Well, the Daily Show book has been pretty fantastic so far. It's constructed as a faux American Government school textbook, and deftly evokes the sort of fascist hagiographic historical narrative that i remember being righteously indignant at having to pretend to pay attention to in fifth grade as Robin Tang and i secretly constructed draconic taxonomies in the back of gina kane's classroom. (The popular kids sat on the opposite sides of the classroom, with the girls on the side near the door, and the boys near the windows. Those of us who spent lunchtime recess saving the worms from predatory magnifying glasses, or constructing mythological suburban fantasy realms inhabited by telepathic insectoids, or creating and practicing secretive rituals involving bovine phonetics were exiled, partially by choice, and partially by the weight of the scorn of both our classmates and our teacher.) Textbooks are a site at which the nation is imagined and at which the imagined nation is reproduced (and i'm probably stealing this or rehashing or presenting an inferior rip off of a friend's three year-old Border Feminism paper i haven't read, but as Kurtis Blow might have said, them's the breaks,) and thus there's something both particularly subversive and particularly effective about Stewart et. al.'s project. Particularly devastating are the "Discussion Questions" at the end of each chapter, such as "If 'con' is the opposite of 'pro,' then isn't Congress the opposite of progress? Or did we just fucking blow your mind?!?" and "Remember that old Schoolhouse Rock cartoon about the bill who sings a song about how he becomes a law? Hey, and what about the Snorks? Remeber them?" (Of course i remember the snorks. I can still sing the fucking theme song, but that's neither here nor there.) Incidentally, i think everyone needs to stop what they're doing right now and thank mark bellhorn. Thank you mark bellhorn. Alright, wat was i talking about? Oh yeah, the Daily Show book. Yeah. the whole textbook thing is a completely brilliant idea, and i wish i'd though of it. And it's 12:23 am on a weekend, and i've lost the will to blog at the moment. I'll be more lucid later. Swim along with the Snorks!