For those of you who don't read the Montreal Mirror, here's an interview from last week's issue w/Dave Rees...---------------------
Subversive satire is in the motherfucking house!
>> David Rees, creator of the dark yet hilarious comic strip Get Your War On, arrives in Montreal for Blue Metropolis
by PATRICK LEJTENYI
David Rees never meant to be famous. It happened by accident. His sardonic but ridiculously funny Internet comic strip Get Your War On (www.getyourwaron.com), featuring an anonymous group of cubicle-dwelling schleps agonizing over current events and cursing savagely, mixes blunt political satire with humanitarian concern and suspicion unseen in any comics page today. While the strip's language may be profane, Rees himself is a thoughtful, compassionate 30 year old - so compassionate in fact, that he is donating all the proceeds from his book to Adopt-a-Minefield, which pays for a de-mining team in Afghanistan.
Inspired by '80s political punk rock, especially southern California's the Minutemen, and armed with a hip hop vocabulary and rhythm, Rees is living proof that a strong sense of moral outrage can lead to good things.
The Mirror spoke to Rees over the phone from his Brooklyn home, in advance of his appearance this weekend at the Blue Metropolis literary festival.
Mirror: Tell me a little bit about how the strip got started - what propelled you to do it and use that particular tone of irony and anger?
David Rees: I started making the strip really late at night on October 9, 2001, which is about 48 hours after we started Operation Enduring Freedom, the bombing of Afghanistan. At the actual moment that I started making the strip, I hadn't sat down at my wife's computer to make a satirical cartoon, I had sat down just to update my Web site with the regular, apolitical cartoons that I have. But it just seemed really kind of stupid and futile at that moment to make more just kind of gaggy cartoons that didn't really address how I was feeling.
When it became obvious that we were gonna bomb Afghanistan, I just couldn't believe that people weren't saying more about what this would actually mean for the people in Afghanistan. People were making jokes about Osama bin Laden fucking a camel, but no one was making a joke about, "Well, guess what's about to happen to these people?"
And so I was like, what the fuck? I'm gonna try to make a cartoon that actually addresses how I feel for once in my life.
M: Can you talk to me a little bit about the clip-art technique and why you chose those particular images?
DR: There was a point when I was working a lot at boring temp jobs where I just had a computer, so I had access to clip art, and I was really bored, and I would just use the clip art and have the little clip art characters get in arguments or whatever. I had self-published two comic books of clip art comics before Get Your War On, and so that evening, I had the clip art open and thought, "Well, I'll just use the same guys but I'll have them talk about the War on Terrorism rather than the usual gags."
The importance of dumb humour
M: I heard you were pretty pissed off at Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, who said that irony is dead, and that that was part of the motivating factors to start the strip.
DR: I think I can be forgiven for thinking this, but I assumed that he was associating irony with dissent or criticism, like we were entering the new age of American sincerity and American acquiescence. And I really resented that, because a lot of my favourite American art is able to combine cutting humour with a humanitarian concern for other people and a fuck-you attitude. This is a moment in our culture where that type of stuff could really be useful, or at least contribute something to this national conversation or whatever you want to call it. And then you got these assholes on the Upper West Side telling us that's not an option.
But that's how I thought. But now, to be fair to that guy, I wonder if what he was saying was that the era of humour that's not about anything is over, and that culture needs to start addressing the dangers of the world. But then again, his stupid magazine still fucking has stupid fashion shoots and stuff. So whatever, fuck you! I don't feel too bad about that. Regardless of whether his theory was correct or good-hearted or whatever, the fact that he made it literally while the dust was still in the air in lower Manhattan is just so obnoxious.
M: How much do the characters in your strip reflect your personality?
DR: It depends, because initially I wasn't even thinking of them as characters, it was just this template I was using to make jokes. So sometimes they'll be saying something that I actually agree with, and sometimes they'll be saying something that I want to make fun of. And sometimes it's not conscious. I kind of treat it as a journal or a diary, where I can just vomit whatever I want into these guys, and have them say it. I try to keep it really intuitive.
Profanity and its uses
M: You use a lot of profanity. The word "fuck," it's got a million different uses. What is it that you like about that particular word?
DR: First, it's a really flexible word. The second is, that if you listen to a lot of rap music, you hear it a lot because it's such a good rhythmic word to fill out the beat of a line. You can just drop it in to fill space and it won't change the content of the line.
But I think the reason it worked in those initial Get Your War On strips in October 2001 is because at the time it was so inappropriate. It was totally out of left field to be cussing violently at Operation Enduring Freedom. You weren't seeing a lot of that.
M: Let's talk about semantics and pop culture a little bit more. It seems to be that the English language hasn't been fucked with by the powers that be like it is now since the first Gulf War. It's like the Rumsfelds and Cheneys of this world have expropriated certain words -
DR: I think Bill Clinton was fucking with language pretty hard when he said, "It depends on what your definition of ‘is' is." Or to say that receiving fellatio does not constitute having sexual relations.
