Sunday, May 8, 2011

"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

On the night they killed Bin Laden, I went down to Ground Zero with some friends and stood in the middle of a big crowd and watched people climb the stoplight. At the time, I saw nothing wrong with the scene. I still don't. It certainly wasn't our most mature moment as a nation, but such release is natural, expected almost. We had gone nearly ten years since 9/11, ten years fighting two wars against an enemy that wore no uniforms and knew no surrender. The celebration at Ground Zero was not so much a celebration of Bin Laden's death as it was a celebration of having finally won something in a war where winning had become commonly accepted as nearly impossible. They had, I think, reason to celebrate, even if they didn't know exactly what it was they were celebrating.

Still, every party has a pooper. In the hours and days that followed the triumph of SEAL Team Six in Abbottabad, critics made themselves vocally known, showing up on Facebook and Twitter to denounce the rampant "death celebration" sweeping the nation, quoting Mark Twain and Martin Luther King, Jr. in an argument for moderation.

Social media has, in a lot of ways, made a lot of people dumber. Paradoxically, the dumber we get, the quicker we are to realize when other people are being dumb. The Internet, it seems, has both laid bare our collective stupidity and inspired others to developed a heightened sensitivity to stupidity. Such was the case with Bin Laden: on one side, trigger happy, war weary mega-patriots danced in the streets; on the other side, self-righteous, pious do-gooders shook a collective finger in disapproval. I'd like to make clear at this point that I belong to neither group. They both annoy me equally. Hardly anything is as black and white as these two sides claim it to be, especially war, which is what this, in the end, is all about.

War is an ugly, tremendously terrible business. It's horrific, violent, bloody. Thousands die. As far as I'm concerned, there is no place for it or the people that make it. No war is more virtuous than any other, and war is never a just solution for any evil. That said, when we make a decision as a society to wage war on another people, we must all accept responsibility for it. We're not obligated to agree with it, but we've got to face the facts: we're doing it, and we've got to answer to it when things go wrong or, in this case, right.

Celebrating and dancing over the mangled corpse of your enemy is a solemn rite of war. It goes hand in hand with a more comprehensive premise of war: shoot your enemy before he shoots you. Had Bin Laden gunned down President Obama in the East Room, the militants of al-Qeada would've been climbing stoplights just as we did. Celebrating the death of a vanquished enemy is disgusting, reprehensible perhaps. But it isn't to be criticized, it's part of the package deal.

Of all the things we can think and do and say right now, the most considerate of all possible reactions is to consider the cost in human terms. The killing of Osama Bin Laden was, by almost any metric, the shallowest of victories. My personal metric of choice is human lives lost, specifically the civilian lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are people whose names we do not know, whose faces we never saw. Twitter and Facebook has had nothing to say these past ten years on the thousands of civilians sacrificed in the name of finding Bin Laden and defeating al-Qaeda. To claim the moral high ground now, in the flush of victory, is somewhat embarrassing to the do-gooders who had nothing to say about these tragedies.

It's disgusting to me that it took ten years and the paying of such a tremendous cost in human blood to track down a single elderly dialysis patient living in a barricaded compound in a suburb outside of Islamabad. Thousands of innocent lives later, we've got what we wanted. In the process, we've all forgotten who we were and what we said when we got into all this.

Osama is dead, justice has been done. It's good that he's gone. Maybe we shouldn't have celebrated his death, and maybe it's fine that we did. Nothing is black and white. Celebrate this victory, I suppose, but remember that the war wages on, that there are still battles yet to fight.

We aren't less human because we celebrate the death of an enemy. We are less human because of the price we paid to win that kill, because of the wars we started and the lives we destroyed in the process. If you want to criticize an injustice in all this, criticize that injustice. Had Bin Laden been beheaded on live TV in October 2001, none of us would be misquoting Mark Twain in a cry for moderation. Rather, we'd all be climbing stoplights, delighting in the smell of the blood of a fresh killed enemy, voting to install George Bush as emperor for life. To claim moderation now, having waged ten years of war, is hypocritical. Accept responsibility, end the war. Nothing else makes any sense.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Apartment 3-G


Today's victim: Apartment 3-G.

Apartment 3-G is one of those strips that refuses to die. The strip has been in continual syndication with King Features Syndicate since 1961, regaling audiences with tales of Margo, Abigail, and Lu Ann, three women who share an apartment in Manhattan (presumably 3-G).

