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Dear Puffin,
It is definitely fall. I know this because it is about 40˚F, raining like hell, and I slipped on a pile of slimy, cold, and above all wet leaves. People talk a lot about how much they love fall. I don’t. I fucking hate fall. I think I see things differently than they do, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m turning into a crank or because I’m growing up.
Yeah, pretty sure I’m a crank.
Happy birthday Puffin
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin,
I’m taking a rest from hardcore political blogging to return to my poster art roots. Today I’ve rounded up some great sci fi propaganda posters, much like the ones I wrote about here and here and here and here.
First we have Princess Leia/Rosie the Riveter, by Tom Sullivan.
We’ve also got an excellent Halo victory poster by The Fearsome Blooming Skull.
There’s a whole series of Battlestar Galactica posters from Thinkgeek.
These posters from Kick-Ass are excellent, although I can’t really pin down the name of the artist. Possibly someone named Ignition Print?
Aaron Wood has also done a great series of social networking propaganda posters, which I like even better than the last batch I posted. You can guy them from his Etsy store.
And with that, Puffin, I leave you. Remember, loose lips sink ships!
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin,
It should come as no surprise that I don’t much care for anyone in the GOP field and this includes Herman Cain. He’s like a malicious version of Ross Perot, with none of Perot’s charm. So I have a certain base-line level of disgust with Herman Cain to start with, but there have been two spikes recently which have caused me to absolutely despise him. The first was this little number, reported by The American Prospect.
Cain’s speech Friday afternoon was a barnstormer. His loudest applause, a standing ovation, came when he noted his upbringing under Jim Crow, but he told the crowd that he’s never been upset with the treatment of blacks in America. “I have achieved all of my American dreams and then some, because of the great nation, United States of America,” Cain said. “What’s there to be angry about?” he asked.
Here’s the more official version from the transcript:
One of the questions that I get asked sometimes running for president of the United States: Mr. Cain, didn’t you grow up in the civil rights movement?
Yes, I did, in Atlanta, Georgia — raised in Atlanta, Georgia, during the ’50s, the ’60s, before the civil rights movement, during the civil rights movement. I was around when they signed the civil rights movement (sic) of 1964, when they signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This nation has made it through the Civil War. This nation has made it through the struggle we had with slavery, Jim Crow laws, civil rights.
A reporter asked me just yesterday: Well, aren’t you angry — (laughter) — about how America has treated you?
I said: Sir, you don’t get it. (Laughter.) I have achieved all of my American dreams and then some — (cheers, applause) — because of the great nation United States of America. (Cheers, applause.) What’s there to be angry about? Angry? (Applause continues.)
Translation: Herman Cain made a lot of money, therefore people no longer need to be angry about Jim Crow. Um. OK, nationalism and patriotism are all well and good, but this takes flag-waving American exceptionalism to a whole new and awful extreme. This is the race-relations version of that disgusting old GOP chestnut “well I lucked out, why didn’t you?” which is just another way of casting the poor as undeserving. After all, if they deserved to be rich, they would be! Herman Cain hasn’t felt discriminated against, apparently, so why should you? Hear that, black America? Jim Crow wasn’t that bad. And anyway, the elected government of the United States of America may have enacted generations of legislation victimizing black Americans, but America (an amorphous entity made up of fireworks and apple pie) made Herman Cain’s American dreams come true.
It’s like he’s saying no harm no foul. Which is laughable, not to say benighted and revisionist, because he’s apparently forgotten or chosen to ignore the generations of black (and Asian, and Latino, and native American, etc) Americans whose American dreams did not come true because of Jim Crow, and the mountains of other legislation that either directly discriminated against or failed to protect the rights and privileges of American citizens. And he’s apparently forgotten or chosen to ignore the fact that Jim Crow type laws were written explicitly to prevent minorities from participating in the American dream.
No one is saying that Herman Cain, or indeed anyone, needs to be carrying a chip on their shoulder about stuff that happened 40, 50, 60 years ago. How people interact with their own ethnicity ought to be entirely their own business. Of course it isn’t, but it oughta be, and to that end I will not unleash the extensive commentary I had written earlier about how Herman Cain is a dipshit for so obviously attempting to erase his ethnicity in order to hang with the good old boys of the GOP. And yet, at the same time, he’ll use the “Niggerhead” situation as a way to score off Rick Perry, which is not to say that Perry doesn’t deserve it.
