Hypocrisy in Hollywood (SOPA)

The bill is off the floor for right now, but some European powers have launched similar efforts, from what I gather. This is a big graphic but worth your reading.
Created by: Paralegal.net

Deaths in 2011: October

As usual, this (seriously overdue) entry is not an all-encompassing roster of newsmakers who died in the given month; look to Wikipedia if you want a broader compilation. Rather, these are the ones that struck me as particularly important or notable or poignant or otherwise meriting comment here given the themes that interest me.

October:

• Scottish folk musician Bert Jansch (3 Nov. 1943 - 5 Oct. 2011) was one of the greatest guitarists I'd never heard of until after news of his death. A major name in the 1960s folk revival in Britain, he was a founding member of the band Pentangle and saw his work ... urm, let's say "repurposed' ... for an early Led Zeppelin hit.
• There's now a vacancy for "Square-Jawed Military Man With Stick Up Ass," as Charles Napier (12 April 1936 - 5 Oct. 2011) died the same day. Even if you didn't know his name, chances are you've seen him and loathed him in one appearance or another.
• And I defriended a couple of people at Facebook after the death of Apple marketing maestro Steve Jobs (24 Feb. 1955 - 5 Oct. 2011) led to their making some truly assaholic comments.
• Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (born in June 1942, killed by rebels 20 Oct. 2011) was the worst threat to America ever! Except when he was our buddy. Then he was a bad guy again. And I think he also worked in a few films under the name Danny Trejo, but I could be wrong. This shit gets confusing, you know?
• Shirley Becke (29 April 1917 - 25 Oct. 2011) was the first woman to reach the rank of chief officer in British policing, a distinction she earned with her 1969 promotion to commander. Her law enforcement career including being the final top officer in an all-female division of London's police department that was dissolved and folded into the larger body. This would make her a bit of an inspiration for Prime Suspect character Jane Tennison, one suspects.
  
• Gay rights activist Aristide Laurent (15 Sept. 1941 - 26 Oct. 2011) helped co-found in 1967 The Los Angeles Advocate, which lives on today as The Advocate, a leading news, entertainment, and political magazine for the LGBT community. As such, some people will see his life's legacy as contributing in some way to the downfall of America, when that "honor" actually belongs to ...
• Economist William A. Niskanen (13 March 1933 - 26 Oct. 2011), an architect of Ronald Reagan's economic programs that are continuing to wreck havoc on American lives. From 1985-2008, he chaired the libertarian Cato Institute and helped perpetuate the ruinous policies of deregulation that have allowed the wealthy to amass ever more capital while starving out people who actually work for a living (or at least would like to do so).
• Sir Jimmy Savile (31 Oct. 1926 - 29 Oct. 2011) was a longtime British media personality whose work included hosting the music charts show Top of the Pops.
• Axel Axgil (3 April 1915 - 29 Oct. 2011) was a Danish gay rights activist. He and his late partner, Eigil Axgil (1922-2005) had been together for four decades when they were finally allowed in 1989 to enter into a legally recognized domestic partnership, making them the first known same-sex couple to do so in the modern world.
• Tom Keith (21 Dec. 1946 - 30 Oct. 2011) was a longtime collaborator with Garrison Keillor, from their college radio days up through working as a producer on the live radio and stage show A Prairie Home Companion and appearing on stage as a voice actor and sound effects artist.
• And Alfred Hilbe (22 July 1928 - 31 Oct. 2011) was a former prime minister of Liechtenstein, the only country to my knowledge created out of comic book panels. (I should verify that.)

Here's a letter that my hometown newspaper (The Camden Chronicle) and former employer (The Jackson Sun) were both too cowardly to print:

---

Dear editor,

While spending the last 18 months studying at a seminary outside Boston, I’ve been keeping track of events back at home in Benton County. And as I’ve lived in Boston and seen how the descendants of the original Tea Party participants run things, I’ve come to realize the folks back at home have some misunderstandings.

The protest against taxation without representation was not a protest to end ALL taxation; the New England patriots just wanted the money spent more fairly, closer to home, rather than in England. So I think in the interests of accuracy, the modern-day Tea Party should embrace the ideals of the philosopher who’s so inspired them, the Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand.

Rand was a staunch capitalist and rugged individualist who admired bold thinkers, such as a serial killer of her era whom she praised for knowing what he wanted and going out to get it. She would surely look on approvingly at efforts to defund our local library (and provoke the state to remove books for the first time in state history) so as to ensure the future generation could be raised uneducated and thus better fit to serve those in power.

Rand was not a Christian; she saw Jesus’ advocacy of helping others as a sign of weakness. She’d thus admire the bold fight against providing health care to the poor, feeding hungry children, extending unemployment benefits, or helping provide health insurance to public workers, all Tea Party positions that ask “What would Jesus do?” and then propose to do the exact opposite thing.

Tea Party politicians cannot follow Rand and Jesus, but they don’t have to reject religion entirely; indeed, they’ve worked hard to instill religious values in our government, just not the religion you’d expect. Anton Levay based many of the teachings of the Church of Satan on Ayn Rand’s principles. So I encourage the Benton County Republicans to change their name to the Satanist Party and proudly present their true face to the world as they battle to preserve wealth and success for themselves, poverty and underperformance for the rest.

