He would be 69, if he had not been killed. It is one shame of my people. I am so sorry that it happened, so sorry that white people did that.
UPDATE: This review of Barry’s soon-to-be-bestselling graphic novel for people of all ages was originally written about the first printing of his book, which he independently commissioned. My personal copy (actually my daughter’s) is inscribed by Barry and will one day pay for her college education and starter home and probably a nice boat, too. Because that is how big Barry Deutsch is going to be. She in essence has one of the bats that a youthful Babe Ruth practiced with, signed (engraved!) with a personal note.
The now-professionally published book is getting rave reviews from industry heavyweights. My own review still stands: it’s an outstanding work, regardless of the I am sure substantial improvements Barry’s work received by going through a mainstream house.
The book is schedule for publication in November. I recommend it to EVERYONE. Even illiterate people should, if apprised of this review, go to Amazon and order it. Buy lots of copies, because every child you know will want one for Christmas, or Hanukkah, or other festive multicultural giving occasion, as appropriate. You’ll want one for yourself. If you’d like, buy it through this link right now, and toss a buck to my elderly grandma, the recipient of my Amazon.com affiliate riches. (She plans to buy a boat…for the tub, to entertain the great-grand-nephews.) The pre-order deal is amazing – under $11!
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“Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword”, written and drawn by Barry Deutsch, is an independently-produced 57-page comic book that tells the story of Mirka, an 11-year old girl living in the fictional ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Aherville. (”Hereville”, to the goyim.)
This is not a Marvel comic book filled with iron-jawed superheroes, though Mirka yearns for heroics – dreaming of dragonslaying as she tends her younger brother, knits with her stepmother, and prepares the Shabbat meal with her family. “Hereville” explores themes more adult than its protagonist might wish for in a comic book – primarily, coming of age, the role of women in traditional societies, a subtle exploration of how communities on the margins of a larger society nonetheless view themselves as the center, with their own set of outcasts and marginal figures, and the struggle faced by an independent, somewhat nonconformist young girl faced with a social role not of her choice or to her liking.
The story of Mirka begins with a friendly argument, and climaxes in a debate whose outcome could mean death to Mirka – or could, if we didn’t presume from the title that our heroine would prevail in the end. In between, Mirka saves an outcast woman (a “witch”, according to the local boys) from a beating, and is offered a reward for her service – a reward that takes the form of a quest to retrieve a sword from the local troll. But before Mirka can battle the troll, she must keep her brother from ratting out her plans to their ever-protective parents, celebrate the Shabbat, and find a way to get out of the house at night without being detected. These obstacles and travails are drawn with wit and warmth, and the reader is drawn into the oddball world of “Hereville” without a backwards glance. (A world of trolls, witches, electric lights and vacuum cleaners? Don’t ask questions – just enjoy it!)
“Hereville” is in some ways an experimental work. Deutsch attempted an ambitious method of displaying night-time scenes, using a dark palette and brown/black backgrounds to distinguish the approximately 1/3 of the book that takes place outdoors at night. This choice makes the night-time scenes quite distinct and recognizably “night”, but at the cost of washing out much of Deutsch’s distinctive linework style. The occasional frames with starlight and moonlight, or with a character’s eyes shining, make a dramatic contrast and are really very lovely.
“Really very lovely,” in fact, is a fair descriptor for most of the artwork of “Hereville”. Other reviewers have noted that the artwork improves through the course of the book’s 57 pages; I would not characterize it as an improvement, but as an evolution of the stylistic choices Deutsch made. “Hereville” began life as an online serial comic, with one or two pages appearing over the course of a week, and some stylistic modifications are to be expected. In the beginning of the book, the artist uses a lot of lined backgrounds, but by the end of the work he seems more confident in the foreground’s ability to carry the frame. Some of the individual frames and composite frames are absolutely beautiful; the four-page scene depicting Mirka’s struggle in the final conflict of the story is simply brilliant work, as are many of the individual frames preceding it. (Indeed, much of my complaint with the night-time scenes is a lament that I’m being deprived of the full enjoyment of the linework.) All of the artwork throughout the book is attractive and works well as settings for the story.
And “Hereville”, despite the beauty of the artwork, is primarily a story. Unlike some independent comic book authors who seem to feel the need to add thirteen layers of ironic detachment to their work, Deutsch is presenting a tale. It is a tale with context and subtext, and the reader will add much of their own worldview to the reading (this reviewer had assumed that the residents of Aherville were speaking a mixture of English and Yiddish, and was brought up short towards the end when the context abruptly shifted and it became clear that all of the previous dialog had actually been pure Yiddish, rendered in English simply for the benefit of the reader) – but Deutsch is content to let his characters tell their own story, without heavy-handed editorializing. Deutsch is a better artist than he is a writer – many authors with that balance of skills would provide us with gorgeous visuals illustrating vacuity. Instead we have a good story made brilliant by its artistic sensibility.
