In the autumn of 2010 I decided to stop following politics so closely, in part to focus on my fiction writing, but also because I was getting sick and tired of all the Tea Party nonsense and could see the handwriting on the wall in terms of how the midterm elections would turn out. I still kept half an ear on the news, though, since I needed to know what was going on for my teaching work and other reasons. It was in those pregnant weeks before the midterm elections that the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, famously declared that after the Republican landslide that was about to come, “The single most important thing [they] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Inter-party animosity is hardly something to generate headlines, but it is not, nor should it ever be, the primary guiding force of a politician, let alone a political party. Your primary objective, as an elected official, is to serve the needs of your constituents, whether you believe those needs to be increasing or decreasing the role of government in any particular area. This may ultimately result in other elected officials being voted out of office, but that is always a secondary goal, an effect of the policies you put into place as opposed to a cause. Even if your main goal, deep down, is to get rid of a politician you really despise, you at least put on a veneer that your primary goal is to put your policies into action. McConnell’s naked admission that Republicans were primarily interested in stopping Obama’s reelection efforts should have been a red flag to independent voters that Republicans didn’t deserve their vote, but the anti-Obama furor drummed up by the right, combined with apathy on the left thanks to Obama not acting strongly enough to rescue the working and middle classes from the recession, were too much for Democrats to overcome in 2010.

Republicans playing chicken with the debt ceiling in 2011, and other similar acts of brinkmanship, garnered the most attention after that election, but one of the (many, many) things that hasn’t received as much scrutiny as it deserves is just how little Republicans have actually done since the 2010 midterms. In the first congressional term since those midterms, fewer bills got passed than in any other congress in recorded history, less than a quarter of the number of bills the “Do-Nothing Congress” of the late 1940s. Part of the reason for this is that once Republicans took the house back over they promptly reinstated the ridiculously untaxing schedule that was a hallmark of their previous tenure leading the House, with the House of Representatives only scheduled to work 126 days this year. Worse yet, House Republicans are outright wasting what time they do spend in Washington by repeatedly and pointlessly voting to repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act; this week marked the thirty-seventh time in the past thirty months House Republicans have voted to “kill Obamacare,” even though all these efforts were destined to die in the Senate, let alone overcome an inevitable Obama veto. I understand holding one vote for symbolic purposes and to get congresspeople on the record, but thirty-seven votes in less than two and a half years is nothing short of absurd, a head-smackingly obvious sign of how Republicans are more interested in playing petty games for their base’s amusement than in doing any actual business.

Americans didn’t seem to mind so much in President Clinton’s second term when Republicans went impeachment-crazy over the Monica Lewinsky thing, mostly because the economy was going gangbusters and people were so fascinated with the Internet that they weren’t noticing how much harder they were having to work to maintain their standard of living. We are far, far from those conditions right now. Even as corporate profits and the Dow Jones Industrials and S&P 500 hit record highs, unemployment continues to move at a snail’s pace, and both working-class and middle-class Americans are still suffering the effects of the most recent recession because all that money corporations and their CEOs are making isn’t trickling down (not that it ever did). This is a time when strong government action to bolster the economy is needed, but instead of getting good action, or even bad action, now one of conservative America’s biggest think tanks is literally telling elected Republicans to do even less than they’ve already been doing, to stop doing the work they were elected to do in order to devote their time to fluffing up the aura of scandal surrounding President Obama right now.

To be sure, two very legitimate scandals broke this past week: Revelations that IRS agents illegally targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny, and the US Attorney General’s office admitting to the Associated Press that they secretly subpoenaed the home and work phone records of AP employees in what, at first blush, appears to be a massive overreach of power. Although there’s no serious suggestion that President Obama was personally involved in either of these scandals, they still need to be investigated and resolved thoroughly. (I don’t like how some liberals have tried to smokescreen the IRS scandal by pointing out how ridiculous the tax laws are in allowing political groups to get tax-exempt status; that’s a legitimate point that needs to be addressed soon, but conservatives deserve time to voice their outrage right now.) Unfortunately, these legitimate scandals are getting obscured by the very Republicans who should be the most eager to pursue them because of the false scandals they’ve ginned up for their bloodthirsty base — everything from Benghazi to Umbrella-gate (no, I am not kidding about that last one) — to the degree that trying to keep track of all the ridiculous claims the far-right is making about Obama is now a full-time job.

That’s the thing, because there are already lots of people whose full-time job is pretty much fanning the flames about all bad things, real and perceived, about President Obama and Democrats. From talk radio, to Fox News Channel, to the rapidly-growing beyond-the-fringe efforts like The Blaze and InfoWars — outlets based on such absurd paranoia and conspiracy theories that they give tinfoil hat aficionados a bad name — America already has more than enough people working to discredit Obama and the Democratic Party in the media and push a radical conservative agenda. If more people want to get into that business — and I guess I can’t blame them because clearly there’s a market for it, and people need to make money — then maybe they should go into that as a full-time job.

If you are an elected member of the House of Representatives or the Senate, though, you already have a full-time job, one that you have taken an oath of office to fulfill. It may not get the hoopla of a presidential inauguration, but it is no less important or sincere of an oath. If you no longer want to perform that job because you are more interested in trying to scandalize another elected official than do the people’s business — the business you were elected to do — then you should resign your office and allow someone who will do that job to take your place. Say what you will about Sarah Palin — I certainly have — but at least she had the decency to end her tenure as Governor of Alaska when she decided she’d rather be a right-wing media darling and cultivate her little cult of personality than do a governor’s job. Similarly, the conservative think tank responsible for this “Hey Congressional Republicans, stop passing bills so you can slam Obama all the time” missive is headed by Jim DeMint, who left his job as a Senator from South Carolina months ago in order to lead the think tank.

It’s no great secret that Republicans, starting shortly after the Reagan Revolution, deliberately sabotaged government departments they didn’t like by cutting their funding and appointing people who weren’t interested in handling the duties that those departments are tasked to handle. When Democrats got back in power, Republicans then said that these departments needed to be cut even more (if not eliminated) because “clearly” they weren’t effective (because they were sabotaged), and as Republicans and Democrats have traded power in Washington this cycle has no less than devastated numerous government offices. If Republicans are going to pull what is effectively the same tactic on an entire branch of government, then it may soon become impossible for Congress to do, literally, anything.

It would be bad enough if this were being done in secret, but the fact that conservatives are so publicly and unapologetically considering this demands strong and immediate action just to ensure the ability of our government to function on the most basic of levels. Any elected official, regardless of party, who willfully refuses to perform their job in order to spend more time bolstering a partisan media firestorm should be impeached for dereliction of duty and refusal to perform the duties they swore an oath to perform. If that means impeaching every Republican in the House and the Senate, then so be it. They’re the ones who are so eager to turn everything into a scandal, so let’s see how they like beings the targets of one for a change.