Jason Tippitt
Newton, Mass., originally from Camden

What addiction is depends on who you are

The major textbook for my Justice Matters course this semester is Margaret Urban Walker's Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. Her methodology can be applied to issues that extend well beyond race, however.

A thought hit me in the half-awake time this morning: What addiction is -- whether it's a disease or a moral defect -- depends on where you are in the power structure. Walker talks a lot about power structures, where those at the top have the epistemic authority -- high-fallutin' talk for the ability to define themselves and those below them. One way this is done is by defining its own ways of being as the norm, so that anything deviating from that standard is thus seen as inferior. For example, she argues that a definition of rationalism has been used to shut out women and ethnic minorities whose legitimate concerns are dismissed as signs of "moodiness" or "hot-headedness."

The nature of addiction became a source of tension between an ex-girlfriend and me. Her mom was a 12-stepper; I happened to bring up, just for consideration (and not necessarily in agreement), the arguments made in the episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! that took a skeptical view of 12-step programs and the notion that addiction is an illness. (Their take was that the way to stop drinking was to stop drinking; but again, I'm not endorsing that, as I have many problems with the way the libertarian Penn Jillette sees the world.)

Walker explains that power structures are preserved by what she calls necessary identities (necessary not for those upon whom they are grafted but for the interests of those defining the marginalized) and that those necessary identities are preserved in a number of ways -- what she calls epistemic firewalls -- that move the power dynamic out of sight or otherwise keep people from talking about it. Stereotypes are one useful tool for changing the subject or showing why it's only normal that "those people" would be at a lower level in the social structure.

Wealthy white conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh is found to have a bunch of oxycodone and hydrocodone obtained illegally. Though he shows no mercy toward ethnic minorities and the poor if they drink to excess, use illegal drugs or abuse legal ones, he's allowed to go into a recovery program. He spends about an hour in jail before bail is posted; he keeps his radio show, eventually becoming for some time the de facto head of the Republican Party.

Wealth of course plays a part in Rush Limbaugh's not picking up an alias of Prisoner #12483649468345 or a new understanding of same-sex relationships during a stay in a correctional facility. But race is surely a part of it as well. Ask African-American actor Sam Jones III -- who played Pete Ross on Smallville and a recurring role on late-days ER -- once he gets out of the federal prison where he's spending a year for a small part in an oxycodone trafficking ring (and could have served up to 20 years).

Intent to distribute plays a role there, sure. But apples to apples, our society tends to look at a privileged person's illegal drug use or excessive drinking as signs of a disease called addiction and at a less privileged person's parallel activities as proof that "those people" make poor decisions, lack moral fiber, are naturally inclined toward bad behavior.

Remember what Walker said about declaring a narrowly defined elite group's behavior as the rational norm. If addiction is a disease, then it can be treated through a process and does not reflect poorly on the moral character of the addict; it was the disease that missed the children's sporting events and sold the items bequeathed to the spouse by a deceased grandparent, not the addict himself of herself. But when the poorer addict missed those sporting events and pawned off items that the spouse had worked hard to buy, it's all on the addict.

These dynamics underlie much of our drug policy. Powder cocaine is imagined to be a drug of wealthy white persons, crack cocaine as the drug of poor blacks, and so there are vast differences in legal severity for possession of one versus the other. I imagine a look at the court system, specifically at who is allowed a pre-trial diversion to drug treatment, would suggest racial disparities as well. And while one need only look at death row to see how the color of skin affects sentencing for identical crimes, the readings in my spring course Mental Illness and Oppression in the United States also showed how a white person and a black person engaging in the same behaviors will be diagnosed differently by the mental health care system -- with the black patient always at a greater risk of being labeled violent, which again (Walker would say) illustrates a perceived and/or projected deficit of rationality.

Twelve-step programs do help some people. Some people are able to just quit on their own if they like. Dogmatically clinging to 12-stepping or dogmatically opposing it is naivete, either way. Until we solve the problems of inequality and human suffering that lead some people to a point where the only way they can see fit to survive is by numbing themselves, we're going to have the problem.

Deaths in 2011: September

As usual, this is not an all-encompassing list of notable people who died in the month in question. (See Wikipedia for that.) Rather, it's just a summary of the ones who struck me as particularly consequential or who meant something to me personally.

September:

• Michael S. Hart (8 March 1947 - 6 Sept. 2011) invented the e-book and founded the Project Gutenberg endeavor, which made its offerings available for free.
• Actor Cliff Robertson (9 Sept. 1923 - 10 Sept. 2011) was one of the last of the square-jawed movie stars, with roles ranging from a young John F. Kennedy in the war movie PT 109 to playing Peter Parker's beloved Uncle Ben in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy.
• Welsh-born Australian actor Andy Whitfield (17 July 1972 - 11 Sept. 2011) was best known for playing the title role in Starz's drama Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which had to be detoured (into a prequel miniseries and re-casting of the lead role) after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
• Character actress Frances Bay (23 Jan. 1919 - 15 Sept. 2011) started her career in her 50s and made her mark playing quirky characters in projects such as Happy Gilmore and Blue Velvet and, more recently, as a patient who seemed unable to die on Grey's Anatomy and a silent aunt on the TV comedy The Middle.
• Cartoonist Tom Wilson, Sr. (1 Aug. 1931 - 16 Sept. 2011) was creator of the long-running comic strip Ziggy and drew the feature until 1987, when art duties passed along to his son.
• Jack Adler (1 July 1917 - 18 Sept. 2011) was a longtime DC Comics cover artist and colorist who retired as production manager and vice president of production. He was also a cousin of radio shock jock Howard Stern.
• Leroy Schweitzer (who died 20 Sept. 2011 at age 73) was a member of the "Christian Patriot" (which is, actually, neither) secessionist cult the Montana Freemen and died in prison due to his and the group's criminal activities leading up to and during a 1996 standoff with federal authorities.
• Rock 'n' roll photographer Robert Whitaker (13 Nov. 1939 - 20 Sept. 2011) helped create album covers including those for Disreali Gears by Cream and the infamous "butcher shop" image for The Beatles' compilation album Yesterday and Today.
• Sept. 21 brought about two instances of state-sanctioned murder in the United States. Lawrence Russell Brewer (age 44) was an unrepentant killer who participated in the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Texas back in 1998. Troy Davis (born 9 Oct. 1968) was probably wrongly convicted of killing a Georgia police officer in 1989 -- he might not have even been present at the time -- but matters like that don't deter the American system. Your Humble Blogger opposes the death penalty in all cases; life without parole is a real punishment for the guilty, not an early exit, and it can be reversed in cases of wrongful conviction. (Shockingly, neither of the persons whose deaths prompted these capital sentences returned from the dead after the executions. All either action accomplished was bloodying the hands of every Texas and Georgia resident who didn't actively oppose the executions.)
• Sergio Bonelli (2 Dec. 1932 - 26 Sept. 2011) was an Italian comics writer and later publisher whose works included the long-running adventure titles Mister No and Zagor.
• India-born Canadian actress Maple Batalia (who died 28 Sept. 2011 at age 19) was a rising actress who had a small role in the comedy Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (her sole credit at IMDB.com). She was fatally shot on the campus of Simon Fraser University in Surrey, B.C., with her family blaming her death on a male classmate with an unrequited crush.
• Remember the cross-eyed opossum that became an Internet sensation about a year ago, even inspiring a viral video? Her name was Heidi, and she was born in America but lived in the Leipzig Zoo in Germany. The opossum was euthanized 28 Sept. 2011 at age three after suffering undisclosed medical problems.
• Music executive Sylvia Robinson (6 March 1936 - 29 Sept. 2011) was founder and CEO of the pioneering hip-hop label Sugar Hill Records; this after a singing career that included perhaps the most annoying single ever recorded, "Love Is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia (and, improbably enough, co-written by the usually quite cool Bo Diddley).
• Marv Tarplin (13 June 1941 - 30 Sept. 2011) played guitar in Smokey Robinson's Motown band The Miracles and helped co-write many of the band's hits between its founding in the 1950s and his exit in the 1970s. (Among his other co-writing credits: "One More Heartache," covered in a rockin' fashion by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.)
• And Ralph M. Steinman (14 Jan. 1943 - 30 Sept. 2011) was a Canadian immunologist and cell biologist who was announced as a Nobel Prize winner three days after his death.

Deaths in 2011: August

As always, this is not an all-inclusive list of notable people who died in the given month; look to Wikipedia for that. Rather, this is a list of those newsmakers and personalities who meant something to me in particular or struck me as important to pass along for one reason or another.

