Disarm the Cops! (Feb. 26, 2010 op-ed)

I have an opinion piece over on the website of The Oregonian newspaper, Oregon Live. In it, I argue that, since the police insist on misusing their weapons, perhaps we should take them away.

The comment section, following the essay, is crowded with attacks focusing on my employment-status, gender, reading habits, and my alma mater — which is, you know, pretty much what one expects.

The irony here is that disarming the police is actually my attempt at a moderate compromise position. As I’ve made clear elsewhere (for example, in Our Enemies in Blue), I’d rather just not have cops at all.

Update: The moderator seems to be removing most of the ad hominem attacks. The conversation has shifted, instead, toward naked racism. (I must say, I hardly consider it an improvement.)

One commenter, “Gargleblaster,” is working hard to prove (as he puts it) “More black people equals more murders.” Adding to the absurdity, he seems to believe that this generalization, on its own, justifies Officer Ron Frashour’s shooting of Aaron Campbell. But not only was Campbell unarmed, and trying to surrender — he wasn’t even a suspect. The police were there to check on him because his family worried he might be suicidal.

It’s revealing to see who the Police Bureau’s defenders are and the kind of arguments they make: When logic fails, they appeal to simple prejudice.

Am I a Condescending Sexist Jerk? also: comics reviews and porn (February 2010)

Here’s a funny little teacup tempest:

Last year, shortly after Ariel Schrag released the fourth volume of her comics memoir, Likewise, I wrote a review covering the entire series. The piece was intended for The Comics Journal, but it got put off repeatedly and eventually the editors decided it had just been too long since the book had come out.

Lucky for me, the folks at Verbicide were less concerned with up-to-the-minute newness. They ran the review, titled “The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag” on January 29.

Ironically, not quite a month later, one of The Comics Journal‘s affiliated blogs, The Hooded Utilitarian, is hosting a roundtable discussion on the last volume of the set, Likewise.

To start things off right, Noah Berlatsky wrote a survey essay covering the reviews of Likewise. And in it he pretty much accuses me of being a condescending sexist jerk.

Ng Suat Tong comes to my defense, and Berlatsky calls him a condescending sexist jerk, too — but now at least I have company.

I’m not in the habit of responding to reviews (especially not reviews of reviews). But I do want to state my position clearly in case it has been misunderstood.

Noah wrote: “In short, Williams recognizes that Schrag is working in a modernist idiom, where form follows function. He finds this alienating. He recognizes that the alienation is a deliberate artistic decision. And he responds by…sneering at Schrag for successfully alienating him when she should be writing entertaining, unambitious anecdotes, since that is what high-school girls do best.”

Now, it’s not that I object to highbrow modernism when it succeeds. But I do object to it when it fails. (Pointing out that Schrag intended her book to feel sloppy and dull — or, as Berlatsky puts it, “alienating” — is hardly a defense.) Given how badly I think Likewise failed, I wished aloud that Schrag had stuck with the approach that worked well in her previous books. That’s not because it’s “what high-school girls do best” — but because it’s what Ariel Schrag does best.

I don’t think I suggested that teenaged girls are incapable of producing substantive work. And if someone can convince me that I did, I promise to go back and re-read both Frankenstein and The Outsiders to remind myself that they can.

MEANWHILE:

I wrote a two-part essay, “Border Horror,” in which I parse the economic and political subtext of a zombie comic, Infestacion: The Mythology, and a vampire comic, 30 Days of Night: Juarez. Both happen to be set at the US/Mexican border.

And I’ve offered my gloss of Alan Moore’s anarcho-porno manifesto, 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom.

You can read these, and the rest of my work for the new online Comics Journal at:
http://classic.tcj.com/author/kristian-williams

Recent Reprints (February 2010)

I like it when my work gets reprinted.

Of course it’s flattering that someone admires the piece enough to run it again. But more importantly, reprints present a good chance for the piece to find a new audience, completely apart from the readers of the first release. And it’s nice that an article that took me dozens of hours of concentrated effort gets to live on beyond the magazine’s brief moment on the news stand.

Lately, I’ve had several pieces resurrected in this way:

The Portland Alliance ran my polemic against police unions, “No Solidarity with Police Union,” which originally appeared in the Portland Observer. It’s in the current Alliance, but you can also see it a facsimile of it from The Portland Observer here.

The current issue of the American Gun Culture Report includes the essay Peter Little and I wrote about gun control and race for In These Times.

In its November/December issue, the Earth First Journal reprinted my essay, “The Green Scare, the State’s Priorities, and Day-to-Day Repression.” I originally delivered it as a lecture in May of last year. I then converted the lecture into an essay for the Eat the State website.

And I recently came across a pirated pamphlet edition of my Monthly Review essay, “The Demand for Order and the Birth of Modern Policing.”

The pamphlet was free, so I can’t complain too vociferously. I do wish people would ask me first, though. It’s just polite.

Comics Reviews (January 2010)

I have three recent reviews on The Comics Journal website:

They concern Joe the Barbarian #1, BPRD: The Black Goddess, and the Bill Watterson biography, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes.

You can see all three, and the rest of my tcj.com work at my author page there.

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