Anti-Intellectualism

So, there I was looking through the news at CNN (I like to hit the American news spectrum: I start at Fox, dart left and hit MSNBC, then settle in the middle with CNN. Then I go find the wacko channels; much fun). I read an article about Conservatives having issues with the McCain campaign keeping Governor Palin under wraps. I came across this quote:

In defense, Republicans say the complaints are coming from "intellectual" conservatives -- not Main Street Republicans, who they insist love the "hockey mom," from Alaska, as Palin describes herself.

"These are the folks that really have responded to the candidacy of a McCain-Palin ticket. These are the folks that are showing up in huge numbers, tens of thousands, to the rallies," Leslie Sanchez, a CNN political contributor, said.

So, correct me if I am wrong here. The complaints regarding Palin and her complete on air meltdown with Katie Couric are only coming from the intellectuals. Let me rephrase that:

Disregard the problems, only smart Republicans are having problems with Palin.

Similarly, I keep hearing that only eggheads and intellectuals are voting Obama.

The educated, smart people are voting Obama.

Now, please don't take this as "only dummies are voting McCain." I know very intelligent people who for whatever reason have decided to go that way. Yet, I can't get over the continued vilification of the intellectual. You know, the people who invented vaccines and make schools work so we are not a third world country.

No, smart doesn't always equal right.

Just the vast majority of the time.

Faith is a funny thing.

People without faith don't understand people with faith. People with faith can't objectively explain their experiential evidence to those without faith. In my life I have had faith in a lot of things, and many of those things when exposed to the light of day, or to the perspective of age have lost their luster. The things so easily believed in as a child become hard to swallow as an adult, as much as we may want to, as much as we wish we could still take the comfort we did when more naïve.

My efforts as I have gotten older have been to remind myself the faltering foundations of my faith are based far more on changes in me than changes in those things I believed. At times though, things in which my faith were strong have changed to try to match my new perspective, thus losing exactly what it was that built my faith in the first place. The hell of it is, people like me often ASK for these things to evolve to our perspectives, and then complain when they are not what they once were.

Once in a great while though, something amazing happens. The object of faith evolves, changes to fit the perspectives of the faithful, yet retains all that made it holy in the first place. When such an event occurs, faith is made manifest and all your travails in the name of belief are cast aside. For one miraculous time, all doubts are gone and you bask in the power of that which you believed in, and walk away better for it, knowing that as troubled as you may be, this perfect confluence of want and need has happened, and by happening has established that it may happen again.

I love comic books. I love what they have always meant to me, and as much as I recognize there are lots of genres which flow well in the graphic format, the modern myths of the Superheros are my very favorites. I also recognize the Superhero genre can support many types of story telling-- from the 1950s Zap/Pow to Watchmen. Yet as we the audience have matured, comics have tried to keep up with us, and Zap/Pow is gone replaced with what I almost refer to as “every hero a Rorschach” syndrome. There's still plenty of fine storytelling going on out there, but so seldom now do I see the stories that made me enter the four-colored world in the first place. So often the people in my comic shop are my age, and not the age I was when I first read Detective Comics. So often the people my age in the comic shop with me lament about the quality of the comics we spend hundreds of dollars on each month (yet continue to spend hundreds on each month). Why do we keep coming back?

Because sometimes your faith is rewarded. Sometimes a comic series plays off so perfectly the child within you thrills or cries and the adult holding the comic still manages to say “wow” and truly mean it.




Superman is not my favorite character, and yet we must acknowledge he is the essence of the comic genre, and likely America's immortal contribution the heroic myth like the Hellenistic Hercules, the Semetic Samson, and the Britannic Arthur. When Joseph Campbell's intellectual heir in the 30th Century is writing his version of “Hero with a Thousand Faces” Superman will hold his own with the great myths of human history. If you have any doubt, read all 12 issues of All-Star Superman. Grant Morrison, as absolutely insane as I understand he is, and as convoluted as he can write things, has distilled everything a comic book and a comic book hero should be into these 12 issues. Look at this distillation of the Superman origin:



Seventy years of Superman history in four panels and eight words. I wish the writers on Smallville understood this kind of dramatic brevity.

