Another month, another tedious kerfuffle about whether or not superhero stories are inherently bad/childish/stupid. I gotta tell you, for all that superhero-bashers decry the genre’s tendency to lapse into rote, repetitive predictability–well, I guess you can see where I’m going with this.

The lastest debate centers around Christopher Butcher, who (as I discussed the other day) is really pissed off that writers like Brian Bendis have eschewed ostensibly more personal work to play in the big spandex sandbox. As backup, he links to a Millarworld messboard post approvingly cited by Graeme McMillan. The post argues that superheroes are inherently non-adult, that any attempts to create some sort of “adult take on superheroes” are doomed to failure, that the books heralded as the “adult takes on superheroes” (The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen) are in fact about “about the impossibility of treating these iconic characters as “adult” and having them continue to behave in the way we have come to expect,” etc. The poster seems to find the the Big Two’s big guns the most offensive in this regard:

the mainstream characters – the archetypes and the bit-part players that surround them – simply cannot be written as adult characters with out appearing utterly ridiculous to all concerned.

In this way his prejudices dovetail neatly with Chris Butcher’s, who’s drawn that same distinction between corporate superheroes and creator-owned ones.

Can anyone tell me why? Seriously, I want to know. Of course the odds are against you if you want to do some serious life-changing work in a flagship title–it takes someone with the talent and clout of Frank Miller or Brian Bendis or Grant Morrison to convince the suits that allowing them to really fuck around with some of the company’s toys might make the remaining toys work better. But it can be done, and it is done, all the time. Again, what is this mystery difference in quality between Powers and Bendis’s Marvel work, or The Filth and New X-Men, that folks like Chris & Tim O’Neil treat like an article of faith? Creator-owned superpeople are better because they’re creator owned. QED. If there’s more to it than that, I’d love to have it explained to me.

Steven Berg is all over this particular beat, offering a hilarious takedown of Chris’s assertions. How, he asks, is what Bendis is doing with Daredevil or Morrison doing with Cyclops any different than what Moore is doing with Mina freaking Harker? Taking it a bit further, how is it different from Street Angel or Powers or Hellboy or The Filth or any of the other creator-owned superhero concepts that Chris, Tim and others fawn all over? The answer: It isn’t, and moreover I would submit that only people immersed in fanboy culture, who subsequently want to differentiate themselves from fanboy culture, would suggest that there’s any difference at all. I think we’ll all admit that people working in the corporate-trademark field have an uphill battle ahead of them, in terms of dealing with a bureaucracy that wants to preserve the illusion of change without dealing with the actual ramifications of change, that people working on their own characters don’t face–but good work is good work, plain and simple. Your individual mileage may vary, but it seems safe to say that people like Brian Bendis have successfully waged that battle. Why in God’s name would the fact that someone else owns the trademark make the story any less good?

What makes this particular iteration of the superhero debate so weird is the inconsistency of the opposing position. In one breath (in many, actually), Chris will go out of his way to lambaste corporate superheroes and superheroes generally; in the next he’ll go apeshit for a superhero comic, and even a corporate superhero comic, Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier! The flip-flopping is egregious, and in my opinion can only be explained by the desire to gratuitously differentiate oneself from fanboys, and, perhaps, a fairly straightforward hard-on for Marvel.

(And what is it about The New Frontier that drives otherwise sensible reviewers into flights of rhetorical ecstasy? Listen, the art is obviously gorgeous, and two issues in may be too early to draw a conclusion, but so far this just seems like unreconstructed Marvels-style icon worship at its most cloyingly nostalgic, with the added “bonus” of incorporating the impenetrable continuity wonking of (the otherwise superior Alex Ross book of note) Kingdom Come. Honestly, folks, I am a huge freaking geek, and I don’t know who half these goddamn characters are. The fact that the book is drawn by the inheritor of the Bruce Timm mantle can really only get you so far.)

David Fiore, as you might expect, has more reasons why this latest anti-superhero argument is missing the formally inventive, narratively compelling, philosophically fascinating superhero forest for the “people don’t wear funny costumes” trees. Read his piece, read Steven’s, mentally tag on a “‘Nuff said,” and I think this round is over.

Larry Young is the co-founder and head honcho of AiT/PlanetLar, the independent comics publisher that is currently celebrating its five-year anniversary. Known for publishing the comics of such creators as Brian Wood & Tom Beland, as well as the prose writings of Warren Ellis, Young has parlayed a strong Internet presence and innate marketing savvy into a growing spot in the public eye for his company. He got behind the trade paperback/graphic novel format early, putting his creators in a prime position to take advantage of the rise in sales of those formats both within the direct market and in the larger bookstore world.

Never one to shy away from making his opinion known, Young has made statements in Brian Wood’s Delphi Forum and on his own blog that have made him something of a bete noire among comics bloggers of late. So I was both surprised and pleased when, in response to my post on this topic, Larry offered to answer any ten questions I cared to ask him, for publication on this very blog. I happily took up this generous offer, and as you’ll see, the results were both informative and candid. You’ll also see that I probably cheated a little bit on the whole “ten questions” thing.

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Larry Young

Sean T. Collins: So, how did you “develop such a hard-on for bloggers?” Were there specific comics bloggers who said something you found upsetting or misleading? If so, who were they? Or do you think that, your own blog aside, the publishing mechanism itself is inherently problematic?

Larry Young: Well, I just don’t see myself as “having a hard-on” for bloggers, in the first place. I just think the comics blogs I have seen are pretty self-indulgent affairs, is all. Someone will send me a link with a note pointing out something they think I’ll be interested in, and I have to wade through laments about the cancellation of Angel and political screeds about terrorism and lamb stew recipes and whatnot to find a two-line mention of Demo #3.

