Leveling down, by Dennis O’Neil

I’m sure that within easy walk of where I’m sitting, there are people who are wishing they’d done something else last night. The wages of sin are, indeed, death — death is the wages of everything, sooner or later — but sin can have some more immediate wages in the forms of headaches, sick stomachs, dry-mouth. The self-inflicted results of having a good ol’ time.

In Times Square, poor devils who work for the New York City sanitation department are busy cleaning up the detritus from the annual big hoo-hah. Watching it on television was like glimpsing purgatory: crowds and noise and chaos — not my idea of fun anymore, if it ever was. But the would-be poet in me is responding to the chilly, soaking sanitation men symbolize: get rid of the old to accommodate the new. Yeah, ‘t’was ever thus, but we resist the notion, which is really an incarnation of the inevitable, particularly in our national politics.

Given the kinds of things the candidates spend most of their energies fussing over, it would seem that we’ve learned nothing in the past seven years.

Is Hilary’s décolletage really more important than her voting record?

If I could confer one mitzvah on my fellow citizens, it would be this: We will stop being afraid of those who are smarter than we are.

Might we even consider putting them in office?

I mean, is democracy really about leveling down?

Ah well. Forgive the mini-rant. What else should we be talking about? Oh, right — popular culture. But I really haven’t seen many movies, the television shows are mostly reruns, and comic books…? There are two large cartons of them in the room behind me that I’ve barely looked at (though Mari’s read a number of them.) I’m just finishing a long and deadline-intensive project and when my daily work session’s done, I don’t want to amuse myself by doing anything that might remind me of the job.

I haven’t read a whole lot of non-comics stuff either, including two books by friends; I’ll mention them here and you can count them as this week’s Recommended Reading, though it’s policy around here not to recommend anything I haven’t actually gotten through.

Anyway:

Disguised as Clark Kent, by Danny Fingeroth.

Thank God for Evolution, by Michael Dowd.

Not a whole lot left to say. I’m even hesitant to wish you the traditional Happy New Year because the new year really began on December 22, when the days stopped getting shorter. But let’s not get too anal; we can smile tolerantly at some ancient’s mistake — said ancient(s) did come admirably close, given what he/they had to work with — and accept tradition and hope you don’t regret last night and…

Awww, you know…