Amber Sparks
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Happy Labor Day a Little Late; Michael Moore is Awesome
September 7, 2010 — 6 Comments
His response to Rahm E.’s alleged “Fuck the UAW” comment? Brilliant. For instance:
Did you know that back when I was a kid if you had a parent making a union wage, only one parent had to work?! And they were home by 3 or 4pm, 5:30 at the latest! We had dinner together! Dad had four weeks paid vacation. We all had free health and dental care. And anyone with decent grades went to college and it didn’t fucking bankrupt them. (And if you ever used the F-word, the nuns would straighten you out in ways that even you couldn’t bear to hear about).
Then a Republican fired all the air traffic controllers, a Democrat gave us NAFTA and millions of jobs were moved overseas (hey, didn’t you work in that White House, too? “Fuck the UAW, baby!”). Unions got scared and beaten down, a frat boy became president and, like a drunk out of control, spent all our fucking money and our children’s money, too. Fuck.
And now your assistant’s grandma has to work at fucking McDonald’s. Ask her for pictures of what the middle class life used to look like. It was effing cool! I’ll bet grandma doesn’t say “Fuck the UAW!”
Happy (late) Labor Day to anyone who’s every worked long hours at a tough job, or two tough jobs, just to make ends meet. I’m sure that includes just about everyone I know, since I don’t know too many rich people. Or, really, any, now that I think about it.
Salvatore Pane’s Post-Apocalyptic Nixon Story for the Ancient City Project, Up at Necessary Fiction
September 7, 2010
Salvatore Pane is awesome. And partially, yes, because his writing is amazing and because wears many hats, including comic book/graphic novel writer and reviewer extraordinaire.
But I have to admit that my first impression when visiting his blog for the first time wasn’t “Oh, wow, look at all the great places he’s published,” or even “look at these clever and thoughtful and interesting posts,” which they by the way always are. No, the first thing I thought was, “This guy is clearly awesome, because he likes the Angry Video Game Nerd.”
And this is maybe the reason I feel like Sal’s writing is so oddly familiar, in a completely original way. I feel like he comes from a place where I’ve always felt very comfortable (and where many of us have), where pop culture and writing are completely intermingled but also elevated and deservedly so. A place where it’s not nerdy or lowbrow to be way, way into 8bit games or G.I. Joe or Muscle Men or giant monsters or whatever you like, and not infantile to want to examine your childhood through the adult prism of art.
While a lot of writers pay lip service to this concept, I feel like few get it really right. And Sal understands how pop culture is really deadly serious, in a hilarious kind of way, better than most. That’s why, no doubt he writes about it and in it and around it so often. And nails it most of the time. I aspire to someday achieve the literary greatness and absolute trueness of this sentence alone:
Today, even as I’m beginning to forget the voices of dead relatives or friends, I can still hear the laughing dog in Duck Hunt.
So with that all said, when you read this story you’ll start to understand exactly what I mean. And why Salvatore Pane is a writer to watch. Go! Read!
On Being Disappointed in Barack Obama
September 2, 2010 — 1 Comment
In the past few months, I’ve had a lot of friends (particularly DC policy wonks) ask me how I can be disappointed with President Obama when he’s accomplished so much! I’ve answered that the accomplishments didn’t DO enough, that if passing bills doesn’t bring change it doesn’t matter, that his administration has betrayed labor, that they’ve been too hard on teachers in trying to push for education reform–probably because they don’t really understand the problems that beset education and teachers, that he’s been too willing to compromise on the things that we never should have compromised on, that he squandered his goodwill too early. But my disappointment – as one of the earliest Obama supporters, I’ve believed in his ability to bring change for so long so it hurts all the more now – has made me inarticulate and incoherent on the subject.
Luckily, I have a very articulate, much-smarter friend and colleague who has summed up the reasons for disappointment in a sharp, spot-on piece on his blog. Jason Lefkowitz, speaking for me and for many, many other disappointed progressives:
In the final analysis, the measure of a President is not how many programs he passes, or how sweeping those programs are. It’s how those initiatives impact the lives of the American people. The bills and the programs are not the ball game; they are merely the ball.
And while it is true that the Obama agenda has been legislatively ambitious, it has also been, in practical terms, invisible to people outside Washington, D.C. A stimulus was passed, true; but it was so severely gimped that it barely dented the unemployment rate. Health reform was passed, true; but the parts that will touch most peoples’ lives won’t take effect until 2014. Financial reform was passed, true; but the “too big to fail” banks that dragged us into financial crisis managed to pull most of its teeth. And so forth.
Plenty of bills have been passed, in other words; but for the average American, very little has changed in their daily lives. They still live in fear of losing their job or their health insurance. They still struggle under the burden of crushing credit card interest and deceptive fees from their banks. They still see their government run with greater concern for the tender sensibilities of hedge fund billionaires than for the future of the middle class.
They voted for change, but when they look around, there is precious little change to be seen.