August

• Sister Carmela Marie Cristiano (born in 1927 or 1928, deceased 1 Aug. 2011) was a social worker and activist and the first Roman Catholic nun to seek elected office in New Jersey. That happened in 1975, several years into her battle with public officials who had eliminated her teaching job because she'd spoken up about dismal conditions for orphans in Jersey City.
• Holocaust survivor Rudolf Brazda (26 June 1913 - 3 Aug. 2011) was the last known survivor to have been deported from Germany on charges of homosexuality. Wikipedia notes that there are other gay Holocaust survivors, but that they had been placed in the concentration camps on other charges, such as being Jewish; Brazda was the last known survivor whose sexual orientation was known to the Nazis and who was thus forced to wear the pink triangle on his uniform.
• Marshall Grant (5 May 1928 - 7 Aug. 2011) played upright bass and electric bass in the Tennessee Two, Johnny Cash's original backing band. (Luther Perkins on electric guitar comprised the other half of the duo -- which later became a trio, the Tennessee Three, with the addition of drummer W.S. Holland.)
• American World War II veteran Albert Brown (26 Oct. 1905 - 14 Aug. 2011) was a retired dentist and former prisoner of war -- in fact, he was at his death cited by some as the oldest known living survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March, an event he reportedly hadn't talked about very much until the 1990s. He'd earned his dental degree in 1927 and was drafted into the military in 1937. After the war, he was unable to return to his dental practice due to injuries received in the war and his imprisonment, so he went back to school and got into property management, renting homes in California to celebrities and becoming friends with actors John Wayne and Roy Rogers. Born in Nebraska, Brown's family had some other interesting ties that might have made those brushes with fame seem inevitable in retrospect; his mother was an aunt of legendary actor Henry Fonda, and Brown was the godson of Old West personality William "Buffalo Bill" Cody.
• Swedish television personality Gun Hägglund (3 March 1932 - 19 Aug. 2011) held the distinction being the world's first female news anchor, having taken that role in 1958 on the evening news show Aktuellt. She also published several books about cycling and served in a national organization to promote bicycle usage.
• Character actor Michael Showers (14 March 1966 - 22 Aug. 2011) was best known for playing a New Orleans police captain on HBO's Treme, but had appeared on film and television as far back as 2000. He was found drowned in the Mississippi River near New Orleans' French Quarter, dead at way too young an age.
• Songwriter Jerome "Jerry" Leiber (15 April 1933 - 22 Aug. 2011) was the lyrical half of the songwriting and production duo Leiber and Stoller, which penned hits for Elvis Presley, the Drifters, the Coasters, Big Mama Thornton (the original "Hound Dog"), and more from the 1950s onward.
• Esther Gordy Edwards (25 April 1920 - 24 Aug. 2011) was the elder sister of Motown Records founder Barry Gordy and the curator of Hitsville U.S.A., the museum at the site of the original Motown Records studio.
• Your high school history teacher, I can almost guarantee, never taught you about Stetson Kennedy (5 Oct. 1916 - 27 Aug. 2011). And that's a goddamn shame. He was a folklorist; he was a civil rights activist; his infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s laid bare the hate group's secrets to law enforcement and the world at large and shamed the government of Georgia into revoking the group's national corporate charter, in addition to providing a storyline on the Superman radio program; he wrote eight books and co-wrote another; he worked with Zora Neale Hurston; and Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him, perhaps the highest praise (at least when said song was positive in tone).
• Songwriter George Green (28 Jan. 1952 - 28 Aug. 11) penned several hits with his childhood friend John Mellencamp but also saw his tunes recorded by Jude Cole (a personal favorite of Ye Olde Podcaster), Barbra Streisand, Hall & Oates, Vanessa Williams, and the Oak Ridge Boys. Mellencamp adapted his song "Human Wheels" -- only one of several collaborations -- from a poem Green had written after the death of his grandfather. ... After looking it up, I found that the Jude Cole ties were the dryly amusing song "First Your Money (Then Your Clothes)" on Cole's Start the Car and the energetic "Hallowed Ground" that opened Cole's A View from 3rd Street. (Man, oh, man, I wish Jude Cole's music was podsafe. But I digress.)
• Billy Drake (20 Dec. 1917 - 28 Aug. 2011) was a British air ace during the second World War who had 20 confirmed enemy aircraft destroyed, another six probably destroyed, and at least nine others damaged due to his efforts. His father was British, his mother Australian, and he had been educated in Switzerland -- but the neutrality thing wasn't for him.
• And David "Honeyboy" Edwards (28 June 1915 - 29 Aug. 2011) was a Delta bluesman -- guitarist and singer -- who was born in Mississippi, died in Chicago, and was present the night his peer Robert Johnson took his fatal final drink. He died at 96 -- about six weeks after retiring.

Has anybody here seen my old friends Sid 'n' Susie?

The title, of course, is a nod to Dick Holler's 1968 song "Abraham, Martin, and John," made famous by Dion (Dimucci). That's NOT a song that Sid 'n' Susie -- aka Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs -- covered on their album of '60s covers, Under the Covers, Vol. 1, but roll with it.

Whilst driving around doing errands today, I listened to the entirety of that first covers album by the pair of them, among several (thousand) songs I'd downloaded over the weekend and most of Monday from Apple's iTunes store through its new, beta "cloud" feature -- allowing users who've bought certain music, TV shows, apps and books in the past to download them again (such as on a new computer, iPad, or iPhone).

And listening to that album again -- for the first time in a year or more, as I'd bought it on a different computer than the one I'm using now and there wasn't really a convenient (read: not burning CDs to then rip on another computer) way to transfer iTunes buys until now -- not only reminded me how much I loved it, love that pair of voices together, not only got me looking forward to listening to Under the Covers, Vol. 2 (16 songs from the 1970s in its basic form, but I bought the deluxe edition with 10 extra tracks), but led me to post this bit of silly speculation over at Facebook:

Since Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs covered 15 '60s songs on UNDER THE COVERS, VOL. 1, then 26 '70s songs on the deluxe UNDER THE COVERS, VOL. 2, they obviously must do at least 40 -- preferably 50 -- covers of '80s songs in an UNDER THE COVERS, VOL. 3, deluxe edition. (Maybe we'll get to hear Matthew Sweet sing a Bangles song.)

If that seems unfair, well, it is. But the facts are, Susanna Hoffs' breakthrough -- as a member of the all-female quartet The Bangles -- came about a little earlier than Sweet's. And, to my recollection, the first two albums in this series (which has never been formally announced to have a third album in the works as far as I know -- again, I'm just speculating here, partly in jest) stuck pretty strictly to their respective decades.

But I added this:

Sweet recorded a couple of albums in the 1980s but didn't break through until GIRLFRIEND in 1991. But since turnabout is fair play -- maybe Matthew Sweet could sing "Manic Monday" and Susanna Hoffs could do a track off his albums INSIDE or EARTH.