The weirdest thing about this is that the GOP was recently called out on their relationship to black history in America. And do you know who did it? Michael Steele. His response to the “Niggerhead” story was this eminently reasonable and well constructed comment:
STEELE: We cannot be lackadaisical about these issues. We cannot be insensitive in that regard and say well just paint over it, because it still is a reminder of what’s beneath the paint. And I think again that’s what irks a lot of African-Americans and a lot of minorities when it comes to how the Republican Party and sometimes its individual candidates respond to these types of things.
Michael Steele has become a voice of reason. Michael Steele has become a voice of reason!! Aughhhhh!
But as far as Cain’s ridiculous run for the presidency goes, this video is actually just as disturbing.
No, knowing the name of the president of Uzbekistan is not going to create a single job. But it is YOUR job as president, Mr Cain. Being proud of your ignorance of foreign policy may go over well with the tea party, who like to pretend that the economy is the only thing going on in the whole wide world, but it just lost you the neo-conservative vote. And also, hopefully probably, the GOP nomination. Also, how is knowing the leaders of “insignificant” central asian states irrelevant to national security? I’m sure plenty of people thought Afghanistan was irrelevant before 2001. But it wasn’t.
Also, it is probably worth remembering that foreign policy is one of the few arenas for which the president really is directly responsible. Jobs bills, the economy, civil rights at home, all this issues are decided between the president and the legislature. But the formulation and execution of foreign policy is one of the few jobs that falls directly into the purview of the president. Matt Yglesias makes an especially good point:
The contrast with someone like Al Franken is, to me, telling. A comedian running for Senate naturally faces some voter skepticism even if, like Franken, he’s been politically engaged and active for years. So Franken clearly went out of his way during and after his campaign to show that he’s well-briefed and well-versed in the issues. He had a higher bar to cross than your average candidate, so he did the work to clear it. Cain, trying to leap from ex-CEO of third-rate pizza chain to president of the United States, doesn’t think he needs to do anything.
In summation Puffin: Ugh. I am thoroughly cheesed off with these clowns. And Herman Cain is Asshole of the Day.
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin,
As you know, it is killing me that I can’t be at the Occupy Wall St protests. And it’s especially horrible and ironic that the reason I can’t go is that I can’t get time off from my corporate slavery job to attend. But them’s the breaks, as my overlord boss tells me. But fortunately for me I have friends like Jason, an old classmate from Columbia, who managed to get himself down to the protests and has sent us a report from the field.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT OCCUPY WALL STREET
by Jason Fitzgerald
Note: This essay is also published on the Huffington Post’s Off the Bus series here, under a different title.
One of the most well-rehearsed axioms of the Occupy Wall Street event is that “the media does not know how to talk about it,” and, as a result, is talking about it to as minimal an extent as is possible. Fortunately for the occupation’s supporters, their presence is getting harder and harder to ignore. And so the media’s problem is slowly but steadily becoming the nation’s problem. When I joined in the Solidarity March today along with fellow students from Columbia, NYU, CUNY, and SUNY, not to mention an impressive number of labor organizations, I was approached by two different broadcast journalists for interviews. The first identified himself as “Kuwaiti television,” and the second identified herself as “from CUNY.” Each newscaster thrust a microphone in my face and asked the same question, “Why are you here?” I could not escape the feeling that they were speaking for the entire country, maybe the world, and that somehow, if the answer to the question could be “discovered,” all the cameras would pack up and go home, relieved not to have to be in downtown Manhattan anymore.
We must begin by acknowledging that the first fundamental fact of Occupy Wall Street is that it has no message. It is not a localized policy march, like a march for same-sex marriage equality or for a university living wage or for a political candidate. Occupy Wall Street is unlike any of these protest-type gatherings for the simple reason that it cannot be talked about in familiar terms. The “meaning” of the occupation will emerge over time, both by the intellectuals and journalists who are already trying to explain the event’s “goals,” and by history itself, which will measure the occupation by the way it concludes. I think it is worth considering, though, that the present incommensurability of the occupation, the fact that it cannot be explained away by being made to stand in for a “message” or a “platform,” is its greatest asset, and the marker of its significance.
