It’s become clear that I’ve mis-tagged some of these, and I thought it was about time — 1/3 of the way toward a book! 🙂 — to collect them in one place.
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Blog
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New poster: Don’t Let That Shadow
Another in the series, this one with the tag “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them“. This is based on one of the most effective WWII posters I know of, with the same tag but the shadow of a swastika. My job here was harder, in that I don’t have an instantly-recognizable symbol of the Martian oppressors. Instead I settled for a Martian war machine off-camera, with a low spotlight to throw a long shadow. I’m of mixed opinion on whether it gets across the shape but I like the atmosphere.
I used the Poser standard figure “Ben” plus the Poser 4 girl. For no good reason I decided on only two children instead of three. The original had the kids playing with toys, so I used a Poser-standard cartoon character “Ginger” for a discarded doll. Ben, meanwhile, holds a scale model of an Avro Lancaster bomber. Technically, this is counter-factual to my timeline, as WW II doesn’t occur in the world of IW2. But surely some further development of the airplane will occur, and the Lancaster is not a wildly unusual design.
Because most of my posters seem to exhort either “Buy War Bonds” or “Work to Win”, I decided to add something more. In this case, I mention the “Second Guardian Drive”. My nebulous assumption is that this is early in the war, when the humans are in the process of expelling the Martians from Earth. The “Guardian Drives” are bond drives to finance the outposts that will guard Earth’s orbit. This places this poster significantly earlier than, say, “Take the Fight to Them” or even “That You May Breathe Free“.
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Shameless me-tooism
Generally, I don’t like posting a simple link to someone else. But today, I feel compelled, because Glenn Greenwald has done such a masterful job outlining the facts and the reasons behind the catastrophic collapse of American support throughout the world. We’ve allowed this President and his cronies to change what America is, and we’ve allowed him to taint how the world views us. And whether or not you take any moral guidance from the rest of humanity, you have to ask yourself this: If the “war on terror” is a globe-spanning, decade-spanning epic struggle for the survival of civilization itself … wouldn’t it be an easier fight if most of the world was on our side? Why would you go out and deliberately antagonize potential allies?
The only answer I can see is: You’d do that if you were infected with hyper-machismo that views alliances as “soft” and “weak” — the sort of testosterone poisoning that follows naturally when one feels subconscious but unavoidable guilt over dodging an earlier war’s call to service.
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New Poster: A Swell Rocket
Yet more in my one-man propaganda barrage for the Second Interworld War. This one reads, “It’s a Swell Rocket … Send Us More! with the ubiquitous exhortation, “Work to Win”. I modeled it on one from Design for Victory that had a somewhat-goofy airman pointing his thumb at an off-camera airplane and saying, “She’s a swell plane”. Normally I’d claim the moral high ground and insist that I changed to the gender-neutral “it” rather than “she” to help stamp out sexism, but the fact of the matter is, I just didn’t notice until I was done. Then I was too lazy to go back and change it. I also included the rocket, because (as I’ve said before), I labor under the added handicap that my audience doesn’t actually have day-to-day experience with the things I’m illustrating.
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“Brothers in Arms” — Dire Straits
There are so many different worlds
So many different suns
And we have just one world
But we live in different ones…
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New Poster: Keep Us Flying
Another in the ongoing series. This one reads “Keep Us Flying — Buy War Bonds“. The inspiration is a WWII poster with exactly the same wording. In the original, it’s a pilot wearing a parachute harness. (I’m assuming it’s a pilot. It could be an airborne infantryman, I suppose.) Using the by-now standard substitution, I put in a jetpack trooper. Exhorting people to buy war bonds is pretty much the major focus of war posters, apparently.
I made one change. I didn’t like the blank background, so I scoured the Net for a free background I could use. (I found a site called stock.xchg, which has thousands of stock images [get it?], many of which are free to use.) I settled on a stirring sunrise sky, which I like quite a bit actually.
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Scooter Libby and the Rule of Law
OK, first off, what the President did — commuting Libby’s sentence so that he serves no jail time — is itself well within the law. Perhaps unwisely, the Founders did vest that power in the President and he gets to use it, even when it’s unseemly. Let’s leave that aside.