This is a Superman who is not a character- he is Legend. Frank Quietly's artwork is perfect for this story. The nuance of expression is at a level previously delivered only by the great Kevin Maguire, and the fluid construction of shapes and images flow creating a world which is as hyper-real to our present as those brightly colored Zap/Pow comics stand above the black and white world of the fifties. Morrison takes stories and characters we know, and know well, yet makes them seem as new as they must have seemed in 1938. Compared to other great works in this format I truly love, All-Star Superman is still something else; something more.

The title is as sophisticated as anything I have read, full of real emotion and real people, while still present a story full of Science Fiction concepts which will capture the most escapist, or child-like among us. We see a world actually affected by the presence of Superman. Superman's simple existence has inspired great men of science to make a world where Jimmy Olsen doesn't take the bus to work, or even a Segue; he has a rocket pack, and this is perfectly normal. America is not sending astronauts to a space station in orbit; they are traveling to the sun. It's a world where Samson and Atlas DO show up... and end up arm wrestling Superman for a chance to date Lois. How awesome is that?

I am in my mid thirties. I have traveled the world. I have read countless books. I have been to war more than once. I have a child old enough to go to war himself soon.


All-Star Superman brought me to tears.



































All-Star Superman made me cheer.

























All-Star Superman made me laugh.

















All-Star Superman left me in awe.

















All-Star Superman gave me Hope.


















If Warner Brothers thinks they have to go dark to come up with a successful comic book story, here's the proof they are dead wrong.

It took more than two years for DC to publish all 12 issues. I forgive them. All-Star Superman is why I read comics. It has justified my faith.



Yeah, me too.

Thank you.

September Eleventh

To those responsible for the atrocity committed seven years ago I say this:
I do not and will not live in fear of you.
I will not give up my freedom or my free thought for you.
I will not stop being an example and champion of freedom, self-determination, and equitable treatment for all men and women.
I will continue to be the opposite of those who would use fear to exercise tyranny over the hearts, minds, and souls of my brothers and sisters worldwide.

To those brothers and sisters I say this:
Join me. Live not in fear, but in defiance of tyranny. Live not for vengeance but for justice.

Amen.

Liberal Bloggers are dumb.

Ok folks, let me admit I was wrong. I always admit I might be, but it
is less usual that I have to admit I was. I was wrong about Sarah
Palin. She isn't a joke. She's far worse. She's attractive enough
to make people not listen to what she's really saying, and she has
enough problems around her for Liberal bloggers to blow out of
proportion to be dangerous.

See, here's the thing. The left is taking every little rumor about
Governor Palin and hitting it with Pym particles (google it if you
must) to make it much bigger than it should be. Case in point: a list
was floating in the blogosphere of books MAYOR Palin wanted banned.
The list was plainly false. It was a dirty lie. It was made up. The
fact was the Mayoral candidate Sarah Palin simply asked the local
Wasilla librarian if she would remove books if Palin deemed it
necessary, and then proposed this once again when she was elected as
mayor. No book ban. Just a...

Wait a freakin' minute.

She asked if the librarian would be willing to remove books from the
library? Are you serious? According to the NY Times, the Anchorage
Daily News, and Anne Kilkenny it happened.
Witnesses have come forward. In modern America this newly elected
mayor was looking into what it would take to censor books from her
community. This repugnant truth has been tied to an easily disproven
lie... and the lie drags the truth overboard with it when it is washed
away.

I am registered third party, but consider myself a
"Constituitonalist." The idea of a public servant considering
censorship is anathema to me. That alone would be reason enough not
to vote for her (and let's face facts- I hope John McCain passes
quietly in his bed well past his 120th birthday, but odds are a job
like president is not going to sit well with this man, so SHE is
likely who you are voting for).

So, Liberal Bloggers-- Stop being morons. Sarah Palin is raising her
own child, not her daughter's. Sarah Palin has not posed nude, or
even bikini clad holding a rifle (darn). Sarah Palin HAS made
prepatory actions toward censoring books, and MAY have asked a
librarian to resign for the sin of disagreeing with her. Sarah Palin
IS under investigation for possibly firing Alaska's top cop because he
did not fire her ex brother-in-law. The facts are bad enough.
Discrediting yourself by running the unsubstantiated rumors makes you
look like the people who claim Barack Obama is a secret Jihadist.
This election is too important to ignore facts. Play fair, or don't
play at all.

