THE BEST, QUICKEST ARTISTIC REACTION TO 9/11

From September 12, 2001:



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Of course, Tom Tomorrow is a cartoonist, and cartoons are mostly funny, even when dealing with very serious subjects, as Tomorrow usually does. But not on 9/11. Like pretty much every other American, he was utterly devastated. Probably more so because he was living in New York at the time.

When I first saw the strip above, I marvelled at how perfect it was, how out of context it was for him, how with just a few words and a single oversaturated image he managed to capture and express my own feelings. Well, that's not entirely true. Words didn't completely fail me that day, although they mostly did: my first and pretty much only thought was something along the lines of "I fear the reaction of the American people far more than I fear any terrorist." And, of course, I was right to be afraid--a dark shadow of repression and hatred fell across our nation in the wake of 9/11, and many Americans wholeheartedly embraced it. Fortunately, most of my fellow countrymen eventually came to their senses.

But not everybody. My guess is that about 30% of the population continues to understand the "War on Terror" in terms of President Bush's comic book archetypes. They're the trigger-happy nuts who still support the Iraq occupation as a good thing, who support torture and ethnic profiling, who have no problem with a dramatic loss of civil liberties, who support Bush no matter what he does. In other words, the Republican base.

How the hell are we going to move forward as a nation when nearly a third of our citizens simply don't live in the same reality that the other two thirds do?

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