December 2007

Dear Mr. Karamazov,

Please accept my apologies for the nearly three months it's taken me to reply to your letter of December 5th. As you can see, I am sorely in need of a new intern. Since Ms. C.-H.'s departure I have failed to keep on top of administrative duties around here. It's only because I am laid low with the flu and heavily medicated that I've turned my attention at last to the long-neglected mail.

Thanks very much for your offer. However I am sure I do not have to tell you that pornographic pictures are no substitute for an authentic hot female intern breathing in your workspace. Seems like wiith a screen name like "boyzrule" you ought to be a hot boy-crazy chick yourself. What's with that?

If to do retire it will not be because of personal tragedies, but because of professional ones.

Thanks for the links you sent. The study you referred me to illuminates much in the realm of politics and elsewhere. To quote (or paraphrase) Kurt Vonnegut: "The trouble with stupid people is, they don't believe there is such a thing as being smart." A thought that troubles me is: how do we know we are not stupid?

Regards,

Tim

Carlo,

Thanks sincerely for your compliments on my robot-drawing skills. I enjoy drawing robots and regret that there have been few occasions for the depiction of robots in the months since. But why do I need an excuse? Robots are always cool. I hope to cast aside my artistic inhibitions and begin drawing nothing but robots, monsters, space battles and asses in the near future.

Regards,

Tim Kreider

Mark,

Your typographical correction and broader concern both noted, albeit belatedly. I got a couple of very long, serious, well-intentioned letters taking me to task over that let's say somewhat reductive screed on Islam. Apparently I sounded like some kind of dickhead that week, which we all know is not what I am really like at all.

Tim

Josh,

I had not considered your teddy bear/child conundrum before and am at a loss to account for it. Perhaps a child, which carries the divine breath of life, is a vessel worthy to bear the sacred name of the Prophet but a teddy bear, which is a mere plush simulacrum, and of a dumb animal at that, is not? But I think I have foregone trying to fathom the reasoning of the sort of people who would demand to have someone flogged over a stuffed toy.

Regards,

Tim

Charles Hogle:

I hope you'll excuse the time it's taken me to get around to attempting to answer your thoughtful email of three months ago. I hope you didn't imagine that I felt your message was unworthy of a reply; on the contrary. I think you're being either humble or disingenuous by saying you're no expert on theology. I'm afraid I got daunted by the challenge of writing a commensurately erudite response.

I will remind you gently that I am a cartoonist rather than a scholar, although certainly this is no excuse for sloppy thinking or intellectual dishonesty. I'm aware that the distinction I drew between modernity and fundamentalism was somewhat schematic and reductive. But then caricature is, after all, my business.

Your points about the inextricability of religion and rationality are well taken. As my old dance instructor, Herr N., pointed out, the notion of truth as a virtue, which leads to skeptical, scientific inquiry, was born out of the religious impulse. (Newton and Kepler were primarily interested in proving wacko theological/astrological doctrines.) But the scientific, secular world, even through it may have grown out of its opposite, is a genuinely new thing under the sun, and I maintain that it is a better world than the world of superstition.

If you are a longtime reader of my comics you do not need me to tell you that I am no unapologetic cheerleader for the West. I think I've established, if not credibility, then at least consistency as a critic of U.S. policy. We're trying to fill the awful void left by that old Deus abscondus with all kinds of trash, from drugs to porn to useless wasteful merchandise. And our civilization may well be the one that finally does to the planet earth what the Rapanui accidentally did to Easter Island--render it totally uninhabitable for human life. Besides which the Final Solution to the Great Leap Forward will look like pretty penny-ante crimes and blunders, like kids shoplifting Clark bars from the local 7-Eleven or busting the neighbor's lamp on Wreck Night.

The distinction I'm drawing is not meant to be some simple-minded, jingoistic, Us (modern, secular America) vs. Them (fanatical swarthy persons in the Middle East) conflict. Obviously the scism between the religious and the secular doesn't break down along geographic or political boundaries. I know there are lots of moderate Muslims, not that their voices get heard through Western media much. And our own country is more given to fundamentalism than most European democracies. We've always been a semicivilized nation at best. I think it's a disgrace that our chief executive was educated at the finest universities our country has to offer and still thinks like a Mediæval warlord. There's no doubt that he's motivated by the same sorts of delusions that drove the Crusaders. (I've written else where that I regard the Bush administration's War on Terror as so much "sectarian violence," a struggle between two fundamentalist factions.) But this is just one administration, which will soon be peacefully replaced by another, hopefully more rational one. There exists an institutionalized separation of church and state in this country. Fundamentalist Islam, by contrast, represents an unusually pure strain of all that is most malignant and loathsome in religion.