The beginning of May is the start of what’s known as the “silly season” of American politics. Most states have held their primaries, and until we get closer to the election — around September or October — there’s a sense that there won’t be much in the way of “serious” politics done until then. (This isn’t so much the case in presidential election years, thanks to the increased importance of the parties’ annual conventions and vice-presidential announcements and all that hullabaloo.) In addition, fewer people tend to pay attention to the news because they’re out enjoying the nice weather, so many news outlets delve much deeper into the sensational and insubstantive than they normally do in an effort to keep their advertising revenues up through increased viewership/readership. Sometimes the results are laughable — in both good and bad ways — but this year it looks like it will be no laughing matter.

We’re now months into the first round of sequestration cuts, and the stories that at one time were on some people’s radars — devastating cuts to Head Start with some schools literally holding lotteries to determine which kids have to leave, funds for WIC and meals-on-wheels for elderly and infirm people being slashed, furloughs of government employees and kicking homeless people out of shelters and putting them back on the street, among others — have slipped from people’s minds, in part because news outlets stopped talking about them and “news” outlets instead blathered on and on about how cutting White House tours was the Worst Thing Ever. Given that both major political parties just voted overwhelmingly to ease the sequester for air traffic controllers so business travelers wouldn’t face delays, this is a genuine “pox on both of your houses” story with deep human interest roots that touches most of us. Congress voting to ease air travel for the rich but still taking food out of the mouths of poor children and the elderly? Any journalist worth their weight in sweat would be driving across the country right now, collecting and publishing stories of how devastating these cuts are at a time when the economic recovery is still failing to reach the working and middle classes like it is big companies and their executives.

Instead, House Republicans just yelled “Benghazi” en masse this week, and a press corps desperate for juicy scandal to boost their profit margins seems all too eager to go along with them just to get some extra money by fluffing up a far-right conspiracy that has so little substance behind it that any reputable news organization should have dismissed it months ago. As long as our press is governed by profits and not journalism, though, this is the crap we’re going to have to put up with.

I don’t want to get into a full elaboration on why the whole Benghazi controversy is a load of hot air because I’ve done so already, but in short, the errors made during the Benghazi attack and its immediate aftermath have already been investigated and shown to have been accidental, not deliberate in any manner. Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama were both proven to have had no culpability in the matter, but they still took responsibility anyway because that’s what you do when you’re the boss. The only way conservatives’ logic for impeaching President Obama (or effectively disqualifying Hillary Clinton from a 2016 presidential bid) is to begin with what is both their first premise and ultimate conclusion, the same as it’s been for every issue from Cash for Clunkers to Fast and Furious — that President Obama (and Secretary Clinton by extension) “hate America” and are “evil.” Remove that premise — and it’s so absurd that only the blindest of political partisans would even attempt to believe it — and nearly every conservative argument about Benghazi falls to pieces on the elementary question of motive.

Their new tactic is to focus instead on an alleged cover-up after the attack, going back to White House e-mails following the attack that Republicans have literally had their hands on for months, and using some kind of super-secret decoder ring they’ve constructed in the meantime to show how President Obama allegedly tried to conceal the mistakes made in the response to Benghazi. On the plus side, this is one argument where people don’t have to buy into the “Obama is evil/hates America/is a secret Kenyan Muslim America-hating freedom-abolishing socialist atheist whatever” line, because the only claim being made is that Obama tried to hide his mistakes. That reaction is human enough, and one Americans are certainly prone to believe their politicians of doing a lot of the time.

However, when the Republicans rolled out this new line in their congressional hearing this week, there were so many red flags to raise about how it was presented — Democratic committee members not allowed to call witnesses who could have refuted claims Republican witnesses made, and not gaining access to said Republican witnesses — that the hearing shouldn’t have registered as more than a blip anywhere but in the right-wing media bubble. It was pure show trial, Republicans polishing a turd of an argument so well that it provided just enough substance that journalists, tempted by the lure of scandal, have presented it as the political equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie. It’s the hit of the summer! Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Benghazigate. You don’t even have to buy a twelve-dollar ticket to see it; just tune in to your political show of choice.

We have seen this repeatedly since the earliest days of the Obama Administration. Just like Republicans leaped on every small thing they could find about Bill Clinton when he was president that they could scandalize, until the whole Monica Lewinksy thing finally stuck, they have tried to turn President’ Obama’s every word and action into a possible cause for impeachment. If Democrats had put in even a tenth of the effort Republicans have put in to make Bush 43 pay for the very real scandals of his time in office — not paying enough attention to their own intelligence that said months before 09.11 that al-Qaeda was planning on attacking targets within America, Vice President Cheney and oil company executives rewriting the country’s whole energy policy in secret, lying the country into a war that cost thousands of American lives and trillions of American dollars, outing Valerie Plame as political payback for her husband debunking one of the administration’s lies for that war, Bush pretending to play guitar with John McCain while the New Orleans levies broke, among others — Bush would have been out of office, and probably in prison, long before his second term was up. For every real scandal of a Republican president, conservatives froth at the mouth to create an equivalent scandal for a Democratic president, usually with “evidence” and reasoning that doesn’t pass a basic smell test because they pulled it straight out of their asses and it still stinks like what it is — total and complete crap.

The worst part is that this is coming in the wake of a very real scandal that conservatives have every right to seize on, the IRS admitting that they hassled Tea Party-affiliated groups since the dawn of the Tea Party movement, targeting them for special scrutiny. Tea Party groups have been making this claim for years, and they have now been proven completely right. So far this is looking like the work of unscrupulous low-level employees — the IRS has only two positions that are filled by political means because the IRS is supposed to be apolitical — but this is exactly the kind of thing that should never, ever happen to any group. This demands no less than a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of how this happened, who was responsible, and what safeguards need to be put in place to make sure this never happens again.

Perhaps the IRS story will pick up steam in the days to come, but right now Benghazi continues to dominate the news. Like the old journalism saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads,” and the lives lost as a result of the Benghazi consulate attack are “sexier” than a tax scandal, much less poor kids going hungry or getting kicked out of Head Start. It is unspeakably shameful that the press has turned a blind eye to the millions of victims of the sequester, those who already had so little going for them before the illogical and tragic butchering of the social safety net at a time when it is needed most, but time and time again the American press has shown that profits trump actual journalism in their eyes. All we need is a semen-stained dress from Benghazi to make the whole wretched spectacle complete.