Anywho, you can see the original here.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Easily Arranged

I'd like to make a bit of a confession.

The other day, I whited out some text bubbles above the head of a certain beloved American cartoon icon and used my computer to insert text concerning wild banshees and sandwiches. It was an inappropriate thing to do and I apologize.

However. That doesn't mean I've stopped doing it. I'm just more considerate about it. I use artwork for which the copyright has expired. I replace dialogue that wasn't very good to begin with.

Today, we consider cartoonist F.M. Howarth's "Easily Arranged", a sort of cartoon-story which appeared in the July 28, 1897 issue of the once-popular Puck humor magazine. Puck was America's first successful humor magazine, published weekly in St. Louis starting in 1871, running stupendously until eventually being bought out by Hearst in 1918. "Easily Arranged" is a simple sort of thing, with an established tripartite action resulting in a humorous resolution. You can see the whole thing here.

Anyway, as funny as it was in 1897, it no longer tickles the funny bone here in 2011. While the boys of '97 got a giggle from a girl on a bike with no skirt, the men of '11 stopped laughing as soon as the dress came off—naked chicks on bikes are hot, not funny, and this lovely lady doesn't show enough skin for us to make a judgement. Therefore, updating must be done.



Sunday, March 20, 2011

Line Up

It’s 3 A.M. here in Cleveland, Ohio, and I’m waiting for the train to New York. I’ve been here since about 11:30 last night—I walked here from the Greyhound Terminal downtown. I don’t have anywhere else to go: I’m too cheap for a hotel room and too bashful to try and couch surf. Instead, I’m homeless for a night in Cleveland, fulfilling an obscure Kerouac-esque fantasy in the seventh most violent city in the United States.

Here at the train station, Amtrak has an intriguing system-wide policy: uniformed military gets to skip to the head of the ticket line. For some reason, at three in the morning, this is the most bizarrely unfair policy I have yet heard. I respect and support our troops as much as any red-blooded American might. Joining the military is an act to be respected, certainly, but it is far from pure selflessness. There is danger, certainly, and hardship. Still, the military, as we know it in this country today, is an organization one voluntarily commits oneself to—a job, as it were.

A couple hours ago, in Columbus, I bought a bag of Fritos for a man who said he was going to West Virginia. He cornered me outside the bus station. A black man with a crop of graying hair, he smiled and assured me that he wouldn’t shoot. He was a practiced panhandler, opening soft and finishing hard, asking me about what was going on around town—he’d seen crowds, congregating outside hotels and in front of bars. I told him that there was a Lil’ Wayne concert tonight at an arena somewhere. His eyes lit up and he smiled a little bit.

“Where you going? You just wandering around?”

Clearly, I was from out of town. Maybe he was too, but he was the sort of guy who was good at hiding his origins for the benefit of soliciting charity.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” I told him. This was a mistake. It opened the door to all sorts of begging. Without missing a beat, he seized the opportunity and made it clear he was asking for food, not money. He didn’t need any money—just a bag of chips or something small like that, just enough to get hold him over until he got himself to West Virginia.

“Will you be here when I get back?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, I’ll try…” he told me. “I could just get something here, you know?”

He gestured vaguely at the little restaurant inside the Greyhound Station. I didn’t have any cash to give him and I didn’t feel like taking him out for dinner.

Instead, I went to a CVS down the street and bought food. Lots of food, enough for my bus ride and train ride, enough to last me the thousand miles to New York. I bought chips and Oreo cookies and Powerade and pudding and pretzels filled with peanut butter and macaroni I could microwave—if I encountered a microwave between Columbus and New York. I bought a bag of Fritos, for 99 cents.

Back at the station, I handed over the bag of chips and didn’t ask for his name. I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want to know where he was going exactly or why—I didn’t want to hear his stories or be pressed into giving more. He smiled and thanked me and I told him to have a nice day. And that was it, that was all we wanted from each other—a neat, clean transaction. He wanted a free snack and I wanted to pay the price for being the rich boy in a bus station full of poor people. In Columbus, that price is set just shy of a dollar. Affordable, certainly.

Up the road a bit, in Cleveland, uniformed military skips to the front of the line. I imagine myself in uniform, and try to picture myself skipping the line. Would the lady at the ticket window with the scratchy deep voice facilitate this, or would I have to initiate the process myself? Would other patrons usher me to front?