I mean, I get enough of that sort of thing from my pals in the real world; I don’t need to read about it online, too. 🙂

Your blog is mostly an AiT/PL news and update source. Could you ever see yourself offering comics commentary and criticism as well?

No, because that’s not what it’s for. It’s just a way for me to update the home page with company-related news without having to learn html. I’m not sure I could get away with it, now, anyway. When I did my 52 issue fanzine, Planet Lar, I did four or five short reviews a week for a year. People liked ’em, for the most part, because I was a guy riding mass transit on his way to work and writing about the comics he’d just read. If I reviewed something now, people wouldn’t look at it like a guy just telling you his likes and dislikes; they’d think The King Of Independent Comics was being “combative” and taking a dump on their hard work.

Conventional wisdom has it that your online persona is combative; some have said unnecessarily or even detrimentally so.

People see what they want to see.

Is this persona deliberate on your part, or do you think this assessment of your Internet presence is inaccurate? If you have adopted this persona consciously, how does it differ from the way you are in real life?

Here’s the thing about that; I don’t have a “persona,” I have a certain amount of skill in writing. Those reading my writing have a certain level of skill in comprehension. It’s possible there might not be a lot of overlap, there. While I may feel I’m writing clearly and without room for interpretation, a reader might not understand whatever point I’m making, or, even, may not agree with it. If I respond, I’m just being “combative”? Not from my point of view.

Neal Stephenson has a great line about this in Cryptonomicon: “Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be — or to be indistinguishable from — self-righteous sixteen year olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”

I haven’t been following the debate as closely as some, but perhaps this is a good time to set the record straight on Wood & Cloonan’s Demo. Are there now or have there ever been plans to release this series as a collected-edition trade paperback upon its conclusion?

Man, this is like a Perry Mason question. No, counsellor, there are not now or have ever been plans to release this series as a collected-edition trade paperback upon its conclusion.

You’ve said in the past that the book will not be collected–how unequivocal is that?

I don’t believe I’ve said we WILL NOT collect it; I may have been exasperated with a loon or two and written that we may as well come out and say that. But that’s a business reality, and business realities change all the time, and successful companies adapt to those changes.

AiT/PL is a company known for its belief in and success with the trade paperback/graphic novel format; why was this particular title selected to be given the “hard sell” on behalf of its individual, pamphlet-sized installments?

I don’t think it’s been given a “hard sell.” People have written they’re waiting for the trade, I tell them if they don’t buy it now, there might not be a trade. That’s just an economic reality imposed on us by the nature of how this project is set up. The poster-stock covers, the cover-weight interiors, the self-contained stories; everything about Demo screams “$2.95 mini graphic novel.” If some observers of the scene think we’re violating what they think our company is known for, good! That’s how businesses grow, but stepping outside of expectations.

How has this mini-brouhaha affected sales, and for that matter critical & audience reception of the work itself?

There’s no effect that I can see. The work is the work. Critical and audience reception of a project doesn’t (or shouldn’t, at least) be impacted by what a few vocal cats without all the info say on a message board.

AiT/PL has now hit the five-year mark, and the company has an increasingly high profile. To what do you attribute your success thus far? How do you plan to maintain or increase your appeal to comics buyers?

Slow and steady wins the race. We keep putting out the good comics, and people will keep buying ’em.

What book/s are you most proud of having published? On the flip side, what book/s do you see as having been a misfire, or something that you and/or the creators could have handled better?

This is like asking a parent which offspring they love more. I love all our books, for different reasons.

From fans to retailers to creators to publishers to critics, ours is an industry that seems intently focus on spreading the word about comics to the outside world. What brand of “comics activism,” for want of a better term, have you found most successful? How do you think the industry in general, or your own company in particular, can improve upon its existing outreach efforts?

Nothing beats hand-selling. In a well-stocked shop, I could sell anyone a book that they would enjoy, just by talking to them for a couple minutes. If somebody told me one of their favorite movies, the last place they went on vacation and what they had for breakfast, I could put a comic in their hand that they liked, just because I’m enthusiastic about the form and I can extrapolate all sorts of stuff about folks from those three questions and their body language. It’s kind of a monkey trick I learned from my orthodontist when I was a kid, actually.

How do you see AiT/PL functioning in relation to the other indie comics companies–what role does it play, what niche does it fill, what reader needs does it service? Are you satisfied with where you stand in the industry?

I’ll tell you what I tell everyone who asks me this question: we’re publishers, just like Marvel and DC and whoever. The $12.95 it takes to buy The Invisibles: Bloody Hell in America from your local comics retailer is the same $12.95 it’ll cost to buy yourself a copy of Last of the Independents.

What one thing does comics need more of? And what one thing does comics need less of?

The one thing comics needs more of: TREES. The one thing comics needs less of: average comics.

Finally, if there are any current or upcoming projects you’d like to plug, please plug away!

Well, I’m personally excited about the upcoming Planet of the Capes, just because it’s been a long gestation period for the project. I’m looking forward to Ursula, our first translated-from-the-Brazillian-Portugese graphic novel, and of course Hench and Bad Mojo. I can’t wait for WonderCon in San Francisco, too. Nothing better than going to a major comic book convention and being able to sleep in your own bed at night, too.

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For more on Larry and his company on their fifth anniversary, check out Newsarama‘s big piece on the subject. Thank you once again to Larry Young for suggesting the interview, and congratulations to him on five years of AiT/PlanetLar!

