Silent Mob at HMNH

Running an event at the Harvard Museum of Natural History next Sunday, check it out!

Website: www.silentmob.wordpress.com

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Changes for Samantha

I received a copy of the American Girl catalog in the mail today, for some reason. I used to love the American Girl catalog. I spent most of elementary school optimistically marking up every issue with circles and stars, hoping that I might get more than one new doll outfit this Hanukkah (I never did. I also desperately wanted Kirsten's summer dress, and kinda still do). So I sat down with the catalog, prepared for a happy nostalgia-fest.

I knew the company had de-emphasized the core historical dolls in recent years, in favor of "girls of today." But I was pretty shocked to see that each historical girl (many of them strangers - I aged out of the series somewhere between Addy and Josefina) now only gets a two page spread in the catalog. Where's Felicity's four-poster bed? Where's Molly's canoe? Where's Samantha's school desk, with the wrought iron curliques for hiding notes? In fact... where's Samantha?!

Samantha is going back into the American Girls vault.

This? Not okay.

I know, I know, the American Girl books were designed to sell dolls. Insanely expensive dolls, and their insanely expensive (but oh so charming!) clothing and furniture. But, if memory serves, they were also AWESOME.

The books did an honest job of turning history into understandable narrative, and the dolls turned narrative into interaction. Their stories didn't shy away from tackling the darker issues of the girls' times, either - racism, classism, war, poverty, and child labor were part of these characters' lives.

Sure, the history was sometimes a little vague. I remember being totally confused about Molly's chronology. My interior monologue, circa 1992: "There's this huge war going on, and war is something that happens in the past. But she's got refrigerators and cars and stuff, so clearly this is present day. What war is this? Are we at war now? I'll sound stupid if I ask someone. I think I'll just stay confused until I'm 15."

But I also learned that poison ivy means getting covered with chamomile lotion (Molly Saves the Day). And that little girls with poor parents have to work bare-foot in factories (Samantha Learns a Lesson). And that the black character is always going to have the crappy story lines / accessories (poor Addy*).

My sadness at the loss of one of the original three girls (Molly and Kirsten are safe for now) is especially strong, I admit, because Samantha is MY girl. I had the doll, and her little white fur muff, and her sailor outfit with the whistle, and the change purse with the penny from 1904. We couldn't afford to get the matching clothes for me. But Allison Kresch wore Samantha's plaid dress to synagogue one Shabbat and omigod I was so jealous. So see! It wasn't only the books that taught about class differences!

I fear that Samantha's jettison is another step on the American Girl Company's path towards abandoning the historical line altogether. I hope that they are just cashing in on the Disney Vault concept, and will be periodically shelving each girl for a few years at a time to scare up sales. But it is all too likely that Samantha, Felicity, and Addy are being phased out to make room in the stores and catalogs for the likes of Madison, Brooke, and Taylor, with shiny little dolly iPods and dolly MySpace accounts.

The books aren't going anywhere, but the dolls themselves serve a legitimate purpose in a market glutted with Barbies and Bratz. Yes, they're only accessible to rich kids, and that's pretty gross. But rich kids getting decent dolls is still better than no one getting decent dolls. And if you're gonna buy a kid a $90 doll, she damn well better come with six novels worth of back story.

From left:
my Native American doll Lily (named for Tiger Lily),
my Romanian doll Stashie, and my Samantha.
And a Dalek, but he's a more recent addition.

*actually, Addy reminds me of Martha Jones. Both intrinsically awesome yet really poorly used by their series. Also, Kendra from Buffy. And Uhura.

The Doctor, The Middleman, and Sarah Connor Walk Into a Voting Booth

I'm interning for io9, Gawker Media's science and science fiction blog. After a new-hire probationary period of a month, I was finally assigned my own story. But after three complete re-writes, everyone came to the conclusion that the assigned premise didn't work, and my piece was cut. I'm not devastated, because I agree that it was a silly premise, but I still put a lot of hours into trying to make it work, so I'll share the final draft here.

If published, it would have included embedded polls after each entry.

The Doctor, The Middleman, and Sarah Connor Walk Into A Voting Booth…

We learned last week that Doctor Who is the favorite program of the Republican party, but which party is the favorite of Doctor Who? If Dr. Horrible whipped up an anthropomorphism device that transformed Life on Mars and The Middleman into registered voters, would Obama or McCain become the president of Scifi Land? We've broken down the politics of nine of your favorite shows to help you decide how each program would cast their ballots on Tuesday. Vote – it's your civic duty.

Doctor Who

When you look at the Doctor, do you see an anti-gun, bleeding-hearts gay icon with a massive guilt complex and a meddlesome need to make people better? Or do you see an old white man in a suit, who uses his power and privilege to cavort with young girls and topple governments that annoy him? It gets even more complicated if you try to compare individual regenerations. The Doctor of "Genesis of the Daleks" refuses to make a pre-emptive strike, but the Doctor of "The Christmas Invasion" will bring down a regime as punishment for the same - "Do I have the right?" vs. "I can take down your government with a single word."

