If Terri Schiavo Was Iraqi

Last week's single-panel cartoon positing the fate of Terri Schiavo had she been an Iraqi hospital patient—bombed by an American fighter jet, as so many Iraqi hospitals were both during the constant bombing sorties conducted during the Bush 41 and Clinton Administrations and, of course, during the U.S. invasion of 2003 and subsequent occupation, has drawn attention. Part of the attention came from grammarians, who (correctly) point out that the correct usage requires "were" rather than "was" in the title. I knew that. I went with "was" because (a) it's colloquial and colloquial usage is preferred in cartoons and (b) I drew it a day or two before she died and knew she would likely be in the past tense by the time it appeared.

There's also an op-ed by John W. Payne on Lew Rockwell's website using my cartoon as a lede. Editorial cartoonists are always gratified when a print journalist gives us credit by name for inspiring an article. It's also nice when they say who drew a cartoon—as opposed to the New York Times' frequent "a New Yorker cartoon shows a cat talking to a dog..." Memo to the Times: magazines don't make cartoons, cartoonists do. You wouldn't write "a Warner Brothers song refers to boys who will be girls and girls who will be boys," would you? You'd credit the Kinks who sang and wrote that song. So why would you treat cartoonists any differently? Similarly, many journalists pick up on ideas they see in cartoons and, "assuming" that they aren't required to cite their source, simply do the story without citation. Of course, they couldn't/wouldn't do that to a fellow scribe. But they look down on cartooning—this despite the fact that it's a damned sight harder to draw good cartoons than it is to write well (something I know from experience).

So thanks, Mr. Payne!

Here's the opening graph, by the way, of his piece:

One of controversial cartoonist Ted Rall’s most recent pieces is captioned "If Terri Schiavo Was Iraqi." The image is that of a hospital bombed by an American jet moments earlier, the message being that no one in America cares what happens to Iraqi citizens, and, sadly, Rall seems to be largely correct. Over the past few weeks, the media has sustained itself by consuming nothing but Terri Schiavo, and while her death is tragic, the massive coverage lavished upon it eclipses the fact that deadly firefights and car bombs are still fairly common events in Iraq. When the esteemed British medical journal The Lancet published an article in late October 2004 finding that at least 100,000 Iraqis have been killed because of the invasion and subsequent occupation of their country (the study excepted Fallujah because it was impossible to make any reliable estimate about the deaths in that city, so obviously the number is actually much higher), the story was on the news…for one night. So, to recap, the thirteen-day death of one woman who most doctors ruled brain dead was practically broadcast minute by minute on twenty-four hour news networks and then usually loudly argued about by two equally asinine individuals, while the news that the United States government probably killed well over 100,000 people in a year and a half received a perfunctory two-minute mention one night and then faded from view.

Now They're Attacking Me For What I Might Do

Thoughtcrime has triumphed. Kudos to high-ranking FOR Tom for sending this little gem from neofascist David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine blog site:

Undoubtedly, leftist cartoonist Ted Rall is somewhere, dreaming up a way to gain TV time by spitting on the Pope’s corpse. It is no wonder this Pontiff spent so much of his pontificate castigating the world’s “culture of death.”

So what, if anything, am I going to do about the Pope's passing? We'll have to wait and see what the old muse coughs up. What is hilarious beyond belief, however, is to watch the right wing's attempts to co-opt Catholicism's strict interpretation of favoring life whenever in doubt, most recently on display in Sean Hannity's tent in front of Terri Schiavo's hospice in Florida.

The current Catechism interprets its assault on the culture of death regarding a variety of morally tinged political issues: capital punishment, war, abortion, euthanasia, birth control, etc. Only on one of these issues, abortion, do Republicans agree with the recently departed Pope John Paul II: abortion. Both are against it, although for different reasons: the Republicans are mainly against poor people being able to get them because they're all sluts who deserve whatever they get anyway. The pope believed that life begins at conception and therefore fetuses require our protection. It's a respectable position, one that I disagree with but respect nevertheless as perfectly valid and legitimate.

Republicans would never ban birth control because it would be political suicide. So much for principles!

Catholics recognize that it may be necessary to fight a war, but only in self-defense. Neoconservative "preemption" doctrine is anathema to the Vatican, something the pope told Bush when the Evil One had the gall to drop by during the run-up to his invasion of Iraq. (Where are those lightening bolts when you expect them most?) And Pope John Paul II personally eliminated the exception that permitted capital punishment in some cases from canon law.

If you're truly a Catholic in good standing, you oppose abortion as well as war and the death penalty. This means that you can be neither a Democrat nor a Republican. If you have to compromise, the Democratic Party is closer—much closer, on bigger issues—than the Republicans.

So let me the first to say this: this pope was conservative in many respects. He never should have silenced the liberation theologists who tried to bring back the church to Jesus' original message of economic and political justice and equality. Nor should he have stood in the way of permitting women priests or ending celibacy; neither have any basis in scripture and are merely relics of medieval tradition.

On the sliding scale of American politics, however, he was one of us: a leftist who sided with the poor and disadvantaged over the rich and powerful almost every time. So get your stinking blood-soaked hands off our pope, right-wing mass murderers and apologists (i.e., anyone who voted for Bush).