Archive for March, 2010
Hakadosh Barack Who?
by Josh K-sky on Mar.22, 2010, under Politics
Like Matthew Yglesias, I was impressed by Jacob Weisberg’s forceful rebuttal of Israeli apologetics in Slate.com:
But if the stupidity of the settlements is obvious to most American Jews, it is not to the majority of Israelis, who have chosen a prime minister who represents the rejection of a two-state solution. At the same time, American liberals have recoiled from the pattern of miscalculation and inhumanity—there is no other word for it—in Israel’s attempts to protect itself from Hezbollah and Hamas.
However, Weisberg’s conclusion — that this would lead to the much-predicted Republican resurgence among Jewish voters — was surprisingly unsourced and unbuttressed to me:
Barring a breakthrough in the peace process or a change in the Israeli government, I’d predict the drift to continue to continue, with Likud-Republican-religious-AIPAC supporters settling into one camp and Kadima-Democratic-secular-J-Street supporters coalescing into another. [...] For Democrats, the fracturing of Jewish support, which is crucial both in terms of money and swing votes in a few key states, hardly bodes well. Those who undertook the “great schlep“- to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama may be getting an earful from them now. Obama won nearly 80 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. I doubt he will get as much of it in 2012.
There’s relatively little evidence that Jewish voters care enough about Israel to switch party allegiance. (There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence. Have you met my family?) Sarah Posner in the American Prospect, looking at exit-poll data from the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life, found that “Obama garnered 79 percent of the Jewish vote (which looked more like Gore’s 78 percent than Kerry’s 74 percent), despite a relentless campaign of vicious smears, rumors and insinuations targeted at that community and claims that Obama was anti-Israel and a friend of terrorists.”
According to this chart, Obama’s gains with Jews (+4%) were slightly lower than his gains with other groups and with voters overall (+5%). It’s arguable that another Democratic candidate, who was hit with as much “soft on terror” but less “seekrit Muslim”, would have been more popular with Jews the same year. It’s also possible that it’s harder to make gains as the scale of the majority grows; OTOH “blacks voted 95-4 for Obama (up from 88-11 in 2004)”. Regardless, until the evidence in, I think Jews are going to continue, in the words of Milton Himmelfarb, “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”
Haquelbac
by Josh K-sky on Mar.21, 2010, under Uncategorized
“Please link to Haquelbac,” writes John Emerson, idiocentrist and soi-disant troll. “The world needs to be informed that Haquelbac exists.” Surely we can accomplish the former without affecting the latter one way or another.
Anyway, in case one of you vampire dental anatomy enthusiasts makes it over to this entry, you may enjoy John Emerson’s philology of the horrible octopus; the rest of you may enjoy comparing les bousingots to your hipster friends.
Emerson is a public intellectual in glancing contact with his public, a Lake Wobegonian of the above averagest caliber, and a grump of the highest order. And here, we know from grump.
Greenberg
by Josh K-sky on Mar.21, 2010, under Movies
Greenberg, written and directed by Noah Baumbach and starring Ben Stiller, is an logical extension of both men’s bodies of work. Either Grover or Max from Kicking and Screaming, half-continuing their failures to launch, never jettisoning their armatures of referentiality substituting for emotional connection, could have turned into Greenberg the character. And any one of half a dozen of Ben Stiller’s comedies, stripped of a comic rhythm of building and releasing tension, could have turned into Greenberg the movie. Greenberg is a comedy that doesn’t use jokes. It is a comedy without a skin.
UPDATE: My writing partner uses the heuristic that “comedy is about rage, drama is about empathy.” I think Greenberg is a model intersection.
Choker #1 & 2
by Joshua Malbin on Mar.20, 2010, under Comics
It’s rare that I buy a comic for the artist rather than the writer. Ben Templesmith is one of the very few exceptions. He’s the artist who did Fell with Warren Ellis and Criminal Macabre with Steve Niles. (He’s probably most famous for 30 Days of Night, but I haven’t read that yet.) He’s invented this style that overlays uncertain lines with very dark watercolors, creating a mood perfectly suited to horror and crime comics. His pages look like blood spatters seen through fog. Many, many panels are drawn in odd perspectives, sometimes extreme close-ups of parts of characters faces or of scenes off to the side of the action.
