Part III of the stupidest most politically incoherent greatest graphic saga of the modern age, Liberality for All.
In Part I, we meet the members of F.O.I.L. – the Freedom of Information League – CyberSean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Blind Ollie North, fighting against the nightmarish liberal hellhole of of 2021, where there is no warfare, leftist economic polices have brought life back to the shrinking middle class, and a clear line divides politics and religion. Worse still, most people have forgotten that there was ever another way. Worst of all, Ambassador bin Laden has smuggled a suitcase nuke into the country while addressing the United Nations. F.O.I.L. plans to stop his nefariousness while leaving a planted laptop to trick the UN into striking at them, and I don’t quite understand the last quarter of the issue at all. Meanwhile, Reagan McGee, a young man born on 9/11/01, yammers on about the death of patriotism. Reviewed here and here.
In Part II, we flash back to that horribly tragic day in 2006 when Sean Hannity survived a crippling strike against the major right-wing media that took out Limbaugh, Drudge and O’Reilly while leaving Coulter, Malkin, Robertson, Falwell and every damn blogger in the world untouched. Liddy descrates the living shit out of a Muslim. We meet Norscar, the tech genius responsible for keeping Hannity and Liddy alive, and in 2021, Blind Ollie works to revive Star Wars while bin Laden sits in the President’s chair!!!!!1!one Meanwhile,Reagan McGee yammers on about the death of patriotism. Reviewed here, here and here.
And now….
In front of the White House, an Arab holds a suitcase. This can only possibly mean that he is a psychotic Islamofascist ready to blow up the seat of American government, because there is no other reason for a Middle-Easterner to stand in Washington, D.C. with a suitcase, or to be in the U.S. at all. Get out of our country, Ay-Rab!
President Chelsea Clinton talks with Ambassador bin Laden Inside a bubble that has no geographic identifying marks at all. That plus the way it’s laying over the other panel, makes it look like they’re in the Forbidden Zone. Clinton asks the Ambassador to go a-touring with VP Michael Moore while she consults with UN Secretary-General Jacques Chirac.
Fun with ages: in 2021, Chelsea Clinton will be 41. Osama bin Laden will be 64, assuming his kidneys don’t go first. Michael Moore will be 57. I’m okay with all of these people being in the story, although the idea that Chelsea becomes the youngest President ever makes my head hurt a little bit. Jacques Chirac will be 89. There is no conceivable reason Mackey had to use Chirac. If he really needed to make fun of the French, he could have done it without Chirac.
Anyway, bin Laden goes on the Moore-led tour and in a truly jaw-dropping panel, we see the VP rolling down a hallway in a wheelchair (because he’s a BIG FATTY! Hahahahaha I hate this. Moore mentions 9/11, and then gets very backtracky, going on to call it “the unfortunate event resulting from the uprising of Middle Eastern fundamentalist Islam,” like that’s somehow not worse, and I’m really at a loss here: even if you hate, hate, hate political correctness, who feels squicky about using 9/11 as a shorthand? I am deeply confused.
Moore mentions that this event led to his documentary Justifed 9/11 which is so stupid I’m not going to comment on it, yes I am, see the point of an alternative reality story is that things didn’t happen in exactly the same way, and the title of the film was a parody of Fahrenheit 411, suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were being used as a pretext to establish a neofascist state, I can’t believe I have to explain this, so if the government isn’t using the fear of terrorism to steal away civil rights, there’s no documentary.
He goes on the remind bin Laden that he is “on the record as saying, ‘there is no terrorist threat,'” and bin Laden thanks him for his constant support. Since I happen to have Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? sitting on my shelf, I thought it might be fun to quote it a little less selectively than Mackey:
“Now, when I say there is no terrorist threat, I am not saying that there are no terrorists, or that theer are no terrorist incidents, or that there won’t be other terrorist incidents in the future. There ARE terrorists, they HAVE committed evil acts, and, tragically, they WILL commit acts of terror in the not-too-distant future. Of that I am sure.
“But just because there are a few terrorists does not mean we are all in some exaggerated state of danger. Yet when they speak of terrorists, they speak of them as if they are in the millions, that they’re everywhere, and that they are never going away. Cheney has called this a ‘new normalcy,’ a condition that ‘will become permanent in American life.’ They only hope.
