A Yank in Oz

Interesting times.

Blogging has been light this past month (even by my standards) because real life has been unusually eventful — even by my standards. I don't normally blog about my career, except to mention in passing that I work in telecommunications… but as of last week I've left the company I worked for since 1991, and my lady-love and I are planning to depart Australia in the near future. Our next stop is the U.S. West Coast, at a city to be determined (probably San Francisco or Seattle, but we'll see) — and we have one other announcement to make, which I'll be calling people to tell personally before I spill the beans here.

Needless to say it's been an exciting month… just not one in which I've had a lot of time for blogging. Stay tuned.

The Doctor is in:

If it weren't for Howard Dean, I'd still be on the sidelines of American politics: Interested, but not involved. Dean's grassroots organizing, and his call to civic duty, galvanized millions of people around the world — myself included — and his pull-no-punches presidential campaign changed the tone of the Democratic Party. I always thought the Democrats of 2000-2003 were bringing an olive branch to a knife fight: Offering the hand of bipartisanship to an uncompromising opponent who sought their political destruction. On the national stage, Dean was the first and strongest voice to say Bush couldn't be trusted to put country ahead of party… and he recognized that you don't win elections by letting your opponent define you. You win them by standing for principles worth fighting for.

So, naturally, I'm delighted to have Dean as Chairman of the DNC — and I like this quote from his acceptance speech:

We know that we're the party for young Americans looking for a government that speaks to them… we know that we're the party for working Americans desperate for a government that looks out for them… and we know that we're the party for older Americans and veterans and members of the Armed Services expecting and deserving a government that honors them.

And we know that no matter where you live or who you are, what you look like or how you worship, ours is the diverse party that welcomes you.

But right now, as important as all of that is… it is not enough. We have to move forward. We cannot win if all we are is against the current President.

Republicans wandered around in the political wilderness for 40 years before they took back Congress. But the reason we lost control is that we forgot why we were entrusted with control to begin with.

The American people can't afford to wait for 40 years for us to put Washington back to work for them.

It can't take us that long.

And it won't take us that long… not if we stand up for what we believe in… organize at the local level… and recognize that this Party's strength doesn't come from the consultants down, it comes from grassroots up.

Amen. I don't expect miracles from Howard Dean, but I do expect him to fight the good fight more effectively: Where Terry McAuliffe was an effective fundraiser, Dean will be that and more. He'll be able to put the GOP on the defensive, to draw them out and draw their fire, and he'll give our candidates the time and money to define themselves before the GOP does it for them. For those of us who supported Dean as a presidential candidate, his second act as a DNC Chair is the best news we've had all month.

Comics trips.

When I was growing up, we didn't have a World Wide Web like you kids today: We had the Marion Daily Republican for news about our friends and neighbors, and the Southern Illinoisan for reports from the outside world. Sometimes Dad would even splurge and invest a nickel in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but mostly we read the hometown papers.

I don't remember which paper had the better comics page, but I do remember thinking they had a lot of dead weight in there. Strips like Hi and Lois or Blondie just recycled the same six jokes every week; maybe once in a while they'd hit the funny bone, but after the 83rd time Sarge punches Beetle the novelty starts to wears off. Gary Larson was a breath of — well, I wouldn't call it fresh air, but The Far Side was certainly unique — and Calvin and Hobbes's Bill Watterson was the best cartoonist of his time.

I read Watterson's tenth anniversary book, and what I remember most was his lament that commercial pressures were literally squeezing the comics. The publishers wanted to fit more comics on the printed page, and unless you had the clout of a Garry Trudeau (whose mostly-for-grownups Doonesbury strip often found its way to the editorial page), you had no choice but to try to draw into a smaller box. The size of the strip left only enough room for simplified drawings and limited dialogue; it was really only on Sunday that someone like Watterson could stretch his artistic wings.

The impression I received was that the comics pages were contracting, and that the only way a new artist can "break in" these days is if some other cartoonist retires. Watterson's retirement was a bonanza for Scott Adams, freeing up space in hundreds of papers for the up-and-coming Dilbert — but I really can't think of a cartoonist since Adams who's been nearly as successful, and I think part of the reason may be that there simply aren't any openings.

…all of which brings me to Michael Jantze's The Norm. One reviewer described it as "the best comic strip you might not be reading," and I'd have to agree: Jantze's artistic skills are in Watterson's league, and his Sunday strips are a joy. The story centers on title character Theodore Norman Miller and his relationships with girlfriend / wife Reine (pronounced Re-NAY), best friend Ford, and other supporting characters — and with his own inner selves, who occasionally step out and take part in the action.

The Norm is the only comic strip I've seen that does regular fourth-wall jokes: Norm occasionally stops the action and talks directly to the audience, and sometimes has to adjust the "camera" so it's pointing in the right direction. (One week Norm was nowhere to be found, so the camera followed Reine around — who, of course, spent the week politely trying to shoo it away.) It's a strip that tells a story about the lives of its characters, and loyal readers have seen Norm go through relationships and breakups, jobs and layoffs, friends moving away and coming back home, and other milestones.

Until last September, The Norm was syndicated by King Features and appeared in about 70 papers nationwide — but Jantze decided to end his contract and strike out on his own, so he and wife Nicole are now distributing The Norm from their web site. They've gotten about 4,000 people to subscribe for $25/year, which is enough to keep them in pencils and web servers for the time being… but they're not going to get any new readers except by word of mouth.

About a year ago my other favorite new comic strip, Stephen Hersh and Nina Paley's The Hots, died an inglorious death from much the same causes: You can't earn a living drawing a syndicated comic strip these days. If you're an established cartoonist you can get by, but there's not enough room on the comics page — and not enough readers buying an old-fashioned newspaper — to let talented new artists establish a following.

