Graphic Novels

A new essay, this one about the history of "Graphic Novels". There's an attempt here to compensate for the kind of highbrow treatment given to the subject recently in Time magazine and New York Magazine, but in an overarching and intelligent way; in other words to look at what the graphic novel is both in bookstores and comic book shops. Enjoy:

Graphic Novels

Election

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

This was supposed to be the election where the nation finally comes to its senses and trounces Bush out of office, and we all thank Heavens he's behind us like some bad nightmare we can let fade into memory.

So what happened?

In 2000, Gore won approximately 51 million votes, Bush 50 million.

In this election, Kerry won 55 million votes, Bush 58 million.

So Kerry got more than Gore and still lost. Who are these people who voted for Bush? Well, they're not in the cities. New York, Boston, Philidelphia, Chicago, DC, Miami, LA, San Francisco, all these places went to Kerry, DC by 90 percent. They're not ethnic minorities, blacks voted 10 to 1 for Kerry, and Hispanics voted for Kerry (though Bush made larger-than-expected headway into their vote). They weren't independant voters, Kerry won them by a slight majority while Gore lost them last election. And they certainly weren't gay voters.

The deciding factor seemed to be education and religious observance. In most states, Bush won overwhelmingly among people without a college education. He also won overwhelmingly with people who go to church
regularly, while people who never go to church voted overwhelmingly for
Kerry. Look at Ohio alone: "One-fourth of Ohio voters identified themselves as born-again Christians and they backed Bush by a 3-to-1 margin."

So, ladies and gentlemen, we have a president who was voted into office by inbred, hillbilly, bible-thumping, ignoramous hicks. We just happen to live in as country with 58 million of them. That's why the rest of the world is so confused by us; our rhetoric sounds more like that of Nigeria or Lebanon than of a Western democracy, we've got these huge numbers of maleducated evangelists out somewhere in the plains controlling our national government.

At this point I'm tempted to say, Let's New York, New England, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illonois seceed from the Union. We'll become a new country, we'll call it Smartlandia. Then California, Oregon and Washington can seceed and become their own country and control the Western seaboard. We'll give the Great Lakes states to Canada. I mean, this seems like the revenge of the Confederacy anyway, maybe we made the wrong move trying to keep them in the Union in the first place. They tried to seperate from us and we wouldn't let them, and now they're fucking up our elections.

Now all we can do is look ahead to 2008. Who's going to run? Hillary Clinton, perhaps? John McCain? Rudy Guilliani? I don't like any of them. And yet all of them would be better presidents than George W.

We're fucked.

E

Addendum: At least Alan Keyes got stomped royally by my man Obama. At least there's still hope in Illonois.

Fuck.

Fuck.