Obviously, I didn't have time for a Halloween special this year (enjoy last year's if you must). Though I suppose there's something Halloweenish about Kakeshya's orange scarf in the new Venia's Travels. Also, an astute observer will see two pumpkins in the backgrounds of several panels.

Yesterday I went out to lunch to a sushi place I used to go to all the time and I was surprised to find it completely deserted. I didn't even see the help. The place never seems to have its lights on in the middle of the day, though, so it was dark and the air was thick with dust, which, now that I think about it, was odd. Normally the big widescreen TVs have sports on, too, and they were off. I wandered in a few steps but I guess I'm too timid a guy to just start saying, "Hello."

The sushi at this place is really cheap, which is why I go. I can get a decent plate for ten dollars, but lately I've been wondering what the trade-off was. This came to mind yesterday when I noticed the absolutely pervasive stench of bad fish in the empty place. Fish gone bad, yes, but not so much like it spoiled in the sun, but I'd swear it was something worse, like bacteria unknown to man had colonised on and mutated the fish guts.

I was beginning to think the place had just been abandoned. Maybe the manager was the only person working that day and she had had to make a bank run but forgot to lock the door. I felt sort of bad because the manager had gotten familiar enough from my frequent visits--she was a nice little old Japanese lady.

Anyway, I was about to go outside, when I heard what I thought was either a woman crying or groaning. A sort of protracted moan, but barely audible. I walked around the bar and saw something real fucking weird. The light was dim, so at first I had only an impression of moving fishy parts--undulating like dark lava. White rimmed gills trembling as they pulled apart and rhythmically snapping shut again. Tentacles pulling through the junk like lazy ballerina worms, their suckers catching on broken and blackened fish scales. Then I realised there were something like human eyes in the mess, lost in various crevasses and glittering in the grey light.

There were other human pieces, too, oddly deflated and indistinguishable from the fish bits. A leg barely recognisable for the odd fish ribs filling out the places where the kneecaps should be. Still less identifiable pieces of human flesh sagging across like a balding man's comb-over. The moan started to rise in pitch, into something like a plaintive scream, but the impression of human emotion vanished as the pitch rose past levels reachable by human vocal chords.

I ran, not from fear, really, but because the sound was actually painful. My shoes sloshed through about an inch of cloudy mucus on the floor I'd somehow not noticed before and a salty smell filled the air.

Well, I have to go to my parents' house now. Happy Halloween, everyone!

The new Venia's Travels is online and, boy, are my arms tired. My eyes, too--it's only 4am and somehow they're drooping. I think I'll reward myself by watching the new Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. It's not been fansubbed, so I'll be relying on my spotty Japanese. He's like ninety and covered with liver spots. Still, I'm looking forward to it.

Normally Hayate no Gotoku parodies a variety of different manga and anime series and I was surprised to find the episode I watched this morning contained a reference to the short Sherlock Holmes story "The Speckled Band" and a reference to Dick Cheney shooting someone in the face. It's strange when American politics pops up in Japanese television. I suppose Cheney shooting someone in the face must be one of the strongest impressions someone living in a foreign country might have of American politics.

I also watched a bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail while eating, and for some reason when The Knight Who Says Ni tells Arthur to cut down a tree with a herring, I decided to look up "herring" in Wikipedia. Wikipedia said, "Herrings are focus of many jokes as a result of a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the Knights who say Ni ask King Arthur to 'cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with ... a herring!'" Life seems to be about odd loops and reflections so far to-day.

There's something wrong with that sentence, isn't there? I shall fix Wikipedia . . .

"Herrings are the focus of many jokes as a result of a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the Knights who say Ni ask King Arthur to 'cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with ... a herring!'"

There. I am a Wikipedia hero. Setsuled the Wikipedia Editor. Like Joe the Plumber or Roger the Shrubber or Howard the Duck. Will the (name) the (occupation) jokes ever run their course? Not until the coming of Rob the Killjoy, perhaps.

Can you believe I'm actually considering doing NaNoWriMo? I just want to breathe work, it seems.

First of all, happy birthday Natalie.

I just finished watching Barack Obama's 30 minute infomercial. It felt like an infomercial. I like Barack Obama, though I can tell if I didn't this infomercial would not sway me, but, then, infomercials never work on me. Still, it deepened the feeling I have that, if he loses, it's going to be one of the saddest days in the world.

