In editorial cartoons and columns, he lambastes liberals and conservatives alike. His latest move? Calling for revolution. Now.
by: Rosette Royale, Street News Service
The funnies. Who doesn’t like the funnies? Probably the individuals who get skewered in them, the windbag-prone characters who suffer deflation at the hands of a talented cartoonist or illustrator. Chances are, many of the folks who find themselves in a Ted Rall cartoon wish they’d never gotten caught in his crosshairs.
An editorial cartoonist fond of characters with pointy noses and beady eyes, Rall knows how to lampoon society’s blowhards. Be they Democrat or Republican, progressive or conservative, CEOs or military commanders: In his hands, he highlights their foibles with a lacerating wit. Even Obama doesn’t get a break. And speaking of Obama…
Last year, Rall called for him to resign. Not in a cartoon, but in an editorial column. He’s also written cartoon blogs for the LA Times on the ongoing occupation in Afghanistan. All of which means he’s busy. But not busy enough that he didn’t find time to write a book: “The Anti-American Manifesto” (Seven Stories Press, $15.95) an unabashed call for another American revolution. The book is so tough, it might make a devout Buddhist give up meditation for confrontation.
But the thing is, when you meet Rall, he’s unexpectedly nice. On tour for his new book, we met at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle before his reading We sat in the café where, in the span of roughly 25 minutes, Rall, a Pulitzer finalist for his cartoons, smiled as he let it fly: the Dems, the Republicans, the Tea Party, AIG, the Afghan National Police. He covered them all and then some, in the guise of saying: America, time to wake up!
Rosette Royale: You’re the author, most recently, of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” That’s a title.
Ted Rall: I’m so happy. It makes me smile because it’s so over the top and so funny. Originally it was supposed to be called “The Post-American Manifesto,” because of the central thesis, which is that the U.S. is going to fall apart, and if the left doesn’t step in and take power, the right wing will fill the vacuum. Then one night I was up late thinking about what the right wingers would say about it and I thought, well, they’re just going to call me anti-American, as usual. So I thought, there’s no better way to prevent people from insulting you (with) a term than to embrace it. Not to mention I thought it might attract a little bit of attention in a world of a million blogs.
R.R.: Has it?
T.R.: Not as much as you’d think, but the day is young. The book just came out. I was kind of expecting the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity cluster-fuck, but not yet. The thing is, they can’t ignore it. If they ignore it, it legitimizes it.
R.R.: So, your central thesis. How about if you talk a little bit about that?
T.R.: The United States is broken. Politically and economically, primarily, but I would argue in a lot of other ways, too. The economic system, I think it’s clear to everyone, has failed. Throughout the last four years, we’ve seen a decline in wages. People supplemented that by borrowing more money and so easy credit made up for that, to drive the consumer economy. But when the credit markets seized in 2008, suddenly you couldn’t earn money, you couldn’t borrow money. Now, there’s no new jobs and there’s no jobs program, so there’s not going to be any money. You also see a political system that’s monopolized by the Democratic-Republican duopoly, where a third party, like the Greens or the Libertarians, have no way of breaking in and therefore (the duopoly) doesn’t represent the vast majority of Americans. I cite four major events over the last 10 years that demonstrate that.
Working backwards: The economic meltdown proves that the economy is no longer capable of providing people with sustenance and living; the incompetent and evil handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans proves that the government is both incompetent and malfeasant; the inability of the military to prevent 19 morons from flying around our skies for two-and-a-half hours, without being apprehended by the Air Force, proves that the billions of dollars that we pour into the military are all squandered and wasted; and the 2000 election and also the 2004 election prove that the system is not democratic. So rather than just sit around and wait for things to get worse and collapse, let’s get rid of this ridiculous regime.
R.R.: What do we replace it with? What goes in its stead?
T.R.: I have ideas about that and that’ll be in my next book.
R.R.: So we have to wait.
T.R.: You have to wait. But you know what? It’s not about Ted Rall.
R.R.: Who’s — or what’s — it about?
