratulations on fooling him for a solid ten minutes - just exactly what I would have hoped for, but calibrating that precise level of bamboozlement across a few thousand-odd readers is, of course, impossible. And as enjoyable as it is to imagine, in advance, hoodwinking one's adversaries, that is structurally unlikely - my adversaries mostly don't read me. Therefore any japery will work primarily on allies and friends.

So, What Did We Learn Here? Firstly, my readers are really, really nice folks. The folks who got it were very complimentary. The folks who feared I had lost my head were very, very kind about it. And the folks who thought I was being a jerk were sympathetically frank rather than nasty. Second, to the extent there are any lessons to be drawn, they're more for writers than readers: people approach your writing more in a spirit of trust than skepticism, even on the most unreliable day of the year. I bought Nate's prank to the extent of misreading the e-mail in which he assured me he was not serious. And the reaction tells us nothing whatsoever, I think, about the relative merits of hawkishness or dovery as such. Like I said, some hawks got it, some didn't, most didn't read it in the first place. More of my favorite doves were fooled than I would have expected, but this doesn't mean doves are especially credulous as a class - it's an artifact of the sample.

Anyway, that's what I got to say. I thank everybody that enjoyed it. I thank everybody that put up with it. Individual, private apologies are available on request. Anyone who's really mad may enjoy the first half or so of this Atrios comment thread. The holiday is over now.

Real Community - In the comments to my Brainwash essay, Rich Puchalsky writes

Not to mention that what some consider to be "bureaucracy", others consider to be society.

I hadn't thought of it like that.

Good Point - Maybe I overdid the "superhero defense" thing. Tim O'Neil points out

And anyway, superhero books are repressed... the things are just full of sublimated sex and misplaced aggression, the type of stuff that appeals to - ahem- sexually repressed tweens and teens (not to mention those sexually repressed members of the electorate who are old enough to vote and drink). If you don't see it, I don't know what to say, other than I have no more time or desire to discuss this now. (Was that a weasel answer or what?)

Tim or someone said earlier that most people stop responding to superheroes around the time they start getting laid. And it occurred to me recently that most of the adult superhero comic readers I know are married, so getting laid is largely out of the question. I now think superhero comics might be okay for Eve, whose chastity is religiously motivated, but not necessarily for the rest of us.

Second Thoughts - I think Glenn Reynolds said about what there is to say about yesterday's Fallujah riot, which is very little. (This is all bound up in my changed thinking about the war.) The people of Fallujah are like the famous headless fowl - flapping around something fierce briefly now that their day is almost over. (I don't agree that the attacks on American civilians are entirely John Kerry's fault, though.)

It's embarrassing to admit you were wrong about something as big as the war, and it's even harder to say why. Aside from everything else the pro-America side has pointed out - the evil of Saddam's regime; the nexus of terror and terrible weapons (which doesn't go away just because, in this particular case, there were no terrible weapons and not that much explicit connection to terror: it's coming); the prospect that continuing to oppose our efforts to rebuild a free Iraq just emboldened our very real enemies - what really tipped it for me was the Madrid bombings. You might say that, like the Fallujah rioters, I too have been flapping around something fierce since that day - and I think that, in that, I was like the "antiwar" movement as a whole.

It all comes back to what Charles Johnson, Glenn, Steven Den Beste and others have called "the culture of death" in the Arab/Moslem world - people who would rather annhilate themselves along with us than build something positive. I had objected that President Bush's policies, by seeming to confirm the worst fears of the inhabitants of the region, exacerbated rather than cured this derangement.

But then I thought of Madrid. One detail has gotten lost. The killers detonated their bombs by cell phone. They themselves got off the train safely, though alert action by the Aznar government rounded several of them up in short order.

They didn't kill themselves too.

Yes, they murdered hundreds. Yes they are evil men, mass murderers who should be killed after trial and sentencing. Yes, we have a long way to go. But they were not suicides like the destroyers of the Cole and Khobar Towers, the WTC hijackers and the numberless slaughterers of Jews in Israel and elsewhere. The President has already taught these aficionados of martyrdom to value their own lives, if not yet others. That's progress. That's a start. It is not, obviously, a final victory. But it's proof that our government's plan to change the culture of death is starting to work. Once our enemies realize the central principle of our own culture - that life is sweet - for themselves, then the next lesson is to apply the principle to others.

