Month: October 2009

The Forward runs a rave of Robert Crumb’s new illustrated Old Testament. It is, indeed, breathtaking:

Unlike previous Biblical comic adaptations, including some published and drawn by Jews, Crumb’s characters actually look Jewish, the women even more than the men. The contrast to the classic work, EC Comics’ “Picture Stories from the Bible” (1945) in that respect is most illuminating. But more recent works like the best-selling “Manga Bible” (2000) are not much different (nor was the “The Wolverton Bible” by one of the strangest of comic artists Basil Wolverton). 

Close readers will see Crumb’s wife Aline Kominsky, to whom the book is dedicated, again and again, in various guises; perhaps only Chagall drew his beloved wife so often and with such varied imagination. Not only are the characters Jewish here, they are all ages and sizes.

If, for instance, there are more drawings of Jewish elders in any single volume of comic art anywhere, I have never seen them. 

The women here are beautiful when young, heavily busted with large, muscular thighs. The men are strong, their beards full and noble. The deity has a really big beard and retains his notoriously bad temper, as well as his commanding presence, and absolute demand for loyalty. The animals of Genesis (in Noah’s ark and elsewhere) may be where Crumb is most similar to earlier comic art adaptations of Biblical texts, but they are drawn, like everything else, with such loving care that they are special and demand repeated viewing.

Pretty well, according to David Rhode:

They vowed to follow the tenets of Islam that mandate the good treatment of prisoners. In my case, they unquestionably did. They gave me bottled water, let me walk in a small yard each day and never beat me.

So that's one more feather in Cheney's cap: he brought prisoner treatment under the US to below that of the Taliban.

Andrew's Sunday column explored Obama's brand of pragmatism and long-term strategy. Sully also parsed a new survey of the Republican base, recommended Rory Stewart's latest on Afghanistan, and addressed a reader's take on the "immutability" of religion and homosexuality – a thread continued by another reader.

In other commentary, Lawrence Lessig tweaked the utility of total transparency, Caleb Crain saw a paradox in marriage, Scott Adams mused over the shamelessness of pundits, Patrick Range McDonald cornered Hollywood over its hypocrisy on homosexuals, and Larison read the 2012 primary. We also ran videos from TED here and here, and this commentary on cults was pretty fascinating.

In Palin news, she appears to be busy spending her hard-earned money.

— C.B.

Kerry Howley disapproves of government tweaking the birthrate:

I wrote a long article on fertility trends last year, and in the course of my research I became wary of politicians who think there is a “right” birthrate to be achieved through domestic policy. American women are not a population of breeders to be incentivized toward motherhood whenever politicians want a few more natives around. The further talk of paid maternity leave can be kept from talk of birthrates, the better.

Sweet, simple, and sentimental:

Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

John Holbo blurs the lines:

Practically all crime is ‘thought crime’ in the good ol’ common law sense of the Latin phrase actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – ‘the act does not make guilt unless the mind be guilty.’ If we were to take a strict liability approach to all violent crime we would be obliged to place wrongful death on a par with premeditated murder. (After all, it’s not as though the lives of those killed accidentally are worth less.) This refutes the notion that there is something sinister and Orwellian about post-Drakonic/post-Hammurabian developments in criminal law. (Damn liberals and their newfangled political correctness!) It doesn’t follow that ‘hate crime’ legislation makes moral and practical sense, of course.

Erick Schonfeld deciphers what the internet hegemon is really up to:

Google is not digitizing these books so it can sell copies of them. They are out of print for a reason. There is no market for them as whole books. Their value lies in cutting them up into snippets and relevant excerpts, and showing those snippets along with search ads to people looking for related information. The reason they are valuable to Google is because they are a rich source of high quality information that will improve its search results, and in fact give them an information advantage over other search engines without equal access to the world’s books.

There would be some value in printing them out via the espresso book machine. The demand for any individual out of print book is small but the sum demand for all out of print books is significant. When doing a run of one costs the same as doing a run of 10,000 such exchanges suddenly become profitable. Alan Jacobs has mixed feelings.

It’s his first video interview since the election. A translation would be awesome.

Larison has a shrewd take on the bewildering dynamics of a dreadful field:

I have thought for a while that Huckabee’s personality could have some of the appealing all-things-to-all-people quality that Obama had during the election. If the economy remains a major issue in the next election, as it most likely will be, the sheer disgust economic conservatives still have for him could be worn almost as a badge of pride in the general election. An early opponent of the bailout, Huckabee could tap into populist dissatisfaction with the coziness of corporations and government without being pigeonholed as nothing more than an obsessed tax-cutter.

Huckabee isn’t going to have that chance.

Even if it seems irrational, movement activists who are not primarily interested in social issues distrust Huckabee intensely, and they will work to block him and deny him funding just as they did last time. The anti-Huckabee sentiment among movement activists is a useful reminder that all the Republican culture war defenses of Palin during the general election were aimed at mobilizing all the people whose candidate, Huckabee, they had just spent the previous 18 months mocking and ridiculing with all of the same language used against Palin. For turnout purposes, the GOP still finds Huckabee’s people useful, but its leaders and activists will not tolerate Huckabee taking the lead in the party as the nominee.

The effect this will have, as Stuttaford’s post suggests, is that most Catholic, mainline Protestant and secular Republicans will rally to whichever anti-Huckabee candidate appears strongest. This will most likely mean a coalition of voters arrayed behind Romney, who will then be a far weaker draw in the general election than Huckabee would have been. At first, that sounds implausible. Surely the more “moderate,” less “sectarian” candidate should be able to win more support, right?

No, not really, because the things that make Romney more attractive to non-evangelicals in the GOP also force him to spend more time trying to prove that evangelicals and social conservatives can accept him. Aside from the complication that his religion introduces into this, this means that Romney has to emphasize social issues, on which he has no credibility, and public professions of religious faith, which are some of the things that so many Republicans and independents find viscerally unappealing about what they perceive to be the norm in Republican politics.

Ellensburg, Washington, 9.45 am