Joshua Malbin

The Los Angeles Times/USC poll finds that support for legalized marijuana leads at 49%, but is soft, with one-third of supporters only “somewhat” supporting it:

Voters were also split over whether legalized marijuana would worsen social problems, such as increasing crime and triggering higher marijuana use among teenagers. Those concerns appear to have much more potency with voters than the debate over tax revenues. Among those who oppose the initiative, 83% think it would add to the state’s social woes; 55% of married women also believe that.

Me, May 20:

The talking points in favor of legalization are simple: regulate and tax it like alcohol and reap more than $1 billion of revenue that can patch the holes in our budget. These are terrible talking points, and I think it’s because of this mostly bloodless approach to the issue that the initiative will fail.

The one-third of supporters who polled as weak will mostly not vote; a few will be turned to “no” votes. What if we generously assume that one-third hold to yes, one-third convert to no, and one-third don’t vote, and also that the 10% who answered “don’t know” or refused to answer don’t vote? The measure goes down, 55-45. I think it will be closer than that, but that kind of loss doesn’t feel extreme.

I’d like to see an ad for legalization that forgot about the tax revenue case and showed a boring looking middle-aged couple saying something along the lines of, “We don’t really smoke much pot anymore. It was pretty fun when we were younger, but these days we prefer a nice glass of wine. Still, I wouldn’t mind an occasional hit, and certainly, no one should go to jail for it. We’ll tell our kids what we’ve already told them about alcohol: your body isn’t ready for it now, but it’s something you might enjoy occasionally in moderation.” Then some policy case foofara, followed by a tag of the couple saying, “Oh, you remember that party where you shared that spliff with Kenny? That was trippy, man…”  and being embarrassing dorks.

I don’t think it would turn the election, but it would start to address the emotional content of the civic debate in a way that “use taxes will fill the budget gap” doesn’t.

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“Hmm. This van has a Max Cargo Capacity instead of a Max Payload.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Max Payload is a much better porn name.”

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Fuck you, Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura, for making me almost cry on the F train. Seriously, I was like this close. Fuck you for writing the Bridge to Terabithia of comics.

I’ve written a lot of negative reviews recently, and a lot of the positive reviews I’ve written have been half-hearted at best.  It’s been a long time since I got to write a rave about a book I didn’t suspect beforehand I was going to love. I Kill Giants is why I read comics.

It’s about a fifth-grade girl named Barbara who’s a little undersized, friendless, and really weird. She plays D&D instead of hanging out with kids her age. She gets sent to the principal’s office for disrupting career day—because she already has a career, thank you very much, giant-killing—and then to the school psychologist’s office. She carries a magical giant-killing hammer named Coveleski, after a turn-of-the-2oth-century baseball player. Her sister looks after her and her brother and there’s an unspeakable horror living upstairs.

Childhood escapes from troubled home lives into fantasy are hardly unexplored territory, but Kelly and Niimura execute Barbara’s perfectly. The sense of genuine menace builds as elements of Barbara’s imagination come to life in the real world. Giants are coming, and her crudely drawn familiars can’t help her, they can only die. The major villain, when he appears, would be terrifying to a child.

Seriously, just buy it. Buy it immediately.

Preview below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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I don’t think this November’s California Marijuana Legalization Initiative will pass. According to Joe Mathews at Planet Zero, it’s tied in the polls (a surprise to me — another poll, touted by advocates, touted upper-50s support) and it’s losing with women, seniors and Latinos. The election is five and a half months away, however, and neither the Yes nor the No campaign has taken off in earnest.

The talking points in favor of legalization are simple: regulate and tax it like alcohol and reap more than $1 billion of revenue that can patch the holes in our budget. These are terrible talking points, and I think it’s because of this mostly bloodless approach to the issue that the initiative will fail.

The No position has an advantage in every election; people are reflexively suspicious of initiatives. (This seems not to be the case regarding initiatives promising stiffer criminal penalties.) The No campaign against marijuana legalization will be mostly fought by parents’ groups and police groups, who will go back to the Reefer Madness well, calling marijuana addictive and predicting horrible social consequences for children if they can access the devil weed as easily as they can find someone to buy them cigarettes (though I’ve been told by under-18s that it’s easier to buy pot from the old dope peddler than it is cigarettes from terrified store clerks). It will be an emotional campaign, and it will depend less on the strength of its arguments as much as it will on the ambivalence of the electorate. Consider what strikes me as one of the more effective lines of attack:

“We are quite concerned that by legalizing marijuana, it will definitely lower the perception of risk, and we will see youth use go through the roof,” said Aimee Hendle, a spokeswoman for Californians for Drug Free Youth.

I don’t think the perception of risk attached to marijuana is all that great, and I think youth use will depend mainly on price, which will depend mainly on tax rates. A voter is likely to have tried marijuana (102 million Americans over the age of 12 have), but what the Yes campaign hasn’t quite gotten its head around is that plenty of them didn’t like it, maintain a comfortable hypocrisy around their ability to procure it without penalty, and would like their children to use less of it than they did.

I also think there’s some wishful thinking among advocates that the experiment with medical marijuana and quasi-legalization has eased Californians’ fears, or that they would prefer outright legalization to the wink-and-nod around the medical marijuana regime. Again, this is a place where since no one can craft a forceful, emotional argument that legalization is superior to casual users free-riding on the suffering of actual patients, the emotional brutalism of the No campaign is likely to gain more traction.

I’ll certainly vote in favor of legalization, and I encourage our vast and influential readership to do so as well. (Hey there!) But I suspect that it will poll between tied and slightly in favor for most of the lead-up and will finally lose by a small margin. I would love to be proven wrong.

