Vivid characters, pace, voice, tension. Sci-fi world deftly mixes medieval with modern. A lot of familiar pieces put together in a fresh/brilliant way.

This afternoon I read some Facebook shit-talking about Lady GaGa refusing to join the Arizona boycott, and got this sinking feeling in my stomach… as in: oh no, another artist who I kinda like is punking out, refusing to confront the terrible problems in this country, trying to pretend like as an artist she’s somehow above politics…

But… after I read what Lady actually said and did, I think she’s a lot more courageous than the artists who stayed home instead of marching onto conflicted territory. And more than that: I think she sees her role as an artist to be inherently political. Which it is. And she’s ready to use it.

She went to Arizona. She played her sold-out show. And she was able to speak directly to 14,000 Arizonans, all of whom like her enough to shell out big bucks to see her. Some of those people (or at least their parents) probably voted for SB1070. Some of those people will be profiled under it.

“I will not cancel my show. I will hold you, and we will hold each other, and we will protest this state,” she said, stepping out with STOP SB0170 scrawled on her forearm.

“You really think us dumb fucking pop stars are gonna collapse the economy in Arizona? I’ll tell you what we have to do about SB 1070. We have to be active. We have to actively protest.”

“Do not be afraid,” she told the crowd. “Because if it wasn’t for all of you immigrants, this country wouldn’t have shit. And I mean it. I mean it so deeply in my soul.”

This is actually really exciting to me. I’m not anti-boycott. A boycott is like any other action strategy - one more tool in the toolkit, and we have to use whatever we can in the most intelligent, consistent, and active manner possible. But sometimes a boycott, especially if it’s done half-assed, as they often are, is just plain liberal bullshit. “Let me feel better about myself because I don’t shop at Wal-Mart, like my $9.99 is going to break the company’s back.” “Let me issue a public call for a boycott of Target, because that’s easy enough to do from my laptop, because Facebook spreads that shit so fast I can feel like I’m actually making a difference, instead of getting up out of my chair and really building something.”

Mao Zedong, who for all his, er, “complexity,” was a damn good political writer, said that one of the eleven main types of liberalism was this: “To work half-heartedly without a definite plan or direction; to work perfunctorily and muddle along.” From this I would extrapolate: To do random things and expect them to make a difference is a form of liberalism, because the truly revolutionary response - to engage in a systematic organized collective campaign of action - is a lot of fricking work. Because actually going to talk to the people who voted for a racist law, and try to get them to see reason, is really hard. Because talking to the people who are directly affected by that law, and showing them that you stand with them and support them, takes a lot more guts and courage and time and effort than staying home and looking down your nose at the people who are actually living it.

Who would have thought that Lady GaGa would be the one to remind us of this?