Idiot America Charles Pierce is a frequent guest on NPR‘s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” though I didn’t know this until after I read this book (go figure).
Despite the inflammatory title, Idiot America isn’t a criticism of the country, but rather a condemnation of the way in which idiocy or nescience has become something to be proud of; it’s a sort of extension of Thomas Frank’s question of authenticity. And it troubles Charles Pierce to no end.
The Secret Life of Words I received The Secret Life of Words as a Christmas present from my brother (fellow bibliophile), who at time compared it favorably to Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. It wasn’t until after it had arrived, however, that he admitted he had recently read Bryson’s Made in America and found it a more engaging read than this piece by Hitchings.
All three are excellent books, and by and large try to accomplish different goals.
Stuff White People Like In less than a year, the blog Stuff White People Like went from being an obscure satirical blog to a full-fledged tour de force, probably worthy of its own entry: white people like Stuff White People Like, since they are fans of both self-deprecation and irony.
Here’s the gist of Stuff White People Like:
The Ten-Cent Plague I was always around comics growing up; with the exception of the 6-part Double Dragon series, however, I was never really a collector myself. I spent a lot of time around them, though, usually pawing through boxes at the annual sale at the local comic book shop, or reading my brother’s once he was done with them. By the time my brother and I read comics, the mainstream was dominated by superheroes. Granted, we had entered an era where it was all right to have blood and sex and swearing again, and I suppose I always assumed that’s the way it was.
David Hadju’s The Ten-Cent Plague is the story of the rise and fall of comic books—queerly, it stops short of chronicling their inevitable rise (D.C. and Marvel, especially), focusing mostly on their origins and the hysteria they generated during the 40s and 50s.
Comics began as funnies, more or less: crude drawings with limited text, mostly aimed at new immigrants with poor English skills. They were about and for the lower class, and generated little more than distasteful sniffs from the educated, who saw them as merely another vulgar habit of the underclass. Within a few decades, however, there was a thriving industry that produced a wide array of monthly rags: from illustrated Bible stories to Archie to a variety of horror and crime comics that were, it seems, relatively lurid and often prurient. They may very well seem tame by modern comparisons, but comic book covers featuring severed heads might elicit some shock and awe regardless of generation.
If you haven’t already heard of the Duggar family from their show on the Discovery Channel, or from other various and sundry news reports that pop up every time Mr. & Mrs. Fecundity drop a new child into the world (every nine months), then let me sum it up for you: they’re a family of Quiverfulls, fundamentalist Christians that believe it’s their responsibility to keep having sex without protection and raise as many children as that lifestyle produces. Meanwhile, they dress like the polygamists from Texas and creep out just about everyone they meet. It seems like only yesterday that I was reading some puff piece about her 17th child; now it’s up to 18:
The Duggar kids planned a big Mother’s Day surprise for their mom this year. But the surprise was on them when Michelle Duggar announced on the TODAY Show that they were soon to welcome an 18th sibling.
“We’re expecting!” the happy mother told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira and the entire Arkansas clan. “Number 18!
[...]
Joshua, the Duggars’ eldest son, said the news, two days before Mother’s Day was “a shock” — if only to a point.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” the 20-year-old said. “But it’s been nine months [since the birth of the last baby], so yeah.”
I love the eldest son’s reaction: oh, right, it’s been the minimum possible amount of time since her last pregnancy, so of course she’s got another bun in the oven. You think maybe young Joshua is starting to get the feeling that his family is nuts?
But because they say that God told them to keep squirting out babies, then it’s all right. And they’ll keep doing it until they have another miscarriage due to the monstrous abuse of her vagina. But that one won’t be God’s fault.
See “Multiply and Conquer” at Bitch magazine for more good stuff.