I do think it was smart of Obama to really push the hope theme. I think it shows both a real sense of the country's current psychology and a storytelling sensibility of where the country, as an audience, wants to go next. From just about every corner of reality it seems like there's despair and the Republican platform has been essentially just to wave rancid meat in front of our faces. The Obama message seems to be, "Isn't it time we had a glass of water and maybe some carrots instead?"

When I was in line at the grocery store to-day, a girl cut in front of the guy behind me. She only had a loaf of bread and he had a full cart and most people would probably have asked her to go ahead of them in any case, but the girl didn't ask. The guy didn't say anything, and I think he was paralyzed by the fact that this girl was really cute. She may've been a stripper or a waitress at Hooter's because she was wearing tiny red shorts and a tight white shirt over breasts that weren't terrifically large, but slightly more than one would expect from a girl so short and skinny.

She stood really close to me, and I think she was trying to find a way to get ahead of me, too. But she was clearly afraid of setting her loaf down before one of those divider bars became available, fearing maybe the catastrophe of the cashier scanning both her items and mine together and a potential scoundrel like me not lifting a finger to stop it. So she's cheeky enough to cut in front of a guy, but setting her groceries down without the divider bar was an unthinkable breach of etiquette.

I had two other stores to go to afterwards, and I couldn't stop looking at pretty girls. It was like the first girl had sparked something. Then I just couldn't get over how many nice looking girls there are in the world. I remember my friend Marty, when he was my film teacher in high school, once talked to the class about how people in movies assume a certain standard of beauty that is above the standard of the average person on the street. That might be true--I don't see a lot of close-ups of passers-by. But I'll be damned if reality's female extras aren't perfectly fine in my opinion.

At Target, I saw there's a new, two disk DVD edition of Vertigo. Looks like it has the same commentary as the edition I have as well as one new commentary. I can't believe I'm actually tempted to buy it just for that one new commentary.

Anyway, Caitlin's posted links for purchasing her books to-day, and, as usual, I'm reposting them here 'cause I still love the lady.

Daughter of Hounds

Silk

Threshold

Low Red Moon

Murder of Angels

Tales of Pain and Wonder

Last night I dreamt that outer space was underground. Which was eerie--it made me wonder what the fuck was in the sky.

There was some kind of haunted mansion space station I was wandering around in and I remember at one point being in a large elevator that shot out of the ground. There was a little boy with me and I remember saying, "Kid, don't look out the window or you'll get sick." I woke up then, wondering if not looking out the window might have been more likely to make him sick.

I just got back from my parents' house where my mother served squash stuffed ravioli with pumpkin sauce. I liked it, but I like anything pumpkin flavoured except pumpkin beer.

It was walking back here that I finally remembered I'd forgotten to watch the new Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I'll see how much I've gotten done by 5am before I decide whether I'll watch it to-night. So much to do. I still have to colour the last two pages of chapter 11 and of course I would write an especially difficult to draw script for 12. I am rather happy I've maintained an ability to write scripts without being too influenced by whether or not they'll be easy to draw.

I listened to The Daily Show while colouring last night and found Jon Stewart's interview with Campbell Brown kind of annoying. It seemed to be an encounter extending from the same half-formed irritation that sparked Stewart's outburst on Crossfire. Brown talked about how her "no bias" show is meant to cut through the prevalent false equivalency in news media, though from what I've seen of her show it is itself indulging in that false equivalency. Stewart refers to Keith Olbermann as though Olbermann is the equivalent of Bill O'Reilly, which seems to me an outgrowth of Stewart's own confused self hatred incited by right wingers he tries to give a fair shake to.

I've seen no evidence to suggest Stewart is any less left leaning than Olbermann. Neither of them do anything on the level of fact distortion and propaganda of Bill O'Reilly. That's what makes O'Reilly bad for the news media, not the fact that he's right wing. Campbell Brown is generally just sort of lukewarm. Her starmaking pwning of Tucker Bounds resulted from the simple situation of Brown behaving how interviewers ought to behave with a witless McCain surrogate and his completely empty argument. The fact that the McCain campaign was infuriated by the interview has more to do with that campaign's paranoia and stupidity than Campbell Brown's talent. So CNN saw her as someone they could market as an alternative to what has been publicised as the left/right poles of Olbermann and O'Reilly. CNN tying to be current always feels like Alan Greenspan trying to discuss teenage sex (see D.L. Hughley and Anderson Cooper).

