Here’s Sydney and Bean at PSU today, where Chelsea Clinton was appearing. Sydney: Grrrrr!

Look under the fold for more pics… It’s worth it, I think.

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In comments, Nancy asked me to list my 10 or 20 favorite graphic novels. Actually, I posted a favorites list in 2003, but looking through the list now there are several comics I want to add. So here it is, reposted and updated.

I’m only considering graphic novels here — meaning only comics that are available as bound books (i.e., no webcomics, and no floppies), and no collections of comic strips. I’m also not including any superhero comics, mainly because even the best of them aren’t as good as the ones on this list. Maybe I’ll do follow-up posts listing favorite webcomics, strips, and superhero comics.

Also, my list is deficient because I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to manga and Eurocomics. And the recommendations aren’t given in any particular order. And this list is by no means complete — there are lots of books I love that aren’t listed here. Nonetheless:

• Curses by Kevin Huizenga. To quote from a review on Amazon:
  

  The Ganges stories here vary greatly in length, from a three-page quickie that appeared in Time magazine to a forty-page adaptation of a Sheridan LeFanu story (”Green Tea”, for those keeping track). Ganges and his wife are the only solid connectors between the stories, but incidents and characters crop up again and again in different stories, so the volume has more of a feel of coherence than it otherwise would. Much of it reads rather like a magical-realist memoir; there’s a realistic setup (e.g., Glenn and his wife trying to have a kid…) that leads to a thoroughly absurd conclusion (…and the only way to do that is to steal a feather from an ogre who lives somewhere beneath 28th Street), or vice versa. It’s a good deal of fun, and Huizenga’s somewhat minimal drawing style is adaptable to just about anything (and there’s some wonderful versatility to be found between these pages).

  All true. To be fair, some of the early stories here drag a little, but the ones that don’t drag are so audacious and funny that it’s one of my favorites anyway. And the artwork, understated and influenced by early newspaper strips, is wonderful.

• Get a Life by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian. These slice-of-life short stories about the life of a bachelor in Paris are a little bit sexist, and sometimes use stock characters; but the jazzy, cartoony artwork is brilliant, and the writing is funny and kindhearted. These stories are hugely popular in France, and a companion volume, Maybe Later, contains autobiographical short stories about the cartoonists’ lives (concentrating on their work lives).
• Baker Steet: Honour Among Punks, by Gary Davis. Sherlock Holmes reimagined as a punk woman of color in an alternate-universe London. Damn, I wish this series had lasted longer; but David did complete one full-length murder mystery, plus a couple of short stories. Davis’ stunning, detailed black-and-white penwork — and his obvious knowlege of the British punk scene¹ — make this comic one I can reread many times (it was written and drawn in the 80s). Some of it doesn’t age very well, though; in particular, there’s a radical feminist trans character who makes me wince now.
• Maus by Art Spiegelman. I don’t really need to describe this one, do I?
• Blankets by Craig Thompson. Great, thick autobiographical tale of the author’s first love and his journey from fundimentalist Christianity to disbelief. I reread this last week and was blown away again. I love Thompson’s expressionistic drawings, and his relaxed, takes-as-many-pages-as-it-takes approach to storytelling.
• Black Hole by Charles Burns. This thick horror graphic novel, about a venerial disease that causes bizzare and variable symptoms (full-skin peels, tails, cat-person-face, etc) among a community of suburban white teens, is fueled almost entirely by Burns’ mastery of mood. It’s creepy, it’s repressed, and it’s drawn in brushwork so lush and controlled that it seems a little inhuman.
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Here’s how Time described it when they named it their book of the year: “The unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. Oh, and it’s a comic book: Bechdel’s breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.”
• American Born Chinese by Gene Yang. The Amazon.com description: “Indie graphic novelist Gene Yang’s intelligent and emotionally challenging American Born Chinese is made up of three individual plotlines: the determined efforts of the Chinese folk hero Monkey King to shed his humble roots and be revered as a god; the struggles faced by Jin Wang, a lonely Asian American middle school student who would do anything to fit in with his white classmates; and the sitcom plight of Danny, an All-American teen so shamed by his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee (a purposefully painful ethnic stereotype) that he is forced to change schools. Each story works well on its own, but Yang engineers a clever convergence of these parallel tales into a powerful climax that destroys the hateful stereotype of Chin-Kee, while leaving both Jin Wang and the Monkey King satisfied and happy to be who they are.