About a decade ago, after 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq, we decided to canonize our military. In so doing, we laid ourselves prone. The more we uphold our military, from the generals down, as infallible paragons moral rectitude, the more we open ourselves up to abuse. Whenever our right to ask questions is made a societal taboo, shit hits the fan.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t support our military—we absolutely should. But our support must be respect always and worship never. Soldiers and sailors and airmen—like firefighters and police officers—have achieved something remarkable, an achievement of will and fortitude which provides for our safety and betters our fortunes. But their achievement is foremost a personal accomplishment, to be respected but not made holy. To worship the military is to declare ourselves unworthy of walking amongst them, to transfer, unwittingly, a little bit of their accomplishment over to our shoulders as we struggle to measure up. We steal a difficultly forged identity from hardworking Americans and subsequently allow another sort of people—our military leaders, no less—to be made superior to us—the very definition of an anti-American sentiment. Patriotism is not a yellow ribbon on our bumper or a box of goodies mailed to anonymous soldiers overseas. These acts are acts of compassion inspired by a love and respect for those among us who do the things we ourselves cannot. Patriotism, on the other hand, is something else, something more vexingly complicated, something not so easily scaled to fit a bumper sticker.

I don’t know if my friend from the bus station ever knew military service. Perhaps he did, serving in some forgotten corner of the world, discharged without notice and set out upon the streets in the crudest of fashions. It is more likely, however, he did not serve. Instead, I am quicker to picture him living a useless and destitute life, drifting between bus stations and bars and little apartments he can barely afford, scamming food from guilty white people, scraping together enough money from odd jobs to get himself to his brother’s house in West Virginia where a job is waiting for him—maybe.

Regardless, my bus station friend deserves to be neither a patron of our national compassion nor an example of our modern collective patriotism. He is rather an example of what we have all become. His eyes reflected to me a uniquely American sort of hunger and desperation, a potpourri of fear and wanting and paper-thin confidence. He was, in short, the living embodiment of our new culture—a culture designed to mitigate our guilt. We feel guilty that he might be hungry, that he might be discriminated against, that we might go without doing something we could easily have done. We pity him and buy him corn chips with the same sort of guilty vigor that inspires us slap yellow ribbons on our fenders without stopping to ask why. If I’d done it again, I’d buy him corn chips, certainly. But I’d make him earn it. I’d make him convince me he deserved it, I’d make him tell me his name and his story and what was waiting for him in West Virginia.

Patriotism is like this, asking questions of ourselves to validate our confidence, not our guilt. Had I gotten to known my bus station friend, had I taken the time to hear his story, I would’ve become just a little bit more American. I would’ve known more about who we both were, about where we were going and about why any of it really mattered anyway.

I’d like to think that we all accomplish something in the course of life, even if that one thing which we do accomplish has no ultimate effect on the world. Nobody goes to the Greyhound Station solely for the purpose of going to West Virginia—something is waiting for us at the end of line, otherwise we wouldn’t bother riding. We’re all out to make a change, however slight, on the fabric of the world.

At the moment, I go to college in New York, where I pay a lot of money to sit in a room with an aging absurdist playwright and learn the craft of writing screenplays. On the scale of useless pursuits, my expensive private school education ranks near the top of the spectrum. But I do what I do because I love doing it—and because a part of me believes that somehow, if I write enough and make enough movies, the world will change and be a little bit different when my time comes to leave it all behind. This is my little bit of change, my little struggle to be a patriotic American.

Someday, a sign will inform patrons of the Cleveland Amtrak that screenwriters are welcome to step to the front of the line. An adjacent sign will ask that hustlers with free corn chips be allowed to pass to the head of the same line. Indeed, an infinite multitude of signs will crowd the wall, one on top of the other, each one calling for a different strata of the national collective to step forward and claim their rightful place of respect at the front of the ticket line. It’ll be a mess, for sure, everybody jostling and arguing for their right to be at the front of the line. But it’ll be okay. It’ll be okay because, for the very first time, we’ll each know—and have a little bit of respect for—just what we’re good for: whatever the hell we want.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

More Love Advice From Feudal Lord

Dear Feudal Lord—

My girlfriend recently told me she thinks we should take a break and start seeing other people. We had something great going—where did this come from? I just don’t understand why she’s doing this.

How do I get her to reconsider? She’s coming over this weekend—she says she wants her Tupperware back.

Help!

—Big Problems in Big Horn, WY

##

Dear Lord Big Horn—

Lo! What a quandary! What vexing tribulation yonder!

