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ted ral is not exactly a new phenomenon.
he's often kind of scattershot in his approach, failing as often as not in my view.
but i look at his comics when i run across them.
in this case, you have a bit of black humor aimed at the military recruiment practices which target working-class kids. i dont think he is particularly on the mark in it.
that said, rall is self-evidently not a conservative and so linking him to collective pathologies like "patriotism" seems a bit odd. i've said this alot: nationalism is a collective mental disorder...an amazingly primitive signifiers around which to articulate the usual patterns of inclusion and exclusion that make identities of this order appear to mean something.
you see this playing out above, particularly in ustwo's snippy little posts.
beyond patterns of inclusion and exclusion--which are only important because they put this category of "nation" or "us" into motion and so give it a sense of tangibility---what it seems mostly to legitimate is tedious self-important public rituals and a requirement that kids be forced to recite stupid oaths. and wholesale breakdowns of taste in graphic design.
look at the new american twenties.
what makes the comic really funny is the frothy, salty accusations of rall as part of some phantom fifth column sucking the lifeblood of wholesome americans. that's another function of nationalism--enabling people to say really stupid things.
rall is a cartoonist who likes provocation.
i find his work much funnier now than i did before i read through much of this thread.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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