  Yang skillfully weaves these affecting, often humorous stories together to create a masterful commentary about race, identity, and self-acceptance that has earned him a spot as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People.”

• Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet. I’ll quote Publishers Weekly:
  

  French cartoonist Larcenet has created a leisurely story about Marc, a 20-something photographer, who is embroiled in crisis in both his life and art. His artwork is not satisfying him; his elderly parents and working-class childhood are weighing on him; and his crippling panic attacks have become more frequent. On the other hand, he falls in love and hatches a new photography project aimed at exploring and redeeming his shipyard roots and ailing father. But this is not just another coming-of-age tale. Through his characters, Larcenet presents a vision of French politics, history and society, weaving all of these strands together to create a multilayered book. The dialogue is insightful and sometimes painfully realistic; the artwork firmly roots readers in the French landscape and milieu while maintaining a cartoonish distance with the character designs and expressions.

• Notes For A War Story by Gipi. Possibly the best comic I’ve read all year. Despite the title, it’s not what people usually think of as a war story; there are no battles, and the characters aren’t in the army. They’re three young men trying to find a way to get by in a region ripped apart by war. It’s a story more about how war interacts with class, friendship, and the hunger of young men for male role models. Plus, Gipi’s drawings are awesome.

  There are very cheap copies available on Amazon.

• From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. The grimmest of Moore’s comics (which is saying a lot), but also the one with the most texture and richness. This is also the only Jack The Ripper story I’ve ever seen which makes the victims into real characters, rather than just generic ripper-bait.

  (They made a terrible film based loosely on this comic, but you shouldn’t judge the comic by the film — the film really butchered it. As it were.)

• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. The single most essential work of non-fiction about comic books is a comic book, and a damn entertaining one. This is the one book to read if you want to deepen your understanding of how comics work. Scott’s recent sequel, Making Comics, is also terrific, especially if you’re interested in creating graphic novels yourself.
• Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse. This coming-of-age story about a young gay man in the South during the 1960s civil rights struggles is the most criminally underread comic book of the last decade - one of the few comics that could sit next to Maus on your bookshelf and not be outclassed.
• Palestine by Joe Sacco. This nonfiction comic describes Sacco’s time spent in Palestine. Sacco’s depiction of the situation in Palestine is humanizing and spectacular, and it’s made palatable by his evident doubts about his own purpose in going to Palestine. (This is one of several journalistic comics by Sacco, all of which are fantastic).
• Cages by Dave McKean. “McKean is also an accomplished cartoonist in his own right. This is his magnum opus to date: an immense, pulsing graphic novel that’s also a treatise on art, creativity and the uses and misuses of technique. Originally serialized between 1990 and 1996 (and collected in 1998), it’s been out of print for several years. The book’s plot is fairly rudimentary: a painter, a writer and a musician who live in the same apartment building find their lives intersecting. But the book’s gradual shift from literalism to fanciful allegories and stories-within-stories mostly serves as the springboard for a visual tour de force.”
• Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Usually, adaptations of novels into comics suck. This is the exception - an adaptation with as much wit and depth as the original. What makes it work is Paul Karasik’s and David Mazzucchelli’s cartooning, which combines simple (but incredibly well-chosen) lines with wildly playful, sometimes surreal layouts that explore the novel’s themes of identity and obsession. Amazon currently has used copies of this available for only two bucks.

  So what’s it about? Umn, on the surface, it’s sort of a hard-boiled detective novel, except it’s really about an author of hard-boiled detective fiction who gets sucked in to pretending he’s an hard-boiled detective, and one of the false identities he takes on is Paul Auster, the author of the novel this comic is based on.

• The Frank Book by Jim Woodring. This is as wonderful as it’s indescribable. The Publishers Weekly description is okay: “Woodring, a modern master of hallucinatory cartoon fables, specializes in comics that look normal but aren’t. Woodring’s hallmarks are inventive, often bizarre creatures who inhabit otherworldly landscapes and dreamlike narratives. This book’s hero, Frank, is a catlike anthropomorph who lives in a surreal, exotic world.” But it fails to mention how horrifying and grotesque Woodring’s dream-world often is.
• Love and Rockets, the amazing comics of brothers Gilbert and Jamie Hernandez. The trouble is, there are so many reprints, it’s hard to know where to begin. There’s a huge volume of Gilbert’s comics, Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup stories, but it’s currently out of print. If your library doesn’t have that, I recommend starting with Human Diastrophism, which is astounding. Gilbert’s work features magical realism taking place (mostly) in a small village - I’m not sure if it’s in Mexico or Central America - but the stories are stunning, with some of the best-realized characters ever seen in comics.