I’ve gone on and on about what I think of Spain’s response to the 200-odd murders that occurred on its trains the other day. So why don’t I point you to what I feel is a more appropriate response:

In the face of this kind of subhuman nihilism, people know without having to be told that the only response is a quiet, steady hatred and contempt, and a cold determination to outlast the perpetrators while remorselessly tracking them down.

That’s Hitchens, though as you can tell by parsing his syntax he’s talking about how Spain, and the world, have reacted to ETA and their ilk. He’d like to extend this sensibility to Islamist terrorism.

Of course, other people feel quite strongly that though their methods are abhorrent, their goals are basically sensible, and it’s best for us just to do what they want, since if do that they’ll just give up and leave us alone.

Take your pick, ladies and gentlemen.

Scenes from the theoretical victims of what Franklin Harris insists on referring to as “Bush’s failed war” and what Spanish Prime Minister-elect Zapatero refers to as “a disaster” (courtesy of ABC News):

A year after the bombs began to fall, Iraqis express ambivalence about the U.S.-led invasion of their country, but not about its effect: Most say their lives are going well and have improved since before the war, and expectations for the future are very high.

Worries exist

Question: How will you be able to find Sean T. Collins at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con?

Answer: He’ll be the gentleman with a lovely lady wearing this on his arm.

First off, you may have missed it amid all the poliblogging, but I did a Comix and Match yesterday, too–you can find it here. The juicy part is a defense of Brian Bendis’s franchise-character work against criticism I find arbitrary at best. Take a look.

Franklin Harris reports that manga publisher Gutsoon is placing all its titles on hiatus, while they try to figure out how to get a wider audience to purchase them. Well, that certainly seems to be a better strategy than, say, simultaneously launching six or eight series featuring second- and third-string characters and hoping that maybe like one or two of them are ordered in sufficient numbers to avoid being cancelled inside a year. But is this a sign that the manga skeptics were right, at least insofar as their claims that the sheer volume of titles coming out from Tokyopop and Viz were going to keep other manga books from finding a viable foothold? In other words, will those two companies be to the bookstores/Japanese comics what Marvel & DC are to the Direct Market/American comics? Stay tuned…

…or look to Newsarama, where there’s an article on this very topic (link courtesy of Kevin Melrose). Reporter Matt Brady predicts “a manga bloodbath” in the coming year, wherein

lower sellers will drop out of stores entirely, as they won

Yesterday we discussed the notion, insisted upon by various and sundry antiwar pundits, that the Spanish election didn’t really have anything to do with a cowed electorate repudiating the fight against terrorism and turning toward appeasement. But dammit, if it keeps turning out that the Spaniards themselves failed to get that memo, as this Washington Post article suggests, we may have to revise that particular theory.

UPDATE: Oh, dear–did anyone get the memo? The bien pensants at the Guardian sure didn’t. I mean, take a look at this editorial–saying that hunting down the Madrid terrorists probably wouldn’t solve anything, repeating already-debunked claims of the fake-turkey variety about Bush’s ad campaign, declaring that we must move past the simplistic notion that terrorists are bad guys, calling a national allegiance to its own constitution a partisan political ploy, calling for a dialogue in which the democracies of the West and the thugocracies of Islam are equal partners, and throwing in some truly gratuitous and breathtaking Jew-baiting moral equivalency to boot. (Link courtesy of Steven Den Beste.) People, people–you’re off message!

No, you know what? The glib act can only get me so far. Disgusting fifth-column appeasement of the type the Guardian and its fellow travelers are now embracing–encouraged, wouldn’t you know it, by those Spanish election results that are supposed not to mean what we hawks think they mean–needs to be called out directly. Appeasers, Jew-baiters, America-bashers, liars, fascism apologists, moral equivocators, quislings, I’m calling you out. I will not stand for Paz In Our Time.

* That Britney Spears song “Toxic” that everybody likes really isn’t very good. I feel vindicated. (Folks, if you want to hear good James Bond-style music that isn’t actually from a James Bond movie, buy Portishead’s records.)

* I also feel vindicated that the Strokes have released “Reptilia” as a single, seeing as how it’s easily the best song from Room on Fire. And the video’s actually quite good and interesting-looking.

* So is the video for Blink 182’s “I Miss You,” believe it or not. And the song is good, too! You half expect the bass player to appear with a shaven head and a long-sleeved black t-shirt reading “ZERO” on. And if they keep making this kind of music, the guy with the lousy voice could actually make his lousy voice work in the context of what they’re doing, which is impressive. Even the de rigeur lesbians are creepy hairy French 1930s surrealist lesbians rather than porn stars with enema bottles or whatever. Well done, Blink 182–a worthy follow-up to that side-project song from a year or so back, which was also good.

* However, the fact that every single other band has a lead singer who sounds just like the lousy singer from Blink 182 is not good at all.

* What the hell is this Maroon 7 situation?

* Jim Shearer?

* Oh, hooray, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have the video for “Maps” in heavy rotation. Best song of last year, I think. And the video’s pretty good too, if a little staid. It reminds me a little of the Doves’ video for “Caught by the River,” a song that should have been an enormous fucking hit in the States but wasn’t, possibly because they looked bored while performing it. It’s tough for Karen O to look bored, though, so there’s hope.

* That blue-eyed soul remake of “Fell in Love with a Girl [Boy]” is way too easy.

* It’s nice to see that after a year away, hip-hop videos still look and sound exactly the same. Good on you, hip hop!

