The Simmering Cauldron of Outrage

OK. Yesterday we joined the anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout to vent our rage at those pieces of legislation.  Yet, YET!, in many ways, it pales in comparison to what’s going on in Arizona. On Tuesday evening, the day after MLK Day, I was reading a piece by Carolyn Kellogg that was about whatever Apple’s upcoming announcement would be about .  I got to the bottom and was stunned to come across this:

Meanwhile, textbooks for elementary and high schools must be vetted by state and local officials, an entirely different challenge. Arizona, for example, has banned ethnic studies classes statewide; this week, to remain in complaince and receive millions of dollars in funding, Tucson schools removed a number of now-banned books, including “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement” by Arturo Rosales and William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Does Apple really want to jump into the middle of that?

What? Arizona banned ethnic study classes?  Books on Hispanic civil rights and The Tempest are being removed from libraries?  Wait.  William Shakespeare’s The Tempest?  A Tucson teacher explains the predicament that the law places on teachers:

We study this work by Shakespeare using the work of renowned historian Ronald Takaki and the chapter “The Tempest in the Wilderness” from his a book A Different Mirror where he uses the play to explore the early English settlements on this continent and English imperialism. From there, we immerse ourselves in the play and discuss the beauty of the language, Shakespeare’s multiple perspectives on colonization, and the brilliant and courageous attention he gives to such important issues…However, TUSD is basing our compliance upon their appeal and Mr. Kowall’s ruling. Thus, I believe our administrators advised me properly when they said to avoid texts, units, or lessons with race and oppression as a central focus…. In clearer words, if I avoid discussing such themes in class, yet the students see the themes and decide to write, discuss or ask questions in class, we may also be found to be in violation…Due to the madness of this situation and our fragile positions as instructors who will be frequently observed for compliance, and be asked to produce examples of student work as proof of our compliance, I cannot disagree with their advice. Now we are in the position of having to rule out The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, etc. for the exact same reasons.

So, apparently, until further guidance is provided, teachers have to eliminate teaching anything that students may interpret on their own as containing themes about civil rights, race, colonialism, etc.  Doubleplusgood.

Monopoly

Authors weigh in on Amazon’s heavy handed Christmas tactics.    The outrage of the authors may be the least of Amazon’s worries.

Banned Book Week

This week is Banned Book Week.  Do your part to defend books.  Check out this handy map of documented book challenges across the US from 2007-2011 to see what has happened in your area.

When I’m President

When I become President, I’ll have to retire this blog.  I’ve been following the commentary on President Obama’s vacation reading, and I’m not sure that my habits would measure up either.

First, I read a lot of fiction.  Of course, everyone knows that serious people do not read fiction.

…five of the six are novels, and the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.

Second, every year I make a reading resolution to read more books by women.   I usually come up short and repeat the vow. This year is probably my best year yet, and my books still aren’t split 50/50.  I’m probably also short on a representative number of books by minorities and/or works in translation.  I try not to beat myself up about it and look for ways to improve instead.  This approach doesn’t work when you’re President.  Not reading more books by women is prejudice:

Now the fact that the president of the United States apparently doesn’t read women writers is not the greatest crisis facing the arts, much less the nation — but it’s upsetting nevertheless. As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their manifestations may seem relatively benign.

OK.  I’m now President and I’m going on vacation. None of that purchasing books at the local indie bookstore that appeal to me on the spot or I heard something good about on NPR or have pretty covers, like I do.  I’d be best served to have an elite commission make sure that they are properly distributed among author sex, nationality, color, religion, and font selection.  And go heavy on the lady writer non-fiction, please.

No.  If I were President, I think that I would ultimately do what the guy before Mr. Obama did and lie my ass off.  Apparently, people will believe you.

George W. Bush boasted an almost exclusive focus on works of history and biography, devoting the summer of 2006 (the White House announced) to reading life stories of Lincoln, Mao, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, Babe Ruth, and Roberto Clemente—as well as heady accounts on the position of Muslim women and major diseases (polio and influenza) that exerted a profound impact on the United States. His only chosen work of fiction, the existentialist Camus classic The Stranger, might have been part of an effort to repair tattered relations with France, or to make up for assignments he blithely ignored during prep school at Andover.

Sure.  Bush may have been wanting to patch up relations with France.  Reading Camus would be a sound way to do that.  Nice theory.  Or you could just watch the tape on how the Camus came to pass:
 

 
I ranted about this reading competition a while back. My opinion on the matter stands.