  Jamie Hernandez’s huge reprint book Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories is still in print, and if you don’t mind being spendy it’s worth it. But if you want a more reasonably-priced sample, maybe you’re better off starting with volume 3 or thereabouts. Anyhow, Jamie Hernandez draws better than almost anyone in comics; his spare, efficient lines and black spotting are flawless. His writing is terrific, too; part slice-of-life, part soap opera, focusing on twenty-something punk Mexican-American women living in L.A.. Totally absorbing.

• Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. They made a pretty good movie of this comic, but the original is much better (and tells a significantly different story). This book, about two teenage girls, charts out one of those friendships-that-will-last-forever that people have in high school, and why it doesn’t even last to college.
• Playboy by Chester Brown. An autobiographical comic about Brown’s experiences (and particularly adolescent experiences) with Playboy magazine. Intelligent, disturbing, asks more questions than it provides answers.
• It’s a Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken by Seth. An autobiographical (or is it?) comic about art and obsession, focusing on Seth’s search for an obscure 1940s cartoonist. “While trying to understand his dissatisfaction with the present, Seth discovers the life and work of Kalo, a forgotten New Yorker cartoonist from the 1940s. But his obsession blinds him to the needs of his lover and the quiet desperation of his family. Wry self-reflection and moody colours characterize Seth’s style in this tale about learning lessons from nostalgia.”
• Mr Punch, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Gaiman’s famous for Sandman, but Mr Punch is a much better comic. “Neil Gaiman has several recurring themes to which he revisits again and again like the swallows returning to Capostrano. Foremost among these is the persistence of memory, which is the theme of ‘The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch.’ … The tale revolves around a Punch n’ Judy show at a seaside carnival and how it acts as a trigger for a young boys memories of his family. As with much of Gaiman’s work, there are tales within tales here, and the real story he tells is more implied than elucidated upon.”
• The Complete Crumb Comics Vol 17. I know that starting with Vol 17 seems weird, but the comics collected here - short stories from the last few issues of Weirdo and from Hup - are among the best Crumb has ever done. However, Crumb’s misogyny will rightly repel a lot of “Alas” readers.
• Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks. “World-famous cartoonist Dick Burger has earned millions and become the most powerful man in the comics industry. However, behind his rapid rise to success, there lies a dark and terrible secret, as biographer Leonard Batts discovers when he visits Burger’s hometown in remote New Zealand.” A mix of extreme cleverness, good writing and genuine love of comics makes this graphic novel so much better than you’d expect it to be.

  Plus, I love Horrocks’ drawing, which disdains trying to impress readers with a flashy surface, and instead impresses with stunningly great everything-but-the-surface.

• Bone by Jeff Smith. This is a pure epic fantasy adventure, with good characters and a plain joy in cartooning that shines out of the pages. If you can’t stand the fantasy genre, then you won’t like this, but otherwise it’s a classic. Just start with volume one and keep on reading.
• When I originally wrote this post, I said: “Beanworld deserves to be an all-time classic, but it’s marred because Larry Marder never completed it.” However, Larry Marder is now restarting Beanworld, which makes me very happy. Probably that means there will be new reprints coming out soon, too.
• Cerebus should have been an all-time classic, but unfortunately Dave Sim suddenly turned into an extreme misogynist and religious fundimentalist and ruined the story in the last quarter. Nonetheless, some of his work before he lost it includes some of the best comics ever done: In particular, High Society, Church & State, and Jaka’s Story are amazing achievements. High Society is the place to begin; it’s actually the second volume of Cerebus, but you can follow the story well anyway, and the first volume isn’t nearly as good.

1. Well, for all I know, he made it all up. But if so, he did it convincingly. (back)

Pat Buchanan:

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. [...]

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

Angry Black Woman provides the gratitude:

Thank you, White people, for all you’ve done for Blacks.

Thank you for kidnapping and/or buying my ancestors in Africa, packing them onto ships where malnutrition, disease, anti-hygenic conditions, beatings, and rape ensured that a significant percentage did not survive the trip, but enough did for you to turn a profit.

Thank you for enslaving my ancestors, forcing them to labor in the fields and in your houses for no pay (room and board is certainly enough!), in poor living conditions, without education, without their families, in many cases, and without hope that their lives would ever get better.