Earlier this year, my Facebook timeline was flooded with my friends reposting an image of a breast cancer survivor’s chest tattoo that Facebook repeatedly deleted because the image of a woman’s naked chest technically violated their nudity policy. Facebook eventually relented, but it reminded me of an episode of that Comedy Central atrocity known as The Man Show, in which a man who’d gotten breast implants on a dare came on and showed off his implants. Despite his chest looking every bit like a naked woman’s, there was no censorship. I’ve always considered the American obsession with censoring naked female breasts comical, but these two episodes, taken together, just leave me scratching my head.

I had my own, much smaller, run-in with Facebook’s rules last year as I began to publicize The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon. About a year ago I started a Facebook page for the novel so I could use Facebook to help spread the word once I’d been shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize and “the cat was out of the bag” on my novel. I begged my friends to help the page get twenty-five likes, the minimum required to get your own custom URL, so I could get something like facebook.com/theprostitutesoflakewobegon or facebook.com/prostitutesoflakewobegon before someone else took those URLs for their own use, much like cybersquatters have seized domain names for ages. The moment I got my twenty-fifth like, I immediately tried to grab those URLs, only to be told by Facebook that they weren’t available. Dejected, I tried loading both URLs to see who’d gotten them. As it turned out, no one had gotten them, and a quick test on my part revealed that Facebook doesn’t allow “prostitute” in custom URLs. Yes, that word could be used in a page URL to help promote an actual prostitution service, but given the number of non-prostitution services that could have use for “prostitute” in their name (help for prostitutes being abused by their pimps, for one), Facebook blacklisting “prostitute” in their page URLs just doesn’t make sense to me. I eventually had to settle on facebook.com/TPOLW, although Facebook has no problem with me using “Prostitutes” in the page’s title. Go figure.

It is in the context of both these episodes that I find Facebook’s decision to permit the “Women Deserve Equal Rights — And Lefts” image mentioned in the Fem 2.0 article above so perplexing. Remove those two incidents, and there’s a very uncomfortable free speech dilemma that would really pit my pro-First Amendment tendencies against my feminist beliefs in a way that would keep me up thinking about the issue into the wee small hours of the morning. If Facebook deemed the mastectomy tattoo picture against its guidelines (at least long enough to cause the huge uproar that led to them reversing their decision) and they blacklist “prostitute” in their page URLs, though, I don’t see how they can consider an image of a battered woman cowering in front of a man’s clenched fist — with words inciting violence against women printed on top — acceptable for their service.

Over the past few years, Internet memes have taken over popular culture more and more. Yesterday I actually had to explain to one of my classes the history of the rickroll, but all of them know about more recent things like the Harlem Shake. Although most people think of more benign things like “Gangnam Style” and LOLcats when they think of Internet memes, there is a dark underbelly to Internet memes that trades not only on racism and sexism and homophobia and similar malignancies, but in the advocacy of outright violence and murder against marginalized and discriminated groups. Treating women as objects of abuse and virtual slaves to men is one of the most common tropes in this culture, to the point where even My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic utilized one of them in one of their episodes as a “wink” to the show’s older Internet-driven fanbase, depicting physical relationship abuse. This is a huge black mark on the show’s history, and it defies description how there has not been a large movement to have this scene removed from the episode, especially after the way Hasbro reacted to the whole Derpy controversy.

It’s wishful thinking to believe that hateful and violent meme images like these don’t have a negative influence on people who lack the skills to contextualize them for the garbage that they are. Yes, humour can be squeezed out of even the most vile concepts by keeping them concepts and not getting into actual unacceptable acts — the whole George Carlin “imagine Elmer Fudd raping Porky Pig” thing — but it still takes a skilled comic to get an appropriate joke, and the only attempt at “comedy” most of these meme images make is to denigrate the very groups they attack as stupid or worthy of abuse. The comments on the “And Lefts” image that the Fem 2.0 article talks about — “You ‘feminists’ [sic] need to pull your heads out of your asses and accept that you deserve a beating if you fucking provoked it,” just as one example — show just how widespread the problem is. Most of these comments are likely from sexually-frustrated fourteen-year-old boys who’ve never even gotten close enough to a woman to strike her, yes, but some of these are from grown men, and as someone who has dealt with many survivors of relationship abuse in my life, including in my own family — it is a sensitive issue for me — I can speak from personal experience to the existence of this culture that treats abuse of women as not only acceptable, but something to be lauded.

I have always been a strong proponent of the First Amendment, but no rights are absolute. The First Amendment does not protect child pornography, nor does it protect those who incite panic by yelling “Fire” in a crowded room when there is no fire. One of the litmus tests that has often been used to determine whether or not the First Amendment is applicable to a given instance of speech is if it has the effect of promoting violence. That can be a grey issue with a lot of instances of speech, but the “And Lefts” image, to me, is a clear-cut instance of advocating violence. The text on the image can be easily reduced to “women deserve to be hit,” and the picture behind the text clearly shows the context in which that message is meant.

Granted, I’m not a legal scholar, so my reasoning as to why that particular image doesn’t fall under First Amendment protections may be faulty, but keep in mind that, in this particular controversy, the entity determining whether or not the image should be publicly posted is not the government, but Facebook. Nudity is legion on the Internet, but Facebook, as its own entity, is within its rights to determine that it will not allow photos of naked bodies to be posted on its service. Likewise, it is within its legal rights to say that nudity is not okay but that the “And Lefts” image is acceptable. When it does so, though, it sets a dangerous precedent that could lead to images even more vile and repulsive than the “And Lefts” image being posted, and if this is the case, many people are likely going to consider whether or not they will continue to support Facebook by maintaining an account on their service. I certainly will.

Thanks to my old friend from Backwash.com, Val, I knew about the bombs that went off in Boston before television-watchers did. She retweeted some of the first tweets about the bombs at the Boston Marathon as soon as they were posted, and when I switched on cable news I found that they were still calmly running stories on other topics. As the first visuals of the bombing hit my television screen, I had an all-too-familiar feeling from when my family was living in a hotel room after our house caught fire in 2001 and we saw the twin towers on fire. Even if I hadn’t had to stay on top of the story so I could talk about in in my classes the next day, I still would have been fixated on coverage of Boston, going from my computer to my television and back again to get all the latest details, as I spent most of my week this week.

As the hours wore on, my immediate concerns about how many casualties there were and if anyone I knew was affected (one of my classmates from way back lives in Watertown now, but she’s okay), my mind naturally turned to trying to piece things together. I knew details would come out eventually, but the puzzling nature of the attack — bombs not as sophisticated as what al-Qaeda was using over a decade ago but a civilian-focused attack in their style, the symbolism of tax day pointing to a right-wing group although right-wingers typically don’t target civilians — created a puzzle that I fixated on. Puzzles always interest me, but I think in this case I was using the mental gymnastics as a way to distract myself from the pain I was feeling for Boston (and later Texas after the explosion there, to say nothing of the ricin-laced letters that evoked the days after 09.11 all the more).

