by Tim Kreider
The morning of the inauguration I realized I couldn’t stand not to register my impotent protest and took a train from New York to D.C. to go stand in the freezing rain and jeer. News stories the next day catalogued some of the items thrown at the presidential motorcade: an egg, a tennis ball, some ice, an orange peel. I had always resisted drawing overtly topical cartoons, but the week of the inauguration I ran one titled “What If . . . Some IDIOT Became the President???” My friend Felix was cast as unlikely commander in chief, his desk littered with bongs and comic books, as an aide burst into the Oval Office crying, “Mr. President the Russians are at it again!” Felix, eyes dilated and glassy, clutches his head in his hands as if to keep it from imploding and says, “SWEET weeping Jesus what do we do.” I drew this cartoon in January of 2001, eight months before the scene depicted would come to pass.
I experienced the event now known only by its numeric date, as if too terrible to be named, in the same way most of my compatriots did—on television—and reacted the same way so many of them did—by going temporarily insane. A hundred miles from the city, in my isolated cabin, I wanted to see those responsible nuked, their shithole paradise turned into a vast flat rink of Trinitite that would glow faintly at night for the next thirty thousand years to remind the world that the Americans were not to be fucked with. I later noticed that most of the people who went conspicuously berserk with gung-ho bloodlust had experienced the attacks as a TV event, fiery Act I of a formulaic Hollywood blockbuster whose climax had to be the inevitable Act III: Spectacular Payback.
It wasn’t until I went to New York a few days later that I realized how misplaced, how grotesquely inappropriate a response this was, like showing up drunk and picking fights at a funeral. Riding the escalator up out of Penn Station, having seen the newly mutilated skyline for the first time, that vast absence ghastly as an amputation, I tried to arrange my expression into a New York face, blank and unapproachable, and failed so completely that a girl on the escalator next to me started crying and embraced me. In the streets, the faces of New Yorkers were heartbreakingly unguarded, like mollusks with their shells torn off, gelid and flinching at the unfamiliar air.
Late that night, draped over chairs in her living room in Brooklyn drinking tumblers of Irish whiskey, Lauren and I sat up long after Lars had gone to bed, talking. She told me her mother, back in Seattle, had cried over the phone that week. “That’s what the terrorists accomplished,” she said. “I mean, besides the actual deaths, and the grief—that’s the worst thing they did: they made everyone in the world feel like shit.” Her reaction was so innocent that it shamed me back to sanity. My contempt for the bellicose hysteria of my fellow Americans would always be the more unforgiving because I’d briefly felt it myself, the way we bitterly renounce infatuations or faiths we’ve outgrown.
Our conversation that night had the raw, punchy honesty of talk at last call, or a wake. Outside her window, across the river, the island of Manhattan was still a crime scene south of Fourteenth Street. TV vans were jammed up and down Eleventh Avenue, their antennae craning like rubberneckers at a car wreck. Downtown, near the relief tents, piles of exhausted firefighters were sacked out on the sidewalks like litters of kittens. The only planes in American airspace that night were military jets. Somewhere out in the darkened continent, our callow new president was in hiding. War was in the air. We didn’t know exactly who the war would be with yet, but we knew that soon, sometime in the next few months, thousands of people somewhere in the world were going to die. You could feel History all around you, not an abstraction but alive and dangerous, like an epidemic.
Lauren talked about Pearl Harbor that night, how we look back on it now as the first chapter of a story so familiar it seems a foregone conclusion: A day that will live in infamy, the assembly lines retooling from Fords to Superfortresses, D-day and Hiroshima, the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square. But this narrative is only inevitable in retrospect; back then, no one knew how history was going to turn out. There were plenty of isolationists and pacifists in this country before December seventh, and there were still some afterward; they’ve just been airbrushed out of the textbooks. People then were exactly as frightened and clueless as we were now, unable to see even an instant in front of them, taking uncertain stands for whatever seemed right at the time.