Oh, cable. The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, History Channel specials about barbarians, non-stop Law & Order reruns, and VH1 Classic. Delightful.

Necessary caveat: Regardless of the actions of the Spanish electorate, regardless of the political ramifications thereof, 200 people are dead, 1500 are wounded, and countless others are greiving. It’s still an unspeakably awful tragedy, and the heart still strains with the senslessness and pain of it. Mine does, that’s for sure.

You’re starting to miss me talking about Blankets, aren’t you?

Here are some more thoughts on Spain (for earlier installments, go here, here, here, here, here, and here):

1) The first and most obvious conclusion to draw is that al Qaeda will now begin its very own “Rock the Vote” campaign in earnest. Jim Henley points out that the motives of the Spanish electorate probably were more nuanced than “we supported the U.S., al Qaeda attacked us, we should now stop supporting the U.S.,” (Aznar’s simple reluctance to ascribe the bombings to anyone but the Basques despite mounting evidence agains this theory seemed to have angered a lot of voters, and rightly so) but when talking about the thought process behind al Qaeda, “nuanced” is the last word I’d use. These motherfuckers want to conquer the world, like HYDRA or A.I.M. for Chrissakes. They’re going to draw a lesson from this, no doubt about that, and the lesson is “murdering hundreds of people in countries with governments who oppose us will lead to the toppling of those governments.” If I were English or Italian, I’d be very worried right now. And if I were American, I’d–oh, hey, look at that! This ought to be a fun campaign season.

2) Aside from the thinking of al Qaeda, the thinking of many–not all, I’m sure, but many–Spaniards was very similar:

It reads, “Could this picture have cost 200 deaths?” And then there’s this:

This one says, “The bombs dropped in Iraq explode in Madrid.” It’s clear that a large number of Spanish voters viewed the Madrid terror murders as a direct consequence of Spanish involvement in Iraq–and what’s more, they thought that the terrorists were, all things considered, in the right! Granted, their methods were a little blunt, but the message was received, and agreed with.

Granted, these kinds of protestor images are the type the news media would invent if they didn’t already exist, but it does seem that thousands of like-minded protesters took to the streets on election eve saying just this sort of thing. Then they woke up on Sunday and said it again, in the ballot box.

3) It is also, by the way, the exact same thing being said by the winner of the election, Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. In his first post-election interview, an interview which quite frankly is beyond my worst nightmare vision of what this guy was going to do and say, the newly elected Prime Minister says:

“The war has been a disaster, the occupation continues to be a disaster. It has only caused violence,” Zapatero said in his first interview after a surprise triumph on Sunday.

“There must be consequences. There has been one already — the election result. The second will be that the Spanish troops will come back,” he said.

“Mr Blair and Mr Bush must do some reflection and self-criticism. You can’t bomb a people, you can’t organise a war with lies,” he added in a lengthy chat with Spain’s Cadena SER radio.

Zapatero goes on to say “I want Europe to see us again as pro-European, my feeling is that the election result has caused surprise but a lot of satisfaction in Europe.” “Europe,” of course, means nothing more or less than “France and Germany”–countries like the U.K. and Poland are just as firmly entrenched on the European left-elite’s pay-no-mind list as they are on John Kerry’s (whose every statement to the effect that we have no real allies anymore is a kick in the nuts of every British and Polish soldier in the field, to say nothing of those countries’ leaders). Basically you have the brand-new leader of a major European nation capitulating to about a dozen bombers, threatening to bring his troops home from a country that needs a destabilizing pull-out like it needs a SARS outbreak, saying that the election result and the horrendous violence are both direct consequences of the “disastrous” invasion and occupation, repeating the “BUSH LIED/BLAIR LIED” tinfoil-hat party line, and making it quite clear to the American people that he doesn’t really care about them at all. Just wanted to make that clear, since it’s perfectly clear to Zapatero, and the people who elected him, and the murderers who engineered that election result. (Link courtesy of The Command Post.)

4) And lest you think that it’s only Gulf War II that the Spanish thought it was a terrible idea to support (it’s always a good idea to try to leave this conflict aside, seeing as how it’s a totally unrelated neocon Zionist oil-baron imperialist project with no relation whatsoever to the War on Terror, etc.):

This is a book of remembrance left at one of the train stations where an attack took place, and the message reads “Aznar: the answer of Afghanistan and Iraq is here.” Emphasis mine. Now unless you’re maintaining regular (out to) lunch dates with Ted Rall, it seems safe to assume that the Afghan War was a direct response to the 9/11 attacks, its goal being to depose the regime that supported the attackers and capture or kill their associates and commanders. This, generally speaking, is believed even by people who think the Iraq War was an unrelated, preordained war of expansionism. And even this directly related and universally understandable use of force against Islamic fascists is unacceptable to a great many people in Spain. In a conflict between the United States and the Taliban, they’d prefer their country to not take sides. That is deeply, deeply disturbing.

5) To take that point a step further, let’s not forget that Spain was a staging ground for 9/11, and that one of the men arrested in connection with the Madrid attacks was himself a disciple of a man convicted for aiding and abetting the 9/11 hijackers. Islamic terror was a major Spanish problem long before Madrid. And Spain’s voters have now told those terrorists “Hey, man, go about your business–we’d just as soon leave you alone.” Again, take a look at a scene from the anti-government protests:

That’s supposed to be a Guantanamo Bay detainee. Just a couple of days after the Gitmo detainees’ fellow travelers slaughtered 200 commuters, the biggest outrage this fellow could think of was the incarceration of Taliban and al Qaeda in sunny Cuba. I say again that Spain sent a message not just to the terrorists yesterday, but to us as well, and the message to us was “fuck you–you deserved it.”

