Did Somebody Mention the Dirty Fucking Hippies?

Looks more like an assault rifle than a sub-machine gun to me – a sub-machine gun fires the same ammunition as a pistol, and hence has limited range and not much need for a long barrel. More specifically it looks like an AK-47 (or one of it’s many replicas), which is one of the canonical examples of an assault rifle.

See, my first thought was: the WSJ publishes cartoons in color?! That surprises me more than the content.

“More specifically it looks like an AK-47 (or one of it’s many replicas),…”

And you know who uses AK-47’s?

That’s right – COMMIES ISLAMOCOMMUNIFEMIECONAZIFASCISTS!!!!?!?!?!?!?
(updated to meet the Wingnut propaganda act of 2001)

When the WSJ actually gets the free site working again, the textual drivel accompanying the cartoon will be here.

I agree with #2 that there is some very strange trope with that cartoon, the skulking figure in the background as the weak-kneed walk past.

i believe the trope being pushed with this cartoon is that while stoned out, ignorant hippies march in endless circles with “PEACE” signs, the scary islamofascistterroristillegalalieninamask is waiting to leap out and blow them all away – the point being, stoned hippies who are not bug-eyed terrified of the IFTIAIAMs are OUT OF TOUCH WITH TEH REALITY!!!1 and if you are not sufficiently terrified then you, too will be prey to these scary scary bogeymen and are yourself a stoned hippie who smells bad!

It’s a Cold War theme, barely refurbished. ‘Those opposed to unending money-laundering through the military for “security” really just want us all to die.’

I don’t know whether the authors of this crap are fascist or just lazy. Don’t they have any new ideas?
.

Check out “Native Tongue” under Portfolio at 14’s link.

Shouldn’t the alien have some sort of advanced plasma rifle, not a primitive Earth assault rifle?

Now just wait a second here. The dude on the left has nicely cut arms, and the woman with the beads has some pretty righteous definition in her abs. I mean really, wouldn’t it be better to look like this than like Dennis Hastert, or pretty much any Republican politician? The left is just HOTTER than the right, always has been. OK, something of a joke, but seriously: do we have to endorse cultural conservatism to be “respectably” anti-war? Ellen Willis had a great critique of this position in an article called “Escape from Freedom: What’s The Matter With Tom Frank (And The Lefties Who Love Him)?” Pdf available at
http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/view/30/26

Geez, these neocons are total wusses. If this is a world war, it’s at least world war five.

Here’s the analysis I base that upon, from an actual comic book rather than the fake one the Wall Street Journal is trying to become.

Issue #12 of _Outlaw Nation_ , a DC Vertigo comic, published in August 2001, written by Jamie Delano. On page 14, the villain gives this speech:

“Gloves [one of the villain’s agents] did good work in WW3, trashing all those piss-ant countries for democracy, fun and profit. Heh! Nothing that boy liked better than to shit in a peasant’s well and then sell him Coca Cola.

“But a one-trick pony like him just couldn’t make the evolutionary jump from cold warrior to new world orderly. He blamed me when the collapse of socialism didn’t roll out the absolute state of America called for in the grand design..

“But the finance bombs of world war 4 make all the established conspiracies redundant.”

“World war 4…?” the hero asks.

“Global capital’s viral assault on the nation state. Don’t tell me a smart kid like you hasn’t noticed?”

s/Null/Nall/

Um, the approved interpretation of this cartoon is that antiwar protesters aren’t supposed to be ignoring the scary guy with the assault rifle, he’s one of them.

Please make a goddamn note of it this time. Thanks.

Since we are on the subject, read up on ex-novelist Martin Amis’s latest piece in which he argues that because the British say 11/9 instead of 9/11 this proves we are all appeasers of communoslamofasconazism. Since CT readers are unlikely to believe this: I quote .