How do we teach that lesson? The same way we've taught the first one. And - this is crucial - with the same teachers. Soon, I expect we'll have cornered Bin Laden and Zawahiri in Pakistan or Afghanistan, started to drive American deaths back down in Iraq and provided the beginnings of a stable, multi-ethnic society in the very place it's most needed, the heart of the Arab Middle East. I like to think the path will be just a shade clearer with me no longer obstructing it.

To my Loyal Readers who have followed me this far, I very much appreciate the years of support. I realize this may lead to something of a rupture with some of you, at least for a time. But do me a favor. Think about this stuff. Just think about it.

I'm reminded of Craig Thompson's narrator, "Craig," in his graphic memoir Blankets, to which I was rather unfair in the past. The point is, "Craig" never stopped seeking the truth as he saw it, never bound himself to received ideas - his own or others. We can do no less.

Unqualified Offerings: Corrupting America's Youth Since 2001 - Your free IHS Summer Seminars list.

UNworkable - Stupid unaccountable bureaucracy! Ineffectual talking shop on the Hudson! It took the UN seven months to fire the staffer the leadership considered most responsible for allowing the August 19 bombing of its Baghdad headquarters to occur. Seven months! You'll note that when the the government of, by and for the people suffered an even bigger atrocity in September 2001 it only took the government - um. Um.

Latest Notes from the Hellmouth - Your daily dose of outrage comes, as so often, from Zero Intelligence:

MLK is one of those 'progressive' schools that suspends everybody in a fight regardless of whether they were instigating it or defending themselves. They have a solution for her problem though - for the past couple of months they've kept her alone and secluded in her classroom while the rest of her schoolmates (including her bully) go outside to play.

There is, alas, more.

A Fanboy's Labor-Saving Device - Eve Tushnet spends three paragraphs saving me work:

First let me get the polemical point out of the way: People who complain about superhero characters' vigilantism are being too literal-minded and missing the point. The situations superhero characters confront are meant to mirror or illuminate situations we face. Sometimes the vigilante nature of the superhero helps call societal conventions into question, emphasizing the primacy of conscience and placing the hero alone in a moral landscape a lot like the landscape of the Western (another very American genre--and more on this stuff soon). Sometimes vigilante status is just a way to clear away bureaucracy and real-world constraints so that the storytelling can move fast and keep a tight focus on the central character's choices. For those of us who read those serial-killer-profiling books, in the second kind of story vigilantism is m.o.; in the first kind, it's signature. Obviously, many superhero stories use both aspects of the convention, with one or the other predominating.

Comparison: the costumes. Superhero comics use costumes for a host of reasons. Mechanical: Costumes make it easier to tell the characters apart, especially when the artists keep changing. They also make it easier for readers to slide into the fantastic--they're like unicorns; when you see one you know you've left real-world conventions and should readjust your expectations accordingly. Plot: Costumes make it easier to suspend disbelief that characters with secret identities can maintain their secrecy. Thematic: Like secret identities in general, costumes help emphasize themes of identity-creation, personal vs. public persona, and the attractions and stresses of playing a role.

But costumes aren't there to suggest that dressing up in colorful spandex is actually an effective response to trouble in the world or in one's psyche. That's just not what they're doing. Ditto, IMO, vigilantism. It serves mechanical, plot, and thematic purposes, but there's no point in trying to force it from symbol into policy prescription. Therefore, criticizing it for being a lousy policy prescription misses the point.

Then she goes on to give an entirely different take on the appeal of the superhero story that is, however, at least as plausible as my own. In that light, I recall an academic symposium at which a panelist recounted the story of a gay kid who felt that Spider-Man helped him get through his adolescence because the the alienation, the compulsion to act in secret, the desire to engage society but on one's own anarchic terms spoke to him deeply.

Also: How to raise a non-reader!

But What About the Mysterious Blue Area on the Moon - Dave Allan, official second-oldest friend of Unqualified Offerings, tips me to Nobel-Laureate Steven Weinberg's critique of the President's Manned Mission to Mars program in the New York Review of Books. (Read it fast. Most NYRB articles pass behind a pay wall within a couple of weeks.)

