My Dragons
Snark in Print
This takes a little setup.
Back in December, Bitch magazine had an article about knitting and other handicrafts and how they relate to activism. (This was issue #34, with the cover in various shades of green, if you're interested.) The article talked about the Quilt Code, that being the idea that slaves in America used pieced quilts as maps and/or signals on the Underground Railroad--a Log Cabin block hung outside your house indicated that it was a safe place to stop, the North Star pattern reminds you to go north (!), etc.
Of course, the Quilt Code is completely bogus. It's so charming, but completely impractical--what do you do if the route changes? What happens if, in the gathering dusk, a slave can't tell that the center of the Log Cabin block isn't the red that means "safe hearth" but the black that means "stay away"? Why on earth would you waste time making a quilted map of the area you live in, when the month you spend doing it could instead be spent travelling? I love steganography, don't get me wrong, and I'd adore it if the Quilt Code were real. But it isn't.
Anyway, I sent a short, fairly pithy (if I do say so) letter to this effect off to Bitch, and on Saturday I discovered that they had printed it in their spring issue. I'm kind of proud of myself, in that I think I managed to make my point reasonably quotable in that print-this-in-the-letters-column sort of way.