Where you might least expect it

I think I have mentioned this before, but one of my favourite sources for actual analysis of political events is a column, written by a comic book writer, on a comics web site.

The columns are quite long, and usually start out with comic-related material, but they eventually get around to a few paragraphs (or a few dozen if Steve gets on a roll) on political matters, and those few paragraphs often are of more use, with respect to the issue they address, than many of the strictly political commentators I read. Grant is less comprehensive in subject, choosing only one or two things each week, while some political sites/commentators try to cover everything, which gives Grant an advantage, but it’s more than that.

For example, here’s a paragraph from this week’s column:

Orwell’s prescience also manifested recently in the Office Of Foreign Assets Control‘s (who even knew such a thing existed?) decision to prohibit American publishing houses from publishing works originating in countries under sanction, in the absence of government approval. Publishing houses will be liable for up to a million dollars, editors, publishers and others subject to quarter-million dollar fines and ten year prison terms. The Baltimore Sun’s article cites the pure anti-First Amendment unconstitutionality of this, and discusses the side-effect of barring the work of dissidents from listed countries. But they’re missing the point of it. Ostensibly, it means no one in a sanctioned nation can make money off their work in the USA, but it’d be easy enough to put any money in escrow or confiscate it (and did Mao actually earn and/or receive royalties when they published his LITTLE RED BOOK here?) It really means, from the government’s POV, we are no longer allowed to know what our enemies think or understand how they express themselves, aside from official government (ours) proclamations on the matter. I guess even the slightest chance that I expect the courts will blow that one out of the water, but there’s no telling with the courts, especially these days. Is it already 40 years since Phil Ochs sang, “Somehow it seems strange to hear the State Department say “You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay”?

I’ve seen this story tracked and debated, and I’ve seen quite a lot of noise about freedom of speech and censorship, and the reasons why this ‘blockade’ will hurt exactly the people we should be encouraging, etc., but Grant’s one paragraph formulation of the ‘this means we aren’t allowed to hear what they think’ line is the most concise I’ve seen anywhere, and it’s a point that seems to have missed many of the people who should be most concerned about it.

Last week, it was the same kind of thing with the Ward Churchill brouhaha (if you don’t know, start here) that’s been circling around the blogosphere (and the punditosphere of the mainstream media, of course). Grant takes a few paragraphs and again actually does some analysis:

Bear in mind that at no point did Churchill say the 9/11 attacks were good, or moral, or justified. He never said anyone deserved to die. His desire is to understand the motives of the attackers, which is, of course, a sin in the Hand Puppet’s America. Again, as Churchill puts it: “It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which US Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American ‘command and control infrastructure’ in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a ‘legitimate’ target. Again following US military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than ‘collatoral damage.'” This is a tricky fine point, but follow it: Churchill’s argument isn’t that bin Laden’s little band of fanatics had every right to attack the World Trade Center and kill thousands of people, or that it’s his judgment that they were justified, but that the Pentagon’s own logic, if followed through, would seem to justify it.

But Churchill, bear in mind, doesn’t accept the Pentagon’s logic. And that’s his ultimate point: “If the US public is prepared to accept these ‘standards’ when they are routinely applied to other people, they should not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them… If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.” Which strikes me as simply logical, even Biblical: it’s the Golden Rule.

Now I’ve seen a whole lot of discussion on this too, ranging from Coulterian “Churchill should be killed for what he implies” through to very abstract academic freedom arguments–many of which have nothing to do with Churchill’s statement at this point, but not very many people who appear to have read for comprehension what Churchill actually said.

(I wonder if reading comprehension and formal logic skills are developed by scripting comic books–maybe we should push for that to be part of the common curriculum of the western world.)