It was a good Fourth of July.

As usual, folks came over to our house and we threw some stuff on the barbeque and blew some other stuff up in the street in front of our house. On other nights, our neighbors that sort of thing (not the grilling, the explosions); tonight, they hung out on their front porches with their children and grandchildren and enjoyed the show.

So was this patriotic? Someone quoted someone’s line about “celebrating America by blowing up a small piece of it.”

If I were patriotic, I hope I’d be the kind of patriot Julia is.

Julia’s essay is smart and compassionate, the best kind of tough-minded liberalism. (That, by the way, is the phrase that Dean or Kerry or whomever should begin endlessly parroting to the press: “tough-minded liberalism” is the soundbite rejoinder to “compassionate conservatism”). It shows that being patriotic isn’t dumb, and it isn’t right-wing; it’s American, in the best sense of the word.

Or so I assume, although to tell the truth I have no feeling for what the “best sense” of the word American is. Julia’s essay is patriotic, and a well-written essay about patriotism means no more to me personally than a well-written essay about breathing water.

I’m not going to argue that patriots are stupid. I think patriotism is a lot like religion, y’know? Some awfully smart people are religious, and so I don’t go around claiming that religion is for the stupid. But I fundamentally don’t get it. Whatever thing some people have which makes them worship and love a benevolent sky-god they haven’t even seen, I lack it.

Similarly, whatever it is that makes people love their country, or proud to be American - I don’t have it.

It’s a mystery to me. How can anyone love a country? It’s a thing, an organization of people. You might as well profess love for the National Association of Vending Machine Distributors.

Of course, I can see loving the things a country represents. You know, liberty, freedom, that sort of thing. But the US doesn’t have a monopoly on these things. As far as I can tell, the citizens of other industrialized democracies are pretty much as free as we are. Sure, we could nit-pik over the details, but on the whole the residents of Canada and Demark aren’t exactly bent under the yoke of tyranny.

On September 11th, when I first heard about the attacks, I didn’t believe it. (Collapsed? How could the World Trade Center have collapsed? I used to spend my lunch breaks on top of the WTC. My parents have an office in the WTC. How could it have collapsed?) After that, I just wanted to make sure my parents and other folks I knew were safe (they were, knock wood).

Once the reality sank in, I was sad for the people that died. But I wasn’t sad for America. And I was no sadder for the folks who died in the WTC than I have felt for other innocent people murdered around the world. A dead American is sad, but no sadder than a dead African, a dead Arab, a dead Israeli.

Then the flags popped up, like daisies suddenly everywhere. (At my workplace, a pretty building that is rented out for weddings and concerts, a large flag was placed to the side of the stage. It is discreetly tucked out of sight for weddings in which the brides’ color scheme contrasts with the red, white, blue). Patriotism became representative of a certain ideology, and that ideology is right-wing. Some left-wingers argued, eloquently, that patriotism is found on both sides of the political center.

Whatever. It may be found on the left and the right, but it’s not found in me. America is a country. It’s where I was born. I love American food, but if I had been born in Greece I’d love Greek food instead. I think some Americans have done some things awfully well: I love certain American musicals and American comic strips. American feminism is great, and so is the American anti-racist movement.

On the other hand, I often hate American foreign policy, our voting system is awful, and our Democracy is dominated by money above all. And all these problems are to a great extent locked in place by our Constitution. There’s a lot that’s wonderful in our history (read Howard Zinn), but also a lot that’s shameful, and you know what? I can’t take pride or shame in any of it, because I wasn’t around then, and I’m not the author of the good or the bad things those folks did.

What’s good about the USA is that it gives a lot of people (although not all) who live here a chance to work and live and eat and laugh and hang with friends and get political and fuck and cook and write and draw and dance and watch TV and play music and marry and argue and raise children and vote and go to movies and swim and pray and joke and get together for a holiday once in a while, in which we throw some food on the grill and step outside to watch the pretty fireworks.

That’s what life is about. That’s what matters. What some people who died long before I was born named the patch of dirt I live on while I do those things doesn’t matter much.

I admit, I’m lucky/privileged/spoiled to have been born in a country (and into a class) in which I’m able to do all that (and better yet, take all that for granted). But the US is hardly unique. I’m pretty sure that even in an evil, enemy country like France, folks dance and laugh and hang out with their friends, too.

