The Answer Outstripping the Question

Page 27 March–April 2009 from now, it will be necessary to show Rees’s work to our descendants, who probably won’t believe that seven years witnessed such a catastrophic abuse of US military and political power. “Holy shit,” one character exclaims after seeing George W. Bush on television, “that guy was the PRESIDENT?” “You got it,” replies another. “Remember Abraham Lincoln ? This guy has the same job.” Rees is the funniest political cartoonist working today. Rees is the funniest political cartoonist working today, because he dares to answer savagery with savagery. His working method is simple. The characters are corporate clip-art figures, public domain and generic—bland men and women seated behind desks and at board meetings. In strip after strip, they rant and rave to one another, more often than not through telephones. Over the years, other characters come and go—Voltron, Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, a mewling infant who represents Iraq’s ingratitude at having been liberated—as well as a bizarre menagerie of talking animals (one of whom declares to the reader, in the midst of Israel’s brief 2006 war with Lebanon, “We can’t wait until you’re done killing one another”). But it is the frozen office temps who carry the strip, year after bloody year. These frozen protagonists—physically isolated from one another, trapped in static poses, forever lacking pensions and health care—serve as perfect metaphor for the passivity and paralysis of the US under the Bush Administration. As the strip progressed, a few personalities fleetingly emerged. The woman on the phone became “the annoying lady who never shuts up about Afghanistan,” remembering our assault failure there long after everyone else wished it forgotten. Her male coworkers regularly return to alcohol and other drugs for consolation. The three temps in the break room (the one in the center poised, a modern Tantalus, with a donut halfway to her lips) remain the most desperately clueless, alternately embracing and rejecting the government’s promises of security, schizophrenically cynical and desperate. Rees reserves most of his ire not for Bush per se but his enablers : Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Barney Franks, Tom DeLay, Joseph Lieberman, Rick Santorum , Harriet Miers, Lewis “Scooter ” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz—and, above all, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove (and their realpolitik predecessor Henry Kissinger). Other war cheerleaders come under assault as well: near the end of the compilation, Rees interrupts the strips with an essay he originally published in August 2007 at the Huffington Post, “Cormac Ignatieff’s ‘The Road,’” an attack on Michael Ignatieff and other pro-war intellectuals by way of a Cormac McCarthy parody. The media, which all now acknowledge failed to do its proper duty in the run-up to the Iraq War, is also routinely excoriated for providing mute witness to still-ongoing genocide in Central Asia and Africa (Rees frequently takes pains to rail against the horrors in Darfur, and how they have been systematically ignored .) Thomas Friedman appears as “The Mustache of Understanding,” an “uncannily optimistic,” wildeyed fanatic spouting incomprehensible metaphors. On another occasion, a character says of The New York Times’s apology for having supported the Iraq War: “Fuck a mild-mannered apology on Page 10. The only honest way for the New York Times to deal with this shit would have been to run a big-ass banner headline that says, ‘WHYTHE HELLAREYOU STILL READING US? DOES JUDITH MILLER HAVE TO KILL YOU HERSELF?” So, now that Obama is our president, is the madness ending? Rees has announced that he’s quitting making “Get Your War On,” but the final strips remain characteristically pessimistic. “You know what’s funny?” says the standing man who appeared in the very first panel of the very first strip. “I still don’t actually know much about Iraq. OrAfghanistan.” “Why don’t you ask someone who lives over there?” his coworker suggests. The man replies, “Are the people who are still alive really representative?” Seven-plus years after 9/11, the dead are dead and will remain dead. Most of them, being brownskinned foreigners, have already been forgotten. There has been no progress, no...