One of the things I've been listening to while colouring has been the videos of Neil Gaiman reading his new book, The Graveyard Book, on his blog. I finished it last night and I liked it. Gaiman creates a small, but very detailed world in and around a graveyard, the details emerging naturally from the protagonist's, Bod's, interactions with the world and the people in it. The first portion of the book feels like a collection of short stories about the same character, which adds a great deal of tension to the climax, as Gaiman has introduced with the earlier vignettes simultaneously the crucial shaping of Bod's character and enhanced the verisimilitude by lingering in seemingly non-crucial but interesting details of the world.

By the end of the book, it feels as though Gaiman's considering chess moves, and the valuable pieces are those that have been given significance earlier in the book but which one wouldn't necessarily expect to take the stage as they do. I think it's built well for enjoyable multiple reads, because things like the Ghoul Gate and Liza the witch have interest as they factor into the forward movement of the story, but could also be dwelled upon for their individually nice renderings even after the reader knows how things have ended up.

It's interesting listening to an author read his book before an audience. I find my reaction to the material was modified a bit by the audience reaction, sort of like a sitcom, I suppose. Things like the recurring device of each new ghost being introduced with his or her epitaph were things I would have found interesting on paper, but the fact that the audience laughed at them made me laugh, too.

I also noticed every Neil Gaiman book I can think of since Sandman has been about someone getting caught in an unusual, supernatural event, sometimes finding in him or herself supernatural abilities, and using these and/or some cleverness, to defeat the villain. With the exception of Coraline, it's always boys or men, as far as I can recall. I don't really mind this formula, since he does it well, but I would be interested in seeing him try something completely new. At the very least, I hope he explores using female protagonists more. I love female protagonists. I love females.

To-day I dreamt I ran into Harrison Ford at Disneyland. He was dressed as Indiana Jones and we had an awkward conversation until he mentioned his dissatisfaction with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Then we sort of bonded as we talked with increasing enthusiasm about all the film's bad points, from the lacklustre climax to the lousy, overused cgi. Then we got to talking about the father and son stuff and Ford listed off reasons it worked in the third movie but not the fourth, and I just smiled and nodded because don't think it really worked in the third movie, but I know a lot of people disagree and I sort of respect the opinion.

While colouring yesterday, I listened to RiffTrax of The Happening. No offence to those of you who maybe enjoyed that movie but . . . I was overtaken by the gale force levels of utter crappiness and immobilised by the unrelenting clueless silliness of this film. And it made for what was easily the best Rifftrax so far. Two comparisons to Monty Python from the Rifftrax crew were so fatally apt one is forced to conclude (surely against some evidence to the contrary) that "M. Night Shyamalan" takes himself so seriously as to have absolutely no reliable perspective on what he's pumping out to his audience. To be fair, this is the first movie of his I've seen since The Sixth Sense.

I've been trying to remember what Monty Python sketch it was where people started throwing themselves out windows but I could clearly see it and nothing else when the mannequins bodies started falling off the building in Happening. What's the buzz, tell me what's . . . THE HAPPENING. Mother of Zeus, what a fucking name. I envision Shyamalan walking onstage naked but for a green tutu and shouting, "I am the Spirit of the Forest come to exact irrevocable vengeance! The Time is now!" and not understanding why everyone in the audience starts laughing. The Rifftrax people didn't even comment on John Leguizamo's and Mark Wahlberg's oddly breathy line deliveries. Like Shyamalan was constantly telling them, "Not so loud, you're scaring me!" I wanted Wahlberg's character from The Departed to come in and start pistol whipping shrubs.

I was a little disappointed there were no "Don't bring your evil here" jokes.

RMG posted this. It bears repeating.

I just caught a bit of D.L. Hughley's new Daily Show knockoff on CNN while eating lunch. It's about as lousy as his short lived Bill Maher knockoff show on Comedy Central was. I switched it to Graham Norton then and saw that Goldie Hawn was on. She talked about being so happy one day while stopped at a traffic light while listening to Elton John that she got out of her car and started dancing. Then the guy in the car behind her got out and started dancing with her. I don't think I like Goldie Hawn.

Michael Powell's movie Peeping Tom was on TCM, and I haven't seen it in years, but I had too much to do. I only just to-day finally finished the script for chapter 12. It was difficult. I may've been overthinking it. The solution I came up with for what seemed to me a very complicated problem turned out to be very simple. I'll do rough sketches later to-night then draw the first page to-morrow. Maybe the first two pages. Except I've only got two pages of chapter 11 coloured, so I suppose I oughta allocate more time for that.

