“A monstrous challenge and insult to the authority of the White House”
I’ve added several new reader reviews of the book, here. A couple of my favorites:
Believe it or not, there are still folks in Utah who haven’t been introduced to your amazing cartoonery. So I bought two books, one for myself, and one for my mother and father in-laws. The in-laws couldn’t put it down, and neither could my older kids, who swiped my copy to share with their friends at their high school. Just as a great testimonial to the supposed power of your book, one of the counselors at their high school, who got a peek at it when we returned to Oregon, declared that anyone else bringing such a “monstrous challenge and insult to the authority of the White House” would be suspended from school on the spot. Haven’t seen any suspensions yet, but we hope to soon! My in-laws said that This Modern World is the best strip they have seen in years and is even better than what they remember of Doonesbury when it came out. Thanks for all your work!
From St Johns Booksellers in Portland Oregon:
We’ve already sold thru our first prepack of ‘Hell in a Handbasket” which is no mean feat for a small bookstore only open nine months in the same town as the mighty Powell’s. (The only other two books that have sold as well are Al Franken’s “The Truth’ and Neil Gaiman’s ‘Anansi Boys.”)
Even better, there’s an election here in May. We’re having a forum with the candidates at the store, and asked them to provide a list of titles they’d recommend to their customers. As you can see, Jim Robison suggested ‘Hell…”
If you click through, you’ll also find handy instructions on how to turn all the useless change from your dresser drawer into a copy of HIAH. And there’s the guy who says that HIAH “is enough to make somebody want to throw themselves under a bus.” But he means it in a good way.
(Also, just for the record, I know diddly-squat about Jim Robison, apart from the fact that he has excellent taste in reading matter.)
From the Times editorial page editorial page this morning:
And under the terms of two disturbing agreements — with the C.I.A. and the Air Force — the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950’s, have vanished. This not only violates the mission of the National Archives; it is also antithetical to the natural flow of information in an open society.
As time passes, the need for secrecy, which should always adhere to a very strict standard, usually diminishes. Apparently the C.I.A. wants to turn back the hands of time.
The new director of the National Archives, Allen Weinstein, rightly put a stop to this nonsense as soon as he heard about it. But he will need to do more than just abrogate these suspect agreements with the C.I.A. and the Air Force. He will need to figure out how they came about in the first place. The former director, John Carlin, has said he knows nothing about them. They appear to have been signed only by the assistant archivist.
What makes this all seem preposterous is that the agreements themselves prohibit the National Archives from revealing why the documents were removed.
The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism.
Mr. Anderson’s family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen.
Mr. Anderson’s son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father’s principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.
“It’s my father’s legacy,” said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist’s nine children. “The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father’s view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they’re up to.”
With Neil Young’s new anti-war album coming out soon, it looks like we’re about to go through another round of dipshit right wing bloggers explaining why artists and musicians aren’t qualified to express political opinions.
Unlike, you know, the dipshit right wing bloggers themselves.
Jonathan Tasini (a union activist who’s running against Hillary Clinton for the NY Democratic senatorial nomination) makes this important point about immigration to the U.S.:
What has been lost in the debate about immigration is this fact: our country’s foreign and economic policy is largely to blame for the flow of people who come here illegally…If you think about the hundreds of thousands of people who have come here over the past several decades from countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, many of them fled to the U.S. because they would have been killed or imprisoned by their government’s repressive regimes or forced to live as refugees. These were often regimes that our government supported for many years, if not decades, with large infusions of weapons and money…
When I was growing up near Washington, DC it was hard not to notice the upsurge in people there from Central America, particularly El Salvador. This was right when the Reagan administration was trying to do for indigenous people in Latin America what our forefathers did for American Indians; i.e., wipe them off the face of the earth.
The neat thing was that as Washington policymakers were doing this, they were able to hire people fleeing those countries for $$$cheap$$$. During that time you’d see Central American refugees all over the wealthy DC suburbs, working as nannys, gardeners, etc.