(All these images come courtesy of LGF.)

6) Even ignoring all the immediate geopolitical ramifications of the Spanish election results, it’s stupid for an entirely different reason: al Qaeda wants to reconquer Spain for the ummah. Tacitus has a link-rich post on this topic, which demonstrates a variety of things, including just how seriously al Qaeda takes the loss of the once-Muslim kingdom of Andalusia (Spain, of course), and just how fucking batshit insane al Qaeda’s philosophy really is (as if you needed more evidence of that). The problem, of course, is that Spain’s voters apparently recognize none of this.

I always think it’s important to rank al Qaeda’s one-world ambitions fairly low as a predictor for their actions. The organization is taking the long view, and I think that even in their most optimistic appraisals of their situation they know that a planet united under the Crescent is scores of years away. Right now their motive is primarily just to murder as many thousands of infidels as they can in an effort to punish those enemy regimes with a direct hand in the current Muslim world. But many people apparently feel that if those regimes (the U.S., India, Russia, Israel, Australia, the U.K., etc.) were to suddenly extricate themselves from the area, terrorist attacks against them would forever cease. Even a cursory glance at the theology behind Islamic fascist groups like al Qaeda (and for that matter Hamas, Hezbollah, al Aqsa et al) reveals that these groups will not stop until their grotesque brand of Islam rules the entire globe.

In essence, Spain is trying to pass the buck, hoping that a short-term refusal to engage the problems posed by Islamic facsist killers (who, I’d just like to point out, apparently feel a great deal of affinity with the deposed Baathist regime in Iraq, on whose behalf they just murdered 200 Spaniards) will result in a long-term reprieve from those killers. And this, of course, is bullshit.

The situation is different from that of Europe in the 1930s in its specifics–the countries who appeased fascism back then had only five or ten years to wait before the no-longer-satiated killers came gunning for them; these days those countries may perhaps have a good deal longer–but not in its fundamentals. Spain is trying to appease totalitarian murderers, who by their nature cannot and will not remain appeased forever. They’re still holding grudges from the Middle Ages, for crying out loud. Those grudges will not die because some quisling Socialist prime minister stops aiding the reconstruction of Iraq.

7) Is there any reason to hope? Yes, some. Glenn Reynolds links to a pair of articles that suggest that, due to internal outrage and external pressure (primarily from Ireland, a nation with a long legacy of sorrow thanks to terrorist scum on both sides), Zapatero may well take a hard line against terrorism.

Paradoxically, I think that the Left, who until this point in the WoT have primarily served as fascism’s respectable apologists and enablers, may actually have freer reign to attack terrorism than the Right does. Speaking mainly on unrelated points, Jim Henley recently pointed out that ostensibly left-liberal politicians and officials can get away with murder from their constituencies when they’re actually in power. Take a look at Saint William of Hope, Arkansas, who in actuality was an enthusiastic drug warrior who eroded civil liberties and packed the prisons in the name of the War on Drugs, who relegated gays to second-class citizen status in matters of both marriage and the military, who used government muscle to assault free speech with things like the V-Chip, and whose own actions against terrorism relegate the Patriot Act and its ilk to mere icing-on-the-cake status. Of course, nowadays the American Left looks on the Clinton Years as the kind of Golden Age with the kind of grotesquely distorted nostalgia that would earn a knowing nod and a sad but wise smile from an al Qaeda fanatic pining for the days of al-Andalus.

Of course, waging a hardcore War on Terror from the Left would, unlike most of the aforementioned, be a good thing. I myself already view the WoT from a liberal standpoint, and see it as the liberal cause of our time. Left-liberal politicians could take advantage of their die-hard constituents’ unshakeable belief that such politicians Know Best and really put the hurt on al Qaeda and their cohorts. I’m no longer one of those die-hards, but I remember the mindset well enough. If Bush cites “human rights” as a reason to invade a country, they say “Halliburton.” If Zapatero were to cite “human rights” as a reason to invade a country, they’d say “of course–and how can you possibly oppose this, you fascist?” (There are some Leftists, of the International A.N.S.W.E.R. variety, who will oppose all military action by Western governments, forever and ever amen, and who in fact did so when left-liberal leaders went after the exterminationist regime of Slobodan Milosevic. But having a more mainstream left-liberal government in power will set up an opposite pole on that end of the political spectrum, and such pro-dictator “Leftists” will once again assume their well-deserved position of ignominious obscurity.)

The fact that left-liberal pols can generally count the members of the news media among their supporters will help, too. Take a trip down memory lane and recall the news coverage of Bill Clinton’s military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan versus their coverage of Dubya’s for example. The primary difference between the two, of course, was that Dubya’s were actually successful, and yet Clinton comes off looking like George Marshall while Bush is painted like Robert McNamara. Go figure.

The thing is, though, that thus far Zapatero has shown no sign that his lip-service to getting tough on terrorism is anything but lip-service: His first major policy statement is that he’ll pull his troops out of Iraq. (He leaves himself some wiggle room, invoking the mystical powers of the UN to wave its magic wand and grant those troops legitimacy that somehow they’d otherwise lack were it not for the approval of wise and good-hearted UN member states like Syria and Zimbabwe.) Now, you may believe, bless your na

The estimable Jim Henley labors mightily to tease an interpretation out of the Spanish attack/election that doesn’t involve the word “appeasement,” and comes up with the following:

1) The from-behind Socialist victory was about Prime Minister Aznar playing politics with the bombing investigation, and not about the Iraq War;

2) Except when the from-behind Socialist victory was about the Iraq War, but it was Aznar’s own fault for backing a course of action overwhelmingly rejected by his constituents.