I remembered the feelings I had after the 09.11 attacks, those feelings of hatred and wanting revenge on those who killed so many Americans. Maybe it was because of that experience earlier, or maybe it was because the scope of the Boston bombings wasn’t as large as the 09.11 attacks, but I never gave in to those negative emotions this time. I try not to let myself feel those emotions (admittedly, I don’t always succeed), but what really made me see the ugliness of those emotions is how they gripped so many people in this nation for so long, not just in the American populace but also in our elected officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, who should have known better than to follow the mob mentality that so perversely pervaded this country in the years following the 09.11 attacks.

More than that, though, I remember Republicans and conservatives seizing on 09.11 as an excuse to force the nation behind Bush 43 and every word he said, demanding nothing less than total fealty from all Americans and labeling those who dared disagree with even one statement of Bush’s as “un-American” or “with the terrorists.” Many Republicans kept beating that drum long after 09.11, long after they twisted the fear Americans felt after the attacks to drag us into an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq, long after that war became unpopular as evidence mounted that we were lied into that war, all the way through the 2008 election. The moment Barack Obama was first sworn in as President, “we have to support the President no matter what” pretty much flew out of the window.

I was not so foolish as to believe that Republicans would mobilize behind President Obama in the moments after the Boston bombings. However, there was a part of me that hoped that conservatives would not return to the same racist and Islamophobic rhetoric and actions they took after 09.11, fostering fear and intolerance among Americans that is even more unacceptable now than it was back then. Clearly, my naivete got the better of me again.

Racism and Islamophobia are an all-too-effective tactic for some Republicans to keep their base. In modern times this dates back to the “southern strategy” Richard Nixon and his campaign used to secure the angry white vote in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, which to this day has made many southern states all but untouchable for Democratic presidential candidates. More recently, this has been evidenced repeatedly by the birther movement — which is still pushed by the Donald Trumps of the world today — and other subtle attempts to call attention to the “otherness” of Obama. Just look at how many times Mitt Romney used the word “foreign” in describing Obama’s policies in the last presidential election; he never used it to describe Obama himself, but the word still had its effect, a sly wink to those on the far-right who still cling to the fantasy that Obama isn’t really President because he was actually born in Kenya. These are the same people who also push the idea that Obama is a “secret” something, usually a secret socialist or a secret Muslim. Ah, there’s Islam again.

This is what’s led to the nonsense of Republican-controlled cities and states passing laws stating that they will never let themselves be put under Sharia law. All the while these same people continue to block the ability of same-sex couples to marry and enjoy the benefits of opposite-sex couples for no other reason than forcing their own religious beliefs onto all of us us through law. Heck, the Republican Attorney General of Virginia (and gubernatorial candidate) is trying to reinstate anti-sodomy laws in his state. For all the Republican Party talks about putting on a “new face” after their 2012 electoral defeats, their anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-minority legislation in the past few months show that they’re doubling down on the same policies they’ve been pushing in the Tea Party era.

In the months after the 09.11 attacks it was difficult to stand up against the forces of racism and Islamophobia. Not only was I going through a lot of personal problems at the time (the house fire, being a full-time college student again for the first time in over six years, friend problems), but voices in opposition to the hatred and fear-mongering that came after 09.11 were few and far between in those first months after the attack. That is not the case this time, thankfully enough, but Republicans have proven how obstinate they can be these past four years in opposing Obama, lying and filibustering everything they can to the point where ad mauseum doesn’t even begin to describe how sickening it is. We can’t expect this time to be any different, as some Republicans and conservatives will keep doing everything in their power to attack Islam and Muslims.

That is why it is so important for us to raise our voices against the tides of racism and Islamophobia now, before they sweep up more Americans with their hatred. The brothers behind the Boston bombings are as much Muslims as the Westboro Baptist Church are Christians, and although many Americans are aware of this, there are some who are all too eager to scapegoat a religion and its people if those in power give them the opportunity. We must make our voices louder than those who would use what happened in Boston to turn people towards hatred. We can’t let ourselves be afraid this time.

A lot of talk is made of recent GLBT progress — witness the rapid growth in support for marriage equality in just the past few years here in America — but more often than not these measures of progress only affect transgender people tangentially, if at all. Certainly there have been causes for celebration in the past few years, such as President Obama adding protections for gender identity for federal hiring and appointing transgender people as advisers and members of the Democratic National Committee, but transgender concerns and rights still aren’t nearly as visible as things like the struggle for marriage equality.

Two decades ago, as Bill Clinton began his presidency and we had the first significant recoil from the cultural conservatism of the Reagan era, sexual orientation began to be a less problematic issue for many. The “gay panic” that started with the whole Anita Bryant debacle in the seventies, fueled significantly by the misperception of AIDS as a “gay disease” in its early years (and President Reagan waiting far too long to address the issue, an unpardonable slight), began to fade away, but throughout the nineties, and even into the first years of the new millennium, there was a strong undercurrent within the GLBT community that people had to “look straight” and “act straight” in order to gain acceptance. I haven’t picked up an issue of The Advocate in several years, but back when I was at the University of Toledo I read it quite frequently, and flipping through the pages you would hardly ever see a transgender person, or a person of size, or anyone who didn’t fit “the look” seen in practically every other magazine of the time, either in the articles or the advertisements. You could come out of the closet, but only if you didn’t look or act like you were ever in the closet in the first place.

This has gotten better over the past few years, but there’s still a lot of work to be done, especially when it comes to raising awareness of the issues transgender people face, both in America and around the world. We can’t afford to overlook the struggles that gay, lesbian, bisexual and pansexual people still face, just as we need to continue to fight the racism and sexism that is still far too common in our culture. Still, the fact that such an elementary issue as bathroom usage can cause not just this kind of publicity, but the kind of stereotypical and hateful response that prompted State Rep. John Kavanagh of Arizona to introduce and defend his bathroom-use bill, shows that there still needs to be a lot of consciousness-raising and education done on the issues that transgender people, and genderqueer people as a whole, are facing.

Let me start by saying that, as important and personal as issues of gender identity and expression are to me, this particular avenue of entry to the issue is one that is being forced upon me based on what’s in the news. I don’t think any sane person could call me a prude, but for all that I talk openly about issues of sex and sexuality, bathrooms, and more specifically the primary reason we all use them, kind of gross me out. I’m somewhat uncomfortable trying to handle this particular area of gender identity and expression, but this is the hot topic right now, so I’ll do my best and step around the more unseemly aspects of this conundrum whenever possible.

