THIS MODERN WORLD

I’ve added several new reader reviews of the book, here. A couple of my favorites:

Believe it or not, there are still folks in Utah who haven’t been introduced to your amazing cartoonery. So I bought two books, one for myself, and one for my mother and father in-laws. The in-laws couldn’t put it down, and neither could my older kids, who swiped my copy to share with their friends at their high school. Just as a great testimonial to the supposed power of your book, one of the counselors at their high school, who got a peek at it when we returned to Oregon, declared that anyone else bringing such a “monstrous challenge and insult to the authority of the White House” would be suspended from school on the spot. Haven’t seen any suspensions yet, but we hope to soon! My in-laws said that This Modern World is the best strip they have seen in years and is even better than what they remember of Doonesbury when it came out. Thanks for all your work!

From St Johns Booksellers in Portland Oregon:

We’ve already sold thru our first prepack of ‘Hell in a Handbasket” which is no mean feat for a small bookstore only open nine months in the same town as the mighty Powell’s. (The only other two books that have sold as well are Al Franken’s “The Truth’ and Neil Gaiman’s ‘Anansi Boys.”)

Even better, there’s an election here in May. We’re having a forum with the candidates at the store, and asked them to provide a list of titles they’d recommend to their customers. As you can see, Jim Robison suggested ‘Hell…”

If you click through, you’ll also find handy instructions on how to turn all the useless change from your dresser drawer into a copy of HIAH. And there’s the guy who says that HIAH “is enough to make somebody want to throw themselves under a bus.” But he means it in a good way.

(Also, just for the record, I know diddly-squat about Jim Robison, apart from the fact that he has excellent taste in reading matter.)

From the Times editorial page editorial page this morning:

And under the terms of two disturbing agreements — with the C.I.A. and the Air Force — the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950’s, have vanished. This not only violates the mission of the National Archives; it is also antithetical to the natural flow of information in an open society.

As time passes, the need for secrecy, which should always adhere to a very strict standard, usually diminishes. Apparently the C.I.A. wants to turn back the hands of time.

The new director of the National Archives, Allen Weinstein, rightly put a stop to this nonsense as soon as he heard about it. But he will need to do more than just abrogate these suspect agreements with the C.I.A. and the Air Force. He will need to figure out how they came about in the first place. The former director, John Carlin, has said he knows nothing about them. They appear to have been signed only by the assistant archivist.

What makes this all seem preposterous is that the agreements themselves prohibit the National Archives from revealing why the documents were removed.

And then there’s this article:

The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism.

Mr. Anderson’s family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen.

Mr. Anderson’s son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father’s principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.

“It’s my father’s legacy,” said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist’s nine children. “The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father’s view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they’re up to.”

With Neil Young’s new anti-war album coming out soon, it looks like we’re about to go through another round of dipshit right wing bloggers explaining why artists and musicians aren’t qualified to express political opinions.

Unlike, you know, the dipshit right wing bloggers themselves.

“I hear the voices, and I read the front page and I know the speculation,” the president said. “But I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”

Read it and weep.

Jonathan Tasini (a union activist who’s running against Hillary Clinton for the NY Democratic senatorial nomination) makes this important point about immigration to the U.S.:

What has been lost in the debate about immigration is this fact: our country’s foreign and economic policy is largely to blame for the flow of people who come here illegally…If you think about the hundreds of thousands of people who have come here over the past several decades from countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, many of them fled to the U.S. because they would have been killed or imprisoned by their government’s repressive regimes or forced to live as refugees. These were often regimes that our government supported for many years, if not decades, with large infusions of weapons and money…

When I was growing up near Washington, DC it was hard not to notice the upsurge in people there from Central America, particularly El Salvador. This was right when the Reagan administration was trying to do for indigenous people in Latin America what our forefathers did for American Indians; i.e., wipe them off the face of the earth.

The neat thing was that as Washington policymakers were doing this, they were able to hire people fleeing those countries for $$$cheap$$$. During that time you’d see Central American refugees all over the wealthy DC suburbs, working as nannys, gardeners, etc.

I’ve always thought that was one of the greatest geopolitical bankshots in history.

Hey, Rosa—did you like the way I finalized that deal to send attack helicopters to the folks who cut off your father’s balls and stuffed them in his mouth? I bet you did! Now, do the laundry and change my kid’s diapers!

But the story doesn’t end there. If things continue to go well, Stephen Hadley will soon be able to afford a entire squad of strapping young Iraqi lads to edge his lawn.