Of course, if they *really* wanted to throw us for a curve, they'd release UNDER THE COVERS, VOL. 0 as an EP of seven songs from the 1950s, and UNDER THE COVERS, VOL. -1 as essentially a single with three songs from the '40s. 

OK, that would be silly. 

(Though come on, who doesn't think the two of them would kill on a cover of Woody Herman's 1945 hit "Your Father's Moustache"?)

Yes, that really was a charted song in 1945. My final thought on this subject posted at Facebook was this, just moments later:

‎... Yeah, I'm gonna have to blog this.

Matthew Sweet's made his mark as a power-pop guitarist and singer whose music sometimes has a dark edge. Susanna Hoffs is a sweet-voiced, sometimes wistful singer and onetime actress who blends with him amazingly well. And the songs they've chosen to cover are generally well suited to their strengths and established styles -- in a musical setting somewhat more influenced by Sweet's sound as a solo artist than to Hoffs' past as a Bangle.

The first album saw them covering The Beach Boys, The Beatles, the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, the Fairport Convention, The Left Banke, Love, the Mamas and the Papas, the Marmalade, Neil Young and Crazy Horse (twice!), Stone Poneys feat. Linda Ronstadt, the Velvet Underground, The Who, and The Zombies.

The second album saw them covering Big Star, Bread, Carly Simon, Derek and the Dominoes, Fleetwood Mac, George Harrison, the Grateful Dead, John Lennon, Little Feat, Mott the Hoople, the Raspberries, Rod Stewart, Todd Rundgren (... twice?), Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Yes. Those who bought the deluxe edition also got to hear the band cover songs by the Allman Brothers Band, Badfinger, Blondie, the Buzzcocks, Gram Parsons, Nick Lowe, James Taylor, Queen, the Ramones, and Television.

Between the two albums, some of the source bands are more obscure (the Marmalade, the Left Banke, the Fairport Convention, the Raspberries, Mott the Hoople, and arguably Bread, Little Feat, and Todd Rundgren) than others, especially today. Television WOULD fall into that category if not for the fact that the band's guitarist Richard Lloyd later played on Matthew Sweet's biggest solo recordings.

So let's speculate about what some future covers albums from the duo might include.

More thoughts on DC Comics

So, I've been thinking a lot -- as usual -- about the DC Comics revamp (coming Aug. 31 with Flashpoint #5 and Justice League #1), and I'm generally pleased by what I see taking shape not only in the first month of the relaunch but in the second and third months as some miniseries come to light. The First Wave series (integrating Doc Savage and The Spirit into a shared world with a gun-toting Bat-Man) seems gone, but T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents will be returning and Astro City will become an ongoing in its own previously established continuity. The The Huntress, The Shade and My Greatest Adventure mini-series add new layers to the onion, as does Legion: Secret Origins.

Again: Only in comic books are superhero stories "mainstream," with straight-ahead character dramas, comedy, romance, Westerns, biography, science, sports, true crime, etc., relegated to the "alternative" label. DC spokespeople have speculated that All-Star Western (an oversized book with an ongoing Jonah Hex lead feature plus backups) will prove to be the most under-ordered of the 52 ongoings in the initial wave -- that Jonah Hex's relocation to a postbelllum Gotham City will lay historical groundwork for the modern Batman books and other bits of the DC Universe and thus make it enticing to people who don't normally read Westerns.

Much of the buzz I've seen involves books that have roots in the 1990s and early 2000s -- the Milestone (Static Shock) and WildStorm universes' integration into the DC Universe (Stormwatch, Voodoo, and Grifter), but also books whose characters went into Vertigo (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, several characters in Justice League Dark) or seemed geared that way (Resurrection Man, the title whose revival most surprised me).

The announcement that there's a Chase collected edition coming soon -- something for which groundwork was probably done well in advance of the recent debate about women's representation in the pages and in the credits boxes -- and the recent reprinting of some (maybe all?) of Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's Night Force has me thinking about what else might be in the pipeline. Here are things I'd love to see DC Comics tackle soon:

1.) A modern Justice Society of America book and WWII-era All Star Squadron title, using the "masked men and women of mystery largely written off as urban legends or isolated kooks" idea I've advanced before. Rumors of a James Robinson and Nicola Scott JSA book would make me very happy if they came true; it's also worth noting that The Shade as a character worthy of a 12-issue miniseries almost requires that there be a Starman (or a Starman legacy) acting in tandem. I maintain that in a truly integrated universe merging the DC, WildStorm, and Milestone universes, Icon -- rocketed to Earth, raised from infancy by slaves in the American South before the Civil War, and on a power level with Superman, and in the modern day a wealthy black conservative businessman when not in uniform, whose partnership with a teenage single mother (and much more liberal) sidekick named Rocket creates conflict -- MUST be a member of the Justice Society/All-Star Squadron.

2.) Ending books that I'd like to see come back include Secret Six, Zatanna, and Xombi -- all by their current creative teams. (See my own personal "Dream New 52" here -- which hadn't included Zatanna, but I've heard enough good about her ending series to want her in a solo book.)