God- I'm asking politicos to play fair. Now I'M the moron!

Jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiihad, cowboy!

I am sure you've seen the e-mail; Barack HUSSEIN Obama is actually a closet Jihadist who will dismantle America from the inside out, and has been a Manchurian candidate type for decades, with ties going back to childhood.

I have actually been rolling these stories over in my head quite a bit
recently, and I have come to some conclusions.

Did George Bush protect America?

In his last 8 years, the President would seem to have kept attacks off
American soil. We have passed legislation, some shady, allowing for
investigation of terrorist suspects. We have created the Department
of Homeland Security; given special powers to the military and FBI;
allowed the NSA and CIA to collect on American shores; allowed warrant-less wire tapping; used coercive interrogation techniques; Law
Enforcement has more ability and databasing now than ever before in
history. We must surely have the safest state in human history.

And they never discovered Obama is a terrorist? Are we really saying
that the myriad of enforcement and intelligence agencies with all
their technological and Human intelligence abilities have allowed a
sleeper agent to not only be elected to congress, but to become a
presidential contender? They never tapped a phone call between Obama and his contact? No e-mails with encoded messages to his Jihadist brethren?

And what about all the press out there, national and otherwise? Looking through these articles, the only people with these stories are the admitted far right, and have to draw on forty year old insinuations to "connect the dots". Look at the references
in these articles-- World Net Daily, Newsmax, personal blogs, and a
couple of BBC and NY Times articles that aren't about Obama but other events. You can claim liberal media bias, but if there was clear evidence here, do you really think Bill O'Reilly wouldn't lead with that story, instead of Edie Hill giving snarky little
comments about "terrorist fist bumps?" Wouldn't Limbagh be handing
over research to the FBI to arrest Senator Obama? I do agree there are biased news outlets in mainstream media, but they all bow to their first master: Money. Sensational sells, and even if Keith Olbermann wants to have Obama's baby, you can;t tell me MSNBC wouldn't break a story about Obama being a terrorist if there was proof of such. Profits beat politics any day, and the ratings go to the newsfolk who break the big story first. Yet not even Fox News has Fair and Balanced its rightside lean to the point of actually playing the story. Do we really believe ALL the mainstream media would skip this story if it was true?

All the vetting the press has done on Obama since the campaign began, and no one has discovered the deep seeded Islamist within? He has never slipped up with a "aham d'Allah" offhandedly? The Republican party, who would gladly push anything they could has only had Sarah Palin go so far as to disparage community organizing, but hasn't been able to claim him as a Mujahadin. Would they really pass that up if there was actual evidence?

When Obama was granted a security clearance to become Senator, none of
the investigators found any evidence of this? My clearance from my Firm had four
investigators- surely a few more are working on Senators, and even if
they aren't, are we really saying the government security agencies
couldn't find what Scott Thong at Worldpress could?

Let me also understand that some of the "clues" to Obama's actual origins lie in the memoirs HE HIMSELF published? This incredible sleeper agent planted into our society in the 70's by the Muslims in an incredible act of insidious premonition has fooled EVERYONE but a few bloggers and far right websites. Yet, an agent of this caliber NAMED HIS CONTACTS IN TWO SEPARATE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES!!!

But here's the real issue:

If Obama is a secret Islamist, and is setting us up as a Jihadist, then
the Bush administration has failed far more spectacularly than any
detractor has ever thought. The Bush administration has allowed
America's enemy into congress and perhaps into the White House. Is
that what we are saying here? Every federal agency, every bit of law enforcement, every security and intelligence agency utterly failed? The press, the Republican strategists, hell, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney all failed to find out this startling truth? If that is true, that alone would be a good reason to get the Republicans out of office, or at least impeach the current administration.

Jaded as I am , even I have more faith in my government than that. When the CIA has enough reason to put Obama in Gitmo, then, THEN, I will buy the secret Jihadist argument.

Until then save me some hummus and falafel!