Definitely Unround

There are different ways to create a Lego Robin, including the life-size statue shown in the last weekly Robin and the figure created for the Lego Batman set and games and cake.

But the one above gets extra points for tackling a tough challenge. It was posted by crises_crs to Flickr’s CubeDudes group in 2010.

Here’s another take on the same subject from Angus MacLane. That one actually shows the green trunks.

The Right-Wing Campaign against Health Insurance

This week’s exploration of OIP Derangement Syndrome comes from Norm Ornstein of the center-right American Enterprise Institute writing in the National Journal

When Mike Lee pledges to try to shut down the government unless President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely, it is not news—it is par for the course for the take-no-prisoners extremist senator from Utah. When the Senate Republicans' No. 2 and No. 3 leaders, John Cornyn and John Thune, sign on to the blackmail plan, it is news—of the most depressing variety. . . .

to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its [the health-insurance reform law’s] implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one's breath away.

Reuters reported on another aspect of this campaign:

Americans for Prosperity launched a $1 million TV ad campaign against the healthcare law this summer to test its message in swing states of Virginia and Ohio. The 30-second ad presents a young pregnant mother who asks questions that suggest the law will raise premiums, reduce paychecks, prevent people from picking their own doctors and leave her family's healthcare to "the folks in Washington."

The group plans a bigger push on TV and social media to persuade young people, especially men under 30, to see the healthcare law as a high-cost liability directed at them.

That group’s old ally, FreedomWorks, is actually trying to convince young people to refuse to join the health-insurance system. That’s right: these right-wing groups are campaigning to convince young pregnant women and men under thirty from obtaining health insurance.

Andrew Sullivan adds

I should realize this by now, but the current GOP clearly believes it is the only legitimate governing party in the US and its response to a loss is to intensify its rage. They never forgave Clinton for being re-elected; and the idea they’d let a black president leave a legacy behind is obviously inconceivable to them. And yes, that’s calling them irrational and not a little racist. But how else do you explain people who are actively attempting to persuade young adults not to get health insurance?

Editing Dahl

From Stephen Roxburgh’s recollections of editing Roald Dahl’s The Witches thirty years ago, just published in Publishers Weekly:

On May 16, I sent Roald our American copyeditor’s queries, three closely typed pages of minutiae, most of it involving using American English rather than British English. Roald wrote, “I don’t approve of some of your Americanisms. This is an English book with an English flavour and so it should remain.” Here are a few examples:

“elevator vs. lift: I agree elevator for ‘lift’ because most American children simply won’t know what ‘lift’ means.

“candy vs. sweets: I do not agree ‘candy’ for ‘sweet.’ Your children will know what sweets are and anyway it’s important for the witch to say “Sveet-shop.” So no candy or candy-shops, please.

“tuna fish vs. fish-paste: I won’t have ‘tuna fish’ for “fish-paste.’ Please keep this Anglicism. It’s a curiosity even over here.”

I’m pleased that even though Dahl began with a broad statement about “Americanisms,” he made his actual choices based on how well the text would communicate to young American readers.

Also notable in this article is that Dahl originally thought The Witches needed a more conventional ending, as forecast in its original beginning: “I myself escaped twice from the clutches of witches before I was eight years old, and for that I have to thank my grandmother.”

That Part about Not Needing Money in Oz? That’s Off.

The Disney by Mark blog is reporting that the Disney corporation is preparing what a lot of us expected ever since O.Z. Diggs landed in Oz in the middle of a waterpark ride: a theme-park spin-off of Oz the Great and Powerful.

It will reportedly become part of Disneyland in California, replacing an attracton based on old western movies:

DbM has it from reliable sources that our friends at Imagineering are finishing up concept and show design for an Oz land (or area) and Oz attraction based on the movie Oz the Great and Powerful. It will be located where “Big Thunder Ranch” now stands. An alternate location was at the old Motor Boat Cruise next to it’s a small world, but fire-safety issues with the monorail precluded it.

It is anticipated that the area will have one E-ticket ride and two C-ticket attractions. A restaurant similar to the Magic Kingdom’s “Be Our Guest” but placed in the Emerald City, and a Munchkinland-themed retail store will also be included. Show elements will include a hot air balloon, tornado effects, giant bubbles, and Dark Queen Evanora’s army of Winkies and flying baboons. Word is that China Doll will be featured in the ride. The final attraction mix will be decided shortly, and DbM expects that the announcement about Oz land will be made at D23.