To an extent this is a dog-bites-man story. As Weinberg himself notes

Astronomers and other scientists are generally skeptical of the value of manned space flight, and often resent the way it interferes with scientific research. NASA administrators, astronauts, aerospace contractors, and politicians typically find manned space flight just wonderful.

but Weinberg makes a plausible-sounding case that the Mars program, vaporware or not, is already cutting into NASA's science budget. He misses the obvious conspiracy theory for some reason. Which scientific research will suffer most heavily? Experimental cosmology. Which scientific research in NASA's purview would most naturally discommode the Christian fundamentalists in the President's base? Hey, I don't need two separate answers to dispose of both of these questions!

But what about the romance, dammit? It tugs at my heart. It urges me to forsake my libertarian principles for the sake of mankind's greatest adventure. Weinberg claims to feel it too:

I hope that someday men and women will walk on the surface of Mars. But before then, there are two conditions that will need to be satisfied.

One condition is that there will have to be something for people to do on Mars which cannot be done by robots. If a few astronauts travel to Mars, plant a flag, look at some rocks, hit a few golf balls, and then come back, it will at first be a thrilling moment, but then, when nothing much comes of it, we will be left with a sour sense of disillusion, much as happened after the end of the Apollo missions. Perhaps after sending more robots to various sites on Mars something will be encountered that calls for direct study by humans. Until then, there is no point in people going there.

The other necessary condition is a reorientation of American thinking about government spending. There seems to be a general impression that government spending harms the economy by taking funds from the private sector, and therefore must always be kept to a minimum. Unlike what is usually called "big science" - orbiting telescopes, particle accelerators, genome projects - sending humans to the moon and Mars is so expensive that, as long as the public thinks of government spending as parasitic on the private economy, this program would interfere with adequate support for health care, homeland security, education, and other public goods, as it has already begun to interfere with spending on science.

The last thing I want, Loyal Reader, is to get you to stop thinking of government spending as parasitic on the private economy. And even if we hurried up and became Swedes tomorrow, we presumably wouldn't believe in or be capable of infinite taxation and public spending. The Mars mission would still have to compete with your favorite basket of public goods for funding, and it will still, on Weinberg's logic, lose. Note that the apparent choice already before Weinberg is one that favors Martian trips over, among other things, expanded government health care. Weinberg clearly wants expanded government health care and such a lot more, Kim Stanley Robinson notwithstanding.

It pains the twelve-year-old me, but I have to agree - at least about wanting other things more than the Mars mission, like significant deficit reduction. When the robots discover something only humans can further study, let's talk about the wisdom and constitutionality of government-funded manned space travel again. Until then, if you want to go, do it with your own money and your own time. Put together a convincing enough plan, though, and I might chip in.

Toward More Gaudy Nights - Last week was a busy one, so I haven't been able to properly address the comment thread for "Gaudy Night" at Brainwash. I hope to get to it in the next day or two. The most sweeping objections come from Rich Puchalsky and deserve detailed comment, but in brief, I think he's prey to various levels of excessive literalism (re both the essay itself and superhero stories as well). I'll post something here when I've posted something there.

Meanwhile, Sean Collins and J.W. Hastings tripped over a grammatical infelicity of mine. I wrote

Most of the field's best writers have been liberals or leftists, so our core questions tend to get answered accordingly: the powerful should behave like social workers at home (violent social workers, mind you) and neoconservatives abroad.

By this, I was not intending to distinguish how the powerful (superheroes) should behave domestically from how they should behave internationally. It just reads that way. (Bad Jim!) I could better have written

the powerful should behave the way social workers behave at home (violent social workers, mind you) and neoconservatives behave abroad

That is, the powerful should actively intervene to "help" others, and here are two real-life models that fit how they should do so. (Because Yes, Sean, I think of the Siamese twins of neocon benevolent hegemony and Blairite humanitarian interventionism as simply the Nanny State overseas.