As usual, the people who stepped confidently forward with answers in the crisis were either idiots or villains—the best lack all conviction, while the worst you know the rest. Earlier that afternoon I’d eaten lunch at a Polish diner where I saw some politician or think-tank wonk on TV explaining that the terrorists had attacked us because “they hate our freedom.” It sounded uncannily like a line from the ’70s Battlestar Galactica series describing the evil alien Cylons. Jesus, I thought—is this what it’s going to be like? It seemed as if, sometime in that gluttonous, concupiscent Clintonian interlude between the Cold War and this new one, the body politic had gotten so flaccid and atrophied that we could only understand anything in cartoonishly stupid terms.
I had, of course, seen nothing yet.
* * *
When any nation-state decides to attack another, the sequence of events is as predictable as the etiology of a disease. Thucydides, writing twenty-four centuries ago, dryly catalogues how the meanings of words are perverted so that recklessness becomes courage, prudence cowardice, and moderation unmanly. In the years of the War on Terror we all learned Orwellian new locutions like extraordinary rendition (kidnapping), enhanced interrogation techniques (torture), and misled (the lie that we weren’t being lied to). The government branded the unconnected countries they’d targeted “the Axis of Evil,” a comic-book locution like the Legion of Doom. The word freedom became so soiled by abuse it could never be spoken by anyone without ignoble motive again.
Hermann Goering, in captivity, was wearily candid about how you get ordinary shlubs to go to war: just tell them your intended target is planning to attack you, and denounce the pacifists as unpatriotic. When administration officials invoked spy-movie scenarios of “a ticking time bomb in Times Square” or a mushroom cloud over Manhattan, the Gulf of Tonkin might as well have been Jenkins’ Ear or Helen of Troy for all the American people seemed to know. The intelligentsia, inasmuch as there was such a thing in the twenty-first-century United States, were condemned as effete, craven elitists—“the blame-America-first crowd” or “Bush-haters.” Solemn columnists came out of the closet as apologists for torture, a position that would have sounded, only a year or two earlier, like being pro-rape. No one on TV or in print seemed willing to risk saying anything sane or true for fear of being called traitors, cowards, or faggots. One administration insider, deranged by hubris, declared the concept of “reality” naïve and obsolete. The dissonance between official reality and your own fugitive perceptions was so complete that it was easy to feel as if it was you, not the rest of the country, who had gone insane. It all felt less like the usual glum defeat of having the other party in power than some unprecedented historical aberration, a brutal discontinuity with the America we had grown up in. “I almost can’t bear to think of it,” Lauren wrote me, “that America is being led into the first truly preemptive war in its history by an unelected leader.”
It was, at least, great material. Along with military contractors and the petrochemical industry, satirists were among the few beneficiaries of what the administration was calling “the War on Terror.” After 9/11 I felt morally conscripted into becoming a political cartoonist; it felt unconscionable to draw cartoons about anything else, given even the marginal public forum of an alternative weekly newspaper. Being a cartoonist during the Bush administration was like being a landscape painter at Krakatoa: each day brought some new affront to common sense or human decency as comedic fodder; the people in power were a rogues’ gallery of grotesques out of Dick Tracy. The most incredible character of them all was the president himself, feckless and entitled as any child-king, a swaggering malaprop with a fondness for military cost
ume. It was commonly assumed he was a figurehead controlled by his vice president, one of his dad’s old cronies, who looked like a caricature of a corrupt industrialist by George Grosz—a bald, snarling oil baron with a mechanical heart.
I still remember the first news story that cheered us up after 9/11: a funeral director in the Atlanta area had literally let his work pile up, secretly stacking dozens of bodies in the woods out behind his funeral home. Lauren and I, both chronic procrastinators, liked to think of this as a simple Failure to Deal on a horrific scale. We imagined him telling himself that this outdoor-storage thing was just a stopgap measure, strictly temporary, waking up every morning and groaning Ugh, I really gotta get on top of this situation—first thing Monday, I swear to God. In those days, this is what constituted comic relief.
In early 2002, as the Bush administration was cramming a suspiciously well-prepared three-hundred-page package of legislation through Congress under the dystopian name of “the Patriot Act,” Lauren and I organized a “statement of conscience” to be placed in the Comics Journal, then the definitive publication of comics news and criticism. It was modeled on a famous diptych of ads that had run on facing pages of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1968, in which the science-fiction authors of the era had declared themselves in opposition to or support of the Vietnam War.I Ours was a three-line statement of opposition to the Patriot Act and the imminent invasion of Iraq that concluded: “If comics have taught us anything, it’s that superpowers should be used only for good.” Beneath it ran five columns of names, like a splash page of the assembled Justice League.