So check out The Norm — and if you like what you see, tip the artist. Michael and Nicole Jantze are still working the kinks out of the non-members part of their web site, but hopefully soon you'll be able to preview the strip and find out what you're missing.

And now a word?

The management of A Yank in Oz is flabbergasted to introduce our first commercial sponsor, an advertiser who apparently believes this blog is about a New York Yankees fan swept away by a tornado. (Well, that's one possible interpretation of the blog's name.) I had given up on the idea that blogads were going to be a lucrative source of revenue — or even a source of revenue — given the utter lack of response thus far… but apparently someone looked at the sophisticated, talented audience of this blog and decided it was an opportunity they couldn't pass up.

And so a warm welcome to the fine folks from ticketsinaflash.com, who are here to provide for your American baseball ticket needs. I'll try not to spend in one place the glorious eight dollars I'm about to receive for this ad. (Let's see, two and a half years of blogging, maybe five or six hours per week, means I'm getting paid about… five cents an hour. That's more than double what my opinion is usually worth.)

While we're on the subject, why don't you all wander over to this site, sign yourselves up for some junk-mail offers, and then get yourselves (and me) a free Mac Mini? It's not like the junk-mail people don't already know where you live.

Two worth reading:

A commenter at The Peking Duck declares that what we now have in Iraq is "the equivalent of a kind of Vichy Government being set up," and that morally the insurgents are right to resist and the quislings are wrong to cooperate. Richard presents the opposing view with a powerful summary of why — in spite of all Bush's failures and screw-ups — we can't abandon the Iraqi people to the hands of the murderous few.
Andrew Sullivan and Greg Djerejian take John Kerry to task for not denouncing Abu Ghraib loudly enough to satisfy them — and The Poor Man gives them exactly what they deserve. If you didn't hold Bush accountable for torture, then you can't avoid your share of the shame.

Often in error, never in doubt:

Glenn Reynolds marks the occasion of the Iraq Survey Group giving up the search for Saddam's nonexistent WMD stockpiles (link via One Hand Clapping) by tartly noting there were other reasons to go to war too, y'know, and that Bush's only mistakes were (a) listening to the CIA and (b) going to the United Nations in the first place.

I've noted elsewhere the problem with Glenn's assertion that the UN road was a mistake: At the time, he praised the Bush Administration's strategy and lauded their diplomacy skills. As for the claim that the Bush Administration was following the CIA's lead, as opposed to grabbing the CIA by the nose and frog-marching them to a pre-ordained conclusion, well… let's just say the reality-based community would take exception to that premise. There's also the issue that bypassing the UN would have made it difficult for Tony Blair to build his case for war, leaving Bush with a "coalition" of America and Poland.

Meanwhile, what I wrote at the time was disappointingly prescient. The Iraq war has been a success only in that it removed Saddam Hussein from the list of world leaders; in all other aspects, our efforts in Iraq have failed to deliver what Bush and Perle and Rumsfeld promised. We've turned Iraq into a latter-day Lebanon, a breeding ground for terror and torture, and it's grinding down our armed forces, increasing the threat to our homeland security, distancing us from our allies, and disgracing our reputation abroad. Iraq's upcoming "elections" will have the same effect as the "transfer of sovereignty" we had last June, and the same effect as the capture of Saddam: Things will continue to get worse, and we'll shift our focus to the next milestone.

I supported the decision to use force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. I supported it because I believe Saddam committed crimes against humanity — and I believe the world would be better served if we enforced our calls to end genocide, and held world leaders to some minimal standard of respecting human rights. I would love to further establish that precedent; it's the direction America was heading in when we put Milosevic on trial.

But the Bush Administration's case for war barely touched that argument — in spite of recent claims to the contrary. Bush's case was "all about" smoking guns, mushroom clouds, and falsely connecting Saddam to the 9/11 attacks; the case for invading Iraq on humanitarian grounds just didn't have enough sizzle for an administration that was busy linking Saddam to 9/11 at every opportunity. Dubya's case for war was noteworthy not only for the falsehoods it loudly proclaimed to be true, but also for the truths it shoved aside to make room for them: It's disingenuous to pretend that beating the drum for war, with repeated wolf cries about they'll-have-nukes-in-a-year and we-think-Saddam-met-with-Osama, will not drown out the remainder of both sides of the discussion.

I'm still willing to make the argument that deposing Saddam was the morally right thing to do, and that military force was the only means to that end. But, unlike my neocon "friends," I accept that my opinion may be in the minority. I'm not prepared to pad my argument with false premises and scare tactics, to build up a temporary majority just long enough for me to get the tanks rolling in, because that would be wrong. If I can't win over at least half the voting public, then either I'm a poor advocate or my argument is flawed — but in neither case do I gain the right to mislead people in pursuit of my goal.

There are people who believed that the risks of war, the downside risks and consequences of sending our troops into hostile lands, outweighed the advantages of removing Saddam. To date, these people have not been proven wrong… and the Bush Administration's disastrous mishandling of the post-war has strengthened their arguments. On bad days I'm reduced to arguing that Bush's incompetence at post-war strategy was not foreseeable in advance — and I'm arguing with people who predicted the Bush Administration would be incompetent at post-war strategy, so you can imagine how well that goes.

Right-wing bloggers can claim, in some cases justifiably, that their argument for war included the case against Saddam on humanitarian grounds; if so, good for them. But they can't argue retroactively that Bush made the case for war on humanitarian grounds, or that he argued the case for enforcing international law. Aside from one excellent speech that Bush gave on September 12, 2002, Bush's case for war relied on 9/11 ties that didn't exist… and on weapons that weren't there.