ANNOUNCEMENTS: A reminder about my planned
reading tour to promote my next collection, Fuck Them
All: A Chronicle of the Era of Darkness, Volume II next
spring. If you have at any time rashly offered lodging, liquor,
or less savory forms of hospitality to me and have not thought
better of it since, please reiterate those offers now so
that I can plan my route. And if you know of a good bookstore
in your vicinity that might be interested in hosting a slideshow
and reading, please recommend it.
Artist's Statement
I got to thinking about this cartoon when I read an op-ed in the Times by
Bob Herbert on Al Gore’s envelope-pushing advocacy of 100% conversion
to renewable energy sources within ten years, and his glum certainty that it
would be D.O.A. in the national discourse. “When exactly was it that
the U.S. became a can’t-do society?” he asked. I am not providing
a link to this op-ed because on re-reading it it occurs to me that my whole
cartoon is stolen from it, but he, too, recalled this country’s great
defining achievements of the twentieth century: World War II, the Marshall
plan, the Civil Rights era, the Apollo program. When did we lose faith in our
ability to pull off great, audacious things? In Kim Stanley Robinson’s
trilogy about climate change he envisions unprecedentedly huge, hubristic global
engineering projects--the U.S. Army Engineering Corps restarting the stalled
thermohaline circulation by dumping trillions of tons of salt into the oceans,
for example. What seems so heartbreakingly implausible about this scenario
is not the Herculean physical and logistical challenge of it, but the political
will that would be necessary to initiate it. I really can’t see this
country, rigidly ruled as it is by old lizard-eyed oil barons like Dick Cheney,
men with mechanical hearts who’d rather sell out their grandkids’ futures
than see a quarterly drop in profits, converting to renewable sources of energy
until they have wrung the very last dime from the last consumer insecure enough
about his penis size to buy the last Hummer on the last used-car lot in America.
I keep thinking of Chris Rock’s routine about how we used to cure diseases. "What's
the last shit a doctor cured?" he asks. "Polio. You know how long
ago polio was? 1952. That's like the first season of Lucy."
You think they're gonna cure AlDS? No--they
can't even cure athlete's foot. They ain't curing AlDS.
Shit, they ain't never curing AlDS. Don't even
think about that shit. They ain't curing it, 'cause there
ain't no money in the cure. The money's in the medicine.
That's how you get paid: on the comeback. That's how a
drug dealer makes his money: on the comeback.
Panel 1: The Empire State building in fact
took 410 days to construct. It was the tallest building in
the word for forty years and remains so in my heart, even
as Pluto will always remain our ninth planet. Surrounding
the base of the building in my drawing are several monumental
structures of the Ancient world: from left to right, the
Pharos Lighthouse, the legendary Tower of Babel (drawn, hastily,
after Breughel’s depiction), the Great Pyramids, the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Colossus of Rhodes. All
of these, except for the Tower of Babel (which was probably
based on the Etemenaki, a ziggurat in Babylon), were real.
I was dweebily obsessed with the Seven Wonders of the Ancient
World as a child. My favorite was the Phraos, which by contemporary
accounts may have been more than 600 feet tall, unsurpassed
in height by any human construct for sixteen centuries.
As a former connoisseur of very tall buildings
and an American citizen, I’m increasingly embarrassed
and disgusted by the stymied state of the Freedom Tower.
It was bad enough when they replaced Daniel Liebeskind’s
rather graceful, futuristic design that echoed the Statue
of Liberty with an ugly hulking bunker that turns a blind
concrete face to the street like some titanic cenotaph or
Temple of Phobos, a Brutalist monument to the culture of
fear fostered by the Bush Administration. But the fact that
it’s been seven years since the destruction of the
World Trade Center, and that, in that time, we’ve done
jack shit at ground zero except sell ghoulish souvenirs to
rubbernecking tourists is a shame upon the nation. It seems
somehow disgracefully emblematic of this country’s
inability to do a single fucking thing right under the reign
of its illegitimate idiot frat-boy king. I realize that the
Ground Zero fiasco is a bureaucratic clusterfuck implicating
about a dozen New York city and state agencies as well as
the feared organizations of 9/11 widows, and yet it seems
to me that a really inspiring symbolic gesture for President
Obama to make at his inauguration would be to issue some
sort of executive mandate to get something built on that
spot pronto. It would provide us all, as a country, some
emotional closure on that ghastly open wound, and herald
a new era of what America's one true and rightful King called
Taking Care of Business.