I don’t know the Disney jargon or how reliable this source is. Many of the blog’s commenters are skeptical or dismayed by the prospect. There’s plenty of time for plans to change or develop before the threatened sequel.

For now, the Hollywood studios’ biggest Oz attraction remains Sony Studios’ giant arching steel rainbow, shown above. Sony didn’t produce any beloved Oz movie, of course, but decades back it bought the M.G.M. studio lot, which includes some areas involved in producing the 1939 movie.

The Real Story of Horton the Elephant

When Dr. Seuss was asked about the genesis of his 1940 picture book, Horton Hatches the Egg, he usually told some variation on the story quoted here at Mental Floss:

I was in my New York studio one day, sketching on transparent tracing paper, and I had the window open. The wind simply took a picture of an elephant that I’d drawn and put it on top of another sheet of paper that had a tree on it. All I had to do was to figure out what the elephant was doing in that tree.

Charles D. Cohen’s “visual biography” of Seuss is titled The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss in part, I suspect, because it seeks to get to the truth behind such anecdotes.

When it comes to Horton Hatches the Egg, Cohen shows that:

• Seuss had drawn a whale up a tree for Judge magazine in 1927, a dachshund hatching a stork’s egg for Life in 1929, and a walrus hatching eggs in a tree for Judge in 1931.
  
• He had drawn elephants with wings for Life in 1930 and a book called Spelling Bees in 1937.
  
• He had drawn an elephant sitting on an egg for Life in 1934.

And in 1938 Judge published a one-page “Dr. Seuss Fable” titled “Matilda, the Elephant with a Mother Complex,” about a childless elephant who sits patiently on a chickadee egg, enduring the scorn of her fellow animals, until it hatches. Matilda didn’t go up a tree to do so, but clearly Horton Hatches the Egg had been gestating in Dr. Seuss’s mind for years rather than being inspired by a fortuitous breeze.

The really significant changes are that all those previous cartoons and stories had been for adult audiences, and almost all presented the odd mammal as misguided rather than heroic. The egg-sitting walrus was part of “The Truly-Dumb Animal Shoppe”; the first winged elephants were the product of delirium tremens; the elephant from 1934 cracked the egg’s shell.

As for Matilda, she managed to hatch the chickadee, but it took one look at her, “cried out in terror,…and flapped off frantically.” The moral of that story is: “Don’t go around hatching other folks’ eggs.” That, of course, is quite a different outcome from Horton’s pride at hatching an elephant-bird.

When Dr. Seuss went back to that idea as a recently-hatched children’s-book author, he was able to embrace the nonsense of the image of an elephant in a nest in a tree and create an ending that adults might know is unreal but which rewards Horton. For young readers, Dr. Seuss took his old elephant who defied convention and made him heroic rather than pathetic.

The Seuss, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Seuss analyzes other oft-told aspects of Dr. Seuss’s life as well, such as when and why he adopted pseudonyms and the critical response to The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. It’s worth a look.

Robin Statuary at Comic-Con

This weekly Robin features photos of two statues of the Boy Wonder on display at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con.

On the left is an inflatable figure of Robin from the Teen Titans Go! cartoon, about two stories tall, courtesy of Bleeding Cool. I think he’s supposed to be pointing the team into battle (“Teen Titans, GO!”), but given the way the balloon was positioned, I couldn’t help but perceive him as making fun of Raven.

Below is a smaller sculpture of Robin as he appears in the Batman Live arena show—the US version, not the British one I saw. (The US costume includes extra arm pads and those red patches on the outer thighs.) This life-sized figure was constructed of Lego blocks.

For someone who started reading comics forty years ago, it’s striking how “off model” these images of Robin are. Back in 1964, DC Comics felt it had to trumpet “New Look” when it modernized the style of its Batman comics to make them more like the rest of the line.

Twenty years later, the company had to show Jason Todd wearing the exact same costume as Dick Grayson and dyeing his red hair black so as to mollify its licensees. Already readers (and characters) were pointing out the deficiencies of that outfit. And surely some folks in Gotham City might have noticed that a young former circus flyer started dyeing his hair (how many young teen boys do that?) just when Robin reappeared at Batman’s side. But the need to keep the art “on model” trumped logic.

