September 10th

I've been meaning to post this for a couple weeks, but, you know, lazy. Anyway, a while back someone from McCain's campaign asserted that Barak Obama's foreign policy was a "September 10th mindset." I can't believe that after almost seven years Republicans can still get away with calling dissenting opinions naive and not worthy of substantive response, so I've decided to come up with my own glib reply.

After September 11, many people jumped right through grief to wild anger. There were any number of people who asserted that we should just bomb the whole Middle East; make it into a parking lot; turn the sand to glass. Many people considered all Muslim's suspect and considered Islam an inherently evil, violent religion. Diplomacy was a quaint feature of an all too distant past. Over time people calmed down. They worked through their grief and they learned a lot about that region of the world and the people who's roots travel back there. They came to understand that few problems are as simple as "us" and "them"; "with us or against us." They realized that we couldn't fight the whole world even if we wanted too, and even if it would help. They also found that we don't, and it wouldn't. They figured out that fear isn't the best state in which to make decisions.

But not McCain. Nope, he's stuck in a September 12 mindset.

Genre

Hey there stranger! I'm sure you're here because you were googling for Indiana Jones, but this here's a not very well maintained blog about comics, politics, and all kinds of nerdity.

Anyway, I was driving home today and heard an excerpt from an interview between Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese from the late 90s. At one point Ebert says, "movies aren't about their subject; they're about how they're about their subject...I don't want to see a bad cowboy movie, or a bad boxing movie, I want to see a good boxing movie." And then, and I'll paraphrase because he wasn't very diplomatic here, that he doesn't understand people that say they don't like movies about subject X.

I've never heard it described so perfectly. I've never understood people that avoid genres because I've always thought that what they really meant wasn't that they disliked the genre, they just dislike the bad examples of that genre. The same goes for video games or comics: When people say they don't like comics, I hear "I haven't really tried very hard to find comics that I like."