A Fanboy's Reviews - Yes, I've become a crummy comics blogger! Let's try to make up for it a little with some reviews:

Tell Me Something (Jason) - Basically, a James M. Cain story for furries. One-name cartoonist Jason chronicles a love triangle involving a crow poet-turned-pickpocket, his coke-snorting crow ex-girlfriend and her dog husband, who is either a crime lord or someone who just happens to have the phone numbers of hit men. And the female crow's father is a dodgy character himself, who keeps bully boys and porn photographers around. The template is silent movies - each page after the first one has two by three panels as regular as a reel of film; there's no word balloon dialogue at all, just a handful of word-only panels interspersed among the pictures like dialogue cards in a pre-talkie. The pictures carry the story. If, as Eve Tushnet, Dave Fiore and I were musing last week, page layout is to sequential art as meter is to verse, then Jason is Alexander Pope rather than Shakespeare - his six-panel grids have all the regularity of Restoration verse, and like the better Restoration verse, manages to weave a lot of event on its tight little loom.

I liked it. We are not talking timeless work of genius here - one of the reasons Jason is able to convey his wordless story is because you've seen most of it before, elsewhere - but the plot describes a satisfying spiral and the storytelling has a pleasing economy to it. The book's anthropomorphic world is amusing and baffling at once (sometimes "cartoon physics" works for our hero, the crow poet, sometimes they don't) and suggestive. (While there are other animals, dogs and crows predominate. I at least want to read a certain ethnic tension into the book's dog-crow relations.) And the package is lovely - crisp black and white line art, thick brown cardstock cover with foldovers, and only 8.95.

Light Brigade, 1 of 4 (Peter J. Tomasi and Peter Snejbjerg) - During the closing days of World War II, a company of American GIs gets caught up in a war between rebel and loyal angels. The color art is lovely. Snejbjerg does a great job of indiviuating the soldiers' looks. The snow scenes are gorgeous, the battles evocative if not altogether realistic. (I suspect the German soldiers stand too close together when charging, but hey - they're zombie!) The story is, frankly, standard-issue Vertigo eschatological horror, not that there's anything wrong with that. The human-interest hook is GI Chris Stavros, who suffers an irony surfeit at the beginning of the book. (Crouched in a foxhole, he learns that his wife has died back home and his son is crippled.) The MacGuffin is a sword that must not fall into rebel angel hands. I might have preferred a straight-up war comic. Still, Nazi zombies. Cool.

Conan #2 (Kurt Busiek and Carey Nord) - Retells Robert E. Howard's short story, "The Frost Giant's Daughter." Writer Busiek does a serviceable transcription job getting Howard's simple plot across. I've read "Frost Giant's Daughter" twice, and once this year, and detect no false notes. The art is uneven. There are some gorgeous landscapes. The panel layout is vigorous - rarely so many as six panels to a page and a lot of insets. Like Snejbjerg and Light Brigade colorist Bjarne Hansen, Nord and colorist Dave Stewart do beautiful snowscapes. The aftermath of a skirmish that crosses pages four and five, and the distant-view chase scene atop page 13 are striking. Njord's rendition of Howard's Frost Giants is impressive. As to human figures, there's good and bad. He has a gift for the outrageous musculature that has become a trope of sword and sorcery art. (For good - or evil; as Ron Edwards has pointed out, prior to the invention of the Nautilus machine - and anabolic steroids - even fit men just didn't have such physiques.) Conan and his opponents look like someone took a human-shaped net bag to Safeway's annual steak sale and just kept shoving purchases in there. But all cartoonists have their favorite views, and Nord's is one from which a charging Conan's chin all but disappears. And, maybe because the pages are shot from Nord's uninked pencils, we tend to lose Conan's eyes in shots where the character appears at any distance.

I would go so far as to say that Nord hasn't mastered the basic trick of making a character look like the same guy consistently from panel to panel and page to page. But his art has an appropriately brutal energy about it and his page designs forgive much.

Mother, Come Home (Paul Hornschemeier) - How I have feared to review this book. Because I may not be up to getting across how good it is. Right now, this is my graphic novel of the year. If it somehow loses eligibility because the chapters were originally serialized in the author's ongoing Forlorn Funnies comic, change the rules.

This is the story of a boy, Thomas Tennant, and his father. The boy's mother, the father's wife, has died, and they're trying to cope with her loss. It doesn't go so well. Hornschemeier is a young man, I've learned, but he knows an awful lot about not just sons but fathers.

Jeez, you know what? I'm going to have to try this again later. The book deserves better than I can manage to give it right now. Come back soon, but don't wait to buy it.

Counterpoint - Hesiod defends the Clinton Administration from - me.