The book is not without its flaws. The troll, when he makes his eventual appearance as the story’s ultimate villain, is not particularly impressive or frightening, despite his very real power. Mirka is not always drawn with perfect consistency, particularly her nose, the changes to which would seem to require Aherville to employ its own full-time cosmetic surgeon. Plot-wise, the denouement could have been handled better; Mirka’s eventual victory feels somewhat contrived. Artistically, the beginning and middle of the book feel more lovingly handled than the end, which despite the power of many of its constituent panels, feels somehow rushed.
But these are minor critiques for the most part, akin to noting that a fantastic rose has a thorn on the stem or that a gorgeous dimpled infant’s hair is tousled. “Hereville” is a gem of a book, one that whets the appetite for more – and more is promised, for Deutsch has announced that the second chapter in Aherville’s saga will commence in January of 2009. Readers everywhere should delight in this news, set their bookmarks, and wait hungrily for the next pages of this ongoing work. It will be a long year – but in the meantime, we have “Hereville” to read and re-read.
For a taste of the published work, the pages of “Hereville” can be read online at Deutsch’s comic site, or purchased as a paper book. Pre-order the soon-to-be-published edition here:
Thinking about an old friend’s routine but soul-grating hassles with an incompetent scheduling department at her health care clinic, and thinking more generally about these kinds of broken processes, I came to a startling, if perhaps not novel, conclusion.
Where there is a broken system, an oddly failed yet presumably viable organization or process, somewhere, there is an idiot. Somewhere in the chain of command or in the network of dependencies or in the shifting hierarchies of the old boys’ system, whatever organization or lack thereof controls or influences or encompasses the problem, the grit in the machine, the error under consideration – somewhere there is a buffoon whose idiot hand trembles uncomprehendingly on some critical lever he or she has not the wit to understand.
Sometimes there is more than one of them. That’s when you really have a problem.
From a management consulting perspective, finding the idiot can be very rewarding, if dangerous. If the idiot turns out to be the CEO, you have a problem. Luckily, there are a lot of other candidates too. Dead people are (were) very often idiots, and are convenient to blame, if you do it quietly.
Some problems, of course, aren’t actually caused by idiots, or if they are caused by idiots, the idiots are far away and beyond your ability to affect. Organizations affected by a minor outburst of idiots in powerful places, however, have a distinct feel to them. Memos and emails appear, their exact authorship unclear, providing directions that are either vague or self-contradicting or both. Important jobs go undone while reports are updated like clockwork. Staffing levels go awry and service times become stupidly slow or unrealistically fast.
Find the idiots. Worm them out, by hook or by crook. Find them nice work in the urinal storage facility up in Adak, and hire someone with a measurable IQ to replace them. It might be the difference between life and death for your organization.
If you’re self-employed, you might need a mirror. I will talk more in a later note about being an idiot yourself and how recognizing it can tremendously improve your performance.
Boom.
NOW ON SALE:
24 Types of Progressive Mousepads
24 Types of Progressive T-Shirts
Barry gets a cut of all t-shirt and mousepad proceeds, btw.
In the spirit (and using the artwork) of Barry Deutsch’s “24 Types of Libertarian”, I present this mashup: the 24 Types of Progressive.
(It’s cool that I used his art. He even lettered it for me. It’s a joint project. That being the case, I can’t resist hassling Barry a little bit and apologizing for the mostly-male, mostly-white cast. Barry’s just sexist and racist that way, saying “I could revise the artwork to more accurately reflect the gender and racial balance of the progressive movement. But I would rather sit here playing Civ4 and guzzling bourbon.” Shocking, but what can you do.)
I have to say this “cartooning” thing seems pretty easy. I wrote up a few ideas, sent them off to Barry, went to bed and poof, in the morning a cartoon magically appeared. What’s all the complaining about, artist-type people? Just get yourself a Barry!
Click the image to see the full-size version.
How much better off would we be if we were drilling in ANWR or similar areas, rather than in deepwater?
We don’t yet know how bad the Deepwater Horizon spill will end up being. Let’s go super-worst case, and say that it reaches the level of the worst-ever oil spill: the 1991 deliberate spill in the Persian Gulf. The high end estimate of that spill is 520 million gallons. Let’s say it’s twice that bad – 1000 million gallons, a nice round billion. Worst. spill. ever.
