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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Zinn has some of his own favorites. "Some are unknown," he explains, "like Harriet Robinson recalling with pride her first strike in the Lowell textile mills. Or the Rodriguez family writing to Bush after 9/11, arguing that their son, who died in the Twin Towers, wouldn't want the U.S. to retaliate with violence. Or Yamaoka Michiko, who describes what it was like to be in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. And then there are some well-known people who possess unknown points of view, like Helen Keller speaking out against war and militarism. Or Mark Twain, who denounced Theodore Roosevelt after the president congratulated an American general for the massacre of 600 men, women and children in the Philippines."
Zinn has been carrying the torch for America's hidden history ever since his now-canonical "People's History of the United States" came out in 1980, but you'd still have a hard time knowing it if you were relying on CNN or Fox for your "news." You'd be surprised how many people on your block have never heard of Zinn -- or maybe not. With hundreds of pieces from voices as diverse as Thomas Paine, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Leonard Peltier, Michael Moore and many, many more, "Voices of a People's History of the United States" should be required reading for every individual lucky enough to call America home. Even Paris Hilton.
"Attitude: Andy Singer, No Exit"
By Andy Singer
128 pages
Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing
Order from Powell's
OK, now for some small disclosures. Unlike Armstrong Williams, I consider myself a serious journalist, even though I'm just as much of a small-time hack as he is -- not to mention $240,000 poorer. But there are things that get my fires blazing, and one of them is the UC-Berkeley-based online journal "Bad Subjects," which was noted in the piece on Joe Strummer above. I wrote a couple of essays for those unrepentant free-thinkers back in the late '90s, although they read a bit amateur compared to the highfalutin crap I'm writing for Salon these days. In either case, my cameos with B.S. had nothing to do with my selection of "Let Fury Have the Hour" for this month's column. That was more a result of my lazy perusal of
To get serious, what I really enjoyed during my time in Berserkeley was reading Andy Singer's "No Exit" strip in UC-Berkeley's Daily Californian newspaper, where it appeared from 1992 to 2001. So I was pleasantly surprised to get a follow-up from NBM Publishing on my last column exposing the best of America's underground comic artists, notifying me that Singer's estranged hilarity was getting its own book. Singer's work has always pointed out the innate absurdities in everyday American life, but don't think that his strip's title is an homage to that father of absurdity, Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Actually, I just meant for the title to convey the idea that there's no escape from the world," Singer told me in a recent interview. "Whether it's politics, relationships, business, money or whatever, you gotta face it. I found Sartre's play cold and depressing -- so much so that I was inspired to write a parody of it, where Garcin, Inez and Estelle have a massive orgy. It ends with Garcin drawing on the walls of the room with Estelle's lipstick and realizing how happy he feels. Of the existentialists, I prefer Camus, who comes across as more compassionate."
Singer himself is a compassionate guy, although he often goes on the attack in his "No Exit" panels. Of course, the usual targets -- consumerism, militarism, arrogance, Bush-Cheney -- get the darts, but, hey, they deserve it. My favorite Singer strips are those that unmask the irrationality of everyday life, like the one where a guy on a cellphone in a sea of cellphone-using citizens complains that he feels "isolated and alone." Or another where a joyous rich man screams "Money buys freedom!" from behind a barbed-wire security fence panoptically decked out with video cameras and sunglass-wearing bodyguards.
Singer also possesses a Gary Larson-like ability to transmit the strangeness of humanity through the eyes of the animal kingdom, like the one where a dog complains to his analyst, "I have a fear of castration, my mother's a bitch and I feel guilty for lying on this couch." All in all, he's a conscientious artist raging against the machines of hypocrisy and unilateralism, not an easy thing to do when you're a starving cartoonist looking to make the papers.
"It's a tough business," Singer agrees. "There are talented people who are trying new things, but the magazine market has all but dried up. On the newspaper front, chains have a stranglehold on the nation's dwindling supply. They take over a paper and turn it into a clone of every other one, so we have the same syndicated cartoons, columns and stories running in 90 percent of the newspapers in the country. It's fast-food journalism based purely on economics."
Speaking of Armstrong Williams and the Bush administration, er, I mean fast-food journalism, Singer -- like many others -- isn't too optimistic about another four years of Republican rule. Although an incompetent, greedy administration allows Singer a wealth of material for his strips, he'd hand it in any day for some forward-thinking policy changes.
"What I worry about is the long-term social and environmental consequences of Bush's policies. Denying that global warming exists won't make it go away. Denying that oil is vanishing won't help create alternative energy. There's 'no exit' from this stuff."