So if you go by Jim’s second theory, we’ve all learned a valuable lesson, which is that if you’re a politician, and you’re mulling over a course of action that is right but is also unpopular, it really is best to listen to the polls. (Or to the terrorists, who, as Jim’s fellow antiwar libertarian semi-comics blogger Franklin Harris points out in the comment thread to this post, were really just giving the Spaniards an impolite but nevertheless necessary reminder as to the appropriate electoral outcome. (Yikes.)) Well, Jim, we certainly wouldn’t want politicians to evaluate their potentially unpopular policies on a case-by-case basis, or indeed to do anything but slavishly obey the whims of their constituents, would we?

But if you go by Jim’s first theory (let’s try ’em all on for size and see what fits, how’s that sound?), i.e. that this wasn’t a repudiation of the Iraq war in deference to the will of Islamist terror but an expression of dissatisfaction with the way the government was handling the investigation–well, let’s just say that some folks appear not to have gotten that particular memo:

Spain’s prime minister-elect, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, vowed to withdraw troops from Iraq and criticised US President George W. Bush after Spanish voters ousted the government that dragged their country into the controversial war.

“The war in Iraq was a disaster, the occupation of Iraq is a disaster,” Zapatero, 43, told Cadena Ser radio Monday….

…An ongoing investigation into the attacks has found growing evidence they were carried out by Islamic extremists linked to Al-Qaeda as punishment for Spain’s help in the invasion and occupation of Iraq….

…Spain’s Socialists won 43 percent of the ballots to 38 percent for the PP, largely because of the near-total public opposition to the war, Zapatero said.

Turnout was a high 77 percent, reflecting the strong emotions in the aftermath of the attacks.

Many voters had expressed anger at Aznar, who had previously announced he was retiring after the elections. He was jostled and booed at Sunday while some protesters shouted “Aznar: your war, our dead.”

Zapatero, making good on an pre-election pledge, said that barring new developments in Iraq before June 30 — the date the United States has promised to hand power over to an Iraqi provisional government — Spain’s 1,300 troops in Iraq “will return home”….

…Zapatero firmly aligned himself with France and Germany, which opposed the war from the start, in calling the invasion an “error”….

…Bush and Blair, both of whom are facing elections in coming months, need to engage in “self-criticism,” Zapatero said.

“You can’t bomb a people” over a perceived threat, Zapatero said in comments coming five days before the first anniversary of the March 20 start of the war.

“You can’t organise a war on the basis of lies,” he said, alluding to Bush’s and Blair’s insistence the war was justified by their belief — so far unfounded — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat.

“Wars such as that which has occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence and terror to proliferate,” he said.

The head of the EU executive arm, European Commission chief Romano Prodi, agreed, in an interview published by Italy’s La Stampa newspaper Monday.

“It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists,” Prodi said. “Terrorism is infinitely more powerful than a year ago,” and all of Europe now feels threatened, he told the paper.

(Emphases mine; link courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.)

Hmm. The victorious Socialist candidate, the chief of the European Commission, and the average Spanish voter (at least according to this report) all seem to have done what we hawkish warblogging types have been ever-so-gently chided for, and jumped to the conclusion that this election shows is Europe’s way of showing that terrorists should not be fought, that Europe is unserious about rebuilding Iraq and preventing terrorist infiltration thereof, and that in a choice between Bush-advocated policies and al Qaeda-advocated policies, Europe is more comfortable with the latter. Don’t they know they’re supposed to wait until they hear from experts like Atrios’s wife?

Update: As it turns out, Prodi probably said that terrorism could not be dealt with by force alone, which is a little bit better. Still, why do I get the sense that the additional methods he has in mind don’t rolling up financial networks and monitoring communications and infiltrating madrassas, etc., so much as they involve Asking Ourselves Why They Hate Us and tiptoeing around so as not to wake them up (and, in all likelihood, really sticking it to the goddamn Jews)?

Postcript: Jim also joshes me for expecting too much too soon from PM-elect Zapatero in terms of getting tough on terror. Four days after the worst terror attacks in the country’s history, and here I am expecting the country’s new leader to do something about it! Easy there, tiger!

No, no, I kid. Jim’s point stems from the fact that my language was unclear: It made it sound like I wanted to see less talk and more action from Zapatero, when no one but the Flash would have had time or ability to do anything but talk at the point when I made my initial comments. What I was trying to say was that Zapatero’s acceptance-speech comments vowing to fight terror were offset, in my view, by his next-day interviews calling the Iraq War a disaster and an error, saying that Bush and Blair lied and were waging war on an entire people, and reiterating his intention to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq ASAP. (This was before I’d seen his earlier comments to the effect that he wanted John Kerry to win in the U.S. so that he and the distinguished gentleman from Massacusetts could form an “alliance…for peace, against war, [and] no more deaths for oil.” So it’s not really fair to draw any conclusions from those statements, is it.)

‘Course, I’m just one of those starry-eyed hawks who thinks that Iraq and the War on Terror are in some way related, which is a notion that has nothing to do with what’s been happening in Spain over the past week, no sirree Bob.