Really, that gets to my first real hangup about this whole issue, which is why we’re making such a big deal about a place where, in my experience, most people want to get in and get out as quickly as possible and don’t interact with one another unless someone has to reach over to use the paper towel dispenser. Even at a place you know well, using a public restroom is always a huge crapshoot (pardon the pun) because you never know what the last person who used that particular facility did. You go to a public restroom in a hurry because you need to do something that needs to be done in a hurry if you don’t want a really bad accident, and then when you’re done you try to get out of there as quickly as possible so you don’t pick up other people’s germs. In my experience, the stereotype of women using a washroom as an informal gathering place to talk away from the menfolk is completely overblown, and if it ever was true then modern developments, like being able to surreptitiously text friends at the table and having to go outside to smoke, have probably significantly decreased how often this happens nowadays.

What galls me the most about this particular case in Arizona is how the reasons being used for this proposed legislation cut right to the same misconceptions and fear-mongering that social conservatives have been using towards non-heterosexuals and non-cisgendered people since before I was born. It’s bad enough that this bill identifies “bathroom gender” as what’s on the birth certificate — so even those who have had gender reassignment surgery and legally changed their gender are still forced to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth — but John Kavanagh saying that people shouldn’t be able to use bathrooms based on “what [they] think [they] are” cuts right to the chase and shows that Kavanagh, like so many other social conservatives, do not even believe in the concept of gender identity. For them, the mere presence of a penis or a vagina — never mind those who are born with indeterminate sexual organs — is enough to make an irrefutable judgment on what’s inside a person and how that person should behave. These are the same people who would look at the snow outside my window right now and proclaim that snow in springtime “proves” that there is no such thing as climate change. When they make their tautologies  so personal as to claim power to define someone’s identity for them, though, that is a deeply personal attack and a violation of the most basic levels of respect and dignity.

As if Kavanagh couldn’t get any worse, he then goes on to state that anti-discrimination laws for restrooms could serve as a cover for pedophiles. This is the same stereotypical slippery slope argument that’s been used for decades not just against genderqueer people, but non-heterosexuals as well, that anyone who breaks the heterosexual “norm” must therefore be a “sexual deviant” in all other possible ways, from kink all the way to pedophilia. It is as offencive now as it was back then, and the growing support for marriage equality in America shows that now that most people have gotten to know non-heterosexuals and have seen that (gasp!) they’re just like everyone else, people are realizing how incorrect and completely foolish that argument was for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and pansexuals. Gender identity and expression are still significantly different from sexual orientation, though, and I don’t know that people’s perceptions of non-cisgendered people have changed as much as they have for non-heterosexuals.

I sometimes see this stereotype when I’m out shopping and parents pull their children away from me as we pass, and it’s one of the few things people do to me that genuinely bothers me. If you’re an adult and you choose not to associate with me because of my gender identity and expression, that’s your loss. That’s your right, though, and more power to you for exercising it. When a person pulls their children away from someone because of their gender identity or expression, or their sexual orientation, or the colour of their skin, or what have you, that is a far different thing. That is teaching that child to be intolerant, to put fear in that child of “the other” that, if left unchecked, will evolve into hatred, and that is precisely what leads not just to dumbheaded bills like the proposed Arizona restroom legislation, but violence against those who break “the norm,” up to and including murder.

As I’ve made more and more genderqueer friends, I’m led to wonder if we just need to get rid of the old binary bathroom system altogether. (Some colleges and universities with genderqueer students have done this, and it hasn’t led to any serious problems I’ve heard of.) Having a single bathroom for all people to use, regardless of gender identity or expression, would solve far more problems than it would create. The only problem would be getting rid of urinals to prevent problems of possible genital exposure, but I’ve never understood why this hasn’t been a problem for cisgender men in the first place. I’m surprised more people like Kavanagh haven’t proposed “gay only” restrooms to solve the “problem” of homosexual men possibly looking at your package when you’re peeing and “what we all know that could lead to.” Seriously, urinals are disgusting, so just put everyone into a stall with a locking door so none of us have to see any of that stuff. (Fun fact: at that private school I went to, the stalls in the high school student restrooms didn’t have doors, so you had to do your business where everyone could see you. Yeah, and people wonder why I have so many issues?)

Kavanagh says that his proposed bill “simply restores the law of society: Men are men and women are women. For a handful of people to make everyone else uncomfortable just makes no sense.” No, Mr. Kavangh, but close-minded hate-mongering jerks are close-minded hate-mongering jerks, and you are part of that handful of people making everyone else uncomfortable by whipping out your intolerance and forcing everyone to look at it. Go back under the rock you crawled out from under, and let the rest of us pee and poop in peace.

Yeah, uh, guess what? I made the quarterfinals.

There are still a couple of more rounds to go before the finals, but I’ve already made the top 100 out of approximately 5,000 entrants, so that’s something at least. Even if I don’t win the big prize, just getting to the finals will get me a guaranteed publishing contract with a $15,000 advance, so I’m hoping for the best here, while still preparing to work with agents and publishers to get the book published traditionally in the event that I don’t win.

As part of the contest, you can now download the first two chapters of The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon as a free Kindle file off of Amazon. (I’ll have to stop entering the novel into competitions after this one simply because I can’t afford to give much more of the book away for free.) For some reason all the reader comments that were on the excerpt’s Amazon page earlier in the day — some of it so glowing that “effusive” doesn’t even begin to describe it — disappeared, but if you’d download the excerpt and give it your honest feedback, I would be most appreciative.

As always, following The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon on Facebook and Google+ also helps me sell the novel, in addition to keeping you updated on smaller news surrounding the novel. More than ever, though, anything you can do spread news of my book within your own circles would be deeply appreciated. As long as I’m in the Amazon contest I’m going to have a spotlight, however dim, on me, and this may be the best opportunity I will have for a long time to build a fanbase for the book. In the event that I’m back to looking for agents and/or publishers next month, the more people I have clamoring for the book, the more likely I’ll be to convince agents and publishers to take a chance on me.

As always, thank you to everyone for your support over the years. Today was another important milestone, but there are still many more steps to go in this journey.

Last year I did a .musecast on the controversy surrounding the use of the character name “Derpy” in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. (Yes, I’ll be doing more .musecasts again soon.) In short, some parents were offended when the show adopted the fan-given name Derpy Hooves for one of the background ponies on the show (one with a bigger following than some of the “mane” ponies) because some people believe that calling someone “derpy” is equivalent to calling them the r-word, both in terms of its meaning and the r-word’s heft as a slur. Hasbro eventually redubbed the episode to remove mentioning Derpy’s name, and also gave her a more feminine voice and undid her signature wall-eyed look in most animation frames. (The original and changed versions of Derpy’s scene, from the episode “The Last Roundup.”) Most fans of the show were livid, but soon moved on to other things.

