It's
not often that one attends a lecture given by a historical figure.
College graduation, sometimes. Schoolhouse Rock re-runs, definitely.
That's why it was a special privilege (and a scene somewhat reminiscent
of the last act of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure) to
attend a Halloween presentation at Housing
Works given by David Rees, author of the monumentally
popular comic/form of social protest/Photoshop doodle known as Get
Your War On, who was dressed for the occasion as our
sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln.
Bah!
you say. It's a cheap marketing trick! Rees is just trying to sell
us the Soft
Skull Press hard-copy edition of Get Your War On,
with its sixteen deluxe new cartoons, such as "Supersize your
Grief" and "Exxon-Mobil Rape-a-riffic Killing Spree"!
To compare some crappy clip art to the task of steering our nation
through the Civil War is nothing less than blasphemy!
Well,
for a thought experiment, suppose some grad student, driven by dementia
induced from eating nothing but ramen noodles, were to take a fresh
look at the archives of The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper
published by William
Lloyd Garrison. Now suppose in the February, 1861, issue,
he were to find a cartoon entitled Get Your Civil War On
that featured two characters conversing as follows:
"I
can't believe the Southern states are seceding!"
"Hey, did you hear they're printing their own money?"
"Yeah, maybe they can use their Confederate money to rebuild
Atlanta after we burn it to the ground!"
Wait
a minute. Are we actually calling "socially significant"
the work of some guy who attaches dialogue balloons to public domain
clip art in order to express, in that sarcastic Gen-X way, the insanity
of the world we find ourselves living in?
Well,
actually, yes, we are. After all, Marcel
Duchamp used found objects like shovels and urinals and
the Mona Lisa and called them art, and Liechtenstein turned comic
strips into a unique style. Rees is doing no more to banal clip
art than Andy Warhol did to soup
cans—and, besides, the spectacle of Voltron
being used as a coat rack is nowhere near as ludicrous as real life,
which has, as of late, been surreal enough to give Man Ray and Salvador
Dali a run for their money.
In his
lecture, for instance, Rees directed our attention to the full-page
ad in the New York Times that Phillips
66, one of the oil companies that shills out oil money
to the Saudi sheiks who, in turn, support Osama bin Laden, took
out to supposedly comfort New Yorkers after September 11—an
ad featuring Raphael-esque cherubs and signed, "The Angels
Who Watch Over You." It's nice to know that petroleum companies
have a direct link not only to the White House, but also to God
himself. Calvin's Elect, indeed.
We can
only hope that future historians using their cybernetic virtual-reality
X-ray research specs to crawl through the Google cache maintained
by the Library of Congress (an AOL-Time-Warner-Exxon-Mobil company)
use David Rees' "Get Your War On" as a document of the
situation in the twenty-first century.
That
is, if Dick Cheney's cryogenically preserved head lets them.