Thank you for raping and beating my ancestors, I appreciate it. Thanks also for forcing them to “breed” as if they were animals, selecting out certain men and women for their strength, hoping that their children would be strong, too, and be able to pick more cotton or engage in other work you couldn’t be bothered to do yourself.

There’s lots more, so read the whole thing. (And notice the familiar cartoon she links to at the end.)

Whoops — it’s a hoax. Barska denies having anything to do with these ads.

Original post below the fold.

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It is undeniable that there are systemic issues at stake. Holly tried to have a conversation about them over at Feministe; it didn’t work. I’m going to make a stab and say that it might be able to work here because there are separate threads here. You want to rail against individual instances of recent tumult? Wander over to Barry’s and have a non-personally-insulting swing.

Please discuss systemic appropriation here.

I’ll start: I’m mostly familiar with the concept of appropriation in an anthropological context, where exoticism and colonial economic factors are more salient than they seem to be here, and where source citing is emphatically NOT a solution. Moreover, I’m mostly familiar with the intersection of appropriative writing and anthropology, where you end up with problematic orientalist fantasies and that sort of thing. I’m not used to thinking about it in an academic context. It’s interesting. I’m up for reading anyone’s explorations of the concept.

*

Update: from comments, because I think it might stimulate conversation / clarify where things are coming from / etc.:

Sailorman asks, refering to the incident that started this discussion, “isn’t this more an issue of attribution than appropriation?”

My reply:

I have opinions on this, but I’m not sure I can get into them without getting into what it seems to me has happened here, which I’m trying to avoid because A) it makes me tired, B) it seems non-productive, and selfishly C) I’m sure it would erode my credibility with *someone* who I respect and I greatly respect people on both sides of this debate.

Um, so, generally:

I think the idea proposed by the, um, plaintants? in this situation is that appropriation occurs when attribution is not acknowledged.

This is particularly problematic in situaitons charged by systemic oppression because some people’s words are taken more seriously than others. If you read enough feminist writing, you generlaly hit upon a few anecdotes where someone mentions that a woman proposed something in say a meeting which was ignored, but when the woman’s male partner repeated it, suddenly everyone said, “Oh! What a good idea!”

(On a mostly irrelevant side note — In my relationship, actually, the opposite is likely to happen — I’m much more likely to be able to convince people of things than my male partner, as I’m more charismatic and verbally inclined than he is.)

But in general, you see white people’s words as privileged over non-white people’s, and men’s over women’s. There’s an anecdote in Holly’s post about her thoughts as an Asian woman having been privileged over those of a black woman.

These dynamics appear to play out in the blogosphere. For instance, it’s probably not coincidental that many of the first influential feminist bloggers were male — see, importantly, Barry. Who is totally the bee’s knees, in my opinion. But it’s legitimate to point out that his words about feminism are sometimes taken more seriously than if a mere woman says them.

In this case, the allegation is that a white woman’s words are taken more seriously — because of her megaphone on the internet, and because of the privilege that allowed her to obtain that megaphone, and so on — than the words of women of color which have come before.

Now. That’s all, um, factual. I think. It’s systemic. It’s about privilege and disadvantage, and who’s heard, and so on.

The appropriation angle is more subjective and more sticky, and I am not going to try to endorse or reject the claims — although as mentioned, I do have opinions, blah blah. So, to try to keep the conversation systemic:

If, systemically, a white woman can say ideas that a black woman can also say and get more attention for it, then it becomes problematic when she repeats those ideas. Because, all of a sudden, people are paying attention. If she doesn’t attribute those ideas to their sources, then the words of the people who originated them disappear. The black women’s words are subsumed and become assumed to be those of the white woman — they are appropriated by her, intentionally or unintentionally.

So, it’s both attribution and appropriation. Through lack of attribution, it becomes appropriation.

Here, attribution can stand in — in a sort of generic, not totally accurate way — for money. Take an example that science fiction writer N. K. Jemisin brought up last year at Wicson: mass-marketed Western shirts that look Chinese.* Chinese people are making real Chinese shirts. Westerners are taking an idea of what’s Chinese, appropriating it, changing it in a way so that it actually reflects more of a Western idea of whta Chinese is than any actual reality of what Chinese actually is, and then they mass-market it and make lots of money. Money is the measure of worth here, and the way you see how people are benefitting from ideas.

