Ion’s blog

This book is decidicated to my sister Sally, who, when she was very young, rendered me two profound services. She awakened my protective insticts; and she provided, if not my earliest childhood memory, then certainly my most charged and radiant. She was perhaps half an hour old at the time. I was four.

Uno desear

Ara

Seat Metalero, para ti, joven gre

Copyright law shouldn’t make criminals out of 60 million Americans, and it’s time for a change. Congress is going to hold hearings; we need your help to make sure that the public’s voice is heard. Tell Congress that it’s time to stop the madness!

“I just feel that these people are bullies,” said Grokster President Wayne Rosso, a member of the P2P United trade group, which offered to pay Torres’ bill. “They’re like the show-business version of the Taliban.”

No s

Forget G.I. Joe. Since Sept. 11, a new generation of war toys has arrived — action figures and accessories pegged to the imperial zeitgeist and designed with historical specificity against a backdrop of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s Tora Bora Ted, a Ken-style doll manufactured by Dragon Models, who with his grenades and machine gun can help kids reenact the taking of Osama’s mountain aerie. The black-beret-clad Talking Iraqi Dis-Information Minister, sold by Herobuilders.com, proudly proclaims, “There are no American infidels in Baghdad!” For the more politically savvy youngster, Herobuilders recently rolled out a Talking Le Worm figurine whose choice phrases include “I vetoed you again, you stupid American cowboys,” “Go ahead, boycott France, I don’t care,” and “I’m a little puppet.”

[…]

Then there are the products that appear to have abandoned any pretense of play and moved directly into the realm of political cheerleading. The Topps Co., best known for its trading cards of sports heroes and entertainment figures, rolled out a hot-selling line of Enduring Freedom Picture Cards shortly after Sept. 11. The series featured “American heroes” President George W. Bush, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, among others, and had a clear message for its young audience: “Kids need to understand that the President (and his team) will keep them safe and that evil-doers will be punished,” the Topps Web site boasted. “Our cards deliver the details in a medium with which they are familiar and comfortable.”

[…]

Taken individually, perhaps the new war toys really are just another “consumer choice,” an easy marketing cash cow for retailers riding the coattails of foreign intervention, a trend filtered in among more innocuously war-themed toys like Hasbro’s G.I. Joe Search and Rescue Firefighter, or Fisher Price’s Rescue Heroes Jake Justice and Billy Blazes, that too have surged in popularity since the Sept. 11 attacks. But consider action figures like the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit G.I. Joe. Modeled on one of the first U.S. units to enter Afghanistan after 9/11, the Hasbro doll “searches caves that pockmark hills to flush out hidden enemy fighters” and is “a certain force in an uncertain war,” a motto ripped straight from the 26th MEU’s Web site. Or you might have seen the guerrilla Easter baskets stocked by local Kmart and Walgreen’s stores earlier this year. Nestled among the jellybeans and chocolate bunnies were toy soldiers bearing machine guns, knives and grenades. Taken together, do these new war toys go beyond play and into the nefarious realm of selling war to children?

Y mientras en EE.UU. las jugueter

Have any reporters noticed how we actually live here in America? With very few exceptions, our cities are hollowed out ruins. Our towns have committed ritualized suicide in thrall to the WalMart God. Most Americans live in suburban habitats that are isolating, disaggregated, and neurologically punishing, and from which every last human quality unrelated to shopping convenience and personal hygiene has been expunged. We live in places where virtually no activity or service can be accessed without driving a car, and the (usually solo) journey past horrifying vistas of on-ramps and off-ramps offers no chance of a social encounter along the way. Our suburban environments have by definition destroyed the transition between the urban habitat and the rural hinterlands. In other words, we can’t walk out of town into the countryside anywhere. Our “homes,” as we have taken to calling mere mass-produced vinyl boxes at the prompting of the realtors, exist in settings leached of meaningful public space or connection to civic amenity, with all activity focused inward to the canned entertainments piped into giant receivers — where the children especially sprawl in masturbatory trances, fondling joysticks and keyboards, engorged on cheez doodles and taco chips.

No es cuesti