T.R.: It’s about all of us. It’s about the big idea that we can think outside of the Ds, the Rs: the donkeys and the elephants; that we are able to mention the “r” word: Revolution. That we can think outside the box. The reason it’s not about me and the reason I didn’t put in an ideological program into the book is twofold. The main reason is realism. Once revolution starts, you never know what you’re gonna get. In 1793, we had the French Revolution but, just a few short years later, Napoleon seized power. That’s not what the French bargained for. When you have a revolution so many forces are unleashed that have been long pent up. It’s pointless for me to lay out a big program, because it’s not going to happen anyway. Secondly, we also all need to have the giant, national conversation that would occur from that seizure of power. It’s not about me saying, “This is what comes next;” it’s about a lot of people saying, “This is what should come next.” I will be one of 300 million people with an opinion, and I will present that opinion in my next book and in columns.
This book is limited solely to the idea of revolution itself, because the American people just haven’t gotten to that point: I mean, this is so obvious to people all over the world. Revolution’s always a possibility. Americans don’t think about that, it’s not even on the agenda. So, this is just a meme, it’s something to think about.
R.R.: So how do we have a conversation, 300 million of us, about how to begin the revolution?
T.R.: Well, we have to look at historical precedents. First things first: tactics. How would you get rid of the existing regime? That’s not easy, so that would be the first conversation to have.
R.R.: Let me stop you for a moment: Who is the existing regime?
T.R.: It’s the corporate, capitalist system and the extremely lame political system, the Democrats and the Republicans and the agents of the state, the police who support them.
R.R.: OK. That’s—
T.R.: The people who run things, the people who have all the money, the people who have all the power.
R.R.: But the people who have the money and the power, they don’t want to give it up.
T.R.: That’s why you don’t just write politely worded letters to the editor of the newspaper. That’s why you espouse revolution. There is no other way. In fact, revolution doesn’t usually work: It’s just that it’s the only game in town. It’s like chemo: No one has chemo for fun. You do it because it’s a last ditch effort. It may make things worse before it makes things better. You do it when you’re desperate. I think that’s our situation now. I mean, the economy’s dying. Forget about the economy: The environment alone should be reason for revolution. This country is the biggest polluter in the world and we have a lot of influence globally on other polluters like the Chinese. Most of those factories either are selling things to the United States, or are owned by American corporations, so all we’ve managed to do is outsource a lot of our air pollution to the Third World. But it’s our pollution.
You know, 40, 50, 60 years ago, maybe there was still time to form a grassroots coalition and work our way from the bottom of the Democratic Party. We don’t have that kind of time anymore. The polar ice caps are gone — forever. They will never come back, even if the last car turned off right this instant, during this conversation. There’s a huge die-off of fish in the oceans, the coral reefs are dying, we have a massive ecological failure on our hands and [he looks at me]: You’re laughing.
R.R.: I am laughing because: Wow, that’s a downer.
T.R.: It sucks!
R.R.: I’m not saying the truth is not rough. But that’s such a tough, tough, tough message. How do you get people to hear a tough message?
T.R.: I don’t really care if they want to hear it or not. They’ve got to. Living in denial, it’s insanity and stupidity. You can’t possibly even really call yourself alive and sentient if you’re not fully aware of what’s really going on. You have to face facts. Fifty years ago, I think I would have said, “We’re headed in a really bad direction, things are really scary.” But now, we have arrived at that bad destination. It may be too late. This is a Hail Mary pass. Anything short of radical isn’t gonna work. Otherwise we’re outta here. We’re gonna be extinct.
R.R.: What about the Tea Party? They, in a way, are staging their own idea of a revolution.
T.R.: To tell you the truth, I have more respect for them than for mainstream liberals because at least they get it. They get that there is a problem. They understand that there is a crisis. They’re wrong about who to blame and they’re wrong about their priorities, but they get that there’s a problem. Liberal Democrats don’t think there’s a problem.