DRP 2012

Political commentary for A Confederacy of Dunces fans:

Read the applicable passage. I think Ignatius was onto something.

The Censor

When it comes to the mindset of the censor,  I think that Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s sums things up nicely:

Like poisonous, dangerous and addictive drugs which are not available for everyone without restrictions … as a publisher, librarian or an official in the book industry, we don’t have the right to make [such books] available to those without knowledge. We should provide them with healthy and good books.

Apparently there are books that should be available only to those with “knowledge”, and the censor decides that he/she is a person with knowledge that must protect others.  This role of the censor as protector seems to be especially in play where children are involved.  There is no shortage of people who would appoint themselves as protectors of children.

For example, This Guy, an assistant college professor, decided to review the curriculum of a local school board and did not like what he saw.  No, sir.  His unsolicited efforts on behalf of the children lead to the removal of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Sarah Ockler’s young adult novel Twenty Boy Summer from the school curriculum and a local library. The books are banned.  Ockler has  posted a thoughtful response to the news.

I read Slaughterhouse-Five as a teen.  I remember that it was that book in particular that opened my eyes to the possibilities of the novel.  Vonnegut broke so many rules it was astounding to me.   It was an exhilarating realization that literature, and life in general, didn’t have to be bound by convention.  It was my portal to the world of experimental and offbeat fiction, which is the literary neighborhood that I spend most of my time in today.  Thankfully there was no one with “knowledge” that decided that it should be withheld from me because it wasn’t “good and healthy.”

I think that efforts to censor books for children, but especially for teens, does them the disservice of underestimating their intelligence and their need to understand the world around them as it exists, no as we’d like it to be.  Luckily, there are the occassional hints of reason that bubble up to the surface.  A school district in the Pacific Northwest had banned Sherman Alexie’s powerful novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian only to reverse their decision a year later.  The board changed its mind when they did something remarkable and unusual – they read the novel.

The book’s 14-year-old protagonist struggles with poverty, racism and death.

Those themes, and particularly the main character’s perseverance in the face of these challenges, bear important lessons for students, Donahoe said.

“When I’m voting a book out of the classroom, I’m denying parents the right to choose to have that book read by their students,” he said.

Exactly.

Oxford Comma Redux

Say it isn’t so!  The oxford comma has apparently been abandoned by — wait for it — Oxford University.  A university style guide says, that writers should avoid the oxford comma“as a general rule.” This news resulted in the following Twitter outbursts:

That’s about all I have to say on the subject.  Add your views to #oxfordcomma(s) or in the comments.  Music, please:

Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma

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Business Journalism for Dummmies

So you’ve been assigned to write a four paragraph business article about a publishing trade show.  Naturally, the big questions you have to ask yourself are “how little research can I do” and  ”how many people can I piss off” in that little space.  Think big.  If you do it correctly, a commenter will be forced to observe, “There’s so much…wrong about this article I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just close my eyes and point at the screen.”

Begin by clearing your head.  A few scotches at the hotel bar should do the trick.  Picture the most superficial impressions of your time at Book Expo America.  Got it?  It’s time to write.   You’ll probably want to start by making an offhand  judgement of all children’s books.

I have nothing against children’s books, but when all of them seem to participate in a contest of garishness for the most outrageous combination of colors, the esthetic model that is being set up is accountable for the bad taste of generations.

Nice start.  Nothing good ever follows a “but.”  Next, you’ll want to make an unsubstantaited statement about what is “widely known.” Something like this:

…the publication of serious literature, and particularly of literary fiction, has been abandoned…

Yep.  That’ll do.  Alright, now in your third paragraph you’ll want to sound coherent, but use exclamation marks to ensure the reader knows what’s important!   Now it’s time to blindside the readers with your grand finale.  You’ll want to conclude with a sweeping indictment of all that you don’t understand.  Start with gross and distorted generalizations about book blogs that conflates everything that you’ve ever halfway heard about books, blogs, and the death of criticism into a few sentences:

Book blogging has become a subculture whose members are mostly women between 20 and 50 years old, often known as “mommy bloggers” because they are housewives who blog about romance novels, horror/vampire stories and paranormal novels. Many of them have hundreds of followers on Twitter, and the result is that they have the power to establish new trends… And the publishing industry has started to take them seriously.

