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Snappy banner, huh? I totally put thought into the font. I mean, five years ago. Five years ago a designer picked that font for me, and I approved it. After thinking about it.
In June 2004, after some memorable equipment failures involving a kitten, I took this font, a design, the company of T.S. Ross, Pablo Sibs, and my brother Nathan, and destroyed the old literary web-zine Unlikely Stories in favor of Unlikely 2.0, a web-magazine of literature, art, politics, and culture. I believe we believed, at the time, that it was part of our personal increase in political awareness, which was itself a manifestation of the growing political awareness of the American populace.
Pour one out for our beliefs, boys.
At the time, it was extremely difficult to find politically-aware essays on a regular basis. After Bush's mishandling of the September 11th attacks, a huge number of amateur journalists and pundits arose, setting up personal web sites to attack America's growing madness. Because most of these people were new writers, many of them suffered under the delusion that they would someday be offered a lucrative book contract. This is probably the main reason that so many political web-essayists of 2004 were unwilling to work with Unlikely 2.0, with its growing cache of sexually explicit, crime-endorsing art. (On the other hand, one newly-emerging Web-essayist, Joe Bageant, really did become a famous New York Times-bestselling author, and he's always been happy to send me reprint rights with a derogatory comment about Copyright law.)
So in order to build a Special Elections issue for October 2004, I wrote to all of the artists and poets I knew, asking them to send me an essay on what they'd be doing on election day. The results were outstanding, and catalogued here.
In 2008, after the welcome phenomenon of the citizen journalist blogger, and paying sites like Digital Journal appeared to inform the venal precisely how much their words are worth in dollars, almost all of the starry-eyed essayists have quit, and it's very easy to find thoughtful and meticulous essayists who are more than happy to work with Unlikely. This October, we're extremely pleased to present Dr. Ellen Brown's analysis of how our current financial crisis came to be and Beena Sarwar's analysis of the September bombing in Islamabad. Stephen Lendman offers an extremely detailed and informative essay on the past and present of U.S. election fraud, and Joe Bageant presents his pre-game discussion of Belize's 2008 elections, lest we become too attached to the US version of unreality. Gabriel Ricard has interviewed blogger-pundit Mickey Z., and reviewed his novel CPR for Dummies. Furthermore, I spent multiple sixty-second cycles on that banner graphic, which we won't really bother using to pretend this is a special issue. Instead, thanks to the efforts of Lora Gardner, we've got the regular roundup of great literature for you: poetry by Steve Dalachinsky, Dan Raphael, Sara Sutler-Cohen, David LaBounty, Changming Yuan, Justin Hyde, Beth Fleeson, Mickey C. and Aryan Kaganof; fiction by P. H. Madore, Kevin Lavey, Dawn Corrigan, Martin Jones, and Amanda Earl, as well as the latest installment of our serialized novel, sLAsH by Bill Berry. Our multimedia update will come out mid-month, as per usual, and not be especially political.
There hasn't been anything like time to arrange a proper special issue. There are big changes coming to Unlikely, and although it will be some time before they see physical manifestation, we hope to announce them soon. But more importantly, although we are as committed to an increased political awareness as we were four years ago, I, personally, though I'll vote in next month's elections, cannot currently see the US national election cycle as an important part of that process. Stephen Lendman explains that better than I ever could, but he omits one point I'd like to make: while we're playing our Obama vs. Nader vs. McKinney vs. Barr game, local elections, in which individual voters can and do have a voice and effect on their own welfare and the welfare of those around them, are completely ignored.
So no special issue this month, and apologies for our recent erratic schedule are due to those regular readers who might have noticed (Hi Moms!). Our future plans are now mostly in place, and we hope to resume our regular publication schedule as of now. We're also looking for reliable columnists, and experienced editors who might want to do special themed issues, and my wallet. Thanks for reading! —Jonathan Penton
Jonathan Penton is the Editor-in-chief of Unlikely 2.0. Check out his bio page.