The success of Carrie Kelley in The Dark Knight Returns might have assured DC that its fans didn’t need all Robins to look alike. A couple of years later the company commissioned a new costume from Neal Adams for Tim Drake.

That costume in turn influenced how Dick Grayson dressed in DC’s Animated Universe and, with futher modifications, in its televised Teen Titans offshoot. We’ve since seen new designs for the 1990s Batman movies, for new Robins, for Batman Live, for the Arkham videogames. Each variation, of course, makes it easy for established fans to identify which Robin is which, and each represents a new possibility for collectibles.

It now appears that the original “model” Robin costume never existed in the “New 52” universe. In other words, as these competing statues demonstrate, we’re all “off model” now.

Back to Slumberland

The good news from Comic-Con: IDW will publish new adventures of Winsor McCay’s little Nemo in Slumberland by top comics talent.

The great news: One of those creators is Eric Shanower.

The baffling news: He’s doing scripts, not art.

I've seen Eric’s McCay homages, most prominently in Promethea. I can’t imagine anyone doing them better. The other guy had better be good.

The IRS and OIP

With each week, it becomes clearer that the scandal about the Internal Revenue Service supposedly scrutinizing conservative “Tea Party” groups more strictly or slowly than other organizations seeking tax-exempt status was the product of OIP Derangement Syndrome.

The roots of the dispute go back to the founding of the Tea Party, a right-wing reaction to Barack Obama’s election as President. We have to remember that the immediate inspiration in 2009 was a television commentator’s rant about a policy that the administration had never proposed. In other words, from the beginning the Tea Party was based on fearful delusions, not reality.

Then in 2010 the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote overturned decades of precedents in the Citizens United case, opening the door for 501(c)(4) corporations to advertise and otherwise engage in political campaigns without revealing their funders. Naturally, that appealed to lots of groups engaged in some political activity. Many of those were “Tea Party” groups—some genuine grass-roots organizations, some “Astroturfed” fronts for established lobbies, and a few probably scams to enrich their organizers at the expense of gullible OIP Derangement Syndrome sufferers.

All 501(c)(4) corporations are supposed to be “social welfare” organizations, and under a 1950s statute they’re not supposed to benefit just a few people or to be involved in politics at all. But drawing the line between political and “social welfare” activity is hard, so the IRS ruled that such corporations had to devote less than half of their activity to politicking.

Those rules require the IRS to determine who benefits from a 501(c)(4) corporation’s work and how much effort it puts into politics. In fact, the rules require a detailed examination. If the corporation spends 51% of its efforts on political campaigns, it’s not eligible for tax-exempt status; if it spends 49%, it is. The only way the IRS can determine the facts is by asking each organization for answers and documentation.

Of course, it was tough for Tea Party groups to document that they weren’t putting most of their efforts into political activities since they were founded as political organizations. They advocated particular policies and campaigned for or against particular candidates. Many Tea Party members told the media that they’d never been involved in politics before joining the movement—and yet for legal advantages Tea Party groups told the IRS that they weren’t primarily involved in politics at all.

One of the traits uniting and defining the American right wing, including the Tea Party, is paranoid resentment of the government—at least when it’s not offering them benefits and advantages. This attitude became even more pronounced under President Obama. So some of those groups complained to a sympathetic ear: Rep. Darrell Issa, who already showed signs of OIP Derangement Syndrome.

Issa demanded that the IRS investigate whether it was scrutinizing applications from Tea Party groups more strictly than others. Inspector General J. Russell George found that the agency had circulated “Be On the Lookout” (BOLO) lists warning that groups using the terms “Tea Party” and “Patriot” might be primarily political and therefore not eligible for tax-exempt status. This actually seems like common sense, but it would be discriminatory if the agency had done this only for groups on the political right.

IRS managers set up a way to divulge George’s report. It produced a wave of outrage in Washington. People lost their jobs. There are court cases pending. But that wasn’t enough for people with OIP Derangement Syndrome. They insisted, without having any evidence, that the Obama administration had instigated the extra scrutiny. They declared that this scandal was “worse than Watergate.”

Since then, however, we’ve learned that:

• The IRS also issued BOLO lists for terms like “progressive” and “occupy/occupation.” Groups on the left also faced scrutiny; they just weren’t so whiny about it.
  