M: Yeah, but that at least is humorous and ridiculous. But when you do it to a word that your country especially values, a word like "freedom," and now… well, what does "freedom" mean to you? Do you think of deep-fried chunks of potato when you hear "freedom?"
DR: One of the things that the strip does is play with language, or get beyond the language. Take the very first strip that I made, about "Enduring our freedom to bomb you is in the house." That's the classic example of one that's trying to cut through the fog of this rhetoric. And that's saying, "Fuck, I dunno, maybe that was the best possible thing to do in that situation." But at least just fucking say what you're doing. Don't act like we're dropping "freedom" on the Afghan people. We're dropping cluster bombs on them, some of which aren't gonna detonate and which kids are gonna step on and die.
M: The word "patriot" is another word that's been really fucked with. You've got your Patriot missile, your Patriot Act…
DR: I made a strip about the fact that they did name the thing the Patriot Act. I kinda feel the same way about that as I do about this one guy in Congress's decision to rename French fries Freedom fries. I just can't believe a grown man is doing this.
The reluctant critic
M: For the past year and a half, it's been pretty bleak times south of the border. Following 9/11, there was this incredible anthrax paranoia, then TIPS and the Patriot Act, Enron, economic decline and now Iraq. How overwhelming is this for you, as an American?
DR: This is something I've had to think about a lot recently, because I agreed about a month and a half ago to make Get Your War On strips for Rolling Stone, and I assumed that the commitment was going to be, at least be initially, for a year. So for the first time in my life I was going to hold myself to continuing Get Your War On. And it sounds silly because it's only one cartoon every other week. But for me, it was really a big decision because I was committing myself to staying involved in all this.
Before September 11, I didn't read the newspaper. I didn't know any geography. I had a really good liberal arts education and I was artistic, but in some senses I was like a typical American. I did not know where Afghanistan was. I did not know if Iraq was to the west or the east of Iran. I knew it was on Kuwait's border because of Operation Desert Storm, but that was about the extent of it. And I certainly had no real understanding of American foreign policy. And after September 11 I kind of felt like, oh shit, I have a lot of catching up to do. I'm gonna figure out where we're bombing now, where we're gonna bomb next, all that kinda stuff.
So I subscribed to all these magazines that I never would have subscribed to before, and I have an atlas now and I look at it just about every day just to figure out where things are going on, and in a way, I don't like it. Because I would love to just fucking not pay attention. It's much more pleasant that way. So I kinda feel like, ugh, it's kind of a drag, but then on the other hand, what the fuck? We're living in such an extraordinary time, and the stakes seem pretty high. If this thing, this clip-art comic strip, is the means by which I'll become a more informed citizen, well, there are worse things that could happen.
I don't want to be disingenuous. It's not like before September 11, I was just some guy who read Sports Illustrated and didn't know who Noam Chomsky was. I was coming out of a liberal-arts-educated, pre-disposed-to-be-skeptical-of-Republicans, Harper's-magazine-subscribing class. I'm definitely in that demographic. And it's interesting, because sometimes people would be like, "Who are you? This voice in the wilderness, is it some high school kid in Kentucky who's never been to college?" And it's like, "I'm sorry guys, I'm just like you." And I always got the sense that they were kind of disappointed, like, "Fuck, he's not actually the voice of the heartland!" [laughs]
Nuance and confusion
M: Is there a lot of frustration and despair among your circle of friends about what's going on in Iraq?
DR: I dunno, it's probably like me, mixed feelings. [On the first night of the war] when they said that they thought that they had Saddam and his two sons in this bunker, I was so excited and happy: thank God, he's finally gonna fucking die. And maybe that's it, we're gonna pull out.
I do have mixed feelings about it. I can't wait for Saddam Hussein to be dead. I would just feel happy. The world would be a better place. But you have to remember that that doesn't excuse just how they fucking botched this entire thing, soup to nut. I feel like I could have gone to the UN with four magic markers and a notepad and convinced the whole world to come with me to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It's Saddam Hussein, for fuck's sake! Who doesn't want to get rid of that bastard?
I have a complicated response to it, and that's what I like to try to get across in my strip, I guess. You know, it's not this Noam Chomsky-like venom directed at foreign policy, but it's not just some dipshit waving a flag because he sees one on Fox News.
David Rees will appear at two events on Saturday, April 5 at the Renaissance Montreal Hotel (3625 Parc). The first is a slide show with Montreal cartoonists Billy Mavreas and Kid Koala, followed by the panel discussion "Sampling Comes to Comix," with Rees and Montreal cartoonists Aislin and Sherwin Tjia (moderated by Mirror music editor Rupert Bottenberg) at 3:30PM in the Salle Mont-Royal. Free. At 9:30PM, also in the Salle Mont-Royal, he will present his strip and a video about de-mining in Afghanistan. Also free. For more info on Blue Metropolis, visit www.blue-met-bleu.com
posted December 17, 2002 07:46
posted December 17, 2002 21:02