I don't think we know whether religiosity is something endemic to human nature. We surely seem to need something of the numinous, some source of wonder in our lives--and, being hierarchical animals who get easily confused and frightened without a leader, we also seem to crave some external authority that'll tell us how to behave. But this doesn't have to mean believing unprovable nonsense or killing folks who think otherwise. Plenty of individuals have learned to live happy and compassionate lives without religion. All kinds of evils that used to be widespread ways of life have been eradicated, at least institutionally; mass rape and massacres in warfare, human sacrifice, slavery. We are still in the adolescence of our civilization, and it remains to be seen what we can overcome and what we can't. I think those who are trying to learn to live without religious dogma represent progress--a blind, clumsy, groping step forward.

The side I'm on is the side of those who are struggling to live without certainty--which is to say, without delusions--and the side I'm against is of those who are clinging fiercely and defiantly to the most discredited and dangerous delusions of all. My convictions lie with those who lack all conviction; I mistrust and oppose those others who are full of passionate intensity. I am, in other words, taking an un-relativist stand on the side of the relativists against absolutists. But even here, I realize, there's plenty of messy ambiguity and contradiction, overlap and exceptions: there are, I know, smug know-it-all atheists who are every bit as dogmatic and humorless and arrogant in their certitude as the dumbest southern Baptist, and profoundly spiritual people for whom faith is the daily struggle with uncertainty and doubt. But you understand this is all kind of hard to cram into a cartoon.

The point is, I think there's room for nuance and complexity in this argument, for recognizing the inextricable origins and nature of the religious and the secular, without suspending all judgment, throwing up your hands, and saying, "ahh, it's all the same." I don't think it's fair to say that although our society is perhaps fatally flawed I would still rather live in a corrupt, morally bankrupt, and exploitative imperialistic republic than in some totalitarian theocratic shithole--just as we ought to be allowed to admit that 9/11 was the not-exactly-unpredictable consequence decades of violent and oblivious U.S. policy while still condemning it, unequivocally, as an inexcusable act of evil.

It's a far from perfect world, as I'm sure you've noticed. I just got here, as you did. I did not make the rules and I don't like them any more than you do, but here we are. There are apparently sides. You don't get to not pick one. That being the case, I'm on ours.

I guess what I'm asking is, Give me a break here, Charles. Just this week [26 March 2008] I got some twerp sending me these interminable plodding emails accusing me of calling our heroic troops terrorists just because I acknowledged the number of civilian casualties in Iraq, and some other wackjob calling me a traitor because I don't buy The Truth About 9/11 crap. I don't want you to think I'm dismissing your criticisms out of hand or flatly refusing to consider what you say. You know you're doing something right when the twerps and wackjobs write to harangue and insult you, but when really intelligent, literate people write to take you politely to task, it's a sign you may have erred, or at least gone too far. You’ve given me much to think about, and your reading recommendations duly jotted down in my little notepad. Thanks again for taking the time to write at such length, and so thoughtfully.

Regards,

Tim Kreider

Bravo, sir. Like the story of Isaac except with a saner moral. "What are you talking about? I'm not doing that. That'd be a horrible thing to do. What are you, crazy?"

Richard Massey,

I appreciate your commission, but I am hard-pressed to imagine what would be the appropriate illustration for this little homily. I'm picturing, instead, one of those corporate inspiration posters with the word "CERTITUDE" and a photo of masses of marching brownshirts or stormtroopers.

As for my screed on Islam, hey, I felt the same way you did about it, and yet I not unpredictably had to defend myself against a couple of horribly erudite and courteous letters criticizing my reductionism and cultural bias. In a way this is even worse than getting semiliterate hate mail from conservatives in that you have to take them seriously and take time to write a thoughtful reply. They are killing me. Though at least they are not literally killing me like Muslin fanatics.

Thanks for your adoration. You will be the first to know if I found a church. I'll have to ask my friend Aaron, who does my taxes for me, about the advisability of this from a fiscal perspective.