We know what that looks like in water. It’s bad. How does it look on land?
A gallon is 0.13 cubic feet. (I know, it looks like more than that when you hold a gallon jug of milk, but a cubic foot is actually a fairly hefty volume of space.)
Thus, a billion gallons is 130 million cubic feet. Holy cow – we’d flood Alaska!
Or would we? The nice thing about an oil disaster on land is that it is relatively easy to throw up a berm to stop the spill from spreading. (In fact it’s so much easier to stop a spill on land that there would never be a billion gallons spilled – there wouldn’t even be a million gallons spilled. Check that list – of the top 12 spills, only one was on land, and that one happened when just such a berm collapsed after eight months of the spill being neglected. But let’s assume for the moment that we’re going to have to contain the entire billion gallons.)
Berms vary in height, but let’s not wait for the Corps of Engineers to show up. We want to protect the Alaskan wilderness, after all, before the tide of black gold drowns Governor Palin and Mr. McGinnis and all the little Alaskan bunny rabbits. Let’s limit ourselves to a berm 10 feet high. That’s something that yahoos in pickup trucks can manage, let alone serious civil engineers. How big a circular berm do we need to contain our spill?
At a height of ten feet, to encompass 130 million square feet, we need a radius of 2034 feet. Now, that’s not a tiny berm. Our rednecks in pickup trucks are going to need some friends. (Of course, they have months to build it, given the spill RATE is “only” a few hundred thousand gallons a day at most.) It’s a circle about 4/5 of a mile across. Not trivial, by any means – not a weekend project. Still, even if throwing up the berm costs $1000 a linear foot (and it wouldn’t, not nearly), we’re looking at $12,779,000 for the whole project – chump change. (And hell, the billion gallons of oil in the berm is worth about $2.4 billion on the open market, so you might even make a little profit on the deal.)
How much Alaska would be wiped out? Less than a single square mile.
THAT is why we should be drilling in Alaska (and Canada and a few other places), rather than out in deepwater.
At Alas!, Amp posts this (rather on-point) cartoon basically pointing out that it isn’t black people’s job to reassure white people that the white people are on the side of the angels. A fair point, and it’s a pretty funny cartoon too, esp. the last inset panel, where the black lady asks “do you even hear the words I say?” and the white lady responds “the ones I like”.
A few days later, Amp’s coblogger Mandolin makes a post discussing white views of racism, and making the interesting historical point that white opinions about racism and race relations haven’t changed very much in the last 40-50 years, and that arguably this demonstrates a large degree of disconnect between white people’s experiences and black people’s experiences on race in the US. (Short version, in the 1960s white people thought racism wasn’t a problem even though nowadays we pretty much all recognize that it was; today white people still think racism isn’t a problem, and Mandolin’s argument is that this indicates that we should be cautious about validating that perception.)
In the discussion following the post, yet-another-coblogger Myca writes in response to a white commenter’s dismissive opinion of Mandolin’s point:
Well, and this is why I think it’s so important to privilege the words and experiences of PoCs in conversations about racism…When you have zero skin in the game, it’s easy to be cavalier. Maybe we should listen to the folks whose skin is the game.
Also a fair point. So a couple of comments later, an African-American commenter named BluntHammer comes in and posts a long comment, not so much disagreeing with Mandolin’s argument as saying that the black community has made its own contribution to white perceptions.
And, well, wow. Mandolin’s response is basically an unbelievably snotty, educated white liberal’s dismissal of a black person’s contribution to the conversation. She starts off by mocking his (completely innocuous) handle. She then goes on to explain why this man’s life experience is irrelevant to the discussion, because it disagrees with “the sociology”, and says that he is “gloating” about his success in escaping the ghetto. She tells him that his opinion is at variance from what the majority of black people think, and that therefore she doesn’t have to take it seriously. She expresses doubt that he is actually black. She…oh, go read it for yourself, it’s quite a remarkable text. (I’m going to go ahead and reproduce it below in full, just to have an archival record, because I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up editing.)
So I guess that privileging the words and experiences of people of color in discussions of racism…kind of depends on the content of those words and experiences. Black people who don’t buy into the progressive worldview of racism? Deluded tools, explicitly compared to UFO abductees.
Progressives love to listen to black people. At least, the black people who say the things that progressives want to hear.
To all who have served their country, and especially to those who have given their life in its service, my deepest thanks.
Yeah, it’s freakin’ Sherlock Holmes territory over here. Nobody can figure it out.
That would admittedly be a best case scenario in his rather exhaustive rundown.