3.) Take a look a little farther back than the 1990s and early 2000s. There was some crazy creativity brewing at DC Comics in the 1980s and 1990s written by people NOT named Alan Moore and Frank Miller, ya'll. And I think there are things there which could be revisited for compelling stories here and now -- even if, in some cases, the original books weren't explicitly tied to the DC Universe. For example, John Ostrander made good use of the titular character from Jemm, Son of Saturn in his Martian Manhunter series early in the new millennium; and the Sun Devils concept has popped up in Booster Gold and Time Masters (all of them with Dan Jurgens on art).

a.) The various Green Lantern-related books (including Pete Milligan's Red Lanterns book) could be joined by revived Omega Men and L.E.G.I.O.N. books (in the latter case, the existence of Legion Lost with a team stuck in the 21st Century might prompt DC to instead title it R.E.B.E.L.S. yet again). Or, Dan Jurgens could insert Sun Devils into the DCnU. There was another DC miniseries from the 1980s titled Spanner's Galaxy -- which had the bonus of a strong female lead character -- that could be worth another look if it wasn't creator-owned. (E-Man and Spanner's Galaxy writer Nick Cuti is still available for work, as are Sun Devils authors Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas. Just sayin'.) And, if Warner Brothers attorneys could make it work, Atari Force, even if under a different name -- which, given that DC is owned by Time Warner and the defunct Atari company was then owned by Warner Communications, would seem to be a less insurmountable challenge than Marvel faces with Rom the Spaceknight.
b.) If you've never heard of a 1980s DC title called Thriller, go read about it at Wikipedia. I've never read it. The book was direct-market-only at a time when newsstand distribution still existed, and the closest direct-sales outlet was two hours away from me, so I missed it. But the premise (a team of pulp heroes 50 years in the future, led by a disembodied spirit, including a synthetic man turned priest, with a second-generation Elvis clone in the supporting cast) SOUNDS fascinating, ahead of its time, and just crazy enough that it could have worked ... though there were apparent interpersonal conflicts that led to the departure of first its writer, then its artist, then five issues by new creators before cancellation. Again, a female lead -- one who sounds like she could have possibly had echoes in Warren Ellis' creations of Jenny Sparks or Elijah Snow at WildStorm.
c.) Ragman. I really liked the interpretation that his suit was a golem made of cloth. Golems are cool. (Any chance Michael Chabon could write it?)
d.) DC Comics is short for "Detective Comics." We deserve an ongoing detective, spy, vigilante anthology -- not quite at the Mature Readers level, but the next step down on DC's in-house rating scale. Rotating ongoing features would include, at a minimum, The Question (Vic Sage or Renee Montoya) in the present, something akin to Sandman Mystery Theatre (with Wesley Dodds), and Nathaniel Dusk (star of two '80s miniseries by Don McGregor and Gene Colan) set in his 1930s prime -- maybe two out of those three features running at any time with a third standalone story picked from the vast assortment of DC characters who'd fit the bill: Ghostly Ralph and Sue Dibney in "Ghost of a Thin Man" adventures, Slam Bradley, King Faraday, Sarge Steel, the Kate Spencer Manhunter, any of the various folks named Vigilante or Crimson Avenger, Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty's Wild Dog, Jonny Double, Nemesis (Tom Tresser), Gotham Central, Deathwish (from Milestone's Hardware) ... you get the idea.
e. Nightrunner. I haven't read anything with this character, but an Algerian Sunni French Muslim living in Paris and deputized as part of Batman Incorporated -- it generates its own publicity and irritates people whom I love seeing irritated. (Every time a Tea Party member cries, an angel gets its wings. True fact.)
f. El Diablo. I refer specifically here to Rafael Sandoval, star of the book by Gerard Jones and the late, great Mike Parobeck in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A rookie city councilman in Dos Rios, Texas, Sandoval fought drug smugglers, a serial killer, and human traffickers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Deputize him as a member of Batman Incorporated and give this man a second shot in the limelight. (Chief Man-of-Bats and his son, Red Raven, could be guest stars or have a second feature.)
g. Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. Many others have written more eloquently than I could about this character, a "chosen child" of mystical destiny who pre-dated Harry Potter by 14 years. She shares the same child-turning-into-powerful-adult meme as Captain Marvel but with a bit more haunted feel that is more attuned to the DC Universe as a whole than the Marvel Family. That said...
h. S!H!A!Z!A!M! could work in a contemporary setting where Shazam! has not. Geoff Johns' re-imagining of the Marvel Family in Flashpoint was an inspired bit of insanity -- six children who, by calling the wizard's name, invoke the hero Captain Thunder (which rids us of the competition's name in a major hero's title as well). It even makes Mr. Tawky Tawny fit the overall mood of the DC Universe better than he ever has. So it's worth a try.

I still, for the record, think the only Supergirl worth the name since the original Kara Zor-El died in Crisis on Infinite Earths was the Linda Danvers version written by Peter David (who used that character -- off the record -- to launch his Fallen Angel series). As such, I still think DC would have been better served by using this opportunity to restore Kara's heart and soul -- have her appear sometime after the events of the new Action Comics #1 but before the events of the new Superman #1 and let her be a founding Teen Titan with the original Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Wonder Girl, and Speedy, and best friend to Barbara Gordon. Missed opportunity.

The religious left is not an oxymoron

Click to enlarge screen grab -- take anti-nausea medication first.

The above image was posted at picture-hosting site Imgur under the headline "Threats of rape & killing from Fox news comments. Lovely people." Which is accurate as things go, so long as you catch the 180-degree use of irony in characterizing these sociopaths as "lovely."

