bookblogging
Jul. 5th, 2008 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Graphic novels:
Various: Rosetta: A Comics Anthology
(This wasn't making much of an impression on me--with a few exceptions, I prefer my anthologies and short story collections to have some kind of theme or common inspiration--but I was doing okay up until I hit the vitriolic racism theming David Collier's piece, "Bringing Up Fathers and Sons." Collier worries that "an incomparably less sophisticated people...will take us down as they did the Romans." For "us," read "western civilization;" his story is a sad, crude collection of poorly imagined stereotypes of Muslims and Arabic civilization, in which all elements of Western and American influence are signs of freedom, open-mindedness, and cultural sophistication, as represented by haute couture and wine and cheese parties. Damn, we're sophisticated. We have wine! You know what I worry about? That this sort of fuckwittery is apparently what passes for sophistication in a commentary on someone else's religion, someone else's culture, someone else's country, and the complications of international politics and hybrid culture. The west is good! Islam is bad! Arabs are decadent and Muslims are hypocrites!
What wisdom, what light, the beauty of this outstretched hand of friendship, this clarion call for understanding between peoples--and we better bomb the fuck out of all the lands of Arabic peoples and rebuild their nations out of legos and corporate franchises before Rome falls again and we can't have wine and cheese parties anymore.
Rosetta! What a lousy stinking metaphor for this book).
Various: Rosetta: A Comics Anthology
(This wasn't making much of an impression on me--with a few exceptions, I prefer my anthologies and short story collections to have some kind of theme or common inspiration--but I was doing okay up until I hit the vitriolic racism theming David Collier's piece, "Bringing Up Fathers and Sons." Collier worries that "an incomparably less sophisticated people...will take us down as they did the Romans." For "us," read "western civilization;" his story is a sad, crude collection of poorly imagined stereotypes of Muslims and Arabic civilization, in which all elements of Western and American influence are signs of freedom, open-mindedness, and cultural sophistication, as represented by haute couture and wine and cheese parties. Damn, we're sophisticated. We have wine! You know what I worry about? That this sort of fuckwittery is apparently what passes for sophistication in a commentary on someone else's religion, someone else's culture, someone else's country, and the complications of international politics and hybrid culture. The west is good! Islam is bad! Arabs are decadent and Muslims are hypocrites!
What wisdom, what light, the beauty of this outstretched hand of friendship, this clarion call for understanding between peoples--and we better bomb the fuck out of all the lands of Arabic peoples and rebuild their nations out of legos and corporate franchises before Rome falls again and we can't have wine and cheese parties anymore.
Rosetta! What a lousy stinking metaphor for this book).