The thing about the Tea Party is their anger is justified, but they’re confused. Now they’re starting to pay attention, but they haven’t read any theory, they haven’t given the left a chance, they grew up with all that cold war, anti-socialism rhetoric. It’s up to people like us — or people like me — to try to talk to them and show them illegal immigrants are not the people who are taking your jobs. Blame the corporations and the Democrats and the Republicans, who deliberately invite them in and offer them jobs and make sure the border’s open so that everyone’s wages go down, so they can exploit all of us. They’re your comrades, they’re your brothers and sisters, you should be marching with them and you should demand legalization for them. The reason these guys are losing their jobs in Michigan and Ohio is because of corporations. The Wall Street Journal just announced that the economy— Did you hear about it?
R.R.: I didn’t.
T.R.: Corporate profits went up 32 percent this past quarter over last year and it was all due to firing Americans. These people should not be running the economy. Every upper-level management person and company should be seized by the Feds, nationalized, either sold off so that we can pay down the deficit and help people stay in their homes or just kept for as a profit-generating vessel for the U.S. government. That should be true about AIG, Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, Chase, Bank of America: all of the companies that have broken the law. I mean, what they’ve done is the equivalent of robbing a million 7-11s at gunpoint.
R.R.: We were in the coffee line and you described yourself as a contrarian. Have you always been?
T.R.: Yeah, probably. What I really worry about is if the revolution comes, I might become a conservative because I might be, “God, these guys, they’ve gone too far and now we need stability.” I tend to be very critical of existing orders. It’s just the way I’m wired: I see the way things are. I look at the space here and I’m like, “The ceiling’s too low, I just wish the ceiling were higher.” I had a job as an editor. It was the perfect job for me because I’d always just see what was wrong. I’m a critic and a contrarian. Believe me, there’s no pleasure in it, because there’s no money in it. If you want to make money as a political commentator, you want to tell people exactly what they already think, like (Pulitzer Prize-winning NY Times columnist) Thomas Friedman does, and be wrong every step of the way and never be held accountable for it. Then you will make a million dollars a year, but that’s not me.
R.R.: You went to Afghanistan in 2001. Then you just went this past summer. What differences did you notice?
T.R.: It was night and day. Infrastructure was the first thing I noticed. There wasn’t any in 2001. They started building it in ’05. Now there are a remarkable number of paved roads, particularly in major cities, a lot of bridges have been repaired. The power is unreliable: You might get two hours or less a day in some places. But cell phones work. Cell phones actually work better in Afghanistan than they do in the United States because all these rival companies have multiple towers in the same place. It’s cheap, it’s awesome.
But in terms of the security situation, it was very dangerous back then because the United States was bombing cars on highways willy-nilly. And there were a lot of mines. Now most of the mines have been cleared. The danger now is the Neo-Taliban, who control probably 80 to 90 percent of the country, pretty much all the rural areas. They have really bifurcated the country, so that you can’t really get from eastern to western [Afghanistan] without basically flying. If you travel on any highway from east to west or west to east, you’re gonna run into these guys. These are bad people. They have no ethics whatsoever. It’s not about Sharia [Islamic sacred law]: It’s about robbing people, raping people, killing people, kidnapping people, holding them for ransom and then killing them. They’re violent thugs. Then the Afghan National Police, they’re robbing people on the highways and half of them are Taliban anyway. Basically the security situation outside of the cities has gotten hellish, like Mad Max.
A lot of the Afghans I met, they were much more optimistic in ’01 about things getting better. Now they know that the Taliban are going to run the country in a year or two. They’re just staring into the abyss.
R.R.: How does it feel to be back?
T.R.: The food’s great. [Smiles.] Unfortunately when you travel there, creature comforts become a huge thing. You start fantasizing about salads with mustard vinaigrette.
But in terms of the poor Afghans, I do feel really, really bad for them. They would have been better off had we never gone there. They don’t understand why we didn’t start building when we got there in 2001. They accused Americans, “You did this on purpose, you wanted this to happen.” I’m like, “Are you out of your mind? It’s America. We don’t do anything right. You couldn’t expect otherwise. We suck. It’s not personal.”
R.R.: So, this country that sucks. When should the revolution start?
T.R.: Hey, if the revolution starts right now, we don’t have to go do my book signing. [Smiles.]
It should have started 50 years ago. Think about if we had a revolution 50 years ago. There would be millions of people around the world who would be alive today who are not.