I don’t love my country. If Evil France somehow took us over in a bloodless coup tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind, so long as our same basic individual rights continued. (In fact, I’d be better off after the coup, since I’d presumably have access to medical care I need).

Don’t get me wrong - I’d naturally be concerned about and object to France’s imperialism, since imperialism is in my view a bad thing. But that there was no longer a country called “United States” wouldn’t bother me at all. Freedom has value. Laughing and hanging out with friends has value. What we call the patch of dirt we laugh on is irrelevant.

UPDATE: Blueheron, who was one of the folks who came to our house on the 4th of July, writes in his 4th of July post:

I just wanted to remind my Portland readers of this gallery show I’m appearing in, which opens tonight:

The show features the work of many terrific cartoonists. Full information can be found on Jenn Manley Lee’s blog. (Jenn, by the way, put this show together and in particular gave me so much help that it’s embarassing.) I’ll be at the opening tonight; if you’re a reader of this blog and you’re there, please come up and introduce yourself to me. (I’ll be the fat man with hippy hair). This is also a chance for you to meet my blogging partner Bean (live! in person!), so don’t miss it.

Two bits of news from my drawing board. First of all, my new page of Dicebox (filling in for Jenn Manley Lee while she takes a much-deserved break) is up. You can read it here for the next six days, until it’s replaced by my fifth (and final) Dicebox page.

Second, I’ve decided to quit doing the weekly political cartoon.

I don’t mind that doing a weekly political cartoon hasn’t been terribly rewarding, financially. But lately it hasn’t been all that rewarding from a creative point of view, either. Putting it bluntly, I’m in a rut. It’s a comfortable rut - a rut in which I’ve produced some work I think is pretty darn good - but a rut, nonetheless.

I’m certainly not going to quit cartooning - but I want to concentrate on projects that are either more rewarding artistically, or financially, or (perhaps someday) both.

Meanwhile, I haven’t abandoned political cartooning entirely. Dollars and Sense magazine has just (after a three-issue tryout) given me a permanent slot in their pages, illustrating their “Short Run” feature with a new political cartoon every issue. I’m very excited and proud to join the D&S staff. Plus I may still do the occasional political cartoon just for the fun of it.

(There’s actually another magazine I just began what I hope will be a long-term association with, which I’m very excited about, but it’s too early to talk about it in public.)

But political cartoons will not be my primary creative outlet anymore. Sometime in the next several months, I hope to premiere a full-scale comic book which will be published in the “new page each week” format; something with an ongoing plotline, and continuing characters. Working on Dicebox this month has reminded me that longer-form fiction was what I originally wanted to do when I became a cartoonist, and it’s time I got back on that track.

I’m still way too busy with real-life stuff to pay proper attention to this blog… sorry, folks. Meanwhile, here’s an interesting email that’s been making the Green Party rounds (thanks to Jake Squid for the tip).

My desk is full of cartooning projects right now, so the next few days will probably not feature many posts from me (although I don’t know if Bean has any posts planned).

In the meanwhile, does anyone have a guesstimate of how much one would have to pay a contractor to turn a garage into a finished garage, suitable to be a family-TV-room type space, with sheetrock walls, electric outlets and the like? If you’ve got any clue at all, please leave a comment.

Jim Henley has coined the wonderful term “Bubble Age” (a la “golden age,” “silver age,” etc), to refer to the comics that came out during the direct-market bubble, starting with 1981’s Dazzler #1 (the first comic book distributed exclusively to the “direct market” of comic book shops) and ending when the direct-market bubble burst in 1993.

While the direct market dominated comics, it created economic conditions that allowed a flowering of wonderful comic books than anytime before or (so far) since. Cerebus, Love and Rockets, Hate, Eightball, Zot!, Understanding Comics, Beanworld, Naughty Bits, Yummy Fur, Bone, Watchmen, From Hell, Sandman, Journey, Joe Sacco’s work, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Mars, Stinz, the Desert Peach, Palookaville, Mage, and dozens more.

Frankly, compared to the Bubble Age, the so-called Golden Age of comics was crap. In the Bubble age, for the first time, a critical mass of English-language cartoonists were able to make a (scant) living without either attempting to appeal to superhero fans, to daily newspaper editors, or to the denizens of head shops.