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This is the first article about Andrew Cuomo in a long time that’s made me seriously consider sticking with Paterson in the primary.

Their relationship of five years has already put her at the center of a political dynasty and raised the possibility that the state’s next first lady will be a celebrity chef, decorator and party planner whose wealth and star power outstrip that of the governor himself.

Just horrifying.

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I found Scott’s article interesting and informative. I do not think he will care but just in case he is the type of person who does believe in lifelong learning and collegiality, I thought I would share my thought about why I was offended. I would think a historian would understand the concept of trigger words that offend groups of people and indicate prejudice. Such as when he wrote, “gun nuts.”

–from the 11:30am  Steve Parscale comment on “Amazing Disgrace”, Scott McLemee’s review of Michael Bellesiles’s latest move.

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OMG So Awesome

Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism.

…

A lot of these guys I was reading about in my American Studies class were German and Italian social scientists from the University of Frankfurt,” he says. “Once you see what their plan was, you realize that it was implemented. It was taking over the cultural institutions. The left is smart enough to understand that the way to change a political system is through its cultural systems. So you look at the conservative movement—working the levers of power, creating think tanks, and trying to get people elected in different places—while the left is taking over Hollywood, the music industry, the churches. They did it through academia; they did it with K-12. You look back at the last forty years, and people didn’t put up a fight.”

Absolutely.  The last 70 years of American politics have been the slow triumph of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, et. al.  I’m pretty sure Adorno, if he were still alive, would have appeared in one of those will.i.am videos during the Obama campaign.

Really I just have to quote Adorno himself:

Faced by corrupt public opinion and the press…[Flaubert] thought he could rely on posterity, a bourgeoisie delivered from stupidity, to give due honour to its authentic critic.  But he underestimated stupidity: the society he represents cannot speak its own name, and as it has become total, so stupidity, like intelligence, has become absolute. … Fame resulting from objective processes in a market society, always fortuitous and often unsought, yet with an aura of justice and free choice, has been liquidated.  It has become wholly a function of paid propagandists and is measured in terms of the investment risked by the bearer of a name or the interests behind him.

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On Glee a few episodes back, Rachel produces a revival of 70′s story-song “Run Joey Run” as part of a plot to vamp up her reputation. What Puck (or any other participant) doesn’t know is that she’s not just casting him alone as the love object, but instead has enlisted all three of her male attractors. The final video shows Rachel in a doomed romance with a boy played alternately by Puck, Finn and Jesse.

Since Rachel introduced her project with a suggestion that her audience might not have all the necessary film vocabulary to appreciate her project, I was prepared for some kind of winking acknowledgement of That Obscure Object of Desire (previously here). But instead, Rachel’s advanced film knowledge was just a jokey reference to her use of bad iMovie effects, and everybody got mad at her for showing how many boys she had revolving around her.

I thought it was cool. Buñuel vs Lea Michele! ¿Quien es mas macho?

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Kill Shakespeare is built around an ambitious concept: Hamlet, at the behest of Richard III, goes on a quest to kill Shakespeare, the shadowy wizard who shapes and ruins his life and those of the comic’s other Shakespearean characters (Juliet, Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, Othello, etc.).  Unfortunately, at least in this first issue the execution is falling short of that ambition.

The first problem is with the narrative voice, for which authors Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col have chosen a generic kind of pseudo-Elizabethan elevated diction: “Hamlet, none can find Shakespeare. I have lost scores of my own men trying to find the coward to drive him to the light. If you are truly who I believe, then only you can find his accursed home.”

This is not how Shakespeare’s characters talk, if for no other reason than that it’s not in iambic pentameter. When you drop that, it’s noticeable. Now, I can understand not trying to write the whole comic as an actual Shakespearean pastiche. It’d be extremely hard to pull off well. But it’s distracting to have this half-measure calling attention to what the authors didn’t do. It makes it that much more noticeable that Hamlet and Richard III in the comic have almost nothing to do with the characters we know from the plays, apart from the fact that Hamlet has a hard time making a decision.

The second problem is that by starting their story with Hamlet’s trip to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the authors are invoking Tom Stoppard, and the comparison isn’t kind to them. Stoppard opened a backdoor from the action of Hamlet for a specific reason: to discuss existential bafflement, the impossibility of finding a reason for being alive given the information on hand. (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead also a) uses 20th-century language for its 20th-century audience and b) happens to be truly funny.) It’s not clear, really, why McCreery and Del Col are doing it.

An argument could be made, I guess, that McCreery and Del Col also have an existentialist project in mind—challenging the supremacy of a cruel Creator—but then Hamlet is the wrong play. Ariel or Caliban from The Tempest might be better figures, or even Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And more importantly, they’re not actually focusing any attention on any thematic aim, but rather on the clumsy metafiction, and making metafiction where someone has done it famously better seems like a mistake. (If they’d had the sophistication to play metafictional games with Stoppard himself, it’d be a different story.)

Finally, the poem that closes the issue, which I think is meant to be portentous, stinks. It should be a sonnet, of course, but it isn’t. It’s doggerel rhyming couplets that not only don’t scan individually but have variable numbers of metrical feet. I know I’m being ridiculously pedantic by complaining about that, but come on, who did they expect to buy the damn book?

More scathing reviews here and here.

Preview here.

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Apart from my rooting on anybody who’d challenge the odious Pedro Espada, I actually know this guy and can vouch for his karaoke skills. We duetted on “Forgot About Dre” this one time and it was HYPE.

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