I’ve always thought that was one of the greatest geopolitical bankshots in history.
Hey, Rosa—did you like the way I finalized that deal to send attack helicopters to the folks who cut off your father’s balls and stuffed them in his mouth? I bet you did! Now, do the laundry and change my kid’s diapers!
But the story doesn’t end there. If things continue to go well, Stephen Hadley will soon be able to afford a entire squad of strapping young Iraqi lads to edge his lawn.
First off, let me take this opportunity to congratulate my friend Mike Luckovich on the occasion of his second Pulitzer. Mike is inarguably one of the most talented daily editorial cartoonists in print today, and deserves all of the accolades he could ever possibly receive, and then some. None of the following is meant to detract from his achievement, nor from that of any of the dozens of other daily editorial cartoonists who have received this profession’s highest honor over the years (including, oddly enough, my wife’s grandfather in 1933).
But here’s the thing: there are quite a few professional political cartoonists working today, obviously including myself, whose careers have been primarily shaped by the alternative press (not to mention many up-and-coming cartoonists whose work appears primarily online). And — to put this delicately — the Pulitzers don’t really seem to be keeping up with the times, at least when it comes to cartooning. The only Pulitzer ever awarded to a cartoonist from the alternative press was given to Jules Feiffer in 1986. If Jules’ Pulitzer were a person, it would be old enough to vote. It would be a year away from drinking legally in every state in the union.
The only other remotely non-traditional (i.e. non-daily-editorial-page) cartoonists to have been recognized within my lifetime are Garry Trudeau in 1975 and Berke Breathed in 1987. And the last time, to my knowledge, that an alternative editorial cartoonist of any kind was even considered was when Ted Rall made the short list a full ten years ago.
The media landscape has changed dramatically since the Pulitzers were founded, and there are a lot of cartoonists these days whose work is distributed in ways that Joseph Pulitzer could never have imagined possible — and whose styles do not conform to the traditional editorial cartoon template. And I can’t help but wonder: do any of us have the remotest chance of ever being considered for this honor, or should we just stop bothering to submit our portfolios each year? Do the judges even glance at these entries, or are they tossed straight onto the discard pile as soon as the entry fee has been retrieved? Most importantly: if the Pulitzer Prize for Cartooning is really the Pulitzer Prize for Daily Newspaper Editorial Page Preferrably Single Panel Cartooning, Others Need Not Apply, would you mind letting us know? That way we can stop wasting our time, and yours, applying for a prize for which we are not actually eligible.
With best regards,
Tom Tomorrow
P.S. To those whose immediate response is “ha! he certainly does not deserve a Pulitzer,” let me just reply in advance: you are probably correct. But I would maintain that the entire field of alternative cartoonists do not deserve to be similarly dismissed out of hand.
Glenn Greenwald once again roots through tangled rhetoric and drags the subtext out squealing into the light:
As Bush followers gear up for another election year campaign to start a war, they are using exactly the same rhetorical tactics and are revealing precisely the same mindset to which we were subjected during the 2002 campaign for the Iraq War. What is starkly apparent from this repetition is that their awareness of history and knowledge of the world is sadly confined to one singular event, which is all they know and which, rather bizarrely, they have a need to live over and over and over again.
To pro-Bush war supporters, the world is forever stuck in the 1930s. Every leader we don’t like is Adolph Hitler, a crazed and irrational lunatic who wants to dominate the world. Every country opposed to our interests is Nazi Germany.
From this it follows that every warmonger is the glorious reincarnation of the brave and resolute Winston Churchill. And one who opposes or even questions any proposed war becomes the lowly and cowardly appeaser, Neville Chamberlain. For any and every conflict that arises, the U.S. is in the identical position of France and England in 1937 – faced with an aggressive and militaristic Nazi Germany, will we shrink from our grand fighting duties in appeasement and fear, or will we stand tall and strong and wage glorious war?
