Humor
Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001-2008
by David Rees
Soft Skull Press, 256 pp., $15.95 (paper)
With the reign of President George W. Bush coming to a not-a-minute-too-soon end and with the promise of a “new” day on the horizon with President-elect Barack Obama set to take the helm next month, things look slightly more rosy than they did in the final months of 2001. But not too rosy. The economy is in the shitter, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and whatever the ultimate fallout they will bring is) are far from over. The world is a strange place, and we are a strange people. Case in point: In the days just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, poking fun at President Shrub or questioning the wisdom of his administration’s response to the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., were dangerous business, enough to get you branded a freedom-hater. Flash-forward to today, and even 43’s conservative flag-pin-wearing and Bible-clutching base wants nothing to do with him. My, how times have changed.
How history will treat Bush and his administration and their monumentally retarded war on terror remains to be seen – or maybe not. Indeed, the history is already written in part, cataloged with razor-edge barbs, snarky lines, and copious profanity and delivered by a clip-art crew of office workers that are the creation of 36-year-old New York-based cartoonist David Rees, whose strip Get Your War On is one of the best and most biting looks at modern America and its dangerous conceits. Just in time for the holidays and on the precipice of what still could eventually become a new chapter in American life, Rees has published his third collection of GYWO strips, chronicling the seven years of anger, depression, and irony that were the Bush Years of Terror.
Rees, who donated the royalties from his first two GYWO books to a nonprofit group that removes land mines from a province in northwest Afghanistan, began his strip on the Internet shortly after 9/11 as a way to cope with and understand what was happening in the world around him, he has said, and also as a response to the reactionary attitude that demanded deference to Bush and all things red, white, and blue. In other words, the strip was a way to push back. The chest-pumping, with-us-or-against-us reaction was nothing but a “disservice to the spirit of American dissent,” he told a radio interviewer in 2007. And so GYWO was born. Thankfully.
Rees’ strips are provocative and wise and delivered with a punch to the gut – concise, angry, and seriously funny. Rees’ book is a great gift for anyone who loves true freedom and praises the power of the written word.
Additional Reading: Karlology: What I’ve Learnt So Far … by Karl Pilkington (DK Adult, 224 pp., $20); Free-Range Chickens by Simon Rich (Random House, 144 pp., $17); Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher (Simon & Schuster, 176 pp., $21)
This article appears in December 12 • 2008.