‘”In my humble”, as one of Updike’s Pennsylvanians likes to put it (sparing himself the chore of saying “opinion”), the name for what happened on September 11, 2001, is “September 11”. In fact, “September” alone may eventually prove adequate – just as every Russian, 90 years on, knows exactly what is meant by “October”. But the naming of September 11, that day, that event, naturally fell to America. And America came up with something pithier: “9/11”. …9/11 is a couple of syllables shorter than September 11, and is to be warmly congratulated on that score. Of course, no one refers to Independence Day as “7/4” – or to Hallowe’en as “10/31” or to Christmas as “12/25” – but such anniversaries are hardly the theme of year-round discussion. Further to recommend it, I suppose, 9/11 sounds snappy and contemporary and wised-up, like “24/7”. True, there is the unfortunate resemblance to “911”, the national phone number for the emergency sevices (the equivalent of our 999), but this distraction pales before 9/11’s triumphant and undeniable brevity. In addition, though you may have your doubts about its appropriateness, and its utter lack of historical resonance (where is the French avenue 7/14, the Italian Piazza 4/25?), 9/11 does have the humble merit of unambiguously denoting September 11.

Or at least it it does in America. In the UK, 9/11 can’t even manage that. Yes, even this menial task is beyond it……, in Great Britain, nearly all our politicians, historians, journalists, novelists, scientists, poets, and philosophers, many of them deeply anti-American, have swallowed the blithe and lifeless Americanism, and go on doggedly and goonishly referring to September 11 as November 9. Why?…’

Amis then goes on to explain that Afghanistan (and Iraq) have been triumphant successes, that ‘we’ (and, remember, ‘we’ not only includes George Bush, but, since the policies being discussed are mainly his, views him as being a kind of ‘Ideal Type’ of the factors being discussed) are ‘Rational’ ‘Reasonable’ and ‘Secular’ whereas ‘they’ are not, that Osama Bin Laden is with no degree of irony or metaphor whatsoever, is literally the heir to Stalin and Hitler. And so on.

And this follows, in some mysterious way, because even though the British should say 11/9,they actually say 9/11. Or something.

I suppose a man with a machine gun looks better peering out from the dark alley than, say, a great big passenger jet or a doughy white guy with a pocketful of anthrax.

Really, the image accompanies the text perfectly. If it excites our disgust as a crude bit of propaganda, all the better, no?

do you folks really care what nutters at WSJ have to say?

‘”In my humble”, as one of Updike’s Pennsylvanians likes to put it (sparing himself the chore of saying “opinion”

This is astonishing. Amis takes sixteen extra words to say “In my opinion.” Even if he had said “In my opinion (and I’ve read John Updike)” he still would’ve saved eleven words. He could learn something from America’s alleged knack for shortening things.

He also cites “Bennifer” even though Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez split up years ago. (The Affleck-Jennifer Garner pairing is “Bennifer II.”)

Oh yes, and he doesn’t have any kind of point. He does say that Iraq was a “misadventure,” but it’s worth more than a passing mention in a column devoted to the irrationality and love of violence of the Other.

Amis:

‘The answer I gave was, I thought, almost tediously centrist. I said that the West should have spent the past five years in the construction of a democratic and pluralistic model in Afghanistan, while in the meantime merely containing Iraq. ‘

It’s true he does call Iraq a misadventure (I was wrong that he described it as a success, although he stil seems to think Afghanistan was), but on the other hand, the above paragraph, if it means anything means he wanted the sanctions regime to continue. The sanctions regime called, by the man who ran it ‘genocidal’.

This is a sentence before Amis denies that the West would consider anything ‘genocidal’. Just to make clear: he denies the West would advocate anything genocidal a sentence after he in fact advocates ‘genocidal’ sanctions.

Why does he get paid to write this drivel? And then we remember that the Times is a Murdoch paper.

Hidari, fair enough in general; I’m not sure what I think about the sanctions regime (perhaps “smarter sanctions” might have worked better), but Amis does have some nerve talking about “an organised passion for carnage” as if it was something that only bore fruit with those nasty Islamists. Wasn’t the decision to invade Iraq not the product of magical thinking and an organized passion for carnage? From “suck on this” to “pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall” to “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,”* the Western half of his contrast hasn’t exactly upheld Reason over the love of death (other people’s), and we’ve killed a lot more people than Al_Qaeda. [Though, like the Carpenter, they’ve eaten as many as they could get. My condemnation of Bush does not, as Amis seems to think, oblige me to praise bin Laden.]

But I don’t expect Amis to be able to think straight; it’d be nice if he could write straight.

*Admittedly this was an explanation of the need to torture innocent people rather than to invade Iraq, but same basic idea.