* Lost season finale tonight! I’m excited.
* Topless Robot’s Teague Bohlen counts down The 10 Most Shafted Characters from Lost. Definitely agreed on #1.
* The Onion AV Club interviews Jorge Garcia, aka Hurley.
* Well, enough happiness–this ought to get you good and depressed: James Turner is thinking about quitting comics following Diamond’s refusal to carry his new series Warlords of IO. (Via Dirk Deppey.)
* Jeet Heer reviews, at length, Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles. There are times where I think he swings for the fences and missess, such as when he argues that Delisle’s and Tintin auteur Hergé’s respective lines embody their era’s respective political zeitgeists, but other passages were quite eye-opening for me in terms of my own take on the book. For example:
Burma, as Delisle encounters it, is not a nakedly Orwellian police state but something perhaps more subdued although still sinister, a suffocating authoritarian regime where the population has resigned itself, uneasily, to the status quo. In trying to distil the unspoken despair he encountered in Burma, Delisle takes a deliberately understated approach, one that is at first glance deceptively casual.
* Cloverfield monster designer Neville Page’s sketch gallery? Yes please! (Via Giant Monsters Attack.)
* Jog reviews Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy Vol. 2: The Slaves of Mickey Eye #2. Putting the opera back in “superhero soap opera”!
* The upcoming He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie Grayskull sounds like it’s going to be awful. Via Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken, who elaborates until being sidetracked by an unfortunate brain aneurysm.
* As always, plenty of horrifying torture news: The new pick to lead the war in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, oversaw the coverup of the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman and three years of torture in Iraq’s Camp Nama. In perhaps related news, the Obama Administration is now seeking to block the court-ordered release of hundreds more photos of torture and abuse of prisoners by US troops, a reversal of his previous position on the matter. (Links via Neel Krishnaswami.)
* The bloodcurdling, “when will I wake up from this endless nightmare?” quote of the day:
One of the reason these interrogation techniques have survived fore 500 years is because they work.
—Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC.
* Have we lost the torture debate to the torturers and torture enthusiasts? On the one hand, leading figures in one of the country’s two major political parties are now comfortable arguing in public that America should adopt the standards of the Spanish Inquisition; leading figures in the other major political party failed to exercise any oversight to prevent this from happening; the President and his administration seem opposed to practicing torture themselves but equally opposed to any consequences befalling their predecessors for doing so and bound and determined to prevent that from happening; and the he-said/he-said nature of media coverage has placed “harsh interrogation techniques” as the normative description of torture and reserved the actual word “torture” for the province of “some critics.” So that’s all in the “lose” column. On the other hand, I like to think that having unpalatable political figures like Dick Cheney out there proudly proclaiming their own brutality will cause people to turn away in revulsion. I don’t know. I have a lengthy track record of abject, shameful, willful ignorance on these matters. I’m going to go make an ELI ROTH WAS RIGHT t-shirt.
I can’t even begin to describe the degree to which I am repulsed by the abject ignorance (at best) of Graham’s comments. I won’t go into detail as to what the worst reading of that quote implies.
I kinda feel like it’s the single most astonishing thing anyone in American politics has said this decade. I almost can’t process it. I feel like it should be a much, much bigger deal than it will no doubt end up being, but as you say, there’s so much wrong there you hardly know where to begin.
I always like to allow room for the unexpected, because it always happen. But unless something really out of left field happens, it does look like the crucial torture debate is over and humanity lost. There won’t be war crimes trials, or even investigations, except perhaps of a carefully confined sort. Throw that together with the heroic defense of the financial sector, and it looks to me like our country’s going to be in catastrophic trouble indefinitely, until that left-field development happens.
Well, we appear to have stopped torturing people. That’s not nothing. Unfortunately this depends on the largesse of Barack Obama personally rather than a collective reassertion of the rule of law, so it’s a castle made of sand. But it isn’t nothing.
Rendition hasn’t stopped, which means torture hasn’t either, since that’s the whole point of rendition. Ad hoc middle eastern torture by low-level military and security officers seems to haven ended, but there’s yet to be real movement towards shutting down all the avenues that allow for it on the higher ends of the intelligence scale. I’m all for progress, but this issue strikes me as one where any hedging is just as abhorrent.