Zine Foo

Reptiles Magazine has an awesome cover critter this month: an adult male veiled chameleon in full display, with a baby veiled climbing on his casque. I couldn’t find the photo at the Reptiles Magazine website, so I pinched this photo from sell.com, where someone is selling baby veiled chameleons for $39 (a decent price).

This bad boy is in full aggressive display. You can tell by the black highlights, the vivid colors, and the jutting chin. His mouth is either gaping or about to gape. What pissed him off? Chances are, another male veiled. Chameleons are, to my knowledge, unique in the degree to which they despise one another. Even as tots, they will put on a vigorous show of aggression and, yes, fight each other.

In the 90s, Karen tried to raise veiled chameleons and a few other species as well. Turns out it’s easy to get them to breed. That’s the one time two adults won’t fight one another. Nevertheless, in veiled chameleons mating is not the sedate, ritualized act the nature programs would have you believe. Think Rhett raping Scarlet, with Scarlet raping Rhett right back, and you’ll have some idea of the excitement of a C. calyptratus mating.

Yes, they’ll breed and lay eggs readily enough, but getting the eggs to hatch, that’s a bitch. Even with a professional incubator, our yield rarely exceeded 10%. Not our most successful business venture, but much more fun than cleaning earwax.

Art Spiegelman (you probably know him best as the creator of Maus) has crafted a great cover for the June 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Once again, I tried finding a copy of the cover at the Harper’s website, but they’re still stuck in May mode. The cover is a cartoon showing eight stereotypical images: a black Sambo, a greedy, big-nosed Jew, a bucktoothed Asian, and so forth. Spiegelman’s article deals with the notorious Danish cartoons — and, yes, Harper’s Magazine has chosen to reprint them in full.

Spiegelman has written a brilliant piece on the history of political cartooning, and he caps it off with his critique of Danish cartoons. He rates them with a one-to-four fatwa bomb scale, a nice touch. I enjoyed his insights, and besides, any essay which pops effortlessly from South Park to Al Jazeera deserves a shout.

Also in this issue of Harper’s, novelist Kevin Baker gives us a long but meaty essay, “Stabbed in the Back,” which serves both as history and exposition of present day Republican tactics. His premise: Republicans, like post-WWI Germans, have opportunistically seized on the meme of the backstab, the betrayal by one who is close at hand. His commentary on WWII, Korea, Douglas MacArthur, and the Vietnam War was an eye-opener for Karen and me. I’m not sure I agree with his final conclusions regarding the Administration’s inevitable failure to make the same meme work vis-a-vis Iraq, but his analysis is certainly unique.

Most provocative of all is Ben Metcalf’s notebook entry, “On Simple Human Decency.” Metcalf takes over from Lewis Lapham, who has edited Harper’s for eons. His question for us is this: “Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down [deleted to keep Walnut from getting kidnapped and sent to an Eastern European torture camp] and kill him with my bare hands?”

He takes this question through some amazing and hilarious permutations. I don’t think Chimpy’s handlers will let him read this one any time soon.

On one level, this editorial works as satire, but Metcalf also has intelligent things to say about the law which forbids people to speak or write any threats against the president. But the essay flabbergasted me. I couldn’t help but think, “This guy has grapefruit-sized balls, writing this thing!” Which is why he’s featured here on Balls and Walnuts, naturally.

D.