People wanted him to be Troy forever. He had other plans.
Heh hehhhh heh hehhhh heh hehhhhhhhhhh...
Look how giddy he is about hurting people.
He will take all the abuse his master can give him, as long as Renfield gets his nice, fat, juicy rat.
When Hate Is Your Life's Work →
And those marchers were not alone, either. It has been sickening to live here for the past eight months and witness the staggering amount of work that many newly emboldened white Americans have put into destroying people unlike them. I’ll happily write a 1,000-word hater’s guide to a retail catalog, but my hateful efforts are nothing compared to the work these men put in. Think of Mitch McConnell, working feverishly day and night to secure votes and secretly drafting bills and calling late night Congressional sessions, all so that he could take health care away from poor people. Think of how FRENZIED he was to do this. Obsessed. Think of the sense of urgency that led him to disregard all other work just to pass a bill that could potentially harm so many, and you know that urgency hasn't faded....
Think of the utter indefatigability of these men and their champions. It’s not simply that they hate, but that they have made hatred their life’s work.
And then think of all the effort needed simply to keep these men at bay, or to undo the evil works they’ve already secured. Trump is a miserable, awful man. And even though I have heard a million times that he secretly loathes being president, the man still endeavored to get the job and shows no sign of relinquishing it, not when he can take time every day to satisfy whatever hateful itch he needs to scratch. It is exhausting to deal with him, and what’s scary is that he’s not even close to being the hardest-working white supremacist in his own government. These are men who are counting on your fatigue. These are men who are hoping that their insatiable hunger for repression wears you down eventually, and that you resign yourself to the idea that inequality is both inevitable and irreversible. It will take GENERATIONS to undo the damage they’ve inflicted upon modern America, if it can be undone at all. It’s like cleaning up after a flood.
I discovered Magary through his novels. My wife got me The Hike awhile back, and I loved it so much I snatched up The Postmortal. Just finished it this week.
After reading both of those books, I can attest that Magary can imagine a whole lot of terrible shit. When a guy who writes dystopian science fiction and fantasy allegories full of dog-headed child killers is horrified by the stuff you've dreamed up, you've done something really special.
Beware of Dog
If you drive any American two-lane highway long enough, you will inevitably pass a real shithole ramshackle house or trailer, blue tarp bricked over the hole in the roof, yard strewn with garbage and the rotting husks of large appliances and cars long dead. This two-bedroom ode to entropy will be surrounded by a fence which will almost certainly topped with barbed or razor wire and adorned with a sign. Something on the order of THIEVES AND TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
I can do this all day...
76 years ago, two Jewish men from New York who worked for a major comics publisher decided to create a new hero that would be an advocate for the US entering the war against racism, fascism, and anti-semitism.
They created the Aryan ideal, dressed him up in the stars and stripes, and drew him punching Hitler in the goddamn face. It was not subtle.
The only good Nazi is a punched Nazi.
That character caught on, and his legacy expanded until his real superpower became that he was the moral center of his storytelling universe. Captain America is essentially an avatar for goodness and protection of the weak. His most recognizable element is a shield.
Then Nick Spencer and Marvel turned him into a Nazi. And, worse, revealed that that entire three-quarters-of-a-century legacy didn't actually happen, not really. Not in the really real Marvel universe.
Now, and it's hard to find images of this because Marvel's whacking them down as they come up, they're going to validate Nazi Cap by showing him effortlessly lifting Mjolnir, Thor's hammer. Which Thor is currently unworthy to lift because he's going through a bit of a personal crisis. But Nazis are worthy. If they're good Nazis.
Oh. I should probably stress that Thor's hammer is one of many Norse mythological symbols treasured by real-world Nazis. So Nazi Cap is being morally validated by a symbol co-opted by white supremacists. A hammer, no less. They are overjoyed.
Will a reversal happen? Of course. But the damage to Kirby and Simon's legacy is done and cannot be undone. And one gets the feeling that Nick Spencer dumped all over that legacy for no better reasons than to be provocative and mess with his critics. He has the luxury of doing this because he doesn't have any ancestors who were rounded up and put into camps, of course. He's gonna do a great toldjuhso dance, you guys.
Does it matter? Yep. There are Nazis in the White House as we speak. Nazis and robber barons looking to line their own pockets by starving the poor. Literal comic book villains. It matters.
The only thing we can do to this turd taco is point out that the taco is in fact full of turds. Or make fun of it. Which Skottie Young has managed to do, on the cover of an actual Marvel comic book:
Probably should have put him in charge of Cap.
Let us now praise sharts fired
You ever have a sneeze go all the way down to your feet? Seeing this felt like that.
Like a tuning fork going off on your dingdong
He'd still be a cat, you know?
Michael K. Williams asks: Am I typecast?
Omar Little is a character worthy of Shakespeare, and Williams' performance is a big part of why Omar and "The Wire" became what they became. But I remember watching him my first time through and thinking this guy is wonderful. I wonder if they'll ever let him do anything else.
End of an Era
I awoke this morning and put on an old mechanical watch I hadn't worn in days. It had run down, so I needed to reset the calendar. That was how I realized that today was January 19th, 2017. The last day.
