Recently, I’ve been spending time investigating copyrights, keen to find out if it’s cricket for me to impose my vision on certain authors’ long ago work. An author myself, I freely admit, I might not cotton to it were some stranger to have her way with my work, without permission, on a stage, for all to see! Either way, I’d prefer things to be settled without a lawsuit.
My head was so full of copyright implications and loopholes, I was unaware that a parallel situation was blowing up beyond all reason in the world of patents. Such ignorance is a luxury unavailable to legions of small software designers, podcasters, and small business owners, as artist and filmmaker Kirby Ferguson of “Everything is a Remix” fame makes clear in his animated primer, “Rise of the Patent Troll.”
The problem, he says, owes to a gap between centuries old patent law and a new technology that yields “inventions” whose parts can’t be attributed as easily as your average sewing machine’s or cotton gin’s.
Depicted here as hairy, pointy-eared storybook figures, the real life baddies are much more scary—newly formed corporate entities opportunistically seeking to enforce patents for digital innovations they don’t really own. Not surprisingly, they’re targeting the little guys, individuals who don’t have the resources to defend themselves when attacked. Yes, in this context, a fairly renowned comedian can be considered a little guy.
Ferguson joined forces with digital watchdogs Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Engine to make the film, but the problem proves too slippery to fully explore in three animated minutes. I think the cartoon is actually bait, to get viewers like me to sit still for the next three minutes, in which the artist turns the camera on himself, to enumerate what citizens can do to make a proposed patent reform bill stick. If it all feels rather urgent, I’m guessing there’s a reason.
The very title of Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book The God Delusion was intended to provoke, and the Oxford evolutionary biologist has seemingly done nothing but, since taking his stand against religions of all kinds, particularly the big monotheisms that claim most of the world’s inhabitants. Dawkins infuriates theists on the right with his self-assured claim that “there almost certainly is no God” and skeptics on the left, who charge him with sexism and racism. Even journalist and journeyman intellectual Christopher Hedges—no friend to authoritarian religions—accuses Dawkins of the same kind of intolerance as Christian, Jewish, and Islamic fundamentalists.
Meanwhile, thousands of people who may or may not follow Dawkins’ every inflammatory tweet credit him with giving them the courage and conviction to walk away from faiths they found oppressive. In that regard, he’s accomplished his goal, and his Richard Dawkins Foundation continues to advocate strenuously for “scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.”
If you’ve somehow missed Dawkins’ message amidst the furor over his method, you can get caught up rather quickly with the film above. Titled, like his book, The God Delusion, the film compiles the two 45-minute episodes of a documentary series produced for BBC 4 called Root of All Evil?, first broadcast in 2006 as a companion to the book. (The producers chose the title to create controversy—Dawkins has called the notion of any one thing being the “root of all evil” ridiculous.) In his introduction to the film, Dawkins proposes to explore “a world increasingly polarized by religion,” and to find out why faith has such a grip on the human mind.
Surveying regions from America’s Midwest to Israel, the film “takes a hard look at the very concept of faith: how it behaves like a kind of ‘brain virus,’ infecting generations of young minds, how it perpetuates outdated and dubious moral values.” Why, asks Dawkins, should religion “demand, and usually receive, our society’s respect”? It’s still a question worth asking, even if you don’t like Dawkins’ answers, or Dawkins himself.
Humanity has long pondered the relative might of the pen and the sword. While one time-worn aphorism does grant the advantage to the pen, most of us have entertained doubts: the sword, metaphorically or literally, seems to have won out across an awfully wide swath of history. Still, the pen has scored some impressive victories, some even in living memory. Take, for example, the CIA’s recently revealed use of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivagoas a propaganda weapon. Repressed in Pasternak’s native Russia, the book first appeared in Italy in 1957. The following year, the British suggested to America’s Central Intelligence Agency that the book stood a decent chance of winning hearts and minds behind the Iron Curtain — if, of course, they could get a few copies in there. A CIA memo sent across its own Soviet Russia Division subsequently pronounced Doctor Zhivago as possessed of “great propaganda value, not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication. We have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.”
That evaluation comes from one of the over 130 declassified documents used by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée in their brand new history of this act of real-life literary espionage, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book. You can read an in-depth article on some of the events involved in this operation — the CIA’s printing of both hardcover and miniature paperback Russian-language editions, the not-so-clandestine distribution of copies at 1958’s Brussels Universal and International Exposition, the CIA’s unexpected alliance with the Vatican in this mission, the inept probing by Soviet “researchers” — at the Washington Post.
You can also watch a CBS This Morning clip on the book just above. Dramatic though this “Zhivago Affair” sounds, it came as neither the first nor last American use of culture as a means of destabilizing the Soviet Union. We’ve even previously featured two others: secretly-funded abstract expressionist painting, and Louis Armstrong’s 1965 East Berlin and Budapest concerts. Cold War America may have had the sword, in the form of its vast nuclear arsenal, polished and ready, but clearly it retained a certain regard for the pen — and brush, and trumpet — as well.