Nothing much else to report. I watched Hayate no Gotoku and Excel Saga with breakfast. I wanted to revisit Excel Saga because I heard Nabeshin, the director and one of the main characters of Excel Saga and Puni Puni Poemi, makes an appearance in episode 32 of Hayate no Gotoku. I am proceeding towards enlightenment.

Remember what I said about zealots pushing the delusional answers to equations that rational people would have different answers for? To-day I read about a good example, the story of a young white woman, a McCain supporter, who claimed to have been attacked by a large black man when he saw her McCain/Palin bumper sticker and claimed that the man then carved a "B" in her cheek. Turns out the young woman was lying and that she carved the B into her own cheek. It's like To Kill a Mockingbird on the scale of national politics. I'm sure if Ms. Todd had been able to convincingly fake evidence of a sexual assault, she'd have done what Sarah Palin has told her is the patriotic duty of rape victims and purchased her own rape kit.

I sure hope this gives Obama a three billion point lead.

While eating dinner this morning I watched the first episode of True Blood, a live action American shojo series. It's not so bad--it's filmed prettily enough, Anna Paquin's decent. It's fairly predictable, but with the glass of shiraz I had last night, it was kind of sweet.

Giving a backhanded compliment? Me?

I watched the final episode of Top wo Nerae 2 this morning, and it was mostly disappointing, as always. The second Gunbuster series really peaks at the fourth episode, though five's not so bad. The problem with the final episode is its failure to interestingly convey the scope of what's happening--the idea of using Earth as a projectile weapon might be impossible to really show, but so's most of the really amazing things in both Top wo Nerae series. The great thing is when they make it work dramatically, even if we sense it's not quite accurately. One of the highlights of the second Top wo Nerae is its astonishing sound design, which I'd not have sacrificed for the realism of soundless space.

But the final episode of Top wo Nerae 2 isn't without its good points, the best of which being its augmentation of one of the first series' most interestingly employed plot devices, the idea of time loss for those travelling at faster than light speeds. Top wo Nerae 2 actually ends at exactly the same moment as Top wo Nerae 1, despite the fact that the sequel takes place more than a thousand years in the future. We see the escape pods of the first series' protagonists, but the show ends before actually bringing the characters on screen, which helps to underline the strangeness of these people who've come across such a vast ocean of time. The fact that the general style of character designs is vastly different in the 2004 series from the 1988 series also helps underscore the eeriness of the anachronism; what could these character look like when they emerge from the escape pods? We never find out.

I think Top wo Nerae's final episode succeeded where its sequel's finale failed. Where Top wo Nerae 2 failed to impress me with its Earth attached to a ring of jet engines, the original Top wo Nerae's massive egg shaped black hole bomb carrying the remains of Jupiter in its core towards the centre of the galaxy does inspire a feeling of awe.



There are a few different things, I think, that contribute to this success, but I'd say that primarily its director Hideaki Anno's decision to have the episode coloured in black and white. Some segments are reduced even further to rough pencil drawings and I think the impression this creates overall is of visions that strain the capacity of human perception. The big egg bomb, particularly, contrasted with the white nebulae has something of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. And the more washed out black and white of the earlier sequences on Earth help establish the vast amount of time that's passed for Amano while only months have past for Noriko as she fights the space monsters.

By the time one reaches the sixth and final episode of the series, it's difficult to believe it began as a parody of Top Gun and Ace wo Nerae (Aim for the Ace), a Japanese girls' series about a young woman's training to become a tennis star and her relationship with her aloof coach. On the face of it, the idea of combining the two in a single parody sounds like a rich foundation for comedy; the unselfconsciously silly, serious as a heart attack focus on learning tennis in Ace wo Nerae combined with piloting machines of war and Maverick's issues with his deceased father have the right elements of wrong and absurd to make good comedy. The image of the fighting robots in the first episode running laps around a high school like the tennis players of Ace wo Nerae is funny in itself. But for a mere parody, why spend so much time carefully designing the ships and machines and why take pains to add an air of realism to the series physics? No modern anime series works as hard on the details as the Gainax series of the 80s, Top wo Nerae being no exception.

Gainax was still a very new studio in 1988--just a couple years earlier, the studio had been six guys making what was essentially fan art, and everything they produced had the marks of passion and dedication, even if not everyone was a hundred percent sure what they were doing. So why all the details for a parody? Because someone wanted to work out all those details. The same reason the series stopped being a parody at some point and became its own thing. Probably it was Hideaki Anno gaining a director's perspective of the disparate elements and realising that the uniting factor was a love for the characters as well as a love for making anime.

