Return of the Big American Party

But what if I don’t have anything to say?

I’ve been mulling a return to the writing things and posting them on the internet world. Not the first time I’ve mulled this. In fact, this space was created for a poorly executed New Year’s resolution to write more. I did well for a few days, then caught myself whining too much, then spent my time playing the new Wii games I got for Christmas rather than actually doing anything constructive. Maybe “constructive” wasn’t really the longterm idea. But then, what’s the point of putting it on the internet?

Before my glorious return to Durham, I cleaned the Carrboro apartment to the the sounds of two friends and former co-conspirators talking about just that. Why create content for the internet if the chances of it reaching an audience of adoring fans or standing out as being unique are slim-to-none? Vanity? Well, yes.

What if I do have something to say?

Blind squirrel. Practice, practice, practice. I don’t care which theory applies. If the constant outpouring of junk produces something readable every once and again, I’ll be pretty pleased with having bothered with the effort. If it produces one fantastic thing, maybe it’s worth it. Hey, what if I even find myself becoming more like a writer and less like a jerk with a computer?

Let’s find out.

Free Comic Book Day came and went yesterday. This is merely my second one as a comic shop guy rather than as a guy who shows up, grabs his freebies, loads up on cheap back issues, and retreats to the embrace of his couch. Over two Saturdays in two years, though, I have picked up on a disturbing trend at the Ultimate Comics location in Durham’s Homestead shopping center.

There are a disproportionate number of little girls that come to Free Comic Book Day. Some are children of geeks, gleefully going along with daddy until they realize that this trip also means that they have to stand around while he flips his way through the $1 books to find some hidden treasure. The vast majority, though, are daughters of parents who saw the sign for the event and stopped to let said daughters take a look. The important thing, though, is that there were way more girls in the 13-and-under set than there were boys. Overwhelmingly. Unfortunately, over and over, the same scenario played itself out.

A little girl looks over FCBD offerings, scowls when she sees a large selection of escapist adventure, but not one book where she can imagine herself as the heroine. This year, we had two books that prominently featured girls on their covers. They looked like this:

The Aspen sampler included teasers for Soulfire and Fathom, books I once hilariously left multiple copies of all over the desk of the owner/operator of SciFi Genre Comics and Games’ office desk with a home-made word balloon reading “Oh, you seem to have walked in on our all-girl naked shower time…how embarrassing.” A flip through the Asylum sampler didn’t give me any hope that it’s cover was all that misleading either. Nope, nothing there for a little girl.

Other books that had women on the cover at all showed them as sidekicks, girlfriends, and totally in need of rescue. Certainly no super heroics for girls to be found there, either.

And that’s what those little girls wanted more than anything: a super hero for them. They pouted and asked if there was anything with Wonder Woman in it. Last year, a girl asked we had something with Elektra. Seriously. A girl asked about Elektra. Elektra? Marvel Comics’ female super hero landscape was so desolate last year that the only female hero this girl could ask for is best known for being stabbed?

The best comic for a little girl who wanted a super heroine at FCBD was DC’s kids’ sampler. Within those pages, the Tiny Titans section had what I’m sure were plenty of girls doing silly things in super hero costumes. But as far as a girl saving the day? Sorry kid, not this time.

There were two Iron Man comics from Marvel, who are trying to capitalize on his movie and generate some interest. They’ve pushed out two Black Widow mini series and launched an ongoing title trying to get her a following based on her role in the same movie. Did she have anything on the FCBD table where she was kicking evil’s ass? To be displayed on a day dedicated to generating new readers? Nope.

The girls would halfheartedly pick up an Iron Man offering, the DC kids’ book, and maybe the Archie special. You could look at them and tell that they were bummed.

Now, when it comes to female characters and carrying their own books, a big line among the comic-reading world is simply that no one is interested in these characters. There’s not a market. Girls don’t read comics. Whose to blame for that aside, that’s a pretty fair generality. I sit in the Ultimate Comics house and watch patrons come in and out, and a very small portion of them aren’t men.