In academic exchange, attribution is a measure of worth and credit. So, without attribution, the idea-originators get neither worth nor credit — just like the people making real Chinese shirts (or making the African art objects that they get small amounts of money for that western art dealers make huge amounts of money off of, or whatever). It’s a matter of worth, credit, money, value, whatever, being given to the priveleged person instead of the person who did the work of coming up with the idea / making the objects / etc.

–

*and here’s a good example of something that almost became non-attribution and thus appropriation. If I were speaking in conversation, I might or might not source N. K. Jemisin as the origin of the analogy — mostly because I would fear losing my audience by sounding overly academic, with attribution. I certainly would if they knew her or knew of her, but I might skip it if I were talking to a creative writing student, for instance, about a story they’d written, and trying to explain orientalism to them. I think that would be basically okay in that situation, but it would be patently bad here, where people even have the ability to follow up (and do! N. K. Jemisin rocks). I had a moment of wondering whether I should credit her, though, because I can’t remember if her blogging handle is associated with her SF name, and I am hesitant to actually *link* her because god knows, I wouldn’t want to out her if she’s not out. Anyway. Point is, if I didn’t attribute (in this relatively formal discussion setting and in writing, particularly) the idea to N. K., I would have been appropriating it.

This is exceptionally clear beacuse I’m pulling from her analogy directly — as I remember it — and she is definitely, 100% the source of it entering my concsiousness.

*

(Shockingly, this is a feminist and anti-racist thread. I’d screw with the comment rules, but I don’t feel like it, so just respect that, eh? Merci.)

Study: Stricter voting ID rules hurt ‘04 turnout

A study by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University shows turnout in 2004 was about 4% lower in states that required voters to sign their name or produce documentation. Hispanic turnout was 10% lower; the difference was about 6% for blacks and Asian-Americans.

Kevin Drum:

By a substantial margin, the Indiana residents most likely to possess photo ID turn out to be whites, the middle aged, and high-income voters. And while this is undoubtedly just a wild coincidence, these are also the three groups most like to vote for Republicans. [...] Overall, 91% of registered Republicans had photo IDs compared to only 83% of registered Democrats.

But like I said, this is probably just a coincidence. I’m sure Karl Rove and the RNC had no idea that the demographics broke down like this. Right?

From Art Levine, writing in The American Prospect:

But Republicans were not deterred by their loss in civil court and pressed for a criminal investigation, a probe which U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias started on the same day that the court ruled against the GOP. Iglesias was a true believer in the menace of voter fraud. As one of just two U.S. attorneys in the nation to form such task forces, he was invited to lecture other U.S. attorneys in 2005 as part of the annual Justice Department ballot-integrity conference.

Iglesias’ efforts weren’t enough for Patrick Rogers, the Republican National Lawyers Association point person in the state, who mounted a campaign to pressure Iglesias to bring criminal charges before the election, rather than form a task force. Indeed, even before Iglesias concluded in 2006 that there wasn’t enough evidence to indict on voter fraud, major Republicans in the state had started asking the Bush administration for his removal. In early December 2006, Iglesias was one of seven U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department fired.

Today, Iglesias says of voter fraud: “It’s like the boogeymen parents use to scare their children. It’s very frightening, and it doesn’t exist.”

From Art Levine (again), this time in The Huffington Post:

“Black voters in Dallas, Texas in 2006, after Mr. Agerwal joined the Justice Department, received a letter that said if you were registered by ACORN, they’re a fraudulent organization, and if you try to vote, you’ll be prosecuted and arrested at the polls.” He testified that he had alerted the Justice Department, but no action was taken. Project Vote, ACORN’s partner in managing voting registration drives, also contacted the Dallas FBI, which declined to investigate the intimidating mailers sent to thousands of African-Americans.

The FBI belatedly responded to Project Vote in late December 2006, asserting that “no factual predication of voter intimidation was established.” The FBI’s decision not to investigate, critics say, is the latest sign that politicization appears to have compromised the nominally non-partisan law enforcement agency.

Moreover, the Justice Department’s response was part of a striking pattern of indifference to alleged intimidation violations. In fact, The Huffington Post has learned, President Bush’s Justice Department hasn’t brought a single prosecution or lawsuit in more than seven years on behalf of any African-American voters who faced direct voter intimidation threats and challenges…

[...]such threatening incidents include black-shirted, gun-toting thugs thwarting Latino voters in Tucson, Arizona in 2006, and fliers from a fake “Milwaukee Black Voters League” distributed during the 2004 election in Milwaukee inner-city neighborhoods warning people that if anyone in their family had been convicted of a crime, “you can get ten years in prison” if you dared to vote. Unfortunately, such cases don’t seem to have been deemed worthy of serious investigation by DOJ, and certainly no prosecutions or lawsuits have resulted.