Here's the essential problem with Jim's argument. The Clinton administration did not invade or launch a massive attack on Afghanistan for PRACTICAL reasons. Reasons that did not exist with respect to Kosovo where we had a unanimous NATO backing us up.

Hesiod makes a good point. While the original article I quoted (and various liberal blogs) stressed lack of domestic in addition to international support, the political geography of Southwest Asia was not nearly so congenial to military intervention as Southeastern Europe was. Al Qaeda's atrocities in New York and Washington didn't just change the balance of public opinion in the US; it changed it abroad as well (for a time, at least).

I think that the case for the Clinton Administration is, therefore, better than you'd think from my original item. That said, the US didn't just happen into a situation in 1999 where NATO was just begging us to take the organization to war. The US overcame reluctance among various parties and worked the media to raise the sense of urgency.

So far no evidence has come to light that the Clinton team made the same kind of effort re Afghanistan. The Taliban were terrible folks fighting a dirty civil war against various domestic opponents. That's the same sort of situation that the US has turned to rhetorical advantage time and again. We still don't know quite what combination of blandishments and threats secured Pakistani cooperation in October 2001 - some combination of them could have been tried in earlier years. (Just as a for instance: an end to anti-nuclear sanctions, lower tarriffs for Pakistani exports and a veiled threat to take out Pakistan's beloved nukes.) Might have worked. Might not have. And the 'stans were the other possible avenue. This would have provoked Russian objections. So did Kosovo, of course.

Still, the argument that the Clinton administration faced a less international situation than the post-WTC Bush Administration did is a good one.

Not Much Gets Past the Boy - Matthew Yglesias finds the flaw in the "remake the Middle East" ointment:

Along these lines, it's worth raising the question of whether the current administration really wants a democratic Iraq, or whether the reason their policies seem so unlikely to create one is that they in fact fear such a thing.

Why might that be, Matt:

Fundamentally, America's beef with Saddam was not that he was a nasty dictator (lots of nasty dictators in the Middle East) but that his policies were inimical to America's strategic interests in the region -- defense of Israel, and preventing the emergence of a hegemonic regional power in the Persian Gulf. Replacing Saddam with an elected government, however, might do very little to change any of this. Saddam's hostility to Israel was, broadly speaking, in line with public opinion. Iraq's quest for hegemony, meanwhile, is a logical outgrowth of the factual situation. Unlike Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, it has a large population; unlike Egypt or Syria it has a lot of oil; and unlike Iran, it's majority-Arab and hence suited for regional leadership.

But wait, there's more!

There are large Shi'a populations in Saudi Arabia and at least one other Gulf state (Bahrain, I think) and they're not very well treated. It would be natural for a democratically elected Shi'ite president of Iraq to see himself as the champion of the rights of his co-religionists right across the border, possibly through methods including military intervention. If a legitimate Iraqi regime were to use force against, say, the Saudi monarchy, it's sort of hard for me to see how the United States could credibly characterize such a move as illegitimate.

Matt does forget one thing - the core principle that we could invoke in such cases: "We decide."

As to the rest of it, near as I can tell, the public-consumption version of Neo Theory is that Arabs and Muslims hate Israel and America because they are oppressed. Not by us, you understand, and certainly not by Israel, which is the only democracy in the Middle East if you live in the right zip code. Rather, repressive Arab and Muslim governments scapegoat Israel (and the US) and their silly subjects believe it. Democratize the Middle East and elected governments will have no need for scapegoats because everything will be swell all day and well into the evening hours, and the citizens of those governments, freed of state propaganda, will leave off their mad rages against Tel Aviv and Washington.

The evidence for this theory seems poor, especially as regards Israel. The US, for instance, has more citizens of Arab and Muslim background than ever, including not just recent immigrants but people who have lived here a generation and more. It's fair to say, I think, that their views on Middle Eastern issues touching on Israel and US foreign policy are a lot closer to those of their confreres in the Old Country than to the New Republic's. And as Fouad Ajami writes today, the democratic welfare states of Europe have been the incubators of the most radical Islam the modern world has yet seen. (Via Outside the Beltway.)

What got Matt started on this line of thought was Juan Cole's reporting of Iraqi reactions to the assassination of Sheik Yassin, late of Hamas.