What I see on Free Comic Book Day, though, is that girls want to read comics, but are constantly taught that the major publishers of American comics don’t care about them. Wouldn’t it be kind of fantastic if someone would recognize that? If there was, say, a Firestar book next to Iron Man and Thor?

Those little girls won’t be back next year. Some of the daughters of nerds, maybe, but not the ones who saw the sign and said “please please please can we go?” They’re lost. You could tell from the extreme disappointment on face after face that Free Comic Book Day, intended to generate more fans, had lost one fan at a time within two minutes of getting out of the minivan.

Girls want to read comics, but you have to show them you’re willing to give them a super heroine on the biggest day of the year. If not, then why should they believe you’ll care about them at all for the rest of it?

The lovable loser in the movie suddenly has the light come on. He’s told the pretty girl in the movie over and over again that he’d be doing something different in an ideal world, something he’d always dreamed of doing. But now, because it’s that time in the movie, our hero gets his life together (usually in a montage) and pursues that dream – this effort being the only thing that was holding him back the entire time.

I always hate that guy.

I hate him because he’s known the whole time what he wants. I hate him because when something causes him to finally reach for it (usually either the involvement or sudden uninvolvement of the pretty girl in his life), everything he ever needed to do this had been right in front of him. He never has to apply for and figure out how to pay for 3 extra years of schooling. Sometimes, he doesn’t even need to work for it. Sometimes it just falls right in his lap at the exact moment when he’s at his best to win back the pretty girl. I really hate him then.

The lovable loser always achieves great success after his transformation to responsible awesome guy. If he failed, it wouldn’t be a movie.

Why do I watch movies?

Health Care passed. The bill was far from perfect, and there are still some things that I think are dangerous when it comes to a lack of a cost-controlling public option paired with a mandate to buy insurance. But I’m willing to celebrate that people who previously couldn’t access health care will be able to. For now.

I’m also pretty upset over the abortion language that got bullied into the bill. I have been assured by someone who follows these things more closely than I do and is also in possession of a real live uterus that the passage of this bill is still a good thing. So I will defer to her judgment on this. For now.

This morning, though, what’s really bothering me some of the narrative that’s going to come in the aftermath. No, I’m not talking about teabaggers, talking heads, and even elected officials screaming to high hell about the Socialist States of America…that’ll be kind of funny. I’m talking about the narrative that was already starting in the instant analysis of the vote on MSNBC last night.

Bart Stupak will somehow go down as one of the heroes of this vote. The guy who did more than some Republicans to obstruct the passage of Heath Care Reform in order to satisfy his agenda. He gets to be a hero. The guy who was willing to keep people from accessing health care unless we restricted women’s access to safe abortion. He gets to be a hero. The guy who, knowing his position can’t stand on its own merit, took the cowardly way out and tucked it into a piece of legislation his colleagues were desperate to pass. He gets to be a hero.

So, sure, I’m happy that something passed that will serve as a single small step in the right direction.

But it makes me physically ill that Bart Stupak gets to go down as one of the heroes who made it happen.

Well, the Twitter is all a flutter with disapproval of The Bachelor’s decision. I find it interesting to watch people armchair quarterback someone else’s barely real life and the heavily plotted out decisions that they make which will be rendered moot once there aren’t producers to pick the setting and shepherd any disagreement into sexual tension.

This kind of thing is hard to predict with real people. One friend was – as it turns out – treated horribly by the only girlfriend of his I ever thought was good for him. Another one is currently happily married to someone he was set up with initially because everyone thought it would be hilarious. Oops.

Well, I’m not going to fall for it.* Nope, I gave it a miss for much classier fare. Cheech and Chong hosting Monday Night RAW.

*When it’s not the heart of Flavor Flav or Bret Michaels on the line.

It’s time for progressives to start taking control of the narrative.

The loss in Massachusetts has shown a lot of things: that the Democratic Party is incapable of winning what should be a slam dunk state because their “safe” choices keep backfiring, that being bullied continues to be a way of life for the Dems, or even that politics are still more important to voters than ideas. Mostly, though, it exposes that progressives in general spend too much time reacting.