Post-postscript: Jim also brings the sobering news that Bob Zangas, a blogger who travelled to Iraq to help the reconstruction as both a Marine and a civilian, has been killed by rogue Iraqi cops. Normally this is the point where the chickenhawk argument would be expected against my wrongheaded bellicose warmongering, so go ahead and make it, if you’re so inclined. I’ll simply say now, as I’ve said before, that I advocate the policies I’ve been advocating out of the fervent belief that, when all is said and done, they will lead to fewer murdered Bob Zangases, not more. Until then, if you believe nothing else I say, believe me when I tell you that I feel the pain of each of these deaths. One is a tragedy. Two hundred is a tragedy. Three thousand is a tragedy. My hope is that these compounded tragedies will somehow make us act in such a way as to avoid the eventual seven-digit statistic.

Post-post-postcript: A round-up of all my Spain posts is here.

Martha Stewart quits company board

Iraq opponents march to White House (Sixty whole people! Wow! Stop the press!)

The Syrian military, some 10,000 strong, surrounds several northern cities in possible preparation for a Hama-style massacre

Question: Which of the following stories can not be found on CNN.com’s front page today?

(Syria and protest links courtesy of Glenn Reynolds.)

Have you taken a look at these paintings yet? And get a load of the shirt she won on eBay today. Let’s just say that The Missus is going to be the belle of the San Diego Comic-Con! “Spider-sense tingling” indeed!

I tend to find Jeff Jarvis’s posts on the Howard Stern/ClearChannel situation more than a bit hyperbolic. Of course I’m outraged at the way the federal government (Democrats and Republicans, by the way) are using thinly veiled anti-First Amendment blackmail to influence the broadcasters, and at how ClearChannel used Howard as a sacrificial lamb to placate the FCC and Congress (and, perhaps, the White House). But Stern is an unfunny idiot, and had no problem at all infringing on free speech when rival jocks (and fellow Infinity Broadcasting employees) Opie & Anthony were the ones doing the speaking. (Stern used all his clout to get Infinity to crack down on O&A’s anti-Stern jokes, to the point where the company forbade the duo to mention Stern’s name, or even elliptically refer to “a certain morning DJ.”) Stern is an obnoxious hypocrite, and if he’s a poster child for belief in the Bill of Rights, then I am Mickey Mouse.

That said, I couldn’t help but chuckle in disbelief at Jeff’s latest Stern-news installment. Jarvis posted a report from a reader who heard some anti-satellite-radio commercials on his local broadcast stations, ostensibly created in anticipation of Stern’s threatened defection to Sirius satellite radio. What did the broadcasters come up with as one of their big selling points? Yes! We have more censorship!

The second ad is amusing in an odd way because it spend more than half the time having people complain about foul language. Someone complains about hearing swearing in songs when normally it’s bleeped out on regular radio (yeah, people love it when radio edits the song of their favorite bands); another person talks about how he often forgot to change the dial when his kid gets in the car so the kid hears all the swearing (forego satellite radio–for the children!).

Amazing. The broadcasters and their big-government friends are touting their ability to parent you and your children, so you won’t have to. Well, at least they know their culturally conservative audience: “Janet Jackson’s nipple, Howard Stern’s cursing, and committed gay relationships bad! Taking the kids to watch Jesus get flayed alive for two hours good!”

Slow news weekend for funnybook fans!

In his daily link roundup, Tim O’Neil gives gossipmongers Markisan Naso and Rich Johnston the business. I read their columns religiously, but a little criticism never hurt anybody.

Kevin Melrose links to a New York Times report from some sort of Bizarro World where purveyors of prose fiction are attempting to siphon respectability-through-osmosis from comic books! And this Bizarro World is America, where manga publisher Vertical Inc. is looking to capitalize on the success of Japanese comics by importing Japanese novels. Well, now I’ve seen everything.

Chris Butcher & Scott Robins point out something I’d missed: Fantagraphics is releasing Tell Me Something, the new graphic novel from Norwegian master of melancholy (and slapstick, believe it or not) Jason, this week. Hey, alright.

Franklin Harris links to the news that Brian Bendis will be taking the reigns of The Avengers, believe it or not. Bendis has an almost supernatural knack for taking the geekiest, wonkiest, fanboy-est ideas around and actually producing something adult and compelling with them–the Sinister Six, Venom, the umpteenth Daredevil/Bullseye faceoff, Secret Wars, etc.–and he’s really gonna have his work cut out for him with this, the goofiest remaining mainline-Marvel “flagship” book.

Speaking of Bendis, how’s this for a false dichotomy:

Oh, and for those of you who would argue that we don

I wonder if history will look at 9/11 or 3/11 as the more momentous occasion.

I want the War on Terror to be fought and to be won now, because the potential outcome if we do not do this is beyond terrible. I think there are two possibilities if we do not take the war as seriously as we should right now, and fight to win. The first is that eventually a massive terrorist strike will destroy a major Western or American city, and that in retalliation a nuclear exchange will wipe out much of the Muslim world in order to prevent such an attack from ever happening again. While technically a “victory” for the West, needless to say this will be the most horrific event in history. I have no desire to see billions of innocent people die in a completely avoidable man-made armageddon, and I have no desire to see the free world commit mass murder, as whatever freedom we preserve will be irrevocably tainted. The second possibility is that eventually a massive terrorist strike will destroy a major Western or American city, but self-preservation will be trumped by self-abnegation, and we will not respond with overwhelming force. Thus, as the barbarians once destroyed Roman civilization by slowly chipping away, civilization as we know it will slowly be chipped away, as we cower and appease our new fundamentalist masters to avoid incurring their wrath again. The caliphate will rise again, as pluralist democracy will slowly disappear.

