Has it really been so long? Indeed, it has…I hope you’ll join me on a little recap of the story so far of LIBERALITY FOR ALL, the world’s foremost conservative alt-history comic book, now in its fourth issue in 19 months. At this rate, Al Gore really will be President before it’s done.
Won’t you join me for a quick trip down memory lane; or for those who have never tasted the fizzy champagne magic of LFA, come experience it for the first time…
Lord Wintergate, having been successful in his suit against Mr Grimnus Battlestone, finally turned his attention to finding suitable husbands for his daughters before the typhus that had so long afflicted Lady Wintergate could take her into death’s cold, quiet embrace. The sisters Miss Wintergate and Miss Charlotte were increasingly divided over the war, as the elder grew more convinced of its beneficent effect on the fortunes of Mr Willingster’s trading company, while the younger was increasingly fearful about the continued safety of her mysterious sailor, Lieutenant Norry. Mrs Lisbet Gilcrest, having alienated most of the neighborhood with her increasingly ostentatious dinners, found it necessary to enlist the counsel of Pastor Linbrook as her agéd father in London took a turn for the worse. While awaiting word on Admiral Snowden’s fate, Lady Agatha became ever more suspicious that Catherine’s time with the stable boy Kilcannon was not so innocent as the two protested. The dowager Baroness Roichbourg, having still not chosen between her grandsons Thomas and Stephen, made plans to leave the matter of her estate in the hands of her attorney Mr Brickle, should she not survive the winter. Jean-Pierre, now stationed in the home of Lord and Lady Featherstone, was shocked to learn that he was not the only agent Napoleon had hidden in that county, although he still did not suspect Mr Dorin, not being aware that the butler’s grandfather had been the exiled Duc d’Isenbord. Miss Willoughby and Miss Kitty still fought, teasingly, over Mr Henry Jenners, never suspecting that he was the same anonymous donor who had given the loan that kept their father out of the workhouses. Mr Poteness continued to amuse the local landowners with his increasingly outlandish tales of life in the Hebrides. That damn chatty kid named after Ronald Reagan hatched a plan to steal an eagle as CyberSean Hannity, Blind Ollie North and the super-powered zombiefied G. Gordon Liddy were busy trying to restart Star Wars. I think. Maybe that was at the end of issue #2. I really can’t be arsed to remember all of these things.
Suddenly, it must be some time later, because all of a sudden we’re in an alley that looks nothing like the inside of a zoo, and Reagan is running from mysterious dark-suited figures, carrying an eagle under his arm. The shock of jumping from one location to another has clearly unnerved the narrator, as he forgets how to use the English language: “He used to say ‘the only reason we have freedom was because people offered their lives to defend it.'” Sigh. No, no, no. Can’t use “he,” it doesn’t have a proper antecedent in the previous post. Also, if you’re quoting someone in the past tense, they were probably using the present tense. I am sorry to be a pedant about these things, but good grammar costs nothing.
It would appear that Reagan has been shot in the back, judging from the weird ways his arms and legs are splaying out as he winces in apparent pain:
Does Reagan live? I have no idea, because the next panel is a completely decontextualized shot of the New York skyline.
Then, Reagan is running again; so I guess that first image was just poorly thought-out, which just shocks me. SHOCKS ME, I say. Anyway, Reagan still looks like he’s about to fall forward, so maybe that’s just the way he runs. Following on that bit of narration where he grouses about his father’s death during a troop “redeployment,” he sniffs that it was really a “retreat and defeat.” This was the moment that I realized that for the immediate future, this issue of LFA would be primarily concerned with hating on the 60% of Americans who want to pull every last damn soldier out of Iraq, which I freely admit was very imperceptive of me. This was also the moment that I realized with a nasty concrete feeling in my gut that I was going to have to read several pages of hating on the 60% &c. And it didn’t seem like it was going to be much fun. And boy, was I right.
Dead end! Reagan is trapped, but that doesn’t stop the narration from burbling on, about how the The Left was just worried about the American troops, without giving a tinker’s damn about the poor folks who were “mowed down like grass in their absence.” Ah yes, the old, “if we leave, even more Iraqis will die” argument. You know, I’m not God, and I don’t know, maybe if we pull out, there will be more deaths in Iraq then there are now. And that would be a very high number indeed.
Secondly, if there’s going to be endless narration, it would be at least a little bit nice if it had something, anything, to do with the action going on.
Reagan hides Freedom in a pile of junk (I love the look of that sentence) as the Narration sez: “The Media didn’t mention those lost innocents either, as each represented an inconvenient truth.” The fucking what now? I don’t even know what to make of that. We’re all familiar with the wingnut complaint that the media insists on showing only the bad part of the war, right? That it’s a mortal sin to show images of death and destruction because it makes it look like the war is going bad? That the media is losing Iraq just like they lost Vietnam? We’ve all heard that, right? So what sort of ass-backwards hypocrisy is Mackey playing at here? Sometimes, I’m sorry, it’s not even funny. It’s just fucking frustrating.
Reagan turns towards his pursuers and bends down to pick up a pipe. Then, in on one of the unintentionally funny peaks of the whole series, he stares straight at the reader and does this really bad-ass ninja thing.