Tim

Sami,

Alas, now that my beloved and indispensable intern Ms. C.-H, has gone, I have no choice but to read my own e-mails, complimentary and otherwise.

Sorry it's taken me this long to respond to your message. I've had a lot going on lately, and am unused to answering all my own correspondence. Plus your note seemed deserving of a commensurately long and thoughtful response, and I needed a nice free Sunday morning to compose one.

I'd begin by gently reminding you that I am a cartoonist, not a serious political commentator, though I agree that is no excuse for intellectual dishonesty or sloppy thinking. And I want you to know your message has given me pause. The last thing I want is to make anybody feel bad about themselves or any less at home in this country than they already do, or to align myself, even coincidentally, with the forces of Assholism. I believe it is the historical and moral mission of the humorist to be always on the side of the underdog, the Little Guy, to take up the flag of the nerds against the jocks, the Marx Brothers against Margaret Dumont.

You raise and put aside the point that Islamic radicals and terrorists don't by any means represent the majority of Arabs, any more than evangelical wackjobs and neocons represent all Westerners. But let's hold on just a second and think this over. As you say, I am smart and fair-minded enough to understand this. But so does that mean I have to stop mocking the Creationists and fag-bashers and abstinence-only crowd out of respect for decent, intelligent Christians like my mother or my friends John and Boyd? Okay I realize this is not quite a fair comparison, since white Christians are the dominant culture in this country and Arabs and Muslims are marginal and mistrusted. So let's ask instead whether, for example, I'm allowed to say that women's magazines and romance novels are for very stupid people without sounding like a misogynist? To get into a touchier subject, am I allowed to admit that I think rap and hip-hop is musically on par with car alarms without being labeled an elitist Eurocentric philistine or just plain racist? What's off-limits for me to say as a straight rich white guy? Who gets to decide?

I can't quite tell whether you're arguing that, as nuanced as Mark Twain's black characters may have been, he was nevertheless as guilty of contributing to cruel and unfair cultural caricatures as his minstrel-show imitators just because he was adding more fodder to the bigoted public conception of African Americans. If you are, I would have to make whatever the official NFL-referee gesture is for Bullshit. Mark Twain gets to do whatever Mark Twain wants, and it isn't Mark Twain's fault if people fail to appreciate the complexity of his work or appropriate and distort it, any more than it’s fair to blame Nietzsche for Naziism or poor Bill Watterson for all those tacky peeing-Calvin decals on people's pickup truck windows.

I guess what it comes down to is what context you see my work as existing in, what audience you think I'm drawing and writing for. I suppose if you look at my work in the broadest context of mainstream American culture, sure, it's just more xenophobic stereotyping, depicting Arabs as fanatics and terrorists and abetting The Man in his demonization of our alleged global enemies. But the thing is, I'm not in the mainstream media. I'm not on TV or in daily papers. I'm printed in one alternative weekly and appear on the prestigious Internet. I think my readership is pretty self-selecting, composed almost exclusively of urban, college-educated liberal types. (The few SUV/shopping mall Americans who stumble across my site invariably scold me for being sick and unpatriotic and then vanish in a snit.) It is expected among this audience that I should castigate my own country's government, pillory the Republicans, and call George Bush a criminal and a fool. Tom Tomorrow has done this for the last 810,397 weeks running and his readers eat it up. But preaching to the choir gets boring, for both the artist and, I would think, for the audience.

But this audience also has a (generally benign and decent) conditioned inhibition against being--or at least looking--ignorant or judgmental of other cultures, lest they be mistaken for jingoistic yahoos or racists. I dislike feeling constrained by this politically correct sheepishness (even though I am also deeply mistrustful of most humorists who rail about the censorious constraints of "political correctness," since what they mostly seem to want is to return to the good old days of telling darkie jokes and smacking broads on the ass without some uptight biddy making a federal case out of it). So in the context of that smaller, more rarefied subculture it is somewhat subversive and nervy to point out that, no, actually I think that other culture sucks. Anybody, humorists included, has more integrity and credibility if they express their own honest, idiosyncratic views instead of predictably parroting some party line. This is why when some dim-bulb apparatchik like William Kristol supports the invasion of Iraq you just roll your eyes and make the jerk-off gesture, but when Christopher Hitchens does it you have to do a double-take and furrow your brow over what he has to say, if for no other reason than to pinpoint where this formerly smart, sane person went completely wacky. As a colleague of mine put it, "It's Kreider's job to call bulllshit wherever he sees it." And here's where I see it:

I truly think that Islamic fundamentalism, like Christian fundamentalism, is abhorrent. Fundamentalism is a refuge for desperate, angry, ignorant people, too dumb to handle any complexity, frightened of ambiguity, hostile to reality. If I were a more compassionate person I would feel some generosity of heart for their confusion and fear, but I'm not, I'm a crank, so I wish them ill. Fundamentalists hate the things I love: art, fun, girls. And Islam is currently more dangerous than Christianity, since most Christians lack the deep gut conviction necessary to kill people over their dingbat beliefs, or at least are safely confined to countries with an institutionalized separation of church and state. The fact that there are still functioning theocracies in the world is an embarrassment to the species.

Which is not to say, by the way, that I believe that the War on Terror is a "clash of civilizations," or that it's the major issue of our time. I feel confident that we'll all drown under rising sea levels or shoot each other over $1000-a-gallon gasoline before the first turbaned invader hits the Coney Island beachhead. "Islamofascism" is not going to take over the world. Adolf Hitler couldn't even take over Europe, and he had the most terrible war machine the planet had ever seen at his command. My own unofficial policy on Islamic theocracies is, let them have their shithole paradise. Like, enjoy the eleventh century, guys. Drop us a line when you invent movable type. Totalitarian societies just tend to be too brittle to last--the Soviet Union only held it together for seventy-odd years, and by the end their empire was revealed as a hollow, rotten shell. Most people don't want to live under a dictatorship of clerics. They want to buy tacky useless crap and watch bad TV and listen to shitty pop music like we do.

What I do worry about is that in the long run rationalism might lose out to superstition. Human beings are not primarily rational creatures. The number of people who actually understand and trust the methods of science can probably be counted in the low thousands. Civilizations do collapse, and Dark Ages ensue. If we regard the present situation as a struggle between rationalism and superstition, modernity and Mediævalism, from my point of view bin Laden and George Bush are on the same side, and the War on Terror is what the media likes to call "a sectarian conflict." A pox on both their houses, says I. I am an enemy of fanatics and assholes whatever side they claim to be on. So I get called an America-hater by semiliterate patriots for mocking the assholes on our side and a racist and Tool of The Man for mocking the assholes on the other side. I make fun of the assholes on our side about twenty times more often than the ones on theirs, since this is my side and it's my job to mock it and there are already plenty of Morning Guys riling up public sentiment against the towelheads. But once in a while the Taliban dynamites a Buddha or the Saudis stone a rape victim or the Sundanese threaten to flog someone over a stuffed animal, and it gets under my skin. And I reserve the right to draw outraged, impotent little cartoons about these things. Further, I claim the right to be silly and stupid about very serious, emotionally volatile issues to no noble or instructive purpose whatsoever. I am currently toying with a little notion called "Captain Pakistan" and nobody's sensitivities are about to dissuade me from pursuing it.

Understand, I'm not comfortably dismissing your argument or heedlessly thumbing my nose at you here. I would say your letter has helpfully complicated my thinking, and will likely modulate my tone on this subject in the future. But I hope you understand I can't afford to let it shut me up. I thank you for taking the time to write at such length and with such serious and thoughtful intent. I hope we understand each other better and can amicably agree to disagree on those points where we can't find accord. You are welcome to write back with your thoughts, but I'm about exhausted on this subject for now, so you shouldn't expect a response inside another month or two.

Regards,

Tim

p.s. I am aware that I'm pretty sheltered in terms of my friendships and exposure to different cultures, and that this is a liability in an artist who purports to comment on current events, but I also think it would be pretty artificial and patronizing for me to go out of my way to cultivate friendships based on ethnicity. Would I want someone to try to make me their token white friend? And although I've heard nothing but wild praise for the Dave Chapelle show and have seen some very funny routines by Arab comedians, I've never had any success pursuing interests out of a sense of obligation. If I could bring myself to do that I would've finished The Brothers Karamazov by now. Right now I'm just trying to cultivate new friendships with men, having lost a lot most of my old Baltimore crew, and am heavily into reading everything by Cormac McCarthy and trying to understand the higher-dimensional implications of string theory. So I've kind of got a full plate. Nonetheless I will check out the Arab comedians you recommended.