Placing an ad in a magazine is not self-immolation or a hunger strike, but opening yourself up to public invective and ridicule is nonetheless a bonding experience. Lauren and I had long ago made a pact never again to read any comments on the Comics Journal’s message board, the electronic bathroom wall of the comics community, but reactions to our ad inevitably seeped around our firewall. Responses were not unpredictable: the administration’s talking points and propaganda slogans were repeated verbatim; certain historical analogies too obvious to mention were invoked; phrases like real men and balls recurred with unselfconscious frequency. I retain a vivid mental image, evoked by one commenter, of Lauren and myself bending over in submission to receive Iraqi fighter jets up our liberal peacenik asses.
One of the frustrations of being attacked by a decentralized terrorist network is that it isn’t immediately clear whom to bomb, which may be one reason Americans turned our thwarted rage against each other. It was as if we’d all been waiting for decades for an excuse to hate each other’s guts: conservatives let rip their long-stockpiled loathing of us East Coast ivory-tower eggheaded elitists, and we finally got to unveil our contempt for those dumb gullible gung-ho fuckheads back in flyover country. The general sense in New York City, one of the only places in the country that had actually been attacked, was that out in America everyone had gone apeshit. A lot of barroom conversations among my friends in those days ended by abandoning discourse altogether, growling in frustration at the futility of rational argument in the face of moronic power. We said things like “Let’s stop talking about it,” “I can’t even take it,” and “Just fuck those fucking fuckers.” I overheard a woman at a sidewalk café—a respectable-looking taxpayer, with a stroller—wonder aloud, not especially sotto voce, “Why someone doesn’t just do a drive-by” on the president of the United States.
In a time of furious absolutes, anyone in the middle gets shouted down and told to shut up. I drew a cartoon of myself standing between the credulous, dewy-eyed hippies of the Left and the militant imbeciles of the Right, sheepishly holding a protest sign with an illegibly long, prolix slogan, full of qualifications and caveats, with addenda and footnotes that had to be appended to the bottom of the sign with tape. While the government was preparing to topple the Taliban, Lauren had said she wasn’t sure she could wholeheartedly join a rally for “peace”: “What would that even mean?” Embracing uncertainty and ambivalence had always been one of the shared convictions (if you can call ambivalence a conviction) on which our artistic and intellectual camaraderie was predicated. We both understood that you could hardly ever know for sure that you were right, but in the world you had to act as though you did—always preserving, for integrity’s sake, an eternal flame of doubt in the back of your mind, never completely dismissing the possibility that you were full of shit. One night before an antiwar rally, painting signs on my apartment floor, we just about wept with laughter thinking up uninspiring slogans like GIVE APPEASEMENT A CHANCE and THEY PROBABLY DON’T HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
Lauren and I always went to protests together, because neither of us really liked them. People seem to get stupider in geometric proportion to their numbers, and I hate being asked to chant things like Hey, hey, ho, ho. And we knew that none of it would make any difference—or so we told ourselves, over and over, as a kind of preventative incantation to spare ourselves any more painful disillusionment than we’d already suffered. But we did it, firstly, because we couldn’t bear to do nothing: that whole decade felt like being held down and spit on by playground bullies, and you couldn’t just passively lie there—you owed it to yourself to at least thrash around and scream. And we did it for the same reason we’d run that ad: out of a square, old-fashioned notion that dissent is one of the responsibilities of citizens in what was still, ostensibly, a republic. But mostly, I think, we did it out of a conviction that was more artistic than political, one so indefensible you’d have to call it faith: that it matters when the truth is spoken, even if no one listens.