I didn’t actually start watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic until months after this episode aired, but I had enough friends who were bronies/pegasisters at the time than I was aware of the controversy when it first broke, long before I watched the show in full. At the time I thought it was an interesting controversy, and I gave it a lot of thought even before I became a pegasister myself. Even back when I cut that .musecast episode a few short months ago, I was still fighting with how to come to an amicable solution for both sides. As much as I love the show, and Derpy in particular, I was also very conscious of the cutting power of the r-word, especially because I’d used it in my past when I was too young and/or stupid to know better. One of my friends is a teacher for children with special needs, and hearing her stories of dealing with her kids, and the stories they tell about how society treats them, has made me even more sensitive about everything surrounding the r-word.

“Derpy” isn’t the r-word, though, and as I’ve thought about this issue more, and even used it as a discussion prompt in my English classes, I’ve come to realize that, contrary to my original thought (and perhaps even to my own instinct), we have to defend “derpy” in order to save the language itself.

As I explained in my .musecast, the issue at the core of the controversy surrounding the word derpy, as well as other words, is the idea of linguistic relativity, or the concept that the language around us shapes us as people. One of the biggest debates when it comes to linguistic relativism is whether or not words can be inherently “bad” or what have you, or whether it’s just what we as a culture pin to that word that makes it a slur. Lenny Bruce was before my time, and Dad was always more of a George Carlin fan so I saw/heard more of him growing up, but Bruce had a brilliant stand-up bit about this whole process when it comes to the most weighty of words in the English language, the n-word. Here’s a scene from the Lenny Bruce biopic that came out after his death, with a young Dustin Hoffman playing Bruce, doing the bit. (Warning: Heavy use of the n-word and other slurs.)

Had I seen this routine when Bruce was still alive, or even when I was young myself, I might have had a different impression of it. The thing is, I was first made aware of this bit long after Chappelle’s Show went off the air, and in the wake of that show’s popularity — and young people watching the show and not understanding how Chappelle was using the n-word to show the ignorance and stupidity of racism — we did have a generation of young people who threw the n-word around like it had no meaning, taking every opportunity to use it because they thought they were being shocking or funny. Looking back, that clearly did nothing to divest the n-word of its centuries of baggage as a tool of oppression and hurt. I don’t know how we could possibly see the n-word thrown around more than during the height of Chappelle’s Show (it’ll happen sooner or later, I know), but if its explosion in usage in the early 2000s wasn’t enough to rob the n-word of its power, I don’t think it will ever go away. (Given how horribly this country treated African-Americans for centuries, and the racism that still persists to this day, I don’t think this is a bad thing.)

The thing about the word derpy is that it doesn’t have that history at all. In fact, its life, at least in modern usage, is shorter than even that of my youngest students. The word “derp” was basically invented in 1998 by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their movie Baseketball as a nonsense syllable, which then took on its connotation of “silly” through its continued usage in following seasons of South Park. How the word became a syllable for the r-word is unclear, but it appears to have been something caused by a relatively small number of people, most of whom were the same people who were interjecting the n-word into all of their sentences after Chappelle’s Show hit it big.

These, then, are the two problems with treating derp/derpy like slurs: Not only do they not have the baggage of being used as slurs for centuries, but the concept that they are synonymous with the r-word is only shared by a relatively small number of people. If you stopped ten people on the street and asked them to define “derp,” I’m not even sure one of them would know what the word means, and yet this small subset of people who know the word’s definition — a small fraction of a small fraction — have been allowed to shift its meaning so that it’s considered a slur by some, enough so that we had this huge controversy over the Derpy character on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

This is, ultimately, why I can no longer look for a “middle ground” solution in this controversy, and why I think it’s important, even long after the issue has been considered settled by most, to continue to fight for the Derpy name. If any subset of people can suddenly decide that a word — even a nonsense word, a modern invention with no historical baggage at all, like derp/derpy — can be a slur, what power does that give them to influence not only our language, but through our language, our culture as well? If we come up with another word to replace “derpy” — let’s say iqejbji (I just slammed my fingers on the keyboard) — and make it explicitly clear the iqejbji only means silly and has no negative connotations at all, these people could still do what they did with derp/derpy to redefine iqejbji as a slur, so that eventually it meets the same fate that derp/derpy did. More importantly, they could do that for existing words as well. No word would be safe from this abuse.

These are the same people who throw all kinds of slurs around for no good reason. They do it to draw attention to themselves because shocking and offending people makes them feel important. I was once in that boat myself, and I still shock and offend people, but these days I only do so in the service of a greater purpose, much like Chappelle using the n-word to poke fun of racism. (Given that no one’s offered me a $50 million television contract yet, clearly I’m not as successful at it as Chappelle was.) The only way to handle these people is to ignore them, because if we allow them this power over our language then we effectively cede control over the language to them, and they will never deserve that power as long as they show such irresponsibility.

More to the point, as others pointed out (but I somehow missed before I did my .musecast), by changing that scene in “The Last Roundup,” Hasbro was basically saying that it isn’t okay to be different in the ways that Derpy is different, and that if you’re like Derpy then you need to be “fixed.” Given the lessons of inclusion that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has made central in the show’s world, and how the brony/pegasister fanbase has promoted these values in the real world (at a time when they are so desperately needed), this is one of the worst possible messages Hasbro could have sent, and by continuing to show the “changed” Derpy in re-airings of “The Last Roundup,” they continue to send that message. The fan animation “Save Derpy” kind of drives this point home perfectly by filtering it through Derpy’s own perspective; again, somehow I hadn’t seen it until I posted that .musecast.

Ultimately the whole Derpy controversy isn’t about a character on a television show, or even the show itself. It’s about not allowing the most malevolent and reckless among us to take control of our language and subvert it so they can get their jollies by turning everything into a chance to offend someone. This is why, for both bronies/pegasisters and people who aren’t fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic but still love our language, and even after all this time, it’s important to fight for Derpy Hooves and petition Hasbro to reinstate her iconic scene in “The Last Roundup.”

Since a lot of the “entertainment” being produced in the 1980s wasn’t pleasing to my palate as I was growing up, I wound up spending a lot of time watching classic films and television shows. Watching reruns of the original Star Trek with my mother in the early 80s on our local independent station — back before there was even a Fox network — led to a lot of bonding, and set me up as a lifelong Star Trek fan. I have my father to thank for turning me on to Blazing Saddles at an age when most kids probably shouldn’t watch it, but it helped me to see the stupidity of racism (and power of satire) at an early age. I can remember when Nick at Nite first went on the air and I got hooked on Dragnet and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. I still see, in my own attempts at humour, influences of some of the great game shows of the seventies like Match Game and The Gong Show.

