Mountain of Judgment

Just so you know, these were made with "smurfy loving care."

Answer: Iron Man would die. (And okay, he survives the end of #29, but that Michael Golden cover is so awesome I wanted to post it.)

“The Kinkster never likes to say 'fuck' in front of a c-h-i-l-d.”

Steve Gilliard posted, then eviscerated these comments by fascist savant Ben Shapiro:

The "chickenhawk" argument is dishonest. It is dishonest because the principle of republicanism is based on freedom of choice about behavior (as long as that behavior is legal) as well as freedom of speech about political issues. We constantly vote on activities with which we may or may not be intimately involved. We vote on police policy, though few of us are policemen; we vote on welfare policy, though few of us either work in the welfare bureaucracy or have been on welfare; we vote on tax policy, even if some of us don't pay taxes. The list goes on and on. Representative democracy necessarily means that millions of us vote on issues with which we have had little practical experience. The "chickenhawk" argument -- which states that if you haven't served in the military, you can't have an opinion on foreign policy -- explicitly rejects basic principles of representative democracy.

Gilliard doesn't need much help putting young Mr. Shapiro in his place, but my reaction is that all the talk of "voting" is irrelevant, a pathetic dodge because the kid has no good answer to the Operation Yellow Elephant critique. Talk minus action equals shit. It says so right in the liner notes of my Brian Jonestown Massacre album. That's why the 101st Fighting Keyboarders have had to convince themselves that talk is action, that they are in fact materially contributing to the war effort by using their amazing rhetorical talents to protect the homefront. Well, if the polls turning decidedly against the war are any indication, they've failed in their daring mission.

Ben and his ilk have the right to their opinion. They have "freedom of choice about behavior". However, having the right to an opinion doesn't absolve you of behaving like a snivelling coward hypocrite for shouting an opinion that you have no intention of backing up, that you presume will be backed up by your inferiors, and that considers all who disagree to be traitors.

Ben's central problem is that this piece of shit war was sold in apocalyptic terms: the Islamofascist boogeyman under the Western world's bed wants us all dead or under its theocratic, totalitarian bootheel. Only war in Iraq, we were told, will begin to turn the tide against the evildoing haters of freedom. Of course, if this is true, every able-bodied American ought to sign up, but especially those who profess to believe with every fiber of their being that this is truly the war to end all wars. That so many of them sit on their hands in the face of abject ridicule, as the blood of "volunteers" flows daily on the streets and sands of Iraq is telling. At long last, they have no shame.

While things are going poorly right now for Ben and his fellow troops in the propaganda trenches, outflanked by a specially-trained team of Gold Star parents, there is a silver lining: in a few short years, young C.S. will be old enough to sign up for the War of Words. So bring it on!

Just looking at the news and saw a story about Kanye West - he's taped a special for MTV that includes his call for the hip-hop community to lose its homophobia. Given that he's got a new record about to be released, I think this is a pretty brave thing for him to do both in terms of his reputation and his wallet.

I'm actually pretty surprised my first post on here is about how impressed I am with someone. I figured I'd be complaining. Nice.

That was the year I discovered comics. First with Harveys--Richie Rich, Hot Stuff, Stumbo the Giant--but within a few months, I was on to the superheroes I had seen on afternoon TV reruns. My tastes in capes were catholic, and my parents indulgent, so I pretty much cleaned out the spinner rack every week. Mainstream comics in 1975 were at something of a creative nadir, exhausted after Marvel's innovations of the 1960s and DC's experiments with "relevance" just a few years earlier. Luckily, I was four years old, and my critical faculties hadn't formed. (Thanks to the comics, of course, they were probably permanently damaged.) I thought these comics were uniformly awesome. Even today, seeing the covers of those first few books I got makes me want to write horribly self-indulgent posts like this. One of the best is this Nick Cardy cover for Action #444. There's a super-hero guest-star, a shocking dilemma, word baloons, caption boxes, back-up features, a satisfyingly fat logo strip, and a company logo promising an entire line of "Super-Stars" beyond the pages of this one magazine. In short, it blew my fucking mind. And the color palatte is akin to early 1970s rock and roll production--things are a lot slicker today, but all the computers in the world can't duplicate the feel of Rod Stewart's "Gasoline Alley", Elton John's "Tumbleweed Connection" or the colors of a 1975 DC comic book cover. In short order I had discovered Jim Aparo's Batman, Ross Andru's Spider-Man and that was it. I was in for life.