We had self-consciously dowdy code names that we used for communiqués about our antiwar activities: she was Beryl Pankhurst; I was Obadiah Blott. Lauren, who’d studied political activism in college, believed that our cause was best served by dressing as conservatively as possible instead of confirming the usual lefty stereotypes. She’d been cultivating a frumpy-old-lady look ever since her days back in grunge-era Seattle (whenever she walked down St. Marks Place in the East Village, where kids were still dressing up as Mohawked punks circa 1978, she’d secretly think: I’m punker than they are) and armored herself for street protests in a cardigan, skirt, and granny glasses. And I was happy for any excuse to wear a suit. I even took to wearing an American flag lapel pin in a futile effort to reclaim that symbol from the warmongers who’d appropriated it. Our protest signs were similarly traditionalist—WORLD DOMINATION IS UN-AMERICAN, scolded one of Lauren’s slogans; INVASION IS FOR NAZIS AND MARTIANS said mine, illustrated with swastikas and tentacles—appealing to a peaceable prewar America that was as selectively imagined as conservatives’ false memory of some bygone God-fearing white man’s paradise.
We were not inconspicuous among the lip rings and dreadlocks, fake tribal tattoos and big rasta hairbags of our allies. One pallid, zaftig Wiccan told us in all earnestness that it was “good to see some normals here.” We often marched with a casket-sized American flag stretched between us, and one guy sneered, “Why are you carrying that?” at us, as if we were displaying the Stars and Bars. I remember a dude standing atop a flatbed truck draped with Palestinian flags, bellowing over a PA system, “WHAT DO WE WANT?”—to which we were to respond, in Nuremberg unison: “PEACE!!!” Al SharptonII took his turn at the mike at one rally to demand that someone “Free Mumia!”—a cause that had become shorthand, for Lauren and me, for the Left’s easily distracted agenda. At one march I had a fit of despairing laughter and had to sit down on a curb after seeing a sloppily Magic Markered sign that urged the world to SMOKE WEED under a scrawled marijuana leaf that looked like a child’s hand-outline picture of Turkey Lurkey.
We were not among those who chained themselves to fences or contrived to get dragged into paddy wagons as acts of passive resistance; we were lazy, craven, dilettantish activists. We had a strict no-jail pact. The closest either of us came to getting arrested was when I was briefly detained by the police for sketching the permed and wattled delegates at the Rep
ublican National Convention in New York, but the semiotic squid ink of my suit and NIXON button allowed me to slip free. When we saw a tense confrontation developing between protesters and police under the solemn watch of the marmoreal lions on the steps of the Forty-Second Street library, we exchanged a glance and deployed our prearranged fallback plan: time to get dinner. We arranged to divide our activities at the RNC protests so as to focus on each of our respective areas of interest: in the morning we went to a labor protest so that Lauren could ogle machinists, and in the afternoon we attended a “mass panty flash” by an organization called the Axis of Eve so I could ogle guerrilla exhibitionists. During a march on Washington, Lauren, a big Founding Fathers fangirl, insisted we detour to the Treasury Building to see the salaciously tight-panted statue of Alexander Hamilton, whom she had once drawn making out with Thomas Jefferson.
After the march in Washington had dispersed, we sat trading swigs from a flask of whiskey on a bench in Lafayette Park, across the street from the black iron fence enclosing the White House and a barricade of black-armored cops bristling with guns and truncheons. “I think we can expect to see some major policy changes very shortly,” I said. “Oh, yeah,” Lauren agreed. “We truly stuck it to the Man today.”
Lauren was not only my comrade in arms through those years but my closest artistic confidante. My main contribution to the antiwar effort was drawing political cartoons, perhaps the purest imaginable exercise in futility; the last time a cartoonist had any actual effect on U.S. politics we still had a bearded president. Through long conversations and reading each other’s work and the pleasure-center buzz of her admiration and laughter, Lauren both honed and gentled my art. We always called the president “George,” with a kind of weary familiarity, the tone you’d use to talk about an exasperating friend or unhousebroken pet. Although in real life I reacted with such instant and visceral loathing to the sound of the president’s voice that I would lunge across the room to snap off the radio whenever he spoke, in my cartoons George became a figure of fun—a hapless, unbright little guy who dimly apprehended that he was in way over his head, like a rhesus monkey at the helm of a crashing starship. He unfailingly called his vice president “Mr. Cheney,” the way you’d address your parents’ friends as a kid. They became a comic duo, like Laurel and Hardy, Mr. Cheney forever growling, “Geooooooorge!” in frustration. As I drew George’s face, I could feel my own features twisting and cringing in involuntary sympathy with the fear and eagerness to please I saw there, the deeply hidden insecurity of the bully.