I don’t recall The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts that clearly, but I do recall how it felt like I was watching something special when they were on, something even naughtier than Blazing Saddles or anything else my parents would let me watch. Even though I didn’t get the jokes, and I didn’t recognize very many of the faces, replays of those shows still stuck with me. The whole idea of comedy roasts didn’t really register on my radar for a long time after that, save for the Ted Danson/Whoopi Goldberg blackface controversy at a Friar’s Club roast ages ago. I knew of the Friar’s Club, but I really didn’t think that much about them until a little over a decade ago, when Comedy Central televised some of the Friar’s Club roasts before launching their own brand of regular televised roasts, promoting them with massive commercial campaigns on their own network.

At first I wasn’t sure what to think of roasts coming “out into the open” like this. As someone who generally tries to adhere to principles of political correctness and proactive respect, I was kind of bothered by a new line of shows and specials where the bar for taste and tact was dropped so drastically, even by the standards of late 1990s/early 2000s television. On the other hand, I’ve certainly crossed that line before; I grew up seeing how political correctness could be taken too far, and I think there are times when you need to push that line in service of a greater point. In addition, to be honest, there are a lot of jokes I’ve heard over the years that I would unhesitatingly classify as tasteless and offencive that have made me laugh out loud, despite my revulsion.

I began to see roasts as, to borrow hippie-speak, the creation of a separate space. Although it’s not usually made explicit to watchers, a roast is supposed to be a place where we can let our guard down for a while, where we can laugh at jokes that would otherwise rub us the wrong way and maybe even prompt us to respond indignantly. I don’t see anything wrong with this, provided that the line between “roast space” and everyday life is clear and respected from everyone involved. You watch the roast, you laugh at the bawdy jokes, you get the release so many of us need from the rigours of political correctness and politeness, and then you go back to your regular life and normal standards of decorum.

Unfortunately, what seems to have happened is that the line doesn’t really seem to be there for a lot of people any longer. It didn’t help that, at the same time Comedy Central began putting roasts on television, Chappelle’s Show became a breakout success for both Dave Chappelle and the network, and a generation of children who hadn’t been taught the finer points of satire, and the differences between television and real life, saw Chappelle’s skits and got the impression that the way to be “funny,” or at least get people’s attention, was to repeat the n-word ad nauseum. Similarly, I think a lot of younger people saw these televised roasts and didn’t understand the special atmosphere that was being created there, and thought that no-holds-barred profanity, racist and sexist and homophobic jokes, and insults, were just a souped-up version of “normal comedy,” if not normal comedy itself.

This isn’t to say that this sort of thing hasn’t existed before my time, or will continue to exist long after I’m gone; I still remember the “dead baby jokes” some of the kids in my neighbourhood made when I was growing up (I never saw the point of those). Howard Stern has been one of the most influential forces in media for decades now. When the line between “normal comedy” and “roast comedy” is blurred, though, not only does it make roasts a lot less special, but it also has a tendency to normalize the racism, sexism, homophobia, and other deplorable behaviours that are at the root of so much roast humour, and to make people believe that such behaviours are acceptable in normal society.

Witness the controversy over the tweet The Onion made during last night’s Oscars about nine-year-old actress Quvenzhané Wallis. Joking about a nine-year-old allegedly acting like a prima donna can conceivably be funny, and even work on a satirical level to point to the absurdities of Hollywood. However, calling a nine-year-old the c-word — like the n-word, it’s a word I’m never comfortable using, even when quoting someone else, unless it’s absolutely necessary — is so obviously beyond the bounds of good taste that, despite The Onion taking the tweet down an hour after it was posted, it continues to generate a much-deserved torrent of bad publicity for a comedic team that had otherwise been known for playing the good taste/bad taste line like a fiddle and coming up with a lot of genuinely funny stuff. With the choice of that one word, whoever wrote that tweet took what was a funny concept and turned it into something supremely unfunny and offencive. If the same word had been directed towards an adult actress, though, do you think it would have generated anything like the firestorm The Onion is going through now? Maybe it would have fifteen years ago, but I’m not so sure it would attract much attention these days.

If it weren’t for The Onion’s idiotic tweet, the growing tide of criticism Seth MacFarlane is receiving for his hosting performance at the Oscars would be getting a lot more mainstream attention. I didn’t watch the Oscars — I never do —  but a lot of people on my Facebook and Twitter feeds were, and the only ones who weren’t outraged by MacFarlane’s performance were my housemate (a huge MacFarlane fan) and people who had worked with MacFarlane before. MacFarlane has made me laugh before — the club where I’ve been doing performance art plays Adult Swim on the televisions, so I’ve been catching a fair amount of Family Guy and American Dad lately — but his style of comedy isn’t really my thing, and as a writer I don’t like how his body of work has done so much to destroy the art of subtlety in writing.

The articles I linked to above provide pretty comprehensive explanations of why so many of MacFarlane’s jokes last night crossed the line and just weren’t funny, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments they make. All I will add is that MacFarlane, like Stern and so many of his media doppelgangers, have an annoying habit of trying to justify their “comedy” by saying that it’s okay for them to do it because they can take as good as they can give. They have thick skins, ergo, we all need to develop thick skins too and put up with their “jokes.” I’ve been accused of being too thin-skinned before, and certainly there was a time in my life when that was very true. (I think it could still well be true today.) For MacFarlane and Stern and their ilk to insist that we all develop skins as thick as theirs, though, and to normalize the awful, wretched behaviours at the root of their “comedy,” is so ludicrous as to often be the funniest things about their schticks.

When respect is thrown out the window, when a minimal semblance of good manners and good taste becomes an object of ridicule, only bad things can happen. As I often tell my students, the world might be a much more interesting place if people just randomly punched each other in the face as they walked down the streets, but it would certainly be a much more painful place, and at some point, no matter how hard you tried, it’d be your face getting punched over and over again. Since I can take being punched in the face, does that make it okay for me to go see Seth MacFarlane and knock all his teeth out for repeatedly offending me and so many of my friends? Of course not. There are laws against that, as well there should be, and I’m the last person in the world who would dare suggest that we enact laws banning bad taste or obscenity. That doesn’t mean that informally, as a society, we can’t maintain those standards ourselves, and call attention to those who insist on habitually breaking them for no other purpose than to shock for the sake of shocking, offend for the sake of offending, and making some quick cash from a populace increasingly inured to the dark roots and harmful effects of this kind of “comedy.” I’m all for shocking and offending in service of a greater point — I do it myself, sometimes gleefully — but to do it for no other purposes than to get a rise out of people and make money is pathetic.