I answered the question, “Why are you here?,” not by citing the degree of inequity between wealthy and non-wealthy Americans (the problem of the so-called “99%”), nor the oligarchy manifesto known as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, nor the bank and corporate bailouts, nor the refusal by any major Western state to take environmental climate change seriously, nor the decades of imperialist inefficacies of the IMF. What I tried to say—and what I am attempting to say better here—is that I came because by being physically present at Occupy Wall Street, I could increase, however marginally, the likelihood that more people would look in my direction.
If Occupy Wall Street is to be permitted any meaning at all, it is as deixis. Deixis takes place when a rhetorician points to something (figuratively or actually) without giving it a name (“here” and “that one there” are deictic terms). A deictic gesture changes the direction of attention, so that what it points away from is as significant as what it points toward. Occupy Wall Street, in other words, is not occupying anything. It is pointing toward and pointing away. It is pointing toward corporate power, through corporate power’s most transparent metonym, the short seven blocks north of Exchange Place that connect Broadway and the East River. And Occupy Wall Street is pointing away from Washington D.C., from the Senate, from the House of Representatives, from Barack Obama, from Rick Perry and Chris Christie, from filibusters, from debt ceilings, from “supercongresses,” from election polls, from Americans for Prosperity, from Karl Rove, from George Soros, from campaign ads, from everything that “the media”—particularly the socially engaged media like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC—understands to be “politics.” Occupy Wall Street turns away from these items and says: That is sideshow.
What is real? The flow of capital, the source of money and the direction in which it travels, who is paying for what, and how they are getting their money in the first place. Equally real are the consequences of these conditions on the lived experiences of the world’s citizens. No matter what the individual protestors’ “interests” and “demands” might be—and I insist that it is not to the occupation’s discredit that many protestors could not honestly and coherently answer “Why are you here?”—the occupation’s message could not be simpler: LOOK!
It is because Occupy Wall Street is, at least right now, nothing more than an act of deixis, and because that content-less gesture has grown in size and strength without any major institution willing it to, that it is significant. Regardless of what legacy Occupy Wall Street leaves behind, its existence matters in the world-historical sense. It is the genuine expression of a real deficiency at the constitutional level of our socio-political system that not only cannot be solved by structures currently in place, it cannot even be understood in those structure’s terms.
The day we—as individuals and as participants in a media apparatus—learn how to talk about Occupy Wall Street is the day Occupy Wall Street’s first and only “demand” will be met. That is the day when we learn how to talk about the world economy as something other than a given state of affairs, to be “managed” by policy decisions and morally sound corporate leaders. It is time to ask the question, “What are the obligations of a state to its people?” It is time we stop pretending that those obligations are not being met because of a surplus of legislators and corporate executives who are “greedy” or “ideological” or “political” or “evil.” It is time we ask the only real question worth asking of Occupy Wall Street—why is this happening? What are the political and socio-economic conditions of our country failing to achieve such that an increasingly large number of people feel they must go to the streets without solutions, without leadership, without message and point to a set of buildings that are themselves not the problem, filled with people who are working for a living and are also, as individuals, not the problem? And how will that be fixed?
… … … … … … … … …
I think he’s on to something Puffin.
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin,
It seems I was either way ahead of the curve or slightly psychic when I did my own personal resurrection of Arrested Development a few weeks ago. There is a bone fide rumor going around, started by no less than the Boston Herald, that Arrested Development is being brought back for a “limited” season. This is in addition to the movie, which I guess/hope/pray is really happening. Someone on Twitter says that the “limited run tv series would allow exposition for what each character has done for past 5 yrs then movie screenplay can jump right in.” And you know, it’s on Twitter so it must be true. The New Yorker’s official Twitter seems to be confirming.
Will Arnett and Jason Bateman are confirming as well.
If this isn’t true then it may be the greatest troll of all time. Tomorrow’s tweet will be from the New Yorker: “We’ve made a huge mistake…..”
Let’s hope this is real Puffin
Love
MacGuffin, who just blue herself