Featured on the Emily’s List Facebook Page today is this “PSA from the 1960s,” where “Batgirl advocates for equal pay while saving Batman and Robin.” Emily’s List, a PAC aiming to put more pro-choice Democrat female candidates into political office, goes on to note, “Over 50 years ago, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, a law designed to end wage discrimination against women. Unfortunately, the fight’s still got many rounds left.”
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First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a prolific columnist and writer, with an impressive list of clips produced both during FDR’s tenure in the White House and afterwards. George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Projecttallies up her output: 8,000 columns, 580 articles, 27 books, and 100,000 letters (not to mention speeches and appearances). Many of those columns and articles can be found on their website.
Their archive offers every one of Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns, which ran through United Features Syndicate from 1936–1962. These short pieces acted like a daily diary, chronicling Roosevelt’s travels, the books she read, the people she visited, her evolving political philosophy, and, occasionally, her reflections on such topics as education, empathy, apathy, friendship, stress, and the scourge of excessive mail (“I love my personal letters and I am really deeply interested in much of my mail, but when I see it in a mass I would sometimes like to run away! I just closed my eyes in this case and went to bed!”)
The “My Day” archive is a little difficult to navigate—you have to browse by year, or search by keyword—but the archive’s short list of selected longer articles is a bit simpler to survey. Some of my favorites:
“In Defense of Curiosity” (Saturday Evening Post, 1935): Roosevelt often drew fire for her insatiable interest in all areas of national life—a characteristic that people thought of as unladylike. This article argues that women, too, should be curious, and that curiosity is the basis for happiness, imagination, and empathy.
“How to Take Criticism” (Ladies Home Journal, 1944): Roosevelt had a lot of haters. This longer piece mulls over the different types of criticism that she received during her public career, and asks how one should distinguish between worthy and unworthy critiques.
“Building Character” (The Parent’s Magazine, 1931): An editorial on the importance of providing children with challenges, clearly meant to reassure parents worried about the effects of the Depression on their kids.
“Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education” (Pictorial Review, 1930): Much of this piece is about the importance of fair compensation for good teachers. “There are many inadequate teachers today,” Roosevelt wrote. “Perhaps our standards should be higher, but they cannot be until we learn to value and understand the function of the teacher in our midst. While we have put much money in buildings and laboratories and gymnasiums, we have forgotten that they are but the shell, and will never live and create a vital spark in the minds and hearts of our youth unless some teacher furnishes the inspiration. A child responds naturally to high ideals, and we are all of us creatures of habit.”
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
Recently attacked by Cossacks in Sochi and by black-clad men with green antiseptic in Moldova, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have, since their December release from a two-year prison sentence, remained the very public faces of the punk band/agit-prop collective known as Pussy Riot. The two also continue to raise the band’s profile in the States. Last month alone, they appeared on The Colbert Report and onstage with Madonna at a star-studded Amnesty International event.
Not only prominent activists for prison reform, Nadia and Masha—as they’re called in the HBO documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer—have become celebrities. (So much so that other mostly anonymous members of the group have disowned them, citing among other things issues with “personality cult.”) The HBO doc begins with profiles of the women, as does a new book, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, by Russian journalist Masha Gessen.
In an interview Friday for KQED in San Francisco (above), Gessen—a lesbian mother who recently moved to the United States for fear of persecution—describes how Vladimir Putin, Pussy Riot’s primary target, has regained his popularity with the Russian people after his aggressions at the Ukraine border and Crimea’s Sunday vote for secession. She cites, for example, alarming poll numbers of only 6% of Russians who oppose an invasion of Ukraine. Yet at the time of Pussy Riot’s infamous performance at a Moscow cathedral in February of 2012, which led to Tolokinnikova and Alyokhina’s imprisonment, the anti-Putin protest movement made the autocratic ruler very nervous.
Gessen sketches the history of the movement in her interview (and details it in the book). At first the protests involved the situationist antics of performance art collective Voina—“War”—(see Tolokonnikova, above at far right, with other Voina members in 2008). The feminist punk band has only emerged in the past three years, when Voina’s art-school pranks became Pussy Riot’s provocations days after Putin announced his intent to return to the presidency.
One month before the cathedral performance that sent Nadia and Masha to prison, the band appeared in their trademark fluorescent dresses and balaclavas in Red Square (top). Only three months prior, on October 1, 2011, they released their first song, “Ubey seksista” (“Kill the Sexist”) and—as members of Voina—announced the arrival of Pussy Riot, a radical opposition to the authoritarianism, patriarchy, and crony capitalism they allege characterize Putin’s rule.