It makes me wonder when Anno's going to try making something new again. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to the next Rebuild of Evangelion movie, but Anno can be such an interesting and surprising director with new material. Both Top wo Nerae and Neon Genesis Evangelion are series that essentially went off their initially proscribed rails and could easily have been disasters, but Anno successfully wielded the chaos.

I need some coffee and dental floss. These are my mission parameters for when I leave the house again in a moment. I just returned from my parents' house where I watched some Sherlock Holmes with my sister while I installed a bunch of antivirus things on her computer.

I'm not as under the gun to-day as I have been. To-night I need to pencil and ink the last page of Chapter 11, then to-morrow I'll write the script for Chapter 12, do the rough drawings on Friday, and draw the first page on Saturday. I'll be one day behind schedule, which is a vast improvement. I could catch up, too, if there're any really simple pages in 12. I bet there won't be, though. Meanwhile, I'll need to finish colouring 11. But I'm reaching a production groove I feel good with. I mean, I always got everything done by deadline before, but never as soon as I liked. I think at this rate I might be moving into a slightly more responsible schedule.

I still can't believe Chapter 11's going to be online before election day. Egad, why can't it be sooner? This is far too much time for McCain to make up some preposterous thing that'll schnooker the undecideds.

When I got in a few minutes ago, Snow the Cat was waiting for me on the porch. I love cats.

I watched the new Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles while eating breakfast to-day. I was so happy to find it wasn't as tremendously awful as the previous episode, of which I can't remember many details, which is probably for the best--

Wait. Flashes are coming of Sarah with a kid, John and the beefy guy from 90210 doing military things, and Cameron awkwardly inserted in a pickup close-up when people obviously panicked about her not having been onscreen for a while. It's true, the episode would've been better off focusing on her, but it was a silly moment in a silly episode.

Anyway, the new episode was decent. It felt oddly like a stereotypical "woman's episode". From all the emphasis on childcare, the new Terminator sent from the future being an attractive woman for no apparent reason, beefy 90210's girlfriend showing up from the future so he can be seduced by her despite being upset she's apparently a deserter, and even the T-1000 was trying to be more nurturing to the little girl she's keeping. I actually found it all more charming than anything, and at least nothing happened that didn't make any sense. Well, except for the new T-888. Why even make big terminators if the little ones are just as strong? We've already been told Cameron was made for infiltration.

I got a lot done last night. To-day I plan to get even more done, so I'll get back to it. I'm hoping I'll have time to clean my room, too.

"All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people."

The new Amanda Palmer album is reminding me of Taxi Driver, I meant to mention. They both seem largely concerned with a character's dissatisfaction with the world, a dissatisfaction that is at times irrational due to the person's self-imposed remoteness from society. Both pieces also deal with feelings of ineffectuality and loneliness. "Loneliness has followed me my whole life," Travis says at one point. I'm always reminded then of how little this mindset has to do with the actual circumstances of the character's life and how much it has to do with his own mind.

Already I'm much further ahead to-day than I was yesterday at this time, having managed to wake up at the bright and early hour of 2pm. For some reason, dialogue for Kakeshya keeps coming to me in Japanese.

Last night I worked pretty much non-stop until 1:30am when I decided I needed some excitement, so I went to the grocery store and bought some tea. On the way, a rabbit ran across the road in front of me and I barely stopped in time. It actually seemed to arc slightly towards my car. I've seen rabbits do this lots of times--as though my approaching vehicle is a sign they'll soon be denied access to the wonderful opposite side of the street.

After buying tea, I went to Denny's where I saw a bunch of cops run out into their cars and speed away.

I watch about an hour of anime while I eat breakfast every day, and lately I've been watching one episode of Hayate no Gotoku! and one episode of Top o Nerae. Hayate no Gotoku! continues to be good, especially the tenth episode written by the author of the manga exclusively for the television series. It involved a few of the periphery characters getting caught in a RPG video game and having to negotiate certain logical fallacies and cliches of the particular video game genre, including characters who die without actually being killed (a coffin appears around one character in which she hops about for the rest of the episode), drawing "aggro", and a ridiculously busty villainess who's forced to say "tima" at the end of every sentence--a parody of a certain kind of cuteness imposed on characters in anime and Japanese video games.

Well, I'll get back to the drawing now . . .

