Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  This long defunct series is soon to be revived full time, but the current kerfuffle over the New Yorker cover is practically begging for a discussion about the nature of satire, its history, form, and intents.  

In the past few days, a lot of text has been spilled over what is and isn't necessary for satire to work.  I want to make one thing clear from the outset: I'm not here to discuss whether the New Yorker cover was offensive or not.  I am here to clear up some misconceptions about what satire is, what it "should" be, and how it works.  I'll be addressing specific criticisms at the end of diary - but first let's have a primer on satire itself:

True to my diary of yesterday, I did, indeed, load up my kids, pack a summery lunch, and drive 20 miles to Concord to swim and hike at Walden Pond. On this dark day with its new FISA implications, I will admit that I wanted an escape, a way to pretend that it was sunny and bright and pre-2000. I chose Walden because I wanted to honor Thoreau, that American thinker who inspired MLK and Ghandi, the innovative, inspirational, independent spirit of him. I wanted to feel close to the True America.

With the FISA vote coming up tomorrow, I plan to spend the day at Walden Pond, a place that has provided guidance and comfort to me at various points during my life. When I was a kid, I swam there. Granted, I didn't know about Thoreau back then. I was 6. But I also spent the day before the biggest professional challenge of my life: my dissertation defense at Walden Pond. It seems laughable to me now that I ever worried about that defense. Seven years later, I'm concerned more about defending the Constitution.

"Guests Of The Nation," by Mike Palecek

Illustrations by Michael Paul Miller, Russell Brutsche, Allison Healy.

Astounding, astonishing, and haunting, "Guests Of The Nation" offers an intriguing alternative to what the late George Carlin called the 9/11 "consensus reality."  Philip K. Dick would love how this deft American novel captures our imagination and never lets go.  Mike Palecek has graced us with a sparkling gem you'll read non-stop and more than once.
— Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt Col [ret.], USAF, Ph.D, working at the Pentagon on 9/11

In the course of my reading, sometimes I come across quotes from classic literature that seem all too apropos of our current political climate. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the protagonist and steamship capture, Marlowe, is telling his listeners of his visit to "the Company," a brutal colonial enterprise, to receive his commission to travel into the African interior.  Here is the exchange he has with one of its clerks:

When you despair, as I do, frequently, of what will become of you...
When you are out of work and have no money to pay the rent...
When your boss is a tyrant and you don't know how you can last another day...
When the politics finally has you beaten down because the idiots outnumber you...

There is an answer.  Albeit a temporary answer...an answer nonetheless...

And her name is Connie Willis.

Connie is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met...and I consider it an incredible privilege that I was able to meet her at all...at a few cocktail parties, years ago.  She probably doesn't remember me, but that's all right.

She is a brilliant writer.  That's all that matters.

More below the fold.

Crossposted to eenrblog, plf515's weekly book entry, my livejournal, and anywhere else it's welcome.

Just the books I read last month, with quotes and commentary.

Human Rights: Abridgement (The Administration's Argument)

Suspending Human Rights in order to win the war on Global Terrorism is a matter of emergency management regulation.  That is, in the event of an emergency, the state must be prepared to rummage through the civilian population in order to seek out and defend the civilian population against the terrorists who hide among them.  Anything short of racial profiling makes it difficult for the state to know (exactly) who is and who is not a terrorist and Human Rights proves to be an increasing impediment for the state to play offense.  Moreover, the enemy in the war on Global Terrorism is one that wears a civilian mask, whose fundamental distinction from regular civilians is ideological, and therefore cannot be found in a uniform, flag, or currency.  Instead, the distinction is found in the enemy’s words, networks, and actions.  

Robert Penn Warren talked about two major concepts in his novel All The King's Men.  Through the character of Jack Burden, we the reader are introduced to both:  The Great Twitch and The Great Sleep.

Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd books feature prominently in my father's journals from 1939 through 1944.  Sinclair's protagonist, the illegitimate son of a wealthy man and a courtesan (named "Beauty" and a happy pleasant woman in spite of what might have been considered her shocking morals), grew up in Europe and met many of the movers and shakers of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.  I read the first book, World's End and took much from it (on my summer reading list is Dragon's Teeth, which won a Pulitzer, and is about the rise of the Nazis in Germany.  

When I saw the first couple of episodes of "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" I saw that what Lucas was doing was much the same type of thing.  Presenting history and events to educate kids, but also to entertain them (adults too, of course).  On this Memorial Day, I wanted to note the fine work he did with WWI.

"Iowa Terror," by Mike Palecek former federal prisoner for peace, small-town reporter, Iowa Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives, 5th District, 2000 election. Palecek received 67,000 votes on an anti-military, anti-prison, pro-immigration platform.