Say what you will about Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, but they get one thing right: they completely ignore progressive talking points. So do Republican Congressfolk. Compare that to the liberal talking heads at MSNBC or President Obama’s eleventy billion speeches in support of health care reform. All the way down to the things we, as progressives, pin to our Facebook pages in anger…all we do is react to the nonsense the right wing spins. We try to clarify, we try to debunk, we try to point out hypocrisy and lies (hell, we even have an entire organization dedicated to such things); but at no point do we just ignore the nonsense and start our own narrative.

Health care reform never should have been the mess it is. Health care reform should have been boldly presented as an inevitability that was good for the people of These Here United States of America. The teabaggers could shout and tear their clothes in the streets, but that should have been ignored as we continued to say “This is good, this is happening,” and – like the Republicans with the Patriot Act – “I dare you to show the people of this country you don’t care enough to vote for it.” It should have come from the Democratic party leadership and served as a double-dare to blue dogs, moderate Democrats, or whatever else you want to call a wuss who cares more about being a career politician than doing what’s right.

Would it have worked? I don’t know, but it couldn’t have turned out any worse than what we did or what we continue to do. If we start now, maybe we’ll be good at it by 2016.

The wonderful thing about it being Jimmy Crayton that I heard the news from is simple.  If Jimmy and I had just gone to high school together, we wouldn’t have cared about each other one iota.  We wouldn’t have disliked each other, but I’m pretty certain that – even as wiseass teenagers – we didn’t have a terrible lot in common outside of the conference youth ministry.

When I mentioned that my local church failed me, that was the other way that it did.  I didn’t have a lot in common with the youth that were there, and there was no reason to explore the common ground that the Church gave us, because they’d all known each other since they were in diapers.   Summers in Louisburg meant that we were stuck with each other for the week, so we might as well bond.

Sunday evening youth group meant that I could be away from these folks (nice folks, don’t get me wrong) and playing Mortal Kombat in two hours.

High school all but discouraged moving out of your social circle.  Sure, Jimmy and I would have known each other.  We might have even left generic messages in each others’ year books at the end of our senior year.

I certainly wouldn’t have been sitting next to his grandmother when he got married, though.  I certainly wouldn’t have been up in the wee hours at Methodist College playing volleyball with Jimmy and a few other staff members in the years after we graduated.

The Conference Youth Ministry gave us that friendship that we otherwise wouldn’t have had.

We still don’t know a lot about the future of the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church’s youth ministry.  Presumably, though, the key beef from the Methodist Building in Raleigh will be that the conference-wide ministry didn’t filter into the local churches appropriately.  So they’re going to want to focus on the local youth groups in the local churches.  Here’s why that’s not as important as they’d like to think.

As a youth, my local church failed me.  I had my pick between two youth groups.  Each had a healthy group of youth that were years younger than I was.  Between the two of them, they had two youth that were my age.  Between those two youth, there was only one that was any kind of fun or interesting and she didn’t come around much.  Even with my parents being the ministers of those two congregations, the United Methodist Church would likely have lost me to the local Lutheran church, where I knew and liked plenty of people, had it not been for the connections I made outside of my own congregations but within the United Methodist Church.

Those summers and those people are the ones who made me want to stay in the United Methodist church.  That’s why I staunchly refuse to leave it as an adult even when it disappoints me.

I’m not done with this yet.

It’s been cold.  I used to think I liked the cold.  As a freshman living in NC State’s Lee  Hall, I liked to open the window in the winter months and sleep under a few blankets and get it nice and (what I thought was) frosty temperature.  It was okay because my roommate had class before me.

However, after a few trips to Western New York in the wintertime, I’ve found that what I really like is North Carolina cold.  After a week in the cold, crisp air of Wellsville New York, I’d been looking forward to returning to a nice balmy 40-50 degree North Carolina winter’s day.

Oops.