With US economies elections often quite close, the 2-4% gain that Republicans gain in elections because they’re led by cheating, lying racists actually does make a real difference. And the system is self-perpetuating; the more racist Republicans are in charge, the more racist Republicans are appointed to positions from which they can make sure that crimes against non-white voters are ignored.

For regular coverage of voting rights and voting access issues, check out the Voting Matters Blog.

(Watch the ad before reading further if you prefer to avoid “spoilers”).

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I like and respect both BFP and Amanda Marcotte. This shit just sucks.

1) I feel horrible for the stress and shit Brownfemipower’s being put through.

I don’t think there’s any blogger whose writing is better than Brownfemipower’s. (There are a few I find as good, but no one better. No one.) It’s wrenching that she’s taken her blog down, it’s wrenching that she’s going through a shitty time.

I hope she’s just taking a break, and that she’ll be back. But only BFP can say what’s the right thing for her to do. As a reader, I mourn the loss of one of my favorite blogs; but I support BFP’s decision, whatever she decides.

2) I also feel horrible for the stress and shit Amanda’s being put through.

Some people have accused Amanda of stealing, and of plagiarism. (I’m not linking, because that way lies blogwars, and I don’t want to start or participate in blogwars anymore). I don’t think that’s fair, or true. And that Amanda is now being criticized on “stop making it all about you” grounds is, I think, especially unfair. It’s not all about Amanda, but it’s hard to see the bigger picture when you’re being attacked.

3) There is a much bigger issue here. Appropriating ideas is, in a neutral context, fine. We all do it, all the time. No one is an island, etc..

But our lives aren’t lived in a neutral context; we live in a racist context. And in that context, when white progressives take up issues that POC activists have been leading on for years, we should credit, cite and acknowlege the work of POC. Otherwise, we’re contributing to a racist pattern that’s been going on for decades, in all forms of writing and art.

Holly at Feministe writes:

What I care about is that when white feminists undertake to write about the issues of women of color — such as immigration, which is clearly a massively race-infused issue — they should do so in solidarity with women of color. In ways that give political voice to women of color, to immigrants, to those whose voice is generally not heard as loudly.

When any of us have a soapbox, an opportunity to get up and talk, we must continue to stand by those who aren’t called on. If you want to consider yourself an anti-racist or a white ally to people of color — if you want anyone else to consider you those things — then it behooves you to swim against the current. If everyone did, perhaps the tides would turn, even if it was just in our corner of the blogosphere. And sometimes all you have to do is simply call out the hard work of another woman who went before you, who has paved the path that you’re walking down with research and ideas and words and strong feelings. All you have to do is cover your bases, pay your respects, and make sure you can’t be read as trying to take sole credit.

I totally agree. (Although I’m sure I’ve screwed up on that account many times myself.)

MODERATING NOTE: Anything that strikes me as a personal attack on either BFP or on Amanda may be deleted without warning.

I think every man should, too. The title of this post is a quote from an article by Connie Schultz:

I don’t think every woman should support Hillary Clinton just because she’s a woman. Smart women disagree all the time, and that has never been more obvious than in our heated discussions about Clinton.

I do, however, think every woman should support the notion of Hillary Clinton. That means judging her by her record and her plans for our future, not by her marital stamina, her choice in suits or her version of femininity. Even if we can’t support her as a candidate, we ought to acknowledge the history that she is making — for us and for our daughters and granddaughters. And we ought to point out to them that making history sure has a downside.

Recently, I learned that some airport shops are selling a “Hillary nutcracker.” She has a smile on her face and metal spikes between her thighs. I don’t worry about the candidate, who has learned how to handle such misogyny, but I do dwell on the young girls who might catch a horrifying glimpse of those steel jaws and decide that no woman should invite such vitriol. [...]

Katie Roiphe writes that she has “yet to meet a woman who likes Hillary Clinton.” Lorrie Moore calls Clinton “a freak.” Amy Wilentz declares that Clinton’s recipe for chocolate-chip cookies “sounds awful” and that when Chelsea was a newborn, Hillary’s hair was “a wreck.”