It's TERROR ... in a small town.

Follow the perils of Jesus Iowa as he is pursued by all the traditional idiots of a small town.

"Iowa Terror," by Mike Palecek, former federal prisoner, small-town reporter, Iowa congressional candidate.

"Mike Palecek writes with wit, compassion, and always with a profound social conscience."

— Howard Zinn

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

It Can't Happen Here is the title of a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis.  It raises the question whether a rightwing, fascist political party can come to power in the US.  It used to be that the very idea was preposterous, unthinkable, impossible.  I'm no longer so sure of that. And acknowledging the frightening possibility has changed my reading of events in other countries in frightening, perplexing, alarming ways.

Join me south of the border.

I spent a good part of yesterday in a doctor's office because of a headache I've had for the last 9 days, so until I can get my "irrelevant crap" together, I thought I would offer this little pop culture diversion. Given that Iron Man is at the top of the box office, The Sprit and new Batman & Incredible Hulk films are coming later this year, and in the works are Iron Man 2, Superman: Man Of Steel, film versions of Thor (possibly with Brad Pitt as the title character), Captain America, The Avengers, and Watchmen, to name a few, I thought I would offer this question for the night:

Favorite Hero, Favorite Villain?

I've touched on this subject in the past, but I've always found the genre fascinating not only because of the literary qualities, but some of the political, religious & other sociological aspects. For example, there are dog people & cat people. Some are Elvis people & other are Beatles people. And then there are those that like Batman & those that are with Superman.

If embezzlers and MBAs had a Hall of Fame, Nicolas Fouquet would be shamelessly prominent.  As the Minister of Finance during the early reign of Louis XIV, Fouquet maintained a bookkeeping system modeled after the Gordian Knot.  It could be said that he would collect all the revenues but was willing to share some with the government, or at least the officials he liked.

Fouquet had the finest home in France.  It seems unlikely that he afforded it just by brownbagging his lunches.  The thought certainly occurred to Louis XIV, who evidently resented being the social inferior of his minister.  The King ordered Fouquet arrested for embezzlement.  There was a public trial, and the verdict could hardly be in doubt, but the judges proved unusally sympathetic to the accused.  (Had they been past recipients of Fouquet's generosity?)  They sentenced him to banishment; you might well suspect that Fouquet planned a comfortable exile.   The King, however, overruled that lenient sentence and condemned Fouquet to life imprisonment.  The disgraced minister spent the last fifteen years of his life in a less than luxurious cell.   He died this day in 1680.

"We can lie in our beds and hear the moans of dying snobs who are soon to find equality for once in their lives."

This is the raving hallucination of a drug addict, Hypo Sleigh, speaking as one already in his grave.  But he is delivering this fantasy to the bored mates in his jail cell at the turn of the century, in Jim Tully's "Shadows of Men."  Tully's books are mostly forgotten, but they are torn from his experience as a road kid (a young hobo), an apprentice roughneck in circuses and traveling shows, and a boxer.  Tully came of age with the lowest of the low, and his writing about it eventually earned him a three acre estate on Toluca Lake.

And somehow, that one line from Tully brought to mind a book by the brilliant Norman Spinrad.  His "Bug Jack Barron" from 1969, is a frightening and prescient novel that points at the ultimate exploitation of the rich by the poor.  The way in which those "dying snobs" could escape Tully's final equality

"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee"

"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville (1851)
(and of course, borrowed for "Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn" (1982))

So I figure it doesn’t matter if you would rather cite Melville or Star Trek--either way I’ve caught your attention and summed up Hillary Clinton’s campaign at the same time!

As I watch Hillary Clinton implicitly endorse John McCain over Barack Obama, I can’t help but think of the warfare of Khan--Genghis or Noonien Singh I leave to you--and the obsession of Captain Ahab. Am I the only one who sees in her single minded need for the Presidency, and the lengths she will go to fill that aching void, the same scorched earth "if I can’t have it I’ll destroy it" approach to the battle, and that same "damn the Pequod and it’s crew" approach to the hunt?

In the 1980’s science fiction went through one of its periodic transformations when cyberpunk burst onto the scene. Writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and later Neal Stephenson brought us a less than bold new world based on then current trends in technology, social breakdown and economics, and the dystopian style changed entirely the direction that Science Fiction was going. Gone was the sterile utopia of the Star Trek Universe, with everyone trim and dressed in form-fitting lycra walking hospital-clean decks of the far future. The world of cyberpunk was just around the next graffiti-covered corner, waiting only the next mega-corp merger to unfold its high-tech with broken windows visions.