Disavow yourself, say I, from this maid. She seems daffy in the cerebellum, if you must have my opinion, a most disagreeable sounding wench indeed. The fact that she has not heeded your wishes to continue in union is cause enough for abandoning her in favor of a more agreeable female. Time to move on to that little vixen of mistress you have been entertaining on the side!

Do not be sad, Big Horn. Rather, rejoice! You have ditched a most unworthy wench in favor of more fruitful pastures! Cast that filthy courtesan aside to whatever poor soul might be desperate enough to take her in! As men we are blessed with sacred right to reject or accept the female—and how they should be thankful to have us!

Our Father Almighty gave unto thee testicles, dear Lord Big Horn. Use them!

Salutations and Godspeed,

—Feudal Lord

Where To Woo Women Like A Gentleman

Manhattan is a veritable smorgasbord of women, with potential female mates abundant in all manner of size, shape and color. Unfortunately, it is not always clear where one might meet these women. Here, for your edification, are a few of Manhattan's most convenient breeding grounds.

Cooper Union Library – The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is many things—a world renowned art school, a highly selective architecture and engineering institution with a reputation for turning out some of the most talented artists and designers of our generation—a living testament to the very best artists this country has yet produced. What Cooper is not, however, is a conservatory for the socially well-adjusted. Simple social graces—opening doors for ladies, saying thank you—are lost on many an awkward engineering prodigy. If you happen to be lucky enough to be a member of one of the fine educational institutions represented by the Research Library Association of South Manhattan, Cooper is the place to be.

Dog Runs – Many Manhattan parks have ‘dog runs’—that is, runs for the dog. In other words, a patch of dirt where dogs can run around and poop. Be careful to avoid coming off as a creep, however—do your best to appear legitimate. Make sure that your dog really does belong to you and that he really does have to poop. Nothing is more off-putting to a dog-owning sex goddess than a guy with a bored looking stolen dog. Remember, you’ve got to love the dog more than her. Otherwise you’re just an asshole.

Staten Island Ferry – Classy, damn classy.

Burning buildings – Men who rush into burning buildings are, simply put, sex magnets. What’s more, Manhattan has an above-average concentration of flammable buildings. The key? Getting there before the fire department. As soon as those FDNY guys show up, all bets are off. For one thing, they’ve got a big shiny red truck and you don’t. (Also, studies have shown that the average FDNY firefighter has a larger penis than you do.)

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Stranded On A Desert Island With A Cell Phone

A: yo, you there?

B: wassup?

A: i’m on an island.

B: wtf man, where are you? you need to be here right now.

A: i’m on an island.

B: no, seriously.

A: i am serious. the plane crashed.

B: dude, you need to be here right NOW. TWINS.

A: baseball? this isn’t the time for that.

B: haha. not minn twins, idiot. i’m at amanda’s party and her roommate has her sister over and theyre TWINS.

A: that’s cool, I’m stranded on a fucking island.

B: i call the blonde one. her tits are AH-MAZING.

A: hey, could you shutup for a second and call my mom and tell her where I am?? she isn’t picking up her phone…

B: ahahah. yeah, sure, if i knew where u were…

A: i’m on an island.

B: like a metaphorical island? i told you to stop reading kierkegaard.

A: no, like an actual motherfucking island.

B: kewl.

A: shutup, i’m serious. I need helpppp!!!

B: you know whats gonna suck for you?

A: what?

B: when you run out of battery. i mean, seriously, that will SUCK.

A: funny, find my mom.

B: wait… if you run out of battery, i’m not going to be able to tell you about banging amanda’s roommates twin sister. shit.

A: i wouldn’t want to hear about that even if I wasn’t stranded on an island.

B: yeah, because your so devoted to Stephanie....

A: screw you.

B: she broke up with you, time to fuck other bitches.

A: we’re taking a break, it’s not breaking up.

B: taking a break, breaking up, same dif.

A: no, its not the same. so just shutup and call my mother.

B: steph basically told Amanda she’s sleeping with kyle.

A: who’s kyle?

B: he’s a senior. financial accounting. lol.

A: that asshole? fuckkk.

B: ANYWAY… you could be banging a TWIN right now. fyi.

A: but instead i’m on an island… FML

B: fml indeed, my friend.

A: hey, how do you eat a coconut?

B: crack it open with a machete.

A: i dont have a machete.

B: i guess ur fucked then.

A: i guess so…

B: so seriously, where are you? lol.