Awesome!  And it’s true, yall!  Now denigrate young women AND belittle technology WHILE flaunting your ignorance:

At the Book Bloggers reception I met many girls in their early twenties who already have hundreds of followers on Twitter. As far as I could tell, I was the only person at the convention who doesn’t tweet.

Trifecta!  And then finish with a crescendo of babble that makes little sense.  Excellent.  Now find a graphic that will add insult to injury.  Is your editor drunk or otherwise  asleep at the wheel?  File that story!  Your work here is done.  Nice job!

Libraries in Troubled Times

In England, a new “austerity” budget threatens to eliminate or drastically reduce many public services.  One proposal has called for the elimination of a number of public libraries.  Author Philip Pullman offers a rousing rebuttal to those who are short-sighted enough to apply market rules to judge the worthiness of public programs:

I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.

Well that’s in England.  Surely, it wouldn’t happen here? It’s already happening.  Texas has proposed reducing state library expenditures to $0 (following California’s lead).

New Rules

Let’s face it. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is full of naughty words and questionable authorial decisions. Mark Twain’s overuse of he H-word is only the start. (I have to use “H-word” as code for “N-word,” which is upsetting enough.) I’ve been authorized by Professor Alan Gribben of Auburn University to pick up the baton he so ably carried into the national limelight and run the novel through another round of edits. Here’s my back-of-the-publisher’s-press-release list of necessary changes:

Send the manuscript through Spellcheck™. I mean, “sivilized”?! Come on. To be honest, I can’t even understand why people think this is such a great book, when Twain couldn’t even spell.

References to events in U.S. History tending toward anything other than a reverence for American Exceptionalism that Glenn Beck would approve: Deleted.

The sarcastic parts: Out.

Suggestions that Christians and businessmen have on occasion behaved in anything less than a fully Christ-like fashion: Cut.

“Harelip” is an insensitive term for people born with cleft lips. Henceforth, change every mention of “the Harelip” to “the pre-operative plastic surgery patient.”

This is America. No one around here knows what a “Dauphin” is and can’t be troubled to look it up on dictionary.com, and the name “The Dolphin” serves only to confuse. Replace “Dauphin” and “The Dolphin” with “The Pretender—Not Royalty at All, and Certainly Not a Marine Mammal.”

“Pap” is a disrespectful way to refer to Huck’s father. Replace “Pap” with “the esteemed Chairman of the local Tea Party.” (Seriously. Check out Pap’s soliloquy from Chapter VI, which Tim flagged for me way back last year.

Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger SLAVE there from Ohio–a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane–the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger SLAVE vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin.

Sound familiar? But I digress.)

Say what you want about these edits, but Professor Gribben had it right: it will surely be easier to assign our version to 21^st-century students. Because our version will be eight pages long, and we’ll post all the answers to the test on the Internet.

(Please also see this new edition of the novel, ed.)

It’s Bowdlerizing Time

There’s been an awful lot of hand-wringing about the “revised” version of Huckleberry Finn that purportedly seeks to address the outrage of concerned parents and return the book to the class room in the process.  The Huffington Post notes the historical precedent:

In 1818 American Thomas Bowdler published a series of Shakespeare translations, which he edited heavily for content that he considered offensive. The resulting texts were tamed versions of the originals. Since then, the act of editing or removing offensive content has been deemed “bowdlerizing” and it has taken place many times.

Taking a walk down that particular slippery slope, I got to wondering what other classics might benefit from being bowdlerized. The Catcher in the Rye has been challenged for years by various school districts for a variety of reasons including “obscenity” and being “centered around negative activity.”  As a self-proclaimed J.D. Salinger scholar, I call for making a few changes to the text that should get this important work off the sidelines and onto the desks of today’s youth, ready to impart its themes that have resonated with generations of teenagers.

The language of the novel may have worked at the time in which it was written, but it needs  to be updated to consider the tender psyches of this generation that has come of age with limited exposure to obscenity and adult themes.  Think of the children!  Correcting the obscenity is easy.  I recommend that the following words should be used on a rotating basis to replace Holden’s off-color language:  dagnabit, daggum, fudge,  gosh darn,  shucks, and motherscratcher.  The “negative activity” is a little more difficult to address, but I have a suggestion for this, too.  I propose to do a simple word search for “phony/phonies” and replace with “swell guy” or “valued members of the community,” as needed.  This should make the book significantly more upbeat and positive.

Of course, I’m happy to appear on your  news talk television and radio shows to discuss my proposals.