• George’s report itself stated that most of the corporations undergoing special scrutiny weren’t “Tea Party” groups. The only organization that actually lost 501(c)(4) status in recent years was on the left.
  
• The BOLO lists and instructions all came from the IRS’s Cincinnati office, according to manager who described himself as a “conservative Republican.”

And there remains no evidence that the White House was involved at any level.

Issa demonstrated his OIP Derangement Syndrome by releasing partial transcripts of testimony. leaving out parts that undercut his delusion of a political conspiracy. He complained when Rep. Elijah Cummings provided us with a fuller picture. But Issa had really been acting from OIP Derangement Syndrome all along. As The Hill reported:

The Treasury inspector general (IG) whose report helped drive the IRS targeting controversy says it limited its examination to conservative groups because of a request from House Republicans.

A spokesman for Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, said they were asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) “to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations.”

This week George said he had never seen the documents about scrutiny of groups on the left. But Issa hadn’t asked him to look for them. Under OIP Derangement Syndrome, he was convinced that wasn’t necessary.

Sorting Out Genres and Modes

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are overstuffed (sometimes literally). Fellow fantasist Bruce Coville credited her, especially at the start of the series, with putting more neat stuff into every chapter than anyone else. But the books also hit all the buttons for several storytelling genres at once.

There’s the genre of the British school story, itself a subsection of coming-of-age narratives. There’s the mystery genre, as Ken Jennings noted. In some books there’s the sports-book genre, where conflicts get worked out on the playing field. And of course there’s the chosen-one-battles-against-evil genre, which many people mistake for all fantasy.

In fact, I don’t think fantasy is a genre at all. It’s what I call a mode. Genres are defined by the plots readers expect: detective solves puzzling crime, couple gets together, gang pulls off heist (or not), soldiers carry out mission, chosen one defeats evil, and so on.

In contrast, modes are defined by their settings and what is possible in those fictional worlds. The major modes I see are:

• contemporary realistic—stories set in the world that readers recognize as like their own.
• historic, and thus constrained to some extent by past events.
• fantastic, breaking the currently known laws and limits of physics. This mode could be defined through science (science fiction) or magic (fantasy). 
• heightened, in which coincidences, emotions, and stakes are turned up a couple of notches above the realistic. When played for laughs, this produces farce. When played seriously, it’s melodrama.   

Genre stories can be told within each of those modes. Thus, there are mysteries set in a fantasy world, romances told in the historical mode, sports stories with extraterrestrials, crime novels either farcical and melodramatic, and so on.

Rowling as a Mystery Writer All Along

Last week’s revelation that J. K. Rowling has published a pseudonymous murder mystery sent folks back to the archives for clues they wished they had seen all along: her remarks that she might publish under another name, a brief mention of a Scottish mystery she was trying out.

But the most perspicacious commenter was probably trivia master Ken Jennings, who wrote back in 2007:

I read the Harry Potter books as enormously sophisticated Scooby-Doo mysteries.

Structurally, these aren’t fantasy novels at all. They’re fair-play mysteries in wizard’s clothing–novels with not just plots and characters and setpieces, but “solutions” as well. J. K. Rowling is justly praised for her elaborate and meticulous world-building, but I’m convinced that a lot of that endless detail is just there for standard detective-novel purposes: to distract, to confound, to envelop the real “clues” in a Cloak of Invisibility. . . .

Rowling seems to draw more from the Agatha Christie tradition: a multiplicity of colorful “suspects,” many with hidden agendas; red herrings galore; and a final drawing-room exposition-fest in which Hercule Dumbledore explains How It Was Done.

Just as in a murder mystery, the guilty party is always the least likely suspect. . . . Some of these reveals even involve the Hogwarts equivalent of a Scooby-Doo rubber mask coming off the crotchety caretaker: Quirrell’s turban, Pettigrew’s Animagus disguise, Barty Crouch, Jr.’s Polyjuice Potion. “Like, zoiks, Hermione–it was Old Man Milligrew all along!” . . .

I bet Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter book–talk about a hard act to follow–will be a classic mystery of some kind. I don’t know if it’ll be a hard-boiled gumshoe case, a true-crime police procedural, a classic manor-house throwback, or what, but it’ll be a mystery novel. She’s been writing them all along, after all. It’s just that no one’s noticed.

And couldn’t Rupert Grint play a fine Shaggy?

TOMORROW: What this should tell us about genre.