By Jeremy Lott on 9.13.04 @ 12:06AM
A celebrated, bitterly anti-Bush cartoonist offers the best reason yet to vote Republican come November.
Put this one on your try-to-avoid list: I spent a good chunk of
this September 11 leafing through Art Spiegelman's In the
Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon, 42 pages, $19.95), a collection
of oversized comic strips about the fall of the two towers of the
New York Trade Center, with additional commentary and a few extras
thrown in.
Spiegelman, author and drafter of the acclaimed World War II
tale Maus, lives in Soho, on the northern outskirts of
Ground Zero. He and his wife were walking that day, three years ago
Saturday, and heard the first plane crash. They turned around to
see the first plumes of smoke. Their daughter Nadja had to be
evacuated from a school practically at the foot of the towers, and
her school took some time to reopen, as it was commandeered to
serve as part of the rescue and clean up effort.
That this event would loom large in the artist's imagination is
not surprising. In the intro, Spiegelman writes that he wanted to
capture a snapshot of something that "didn't get photographed or
videotaped into public memory but still remains burned onto the
inside of my eyelids several years later" -- that is, "the image of
the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it
vaporized."
And capture it he does. In eight of the ten strips, there is the
spirit of the building: a haze of orange, red, and white bars set
against a sky that goes from blue to gray and then seems to swallow
everything whole. It's the one thing about this collection which
really inspires -- the building itself seemingly refusing to fall
without one hell of a struggle -- so of course the author goes out
of his way to ruin it for us. The strip concludes: "The towers have
come to loom far larger than life but they seem to grow smaller
everyday…"
BROWSERS WHO TAKE the time to read the introduction can't claim
they weren't warned. Spiegelman complains that the hijackings of
September 11 were "hijacked by the Bush cabal that reduced it all
to a war recruitment poster." He frets that most U.S. publications
wouldn't touch these strips that his "coalition of the willing" of
several enlightened European publications had no problem with. He
likens democracy in this country to the fallen buildings.
Spiegelman notes disdainfully that one town he visited in
Indiana in late 2001 was "draped in flags that reminded me of the
garlic one might put on a door to ward off vampires," and his
disdain for the stars and stripes is consistent. He almost removes
his daughter from her temporary new school because she is asked to
come dressed in red, white, and blue: "I hadn't raised my daughter
to become a goddamn flag." In the strips, the cursed flag serves as
a sign of complacency, nationalism, and stupidity.
The picture that this picture book presents is one of impending
doom. The introduction is titled "THE SKY IS FALLING!" and one gets
the sense that no irony is intended. It invokes the experience of
his parents in Auschwitz; throughout the strips, Spiegelman worries
that New Yorkers are going to die en masse because of the
toxic dust clouds kicked up on September 11. He frets and frets
that the current Halliburton-Enron military industrial complex is
going to bring the sky down on us all, though he does allow that
the world is ending "more slowly than I once thought."
MAYBE IT WAS the somewhat somber nature of the day but that last
admission got me to thinking, and I finally decided that he had
just made the case for re-electing the President far better than
several dozen right-wing flacks could ever manage. A lot of
criticisms can be leveled at Bush but so far he has this going for
him: September 11 was a one-time event. There have been no major
terrorist attacks on American soil since.
I won't pretend to know how responsible our commander-in-chief
is for that blessed fact, but it's striking. As bombs go off in
Russia and various points in Europe, and as we muddle through Iraq
and what's left of Afghanistan, we haven't seen a repeat on the
home front. Granted, there are grievous problems that need to be
addressed -- pilots aren't yet armed, border enforcement is a mess,
Homeland Security's color-coded warnings are a bad joke -- but
through providence or planning or some great good luck that's
befallen us, it hasn't happened again. Turkey-lurkey might remind
Art Spiegelman that the sky hasn't fallen yet.
topics:
Trade, Military, Iraq, Russia, Oil