Firefly

What do you get when you put the veterans of the losing side of the Civil War into space? You get Firefly, the show that mixed left-wing social values and right-wing economics with a heavy dose of frontier libertarianism. True mavericks Mal and Zoe fought against the ultimate big-government of the Alliance, and now try to live under its radar, stealing from the rich and selling to the poor. Individual freedoms are paramount to the crew of the Serenity, of both the traditionally liberal and traditionally conservative variety; all that matters is that they be left alone by the government. You can't take the sky from Mal – you'll have to pry it out of his cold, dead hands.

Middleman

The Middleman fights evil so you don't have to – big government hand-outs in the extreme. His apprentice Wendy is a struggling artist and her roommate Lacey is a tree-hugging animal rights activist who would be less likely to vote in a polling booth than to turn it into a vampire-puppet theater. But a conservative could easily latch on to the Middleman's Eisenhower-era stylin's and emphasis on modesty and propriety. The Middleman is constantly ribbed for his old-fashioned ways, and yet these ways are shown to be pretty darn effective at saving the world. Are the Middleman's values a parody or sincere?

Torchwood

Let's just get the obvious point out of the way. They're bisexual. Everyone, the entire cast. Nay, the entire city of Cardiff. All bisexual. It's good times. But there are also a lot of big honking guns that get waved around willy-nilly – none of the firearms skittishness of the Doctor's liberal side here - and Captain Jack and his crew have a tendency towards conspiracy and cover-up. Did I say Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11? Silly me – here, have some Retcon. And Ianto truly embodies the spirit of the Republican DIY bootstraps work ethic, working his way up from the mail room (and into the boss's bedroom).

Life on Mars

The progressive reading is pretty clear here. Sam Tyler, 21^st century liberal, wakes up in 1973 and rails against the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the Nixon era (as well as his colleagues' ignorance of computers). But although the viewer is supposed to agree with Sam that these retro ideals and heavy-hitting police tactics are best left in the past, a conservative viewer might note that Sam's weak-handed, suspect-friendly techniques are often shown to be less effective than Gene Hunt's tough-on-crime approach. Additionally, if Sam is in fact in a coma in 2008, then the series makes a pretty compelling argument for not taking people off life support.

Dr. Horrible

Dr. Horrible thinks the world is a mess, and he just needs to rule it. He scoffs at Penny's community-organizing on behalf of the homeless, and his solutions include a Freeze Ray that will stop the world – conservatism taken to a literal extreme - and good, old-fashioned world domination. The antagonist superhero, Captain Hammer, is a handsome meathead who uses his muscle to bully people – sound like any nation you might be a citizen of? But in the end Hammer's bullying and posturing are intended to root out horribleness and evil. A League of evil, in fact. You might even go so far as to call it an Axis. Think of Captain Hammer as George W. Bush, taking down the bad guys while remaining someone you'd like to have a beer with, and Dr. Horrible as Al Gore, kind of dorky and trying to save the world through inconveniently extreme methods.

The X-Files

The X-Files placed a huge emphasis on first amendment rights and freedom of information – secrecy and conspiracy are huge no-nos. Scully was a devout Catholic, but religious issues were drawn with the same brush as supernatural phenomena. Plus, Mulder really liked porn – big plus one for the right to privacy. But the show also featured a deeply ingrained suspicion of big government, and of course our heroes were all strongly against alien immigration. And come on: the guy's name is Fox.

Sarah Connor Chronicles

SCC is all about the guns and the militia training – second amendment rights are pretty strongly supported by all involved, and pre-emptive strikes against threats to the Connor clan are sometimes warranted. On the other hand, Sarah Connor herself is a single mother – a demographic catered by the Democrats. But the future U.S. Military created Skynet, a massive defense system that would eventually gain sentience and destroy mankind, all in the name of homeland defense - Sarah certainly does not welcome these new robot overlords. And let's not forget the franchise's connection to the state of California and its Republican Governator.

Star Trek: The Original Series

So you had your interracial, interspecies cast, complete with interracial, interspecies canoodling – daringly liberal for its time. And that Prime Directive thing is basically the antithesis of the Bush Doctrine. But then again, Captain Kirk did have a tendency to ignore the Prime Directive when necessary. And since Kirk never trusted a Klingon and never will, he also retained some of that Cold War paranoia into the post-Alliance era. It must also be mentioned that, depending who you ask, a couple members of that romantically liberal crew may have been just a wee bit closeted.

Feel free to rail against io9's political agenda in the comments while you predict the vote of other fine citizen-series. And remember, if you're not happy with the results of the real election tomorrow – you can always move to Scifi Land.

Don't mind the traffic...

Well, I just doubled the number of posts I've written here in the last two months! Sorry to clog your rss feeds or whatever, just posting some audition pieces for a blogging gig. Will let you know results, obviously. (and feedback welcome on the posts!)