Mike > Recent Status Updates

Alright, fine, the political parties are basically the same. You have finally shown evidence of this. Now was that so hard?

So is this gonna be an exploration of how teenagers reconcile religion and sex? Because I'm definitely not against the idea. It's just unusual to see McVoy write about something this heavy.

Wait, did you just blame capitalism for cancer? I mean, I guess some cases of lung cancer and skin cancer can be attributed to pollution that would've been preventable if not for big corporations holding back policy to stop climate change. But that's not responsible for the majority of cancer cases, at all. You can't blame capitalism for all of the problems. No matter how socialist you are, you gotta admit that.

Wow. This writing is... pretty bad. McVoy is usually pretty good at giving her characters realistic voices, but this is trying way too hard.

I'm getting connected to Amanda, more than I expected to. If there's one thing to be said for this book, it's strong characterization.

Pinny and Ray's relationship is so repetitive. Three times now, Ray has tried to abandon Pinny, only to realize she can't stand to leave her alone. That's their entire relationship: Ray has to take care of Pinny, but she doesn't want to, so she runs away, then she comes back, Pinny forgives her. Give me something new!

Alright, I can do this. The book is almost done, I can make it through.

I feel like, at times, Zinn is just reporting on public ignorance. Like, with the protests against nuclear plants - nuclear plants aren't nearly as dangerous as most people think they are. Just because there's mass protest doesn't make the protesters correct.

None of these characters are at all developed. They're barely even cardboard cutouts - it's like the idea of characters having personalities didn't occur to Barry.

I had no idea the Persian Gulf War was that destructive. That was a compelling chapter.

I thought maybe this was supposed to be partly or entirely satire. But no, that last scene made it clear, I'm supposed to be taking this pretty seriously. In which case, this cartoonish world just doesn't work on any level.

Amanda, Leo, just celebrate your birthdays together. Then you can end this loop. It's so obvious.

Again and again, Zinn says that political parties make little difference in how America is run, and again and again, he refuses to back it up with any evidence. Zinn, all you have to do is show me a Republican making a decision entirely for the business interest, and compare it to a Democrat making a similar decision. How damn hard is that?

I gotta say, this book really does itself and its message a disservice by making its capitalist hell so cartoonish. There's no subtlety here, and while there are technically no infodumps, there might as well be, because all the concepts are so obvious and simple. There's very little original or insightful about this world - it's the same blind anti-corporatism that kids movies have.

Y'know, this might be kind of interesting, if Ray and Dalya weren't the exact same character. That makes the scenes that weren't terrible on their own pretty difficult to enjoy. But this book is almost over - I'm almost free.

I thought that when this character collected women's clothes and shoes, that meant he was a trans woman. But nope - it was an indication that he was gay. Because that's what gay men do, right? They wear women's clothes? This book makes me sick.

Boy, Howard Zinn of the late 70s. If you think prisons are bad now...

I already know how this is gonna end - it doesn't take a genius.

I knew Zinn was a hippie.

I guess this section isn't too bad. Not that there's anything particularly good about it, but the writing is getting less awful. There's still tons of telling instead of showing, but it's at least less cheesy.

A Nightmare on Elm Street reference? Seriously? What is this, 1988?

(I'm having a lot of trouble finding things to say about this book. It's passable in a pretty nonspecific way.)

Pretty good chapter, no complaints here. I already knew a lot of this, although I suppose I didn't know just how militant a lot of the civil rights movement was.

I can barely focus on anything for more than a few pages - be it the flimsy story, the nearly-identical characters, or the overwrought images - without coming back to how horrendous the writing is.

So, I'm not enjoying this, but at the same time, I can't find any actual problems with it. It's painfully cheesy, but I was too when I was in fifth grade. I can't exactly knock on Mass for portraying eleven year-olds accurately. So it accomplishes its goal, the problems are just trivial and cringe-inducing to an older audience.

That was one of the flimsier arguments in the book - no matter why the war is fought, I still feel like it was a war that had to be fought. Zinn's argument also relied on contradictions - he complains that America didn't cut off trade when Italy invaded Ethiopia, but he turns around and says that the embargo with Japan was inviting aggression.

No chapter about Mean Girls? That's kind of disappointing.

I think this makes four chapters so far that consisted substantially of descriptions of worker strikes. Did Zinn really decide this was more important than the annexation of Hawaii, or the lives of black people in the Reconstruction Era?

I don't always like Fey's personality, but I'm pretty much convinced that she's not putting up very much of a front here. I buy the personality I'm seeing as the real Tina Fey. I dunno if I should or not, maybe she's just a good enough writer to fake it, but the reading experience stays the same either way.

If you want to convince someone to change their mind about something, you first have to address, in detail, all of the person's reasons for holding their prior belief. So if Zinn wants to convince me that Wilson entered America into WWI to fight socialist rebellion, he can't just briefly address the sinking of the Lusitania, he has to talk in detail about the Zimmerman Telegram and Gemany's submarine warfare.

I don't know how to analyze this. It's funny because it's funny.

Didn't I already read this chapter? I get it - things sucked for workers, socialism grew as a result. Zinn just gets more and more obviously biased as the book goes on. He'll give tons of detail about the strikes and protests from the workers, but gives exactly one example of how the reforms of the Progressive Era were as puny as he says, and zero examples of how the political parties were as similar as he says.