Author: Brian Carnell

It Is Not a Sequel, It Is Literature?

What exactly was Dave Winer talking about yesterday when he posted the sentence below, about Alice Randall’s controversial The Wind Done Gone,

Listening to her talk about her family and especially her father, there’s no doubt that the book is literature, not a sequel as the heirs of Margaret Mitchell have claimed.

The last time I checked, a sequel to a novel would generally be classified as literature. Besides which, Randall’s novel has generally gotten very bad reviews with most reviewers noting that had the Mitchell estate not done something as absurd as taking Randall to court, that the novel would have gone largely unnoticed.

The biggest absurdity in the The Wind Done Gone case, however, is that 65 years after Gone With the Wind was first published and 52 years after Mitchell’s untimely death, the novel is still not in the public domain thanks to the several copyright extensions largely bought and paid for by a handful of large media corporations.

Friends of Animals Goes Ballistic

Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, went ballistic over the past couple weeks releasing two open letters on a popular animal rights news list that ended up getting her banned temporarily from the list. Both letters featured Feral charging that other animal rights groups were not abolitionist enough for her taste.

On June 26, 2001, Feral and Great Ape Standing & Personhood co-founder Lee Hall unleashed an letter ripping into In Defense of Animals over a National Institutes of Health contract for taking care of chimpanzees. The IDA put out a press release saying they were disappointed that the NIH had awarded the contract to a company that breeds animals for medical research purposes.

Feral and Hall in turn attack IDA for its implicit concession that it is okay to keep some chimpanzees in captivity. For example, consider this paragraph from Feral and Hall,

Your Release quotes Representative James Greenwood’s statement that the NIH “already has more chimpanzees than necessary.” IDA’s use of this reason to oppose the contract ignores the reality that Chimpanzees should not be owned by exploiters — “necessary or not. The very fact that the law considers research on Chimpanzees “necessary” both justifies and codifies the human right to torture non-human great apes.

In a follow-up press release dated July 3, 2001, Friends of Animals slammed People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals without naming the group specifically. According to FOA’s press release,

During the last several months, one group professing to advocate
animal rights activism — has been promoting McDonald’s. Now this organization is giving the nod to Burger King’s new endorsement of “humane standards” for animal slaughter [a clear reference to PETA]. Not surprisingly, another animal welfare association has jumped on board to laud the fast food establishment’s reform measures. Meanwhile, a coalition of groups is busy advocating a “reform” initiative in Florida to make the farming of pigs more “humane” before they are slaughtered.

Instead of using pressure tactics to force changes in the way animals are slaughtered, FOA is clear that abolition of meat eating is the only acceptable goal,

It is time for all of us who care about animals to accept one clear and simple fact. There is no such thing as humane animal agriculture. The life of a “farmed” animal is hell from the moment of birth to the moment of slaughter. The improvements that are being pushed by such welfare-oriented animal groups will do nothing to prevent animal suffering, or advance the goal of animal rights.

It is a very good day when PETA is attacked for being too soft on animal rights.

Source:

Open letter to In Defense of Animals. Priscilla Feral and Lee Hall, June 26, 2001.

Abolition, Not Reform. Priscilla Feral, Press Release, July 3, 2001.

NOW Elects New President

In June the National Organization for women elected executive vice president Kim Gandy to take over the organization for outgoing president Patricia Ireland. The change at the top of NOW is unlikely to mean very little change for the direction of NOW as Gandy is definitely from the same mould as Ireland.

National Review Online recent ran a brief profile of Gandy including some interesting quotes. Like many of NOW’s ilk, Gandy believes that feminism and pro-abortion politics are largely one and the same thing,

To say you’re a feminist and to say you’re anti-choice is definitely a contradiction. They focus all their attention on this little bit of tissue in the womb, and ignore all the tissue surrounding it.

Not that the father of that bit of tissue counts either. When Congress was proposing to give money to nonprofits to encourage men to marry their pregnant partners Gandy said, “I think promoting marriage as a goal in and of itself is misguided.”

In fact Gandy slammed the a widely circulated statement by The Marriage Movement which said, among other things, that,

Nostalgia for the high hopes of the 1970s should not blind us to the hard truths discovered over the past thirty years: When marriages fail, children suffer. For many, the suffering continues for years. For some, it never ends. Children suffer when marriages between parents do not take place, when parents divorce, and when spouses fail to create a “good-enough” family bond. We recognize that there are abusive marriages that should end in separation or divorce. We firmly believe that every family raising children deserves respect and support. Yet at the same time, we cannot forget that not every family form is equally likely to protect children’s well-being.

Gandy simply kicked in her boilerplate anti-marriage messages saying, “The marriage movement is giving women the message that a bad husband and father is better than none at all. Single moms are being demonized. NOW is committed to exposing and organizing this deliberate return to the days of unchallenged male control.”

