The truth hurts

David Rees’s Get Your War On

By Sam Pfeifle

Get Your War On By David Rees, with introduction by Colson Whitehead. Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, NY. 80 pages. $11.

GET YOUR ABSURDIST SOCIAL COMMENTARY ON: David Rees makes us laugh when we want to cry.

Operation Enduring Freedom, the Office of Homeland Security, TIPS, the PATRIOT Act, State of Heightened Awareness, the War on Terrorism. It’s enough meaningless jargon to make the mind reel.

Do we really have to declare our intent to make sure freedom endures, our homeland (whatever that is) is safe, and that we’re all patriots? The effort involved in trying to sort through the absurdity and discern exactly what it is that one should be worried about in the course of everyday life is enough to make you want to crawl up in a little ball under the bed.

ýne cartoonist/author — better than the acute acidity of Michael Moore, better than the droll irony of Tom Tomorrow — has been able to focus his glass on the political and social crises that have beset our nation in the past year and magnify them to the point where their absurdity becomes so apparent that their very reality is called into question.

That man is David Rees, author of Get Your War Onú a popular online comic strip, accessible at http ://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html, and to be available in book form from Soft Skull Press, as of this October. And, as Rees continues to serve up alternately hilarious and frightening strips on his Web site, you can be sure that follow-up books are in the wings (kind of like those Garfield books that were so popular right around 1988).

Initially, Rees’s comics focused on the governmental response to the September 11 attacks, specifically the “war” with Afghanistan. His first comics, dated October 9, feature the same two panels in endless repetition. First, a white guy in a tie is shown standing, on the phone. Second, a black man in a tie sits in front of a computer terminal, on the phone. The order alternates from page to page.

They’re talking to each other, their words in perfect ovals attached to their persons with lines:

“Oh yeah!” begins the very first comic, “Operation: Enduring Freedom is in the house!”

“Oh yeah!” comes the reply, “Operation: Enduring Our Freedom is in the motherfucking house!”

“Yes!” the first guy affirms, “Operation: Enduring Our Freedom to Bomb the Living Fuck Out of You is in the house!!!”

The characters aren’t even drawn: they appear to have been photocopied or scanned out of a foreign-language primer that was illustrating a typical phone conversation. But, instead of “Hola,” and “Que pasa,” we get “Oh my God, this War on Terrorism is gonna rule,” and “I know! Remember when the US had a drug problem and then we declared a War on Drugs, and now you can’t buy drugs anymore?”

Since the visuals don’t change — literally, the pictures only get bigger or smaller for the first twelve strips — the reader is forced to focus on the dialogue. The characters are cynical, sure, lampooning governmental declarations and practices with profanity-laced sarcasm. But they soon reveal the fear and truth that sarcasm often hides.

“Hey buddy. How are you enduring your freedom?” asks the black man, as his right hand continues to hover over a keyboard.

“OK, I guess,” he gets as a response from the white guy, flipping aimlessly through a binder. “I drink myself into a stupor every night. I can’t get out of bed in the morning because I’m afraid of what I’ll hear on the radio. My daughter is still wetting her bed. And I’m supposed to fly to Chicago for a meeting on Thursday.”

“That’s what we like to hear!”

See, these aren’t the rich power brokers, staffing the boards of Enron and bending W’s ear. And these aren’t the activists who are comfortable protesting what they feel to be an unjust military action. These are middle-class guys — later joined by middle-class women — who might live in Cumberland, coach their kids’ soccer teams, and vote Republican. Hey, they work in offices, isn’t that what they’re supposed to do to make sure their 401ks stay nice and robust?

So, when they’re forced to actually pay attention to the outside world, and they have no idea what to make of it, they fall back on the way they talk about sports, their bosses, chicks in movies, to talk about all the fucked-up shit they see going on in the news.

Check this summation from the standing guy, dated November 8: “Man! I like a good stiff Operation: Enduring Freedom as much as the next guy, but I’ve reached my limits of understanding! All of a sudden my fucking mailman is a Hero on the Front Lines of the War Against Terror? My daughter wants to sell cookies to help the people my nephew’s been sent to fucking bomb? I’m supposed to help the FBI find clues and solve crimes? I’M A FUCKING CLAIMS ADJUSTER, NOT FUCKING ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN! Who’s in charge of this shit?”

As the anthrax scare, Enron scandal, and the potential bombing of Iraq pop up in the national news, Rees is equally cutting. For the average person, what’s going on just doesn’t make sense. Rees mimics the increasing absurdity with increasing amounts of foolishness in the strip.

Voltron appears in the seated guy’s office. The guy calls Tom Ridge to get rid of him.

Standing guy gets really fat after Thanksgiving.

A woman with a big afro loses all her hair, then gets it back.

Three new office workers are introduced, all sitting around eating donuts. “How psyched is George W. Bush to defeat Saddam Hussein for his dad?” asks the man on the left.

“I wish I could do something like that for my dad!” answers the brunette with a donut.

How psyched are you going to be when you get this book? Very. But you’ll also be increasingly aware of just how depressing things are getting on our national political front. Then you’ll buck up again.

At least Voltron isn’t standing in your office.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com.

Soft Skull - smart guy Richard Nash, David Rees’s publisher for Get Your War On, found the strip the same way as we here at the Phoenix did: someone emailed him a link. “One of the guys we work with at Publishers Group West [who’ll be distributing the book] was at the Underground Publishing Conference and saw David’s stuff there. He knew Soft Skull was interested in stuff about work, and so he emailed me David’s stuff and said, ‘I think you might be into it.’ “Well, I first saw it at about 11 o’clock at night, and I was just blown away, and sat down and read through every comic. Not only was it hilarious, but it was so painful and true at the same time. I emailed him right away through his site and said, ‘I’d be really interested in publishing this. Can we meet?’ ” So, Nash and Rees and Rees’s manager were talking when, about a week later, a New York Times article comes out proclaiming the strip the “Dilbert for the Post-9/11 Era.” “And I thought, ‘Well, I’ll never hear from him again.’ ” But Rees, who had, indeed, heard from a bunch of very big publishers, called Nash and said he wanted to work with him. One of the reasons? The set up an agreement whereby Rees will be donating all of his royalties to a group called Adopt-a-Landmine, and Soft Skull will be donating an additional portion of the sales. Nash couldn’t be more excited. “One of the strengths of American culture, something Europe really doesn’t have, is this ability to use popular culture to help us heal and deal with atrocities and challenges. This is really in the tradition of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.” —SP