With that cartoonish framework in place, war is always the best option. It is the only option for those who are noble, strong, and fearless. Conversely, the sole reason for opposing a war is that one is a weak-minded and weak-willed appeaser who harbors dangerous fantasies of negotiating with madmen. Diplomacy and containment are simply elevated, PC terms for “appeasement.” War is the only option that works.
The first time as tragedy, the second time as, well, even more tragic tragedy. With plenty of farce thrown in, at least if your sense of humor is dark enough.
…from Col. Sam Gardiner, the war gaming expert at the National Defense University who’s been much quoted in the press lately talking about scenarios for a strike on Iran. This is what he told CNN Friday:
GARDINER: Actually, Jim, I would say – and this may shock some – I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way.
. . . The Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year. I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, “Hey, I hear you’re accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.”
He said, quite frankly, “Yes, we know they are. We’ve captured some of the units, and they’ve confessed to working with the Americans.”
The evidence is mounting that that decision has already been made . . .
Rumsfeld to Congress: Authorize this, assholes.
What’s amazing is how the corporate media absolutely insists on sticking to the prepared script, even when their sources won’t. Having just been told the war has already begun, here’s the CNN twink’s reaction:
CLANCY: If they do decide on a military option . . .
GARDINER: Right?
CLANCY: What’s the realistic chance of success?
IF they decide on a military option. In one ear and out the other.
Earlier in the same post — discussing the op-ed by Richard Clarke and Steven Simon in today’s Times — our frighteningly astute comrade also predicts:
The problem, which I’m sure Clarke and Simon fully understand, is that there isn’t going to be a congressional resolution this time – in fact I’d be very surprised if the administration gives the leadership of either party more than 24 hours notice before the bombing begins. No marketing campaigns, no debates, no arms twisted in the Oval Office. Just a fait accompli. (That’s French for: “Choke on it, suckers.”
Is anybody else getting just a little bit tired of the constant, sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, as you wait helplessly to see what the insane people in charge of our country are going to do next?
Not soliciting them, mind you. But if you’ve purchased the book and want to add your two cents, send your thoughts and I’ll post them here.
… also — if you see a review in your local paper, please let me know about it. Contrary to what you might assume, it’s practically the only way I ever hear about these things.
Dan Savage is apparently doing brisk business selling “ITMFA” (Impeach the Mother Fucker Already) merchandise these days. (With profit, it should be noted, going to the ACLU.)
But just to keep things in perspective, if only because my cat died today and I’m in a cranky fucking mood, here’s what Dan Savage had to say back in October of 2002 about (a) The Mother Fucker (or at least, his administration), and (b) many of the same people who are presumably now purchasing “ITMFA” chotchkes:
While the American left is content to see an Iraqi dictator terrorizing the Iraqi people, the Bushies in D.C. are not. “We do not intend to put American lives at risk to replace one dictator with another,” Dick Cheney recently told reporters. For those of you who were too busy making papier-mâché puppets of George W. Bush last week to read the papers, you may have missed this page-one statement in last Friday’s New York Times: “The White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein.”
–snip–
But wait! Taking out Saddam means dropping bombs, and dropping bombs only creates more terrorists!
That’s the lefty argument du jour, and a lot of squish-brains are falling for it, but it’s not an argument that the historical record supports. The United States dropped a hell of a lot of bombs on Serbia, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Germany, Japan, and Italy. If dropping bombs creates terrorists, where are all the German terrorists? Or the Italian terrorists? Or the Vietnamese terrorists?
–snip–
In the meantime, invading and rebuilding Iraq will not only free the Iraqi people, it will also make the Saudis aware of the consequences they face if they continue to oppress their own people while exporting terrorism and terrorists. The War on Iraq will make it clear to our friends and enemies in the Middle East (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and democratize… or we’re going to come over there, remove you from power, free your people, and reform your societies for ourselves.
Post-9/11, post-Bali, what other choice do we have?
To echo what Duncan said, I’m always glad to welcome a fellow traveller aboard, but I guess maybe I missed the profuse apologies for that “squish-brain” business.