On and on they go, bruising and battering the only woman to do what they — and the rest of us — could only dare to imagine.

All the while, 11-year-old girls watch.

And learn.

Curtsy: Kate Harding.

(By the way, Katie Roiphe is best known for an anti-feminist polemic she wrote years ago, declaring that there must not be a rape crisis because none of her female friends told her she had been raped. It’s curious that, all these years later, Roiphe’s still making a similar error in logic.)

Talk about whatever you’d like. Self-linking is encouraged.

Oh, and here’s a creepy photoshop drawing from Pixeloo:

This is a design for the banner that I’ll be hanging behind my table at Stumptown, where I’ll be premiering the dead-tree edition of Hereville. The banner is planned to be eight feet wide by three feet high (gulp). I’ll be hanging it from a mounting device I’m building myself out of PVC pipe. It feels more than a little embarrassing — there’s nothing in the world I hate more than selling myself — but I’ve decided I really want to go all-out on this.

So the first question is, what do folks think of the design? It’s really just a variation of the webpage header.

And my second question is, how high off the ground should I get this? The plan I downloaded is for an eight foot high display, so the banner would start at five feet off the ground and end eight feet off the ground. Is that high enough, or should be using a nine foot or ten foot plan instead?

Any advice would be appreciated.

UPDATE: Second attempt:

UPDATE AGAIN: Second attempt, slightly tweaked:

The Nation has a detailed article. A woman working for KBR, a private contractor the US hires to operate in Iraq, claims to have been drugged and gang raped by her co-workers, possibly including her boss. The rape was then covered up.

This part enraged me (well, lots of it did, but this part too):

[Rape victims face] two major roadblocks in the fight for justice. The first is the battle to have the perpetrators prosecuted in criminal court — which, because of Order 17, may be nearly impossible. According to the order, imposed by Paul Bremer, U.S. defense contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted in the Iraqi criminal justice system. While they can technically be tried in U.S. federal court, the Justice Department has shown no interest in prosecuting her case. In fact, for more than two years now, the DOJ has brought no criminal charges in the matter. Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican who has taken up Jones’ cause, reports that federal agencies refuse to discuss the status of the investigation; meanwhile, in December, the DOJ refused to send a representative to the related congressional hearing on the matter.

Even more appalling, the Justice Department, which can and should prosecute most of these cases, has declined to do so. “There is no rational explanation for this,” says Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who specializes in the law of armed conflict. Prosecutorial jurisdiction for crimes like Jones’ alleged rape is easily established under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and the Patriot Act’s special maritime and territorial jurisdiction provisions. But somebody has to want to prosecute the cases.

Horton wonders what the 200 Justice Department employees and contractors stationed in Iraq do all day, noting that there has not been a single completed criminal conviction against a U.S. contractor implicated in a violent crime anywhere in Iraq since the invasion.

[...] “You have 180,000 people over there, you’re going to have a few crimes. [...] And if you eliminate law enforcement, the crimes are going to get worse because people will quickly learn they can get away with it.”

This is an important point. Rapists exist no matter what the US government does, and that’s not the Republican Party’s fault. But it’s reasonable to expect the government to work to reduce rape and to punish rapists; instead, Republican leaders have chosen to be accessory to rape, by refusing to investigate or prosecute the crime.

Do I really think that Bush and his managers want Americans raped and the rapists to get off scott-free? No. But they consider that better than the alternative. In Bush’s eyes, for American contractors to be arrested and tried for rape would be unbearable; letting them get away with rape is, in the administration’s view, the lesser evil.

I can’t wait until these cancers in suits are out of office.

That said, even if we had a competent administration staffed by people instead of soulless monsters, there would still be too many rapes committed by Americans in Iraq. ¹ There would be fewer such crimes, but they’d still happen, because the vastly uneven power relations and dehumanization brought about by war and occupation make rape of soldiers and of civilians inevitable.

This is one reason the Bush doctrine, which makes wars of choice inevitable, is evil. The cost of war is always hideous, and the rapes are just a small part of that. War should always be a last resort. It wasn’t in Iraq. The shame of it is that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and thousands of Americans, have paid the price for the fecklessness and warlust of US leaders. It would have been far better — both objectively and morally — if Bush, and Cheney, and McCain, and the rest of the pro-war leadership class had died instead.

1. I’m ignoring for a moment the obvious point that if the current administration was staffed by competent, decent people, there never would have been an invasion of Iraq at all. (back)