Unite? Never!

I received the following missive from a conservative Notre Dame student (anonymity protected in recognition of his all too rare civility in expressing disagreement:

I waited for your blog to be updated on November 2nd. And then on November 3rd.

Finally, today, I see a response and I am disappointed. I did not expect that

you, of all people, could move past the results shown on Tuesday, but I hoped

that you would. I continue to hope that the nation will unite behind Bush–as

well as help steer him on the best path if he moves away from it.

Forgive me for being unforgiving, but George W. Bush is a geocidal maniac. He killed more than 100,000 people. But even if I were inclined to look past his status as one of the worst serial killers in human history–and my heart just isn’t big enough, I’m afraid–does Bush strike you as the kind of guy looking for advice and counsel to help him along the best path? Does his idea of the best path seem similar to mine? Yours?

Democrats owe Bush exactly the same level of loyalty and unity as John Kerry would have received from the Republicans in Congress and on talk radio. You remember–the kind Bill Clinton enjoyed, when Rush Limbaugh counted down the days under illegitimate occupation we were suffering under the yoke of Bill. That level of unity.

Bush Thinks Mandate is a Gay Porn Magazine

Now the twit is claiming a mandate? Even if he really did win 51-48–a highly doubtful proposition, considering the hijacking of Ohio–you have to be pretty high on Karzai’s heroin stash to think that constitutes a mandate for radical Republicanism. 70-30–now THAT would be a mandate. And even then, would it really be a great idea to completely run roughshod over the aspirations and beliefs of 30 percent of the citizenry?

Don’t answer that.

Column is going up shortly, or so I’m told.

American Postmortem Miscellany

To paraphrase a friend, the people now have the government they deserve. The trouble is, so do we.

I’ll be filing my cartoons and column for this week later today; they should start going up overnight. My thoughts and reactions will follow during the coming days and weeks.

My progressive friends: I know you are disheartened. So am I. A record turnout should have ensured a Kerry sweep. And there’s no doubt that we will never know whether the Ohio vote count was legitimate. One thing is certain, however:

Bush is still not the legitimate president of the United States. He ran on an incumbency he never earned.

We must remain informed. We must keep working to educate and organize the citizenry. We must reform the Democratic Party. (Please, Terry MacA, step down!) Now, when the hour is darkest, is the most important time to stay focused on what must be done. Don’t mourn, organize!

Now the shitstorm begins. Calls for a consumpion tax or flat income tax, privatizing Social Security and invading Syria (the Bushies shut the embassy in Damascus) are being heard. The neofascists are wilding. Keep your head down. America’s time will come soon eough.

By the way, a French edition of my book “To Afghanistan and Back” is now available.

You Know What To Do

On December 20, 2000, the US Supreme Court illegally halted the 2000 presidential vote count in Florida. Since then we have been ruled by a dictator with no more legitimacy than Saddam Hussein. Today it is the duty of every patriotic American to restore democratic rule to the United States by casting a vote for any candidate other than George W. Bush. This especially includes Republicans, who should reject such anti-GOP policies pursued by the Bush Junta as deficit spending and wars of colonial aggression. Party labels do not matter today. Today there are only two kinds of Americans: patriots and neofascists. You know the right choice.

America, and the world, are counting on you.

Book TV on C-SPAN

A talk and Q&A session I gave a few weeks ago at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company will be broadcast on Book TV on C-SPAN2 on Monday, November 1 at 7 pm Eastern Standard Time. The subject was why and how the US invasion of Afghanistan was every bit as unjustified and oil-motivated as the attack on Iraq.

P.S. Thanks to several Friends of Rall for emailing me corrected URL information.

Three Years Later

Well, well—Osama’s back, and just in time for Halloween! And he’s got something new for Americans: an admission of involvement in 9/11, something that until now we’ve had to take the Administration’s (cough) word (hee hee!) about. Perhaps Colin Powell will cough up that white paper he promised back in September 2001 showing the government’s evidence that Al Qaeda was involved. (Egyptian Islamic Jihad, of course, recruited the hijackers. But you already knew that. Didn’t you?)

Two new interviews with yours truly have just been published.

Genius cartoonist Stephanie McMillan (“Minimum Security,” ATTITUDE) asked all the right questions for Fort Lauderdale City Link.

There’s also an interview for the Comixpedia Community, in which I responded to questions posed by community members.

If you live on the West Coast, I look forward to meeting you at one of these upcoming appearances. Changes and additions will be posted here should they occur.

October 15

Time TBA

Friday Harbor/San Juan Islands

Fairgrounds

Will include slide presentation

October 16

12 noon

Elliott Bay Books

101 South Main Street

Seattle, Washington 98104

(206) 624-6600

October 17

Danger Room Comics

201 West 4th Street

Olympia, Washington 98501

2:00 pm: I will be interviewed and take questions and answers from the audience in the banquet room at Plenty (200 4th Avenue West, corner of 4th & Columbia, across the street from Danger Room).

3:30 – 5:00 pm: I will be signing and sketching at Danger Room Comics

NOTE: This appearance may be broadcast nationally via C-SPAN.

October 19

8 pm

NOCTURNAL (sponsored by Reading Frenzy

1800 E. Burnside

Portland, Oregon 97205

Please note address – NOT at Reading Frenzy’s store, but at Nocturnal

They, not I, call it the “Ted Rall Book Release Extravaganza”!

Ted Rall, Jefferson Smith, and a special guest from City Hall!

Join Reading Frenzy for an evening of civic engagement and political activism with cartoonist/commentator Ted Rall, author of Wake Up, You’re Liberal! (Soft Skull, 2004) and Generalissimo El Busho (NBM, 2004). Ted will be joined by Jefferson Smith of The Oregon Bus Project, and one of our favorite public officials (TBA)! Speakers will be followed by a lively Q&A session, and book signing. A few of our favorite local community organizations as well as some of Portland’s finest political cartoonists, such as Kevin Moore and Scott Bateman, will be on hand to display and discuss their work.

October 20

7:30 pm

Modern Times

888 Valencia Street

San Francisco, California

October 22-25: Los Angeles-area appearance

October 26: Possible Las Vegas appearance

New York Times Book Review: EL BUSHO Rocks!

The New York Times Book Review has reviewed GENERALISSIMO EL BUSHO: ESSAYS AND CARTOONS ON THE BUSH YEARS. And they like it!

Here’s what they wrote in yesterday’s issue:

THE BOOK: ”Generalissimo el Busho: Essays & Cartoons on the Bush Years,” by Ted Rall (Nantier Beall Minoustchine).

WHAT IT’S AIMING FOR: Overthrow of the United States government.

WHAT IT ACHIEVES: Oddly, some valuable historical perspective.

ANALYSIS: Ted Rall, a cartoonist and columnist for Universal Press Syndicate, is more hostile to President Bush than most members of Saddam’s inner circle, as this collection of his work from recent years makes scaldingly clear. There’s nothing really humorous here; the satire mixed into Rall’s screeds is far too bitter for that. In a piece from October 2002, he calls the military mission in Afghanistan ”Operation Enduring Failure.” In another 2002 piece, he refers to the Bush administration as a ”circus of hypocrites.” The best part of the volume, though, is its earliest material, centered on the 2000 election. Rall, unlike practically everyone else, allowed the president no honeymoon. He labeled the election stolen early and often. The resolution of the whole mess was far too casual for his taste; there was, he felt, too much at stake. Given all that has happened since, it appears he was right.

NUMBER OF TIMES IT’LL MAKE YOU LAUGH OUT LOUD: None. The fume-o-meter, however, for both pro-Bush and anti-Bush readers, will be close to exploding.

BETTER USES OF THE $19.95: None.

Spiegelman Redux

In 1999 I wrote a piece for The Village Voice urging a reconsideration of cartoonist Art Spiegelman, best known for his 1980s graphic novel “Maus” and subsequent cover artwork for The New Yorker magazine. That piece also bemoaned Spiegelman’s outsized ego and influence in the comics and editorial communities given the paucity of his creative output and his singularly unpleasant, ungenerous personality.

Five years later, Spiegelman’s influence has rightly waned. Upon discovering (after 9/11, when he seems to have discovered politics) that The New Yorker’s editorial viewpoint skewed somewhat to the right of The Progressive’s, Spiegelman sort of quit the long ossified magazine. His cartooning output has been limited to a monthly comic strip, “In the Shadow of No Towers,” that appears in The Forward, heir to the venerable Jewish weekly of a century ago. And he no longer pulls quite as many strings in the magazine world, where he once ordered artists whose work or disposition he found disagreeable blackballed; many such strings have been broken by as recession-ravaged glossies folded during the early part of the new decade.

American readers are now suffering something of an attempted Spiegelman comeback in the form of his new booklet “In the Shadow of No Towers” (42 pages for $20!). Spiegelman, in drawing INSONT, gushes the New York Times Book Review, “has now surpassed the dean of the underground school, Robert Crumb.”

Quelle insulte!

I’ve been waiting for someone else to say it, but as far as I know no one else has. So I will: “In the Shadow of No Towers” is the greatest publishing scam since the Hitler diaries. The cover is recycled from Spiegelman’s New Yorker cover after 9/11: a stupid-beyond-words gray-out of the World Trade Center on a black background. The last half of the booklet’s 42 pages—printed, like a child’s tome, as a board book in an absurd attempt to make it seem substantial, as if it were a real book worthy of discussion, even purchase—is composed entirely of classic turn of the century Sunday comics. Which, it hardly need to be noted, Spiegelman did not draw. The book’s only original content is its introduction. So here we are, 14 years since “Maus,” and Spiegelman has written an essay. Which is fine, but why should anybody care?

The reprinted cartoons from the Forward are the mystery meat in this Brit-thin sandwich. I’ve been scouring the Web for the most likely places where criticism might be found: the comments section for the title on Amazon, the always cranky posters to the Comics Journal. But here too Spiegelman remains a sacred cow. Some are disappointed at the padded content of the book, but one wonders why they would want any more given the quality of what’s there. INSONT’s Forward cartoons suck. They suck so hard that it’s nearly impossible to quantify their suckiness; they suck worse than most of the sucky sample comics aspiring teenagers send to professional cartoonists by email. They suck worse than most daily comic strips, which is saying something, and they suck worse than almost anything printed in an alternative paper. They are drawn like shit—and coming from me, that’s saying something—and the jokes are impossibly stupid. Not one, but two “gags” about shoes falling from the sky, one set of Texas-style cowboy boots (get it?). But don’t trust me, just go to a bookstore and look at the thing, for truly it is a thing of wonder that a major publisher has the audacity to try to foist an object of such suckosity, even on the American public.

Even people who support Bush don’t deserve this.

And yet, The New York Times Book Review, along with most other august institutions of the literary world, dares to compare him to Duke Ellington. “Shaken out of his complacency by Sept. 11, Spiegelman ‘made a vow that morning to return to making comix,’ he writes.” Some gave blood, others enlisted, I went to Afghanistan. Spiegelman hit the drawing board. Step aside, firefighters, and meet the real hero.

“‘I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz smelled like,” he writes in one panel. “The closest he got was to tell me it was…’indescribable.’ That’s exactly what the air in Lower Manhattan smelled like after September 11.” How do you know, Art? I wasn’t at Auschwitz and neither were you but I’m willing to bet good money that it didn’t smell like 9/11, which smelled like burning flesh mixed with that electrical burning scent you get from model trains. No charred wiring in the Reich’s machinery of death. More to the point, 9/11 killed 0.05% of the Holocaust death poll. Oh, and there was nothing personal about 9/11 to Art Spiegelman, save that he’s a millionaire who lives in the tony Tribeca neighborhood near where the Towers fell. He may suffer increased risk of lung cancer down the road from sucking up all of that EPA-approved residue but as a two pack a day smoker, one doubts that it will make much difference to him. To top it all off, this neurotic nut, writes: “‘I finally understand why some Jews didn’t leave Berlin right after Kristallnacht!” Because, you know, living in Tribeca is like being a Jew in Nazi-era Berlin. Get it?

Lots of people write shitty books. Others write padded excuses for a book. But it’s something of an event when such a preposterous pile of pretentious bullshit is widely lauded for its genius. Perhaps it’s appropriate for a time when George W. Bush can be compared to Winston Churchill.