Update: The best reponse that I’ve come across to the Finn flap is this piece by Tayari Jones.

On plagiarism, redux

I’ve had plagiarism on my mind lately, so this news about historian Stephen Ambrose caught my eye.

Ambrose had a long history with the subject. Fortunately, he was called out shortly before he died in 2002 for his habit of repeating things that others had written without putting quotation marks around those things. That’s textbook plagiarism, but because Ambrose more often than not included footnotes that led readers back to the original sources of the words he had appropriated as his own, he did not receive much more than a slap on the wrist from the historical community or from his legions of readers. And lest you think that this problem only cropped up after Ambrose got famous and put together a factory that churned out book after book under his name, you should know that he plagiarized his dissertation and first book. I don’t doubt that a thorough review would show that he plagiarized everything in between, too.

It now appears that Ambrose’s fraud didn’t stop with plagiarism; not only did he appropriate others’ words, he flat out made shit up. And then based his entire, fabulously successful career on that shit he made up. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you own a book with Ambrose’s name on the cover, you should not trust a single word in it.

Maybe Tom Hanks can start making movies based on non-fiction books that contain only non-fiction.

Call to Arms

In its infinite wisdom, the Georgia House decided to submit a State budget that includes the figure $0 next to the Geogria Council of the Arts. This would effectively eliminate any state spending on arts programming and would distinguish us by becoming “the only state in the U.S. without an arts agency.”  Awesome.  The actual budget for this year would have been less than one million dollars, so clearly this was the place to make a huge savings in budget crunch time.

Georgians: Go here to send a note to your legislators.

Atlantans: You can show your support by joining the artists march to the Capitol on Monday.  The march starts at The Rialto Theatre downtown at 1:00 PM.  I’ll provide a link with more info when I find one.

On Plagiarism

I make my living as a university professor—a teacher who also writes books. This semester I’m teaching US History Since 1929, an upper-division course, one of my favorite classes. I like it in part because US History Since 1932 was the one class I took in college that made me want to go to grad school and become a history professor. (Perhaps more to the point, I decided that the professor who taught it, William E. Leuchtenburg, was who I wanted to be when I grew up. More about him in a moment.) I think I like teaching this course because it’s easier for me to imagine that there’s a student like the young me whom I need to inspire in this class than in my other classes.

I put a lot of time into thinking about the books I will assign, the writing assignments, what I’ll do in a given day’s class to stimulate discussion, etc. There is no relationship that I can decipher between the amount of time I put into a given task and how well the students react to it. Some things just work and some things don’t. I slave over some ideas that land with a thud, and I pull some out of my rear end that soar. If enough things work, we’re all happy. When they don’t work, everything can go downhill very, very fast.

Earlier this semester I assigned a book about the 1932 presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s a good book and I thought the students might engage it because in retrospect the 1932 contest has so many parallels to the 2008 election. They found it a little dry, but I thought it would provide enough fodder for good discussions that even if they didn’t particularly care for it, everything would be OK. That’s what ended up happening. They all wrote their reaction papers and moved on.

Except for one student. I only made it through the first three sentences of her paper. The third sentence just sounded weird, so I typed it into google. Sure enough, she had lifted that sentence and 2 others from her introduction straight from an essay she found on the internet. That’s as cut-and-dry a case of plagiarism as you’ll ever see (when I looked closely at it, I even noticed that the parts she copied and pasted were in 11-point font, and the rest of the paragraph was in 12), so I gave her a 0 and didn’t bother to read the rest. But then that was the last thing I thought about that night, and it was the first thing I thought about the next morning. I was so mad about it I threw up while brushing my teeth.

I emailed the whole class and told them they had to upload their papers to turnitin.com, the site that uses plagiarism-detection software to bust cheaters. Meanwhile, I started having all these thoughts about what a failure I must be that someone would try to pull this on me. Why didn’t I explicitly tell the students that they couldn’t copy and paste their essays from internet sites that aren’t even any good in the first place? What kind of idiot must this person think I am that she thought she could get away with this? I can guarantee you that I spent 100 times as many thinking and worrying about this than the cheater did.

When the student finally ran her paper through turnitin, the software determined that she had plagiarized seven sections of her essay from two sources, which together comprised more than half of her paper. The second source, from which she pilfered an entire paragraph, was an online chapter of The FDR Years, a terrific collection of essays that I’ve assigned in previous iterations of this class. The FDR Years was written by William E. Leuchtenburg, the man who encouraged me to go to grad school and wrote my letters of recommendation.