But if the President thinks Libby has been mistreated, why only commute the sentence? Why not pardon him outright? In the next few days, I predict you’ll see an apparent division in the rightwing noise machine. Don’t fall for it — it’s a sham. More below the fold.
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So long, Studio 60
Edited for grammar 2007 Dec 16.
I just finished watching my TiVo’d copy of “What Kind of Day Has It Been”, the 22nd and final episode of Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Studio 60 was highly touted as the Next Big Thing in TV drama, opened with a stellar pilot, and then faded out over the course of a season. A while back, NBC made it clear that it would not be picked up for a second season; the word was out early enough for Sorkin to adjust the storylines for the last few episodes.
Short version: Like most of the post-hiatus episodes, this one was pretty good. It had flashes, at least, of the brilliance that Sorkin brought to Sports Night and of course The West Wing. Much like the rest of the season, alas, it had only flashes. The episode was bittersweet, in that you can see where this might have gone with another season’s chance. There really was potential for a break-out, smart, important TV show, but Sorkin never quite found his feet.
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Irksome metric
Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of the population. It’s not the timing, the seemingly-obligatory article near July 4 warning us that it wasn’t all fireworks and oratory. That’s a useful exercise, too, especially in an age of unquestionable jingoism. No, what has me irked is the following statement:
Yet in all, more than 700 people put their names to the parchment — 12 times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence.
“The parchment” referenced here was a petition by the royalist Americans to their king, declaring their loyalty and dismay at the Revolution. Despite the inherent strength of her arguments, Ms. Jasonoff appears compelled (by insecurity?) to puff up the popularity of the Tory case by a specious popularity contest. She must know better: The Declaration was signed by members “in Congress assembled”; it was not an invitational and the grouping was by design small in number. To compare it to an open petition left out in a New York tavern for three days, is simply absurd. How many roaring patriots would have signed the Declaration (had it be a petition) is unknowable but certainly vast… more vast than 700, if one can judge by how rapidly and how widely it was reproduced.
Ms. Jasonoff’s editorial choice doesn’t really undercut the article and in some ways it’s a tiny thing. But it’s another example of a growing carelessness we display with our rhetoric, a growing willingness to compare apples to oranges and act as if the comparison meant anything. It’s intellectually sloppy.
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Another criminal escapes justice on a technicality
Interestingly, that’s not how the right-wing noise machine is approaching this story, about how some of the indictments against Tom DeLay have been thrown out. You’d think that people who have spent literally four decades decrying “judicial activism” and unjust outcomes of people “clearly” guilty, would be a-twitter that a judge and then an appeals court threw out the indictments on a technical point.
In fact, however, people at, say, the National Review think this post-facto justifies Mr. DeLay and makes it almost criminal that he was forced to step down as House Majority Leader. We should all cry for Mr. DeLay, apparently. Except of course — as even the more-friendly Houston Chronicle article is forced to admit — Mr. DeLay still faces charges of laundering money and of committing conspiracy to launder money. Those were crimes at the time (Illegal to launder money? Who knew?) — and he may still face trial on them.
The guys at the National Review take this as evidence that “the charges seem to be falling apart”, but that seems a tad over-optimistic based on the articles I’ve seen. The dismissal came because the crime Mr. DeLay was alleged to have committed didn’t come into force until 2003, whereas his disreputable actions happened in 2002 and before. It seems the courts had little choice on this one — though I’d love to know what prosecutor Ron Erle had in mind when he pressed the charges in the first place. I doubt this is as open-and-shut as it seems. All that notwithstanding, the other charges are not hobbled by the same calendar problem. Money laundering and conspiracy have been on the books as crimes for quite some time now.
Though the Review article would have you believe that the dismissals taint the other indictments, in fact, the only reason that Mr. DeLay has not faced trial yet is that the presiding judge opted to wait until the appeal of indictments was complete.
Has “the Hammer” been vindicated? Hardly.