While I do think American Atheists is legally right in their case to block the cross at the 9/11 memorial -- in absence of any other religious symbols or a humanist symbol -- I also think it's the wrong fight to pick, and I've told Blair Scott so. This emotionally charged issue is the one that could play right into the hands of the aspiring theocrats and allow them to whip voters into a frenzy that would allow them to amend the constitution to strike the Establishment Clause out of the First Amendment and make America -- for the first time -- a "Christian nation," not just a nation with a lot of Christians.

As stated before, I'm done with the atheist movement. The aftermath of the Norway shooting was my breaking point, when I heard too many atheists repeating the same Islamophobic arguments that the Norwegian shooter used in framing his attack on (presumably mostly non-Muslim) teens attending a summer camp.

A friend at Facebook posted a link to the image above, with this commentary:

Xtian love shining thru yet again. Why do we so rarely see the "sane" or "moderate" xtians publicly denouncing these widespread, vile, daily cries of hate and violence?

My response was this:

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that like most other sane and moderate people ... they go about their lives doing the best they can, where they can, and don't watch Faux Noise or visit its web site regularly. :)

I'm an atheist, but I was liberal even when I was Christian. They happened to start that network after I'd deconverted, but before I did (due in part to the same sort of hate-filled thugs who fill up Faux's audience base, granted) I spent a lot of time arguing with conservative Christians on my college honors program's e-mail list.

Which led a third person to reply:

Problem is, Jason, that it's the so-called "moderates" of any religious sect that are really the most dangerous, mainly because of their numbers. They perpetuate the social acceptance of belief in nonsense without evidence that provides the extremists with credibility and a power base. Without the moderates, the extremists of the Abrahamic religions would be like the Scientologists -- dangerous but nobody really pays any attention to them.

So don't get the idea that the moderates are without blame, as by their silence, and their acquiescence, they support the extremists, and make in possible for them to wield political power.

At which point I asked, "Sam Harris, is that you? ;)" and left the conversation to come over here.

That IS a big part of Sam Harris' argument in The End of Faith. And while it may be factually true that the large numbers of moderate to liberal religious people do provide an appearance of propriety which the extremist conservatives exploit ... that's a guilt by association fallacy that would not be (is not) warmly received when one points out that Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot, for example, were atheists. (And, on the right, Ayn Rand, who is long dead but whose economic policies are still destroying America and dragging the rest of the world down with us.)

And that's completely missing another point, which I had Tweeted a while ago:

"You'll be perfect when you become like me" -- the narcissism behind any proselytizer, religious or nonreligious.

While the statement "if atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color" makes for an amusing bumper sticker, it misses the point that bald and blonde both describe possible visual appearances of the hair-growing areas of the scalp, and atheism and (name a religion) both describe positions that often address matters of morality, meaning, and mortality.

Sam Harris and his followers are religious insofar as they believe peace and justice will come once everyone shares their enlightened position, the same hubris shown by Rick Perry and his cultists gathered in Texas this weekend. ... And that's simply not going to happen. We'll reach a point where people are more able to be open in discussing their lack of belief, yes, but a certain portion of people will always believe, and we have to find ways to live together, working together on areas where we can share common goals. A bowl of soup does not care whether the person handing it to a hungry person is Christian or atheist.

Atheists who choose to preserve their ideological purity by creating parallel philanthropies and social justice movements to avoid association with the unclean religionists are creating extra work for themselves and living in a fantasy world, and that's their right. But I want nothing to do with such ideological masturbation. I see much more potential reward in helping moderate and liberal (and sane) religious voices -- Christians, Muslims, Jews, the famously nonpolitical Bahá'ís, my fellow Unitarian Universalists and Ethical Humanists, etc. -- grow louder and win over the undecideds among their own ranks.

Deaths in 2011: July

As usual, this is not an all-encompassing list of deaths in the given month. I merely list and discuss the ones that struck me as especially newsworthy or had particular meaning to me. You can find a fuller list at Wikipedia.

July:

• Lawrence R. Newman (23 March 1925 - 4 July 2011) was a two-term president of the National Association of the Deaf and an author whose works included the collection I Fill this Small Space: The Writings of a Deaf Activist.
• Jane Scott (3 May 1919 - 4 July 2011) was a legendary rock critic for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, who helped bring the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to that city. Before her retirement several years ago, she was touted as "the oldest rock critic," which she might well have been.
• Native Canadian actor and activist Gordon Tootoosis (25 Oct. 1941 - 5 July 2011), of Cree and Stoney descent, was a mentor to up-and-coming First Nations actors. Among his lengthy list of TV and film credits, he did voice work for Disney's 1995 animated Pocahontas feature, guest-starred on Smallville as a tribal elder, appeared in the TNT Western miniseries Into the West, and played the Oglala Sioux leader Red Cloud in HBO's film adaptation of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
• Cuban guitarist, arranger and pianist Manuel Galbán (14 Jan. 1931 - 7 July 2011) was one of the many Cuban musicians who came to the notice of American audiences through Wim Wenders' film Buena Vista Social Club and the Ry Cooder-produced soundtrack album. He was also the last surviving member of the late '60s/early '70s Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros.
• Former American first lady Betty Ford (8 April 1918 - 8 July 2011) was a game changer for the role she found herself fulfilling after her husband's ascent to the Oval Office as the only president not directly elected to either the presidency or vice presidency. Her struggles with alcoholism and breast cancer launched conversations at a time when both subjects remained taboo, and the nation is better for it. (She was also an avowed feminist, a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, something unthinkable for a Republican woman in the public eye today, a change of course which has left the nation much worse for it.)
• Television producer Sherwood Schwartz (14 Nov. 1916 - 12 July 2011) was active in Hollywood well into his 90s. Among the hits he created in his lengthy career: Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch.
• You've likely never heard of graphic designer Alex Steinweiss (24 March 1917 - 18 July 2011) -- I never had before researching this article, sad to say -- but all of us who are old enough to know what the term "vinyl record" means have seen his work, for he is the man who invented the album cover.
• British entertainment journalist Sean Hoare (whose body was found 17 July 2011, with obituaries listing his age as 47) was the whistleblower who brought down the British tabloid News of the World and tipped the dominoes that could bring down the entire media whorehouse of Rupert Murdoch in time. I'm sure the death was COMPLETELY due to natural causes, of course, and had NOTHING to do with disrupting the business operations of an evil criminal empire disguised as a media conglomerate. Total coinky-dink, fer shure.
• Fact You and I Both Probably Didn't Know: The first "Bond girl" (in a 1954 adaptation of Ian Fleming's novel Casino Royale) was Linda Christian (13 Nov. 1923 - 22 July 2011), a Mexican actress who did most of her work in the 1940s and '50s on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
• Character actor Tom Aldredge (28 Feb. 1928 - 22 July 2011) enjoyed a nearly five-decade career of work on film and television and on the stage. Among his more recent roles were recurring parts on The Sopranos, Damages, and Boardwalk Empire, plus the Western film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
• A whole lot of Norwegians who had positive things to contribute to their society and the world died on 22 July at the hands of a thug who I will not reward by mentioning his name here, someone who should have killed himself before he ever picked up a gun and pointed it at anyone else.
  
• "Troubled singer" was the epithet most often seen preceding singer Amy Winehouse (14 Sept. 1983 - 23 July 2011) during her career, and it has now followed her to the grave, along with obligatory references to the "27 club" -- the well-known and oft-recited list of American rock musicians who died at age 27, a trend which has even inspired a comic book.
  
  My thought? There was zero surprise at the news of her death; a singer whose biggest hit is about not wanting to go to rehab is a singer who has a short half-life in all likelihood. It would have been nice to see her defy the odds and continue working into her 40s and 50s like former "troubled actor" and now just actor (as far as we know) Robert Downey Jr.-- but things happen the way they happen. Her music was great, and no doubt we'll see unearthed tracks released, remixed and re-released into perpetuity, as with rappers for whom death was the ultimate career move, and that shameful cashing in -- scavenging -- indicts us all, if the collective failure to intervene, indeed, the rewarding of her bad behavior and global enabling of her addiction did not already do so.
• Actor Christopher Mayer (21 Feb. 1954 - 24 July 2011) had left the industry more than a decade before his death, one of his last roles coming in the Jim Carrey film Liar, Liar. But his most prominent work came in a long stint on the daytime soap Santa Barbara and a short run on The Dukes of Hazzard as Vance Duke -- who, along with Coy Duke (played by Byron Cherry) appeared out of nowhere on the show as replacements for Bo and Luke Duke (John Schneider and Tom Wopat, respectively) after their actors had left during a contract dispute. He also voiced Vance in a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon called simply The Dukes.
• Singer-songwriter Dan Peek (1 Nov. 1950 - 24 July 2011) was a longtime member of the soft rock band America and an early star of the Contemporary Christian Music genre.
• Rock musician Mike Reaves (who died of cancer July 25 at age 52) was a founding member of the West Tennessee-originated metal band Full Devil Jacket, which played Woodstock 99, opened for various hard rock bands around the turn of the century, and had a song featured on the soundtrack to the animated science fiction movie Heavy Metal 2000.
• Labor organizer and activist Richard Chavez (12 Nov. 1929 - 27 July 2011) helped build up the power of the United Farm Workers, a union co-founded (as the National Farm Workers Association) by his late younger brother César Chávez. And, in so doing, made better the lives of countless men, women, and even children at work in fields helping grow and harvest the food on your table and mine (unless you grow it all yourself, in which case you're probably Amish and not supposed to be online reading this or anything else, anyway).
• And Frank Bender (16 June 1941 - 28 July 2011) was a self-taught forensic artist whose renderings (such as aging a long-wanted fugitive) helped lead to arrests in some cold cases. He was a member of Philadelphia's Vidocq Society, whose work on cold cases has been detailed in Michael Capuzzo's nonfiction best-seller The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases, and he was previously profiled in Ted Botha's The Girl with the Crooked Nose: A Tale of Murder, Obsession, and Forensic Artistry, which contrasted his life story with one of his most difficult cases. Additionally, he created works of fine art that often stemmed from criminology -- such as life-sized bronze statues at New York's African Burial Grounds using three human skulls found at the site and a memorial statue for fallen law enforcement officers.