Since then, the comic book market has - if not entirely collapsed - certainly deflated into a sad lump on the ground. Established talents are still eeking out a living - and only some of them - but the direct market is no longer able to nourish new talents, and the readership seems to shrink every year.

The obvious solution for years has been to distribute comics via the internet - but the problem is, how to make a living off it? No one wants to pay $4 to read a comic on the internet - it’s simply not worth that much. But you can’t make money charging what a comic books is really worth - say, a quarter - because there’s been no way to allow payments that small over the internet.

Now that’s changed.

Folks, go check out Scott McCloud’s new comic, The Right Number. It’s an excellent comic in its own right, with a couple of wild ideas and Scott’s usual skillful cartooning (looking better than it has in years, in fact).

And it’s only a quarter. (There are also a few sample panels you can read for free).

If it works, this will begin the next age, and maybe - just maybe - a new flourishing of comics worth reading. Go get on the ground floor, why don’tcha?

UPDATE: In the comments to an earlier post, Scott Martens explains why he doesn’t find the average comic book worth buying: “$2.50 on something I’ll read in 10 minutes and may only be somebody’s idea of a prologue, or worse, the middle chapter of a story whose beginning I haven’t got.”

So the question is, are folks who aren’t willing to pay $2.50 willing to pay a quarter? We’ll find out…

Via Half the Sins of Mankind, this interesting Slate article argues that folks abroad ought to be free to plagiarize Harry Potter as much as they want.

I’d prefer to be both less and more extreme than the Slate writer. On the one hand, I do think that all publishers of derivative works should be required to pay a small portion of profits (say, 1%) to the original creator; creators deserve to profit from their creations, including their indirect creations. This idea (usually applied to medicines) is called “compulsory licensing”; the creator has a right to profit from her creation, but not to prevent other producers from using her creation.

On the other hand, I do think Rowling has the right to control the use of her own name. So although I’d like any publisher to be able to produce a “Harry Potter” book, I don’t think they should be able to print Rowling’s name on the cover or advertising without her express permission (which she presumably wouldn’t give, or would give only in exchange for suitable compensation). “Half the Sins of Mankind” worries that “people who buy the Chinese book in the mistaken belief that it is a new addition to the series have been defrauded,” but we could avoid this by letting Rowling have an exclusive right to put “written by J.K. Rowling” on the cover.

In exchange for this, society gets the benefit of dozens - perhaps hundreds - of Potter and Potter-derived novels.

On the other hand, why limit the Potter bounty to folks abroad? Why should writers in China and Russia be free to write (and profit from) Harry Potter sequels, but not writers in Britain and the USA? It’s not as if derivative works are necessarily more valuable because they’re created abroad; if preventing such works is a market flaw internationally, it must be a market flaw domestically as well.

UPDATE: Letters from Limbo comments on the same article, and pretty much agrees with my views.

Four Color Hell likes a challenge
Todd at Four Color Hell, a group comics-blog, mentions in passing that he’ll be posting a defense of Dave Sim later this week. For those of you who don’t know who Sim is, trust me; casually mentioning you’re going to defend Sim is a bit like saying “and later this week, I’m going to pop over to the Atlantic and swim it.”

Digby on Affirmative Action
Digby states well something I was attempting to say in comments earlier this week:

The difference between Dean and Kucinich
Kevin Moore says he sees “little daylight” between Dean and Kucinich’s positions on the issues. I wonder if Kevin has seen this handy table prepared by Bob Harris, comparing the two issue by issue. (Via Red Onion).

Long story; short pier on Why You Don’t Read Comics
If you’re at all interested in comic books, this essay by Kip - about everything that keeps comics and readers apart - is a must-read.

Pedantry on replacing Affirmative Action
Scott M. argues that we should replace Affirmative Action with a peerlessly fair and unbiased system: admission to college by lottery.

Fatshadow on fat politics as entitlement politics
Just a cool post taking on an ignorant editorial.

Half the Sins of Mankind on Incest
An interesting attempt to distinguish between incest and homosexuality for legal/moral purposes. An argument that I found interesting, and haven’t heard before, is that incest laws cause much less of a burden than anti-gay laws do.

Not Geniuses on the politics of mediocrity
An excellent post on what’s wrong with our electoral system. Our system is, in effect, designed to reward candidates for being the best fundraisers and the best soundbiters. If we assume that the best fundraiser/soundbiters are always the best leaders, then great; otherwise, we’re in trouble.