…
In the year 2000, your chance as an American of being killed in a terrorist attack in the United States was exactly zero. In 2002, your chance of dying in a terrorist incident was, again, ZERO. And in 2003, as of this writing, the total number of people to die in the United States from acts of terror? Zero. Even in the tragic year of 2001, your chance as an American of dying in an act of terrorism in this country was 1 in 100,000.
Back in the Oval Office, President Clinton asks Black Nanny to wash the Ay-Rab filth off of little William. A time and sapce distortion occurs, and Clinton is meeting with Chirac (who does look extremely old, but still). She mentions that there’s some bad news about the United States’ aid package request to the U.N.
I want to throw this out: Chelsea Clinton is invariably cariactured as being dog ugly (right, Mr. Limbaugh?), but here, she’s actually made to look cute. So I salute Mike Mackey’s egalitarianism, even though it’s transparently because she is one day going to repudiate liberalism for the Truth of the Right Wing.
Chirac suggests that she follow her father’s lead and just tax the holy hell out of the rich, but Chelsea sadly notes that once the top tax rate hit 90%, the rich all fled to England or Israel, which is the most shocking and out-of-left-field “rich Jews” comment I’ve ever encountered. Meanwhile, fun with numbers: the top tax rate in the 1990s peaked at 39.4% – the highest it had been since 1986, socialist commie Clinton bastard. Except, oops, that’s still lower than it ever had been since the thirties. The top rate was 91% from the end of World War II until 1964.
Now, it took me almost fifteen seconds to find all of that in Wikipedia, but Mackey’s probably a busy man. Besides, Wikipedia’s not always trustworthy. So how about Google? Why, look at the first hit! Any comments, Mr. Mackey? Oh, and while we bear in mind that the 50’s had the highest tax rate in the history of time, here’s a graph that shows what happened to the GDP then.
The order of panels is really confusing for a little bit, but I think I’ve puzzled out that Chirac is grousing about the selfish rich, this reminds him that CyberSean’s laptop has been discovered and may help to find F.O.I.L.’s lair. Clinton doesn’t give a damn, and asks for money again. Chirac says that it’s not a good time. Clinton freaks out that the U.S. is going bankrupt because of all the money it’s pouring into foriegn aid and the U.N. I laugh heartily at Mackey’s black-helicopters paranoia about economics, and then start weeping when I think of all the people who agree with him.
Clinton threatens Chirac, and he replies that the lack of U.S. military or economic power means she has no bargaining tools. It also means that the U.N. no longer exists, given that our money and military are pretty much the backbone for anything that institution chooses to do. Chelsea is so sad that she washes her hands.
Elsewhere, history is made as we see Reagan McGee as an adult for the first time. Actually, it isn’t. He’s wearing a sleeveless denim jacket with “Patriot” written on it that we last saw on the back of a vandal in issue 1, defacing a UN poster. Very awesome of the writer to make that totally unclear. In what is actually a nice touch, it is not made obvious that this is an homage to the punk brat from issue 2, whose civil disobedience taught Reagan what it is to be a right wing crank.
Reagan’s mom walks in as he sits at the computer while watching a newscaster talk about bin Laden’s impending apology for 9/11 at the Unity Tower memorial. There will be something called a Unity Tree. Reagan is typing “THE EN” on his computer, which makes me happier than anything in life, because I presume that it means we will have no more ReaganNarration.
Mama Reagan exposits heavily that it’s his birthday tomorrow, and Reagan doesn’t care, but it’s not clear if that’s because he’s a sullen 20 year-old or because there are More Important Things, like the fact that the Unity Celebration in Hollywood will be hosted by that goddamn socialist Barbra Streisand (79 years old). Mama Reagan gives him a gift from Daddy Reagan, and he is shocked! Mama exposits that Daddy bought it just before he went to war for the last time. They both miss Daddy Reagan, as the TV keeps going on about the “controversial” ceremony in Hollywood, blah blah. Apparently, one day per year (9/11), this art installation opens up allowing light to fall on the Unity Tree, which presumably has to be replaced rather often if it only gets light 12 hours out of every 8760.
