THIS MODERN WORLD

Clearly there’s reason for optimism, but this thing isn’t over til it’s over. In four days we find out if the country will be led by the thoughtful intelligent guy who might possibly be able to begin repairing the complete disaster of the past eight years, or by the guy who will continue on the same path, with the help of his dimwitted reactionary sidekick, until there is no hope of ever finding our way back.

If McCain manages to pull out a squeaker somehow — well, I can only quote Lou Reed:

Americans don’t care for much of anything
Land and water the least
And animal life is low on the totem pole
With human life not worth more than infected yeast

Americans don’t care too much for beauty
They’ll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream
They’ll watch dead rats wash up on the beach
And complain if they can’t swim

They say things are done for the majority
Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear
It’s like what my painter friend donald said to me
Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done

It’s like waiting for the results of a biopsy, where the doctors think it will probably turn out okay, but there’s at least some minor chance that you have terminal brain cancer.

I assume it goes without saying to readers of this site, but … be sure to vote on Tuesday.

… adding: when Bill Clinton was elected, the eventual weaknesses of his presidency were already common knowledge: his penchant for triangulation and his history of extramarital activity. The former would ensure that health care reform would be shot down for a generation, and the latter would give Republicans the wedge they needed to completely disrupt the final years of his presidency. And we could have predicted it all from the moment he was elected. With Obama, I just don’t see any similarly grand Shakespearean flaws being foreshadowed in the first act. We’re in an entirely different moment.

From E&P:

Appearing once again on The Daily Show, Bill Kristol, Jon Stewart’s favorite whipping boy (“Bill Kristol, aren’t you ever right?”), tonight defended the McCain-Palin ticket, at one point informing the show’s host that he was getting his news from suspect sources. “You’re reading The New York Times too much,” he declared.

“But you work for The New York Times,” Stewart pointed out.

Bonus wrongness here:

The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”

That’s the kind of wrongness that will probably cost his party the election. Clearly this cartoon needs updating.

Getting back to the Daily Show, this is also interesting:

In a bit of a news flash, Stewart confessed that he would have voted for McCain over Gore in 2000 — but he doesn’t recognize that McCain today.

( …point being, I love the Daily Show, but Jon Stewart has always struck me as one of those “on the one hand/on the other hand” kind of guys, politically … it’s only the extremes of our current era that have made him appear actively partisan …)

It’s always been a hard sell, getting people to buy a compilation of work they believe they have already read (though that seems mostly to apply to cartoon compilations — books which reprint newspaper columns regularly hit the bestseller list). But leaving that aside, I’m beginning to wonder if print anthologies of cartoons will be yet another victim of the intertubes. Having a book to thumb through at bedtime or in the bathroom or whatever is clearly an entirely different experience than sitting at the computer, clicking through archives, waiting for graphics to load, etc. Whether that, combined with a general desire to support artists whose work one finds worthwhile, is enough to continue to induce people to hand over hard earned dollars in the “information wants to be free” age remains to be seen.

The thing is, even though the cartoons have already been written and drawn, these books still consume a disproportionate amount of my time and energy to produce, and this one was a particular struggle (for reasons I’ll write about some other day). And hard as it is to believe, I don’t make much money from them — I mainly keep putting them out because I like having the object, I like having my work collected in a solid form which I can physically hand to another human being. I’m old school that way. But if we’ve reached the point at which the cost-benefit ratio has tipped too far in the direction of cost, I can probably live with that too. It would definitely eliminate a huge source of stress and aggravation from my life — but again, that’s a discussion for another day.

… adding (and editing, to reinforce the point): no need to feel defensive if you don’t want to buy it, or can’t afford it, or whatever. It’s okay, honest. The question is more collective than individual. (Though of course, I should include a link in case you do want to.)

Should also note Amazon numbers are only the crudest indicator of overall sales. I won’t know how well this thing really sold until it’s remaindered! Ha, I kid. Sort of.

…update 2: I work pretty much in a vacuum, so when something like this comes in, it totally makes my day:

I just bought your book. It wasn’t because of you made me feel defensive (honest?) but I decided that after spending years checking your blog almost every single day that it was the right thing to do . . .

When I first discovered This Modern World I was working doing telesales for a company that put on executive summits for CEO of large companies and politically I considered myself an “independent moderate”. I thought both parties were operating in good faith and merely disagreed about how to reach the same goals.

A buddy of mine forwarded me a few cartoons of yours (I wish I could remember which ones were the first I saw) and I was immediately hooked on your work. I went back and read all of your archives and made sure to check the site regularly., Soon I was checking out some of the blogs you link to (first Roy Edroso’s blog was the first to become a staple for me, now I’m a junkie for A Tiny Revolution as well). At first a lot of the attitudes and ideas I was encountering were unfamiliar to me and didn’t make a ton of sense, slowly but surely though things started to come together for me in a way they hadn’t before. Ideas that I formerly held — “Bill Clinton as populist hero”– “Ronald Reagan as economic smart guy who defeated communism” — were re-examined and it became clearer to me the kind of America I wanted to live in, and that the corporatocracy of the Clinton years wasn’t the best I could hope for as a progressive.

Now, years later, I’m proud to buy your book, and would encourage you not to feel squeamish about pimping it on the website. Remember, it’s for our own good, we can’t afford NOT to get this book!

David Brooks has a column which I mostly agree with.

In times like these, the best a sensible leader can do is to take the short-term panic and channel it into a program that is good on its own merits even if it does nothing to stimulate the economy over the next year. That’s why I’m hoping the next president takes the general resolve to spend gobs of money, and channels it into a National Mobility Project, a long-term investment in the country’s infrastructure.

Major highway projects take about 13 years from initiation to completion — too long to counteract any recession. But at least they create a legacy that can improve the economic environment for decades to come.

A major infrastructure initiative would create jobs for the less-educated workers who have been hit hardest by the transition to an information economy. It would allow the U.S. to return to the fundamentals. There is a real danger that the U.S. is going to leap from one over-consuming era to another, from one finance-led bubble to another. Focusing on infrastructure would at least get us thinking about the real economy, asking hard questions about what will increase real productivity, helping people who are expanding companies rather than hedge funds.

So in other words, we should pump money into infrastructure as a way of providing jobs. A sort of national works project, if you will. Sounds like a great idea to me!

(Perhaps we could also pay writers and artists to travel the blue highways, collecting the folk tales of “real” America. At the very least, maybe they could go to the places David Brooks has written about, and set the record straight.)

Greg’s post below is not a joke, though you would be forgiven for imagining that it is. From what I can tell, the whole thing hinges on the entirely imaginary premise that Malcom X might have had a speaking gig in the Seattle area in the summer of 1960, and that he was in the habit of sleeping with random white women at the end of his lectures about black nationalism.

I’m old enough, I remember when people with theories like this had to stand on streetcorners shouting at passers-by.