Reagan threatens the guards surrounding him (who we’ve by now recognized as UN operatives), and then things get weird. I’m not sure where CyberSean is standing, you see, but he is apparently both above and next to the UN troops. He warms up his arm, and then shoots them, and it goes “zeeeek.” And then it’s like a pier, or something, and I don’t have any clue what’s happening.
Sean picks up what looks like a bar of soap with a ribbon in it, and hands it to Reagan. Huh? Oh, right that present from his dad that he wouldn’t open from, whenever ago. He brought that? Why? Reagan goes back to pick Freedom out of the trash (and…now the bird has a normal, beak-colored beak), as he sniffs, “I just couldn’t let them…kill Freedom.” Sean Hannity’s response to that is too fucktabulous for me to to deprive you of the image of him saying it:
Colmes segues badly into an update that Bin Laden and his retinue are preparing for his impending apology, which I assume we’ve heard about, but I really don’t recall, and I’m not going to go back through the old issues to find out. I thought he was in the US to sit in the President’s chair and scare babies. Colmes brings on very special guest Barbra Streisand, because everyone on the left cares what Barbra Streisand thinks about things. Didn’t you know? Well, we all do. “Babs, you look fabs!” says Colmes, and I don’t know what the hell Mackey is trying to say with that, but for a 79-year-old (remember: 2021), she does look pretty good. And not very much like Barbra Streisand. I mean, she’s blonde, but…
Colmes promises that the crowds are thronging in excitement around the Unity Tower to greet Bin Laden, but darn ol’ technical difficulties keep them from showing the video of the throngs. Technical difficulties, in this case, means that a crowd comprised of many people who are pro-American – whether they are good old normal Americans, or more like the Gathering of Eagles of 2021, is not made clear. Obviously the sight of many American citizens storming a UN building, fighting UN soldiers with signs and the odd molotov cocktail, deserves a ReaganNarration, and he saved up a real barnburner. Over three pages, he goes on this incoherent tear about I don’t even know what. Here’s page 1:
Within hours of my birth, my mother took me home from the hospital. It was assumed that every hospital bed in NYC would be needed for the multitude injured in the Twin Tower collapse. Unfortunately, people that were only “injured” never arrived.”
Okay, well, first off, I couldn’t find any stories about women with newborns leaving the hospital because of perceived bed shortages, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, so I’ll let that slide. Second off, I have now idea what this has to do with anything else.
Page 2:
As we got home, she said American flags were displayed outside many homes. Ours would soon join them. Put simply, if you owned an American flag, you flew it that day. A Lady, who live next door to us, had just returned from the store in a frantic search to buy a flag. They were sold out everywhere.
As it turns out, I was in a Wal-Mart on the afternoon of September 11th, 2001. There were many people there. You know what they were buying? Water. Food. Bullets. They weren’t buying fucking flags. (I recall that my mother was trying to figure out if we needed to buy water, and I remember my response in effect, if not the specific words: the attack is over, even the Bush administration isn’t that incompetent that they would allow anything else to happen today. In the 6 years and 5 months of that man’s tenure as president, that is the closest I ever came to saying something in support of him, by the way).
While I don’t specifically remember flags not being flown, I sure as hell don’t remember row upon row of houses with flags, and I know for a fact my family didn’t put ours out. Of course, I was living then in a godless anti-American blue state, albeit in a zip code that went for Bush in both 2000 and 2004, and hasn’t voted for a Democratic member of Congress since I’ve been born.
Sure, patriotic fervor hit the country after 9/11, but on the day itself, I don’t remember a whole lot of patriotism. I remember blind existential fear. I’m willing to admit that maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I hung out in the wrong crowd. Arguments from anecdote and all that; very intellectually unsound.
Back to the comic, the action accompanying all of this wankery is just more images of people attacking other people, and the UN grabbing an American flag away from somebody, I guess – by the time we first see the flag, it’s already in the hands of a UN soldier. Which makes it a little bit less effective for whatever the hell it was supposed to be about, but at least there’s some vague connection between the narration and the action, so I should shut up and stop complaining.
Page 3: the UN man takes the flag to a pile of…burning tires?…and tosses it in. Aiee! Not flag-burning! That is surely the work of such evil that even Satan would be ashamed to associate with it!
Look, it’s not that I’m not sympathetic to the idea that a national flag is a symbol, but for God’s sake, it’s ultimately just a bit of cloth strips stitched together. There’s no animistic spirit residing inside the American flag or any other. And I can’t respect people who exercise energy over the destruction of colorful rectangles of cloth while there are actual tragedies in the world: children dying, ecosystems being torn to the ground.
But hey, I’m the next thing to a Socialist. So who are you going to listen to: me, or Reagan McGee:
She seemed ashamed that she didn’t own a flag that day, ashamed she had no way to show her patriotism. I bet you could have sold an American flag for a hundred dollars on September 11th, 2001. The thing is, if on September 11th you owned one, then you already understood its value…and wouldn’t have given it up for any amount of money.
But you know what you would have given it up for? Bullets. You would have traded it for motherfucking bullets.
Next time: Reagen joins the League of Conservative Gentlemen, or whatever they’re called exactly; Bin Laden remains ee-vil; and Blind Ollie North mind melds with an eagle.