Panel 2: This is the unfairest panel in the
cartoon, since I’m certainly we could still win a world
war if only someone would fight us in one. My friend Ellen,
a reader of John Keegan’s excellent military histories,
pointed out to me that we simply don’t fight pitched
battles anymore. The Russians really let us down when they
just collapsed like a stack of towels piled too high instead
of duking it out on Battlefield Europe like we were gearing
up for for fifty years. Now we’ve got all these cool
toys and no one to play with. We’ve got radar-invisible
planes and our enemies don’t have radar. We’ve
got bombs that can vaporize cities and our enemies live in
caves. We’ve got the best-trained army on earth and
our enemies have girls blowing themselves up on buses. Sucks,
man.
Panel 3: Okay maybe we didn’t completely
rebuild Europe in four years but by the end of the Marshall
Plan’s implementation the economies of most of the
countries in Europe were outperforming their prewar levels.
It’s hard to believe me managed this when, after seven
and six years of occupation, respectively, we can’t
even get the people of Afghanistan or Iraq to quit blowing
each other up already. (Gone are the days when you captured
the enemy’s capital and that was it, like in Capture
the Flag, they had to give up.)
New Orleans—talk about a shame upon
the nation! An entire American city was destroyed--and one
of our best cities, too, one of the least American, the most
untouched by the scourge of Puritanism. (I still remember
my awe at learning there were drive-thru daquiri stands in
New Orleans.) And not only did our federal government let
it drown, it then, instead of rebuilding it—as we did
Berlin, the capital of Hitler’s empire—just said, nah,
you know what? On second thought, fuck it. This is the
behavior of junkies and terminal winos, people who no longer
care about themselves enough to bother keeping their homes
clean or fixing things or carrying out the most basic functions
of taking care of themselves. The toilet gets stopped up
and they just close the bathroom door and start crapping
in a bucket.
By the way, I don’t necessarily agree
with this character’s* implication—I just thought
it was what the character would believe, and a funny punchline.
Personally I don’t think the Bush administration let
the people of New Orleans starve on the rooftops because
they were black, but because they were poor. (Okay--it probably
didn't help that they were mostly black.) This administration
doesn’t give a shit about anyone who didn’t contribute
to their campaign. Those people were not only broke, and
probably Democrats, they weren’t even voters. And I
think Bush and company still see the whole episode as a P.R.
snafu rather than the shameful moral failure that it was.
As I’ve said before, this was the moment when most
Americans lost faith in the war in Iraq, because they realized
that this government wasn’t competent to carry out
its most essential functions, much less an ambitious and
complicated undertaking like a foreign occupation.
It laid bare the divide between the elites, by and for whom
the government is run, and the citizenry, who are, like the
Iraqis, the subjects of an indifferently managed occupation.
It became shockingly clear that our government no longer
had any intention of keeping up its end of even the most
basic Hobbesean social contract. It’s a useful lesson
to remember in case my friend Rob is right and the next few
years see fossil fuel depletion, food shortages, and the
general collapse of infrastructure: do not expect the people
in charge to do anything to help. By the time most people
are considering shooting their fellow churchgoers and PTA
members over the last can of creamed corn on the shelf, our
leaders will already be on private jets bound for gated compounds
in Belize.
Panel 4: Then again, maybe this is the unfairest
panel in the cartoon. No criticism of NASA’s competence
implied. I’m a big fan of the Hubble, the Mars rovers,
and the various unmanned probes that’ve sent back such
beautiful images. I’m just reiterating my wistful complaint,
often stated, that living in the future is less cool than
I was led to believe it would be. Most of the technological
advances have been in the area of consumer gadgetry rather
than big, exciting breakthroughs. I’m not asking for
faster-than-light drive or time travel. I just hoped I’d
get to walk on another planet, or at least the lameass old Moon,
for crying out loud, before I died. Instead we’re trying
to fix the toilet on the space station. Some guy did just
perfect a jetpack that’ll work for longer than a minute
but it's roughly the size of a Geo and appears to lift the
operator four inches off the ground.
This ‘ancient astronaut’ business
was huge in the Seventies, when I grew up. (It was recently
resurrected as a pulp trope in the last Indiana Jones film.)
