Beyond Where You Stand
Website of Jesse Karp
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Bible-toons?!?
Thursday, August 27, 2020
What Puts the Evil in Evil Geniuses?
Evil Geniuses is Kurt Andersen's work of (recent) historical and analytical journalism. It seeks to recount and explain how a group of very wealthy conservatives used their money to alter the public consciousness and influence politics to bolster their own profits, and in so doing set the country on a path of social, economic and climatic ruin.
In his review of the book for the New York Times Book Review, Anand Giridharadas discusses how Andersen closes the book on a note of hope (I suppose you'd technically call this a spoiler, but I doubt anyone's reading this book for a shock ending). Just as the conservatives stole the world out from under the liberals back in the 1970s, when liberal power appeared to be at its height, so too can the liberals now take back that power and steer the country away from destruction. They must, Andersen suggests by way of Giridharadas, simply use the same cunning, the same manipulation, the same power-grasping practices that were once -- and continue to be -- used against them and the rest of us.
But here's what worries me. What if it's the abandonment of self-limitation, the willingness to steamroll over everything else in order to get what you want that is the actual problem? Granted, we are not in a good place right now and granted the liberal route is far preferable in terms of both humane existence and just plain old survival. And granted, the methods they are currently using have not seemed sufficient to the enormity of the task. But what if, in doing ANYTHING you need to in order to win, you become something different than you were, and the extreme level of power you wield simply sends us toward ruin, just a different kind at the other end of the spectrum? What if how you do something is just as loaded with consequences as what you do?
Thursday, May 21, 2020
The Coronavirus Novel I'm Not Writing

Monday, March 23, 2020
Not a Dystopia

Reading is an excellent way to spend some extra time inside. I find that reading books which allow me to conceptualize and understand the problem we're facing help the most. Two books that get right to the heart of things are:
Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick - For my money, this is Philip K.'s best (no small claim in a field of forty-four novels and one hundred and twenty-one short stories). While it doesn't appear so at first, this is very much about how higher powers deal with times of crisis. If you believe the article linked in the second paragraph of this post is about how powerful people try to alter the narrative, or if you believe it's the people who wrote that article that are trying to alter the narrative, Time out of Joint will still resonate for you.
The Plague by Albert Camus - A work of literature that reads like an existential thriller (at times), it has much to say about how people deal -- and fail to deal -- with the particular sort of trouble we're in now.
Maybe you prefer books that get you far away from the problem. I get it. If so, have a look at this, instead.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Prince Valiant's Bartender
So, when you know a comic artist (Gary Amaro, in this case) and you happen to be in the right place at the right time, maybe you end up behind a bar, serving some mead to Prince Valiant himself. That's what happened to me in the February 16th, 2020 installment. Thanks, Gary!