This time, his art is in the service of a kitchen-sink story by neophyte author Ben McCool that I’m enjoying pretty thoroughly. It’s based around a washed-out cop with an Evil Dead possessed hand returning to a force full of genetically enhanced supercops to track down a designer biotech drug dealer through a city full of vampires, zombies, and I think possibly demons. It’s only going to be a six-issue self-contained arc, so enjoy it while you can.
Preview below.
Desperate and Disgusting, Cont.
by Joshua Malbin on Mar.13, 2010, under New York, Politics
Hiram Monserrate is essentially running on pure gay-baiting. There’s nothing else for him. Mind you, he voted for gay marriage a couple of times.
Via Joe. My. God.
The “Si se puede!” at the end is in part because Monserrate, having been booted from the Democratic party, is running on the newly invented Yes We Can! party line. He’s also stolen Obama’s logo, against the wishes of the DNC.
Fortunately none of this BS seems to be working, as Peralta leads by 45 points in the latest poll.
Disgusting and Desperate
by Joshua Malbin on Mar.09, 2010, under New York, Politics
It takes some balls, after being expelled from the NY State Senate for lying about assaulting your girlfriend, to try to regain your seat through naked gay-bashing. Hiram Monserrate is truly just vile.
Footnotes in Gaza
by Joshua Malbin on Mar.07, 2010, under Comics
I’ve wondered what Joe Sacco was doing with himself recently. He hasn’t published a major work since Safe Area Gorazde in 2000, and not even any new minor work since The Fixer in 2003. Well, now I know: for the last eight years he’s been working on Footnotes in Gaza, the most important comic of 2009 or 2010. (Depending on how you count it. It’s listed with a publication date of December 2009, but I’ve only seen it in stores beginning two weeks ago.)
Back in 2002, during the lead-up to the Iraq war and in its earliest days, Joe Sacco was in the southernmost part of Gaza, close to the Egyptian border, interviewing survivors of two events from the war between Israel and Egypt in 1956. One of these, as reported by survivors, was a simple massacre: many of the men in a town and adjoining refugee camp were lined up and shot. The second is more complicated. Israeli soldiers gathered all the men in a second town and refugee camp and selected those they thought were fighting for Egypt to be bussed to a prison. During the course of the day some men were shot for not following orders or beaten to death.
Interwoven with these accounts are Sacco’s observations of life in Gaza as he travels around those refugee camps conducting interviews with old survivors. It’s a sad, cramped place whose residents are not only angry at Israel, for shooting at them and bulldozing their homes, but also at the Palestinian Authority, for selling them out, and often at Hamas and other militants for attracting Israeli guns, tanks, and rockets to their neighborhoods. (2002, remember, was considerably before the Bush administration egged the Palestinian Authority into the armed conflict with Hamas that lost them all control over Gaza.) We see the same neighborhoods in their 1956 incarnations, as fairly new UN refugee camps, and in their much more built-up and crowded 2002 aspects, filled with teenagers who have never lived in a normal place and have nothing to do but follow Sacco around and make trouble.
There is nothing intrinsically important about the two events that have drawn Sacco’s attention. They are two small war crimes in a 50-year war full of crimes on both sides. But consciously or not, by reconstructing events from eyewitness testimony Sacco echoes every Holocaust documentary since and most especially including Shoah. It is jarring to see young Jews, some of them surely child Holocaust survivors or the children of survivors, conducting roundups and lining up men against walls barely ten years after World War II.
There is no way a book like this could avoid being an accusation against the state of Israel, though Sacco does include un-cartooned interviews and documents in appendices to provide Israeli perspectives on the past and current events he depicts. And there is perhaps no way to recommend it as strongly as I would like to without taking part in that accusation. But my own reaction, for what it’s worth, was closest to the perspective of John Sayles’ Men with Guns: it’s true that there are two sides to any conflict, but they aren’t the two sides fighting, they are the men with guns and the people without. All young men grouped and trained to kill are monsters.
Preview here.
Best Of The Decade; or, The Imperfect Transition
by Josh K-sky on Mar.05, 2010, under music
Over at Come In Threes, America’s Favorite Kiwi B-Diddy Disco passed on a request from the Dan Schwartz Blog for contributors’ favorite albums of the decade.
I peered into my iTunes stats, wandered over to my CD shelves in the other room, and put together this list: