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Opus 180:
Opus 180 (March 27, 2006). We take long looks at Drawn &
Quarterly’s Walt and Skeezix reprint
project, perpetual hiatus at The
Boondocks, and the graphic novel The
King. And, in an unprecedented maneuver, we examine some religious issues.
I’m not trying to convert anyone; the ax I’m grinding has no proselytizing
edge. My interest, here, in religion is scholarly or sociological, not
spiritual. The Danish caricatures of Muhammad thrust cartooning into the religious
realm, and that, in turn, brings religion into our field of vision here at
Rancid Raves. But all that is at the end of the usual menu of cartoonery, so
you can skip it when you come to it if the topic doesn’t intrigue you. Here’s
what’s here, in order: NOUS R US —Over the Hedge becomes a movie, Baldo goes on a mission, Playmates are
unfrocked in The New Yorker, the 1986
comics watershed is explained in Playboy,
Universal Press ’tooners substitute for a recuperating colleague, “The
Simpsons” decides not to let Muhammad on the set, death threats and The New Adventures of Jesus, the power
of imagery over words, “South Park” lampoons Scientology, Frank Miller’s new Batman takes on bin Laden, a confusion of early
cartoonist clubs, Knight Ridder’s sale to McClatchy may be good news for
editoonists, Danziger gets the
Herblock Prize; MOORE’S VENDETTA—
What the Brit is thinking; MORE DANISH —The
Arab perspective and the anti-Semitic cartoon contest; COMIC STRIP WATCH— Stasis in Garfield, daring in Chickweed Lane, love in Candorville; DISAPPEARING BOONDOCKS —Will McGruder return in six months? Other
strips jockey to fill the slot Boondocks leaves open; Brian Walker on the
invincible comic strip; BOOK MARQUEE —Jim Whiting’s book and his penny-pickup
project; REPRINTZ —A recent Mutts book; GRAFIC NOVIL —The King, a
meditation on faith; AMERICAN EPIC —The reprinting of Gasoline Alley and
Jeet Heer’s abundant enthusiasms; IS
RELIGION THE PROBLEM? —An examination by Charles Kimball of the ways
religion can go wrong; and, finally, more Bushwah, including GeeDubya’s
sublimated evangelism. And our usual reminder: when you get to the
Member/Subscriber Section, don’t forget to activate the “Bathroom Button” by
clicking on the “print friendly version” so you can print off a copy of just
this lengthy installment for reading later, at your leisure while enthroned.
Without further adieu—
NOUS R US
All the News that Gives Us Fits
Over the Hedge, an 11-year-old comic strip written by Michael Fry and drawn by T Lewis, is one of the nation’s
funniest and best-drawn strips and appears in only about 200 newspapers. Soon,
however—May 19, to be precise—RJ the snack-food raccoon and the rest of the
animal gang lurking satirically in the woods on the edge of suburbia will
transcend newsprint and land on silver screens in theaters everywhere in a
computer-animated rendition by DreamWorks. In their digital incarnations, the
animals look nearly real. Said Lewis: “It’s almost a live-action look, yet
still ‘cartoony.’” Fry and Lewis were thoroughly involved in the movie
production at various stages. “We never felt out of the loop,” said Fry. And
they are happy with the final product. Fry has produced other comic strips over
the years; his Committed just ended
in February. And Lewis has another career as illustrator of children’s books,
15 so far. He dropped the period after the ‘T’ in his name because, he said,
“after a while, it seemed extraneous.” The initial stands for Thomas, which he
avoids because there are too many Thomases in his family. Fry and Lewis began
their collaboration, according to David Astor in Editor & Publisher, with a farm-based strip called The Secret Lives of Pigs. “Lewis swears
he and Fry didn’t initially realize the title had the abbreviation of ‘SLOP.’”
Baldo, the first nationally syndicated comic strip featuring a Latino family
living in the U.S., devoted eleven days at the end of March to warning about
the “Latin Lotto Scam” being perpetrated in Hispanic communities. Typically,
the con artist approaches elderly people with what appears to be a winning
lottery ticket, which, he explains, he can’t cash in because of immigration
issues. He then asks the victim to claim the winnings for him, but, before
turning over the ticket, he also asks for a “security deposit” as a sign of
good faith. Once the victim has donated his money, the con artist takes off. In
the Universal Press strip written by Hector
Cantu and drawn by Carlos
Castellanos, teenager Baldo’s great aunt, Carmen, is approached by con
artists. “The key to preventing this is awareness,” said Cantu. And the
sequence will heighten awareness.
Michael
Jantze, who continues to produce The
Norm online, and Matt Richtel, a
journalist who moonlights by writing Rudy
Park as Theron Heir, have
launched a website collection of Katrina-related comic strips. Said Jantze: “I
think the hardest part of this cleanup effort is that rebuilding takes years.
The Chicago Fire gutted that city, and it took 20 years for it to truly come
back. The idea of www.cartoonistswithoutboarders.com is to keep
going a long time. Comics readers can come back ... catch up on their laughs
and get a reminder to care.” The site will have hot links to websites that
accept help with hard cash, like the American Red Cross.
In the March 20 issue of The New Yorker (the issue with a cover
by Seth), Joan Acocella reviews
Taschen’s Playmate Book: Six Decades of
Centerfolds, in which she reveals, among other things, that Playboy discovered with the publication
of Miss August 1967, who had “a pair of knockers rivaling Mae West’s,” that
“breasts count.” She also observes: “The Playmates of the past few decades look
to me like the ‘cereal box’ buildings that went up on Sixth Avenue in the
sixties, those cold, shiny structures, with no niches, no insets—no doors, it
seemed. Likewise, the current Playmates seem to have no point of entry. And
wasn’t entry the idea?” She quotes from Kenneth Clark’s The Nude, wherein the academic nudes of the nineteenth century are
described as “smoothed out forms and waxen surfaces” and goes on to say,
“Hefner’s latter-day nudes have the same look: the skin like polished armor ...
the golden light, the velvet thickness of the paper. This is not so much sex,
or a woman, as something more like a well-buffed Maserati.” The remarkable
thing about the article, however, is not Acocella’s acerbic opinions, however
highly savored, but the accompanying illustration: a full page of assorted
Playmates in naked zaftig splendor, lifted right from the centerfolds of Playboy.
Elsewhere, in the current (April)
issue of Playboy, Robert Levine and
Scott Alexander have a piece entitled “Of Maus and Supermen” in which they
argue that comic books were pretty universally kid stuff until 1986, when the
medium crossed the Rubicon and became adult. The bellweathers for the new
direction were Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Art
Spiegelman’s Maus, all produced
in that single watershed year. With Maus signaling “the beginning of acceptance,” the medium matured to the point that,
nowadays, as Moore says, “you can read the reviews without realizing it’s a
comic.” Karen Berger at DC Comics is
given a good deal of credit for fostering new talent and nurturing the
revolution, but the authors also cite just about every other notable in the
current crop of graphic novelists and funnybook scribes. Moore, asked if he’s
surprised that graphic novels are now being treated as literary enterprises,
says: “There’s something about this academic acceptance of comics that smells
of death. I see all these beautifully produced books that give the masters of
the medium the respect they deserve, with intellectual analyses of the work,
and they look a bit like tombstones to me. The real energy in any art form has
always come from the margins—the filthy, dirty, neglected edges.” While the
article does a creditable job of surveying the landscape, the authors get a
little carried away from time to time. The comic book events of 1986, they say,
constituted “a cultural force that would shape the next two decades of
entertainment.” That seems a little excessive. And they also assert, without
qualification, that “a glance around the media landscape suggests that comics
have come to rule pop culture.” All pop culture? Music? Clothing? Advertising on
tv? I don’t think so. A little excessive, as I say. In the same issue is a
photograph of Hefner’s daughter, Christie, who runs the Playboy business these
days. She’s fully clothed, up to the neck, and looks like Hef did fifty years
ago before his face was botoxed into a grinning grimace.
At the Museum of Comic and Cartoon
Art in Manhattan, “MoCCA Mondays” feature speakers. On March 27, Mark Newgarden discusses his book, We All Die Alone; on April 10, Ruben Bolling, creator of Tom the Dancing Bug, engages in
conversation with Kent Worcester. Scheduled for 6:30 p.m., doors open at 6:15 p.m. at 594 Broadway, Suite 401.
Rob
Harrell, who produces the comic strip Big
Top for Universal Press Syndicate, recently underwent surgery to remove a
cancerous tumor behind his left eye. While he was recovering, twelve Universal
cartoonists sat in for him on his strip, each doing one strip a day, starting
March 6. “I was shocked they were interested in doing it and willing to do it,”
Harrell said. “But at the same time, I’ve been going to cartooning conventions
for years, and they really are the nicest group of people. So I probably
shouldn’t be so surprised.” One of his stand-ins, Mark Pett whose feature is Lucky
Cow, said: “Rob made it clear that he wanted us to do it in our own style.
We’re not trying to emulate him. It’s more like dressing up for a day.”
The international rioting about the
caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad persuaded the producers of “The Simpsons”
to abandon a plan to have Muhammad show up in a forthcoming episode of the tv
series. Said creator Matt Groening: “In light of the situation in Denmark, we have decided to withdraw our
depiction of the Prophet out of sensitivity towards the Islamic community’s
feelings. And also our sensitivity to our office being firebombed.”
Back in the early days of
undergrounds, one of the first comix—if not, in fact, THE first—was The New Adventures of Jesus in which the
Savior is viewed somewhat irreverently, from the twentieth century perspective
of a person who has read the New Testament with an appreciation for the human
predicament rather than for the divine message. He tries to go swimming but
bounces off the water. (Since he walks on water, see, he can’t penetrate the
stuff, so ....) Frank Stack produced
this gem in a succession of issues, and I asked him recently whether, like the
Danish cartoonists, he’d received any death threats for his sacrilege. Stack
wrote back: “Rip Off did pass on some hate mail to me in the 70s when I was
still just calling myself Foolbert Sturgeon, and it was pretty nasty. One of them put a curse on me. I
included some of it, fictionalized for story purposes of course, in the ‘Daily
Grind’ story in Jesus Joins the Academic
Community. He's checking his mailbox in the main office. The Muslims are
not the only ones without a sense of humor. But the Arab countries are
theocracies. Not only is drawing cartoons of the Big Kahuna a capital offense,
but so is adultery, drinking, and eating pork. I don't intend to draw cartoons
criticizing other religions, which I don't understand well enough for informed
satire. It's dicey enough with our own superstitions.”
Amanda Bennett, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the very
few American newspapers that published any of the Danish Dozen, justified her
decision by citing what a journalists credo ought to be: “It is better to make
information available than to suppress it.” Simply describing the cartoons, as
many U.S. papers did instead of printing the actual images, isn’t good enough,
Bennett said. To make her point, she referred to a famous photograph taken
during the Vietnam War: “Would the words ‘a naked young girl burning with
napalm’ have made us understand the horrors of the Vietnam War as completely as
Nick Ut’s iconic photo?”
Soul singer Isaac Hayes quit voicing
the South Park character Chef on
March 13, saying he objected to the show’s “inappropriate ridicule” of
religion. Series co-creator Matt Stone was dubious. “In ten years and over 150
episodes,” he said, “Isaac never had a problem with the show making fun of
Christians, Muslims, Mormons or Jews. He got a sudden case of religious
sensitivity when it was his religion featured on the show.” Hayes is a Scientologist, and an episode of “South
Park” last November poked fun at the cult. Hayes said that had nothing to do
with his decision: rather, he saw the show’s parody of religion as part of “a
growing insensitivity toward personal spiritual beliefs” in the media
generally, particularly in the recent controversy over cartoons depicting the Prophet
Muhammad, and he didn’t want to be a part of the trend. On the March 22 “South
Park” episode, the Chef character is seemingly killed off but mourned as a
jolly old guy who was brainwashed by the Super Adventure Club, a hardly veiled
allusion to the fantasy underpinnings of Scientology, the ersatz religion
conjured up by sf writer L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. According to a report in
the March 9 issue of Rolling Stone: “75 million years ago, an evil galactic warlord named Xenu controlled 76
planets in this corner of the galaxy, each of which was severely overpopulated.
To solve the problem, Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings and few them to
Earth, where they were dumped into volcanoes around the globe and vaporized
with bombs. This scattered their radioactive souls, or thetans, until they were
caught in electronic traps set up around the atmosphere and ‘implanted’ with a
number of false ideas—including the concepts of God, Christ and organized
religion. Scientologists later learn that many of these entities attached
themselves to human beings, where they remain to this day, creating not just
the root of all our emotional and physical problems but the root of all
problems of the modern world.” About which, S. Scott Bartchy, director of the
Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA, said: “Hubbard thought it was
important to have a story about how things got going.”
Frank
Miller is about halfway through his next Dark Knight title, Holy Terror, Batman, in which the Caped
Crusader meets Osama bin Laden and kicks his ass, defending Gotham City from
terrorists. “It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a piece of propaganda,”
Miller said. Another work of unabashed anger and unfettered violence, I’d say.
Can’t wait to see it. ... Woody Wilson, who writes Rex Morgan and Judge Parker, apprenticed at the game
with the strips’ creator, Dr. Nick Dallis. ... Baby Blues, the comic strip about overpopulation (the exhausted
MacPhersons have three young kids) by Jerry
Scott as drawn by Rick Kirkman, has just arrived in the inner circle of syndicated success as it passed the
1,000 client papers mark. ... “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the
Were-Rabbit” won the Oscar for animated feature film, and now in Bristol, the
hometown of Aardman Animations, producers of the film, a clamor is rising for a
statue to be erected thereabouts in honor of the balding cheese lover and his
long-suffering canine companion. ... Bizarro’s Dan Piraro received the “Ongoing
Commitment Award” from the Humane Society of the U.S. ... Darrin Bell’s Candorville has been nominated for a Glyph Award. Presented by the East Coast Black Age of
Comics Convention, the Glyph Award “recognizes the best in comics made by, for,
and about people of color.” ... With the acquisition of Pixar, the Walt Disney Company has less need for
its Circle 7 animation facility, which was set up to make sequels to the movies
Disney made with Pixar, and so Circle 7 will be closed and 32 animators and
other employees there will be out of work. The remaining 136 or so will move to
Disney’s Feature Animation division.
Where did it all begin? Magazine
cartooner Ned Hilton was once
president of the Cartoonist’s Guild of America, described as “the first and
only organization of its kind in the world ... now [1939] boasting some 200
members.” But there was an earlier cartoonists club, formed under the auspices
of Cartoons magazine in1926, and Eugene “Zim” Zimmerman was its first
and only president. The club disbanded when Cartoons went out of business. And then there was another club, active sometime toward
the end of the 1920s, of which Frederick
Burr Opper was the one and only president. The club fell to pieces when it
tried to elect a successor for Opper. Opper was revered enough by his
colleagues that no one questioned the appropriateness of his being president.
But with his retirement, each individual member thought himself the only one
entitled to succeed the “dean of American cartooning.” Unable to agree on a new
prexy, the club expired of excessive self-esteem.
EDITOONERY. Heads continue to roll. In one of the most
outrageous of layoffs, editooner Stacy
Curtis at the Times of Northwest
Indiana was “escorted out of the building at 2 p.m.” on March 2. He said he
had no warning. In fact, he believed his job was secure because he emphasized
local issues in his cartoons—exactly the emphasis demanded by the newspaper, a
link in the Lee Enterprises chain. “Escorted out of the building”? What? Did
the management imagine he would set fire to the place before leaving? Well, I
suppose after the Danish Dozen, political cartoonists are widely perceived to
be bomb throwers and fomenters of wholesale destruction.
In other news with implications for
editooning, Knight Ridder confirmed on Monday, March 13, that its board had
accepted a buy-out offer of $4.5 billion from the McClatchy newspaper chain.
Knight Ridder went up for sale some months ago because its stockholders were
unhappy that the chain wasn’t making a big enough return for them on their
investment. The situation was widely regarded on Wall Street and throughout the
industry as a kind of referendum on the newspaper industry. If Knight Ridder
didn’t fetch a good price, it would signal that newspapers are no longer good
investments. McClatchy’s offer, however, has apparently laid that fear to rest.
The other encouraging aspect of the deal is that McClatchy is known for its
commitment to quality journalism, not bottom-line profits. Knight Ridder, on
the other hand, has lately seemed more money conscious than news conscientious.
KR had laid off quantities of employees at its 32 papers over the last few
years, hoping to boost profits enough to stave off stockholders’ impatience,
thereby avoiding the inevitable demand that the chain be sold. It worked for a
while but, alas, not forever. McClatchy plans no across-the-board layoffs at KR
papers although it plans to sell 12 of the papers immediately. Included in that
number are the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and the San Jose Mercury News, papers that don’t
fit into McClatchy’s long-standing acquisitions criteria, which emphasize
growing markets rather than stable ones. Interested purchasers include
family-owned groups and private investors, another encouraging sign. In the
wake of this deal, perhaps other newspapers will not be so jittery about their
profit-loss statements; and perhaps they won’t be laying off editorial
cartoonists to improve profit margins for anxious stockholders. We can
hope.
Rocky
Mountain News editorial cartoonist Ed
Stein won the 24th annual Fischetti Competition with a cartoon
about the racial divide revealed by Katrina; you can see his cartoon in my 2005
Round-up of the Year’s Best at Opus 176. ... Michael Ramirez, once with the Los
Angeles Times now with the Investor’s
Business Daily, won the Scripps Howard award for 2005 editorial cartooning
with cartoons that “reflect his philosophy that an editorial cartoon is not
just a funny picture: it’s a fine instrument of journalism that has a point,
tells a story, and defines an issue.” About his professional role, Ramirez
recently said: “I get paid to be obnoxious. Editorial cartoonists are like pit
bulls trained to attack at the slightest provocation. I sometimes feel like
this hybrid between Edward R. Morrow and the Son of Sam. You need to know who
the enemy is to draw conclusions, then draw blood. I’m an equal opportunity
offender. If I haven’t offended you yet, I soon will.”
Jeff
Danziger has won the $10,000 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning in
2005. Syndicated by the Cartoonists & Writers/New York Times Syndicate,
Danziger produces what may well be the nation’s most literate political
cartoons. Jules Feiffer, one of the
three-judge panel determining the award, said Danziger’s cartoons “have a sense
of literary intelligence—in their own way, each is an essay,” adding that
Danziger’s Iraq War commentary is “the closest thing to the feeling Bill
Mauldin gave us in his best days. I think he’s terrific. He’s on a level with
anybody.” Biting and unflinching as Danziger’s cartoons are, his caricatures
are fairly lame; but who notices amid the acerbic wit otherwise on display in
his work? One of the jurying panel, editoonist Tony Auth of the Philadelphia
Inquirer, said Danziger “creates lush and believable worlds that are
complex and compelling. ... It rains in Danziger’s cartoons: he uses weather to
establish mood.” For more about Danziger, re-visit Opus 148.
Fascinating
Footnote. Much of the news
retailed in this segment is culled from articles eventually indexed at http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael Rhode and John Bullough, which covers comic books, comic
strips, animation, caricature, cartoons, bandes
dessinees and related topics. It also provides links to numerous other
sites that delve deeply into cartooning topics.
MOORE’S VENDETTA
The New Yorker’s David Denby didn’t like the movie “V for Vendetta”
much. Calling it “a dunderhead pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and
destruction,” he concludes: “‘Vendetta’ doesn’t have any ideas, except for a
misbegotten belief in cleansing acts of violence. How strangely doth pop make
its murderous way, as V might say. The quarter-century-old disgruntled
fantasies of two English comic-book artists, amplified by a powerful movie
company and ambushed by history, wind up yielding a disastrous muddle.” The two
British comic book producers are Alan
Moore, who wrote the original V for
Vendetta in the 1980s, protesting what he saw as the fascist conservatism
of the Margaret Thatcher government, and his artist collaborator, David Lloyd. Conjured up as a motion
picture in the wake of 9/11, the celluloid “Vendetta” alludes to the new
fascism of the Bush League and seems to extol the redeeming virtues of an
opposing terrorism: V is either a terrorist or a freedom fighter, take your
pick. Moore himself eventually gave up on V being a hero or a villain. “I made
it morally ambiguous,” he told Heidi MacDonald. “And the central question is:
Is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this?
Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn’t want to tell people
what to think; I just wanted to tell people to think.” Moore rejects the idea
that the opposite poles in politics are Left Wing and Right Wing. Says he: “The
two more absolute extremes [are] anarchy and fascism. This was one of the
things I objected to in the ‘Vendetta’ film, where it seems to be, from the
script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism
vs. current American liberalism. There wasn’t a mention of anarchy as far as I
could see. The fascism had been completely defanged.” He elaborated: “I don’t
want to say V is the hero any more than I really want to say he’s the villain.
He’s a force. [Neither fascism or anarchy is] a political system. Fascism is a
kind of weird mystical system, and anarchy is an attempt to move beyond the
need to be politic, the need to manipulate large masses of people. So I tend to
think V is pretty much an allegorical force, an idea given human form. And,
obviously, I have a lot of sympathy with some of his basic ideas. But I think
that killing people is wrong.”
Moore has famously requested that DC
Comics remove his name from “Vendetta” and any work that he doesn’t own
outright; and he’s given up the income from such endeavors, too. Apart from
indulging in a fit of pique, his reasons are somewhat convoluted. “I’m asking
them to treat me in the same way they’ve been completely happy to treat
hundreds of much greater comics creators than I over the decades. I’m asking
them to say to me the same thing they said to Gardner Fox and Jack Kirby and to
all those other guys, just say to me ‘you are not going to see a penny for any
kind of future reproductions of your work, and we’re not going to put your name
on them.’” Under this rubric, Moore is turning his career into an object lesson
of martyrdom. But the real reasons for his strange action lie, I believe, in
the way he’s been treated over the years, the way most creative people are
treated by corporate America. In effect, I think Moore is saying: if you can’t
give me the respect a creator deserves—and if you can’t treat his creation with
similar respect—then I disown the creation. Even more significantly, by
refusing to let DC or anyone else put his name on something adapted from his
work, he is denying them the promotional value of his name. They can’t use his
name to boost box office receipts. Or so Moore imagines. Most of the publicity
about the “Vendetta” movie, however, usually gets Moore’s name into the mix by
saying he’s refused to lend his name to the project. Moore may be content with
this, but I don’t think he’s achieved what he hoped to achieve by scarpering
the premises.
David
Lloyd, meanwhile, thinks the Wachowski brothers’ screenplay is as faithful
to the original story as possible. “In the adaptation, they have had to use
much broader sweeps than we did,” he said. “In the graphic novel, we had lots
of space to tell the story. It’s not a perfect translation, but it is very
imaginative.”
Talking about terrorism, Moore
referred to Americans being frightened of dying in a jihad. “No offense,” he
said, “but that is perhaps more of an American perception than a global one.
You have to remember that over here [in Britain], there were teenagers being
taken out of cellar bars in separate carrier bags all through the 70s and 80s
because of the war in Northern Ireland. Which in that case, the IRA were
largely being supported by donations from America. That was why I was a bit
worried when George Bush said he was going to attack people who supported
terrorism. I thought, Oh my god—Chicago is going to be declared a rogue state,
and they’re gong to hunt down Teddy Kennedy and people like that.”
As for the present state of
funnybooks, Moore said: “I never loved the comic industry. I used to love the
comics medium. I still do love the comics medium in its pure platonic,
essential form, but the comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been
allowed to become a cucumber patch for producing new movie franchises.” Comic
books, particularly superhero comic books, seem “adolescent in their brutality
and in their inexperienced adolescent approach to violence and sex. At the
other end, at the more supposedly intellectual end, I see an awful lot of angst
and adolescent breast beating. ... The industry for all the great claims it
makes for itself these days—we’re kind of post-modern, we’re hip, you know,
we’re sort of a major star accessory—the industry still seems to be based upon
a gangster ethic that was around when it was founded.” Interviewed by MTV News’
Jennifer Vineyard, Moore elaborated: “There’s a lot of rubbish out there. But
there have been some very literate comic books done over the last 20 years,
some marvelous ones. And to actually read a comic, you do have to be able to
read, which is not something you can say about watching a film. So as for which
medium is literate, give me comics any day.” Would he be happier about film
adaptations of his works if he were to undertake directing the films? “I don’t
have any interest in directing films of my work,” he said. “If something worked
perfectly in one genre, why is there any reason to assume it’s going to work as
well or better in another genre that it wasn’t designed for? I’ve not seen
‘Ghost World,’ but I’ve been told it’s very good. I’ve not been told that it’s
better than the comic.”
MORE DANISH
One
of the most exasperating aspects of the Danish Dozen episode was, for Muslims,
the hypocrisy represented by their publication in several European countries, a
hypocrisy starkly illuminated recently when an Austrian court sentenced British
historian David Irving to three years for denying the Holocaust. In Europe,
from the Muslim perspective, it is apparently okay to mock Islam but not to
deny the Holocaust. The moral inconsistency of this situation and other stances
taken in the West with respect to the Middle East is fodder for editorial
cartoonist Khalil Bendib, an Arab
American Muslim. Born in Paris of Algerian Muslim parents, Bendib spent his
early years in Morocco and went to Algeria after it won independence in 1962.
By the 1980s, he was in the U.S., taking a master’s degree on East Asian
languages and culture at the University of Southern California. Working for the San Bernardino Sun in 1987, Bendib
received his first death threats for cartoons critical of Israel in the
Palestinian cause. Now cartooning for the Muslim
Observer, he saw the Danish cartoons as “the latest sign of the West’s
utter contempt for Muslims’ dearest values and traditions.” But, according Signe
Wilkinson editoonist at the Philadelphia
Daily News is sympathetic. Said she: “I believe the European papers should
print the Muslim cartoons denying the Holocaust and mocking Jews. Then,
Europeans will have a full and frank view of the imagery that fuels some of the
thinking in the Middle East.”
Meanwhile, the first stage of the
Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest has ended. Launched soon after Iran
announced an Anti-Semitic cartoon contest, the Israeli version is clearly
lampooning the Muslim competition. More than a hundred Jewish cartooners from
around the world submitted cartoons, and the organizers are now
COMIC STRIP WATCH
In For Better or For Worse for February
28 one of the characters makes the following observation: “I wonder why we say
that people are of different ‘races.’ It seems to me, we’re all running at the
same speed and heading towards the same destination. The only ‘winners’ are the
ones who’ve made the world a better place for Garfield spent the week of March 6
watching tv.The strips weren’t photocopies of each other, but the compositions were pretty
static from day-to-day. The next week, Jon was on the phone all week, trying to
get a date, and Garfield provided a comic exit line in the last panels. The
next week, they were in a restaurant. And so it goes.
In 9 Chickweed Lane, Brooke
McEldowney seems about to question the Catholic doctrine of celibacy. One
of the nuns from the school Edda attended shows up in New York, sans habit.
She’s resigned her order. And she’s the nun we saw nearly holding hands with
Father Durly many months ago.
And in Candorville, Susan Garcia confesses, to herself, that she loves
Lemont. Not too surprising: their relationship has been presumed Platonic, but
cartoonist Darrin Bell admits the
strip is more than a little autobiographical with Lemont being his alter ego.
And Susan, Bell says, is actually his wife Laura. “I’m much, much luckier than
Lemont,” he grins.
Quips & Crotchets
From Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country: “I asked the now regrettably dead painter
Syd Solomon, a most agreeable neighbor on Long Island for many summertimes, how
to tell a good picture from a bad one. He gave me the most satisfactory answer
I ever expect to hear. He said, ‘Look at a million pictures, and you can never
be mistaken.’”
“Foreigners,” Vonnegut writes, “love
us for our jazz. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice
for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.”
Craig
Ferguson, when asked by Playboy if he could be a Bond villain, who he would be: “A Bond villain who harks back
to the old days of the Bond villains, when you had a midget with a hat that
could kill when he threw it at you. The Bond villains now are all Eastern
Europeans with designer stubble. I’m not frightened of guys like that. Fuck
off. No, I want a guy with a false hand, an eye patch and maybe an owl—an evil
owl that might peck Bond’s eyes out. Oh, and whatever side you dress on? That’s
the side you wear your owl.”
Allan Wolper, writing in Editor & Publisher about the dilemma
editors face when prominent figures utter obscenities while speaking on the
record: “Newspapers know it’s unethical to clean up the language of the people
they cover. But they convince themselves they’re doing the right thing. They’re
family newspapers. They’re worried about their children seeing it. ‘I was
shocked to see how sensitive American ears are,’ said Jeffrey Dvorkin,
ombudsman for National Public Radio, who migrated here from the Canadian
Broadcasting System. Dvorkin noted that NPR also passed on Cheney’s [‘go fuck
yourself’ comment on the Senate floor some months ago]. ‘We didn’t say ‘fuck’
on the air. But we were wrong. I would have used it.’”
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind beats everything. —Dennis
Miller adv.
The
Rev. Al Sharpton has no actual
church or congregation. ... The New York
Times reported that Loving County in west Texas, with only 71 residents,
two roads, and one café distributed across its 645 square miles, recently
received $30,000 in anti-terrorist funds from the Department of Homeland
Security.
Jamie Raskin, a professor of law
testifying at a hearing on a proposed Constitutional Amendment prohibiting gay
marriage, faced Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs, who, at the end of Raskin’s
testimony, said: “Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and
a woman. What do you have to say about that?” Raskin said: “Senator, when you
took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold
the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to
uphold the Bible.”
DISAPPEARING BOONDOCKS
I’ve
been expecting, sometime or another, this announcement: Aaron McGruder is taking a six-month sabbatical from The Boondocks. The last new strips were
published the week of March 20. Client papers may elect to re-run “classic” Boondocks for the next six months. In a
letter that McGruder’s syndicate, Universal Press, sent to client papers,
McGruder said: “Every well needs occasional refreshing, and I hope that this
fall, you will agree that the time away from the demands of deadlines has
served the strip, your readers, and me. To be on your comic pages for the last
seven years has been a privilege. I thank you for that and for your patience as
I explored our world through the eyes of Huey, Riley and their grandfather.”
Here are the last dailies, with Huey leading his gang off into the revolution,
reverting, so to speak, to their pre-Boondocks status to “jack a ride” (steal a
car). McGruder’s editor, Greg Melvin,
explained the cartoonist’s decision: “Deadlines are hard on everybody, but
deadlines are especially hard on creative people. When six months have passed,
hopefully McGruder’s batteries will be recharged.” Other syndicated
cartoonists, following Garry Trudeau’s lead in 1983, have taken time off— Cathy
Guisewite, Berkeley Breathed (between Bloom
County and Outland), Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson. All
syndicated cartoonists doubtless agree with Jeff Shesol, who ended his just-launched strip, Thatch, in 1998 to become a speech
writer for Bill Clinton: “There’s a grinding relentlessness to the task of a
daily strip,” he said. “The deadlines never go away. It’s a very isolating
existence. It can definitely grind you down.” Does he miss it? “I miss the
medium,” Shesol said, “but I don’t miss the job. I miss my characters: they’re
extensions of your own personality and relationships and ideas. There have been
some times, pretty often during these Bush years, when I think, ‘Man, I wish I
had my strip!’”
Come October, it will have been six
months since McGruder laid down his pen. The
Boondocks, then, should be looming back up on the horizon. But it wouldn’t
surprise me if McGruder extends his vacation indefinitely. In fact, my bet is
that he won’t be back. I interviewed him in the winter of 2003, about four
years after the strip was launched with great fanfare and hullabaloo. By 2003,
McGruder was populating the lecture circuit and moonlighting on tv scripts and
movie projects. He seemed nearly mesmerized with the prospect of Hollywood
fame, the promise of power and influence in mass media. He realized, when I
prompted him, that a syndicated comic strip gave him a daily platform unequaled
in any of the other media he was dabbling in. Much as he disliked the deadline
pressures, he didn’t want to give up the bully pulpit that the daily strip
afforded him. But it was clear that he was sorely tempted. On the stage delivering
iconoclastic speeches around the country, he tasted fame in a way that
cartoonists, working alone in their spare bedrooms, never do. The audible
adulation of the masses. And he liked the taste. It was only a matter of time,
I thought, before he chucks it all for something seemingly more lucrative, more
visible. More ego-satisfying. Less deadline-draining. Now, I suspect, that time
has come. McGruder left the drawing of the strip to assistants several years
ago. The animated “Boondocks” now absorbs his time: it seems a workable (and
better paying) extension of his peculiar creative sensibility and satiric bent,
so now would be a good time to step away from the strip. And I bet he’ll do it.
Unless, after six months without a pulpit, he realizes—and misses—the bully
opportunity to rail every day against the idiocies of his times.
It is, protestations to the contrary
notwithstanding, scarcely a coincidence that the launch date of a new strip
from Washington Post Writers Group was advanced from May 21 to March 27 just as
soon as McGruder’s intentions became known. Watch
Your Head was on every Boondocks newspaper
doorstep last week, waiting to fill in the demographic gap that Boondocks’ departure created in 300
newspapers. And the new strip is a perfect substitute: drawn in a manner
similar to McGruder’s, the strip, like Boondocks,
has a mostly African-American cast and is created by an African-American, Cory Thomas. But similarities between
the two strips end just about there. Thomas’ art, while in the manga-cum-hiphop
ghetto style deployed by McGruder, is much more detailed and elaborate: for one
thing, we don’t see a parade of pictures in which the characters appear in
static, unchanging profile, panel after panel, the usual drill at The Boondocks. Set at the predominately
black Oliver Otis University, the strip focuses on the campus adventures of six
students, only one of whom is white—a Canadian. The ostensible protagonist is a
smart, bespectacled kid named Cory. His roommate is Jason, who grew up in upper-middle
class splendor but prefers, perversely, to talk gangsta jive and imitate
riffraff. Watch Your Head has none of The Boondocks racial edge: the strip
is about young people adjusting to college and living on the cusp of adulthood
and independence, not about race. There’s not a racial joke or jibe in the two
weeks worth of strips in the sales kit. Watch
Your Head may look somewhat like The
Boondocks, but it’s another world altogether. The gags grow out of the
personalities of the characters, and the punchlines are not telegraphed by the
setups. Good comedy; not spectacular—not edgy—just humane.
Like McGruder was when The Boondocks began, Thomas is in his
mid-twenties. He grew up in San Fernando, Trinidad, reading comic books and
drawing caricatures and mini-comics for his classmates. In 1998, Thomas
accepted an academic scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C.,
graduating magna cum laude in 2002
and starting work on a masters degree in mechanical engineering. He also joined
the staff of the campus paper, Hilltop, as
illustrator, and there he produced the first versions of his strip. The strip
has been in development with WPWG for about a year. Comics editor Amy Lago
praised the strip for its ensemble cast and its character-driven humor as well
as its art. While hoping to squeeze Watch
Your Head into the slot vacated by The
Boondocks, WPWG will also be pushing Darrin
Bell’s Candorville, another
multi-racial endeavor—albeit with a much sharper satiric edge than Watch Your Head.
Another Thought or Two
Brian
Walker, who has now written two massive histories of comics in America—The Comics Since 1945 and The Comics Before 1945 —was asked what
great insight his studies have given him. Said he: “The durability of
cartooning. Radio, television and now the Internet were all supposed to kill
the comics. The comic strip was supposed to die. But cartoonists just keep
coming up with new stuff.”
BOOK MARQUEE
My
friend Jim Whiting, still a
cartooner at age 79, has written a book that tries very hard to be an
autobiography. While it contains an array of salient facts about his life,
they, like Jim himself, appear in no particular order. He sent me the first
chapter of the book before it was published and asked me to compose a “blurb”
for the back cover. So I did. Here it is: “Anyone who's always wanted to be Jim
Whiting should have this handy guidebook, which explains how to be a radio
personality, a magician, and a syndicated cartoonist. Whiting, who has amassed
a small (very small) fortune picking up every penny, nickle, and dime he can
find on the sidewalk, also reveals, for the first time anywhere, who it was who
drove across the Nevada desert wearing white boxer shorts on his head. And all
of this happens before your very eyes in the friendliest prose you can
imagine—in short, a treat for all ages (from the Paleolithic to the Elizabethan
and, hence, to this very century).” Truer words were never writ. Even after
reading the whole tome, I can’t add much by way of assessing the book. Jim
started cartooning at a distressingly early age and sold gag cartoons to
magazines. Eventually, he did a succession of syndicated cartoons—Ad Libs (1943-1972), Wee Women (1965-1974, 1985-1994) and Li’l Ones (1966-1974, 1985-1995), both
the latter originated by Mel Lazarus (Momma and Miss Peach); and Claude & Cleo (1985-1993).
Despite his lifetime drawing
pictures, there’s very little in this book about brushes, pencil shavings,
eraser crumbs, the quest for the perfect line that animates us all, and the
other appurtenances of a career in cartooning. Like most cartoonists writing
about themselves, Jim seems to think no one would be interested in the crises
and triumphs at the drawingboard. The legendary Gordon “Boody” Rogers is the shining exemplar of this misbegotten
notion. He wrote an entire 200-page autobiography without mentioning that he
assisted Zack Mosley on Smilin’ Jack and created two manic comic
book features, Sparky Watts and Babe. Rogers regaled us with his
adventures as a highschool football player and his further adventures in the
armed services. All highly amusing stuff, but if you bought the book because
you knew Rogers was a cartoonist, you’d be disappointed to find him ignoring
this central aspect of his life.
Jim Whiting, however, doesn’t veer
off in quite such an extremity. While he doesn’t discuss the vicissitudes of
daily life at the lip of an ink bottle, he does tell us about all the
cartoonists he met over the years, beginning with Sam Cobean, the celebrated New
Yorker cartoonist whose “naked eye” cartoons revealed as much about
American attitudes towards sex as Alfred Kinsey’s book did, coming along about
four years after the cartoonist. Other cartoonists about whom Jim rehearses
nifty anecdotes include Roger Armstrong,
Sergio Aragones, Bernie Lanksy, Eugene “Zim” Zimmerman, John Dempsey, Ed
Nofziger, Fred Lasswell, Morrie Turner, Harry Lampert, and Jack Markow. Jim tells us about his
youth, growing up in Watkins Glen in upstate New York, where he spent most of
his life until moving, in 1984, to Southern California. He tells us about his
wife and offspring, his entry into the radio business, and the friends he made
along the way. In fact, one has the impression, after reading the book, that
it’s more about Jim’s friends than it is about him. The book is organized
around the names of his acquaintances and colleagues, whom Jim admires
unreservedly. We learn about Jim, his aspirations and achievements, mostly by
what he says, almost incidentally, when introducing us to his friends. And
that’s just exactly as it should be. Jim is not much involved with himself:
he’s much more interested in other people. If you set him loose in a roomful of
perfect strangers, he’ll know more about each one of them within a half-hour
than you could find out in a week. The thing that interests Jim is other
people—what they do, what they think. And he’ll drop everything in pursuit of
this sort of knowledge. The book is exactly like that. Entitled Analecta: Selected Reflections of a
Cartoonist’s Life, the book is just that: “analecta” meaning “a collection
of literary passages,” which, in this case, are stitched together as a crazy
quilt of friendships.
When Jim moved to Solana Beach near
San Diego, he resumed freelance cartooning, and in various places herein, he
tells us how one might proceed to earn a living in this way. He also alludes,
modestly, to his founding in 1986 of the Southern California Cartoonists
Society, which he remained the perpetual president of until just five or six
years ago. Jim is an affable, kind and out-going person, and the book is a
perfect reflection of his personality. You may not learn all that much about
what a cartoonist does, day-by-day (or a radio personality), but you get to
know Jim Whiting pretty well. And that, after all, is what autobiography is
about. And Jim’s casual prose style—warm, conversational and gently
humorous—completes the reflection. The volume, full of Jim’s cartoons and
numerous photos of his friends and family, is available through Amazon.com at
$13, plus p&h; but you can get an autographed copy directly from Jim for
just $22, including p&h: 222 Countryhaven Road, Encinitas, CA 92024.
As for picking up pennies on the
sidewalks of Southern California, Jim reports that last year, 2005, he amassed
$10.42 that way. A pretty good year, compared to the previous four, albeit not
as good as the record year 2000, when he rescued $20.70 from oblivion.
REPRINTZ
As
a boy, Patrick McDonnell always
wanted a dog because he saw such an admirable canine companion on the funnies
page: Snoopy, the imaginative beagle in Charles
Schulz's Peanuts. "I never
had a dog growing up," said McDonnell, so when he grew up, he decided to
leave New York City and move to Metuchen, New Jersey, where he could have a
yard for a dog. And then he bought a Jack Russell terrior and named it Earl.
Soon after that, he met his boyhood idol, Schulz, and when McDonnell asked
Schulz what he should name the dog protagonist of his gestating comic strip, Mutts, Schulz told him to name the dog
after his own pet. And so he did.
The strip's other principal
character is a cat named Mooch. "My mom named Mooch," McDonnell
explains, "because whenever our cat rubbed his head up against me, my mom
called it 'that mooch.'"
Unlike most comic strip animals
these days, Earl and Mooch do not talk to humans. The animals talk only to each
other; and the humans talk to each other, and to their pets—as they do in real
life. But McDonnell maintains the "separate world" for animals, one
that humans can be only vaguely aware of. The strip is unabashedly whimsical,
aiming to provoke a fond smile or chuckle rather than a belly gawfaw or
political ire. And McDonnell’s simple rendering style enhances the aura of
whimsy.
Here's Earl and Mooch, lying on
their backs on the sidewalk as a human approaches. "Belly rub for world
peace," says Earl. The human passes them by without administering a belly
rub. "We're all doomed," says Mooch.
Mooch slurs his S's. When he says
"yes," he pronounces it "yesh." McDonnell is an
unadulterated admirer of old time comic strips. With his wife Karen O'Connell,
he wrote a book about one of them, George Herriman's famed Krazy Kat. Krazy and other comic strip characters of his vintage
talked funny, McDonnell said. That got lost, he said, and with Mooch, he's
trying to revive it a little.
Earl and Mooch and their assorted
friends and owners parade through the pages of the tenth Mutts collection, Who Let the
Cat Out? (128 8.5x9-inch page; paperback, $10.95), the cover of which, like
McDonnell's Sunday strip splash panel, is designed in remembrance of something
else—in this case, a comic book, Mutts
Comics. The book includes several of the "Shelter Stories"
sequences McDonnell regularly does, urging people to adopt their pets from
animal shelters. In one, an adorable little Easter bunny addresses us: "I
was the cute gift that lost its charm," he says, "—neglected in a
small cage in the backyard and then eventually abandoned. Believe me," he
concludes, "being the Easter Bunny was no holiday."
McDonnell was recognized a year ago for his efforts on behalf of neglected
pets: he received the Ark Trust's Genesis Award, given to artists who
communicate animal issues with creativity and integrity.
More Happy Talk
“A
man who tries to carry a cat home by its tail will learn a lesson that can be
learned in no other way.” —Mark Twain
“There’s no fate that cannot be
surmounted by scorn.” —Albert Camus
“Being in politics is like being a
football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb
enough to think it’s important.” —Eugene McCarthy
“The first human who hurled an
insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” —Sigmund Freud
“No man has a good enough memory to
be a successful liar.” —Abraham Lincoln
“When somebody says it’s not about
the money—it’s about the money.” —H.L. Mencken
“When somebody says it’s not about
the sex—it’s about the sex.” —Former Senator Dale Bumpers
GRAFIC NOVIL
In The King (262 5x7-inch pages, two
colors; paperback, $19.95) by Rich
Koslowski, we meet a has-been tabloid journalist named Paul Erfurt who has
been assigned his old beat, Elvis impersonators, in order to investigate the
possibility that one of the breed is, actually, Elvis Presley returned from the
dead. The candidate in question differs from the others in wearing a golden
helmet that covers the upper half of his face down to the tip of his nose. He
also sings so much like the original that his shows in Las Vegas are mobbed by
throngs of delirious fans who, increasingly, are convinced that the guy in the
golden helmet is, indeed, Elvis, the King himself. The putative King never
claims to be Elvis; but he never denies it either.
Erfurt interviews the King and his
entourage and several others, trying to ascertain if he could be Elvis, and the
graphic novel is the story of Erfurt’s investigations. Erfurt discovers, among
other things, that some of “the King’s” more passionate fans, those who are
convinced that Elvis couldn’t have died, have formed “the Church of Elvis,”
proclaiming that Elvis is a god. The Church traipses around the country as a
tent show, raking in millions. When Erfurt accuses the founder of purely
mercenary motives, the guilty party frowns and says: “Mr. Erfurt, an operation
of this magnitude requires a substantial amount of funds to keep it
operational.” Well, yes, but gold statues, limousines, diamond cufflinks? “Mr.
Erfurt, we are honoring a god. It would be disrespectful to do so improperly.”
Suddenly, before we know it, Koslowski’s story transcends the mystery genre and
becomes a meditation on faith and, by implication, on religion.
When Erfurt asks the King about the
charade of his divinity, the King admits only to being “a god” not “the god.”
He’s a god of song, he says. And there have been others—Mozart, Beethoven, Sid
Vicious. “Apollo was the god of song long time ago,” he says, “but then Greek
mythology pretty much died off. People stop believin’ in ya, ya cease ta
exist.” Erfurt accuses the King of deceiving people, but the King says: “These
people come ta me ta feel good. They pray ta me, worship me, listen ta me sing.
... It makes ’em feel good. ... Mah job is ta fill them up with hope. Make ’em
happy.” Erfurt protests that religion is more than just “feeling good.” But the
King disagrees: “Who says it has to be more? Who says we have to suffer?
There’s enough sufferin’ in the world already. Maybe it’d even be awright for
some of us ta start feelin’ good again.”
Humoring the King, the reporter
wants him to produce some sort of proof, some facts—anything that might
establish the King’s genuineness. “Religion isn’t facts or proof,” the King
says. “It’s faith. And with faith, there has to be doubt. You asked me why Ah
wear this helmet? Now, Ah’m gonna tell ya. Ah wear it ta test mah followers’
faith. To create doubt. Mystery. Power. Ah take this helmet off—prove who Ah
am—end of mystery. Becomes fact. Science. Science ain’t religion. It’s science.
Religion dies. Religion dies, Ah die. Skeptics see me die, now they say, ‘Look!
He died! He weren’t no god after all!’ Now it’s not even scientific fact. It’s
nothin’. Ah’m nothin’. Helmet stays on,” he concludes.
Erfurt says he suddenly has a
headache. “It can be frustratin,’ can’t it?” says the King. “Havin’ faith is
hard. Ain’t for everyone. You’ll believe if an’ when yer ready, Mr. Erfurt.”
Erfurt eventually learns who the
King might be, and just as he confronts the King with this knowledge, one of
the King’s entourage takes out a pistol and shoots, and kills, the King,
thinking, with the deluded dedication of a zealot, that the King is immortal
and that “killing” him will establish this as irrefutable fact. Alas, the King
is dead. Erfurt writes his tabloid story, proclaiming that the “God of Song” is
alive. Erfurt has the opportunity to remove the golden helmet and ascertain the
identity of the King, but he doesn’t. And the reporter also destroys the only
solid evidence he has that might prove the King’s claim or disprove it: a
drinking glass with the King’s fingerprints on it. To pursue the matter would
be to destroy the mystery.
Koslowski has been laboring in
animation and the comics vineyard for over fourteen years, some of the time as
an inker at Archie Comics, and he’s produced an award-winning graphic novel, Three Fingers, and a comic book series,
a spoof about comics fans called The 3
Geeks. His drawing style is in the cartoon rather than the illustrative
tradition: his characters are caricatures, not portraits. Chiseled rather than
drawn, they seem somewhat stiff and wooden. But each character is a distinctive
rendering: we always know which of them we are looking at. Koslowski frequently
repeats a panel three or four times as a way of slowing down the passage of
time, indicating the boredom of a character or the pregnancy of a pause. But if
you think the stilted figures and long pauses make for dull reading, you’d be
mistaken. Koslowski’s pacing is adroit; his command of the medium, sure. And
the tedium of his artistic style is deftly enhanced by his colorist, Adam Wallenta, who has added a gray
tone to the black-and-white drawings and then superimposed a dusty blue tint,
giving depth to Koslowski’s flat planes. Ultimately, however, it is the
unwinding of the story, the ostensible solving of a mystery—or is it the
creation of one?—that grips us and keeps us turning pages.
AN AMERICAN EPIC GETS RECYCLED
The
second volume of Drawn & Quarterly’s Gasoline
Alley reprint, titled Walt and
Skeezix, is due in May, and if it’s anything like the first volume, it’ll
be the most elegant reprinting project on the planet this spring. The pages of
the first volume measure 7x9 inches, and there are enough of them—unnumbered,
but probably close to 400 —that the book is almost two inches thick, a solid
squat block on the shelf. When first published in newspapers, the strips ran
almost the entire width of a newsprint page, 18-20 inches, so the 8-inch
dimension on these pages is a considerable reduction. But cartoonist Frank King’s graphic style was fairly
unencumbered, and his pictures take even this severe reduction well. The strips
appear two to a page, and each page carefully cites both year of publication
and month and day. If this volume did no more, it would be a reprinting worthy
of an American classic. But the book is more: it is a testament to the
affection felt for the strip by the book’s designer, Chris Ware, who, with D&Q’s active consent, lavished design
details on the project that are nearly unprecedented in the historic tome game.
The end papers carry minuscule wallpaper images from the strip, one of which is
stamped on the book cover. A silk ribbon book mark is stitched into the book’s
spine. The jacket is a wrap-around layout of familiar scenes from the strip.
And— the ultimate signal of elegance— the reverse of the jacket, the part no
publisher ever prints on, carries a reproduction of an original Gasoline Alley strip at almost the size
of the original. Stunning. Enthralling.
D&Q’s first volume does not
begin with the first appearance of Gasoline
Alley. The publisher made the canny decision to begin with the strips for
1921: starting in January, the book arrives, forthwith, at February 14 when the
baby Skeezix shows up on Walt Wallet’s front door step, the historic moment
when the strip was transformed from a feature about cars and amateur mechanics
to domestic, hometown low-key comedy. The rest of 1921 and all of 1922 fill up
the first volume. We watch as Walt learns how to care for the baby, comically
applying automotive knowledge and terms to the task. When the baby cries all
night and sleeps all day, Walt phones the doctor to say the baby is “out of
adjustment: it’s timed wrong. It’s set for night when it should be set for
daytime.” Walt consults far and wide in determining a name for the child.
“Skeezix” is fine as a nickname, but, needing something a little more formal,
Walt settles on “Allison,”reasoning that the baby is a “son of the Alley.” And
before long, Walt’s bachelor status teeters on the brink when an attractive
single woman, Phyllis Blossom, moves into the neighborhood.
Gasoline
Alley started in the Chicago Tribune at
the behest of the publisher, Robert McCormick, who was persuaded that people
needed help in learning how to care for their automobiles, which were becoming
increasingly available to a middle class public. Although scarcely a self-help
feature, it did talk a good deal about the problems people had with cars. "Cars had character in those days, and
there was plenty to discuss," King once remarked. Set in an alley where
men met to inspect and discuss their vehicular difficulties, Gasoline Alley first appeared on
November 24, 1918, as one of several panel cartoon features boxed together on a
black-and-white anthology page King had been doing for several years for the Sunday Tribune. Called "The Rectangle," the page
was a conglomeration of cartoons, offering comic commentary under a rotating
series of headings—Familiar Fractions, Pet Peeves, Science Facts, Our Movies,
and the like. The Gasoline Alley panel
appeared routinely after its debut but only on Sunday until August 1919, when
it began to run daily as well.
The early years of the feature have
been reprinted by Spec Productions in four volumes, beginning with the November
1918 debut and ending December 31, 1920. Walt Wallet doesn’t show up by name
for two or three weeks, but once he’s identified, we can go back to the beginning
and see a character that looks vaguely like the subsequently named personage. Gasoline Alley was a weekly panel until
Monday, August 25,1919, when it started running daily—albeit still as a single
panel with occasional lapses into strip format. The lapses became more frequent
as the year rolled on, and by winter 1920, Gasoline
Alley appeared in strip format just about as often as it appeared as a
single panel, and by the end of the year, the strip format predominates. Spec
discontinued publication of the series when D&Q came out with its first
volume, but you can still order copies from the website, www.specproductions.com at $20 each. The reproduction is by photocopy, shot from newspaper clippings;
the quality of the early panels is not high, but if you’re looking for the
complete Gasoline Alley record, this
is where to find it.
McCormick may have prompted the
feature into being, but the comics brains at the Chicago Tribune were those of his co-publisher and cousin, Joseph
Patterson. Reflecting on Gasoline Alley in early 1921, Patterson decided all the talk about cars left out women
readers' interests. "Get a baby
into the story fast," he commanded the flabbergasted King, who protested
that the main character, Walt Wallet, was a bachelor. It was then decided to have Walt find a baby on his
doorstep—which he did on Valentine's Day.
With the arrival of Skeezix, the
strip developed a stronger storyline: Walt took several days just to get the
neighborhood's approval of the name he chose for the infant boy. Subsequently,
almost accidentally, the strip evolved its most unique feature: its characters
aged. The children grew up, and the
adults grew older. To King, this innovative aspect of his strip was simply
logical. "You have a one-week old baby, but he can't stay one week old
forever. He had to grow." By logical extension, so did everyone else in
the strip. Patterson concurred. This attribute of Gasoline Alley added a dimension of real life to the strip, and
King went on to convert everyday concerns about automobiles into a larger
reflection of American life in a small town. The strip quickly took on familial
overtones, and the setting, with Walt's subsequent marriage to
"Auntie" Blossom, became thoroughly domestic, the situations those of
ordinary life, the humor—warm, pleasant, low-keyed.
For most of the readers of
McCormick’s Tribune and Patterson’s New York Daily News, the mirror of small
town life that King held up so faithfully in Gasoline Alley probably evoked nostalgia with its fond reminders of
the way things used to be. Said Coulton Waugh in his venerable history, The Comics: “This is a quiet, faithful,
tender picture of suburban America. No bluster, no lurid fuss. It has a calm
pace ... [and provides] one of the most faithful and cheering pictures of the
ordinary business family we have to show.”
The D&Q tome comes equipped with
a stupendous introduction, about 60 pages of text profusely illustrated with
photographs of King’s early life, both before and after marriage. Written by Jeet
Heer, this inaugural section regales us with more than I’d ever heard about
King, and it is mostly well-done. But I think Heer got a little carried away in
one area. I think he is buying the story of King’s granddaughter, Drewanna
King, a little too uncritically. Part of his research consisted of a long visit
with her, during which she hauled out albums of family photos and mounds of
newspaper clippings. Heer describes her as a pack rat and family genealogist,
so, naturally, she’d see her grandfather’s role in the creation of Skeezix as
being central. King’s role was central, surely; but he didn’t play the only
part in conjuring Skeezix. In one place, Heer in effect says that it was King’s
idea to put a baby in the strip. And he goes on to say that Patterson, who is
usually credited with the idea, was a “credit hog and liked to take the
applause for most of the innovations introduced by his cartoonists.” The credit
hog in the Patterson-McCormick axis was undoubtedly Robert McCormick, who ran
the Tribune in Chicago while
Patterson was operating the Daily News in
New York. McCormick had a very high opinion of himself. But Patterson was the
least applause hungry newspaper mogul of his day. He was known as “Sloppy Joe”
because he didn’t even dress the part of a big time publisher. One time when he
tried to gain access to the News Building late at night, the guards wouldn’t
let him in because he was so badly dressed they figured he was a bum.
I know of at least one case where
Patterson should be credited for creating a comic strip character and never
was. This was the Dragon Lady in Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates. But Patterson never stepped forward to make
a claim—or to discredit Caniff, who always claimed he’d invented the Dragon
Lady when, in fact, it was Patterson who suggested putting a lady pirate into Terry. If Patterson was as applause
hungry as Heer says he was, he wouldn’t have stood still for a second to let
Caniff take the credit for one of the most popular characters in comics.
Heer’s reason for discounting
Patterson’s role in creating Skeezix is to build up a relationship between King
and his family and Walt and his. Heer wants the strip to be “profoundly
autobiographical,” as he says, and it can’t serve that purpose if the baby idea
was Patterson’s, not King’s. So Heer shoots down the legend in order to be able
to announce his Discovery: Skeezix is actually patterned after King’s own son,
Robert.
In an interview Heer gave in
connection with promoting the book, he says that Robert was always a little
bitter about Skeezix: he thought his father lavished more love and care on the
cartoon character than on his actual son. Robert was sent off to school, it
appears, and never quite recovered from the feeling of being abandoned—and was
therefore bitterly antagonistic towards Skeezix. Or so Heer would have us
believe. In this confection, Robert King sounds like Dennis Ketcham or
Christopher Robin Milne, two celebrated disaffected scions of authors who took
inspiration from their offspring.
As I say, I think Heer’s going
overboard here. In the first place, it’s not necessary to make Skeezix a
substitute son in King’s mind in order to have King being influenced somewhat
by his own family life in conjuring up incidents for Walt and Skeezix to
experience together. Any author (and Heer admits this, too) draws upon his own
personal experience if that experience parallels the fiction he’s producing.
But Heer apparently wants to take this further and make the invention of
Skeezix a manifestation of some sort of subconscious frustration in King, whose
first child was stillborn in 1912. Robert Drew King was born in 1916, five
years before Skeezix shows up in the strip. In order to make Skeezix part of
the cartoonist’s troubled psyche, Heer has to get rid of Patterson as the prod
by which Skeezix came into the story: if Walt’s domestic situation is to be a
reflection of King’s life, then Skeezix has to be his, King’s, invention, not
Patterson’s. Skeezix’s “Uncle Walt,” by the way—as if to put the finishing touch
on this construction—is Robert’s uncle, his mother’s brother, Walter Drew, who
appears in several of the photographs in the D&Q volume, and in one of
them, the shock of unruly hair that distinguishes Walt Wallet’s appearance is
in ample evidence. So it all fits, eh?
Well, not quite. In the first place,
there’s the pesky business about Patterson inventing the orphan child. In the
second place, Robert King never felt bitter about Skeezix. Jim Scancarelli, the
current author of Gasoline Alley, knew him (he was called “Drew,” by the way—his middle name, and his mother’s
maiden name—not “Robert,” which indicates how fragile the granddaughter’s grasp
of the situation is), and Jim never detected any emotional hang-ups about
Skeezix.
Heer has a nifty story here, but
some of it, it would seem, he’s making up to fit a pre-conceived notion. The
pre-conceived notion is prompted by all of the autobiographical comic books and
graphic novels presently abounding. In Heer’s mind, any book reprinting Gasoline Alley will attract more buyers
if it is autobiographical like R. Crumb’s comix or Joe Sacco’s or Peter
Bagge’s. And when he met with Drewanna, he found out enough to confirm (or to
prompt) a suspicion that Frank King’s strip was “profoundly”autobiographical. I
think, however, that idea is mostly Heer’s pipe dream. And, no, I don’t know
what he’s smokin’.
Volume Two promises more delections.
Another 400 pages embracing 1923 and 1924, during which time, Skeezix is
kidnaped, Walt’s courtship of Phyllis Blossom heats up and then cools off, and
Heer provides an 80-page introduction about the strip’s Chicago background and
the fascination for King and others of the inky-fingered fraternity of the
Grand Canyon.
IS RELIGION THE PROBLEM?
The
question wouldn’t come up here at the Intergalactic Nerve Center of the Rancid
Raves Wurlitzer were it not for the Danish Dozen. Until that brouhaha, religion
and cartooning were very nearly separate universes and never met. Now, we’re
not so sure anymore. And having sidled up to the subject by way of a cartooning
corridor, we can now slip into an otherwise completely alien discourse. But
first, a short apostrophe about my religious beliefs. I’m not undertaking any
evangelical enterprise here. My attitude about religion is pretty much to let
everyone believe and practice whatever sets them free. I don’t care what kind
of spiritual life you have as long as you don’t try to foist it off on me. Live
and let live, I say. Everyone probably needs some sort of belief in something,
but it varies from person to person, and that’s fine with me. These days,
however, religious questions loom larger than ever before. We can hardly ignore
the increasingly vitriolic role religion is playing in human affairs. Probably
a cartoonist has no business messing about in such matters, and, as I say, if
it weren’t for the Danish Dozen, I probably wouldn’t bring any of this up. I
could still avoid the subject, I realize; but I don’t want to. So here we go.
Many of the world’s most pressing
problems at present, not to mention the U.S. predicament in Iraq and elsewhere
in the Middle East, seem to stem from differing religious views, so the obvious
question is: Is Religion the Problem?
Charles Kimball lobs a few answers
at the question in his book, When
Religion Becomes Evil. The book is about the most dispassionate, objective
thing I’ve read on these matters. I was surprised, pleasantly. Surprised and
somewhat illuminated. Kimball is an ordained Baptist minister but he is not at
all shrill or doctrinaire in his examination; in fact, were it not for the
biographical blurb inside the book, it would be difficult to say with certainty
what religion Kimball espouses. He has a Th.D from Harvard in comparative
religion, with an Islamic specialty. His paternal grandfather was Jewish, one
of nine children, who, with a brother, had a successful vaudeville career.
Kimball was involved in the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979 and was one of few
to meet the Ayatollah Khomeini in attempting to get the hostages released.
Kimball was director of the Middle East office of the National Council of
Churches for seven years and is now chair of the department of religion at Wake
Forest University.
He begins his book with the question
that headlines this segment of R&R. And his answer is: Yes and no,
depending. If we contemplate religion in terms of its fundamental purposes, it
is not the problem. All authentic religions, he says, “converge” in teaching an
orientation toward God or the Transcendent and in fostering compassionate,
constructive relationships with others in the world. In other words: You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all
your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets. Matt. 22:37-40. Religion is NOT the problem when it
keeps these two purposes foremost.
But religion can be corrupted by its
human adherents, and when it is corrupted, it can become evil, fostering
behavior that is contrary to and destructive of its fundamental purposes. There
are five clear signals of corruption either happening or about to happen:
When
a religion claims to be in possession of the absolute truth
When
a religion fosters blind obedience
When
an “ideal time” is identified and all else is subordinate to reaching that
state
When
the end justifies any means
When
holy war is declared and waged
Each
of the chapters of Kimball’s book deals at great length, in turn, with these
signs of degeneration, drawing heavily from history as well as from
contemporary events. I’ll review some of his key points, chapter by chapter,
but I’m merely skimming the surface of his argument, which he presents in lucid
easy-going prose—nothing decorative or declamatory, just clearly wrought.
When a Religion Claims to Be in
Possession of the Absolute Truth
All
religions are founded on truth claims. But when particular interpretations of
these claims become propositions requiring uniform assent and are treated as
rigid doctrines, corruption is likely. When a truth becomes Absolute, it’s on
its way to being a corruptive influence.
Historically,
people armed with Absolute Truth are closely linked to violent extremism,
charismatic leaders, and various justifications for acts otherwise understood
to be unacceptable.
The source of such truths is likely
to the religion’s sacred text. But sacred texts are not infallible: all written
language is symbolic and therefore subject to misinterpretation. Language is a
pointer at best. When adherents lose sight of the symbolic nature of language
about God, the text can easily be misinterpreted.
For example: the Christian Bible
says nothing about abortion per se, so zealous opposition to abortion is
usually based upon the Sixth Commandment, and it fosters an absolute conviction
that abortion is legalized murder. Most vocal opponents of abortion allow the
practice in cases of rape, incest or threat to the life of the mother. Not the
extremists. They have demonstrated that they are willing to do murder to
prevent murder.
Suicide bombing is instance of a
sacred text being misinterpreted. Over the years, the validity of suicide
bombing as a tactic has been established, but how do you recruit the bombers?
You do it by referring to a provision in the Qur’an that says those who die
striving in the way of God will go directly to paradise instead of to a
celestial waiting room where they’ll stay until the eventual Day of Judgment.
Other texts justify violence when the religion itself is threatened. But this
highly selective reading overlooks texts that prohibit killing women, children
and noncombatants—and suicide. Extremists, however, have appropriated those
parts of the text that serve their purpose.
Kimball wrote his book after 9/11, and
much of his discourse deals with Muslim belief and how that may, or may not,
influence the course of events in the Middle East. But he points out that both
Islam and Christianity have an inherent tendency to corruption.
The
Missionary Mistake. Based upon a conviction that theirs is a superior
culture and religion, Christianity and Islam are the only two of the world’s
largest religions with a missionary imperative to proselytize. This can lead to
political and/or military coercion. Kimball sites the California mission system
established up and down the coast in the late 1700s as an example of noble
intention gone awry, resulting in unwitting genocide.
It would be better, Kimball says, to
envision mission as a matter of bearing witness to the love of God as manifest
in the ways people relate to others, particularly those that are hungry,
thirsty, or freezing to death after an earthquake in Pakistan. Bearing witness
is the most powerful and persuasive form of missionary activity.
At the end of this chapter, Kimball
asks if it possible to embrace and affirm religious truth without defining
truth for others. By way of answering, he quotes from Wesley Ariarajah, a
Methodist minister:
When
my daughter tells me I’m the best daddy in the world, and there can be no other
father like me, she is speaking the truth, for this comes out of her
experience. She is honest about it; she knows no other person in the role of
her father. But of course it is not true in another sense. For one thing, I
myself know friends who, I think, are better fathers than I am. Even more
importantly, one should be aware that in the next house there is another little
girl who also thinks her daddy is the best father in the world. And she too is
right. ... No one can compare the truth content of the statements of the two
girls. For here we are not dealing with the absolute truths but with the
language of faith and love. ... the problem begins when we take these
confessions in the language of faith and love and turn them into absolute truths.
When a Religion Fosters Blind Obedience
Kimball
cites Jim Jones and David Koresh as charismatic leaders who demanded blind
obedience in their followers. Charismatic leadership is not inherently bad:
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were both charismatic but did not demand
total obedience.
Dangers abound when people take
direction uncritically from religious authorities. Doctrinal positions
supporting otherwise unethical behavior must always be challenged. Religions
that demand blind obedience signal trouble. “Ethics” may be determined by
consulting the two purposes of religion. Think for yourself; ask questions.
Kimball quotes the Buddha on his
deathbed:
Do
not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a
statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with
your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. ... Be ye lamps unto
yourselves. ... Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon
themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is
they who shall reach the very topmost height.
When an “Ideal Time” Is Identified and
All Else Is Subordinate to Reaching That State
For
many of the so-called Christian Right in the U.S., the Rapture is the Ideal Time.
Some believe that we are in a “time” before the final dispensation. A key
development in a divinely ordained sequence of events is the rebuilding of the
Jewish Temple on the site Muslims call Noble Sanctuary. While adherents to this
view may not advocate the use of force to destroy the Dome of the Rock to make
room for the Temple, they link the fate of Israel to the sacred sequence
leading to the Day of Judgment and therefore support Israel uncritically,
regardless of how bellicose Israel’s leaders became towards Palestine.
The impulse towards identifying an
Ideal Time is the conviction that the Present is not desirable, that something
has gone very awry.
For nearly 800 years, the Muslim
world led civilization in mathematics, chemistry, medicine, philosophy,
navigation, architecture, horticulture and astronomy. When the Muslim empire of
700-1500 fell apart and into the hands of outside powers, the catastrophe
begged for explanation, and the explanation, eventually, created in Afghanistan
the Taliban, who explained the Muslim collapse by saying that people had been
distracted from the authentic faith. They demanded the return to “true
religion” and the rejection of Western influence. The Taliban brand of Islam
became the state religion and that, in turn, created at least two classes of
citizens: any state in which rights and status are tied to a particular
religious tradition will relegate some of its citizens to second and
third-class status.
The Religious Right in America not
so far from the Taliban of Afghanistan. They share a religious conviction that
the perceived ideal has been lost and must be restored through institutions of
the state—say, by establishing prayer in schools, by posting the Ten
Commandments, and the like. These reconstructionists seek to remove the
political and institutional barriers to God’s law, believing that God’s rule
must prevail against the principalities and powers controlled by Satanic
forces. For them, the end justifies the means.
The role of religion in a state is
always problematic. In the case of Israel, the problem of religion as national
policy is exacerbated with respect to the Palestinians. Any accommodation with
Palestinians that involves making them citizens of Israel will inevitably mean
Jewish citizens will, eventually, be outnumbered. And so this avenue to a
settlement in the area seems forever closed off. In some cases in the Middle
East, an interim may be imagined where religion is intimately involved in the
state. Iran, for instance, where the basic governmental structure is
parliamentary democracy, with a powerful role for the clergy.
Any religion that justifies any
action by invoking an imperative to reach an Ideal Time is signaling its
internal corruption. Authentic religions live in the present and do not pine
for an Ideal Time. Nor, as a result, do they seek to become the official state
religion.
When the End Justifies Any Means
Here,
Kimball cites the riots in India in March 2002 between Hindus and Muslims,
resulting in widespread destruction and death in the civilian population—all
brought about by a desire to defend a “sacred place” from defilement by
infidels. Ditto the Medieval Crusades, which produced so much horrific savagery
on an immense scale in the Middle East.
When people are called upon to do
violence to their neighbors in the service of a righteous cause, they should
know that something is dreadfully wrong.
In Europe after Christianity became
joined with state power, attitudes and behavior toward Jews deteriorated
because devotees desired to protect their religious community from outside
influences or corruptions. These convictions lead to ethnic cleansing and
protection of group identity—which in some Muslim communities has lead to
reinforcing group identity at the expense of women, ostensibly in the name of
their honor. In Europe, protection of the Christian faith in the Middle Ages
resulted in the horrors of the Inquisition.
The need for institutional
structures to protect the status quo leads to churches and church hierarchy,
which, as in the case of the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church of
recent times, can lead to efforts to preserve the institution at the cost of
the religious purposes.
Sacred space, institutional
structure, communal identity—none are the ends of religious life.
When Holy War Is Declared and Waged
Declaring
“holy war” is a sure sign that a religion has been corrupted. In the history of
Christianity, there have been three distinct attitudes about war:
1.
Pacifism, which prevailed for the first 300 years
2.
The Just War Doctrine, which came about once church and state were united under
Rome’s Constantine in the early 300s.
3.
Holy War
There
are four basic criteria for determining a “Just War”:
1.
Must be proclaimed by lawful authority
2.
Cause must be just
3.
Belligerents should have a rightful intention to advance good or to avoid evil
4.
Must be fought by proper means
The
problem is that there is in this catechism no way, actually, to determine if a
war is just: it was by definition just if the authority figure declared it so.
Moreover, the doctrine also has no obvious connection to the Christian faith.
But these ideas became powerful weapons during the centuries when the behavior
of many Christians was furthest removed from the teachings and example of Jesus:
the era of the Crusades—the third attitude about war—when Christianity declared
a “holy war” on Islam and Judaism and committed unspeakable atrocities in the
name of that purpose.
In this country during the build-up
to the invasion of Iraq, most religions objected on the grounds of the first
Christian attitude about war: war was simply bad; pacifism was the best course.
By this time, most religions have rejected the Just War Doctrine altogether.
September 11 is often seen as the
commencement of the jihad, or holy war, against the West. But this is a
perversion of Muslim text. For Islam, as for all authentic traditions, the goal
of religion is to save the human soul and consequently establish justice and
peace in society so that people can live virtuously and live and die in peace.
The popular conception of jihad—and the extremist application of the notion—is
counter to the fundamental meaning of the term. Jihad in the Muslim tradition
refers to the struggle to do the right thing, to do good works on behalf of
others and for the betterment of society. The “greater jihad” is the inner
struggle to overcome selfish and sinful desires, the wrong tendencies that
inhibit us from doing what we know to be right. It can also refer to military
action taken to defend Islam—or to expand its influence.
While church and state were wed in
Christianity in the fourth century, they have always been together in Islam. As
adherents of a missionary religion, Muslims sought to spread their message and
societal system through proclamation, diplomacy, and force of arms. [Muhammad’s
career went through each of these stages by turns. When he fled Mecca to
Medina, he took with him the followers he’d won by proclamation and diplomacy,
but when the Muslim community needed food and supplies, Muhammad led his
followers into the desert to raid passing caravans. These were bound for Mecca,
and the raids provoked the Mecca merchants to retaliate. But Muhammad proved an
adroit field commander and won his battles. His victorious progress convinced
others that he was, indeed, the messenger of Allah, and so they joined his
community.—RCH] This bellicose history makes it easy for Muslims to be seduced
into the current jihad, that and the miserable kind of life so many Muslims are
forced to live in the autocratic regimes that prevail in most of the Muslim
world.
But the U.S. and its allies in the
present struggle against terrorism are no better, often supporting totalitarian
regimes because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” instead of pursuing
policies and practices by peaceful means. Authentic religion demands that we be
peacemakers, not war mongers.
Summary
Under
the heading “blind obedience,” Kimball examines the careers of Jim Jones and
David Koresh. In the “ideal time” chapter, he takes up the relationship between
evangelical Christianity with its expectation for the Rapture and how that
impinges upon our attitude toward Israel. He sees the Religious Right in this
country as not so different from the Taliban in its desire to create a theocratic
state. About prayer in schools, he says: “As long as there are math tests,
there will be prayer in schools.”
Under the “end justifying the
means,” he cites ethnic cleansing and the Inquisition in Medieval Europe as
ways of protecting group identity. He outlines the conditions for “a just war”
in the chapter on “holy war” but concludes that the Crusades and September 11
invalidate the criteria.
At the end of the book, he offers
several things that we may do to foster peace. Ultimately, Kimball looks to
religion to provide not a road map to a better world, but a compass. He argues
that there are fundamental and universal human truths embodied in authentic
religion—a desire for fairness, integrity, honesty, human dignity, service,
growth, patience, nurturance, and encouragement, as well as faith, hope, and
love. These he sees as not only self-evident but innate in the human condition.
These are the compass. He thinks of God not as an object or being but as a
direction. And he also argues for a religious orientation that embraces
diversity and pluralism, ultimately a serene tolerance of all other beliefs.
Quite apart from the political
aspects of his discussions on Islam and the war on terror and related issues in
contemporary American, I think the book goes a good distance towards answering
the question of how one lives as a religious person in a world in which
numerous religions all demand adherence. How can you be tolerant an still be
devout? Kimball provides a thoughtful and rather comprehensive examination of
the question, based in history and comparative religion study. And he does not
excuse his religion for its historic tendency to fall prey to corruption.
UNDER THE SPREADING PUNDITRY
The Nation struck just the right note: “Rise by fear, fall by
fear. Having deliberately nurtured a national security panic for the past
four-plus years,” George WMD Bush “richly deserves to be trampled in its latest
running: the uproar over his Administration’s decision to hand management of
six U.S. ports to a state-owned Dubai firm” in the United Arab Emirates. A
number of things are wrong with all this. First, most news media did not
explain that Dubai was going to be managing only a few terminals in the ports;
journalistic shorthand—“management of six U.S. ports”—implied something much
more extensive. Secondly, it was probably a mistake to force Dubai out of the
business. The whole thing reeks of xenophobia and prejudice against “Middle
Eastern types” who are all, probably, terrorists. Surely that is not a message
we want to send. But send it we did.
Andrew
Sullivan, a confessed neo-conservative, has lost faith in the Iraq effort.
In Time for March 13, Sullivan ticks
off three “huge errors” in regard to Iraq: first, overestimating the competence
of government; second, a national narcissism that blinded “many of us to the
resentments that hegemony always provokes”; and third, not taking culture
seriously enough—particularly “complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad.” The
Bush League, he continues, “sent far too few troops, was reckless in post
invasion planning and turned a deaf ear to constructive criticism, even from
within their own ranks. Their abdication of the moral high ground, by allowing
the abuse and torture of military detainees, is repellent. Their incompetence
and misjudgments might be forgiven. Their arrogance and obstinacy remain
inexcusable.” And this guy is a friend of the Bush League.
In U.S. News and World Report, March 20, David E. Kaplan voices his alarm about the Bush League’s passion for
secrecy. “Liberals tend to stress government accountability and responsiveness
to public needs. Conservatives want to ensure that the government does not
exceed its legitimate authority. Secrecy is at odds with both of those
impulses. ... What I’m concerned about is that we may lose sight of our own
ideals as a society. We may lose the expectation of open, accountable
government. We will simply assume that the most important political decisions
are out of reach and beyond our ability to affect.”
Oh, and if you want to keep track of
the cost of George W. (“Warlord”) Bush’s Iraq Adventure, you can do so at http://costofwar.com/index.html
More Bushwah
George
W. (“Wiretapper”) Bush believes, fervently, that the mission of America is to
spread democracy around the world. To make freedom ring. But that is not a
democratic notion. Democracy is not a missionary doctrine. Nothing in the
philosophical posture of democracy inclines it in the direction of missionary
work. Rather, democracy exists solely to arrange government in such a way as to
permit the so-called governed to participate in the process. Democracy,
philosophically, is a wholly inward-looking system. We have no business trying
to recruit converts. But GeeDubya has arrived at a missionary purpose for
democracy by way of his religion, and this, as much as anything, reveals the
folly of mixing church and state. As a born-again Christian, GeeDubya is
compelled by the evangelical imperative of his belief to proselytize, to spread
the gospel, to create converts to his belief. Evangelical religions are
essentially missionary. GeeDubya realizes that he can’t go around the world,
knocking on doors and asking people to take Christ into their hearts. So he
sublimates, as Freud would have it: he substitutes democracy for religion.
Making converts to democracy satisfies psychologically his evangelical
compulsion to win converts. It is also a highly risky enterprise. Democracy is
simply not constituted for the task. It hasn’t the internal, philosophical
machinery for evangelical work. And so, GeeDubya’s plan is back-firing. The
citizens of the democracy—that is, we the people—have just about had enough of
proselytizing in Iraq. And since democracy is better suited to attending to the
wishes of its citizens than it is to obeying rulers or bullying other nations,
GeeDubya’s crusade is bound to fail. And failure will be the shroud for the
Fallen: against all hope, they will have given their lives in a doomed cause.
Without GeeDubya’s evangelical fervor, none of those lives would have been
lost, none of America’s youth would have been shipped overseas to patrol a
hostile desert. And the country would have been better off as a result. The
money we have poured into the Iraq project could have been better spent on
democratic projects—improving health care, up-dating infrastructures,
underwriting corporate pension plans, fixing Social Security. But we let
GeeDubya mix church and state, and now we’re the devil’s playthings.
A better way to spread the gospel of
democracy is by the simple act of bearing witness— setting an example by the
way we live our lives and conduct our government. And that will attract
attention beyond our borders, and the attention will turn to envy, and envy to
revolution wherever people yearn to be free. That’s the way America has spread
the ideals of democracy for most of its history, except for a few jarring
incidents. It works. As GeeDubya himself points out, there are more democracies
today than there were in 1945. And with a couple exceptions (Germany and
Japan), all those “new” democracies arrived at their blessed state without the
U.S. knocking on their doors and telling them to take democracy into their
hearts.
GeeDubya keeps referring to
democracy as a “gift” to the people of the world. But as Joe Klein said in Time, it’s not a gift: “It’s an
achievement.” A successfully functioning democracy requires a social order with
free markets and an educated middle class with a tradition of civil liberties.
These things must be in place before democracy can work. Many of the Arab
countries in the Middle East aren’t quite there yet.
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