My local paper printed this letter earlier this week:

Military remains a group of volunteers

Editor of the Reformer:

I am writing in response to many of the disturbing letters I have read in the Reformer Letter Box recently. It seems that many people are using President Bush as a scapegoat for the problems that our country is having. Although he is the leader of our great country, he is just one man, and can hardly be blamed for the problems of millions. He is blamed for the deaths of our men and women in the military that are now serving in the Middle East. Although I am aware of this, I suspect that many readers of this newspaper don't know that those brave men and women have joined the military on their own free will.

There is not a draft, so everyone that is over there has signed up by choice. If I remember correctly, part of the rights we have in this country are free choices. These rights aren't just for one side. They are for the people that are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and the ones that have bumper stickers opposing it, alike.

C.S.

Aug. 15

The writer is a 15-year-old student at [the local] High School.

This young man raises many good points. President Bush is indeed a single organism. He even opposes cloning. So that's a non-starter. Who could be foolish enough to point a finger at one man for such a thorny problem as Iraq? Did Bush even have an opinion on whether we should launch a war of choice on a paper tiger, under false pretenses, for murky, constantly changing reasons? I can't remember.

Further, the United States does not impress hapless young men wandering down by the docks into military service. People like that are probably strolling the wharf for gay sex anyway, which is expressly forbidden in our armed forces. Most people don't realize that, either. For years I assumed, based on that Village People song and those uniforms, that the Navy was just a big government-sponsored twinkie sex club.

"Free choices" are indeed part of the rights we have in this country, and I'm glad young C.S. pointed this out. Our constitution and its amendments are not all about dark-skinned people voting and protecting ass-to-mouth porn. The fact is, hundreds of thousands of brave men and women freely joined the armed services expressly to be killed, blinded or crippled in order to install an Islamic theocracy and terrorist training ground in Iraq. We should be thankful for their suicidal nilhism. Some may question their right to die, saying it's in the name of the twisted, failed imperial fantasies of a cabal of cowards, but I say to those people, have you ever cheated on your taxes? Do you drink to excess? Have you ever found yourself wandering down by the docks late at night? Who are you to judge? In any event, as today's consevatives know, everything's relative. Relative to Hilter, the Bush Administration is heroic. Compared to the fall of Rome, models of clean government; compared to the interrogation techniques of Vlad Dracul, a big bunch of sissies. We need to pick strong standards, benchmarks if you will, and stick to them. Hell, I'm only saying what Casey Sheehan would say to his mother if he were alive.

I particularly enjoyed C.S.'s rhetorical flourish at the end, with the dig about the bumper stickers. It only works because no war supporters would be craven enough to "support" the war with nothing more than a facile bumper sticker. But I guess that's what makes it funny.

In three years, C.S. may freely choose to join his fellow Americans bleeding out in the sand over in Iraq. (I'm sure we'll still be there, barring desperately bad polling numbers for Republicans heading into '06 and/or '08.) Or he may have other priorities. Maybe go to college, join the Young Republicans, hold some affirmative action bake sales. Maybe stay home, sponge off of his parents for a few years. Protect the homeland through more letters to the editor. Whatever. It's his free choice. And defending that is certainly worth somebody dying for, if not C.S. specifically. A steady stream of dying soldiers is what makes America great. Who gives a shit why?

Let's start the proceedings with some Jack Kirby haiku:

Mountain of Judgment
built to hurtle the Zoomway
run, run you Hairies!

Like King Kirby sez:
Goody Rickles is here, man
don't ask, just buy it

Energy crackles
through cosmic machinery--
behold, Kirby dots