I remember realizing, sometime in middle school, how much
it would explain if human beings were a hybrid between apes
and some truly intelligent alien species. Then I grew up
and realized this idea was stupid. Not everybody did. This
assumption that aliens must have helped ancient humans build
the Pyramids or Stonehenge speaks of a basic lack of faith
in human ingenuity, the same lack of faith evident in the
crackpot accusation that the government faked the moon landing,
or the 9/11 wackjobs’ tired rejoinder that, if you
think their accusations are incredible, what’s really hard
to believe is that the whole thing was planned by a few guys
in a cave! Well, actually, that’s easy to believe.
Human beings’ ignorance and cruelty are equalled only
by their brilliance and daring.
In the same way, I feel like lately Americans
have lost some fundamental faith in our own ingenuity and
boldness--we no longer believe ourselves capable of great
things. Can we really be the blood descendants of the same
people who turned the great eastern forest into a megalopolis,
the Great Plains into a breadbasket; who built Manhattan
and Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam; who split the atom,
crushed the Third Reich and Imperial Japan, invented the
movies and rock and roll, and walked on the moon? This nation
of obese, illiterate consumers and litigants, these pampered
whining puds who’d sell out the liberties their forefathers
died for in exchange for a little illusory safety? What the
hell ever happened to us, anyway? I’m reminded me of
how Peter Bogdanovitch* sometimes ruefully introduced himself
in the 80s: “I used to be Peter Bogdanovitch.” We
used to be the Americans.
Understand, I’m not being sentimental
about the past, indulging in nostalgia for a time I never
knew: I prefer living in a time when it’s no longer
okay to talk about “niggers” or “faggots,” when
we can see photographs of the moons of Neptune, when a man
can view more pornography than existed on the whole planet
in 1945 in one afternoon at the click of a button. Even the
ancient Greeks romanticized bygone eras; in the time of Homer
they believed that they were living in an Iron Age, enervated
and decadent compared to the distant Golden Age of larger-than-life
heroes like Achilles and Odysseus.
But in the coming years
we may have to deal with some of the greatest challenges
to civilization and survival that our species has faced since
the last ice age, and it seems as if most of us are afraid
we’re not up to it. There’s something wistfully
pessimistic about the book The World Without Us and
the various cable TV specials that have adapted or copied
it, with their vividly rendered CGI scenes of our buildings
and bridges collapsing, our monuments eroding. There’s
a morbid yearning behind these visions, disturbingly like
an adolescent’s fantasies about his own funeral. Adolescents
like to daydream about such things becausse the prospect
of facing their actual futures is so unimaginable, and hence
terrifying. Come on, everybody! The
game’s not over yet! I believe it was Patrick Henry,
at a meeting of the delegates of the Colony of Virginia at
St. John’s Church in Richmond on March 23rd of 1775
who uttered the now-famous speech:
Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is
over until we decide it is! Was it over when the
Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! And it ain’t
over now! ‘Cause when the going gets tough… [long
pause] …the tough get goin’! Who’s with
me? Let’s go! Come on! AAAAAAHHHH—[runs out
alone; returns]
What the fuck happened to the Delta I know?
Where’s the spirit? Where’s the guts--huh?
This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you’re
gonna let it be the worst! ‘Ooh, we’re afraid
to go with you, Bluto, we might get in trouble.’ WELL,
JUST KISS MY ASS FROM NOW ON! Not me! I’m not
gonna take this! Wormer: he’s a dead man! Marmalard:
dead! Niedermeyer… [response: “dead!”] LET’S
DO IT! GO! GO! GO! GO! YEAAAAAAGGHHHHHH!
*Whom longtime readers will recognize as protagonist
of the classic cartoon “Yep, It’s a Bigass Tragedy”
** Younger readers may not even have heard
of director Peter Bogdanovitch, but, believe it or not, after
the release of his films The Last Picture Show and What’s
Up, Doc? in the early 70s, he was as hot a commodity
and big a critical darling as was Quentin Tarantino after Pulp
Fiction, or David Lynch after Blue Velvet. After
the usual hubris and follies and some ghastly personal tragedies
his career foundered and he fell from the fickle grace of
Hollywood. You may have seen him in recent years as the therapist’s
therapist on The Sopranos.
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