It felt like the last day, too, though I fought that. Today my professional life was filled with people discovering broken things that nobody knew how to fix. And I resisted it, I tried not to lapse into lazy cynicism and confirmation bias, but I could not help but think it a metaphor for what is to come.
The man who is to come is quite a piece of work. He is loud and brutish and vindictive. He is possessed of that particularly deadly strain of ignorance and intellectual laziness that is convinced of its own brilliance. He seems eager to sow conflict, a foie gras goose gavaged with hot takes and contempt, then pointed at the country and squeezed like a bagpipe. It is good that he does not drink, because he is the clearest, most shining example of alcoholic psychology run amok that I have ever witnessed. I am, in short, afraid of him.
The man who is leaving, he is also a piece of work. He is studied and careful. He listens. He is a scholar, but he is not content to cloister himself off with books. He made a life out of helping, and it appears he's just getting started.
Don't get me wrong, he's pissed me off plenty. He is not everything I could want in a leader. He has broken my heart a time or two.
But he did the job well. He did it with dignity and class and grace. He continued to reach across the aisle no matter how many times the Party of No slapped his hand away, no matter how many of us counseled him to stop what proved to be a mostly futile gesture. Futile, maybe, but he left the country better than he found it, and it is by their fruits that you shall know them.
People have tried to dismiss my current slurry of dread and sorrow as a loser's sour grapes. These people do not grasp that I am a Southern Liberal. Losing elections is common and familiar to me. It is practically my god damned raison d'être. So, no. This is different.
So I'm hammering this out before I end a very long day. I am pondering a very long four years in which a lot of people I love are going to get hurt while forty percent of my country cheers. This leaves me sad and angry a lot of the time.
I am told that that's a glimmer of what it's like to be black or gay or trans or Muslim in this country, but I don't dare believe it. I lose nothing tomorrow.
I am tempted to put a rather shiny bow of optimism on this, end with something hopeful about following the example of the one who is leaving. But I know that tomorrow I will likely not muster more than grim determination. I may snap at my coworkers or family. I will waste at least an hour's worth of minutes wondering what the first international incident will be (I'm not counting the two he's already managed).
But the children have school. I have work. I am needed. There are things to be done that I can control, in some small measure.
One of those things: I am pointing to the loud ones and asking my children, do you hear them? Do you hear God in that racket? Do you hear love? And they tell me no, and they appear to mean it. There's at least something to that.
This weekend we march.
Cashing in my serenity
Let's start here.
We voted for him, white America.
The Klan is on the march. People are tagging buildings with swastikas. Nonwhite children are being bullied. Churches are being desecrated.
It's been four days.
Those people count you as allies. Are you? Are we?
Those of us who elected him spoke of Christ when they did so, but that America does not know Christ. It knows power. It is supporting centuries of hate to preserve what it believes it has a divine right to.
That America declared its hatred for my non-white friends, my women friends, my gay friends and bi friends and trans friends. It mocked my disabled friends. It pointed guns at my black friends and Muslim friends. Some of it pointed guns at our own children, and the rest shuffled their feet around a bit and looked down at their shoes and shrugged.
That America turned Christ's name into a bumper sticker. It turned the implement of his torture and murder into a rallying symbol for more torture and murder. It turned a savior into an inspiration-porn mascot for its Sunday stage shows.
It sacralized emotional moments wrought by painstakingly-orchestrated "worship experiences" and ignored the cries of the doomed. It stood on the backs of the disenfranchised and sang songs of praise for how it had been blessed.
In short, it built a nation and a church on white cishet supremacy and misogyny. Those things are in its DNA. I knew it was there and I knew it was bad, but I didn't comprehend its full scale and enormity until this year.
This is not of Christ. He warned us about power and refused it for himself. He told us to take up our crosses and follow him. We invented theological and ideological purity tests instead.
I am talking to you now, white America. Not to those we've hurt with our push-button vengeance-at-a-distance. If they are reading this, undoubtedly they feel like I've wandered into a funeral wearing Poirot cosplay and announcing that zhere is a DEAD person een zees room.
I'm talking to you because you need to hear it from someone who looks and sounds like you, because we are dogshit at listening to them. I include myself in that shame.
So I figure the least I can do to make it up to them is to join them in their suffering and fear, and try to figure out how to lend my advantages to them. I hope you will too.
The Serenity Prayer is inaccurately named. It is also a prayer for the wisdom to know when to set your serenity aside so that you may help bear others' burdens. A plea for the courage to respond to that call.
I haven't done enough. And I'm not sure what I'm going to do now, but I'm starting by plugging in where I can. I'm cashing in my serenity. Because this year was a master class in demonstrating how little of it people have who do not look like me.
The America that raised me told me that it was blue oxen and baseball. The other America told me of firehoses and money and murder. I was scared of their stories, but I am tired of my delusions.
I do not know what to do with this America. Pledge allegiance? Hardly.
But I do know this: My despair is becoming resentment, and that resentment will become fuel, and if my brothers and sisters do not live in the America I was told about, then I will try to help them build it.
With or without you, I and my wife and children will help them build it. If they will have us.
I hope we do it with you, white America. Your country needs you. Come help me figure out how to help.
If you live in central Arkansas and are afraid, @ me on Twitter and I'll send you my contact information. I'll do what I can.