That’s how I see this conflict playing out: two nightmare scenarios, avoidable if and only if we take the conflict seriously in the here and now and battle on all possible fronts against fundamentalist Islam, its bankers and armament suppliers, and its murderous, fascist practitioners.

Even more than 9/11, 3/11 was an attempt by the enemy to directly challenge the West. Three days before an election in a major Western democracy, they slaughtered 200 innocents for the crime of getting up in the morning and going to work in a country whose leadership was taking the War on Terror seriously. In their alleged claims of responsibility, al Qaeda has made it quite clear that the bombings are a direct response to Spain’s participation in the antifascist coalition in Iraq.

How will the Spanish people respond? The conventional wisdom instantly promulgated by the world news media–and, not coincidentally, the opposition Socialist party–is that they will angrily vote the government out of office for having the temerity to defy the wishes of the murderous vanguard of Islam. Oddly, this same “conventional wisdom” has it that if, as initially thought, the Basque separatist group ETA was responsible, this would actually work in the government’s favor, since they’d taken a hard line against the group. In other words, taking a hard line against al Qaeda and Islamic fascism would cost the government the election if those groups were behind the blasts, but taking a hard line against the ultraleft Basque separatists would win them the election if that group was responsible. Odd, isn’t it, that this contradictory CW dictates a government loss given the facts as we now know them. Why, it’s almost as if certain parties have an interest in seeing a certain outcome.

The point is, though, that the people of Spain may well be on the verge of sending the following message: “we’re sorry, nice Islamic terrorists, we should never have gotten involved in fighting against you and in toppling tyrants, we’re going to vote the leaders who got us in this mess out of office, we want to pull out, we want peace, peace now, peace unilaterally, please leave us alone, we’re sorry, we know it’s our fault for doing something you don’t want us to have done, you’re not such bad guys, we’re sure you’ll understand, please please don’t hurt us any more, we deserved it but we won’t deserve it anymore, we’re sorry, you win.” They’ll send the terrorists the message that they have the power, through the murder of innocents (although they’ll show they agree with the killers that, though innocent, they probably deserved it in some sense), the forces of fundamentalism have the power to bring down a government.

Where will it end after that? Where will the newly emboldened terrorists lead us? As I said, there are two possibilities. And I’m so, so afraid of both.

Spain sent a message to terrorists today, and the message was “we give up.” The message is “you were right.” The message is “you win.”

Pre-election bombings in other countries (including our own), already likely, are now a virtual certainty. And why shouldn’t they be? Spain’s Socialists and their supporters have taught al Qaeda that murdering 200 commuters for no reason is perfectly viable campaign strategy.

The Spain debacle is easily the biggest setback to the free world since the War on Terror began, and I feel worse about it than I can remember feeling about anything since that awful autumn. It truly is a disaster–not just for the local- and geo-political ramifications, mind you, but (it bears repeating) because this virtually guarantees that many many more people will be killed in countries across the globe whenever an election is in the offing.

ADDTF reader George writes in to lament the lack of attention being paid to these issues here in America. Of course, the reason it’s not being made a bigger deal of in this country is because the people responsible for making things a big deal, the major news media, think that voting the PP out of office was an eminently sensible response to being attacked by terrorists–a dress rehearsal, if you will, for November 2004 here in the good old U.S. of A.

Not good. Not good at all.

Meanwhile, as a commenter points out here, a major Western nation has just been defeated by an army of approximately one dozen people.

Europe is gone.

…and then I’m done for the day. Glenn Reynolds has a long post on the Spanish election and the lessons it teaches, offering a variety of links and points of view. Definitely worth a look.

Okay, now go look at the paintings.

Here are three paintings by my comically talented wife. Consider it art therapy.

Uprising in Iran.

Uprising in Syria.

“Wind is changing!”

–Ghan-buri-Ghan, The Return of the King

(Links courtesy LGF, IP.)

In addition to the raw agony I feel about the 199 murders that took place in Madrid the other day, there’s the agonizing wait to find out how the people of Spain, and of Europe, will react. After the initial grief and shock subsides, will they wave the white flag, offer a mea culpa, wash their hands of the efforts to safeguard civilization against those who are engaged in the process of destroying it, and decide that the best response to being senselessly brutalized by nihilist sectarian murderers is to try to make themselves inoffensive to them, in hopes that this will be enough to persuade the killers to direct their sickness elsewhere? Or will they find renewed determination to condemn such acts and their perpetrators regardless of their so-called justifications, declare that deliberate murder of people whose only crime was going to work one morning is anathema to life as we know it, stand up against the notion that no one is innocent and that everyone is fair game for a murderous god to destroy, and take the fight to these enemies of liberalism and democracy and humankind without embarassment and without hesitation and without mercy? Whither Spain? Whither Europe?

Agonizing though this wait might be, one thing it will not be is long. Spanish elections are tomorrow.

Suddenly these thoughts just overwhelmed me: I just want to say how heartbroken I am for the people of Spain, how sorry I am that these murders took place. I’ve never been there, but for three years I was a railroad commuter, travelling in and out of the big city. The people killed in Madrid were people like me, trying to earn a living, perhaps looking forward to seeing their coworkers, perhaps looking forward to being back home with their families that afternoon. They ate breakfast and drank coffee and kissed their wives or husbands or kids or pets goodbye. They read the paper, listened to their headphones, took a nap, stared out the window, thought about today’s meetings and schedules and projects, thought about the weekend. Now they’re gone forever because a band of vicious killers thought God wanted them dead.

The tragedy of this, on every level, is unspeakably profound. Please spare a thought for these commuters, and their country, and our world.