In Washington, the wonks doth protest too much. “He’s passed bills! Look! Legislation! See!” But when I talk to my parents, my friends, my loved ones back home in the Midwest, they don’t focus on those legislative accomplishments. They still like Obama and they give him credit for the health care bill and other achievements–but they don’t see the change. They still see friends losing jobs. They still have family members who can’t afford health care. They still see the down economy, see growth continuing to lag, can easily imagine it tanking again. They wonder where the change is that that voted for. They wonder whose champion Obama really is. They don’t believe he’s bad for the country, or wrong for America, but they don’t see things getting better. So what do legislative accomplishments matter to them?
Jason’s whole piece is here. And it’s well-worth reading.
“The Culture of the Western Enlightenment is Better”
August 26, 2010 — 4 Comments
Really worth-reading piece from Susan Jacoby on religious abuses and refusing to let the Right be the defenders of true Enlightenment values.
Two Must-Read Interviews
August 22, 2010
Why must-read? Because the publications and the writers in question are tippy-top notch. And both writers are also very funny people, with a dry wry wit about themselves and the writing world in general. And because Barry Graham and Ethel Rohan conducted these interviews, and they are pros and heroes. So. Read please. Enjoy. Learn.
Scott Garson at Third Face
We Just Don’t Know, Okay?
July 30, 2010 — 4 Comments
(And furthermore, we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. And that’s okay, too.) I like this piece on agnosticism a lot, especially this:
Let’s get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.
That doubt in the possibility is, I think, the reason for my love of the arts and humanities, the reason I write, the reason I create and read and study stuff like history and philosophy. It’s like Rosenbaum writes:
Agnosticism doesn’t fear uncertainty. It doesn’t cling like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates uncertainty and has been doing so since before quantum physics revealed the uncertainty that lies at the very groundwork of being.
I don’t share his disdain for atheists’ certainty–and I don’t necessarily think their “faith” in science is the same as a religious faith, given that the one is based on rationality and the other on something wholly irrational. But the whole thing quite nicely sums up how many of us agnostics feel about being called cowardly atheists. Or at least, how I feel about it.
More Stuff to Read
July 27, 2010
Ethel Rohan’s short shorts in the new FriGG. Well, really the whole new FriGG. Fantastic and beautiful as always.
This crazy good, original, terrifying, funny, moving story by Greg Gerke in Annalemma.
We always knew it, didn’t we, ladies? Now you can confirm it by reading this piece on the myth of the fairer sex, in the American Prospect.
Can liberalism still win? Jon Chait thinks, yes, we can. (Okay, that was cheap. But read this anyway.)
Kay Ryan on the Wonderfulness of Community Colleges
July 12, 2010
I think community colleges are underrated and fantastic. I think more people should take advantage of them. I think Kay Ryan kind of rules for realizing this:
“I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly — and with very little financial encouragement — saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, expect perhaps the bicycle.”
–Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate, quoted in Boneshaker, Issue 42-400.
(Lifted pretty much directly from Balloon Juice–thank you, mistermix.)
Tom Bissell at Powell’s on Video Games and Violence, Among other Things
July 8, 2010 — 2 Comments
Few things piss me off more than righteous attitudes about violent video games and children. Like many people my age, I and my friends grew up using cheat codes to do fatalities on Mortal Kombat and we all seem to have turned out okay. (Some of us also listened to a lot of gangsta rap and metal and played Dungeons and Dragons and yet strangely, none of us has shot up a school or slaughtered his or her family. Shocking, I know.)
It’s not that I think kids SHOULD be playing violent video games or watching R-rated movies or whatever–I just think parents should make that decision, not Washington or some censor board or parental advisory committee. And I think blaming violence on video games and heavy metal is an easy, false, and sometimes dangerous answer (the very probably wrongful conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham was in part based on the FACT THAT HE OWNED AN IRON MAIDEN POSTER AND NO I AM NOT KIDDING I WISH I WERE) and that there are always, as Tom Bissell says, other places for the bad son to go:
The other day I finished Columbine, Dave Cullen’s unbelievably good and bulldozingly definitive account of the Columbine Massacre. The perpetrators of the massacre were both fans of a modded version of the classic shooter Doom. Much was made of that at the time. Less was made of the fact that one of the boys, Eric Harris, was also a classic-lit buff. Shortly before the massacre, he quoted a line from one of the most transcendent works of literature in the language, The Tempest: “Good wombs have borne bad sons.” For Eric Harris, the ecstasies of violent inspiration could be found everywhere. If we dutifully close off those forms of creative expression we find distasteful, the bad son will go elsewhere.
Read the whole, very good essay here.
Soda Series Reading in Brooklyn on July 18th
July 7, 2010
What are you doing on July 18th at 7 pm? If you’re in NYC, you COULD be attending a really cool event in Brooklyn: Soda Series Installment #2.
The Soda Series is a bimonthly reading/conversation of writers at the Soda Bar in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, hosted by Greg Gerke and John Dermot Woods. This particular installment will be a conversation with Matt Bell, John Madera, Jeff Parker and me. I feel awfully humbled to be included alongside these ultra-talented and ultra-prolific writers, and I’m hoping to learn a lot from them during this event.
Hope to see some of you there, too, if you’re in the area. And thanks so much to Greg Gerke for inviting me to participate in such a cool reading series.