We all know MacFarlane is just going to keep on doing what he’s been doing since Family Guy first became such a big hit, though, and that is why, ultimately, his Oscars performance is so much worse than The Onion’s tweet. None of MacFarlane’s awful “jokes” at the Oscars were even close to being as horrible as that tweet that came from The Onion’s Twitter account, to be sure. The Onion removed that tweet shortly after it was posted, though, and they issued a forceful apology — not a middling “we’re sorry if anyone was offended” apology, but a “this was absolutely wrong and we apologize to everyone” apology — and immediately took steps to discipline the responsible individuals and make sure that nothing like this ever happens again on any of their properties. If MacFarlane ever says anything in response to the mounting criticism over his Oscars hosting performance, as well as the offencive things on his shows and movies, I have no doubt he’ll say the same thing that he, and others of his kind, have said in response to similar criticism over the years: Words to the effect of “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

If you’re offended by my unnecessary use of the f-word in that last sentence … well, you’re one of a dying breed. If the lines between “normal comedy” and “roast comedy” keep disappearing, how much longer will it be until we hear Big Bird drop a big old f-bomb on Sesame Street?

My name is Sean Shannon. I’m an English teacher and aspiring author from Toledo, Ohio. More importantly, I’m a longtime fan of your work; I still carry around the same Powerpuff Girls purse I bought more than a decade ago during the height of the show’s popularity. and last year I finally found the time to watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and quickly became hooked. Few television shows have had as profound an effect on my life, and I have made efforts in both my personal and professional lives to spread the show’s messages, not just to increase the show’s popularity, but because I believe the show can be an effective tool in working to make the world a better place. I will even be buying copies of Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony for friends this year to help make up for the sales revenue lost by piracy of the film, something I have used my humble online soapbox to rally against.

However, like many of my fellow bronies and pegasisters, I have been dismayed at some of Hasbro’s recent decisions regarding the show’s direction. From the “unnaming” of Derpy Hooves, to the cease and desist letters that shut down both Shards of Equestria and Fighting is Magic, to the nonsensical change in one of the main characters in the finale to season three that aired this past weekend, there is a growing fear that not only is Hasbro swiftly moving away from the elements of your vision of the show that made it such a huge crossover success, but it is also making it harder for the artists in the brony and pegasister community to feel secure in producing work based off of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic without receiving threatening letters from Hasbro’s lawyers.

You yourself tweeted your disappointment when Mane6 was forced to shut down production of Fighting is Magic and scrap the game’s website. Shortly after that, though, you tweeted Mane6 and offered them original characters of yours that they could adapt to Fighting is Magic so that their years of work on the game would not have been completely in vain. I’m not aware of where this offer stands in regards to what Mane6 can do with the characters, but I am writing you to make this request, on behalf of the fans of all your work past, present and future: Please develop these original characters and license them for not-for-profit derivative works under a Creative Commons license, so that the artists among us can continue to develop your visions without fear of litigation from the company that owns the characters.

To be clear, I am not asking these new characters to become a substitute, or replacement, for your My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters. Even amidst the deep disappointment among some members of the show’s fanbase, I highly doubt that very many fans, despite current rumblings, will abandon the show, and even if they were to do so, Hasbro’s existing market power and distribution channels mean that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic will more than likely continue to be a robust franchise for a long time to come. Not only would “Friendship is Magic with teddy bears” or “Friendship is Magic with slugs” be largely pointless, but would also invite litigation from Hasbro since they own the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters.

However, these new characters would provide a safe venue for artists, both from inside and outside the brony and pegasister communities, to explore the creation of stories, music, videos, and all other forms of media, without the threat of litigation from the owners of the show and characters being used in this new work. As many have pointed out, even posting a fan drawing you make of Rainbow Dash to your blog, or a fanfic you wrote, could be grounds for Hasbro to send out a cease and desist order, and given how litigious Hasbro has been lately, I have to believe that many fan artists are now stymied by the threat of them becoming the next target of Hasbro’s lawyers. By licensing a new cast of characters for not-for-profit derivative works, these artists would have truly free reign to develop and promote their art, regardless of any future decisions Hasbro makes about the derivative works based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic that are currently being made.

In addition to these new characters, I would also ask you, as you did for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, to create a production bible, giving potential writers for this new cast of characters (such as myself) a base from which to work, an idea of the world these characters inhabit and where you would like to see these characters go. As with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I think it will be important to base the new characters and their world on an optimistic view of the future, using life lessons to make their stories as educational as they are entertaining. Given that this will be an ensemble cast, many of these lessons will likely be based on friendship, but as I’ve said before, the last thing we need is a clone of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. There are certainly lots of character archetypes left to be explored in these new original characters; for example, as a writer and artist of many stripes, it’s always kind of bothered me that the creatively-minded ponies, like Rarity and Photo Finish, are depicted as being eccentric, reinforcing one of the lingering stereotypes of we creative types. Why can’t we have an artist character who “normalizes” creativity the same way Twilight Sparkle worked to help normalize braininess? If the new characters are as deep and well-developed as your ponies were, then this should easily lead to stories that significantly depart from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but can still convey the same vision that helped make your ponies so successful and treasured.

(I should also add that no one would, or should, expect you to license Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls this way. We know how long you have worked on that project and how dear it is to you, and you deserve as much compensation, monetary or otherwise, as you can get for all your hard work on it.)

As my unpublished novel The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon is currently advancing in the rounds of this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, I am presently unable to shop the novel around to agents. (I can’t win an award for an unpublished novel if I get a publishing contract.) My work and personal commitments right now are low enough that I would be able to lend my assistance as a writer to you in developing this production bible and fleshing out the new characters. (I cannot offer my skills as a visual designer because I have no such skills to offer. Seriously, even my stick figures look puzzling to most people.) I am sure there are many others who would offer their services up as well if you were only to ask.

It is true that we ourselves could come up with these new characters and world and production bible and such. However, it was your vision that made My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic the cultural force that it is, and it’s been the lack of your vision in recent episodes that has led so many to wary of the show. All those thousands of bronies and pegasisters you see at convention after convention are there because of you, and if you were to offer them a new universe to explore freely, without fear of litigation, I am sure you would see another new phenomenon rise up in short order. I don’t know if the unfettered creativity of so many artists could compete with Hasbro’s vast wealth and expansive distribution networks, but I believe that you could help create a new “show” that would complement and coexist with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and help give the fan community a truly limitless vista on which to expand on your vision and help make the world a better place.

I hope you will give this opportunity some consideration. Not only would it help liberate so many artists from current concerns about developing works derivative of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but I think something truly magickal would result from creating a new world, and cast of characters to inhabit that world, that could be developed freely by anyone.

Take care and be well,
Ms. Sean Shannon