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Category: Politics
Who’s the Leader of the Club? Reflections on cute propaganda in the age of creeping fascism
I once thought the combination of propaganda and crowd control was never practiced more effectively in this country than in the lead up to the Patriot Act. We live in a brave new world in which our bodies, our possessions, and virtually everything we say and do are under a microscope whenever we travel by …
Black Panther, Black Mane, and Retributive Justice
I ended "Captain America's Boise Tea Party" by quoting the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The once lowly comic book is an example of “politics by other means” with the emancipatory potential Benjamin saw in mass art. The blockbuster status of the film Black Panther best demonstrates how that continues as comic characters are successfully translated from the printed page to film, and are …
Continue reading Black Panther, Black Mane, and Retributive Justice
Multimedia Barbarian Part 2
Thulsa Doom says "Read the blog. Watch the video. Or else." This is part 2 of 2 of a YouTube video. A number of sources were drawn from in making parts 1 and 2 of the video that are credited at the end of part 2. If you missed part 1, look for Multimedia Barbarian-a video …
Captain America’s Boise Tea Party
This is an updated version of a blog published earlier on Daily Kos and a talk given to the Anthropology Department Colloquium at Idaho State University. The truth is stranger (or at least uglier) than fiction. This is as true in the Intermountain West of Idaho and Utah as anywhere else. If you doubt it, see …
Multimedia Barbarian – a video
https://youtu.be/EK3y9KsLAuY This is part 1 of 2 of a YouTube video about REH's Conan, that attempts to unpack the history of the character's meteoric rise in popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s. I'll post part 2 later after some editing. Part 2 is less of a love letter about the comics and the times, …