Apparently Gandy missed the paragraph in the statement that begins, “Supporting marriage does not require punishing single parents or their children. The Marriage Movement is a movement for a better marriage culture, not a movement of the smug marrieds for the smug marrieds. Many of us in the marriage movement are single parents or the children of single parents. We know firsthand how children suffer and parents struggle when marriages fail.”

But NOW long ago gave up any pretense of even a small sliver of objectivity or of rationally approaching complex social issues. Like others in the organization, Gandy campaigned for Al Gore and appeared on a number of talk shows defending the vice president. An appearance on CNN highlighted her (and NOW’s) love of extreme scare tactics. Gandy asked,

Why are elderly people eating dog food? Because our Social Security system doesn’t take into account all the years of unpaid caregiving that they contributed to society.

What a bizarre statement giving the huge redistribution of income from the young to the elderly that Social Security has created. I’d be ashamed to go on national television and use such an obvious scare tactic, but apparently that’s all in a day’s work for a NOW president.

Source:

NOW’s new gal. Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review Online, July 2, 2001.

The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles. The Marriage Movement, 2000.

Marvel Comics Abandons Comic Code Authority

Under pressure from Congressional investigations, in 1954 comic book publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America. With New York City magistrate Charles F. Murphy at its head, in October 1954 the organization publish one of the most restrictive codes of conduct every promulgated by an American media industry. The code was revised in the 1970s, but remained incredibly paternalistic. In May, marvel Comics became the latest to abandon the code in announcing that it would develop its own code of content and label its comics accordingly.

If anything, it is amazing that the code lasted as long as it did, but its abandonment has generally come down to economics. Given the huge changes in what was acceptable in film, music and fiction during the 1960s and 1970s, the code looked like an antique by the mid-1970s (when it was revised to allow for comic books to portray police and other authority figures as sometimes corrupt!)

Marvel’s Joe Quesada’s comments hit pay dirt,

In retrospect, thinking about the Code and the CMAA, I just think the CMAA did a very poor job with respect to letting people in the general public know that there were comics other than the one for kids, thus, I think in a lot of ways perpetuating the CMAA, and Marvel was a very big part of it.

As an aside, it is fascinating to look at the rhetoric which led to the clampdown on some of the best comic books ever published — especially the EC Horror comics — and notice that the rhetoric has survived almost unchanged, except directed at today’s popular youth obsession, video games and film. When Sen. Joe Lieberman gives a speech calling for an FTC investigation of the film and video games industries, his comments could have lifted almost verbatim from Frederic Wertham’s classic anti-comic book rant, Seduction of the Innocent (and it is worth remember that, like Lieberman, Wertham was not a member of some far right conservative movement, but instead was a progressive best known for his work with poor and minority communities in New York).

Source:

Marvel drops the code. Comicon.Com, May 16, 2001.

Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Bradford W. Wright, Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001.

On Motherhood and Successful Political Movements

Last week two of the most prominent anti-gun groups, the Million Mom March and the Brady Campaign/Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence announced they would merge effective October 1. The groups tried to spin the event as two large groups coming together, but the reality is that the MMM was forced to close its national office recently due to lack of funds and the organization has never come close to the grass roots level of participation it thought it would inspire.

But leaving the gun issue aside, what surprised me in news coverage of the merger was an odd comment made by MMM founder Donna Dees-Thomases who said at a press conference announcing the merger, “If we moms can push 9 pound babies through our bodies, some of them with heads as big as bowling balls,surely we can push legislation through the halls of Congress.”

I fail to see the connection between the two examples. I’ve never seen a group of men with NRA hold a press conference and say, “If we can ejaculate hundreds of million of sperm at a time, surely we can push legislation through Congress.”

It is very odd to see liberal, presumably feminist-oriented women, falling back on a standard motherhood and apple pie routine to push a political agenda.

Source:

Two leading gun control groups merge in U.S. Reuters, June 28, 2001.

Cities Who Refuse to Hire Smokers

This is very odd, but the Tampa Tribune reports that a number of cities are now refusing to hire anyone who smokes. The reasoning apparently is that smokers will cause increased costs as far as insurance premiums, health costs, etc.

At least in Florida this is legal for the moment. In 1996 the Florida Supreme Court ruled that North Miami had a right to ban the hiring of smokers.

What I don’t understand is how it could possibly be consistent for it to be legal not to hire smokers because they might impose increased health risks while at the same time making it illegal to refuse to hire people who have genetic defects which make them more prone to cancer or other life threatening — and expensive — ailments.

The obvious difference might be that one is genetic while one is a behavior which can be controlled by an individual. But if the only relevant criteria is whether or not a discriminatory practice saves money in health care expenses and lost time due to illness, then the distinction between genetic traits and bad habits doesn’t see particularly relevant.

I wonder how far cities will try to take this. Will fat people be the next to get the boot (since obese people clearly present the same problems as smokers)? Why not go even further and start excluding people who engage in dangerous or extreme sports or activities?