I woke up at 4pm to-day. This after I'd determined to get up a little earlier. I accidentally stayed up watching Stripes. When Bill Murray's girlfriend dumps him at the beginning of the movie, the reasons she gives to him are;

"Nothing's changed . . . You sleep until noon and then you watch Rocky and Bullwinkle. And then you drive your car, what, a couple hours? You come home and you order out food and then you play those stupid Tito Puente albums until two in the morning! . . . And then you watch movies until dawn and then--then you come to bed with me . . . You're going nowhere, John. It's just not that cute anymore."

And I thought, gods, that's probably pretty close to how my life would look in 1981. Replace Rocky and Bullwinkle with anime, Tito Puente with Charlie Parker, the girlfriend with an empty bed, and the only thing really lacking is Internet, my comic, and my blog. I have to wonder what Murray's character was doing while he listened to the Tito Puente albums.

I spent an obscenely long time at Tim's house playing Soul Calibur 4 yesterday before coming back here at midnight and colouring until 4:30am. Then I watched Stripes while eating dinner. I'd better get some drawing done now . . .

There's a rather astonishing video on Huffington Post of Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann equating liberalism with anti-Americanism and calling for an investigation of which members of congress are anti-American.

It's curious what she asks for is a media investigation instead of a congressional or independent council investigation. If members of congress are traitors, doesn't that require something a little more serious than an "expose"? Similarly, the robocalls from the RNC mentioned in the clip that accuse Obama and Democrats of being linked to terrorists concludes he therefore lacks the judgement to lead the country. I guess it's sort of like saying Adolph Hitler should not be in charge of the FDA.

I'm not sure the people levelling these claims realise how ridiculous they are. I think they figure telling people how bad they think Obama actually is won't make enough of an impression, so they finish the equation for us, giving us the result of where they think liberal philosophies will take us. They continually try to establish a significant tie between Obama and Bill Ayers, a former member of a terrorist group called Weatherman, suggesting Obama's in the habit of "palling around" with Ayers and that Ayers is unrepentant.

Yet, Ayers has not attempted terrorist activities since Weatherman was active in the late 60s and early 70s. I looked at Bill Ayers' blog to-day, and I was struck most by how unremarkable his political views seem to be. Not an unlikely character to serve on the board of an anti-poverty group. The rightwing line is that Ayers is unrepentant, but unrepentant about what, exactly?

We were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful. - Bill Ayers

The townhouse incident he refers to was The Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, where three members of Weather Underground were killed when a bomb went off prematurely. Apparently they were planning on taking human lives, but the actions of the group after the incident clearly indicates they later decided against this tactic. Ayers insists he's not a terrorist, and decries al-Qaeda's attacks on 9/11, but if one defines terrorism as actions designed to inspire terror to produce desired effects, I think even the Weatherman bombs that did not take life could be seen as acts of terrorism.

But Ayers refers to the United States' actions in Vietam as terrorism, which, considering they were designed to scare the world away from Communism, they in part were.

So when Michelle Bachmann is talking about Obama's anti-Americanism, and Ayers' unrepentance, it seems more likely that, fundamentally, she's referring to Obama's position on the Iraq war and the Bush Doctrine. How different is Bachmann, Palin, McCain, and most of the Republican Party from the Weather Underground? The Weather Underground's professed motives were to stop the war in Vietnam, and members talked of being enraged by the deaths of thousands people in Vietnam. If they'd been thinking rationally, they'd have seen their actions would not have ended the Vietnam War and in fact would likely intensify the vehemence of their opponents. But it's understandable why someone would feel angry and helpless while thousands are being murdered, and wanting to take some kind of drastic action to stop it. Sometimes, I think, fear of the dark parts of ourselves gets confused with the fear of What Has to Be Done.

To-day's Republican Party is afraid of losing power, of anti-war philosophy being legitimised by a popular vote. They're afraid of "aliens" because they see cultural and biological differences as inevitable threats to safety. This is why conservatives are such big proponents of "states rights"--they don't want Massachusetts' liberal civil rights infecting other parts of the country. They know these views will not be accepted, so they present only what they see as the logical answer to the equation--destruction. In the process solidifying their own delusions.

I'm a liberal, and I have a lot of liberal friends, and when I hear one of them talk about how they hate America, I know they're talking about prevalent fears and policies in America aimed against innocent people. But unfortunately, simply saying things like "I hate America" tends to make the Michelle Bachmann's sound a little less crazy to the otherwise uninformed. This adds fuel to the truly scary people showing up at McCain rallies. In the absence of a better educational system and promotion of it in this country, we have to be very careful these days of running afoul of the stoked delusions of others.

Of course, for a better educational system, we'd need what the right wing refers to as a "big government" . . .