I had to go to my class the next day and read them the fucking riot act about plagiarism. What I didn’t tell them was that if you plagiarize, I will fail you (and I will take it personally and I will take it 100 times more seriously than you will), but if you plagiarize my mentor, I will hate you. That day the atmosphere in class was as toxic as it could possibly have been. But the student realized soon thereafter that she could withdraw from the class without penalty from the university (because this was the first time she had been caught cheating, even though she’s a senior and I know damn well this is not the first time she’s done it), so she did so. Without her the class has been great. For whatever reason, I feel like I’m doing the best teaching I’ve ever done. It’s funny how quickly the dynamics of a class can turn on a dime.

I’ve reflected a lot over the past couple of weeks about who this student cheated and how. Herself and her family, obviously: her parents paid a lot of money for her to sit in this class for a month and a half and learn exactly nothing and receive zero credit for it. Her classmates, too, including one who timed the delivery of her third child for spring break so she could get her assignments in on schedule and get back to class with as little time lost as possible, and another who told me last week that he’s an Iraq War vet dealing with PTSD. They, of course, managed to turn in papers that they had written. She cheated me, but I guess I get paid in part to deal with that kind of disappointment. She cheated Professor Leuchtenburg; even though she didn’t exactly harm him materially, she stole from him the currency of his profession, his ideas and the way he expresses them.

I’ve thought about what it would feel like to have someone plagiarize from one of the books I’ve written. I’m strangely neutral about it (at least in the abstract; talk to me again if it happens in real life). It won’t be like they’re stealing from me, unless they’re publishing my words in another book without attribution, and even then, there’s so little money to be stolen from authors of academic books that “stealing” doesn’t seem like the right word to use. No, the plagiarizer steals the expectation we have as readers that what we’re reading is real, no matter the context of what we’re reading. The plagiarizer steals from us.

Still Can’t Handle It

It’ s old news at this point, but I promised to keep up with this trend.  To get caught up on the litblog buzz from two weeks ago, please read BGB contributor Russ Marshalek’s essay in Creative Loafing’s Culture Surfing.  I’ll summarize by quoting Russ on the controversy surrounding the publication of Justine Larbalestier’s upcoming  novel Liar:

Almost immediately upon cracking that book’s spine, though, what you’ll find is that Micah, the teenage girl narrator, is, as the author describes her, “black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.”

Naturally, the publisher in its wisdom chose this cover to represent Micah on the advanced reading copies -

This choice rightly seemed to annoy many people, the Australian author among them.  After much hullabaloo on the blogosphere, the publishers decided to change the cover and go with this one instead:

This would all be very surprising, only it isn’t.  In July of 2008, I posted about similar shenanigans for three award-winning novels.

A friend of mine has written a book about the Tuskegee Airmen that will be published in the spring. I am officially urging him to not use the picture below for the cover. We can handle it.

American Literature Oxymoron Sez Nobel Dude

In the papers:

Nobel Guy:  Americans R dumb.

Americans: Nuh uh.  U R.

When I read that, I was all “are not!”

Race to the Bottom

Over the last month or so I’ve been getting hits a’plenty from people who are clicking on a link to Baby Got Books that is included in an anti-Obama viral e-mail (for that whole story, see this post).  As I’ve indicated, that entire e-mail is total bullshit.  But it doesn’t stop it from getting posted everywhere.

A few examples of where this e-mail has been posted:

• An Arizona Wildcats discussion forum
• An Orange County Register article about something else entirely
• A genius on Eugene Oregon’s Craigslist forgets the e-mail text but includes the links to the book covers
• This guy’s blog (scroll down under the most offensive Katrina vs. Iowa flooding post that you’ll see all day)
• AOL Message Boards
• A forum for people in the plastics industry
• A forum for Cardinal Sports (scroll down)
• A Comcast user’s forum
• and even Obama’s community blogs!

These are juts a handful of the posts that contain the link back here.  Some people have had the good sense to delete the links and just stick with the text.  A Google search will lead you to about 1000 more instances. The rhetoric in these postings – on both sides of the issue – makes me sad for all of us.  Is it wrong – or terribly naive – to expect something like civil discourse?  Where are all of the adults?