Page 4: Mama puts her hand on Reagan’s shoulder and whooshes him back to “that day,” rendered in black and white. Reagan, apparently 12 or so, listens to an Evil! Liberal! Teacher! talk about how the 9/11 attacks where the response to American imperial arrogance. The fact that this is not the case is of course proven by the lack of similar attacks in the last three years, when American imperial arrogance moved from a controversial leftist theory to an unignorable fact of the world akin to “the sky is blue” or “oil is profitable.”
E!L!T! stands in front of a blackboard reading “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” and I know that reasonable people can disagree on economics, and many wise people do not share my neo-Marxist tendencies, but just as an epigram, I don’t think any moral person can sit there and tell me that it’s not a nice concept. Think, if you will, of private charities, which are not socialist in any way, but still operate under that basic principle.
Of course, my mistake here is assuming Mackey is a moral person.
The teacher, by the way, looks African-American here, but he will cease doing so when next we see him.
Reagan extremely mad at the lecture about how the U.S. pulled its imperial forces and gave them to the U.N., which is not someting that anyone anywhere has ever suggested we do. So yes, TweenReagan, it probably is garbage. He breaks a pencil in half as he screams that his father is in the army reserve, which apparently hasn’t been absorbed into the U.N. and I’m confused.
The teacher, who is now white and has very small eyes, calls Daddy Reagan a warmonger, and Reagan starts blathering about the U.N. betraying America like he’s one of those really creepy homeless people, who are always white, have you noticed? Never see a black panhandler screaming about one-world government. Anyway, Reagn is saved from being sent to the principal’s office by being called into the principal’s office.
Page 5: Reagan angrily pounds a condom dispenser on the wall, surely because he knows he will never have cause to use it. Also, I think that Mackey is wrong: the implication is that all Democrats want to put condoms in schools, but anything that would please the liberal netroots is pretty much guaranteed to never, ever happen.
Reagan’s mom waits in the principal’s office. A military representative is there as well. Reagan gets a series of crash zooms on his face that looks really awful because the lettering in his voice bubble shrinks at the same time, I presume because his voice is squeaking, and if you think of how that would work in a movie, it would be bad. He figures out that Daddy is dead, and runs out, Mama Reagan following.
Page 6: As he runs, he kicks a news paper straight at the reader, a New York Times about Fox News’ bankruptcy, and how George Soros is buying News Corp, and if you think Rupert Fucking Murdoch is going to put ideology over being insanely wealthy, then I presume you’ve never watched or even heard of Family Guy. He keeps sprinting, towards a U.N./U.S. flagpole over the sign “Support U.N.ification,” which is stupid enough that I can imagine someone actually thinking it up. As he sits there, rebelliously asking God to make it not so, he hears a teacher forcing a student to look at the flagpole…just like he did lo these many years ago! This answers my unspoken question of why the hell he stopped under the flagpole. Contrivance!
Page 7: He looks up at a little girl. She is much cuter than he was at that age – her eyes aren’t empty discs of hell. A couple frames that make no sense to me stress Reagan’s relationship to the flags (with blowy wind effects! Ooh!), and then just a straight close-up on the flags that looks more positive than threatening, so I guess I’m still sticking with the “parody” read. His mother catches up with him, standing trĂ©s moodily against a stand of dramatically green trees. In a movie, this is when the strings get really loud and the brass picks up, or if it’s a hip indie movie, the song that sounds really dramatic and pensive but has completely inappropriate lyrics hits the crescendo, which is why I’m currently listening to The Wrens’ “She Sends Kisses.”
Page 8: When I direct my film version, this will be the poster: TweenReagan standing on the ground, the U.N. and U.S. flags avant-gardily appearing beaneath him, the shadow of YoungAdultReagan spreading out from him as his mother cautiously approaches him, and the wind is still obviously blowing. It’s so god-damn dramatic. Wow, Mackey, you sure write the best fucking comics, you hopped-up ass. “Some signed ‘with love, Beth, o’s and x’s.’ She sends kisses, I know this joke, some signed, ‘three 6’s.”
Next time: the secret history of why G. Gordon Liddy isn’t long dead.