Stephanie McMillan

I loved the premise of this book- a group of knitting friends who discover they have all been raped at one time or another and all the rapists have got off scot free, so they decide to take justice into their well exercised hands. With a little help from their knitting needles...
The book is crazy funny but also cuts close to reality (as all good humour must). There's a female cop who is, of course, never listened to. There are groups of men who don't believe in rape because the Bible...and enough governmental acronyms to choke several horses, even if they were BCHs (bigClysedale horses). Tongue firmly in cheek, it blasts the gormless and violent men of the world- makes them ridiculous.
The final triumph is a duel, but I must say no more...
It's a light read, sometimes over the top, but my golly it is worth the time!… (mere)

I had my suspicions about this book before I read it, thinking it would probably be some facile, hand-waving, propagandist claims about what other people said and how to change what we do, but it was sure to be a very quick read, being basically a comic/cartoon book. I was right about it in some ways, but wrong in others.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the book took digs at authoritarian control structures and pop culture propaganda, sometimes even in marginally intelligent ways. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that this was essentially an accidental symptom of a pathological, anti-rational approach to problem solving. It is as if the author of As The World Burns had never heard (by now overused and hackneyed) phrases like "correlation does not imply causation". There is no meaningful philosophy behind the core themes of this book that I could discern -- just some blindly accepted mystical assertions bolstered by nothing more substantive than talking mushrooms and manatees.

Yes, it is true (as this book asserts) that our authoritarian, corporatist, warlike culture is bad for us and our environment. No, it is not reasonable to live (or die) in a cave to save a mushroom. In fact, the arguments deployed in this book to the effect that it is reasonable to live in a cave to save a mushroom are, in many ways, self-defeating, as there is no meaningful ethical theory presented to adequately explain why it is okay to kill to sustain one's life sometimes but not others. There is only some vague presentation of the farcical notion of the "noble savage" and a mystical attachment to considering the feelings of inanimate objects such as rocks (yes, really, the rocks talk too, and they want to help us destroy industrialization).

This is the kind of writing that is meant to convince people by telling them to turn off their brains, even as the words tell us (correctly) that our brains are already pretty much shut down, acting only as passive receptors of propaganda. It seeks only to displace one form of anti-rational dogma with another.

I only stuck with it until the end because of the fact it is quick and easy to read a story told largely in pictures like this (and it took longer than I expected because I needed to come up from the propaganda for air), and I wanted to be sure there was not some satirical purpose in the ridiculous anti-rationality presented throughout. As Poe's Law tells us, "Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing." Put another way, any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from genuine, honest, crazy fundamentalism. I had to read the whole book to be sure this was the latter (fundamentalism), and not the former (parody).

In short, this book was even worse than I feared when I started.… (mere)

This is a very effective collaboration between syndicated cartoonist Stephanie McMillan and environmentalist author Derrick Jensen. The central characters of McMillan's comic strip "Minimum Security" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_Security ) comprise the main characters of the graphic novel. Compared to Jensen's typically long winded writing, his familiar core arguments, which he might normally take a hundred pages to develop (in heartfelt prose), here are established in a dozen pages of cartoon dialogue. Given it's extremely radical message, I'm curious how the average reader would feel about it though.… (mere)