We Can’t Handle It

I’ve noticed an interesting but I suppose not surprising trend.  Here’s what I’ve got:

Exhibit A:

In the US, the new Richard K. Morgan book is called Thirteen.   In the UK, the book is titled Black Man.  (In the UK they also drop the middle initial, but that does not appear to be relevant.) It’s the same book between the covers.

Exhibit B:

Lawrence Hill’s latest novel is called The Book of Negroes in his native Canada, but it is saddled with the much more prosaic Someone Knows My Name in the US.  The same story is told between the covers.

Exhibit C:

This one is a little more subtle, but the same underlying principle seems to be at work. Can you guess which book cover for Zadie Smith’s On Beauty was used in the UK & Canada and which was used in the US?

If you guessed that non-Michael Jordan African-American silhouettes are forbidden in the US, you are correct.

Conclusions:

The message from US publishers seems to be, “Yes, you may be well on your way to electing a black man President, but we have to trick you into reading prize-winning books that might feature black people. We apologize for any discomfort that you might experience.”

Ass Clowns

Here at BGB, we don’t often talk politics.  We don’t hide our politics either; we just prefer to discuss political issues in the context of books.  If at all.  The older I get the less stomach I have for bare knuckle political confrontation.  I mention this because we’ve been unwillingly pulled into some unsavory right wing smear job, and I’m not happy about it.  Here’s the story:

Way back in 2005, which I am pretty sure was before this election season got underway, I posted a review of Barack Obama’s book Dreams From My Father.  Flash forward three years, a right wing smear e-mail starts going around that professes to let Obama speak in his own words by misquoting his books or by providing misleading snippets without the full context.  (Read the e-mail and the Obama Campaign’s rersponse.)

Well, the a-holes decided that they would use the picture of the book that is hosted on MY site in their e-mails by hotlinking to it – rather than download and host their own picture.  Once the pictures are stripped away, the e-mail just reads babygotbooks.com/Obama.jpg where the picture was (see what I mean here)  – which, to me, implies that BGB is somehow on board with their BS.   We are not.

Rather than attempt to find and confront these ass clowns, I decided to have some fun instead.  I have renamed the file for the Dreams from My Father cover and replaced the original Obama.jpg file so that the picture that will now show up in their e-mails is this:

Forward that e-mail around as often as you like guys.  Tell ‘em Baby Got Books sent ya.

Around the same time, and I suspect that the two are related, a comment appeared in the approval queue for Dr J’s review of Barack Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope.  The comment never saw the light of day because I am not interested in having that kind of debate on my web site, but here are a few of its salient points:

Yes, the books are well written, and he is a charismatic, dynamic speaker who can stir a crowd to an almost frenzy–much like an evangelist during a revival.
President and Commander-in-Chief?  I think not.  He has successfully mesmerized his followers into believing he is the answer to our Nation’s and the world’s woes, much like Nickolai Carpathian (sic) in the “Left Behind” series.

Got that.  Obama not only has the magical powers to hypnotize people, but he is like a fictional Anti-Christ.  That is literally demonizing the man.  He is likened to a demon.  Demonization.

As long as we’re talking politics, and speaking only for myself and not for BGB at large, I say:

Under hypnosis,

–Tim

Sacrilege

Each morning, while I stand on the platform waiting for my train to work, this man is smiling at me:

Once on the train, this smiling countenance welcomes me:

Neither of those books will tell you on their covers that the authors head mega-churches and are preachers of the “prosperity gospel”. Slate did a nice job of exposing some of the problems with that top guy’s theology. The bottom guy (based here in Atlanta) is under Congressional investigation because a Senator wanted to know why churches that but Rolls Royce automobiles should be tax exempt entities. And his name is not in any way ironic.  Both of these books are bestsellers.

I was busy with being annoyed by these guys when a link to a web site for The Christ Corporation appeared in my inbox. At first glance, it appeared to be the logical progression for the prosperity gospel gravy train. Instead, it appears to be a poker-faced lampooning of the kinds of churches that these guys run. While checking out the site, I had that occasional feeling that lighting was going to come crashing through the window at any moment. But seriously, who are the sacrilegious here?

And of course, The Christ Corporation has a blog. It features tips for dressing for success (business casual conveys a saintly image) and some original scholarship on the nature of the Antichrist (it’s not who you think!).

And what’s with these guys’ hands? Who poses that way? This guy, while not a preacher, does the same thing…

It’s creeping me out! I guess that one guy at that success seminar at the Arena said that you gotta get those hands in the the picture – no matter how ridiculous you look.