In November of 2011, Pussy Riot staged its first public performance (above), scaling atop scaffolding and Moscow trolley and subway cars while scattering feathers and dancing to their song “Osvobodi Bruschatku” (“Release the Cobblestones”). The song recommends that Russians throw cobblestones in street protests because–as Salon quotes from the group’s blog—“ballots will be used as toilet paper” in the approaching elections.
The collective next released the video for “Kropotkin Vodka” (above), featuring a montage of public appearances in fashionable locations around Moscow. The locations were chosen, the band writes, specifically as “forbidden sites in Moscow.” More from their (Google-translated) blog below:
The concerts were held in public places [for] wealthy putinists: boutiques in the capital, at fashion shows, luxury cars and roofs close to Kremlin bars […] Performances included arson and a series of musical occupations [of] glamorous areas of the capital.
The song takes its title and inspiration from Peter Kropotkin, the 19th century Russian aristocrat-turned-anarcho-communist intellectual.
In their open letter publicly releasing their two most prominent members from the group, six members of Pussy Riot write that the “ideals of the group” Nadia and Masha have allegedly abandoned were precisely “the cause for their unjust punishment.” The two have become, they say, “institutionalized advocates of prisoners’ rights.” And yet in mid-December, 2011, the band performed their song “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests” on the rooftop of a detention center holding opposition leaders and activists. This was at the height of the anti-Putin movement when upwards of 100,000 people took to the streets of Moscow chanting “Russia without Putin” and “Putin is a Thief” and demanding free elections.
While most of us only heard of Pussy Riot after their arrest and trial for the cathedral stunt, their “breakthrough performance,” writes Salon, occurred one month earlier at the Red Square appearance at the top of the post. This was when the band decided to “take revolt to the Kremlin,” and coincided with promises from Putin to reform elections. “The revolution should be done by women,” said one member at the time. “For now, they don’t beat us or jail us as much.” The situation would turn rather quickly only weeks later, and it was with Pussy Riot, says Gessen, that the wave of arrests and beatings of protesters began. The band’s current schism comes just as the anti-Putin movement seems to be fracturing and losing resolve, and the future of democratic opposition in Putin’s increasingly belligerent Russia seems entirely uncertain.
From the paranoid fundamentalist tracts of Jack Chick, to Ronald McDonald promoting scouting, to an upcoming graphic novel explaining the science of climate change, comics and graphic novels have long been a means of both proselytizing and informing, condensing complex narratives into a digestible format with broad appeal. The medium is so elastic, it can seemingly adapt itself to any kind of story, even the most soberly serious and historically significant. For example, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, veteran of the Civil Rights movement, chose to tell his story—in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell—as a graphic novel called March (making him the first lawmaker to appear at a Comic-Con). Part one of three was published late last year and rose to the top of the New York Times and Washington Post bestseller lists. March has also become an important resource for teachers and librarians (download a free 11-page teachers guide from publisher Top Shelf here).
Lewis’ choice of medium may seem motivated by the current esteem in which the form is held in scholarly and popular circles alike, but he was primarily influenced by a much earlier civil rights comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. (See cover up top. Read it onlinehere.) Begun just five months after Rosa Parks’ historic refusal, the comic aimed to disseminate the epic tale of the Montgomery, AL bus boycott throughout the South. A section called “The Montgomery Method” (first page above) instructs readers on the nonviolent resistance techniques employed by civil rights workers in Alabama, with a primer on Gandhi and his influence on King. In the short video below, see NYU professor and King scholar Sylvia Rhor explain the genesis of the comic in the work of Alfred Hassler, then leader of Civil Rights organization Fellowship of Reconciliation. Hassler, a little-known figure who died in 1991, is now receiving more recognition through similar means. He himself recently became the subject of a graphic novel project (and now documentary) called The Secret of the 5 Powers about his work with Buddhist peace activists Thich Nhat Hanh and Sister Chan Khong during the Vietnam War.
As Rhor notes above, the King comic has had tremendous influence, not only in the past, and not only on Rep. Lewis in the present. In 2003–2004, The Montgomery Story was translated into Arabic, and Egyptian revolutionaries during the Arab Spring found inspiration in the comic book that “turned Martin Luther King into a superhero”
Her question? What do English cows sound like when they moo.
The knighted star does not skimp on his answer, even if, as he repeatedly suggests, one cannot do the subject justice in less than an entire afternoon. The dialects of British cows, like those of their human counterparts, underscore that theirs is a society “dominated by class, social status and location.”
The moo of a cow from West Oxfordshire, home to Prime Minister David Cameron, is quite conservative compared to the lusty bellow of a specimen from West Yorkshire, where Stewart grew up. (The latter is so astonishing, he immediately offers to produce it twice.)
Cockney cows, a breed whose ranks have thinned considerably since Shakespeare’s day, sound like sheep.
As an extra treat, Stewart generously agrees to the host’s request for an American cow, impersonating a Nevada-dweller, a geographic homage to the original questioner as well as his bride, jazz singer Sunny Ozell.
Is there anything this man can’t — or won’t — do?
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