Ted Rall

[September 26th, 2007] Syndicated political cartoonist Ted Rall makes right-wingers scoff and party-line liberals squirm. In 2001, his Terror Widows strip suggested that 9/11 widows who went public were more interested in celebrity and cash than grieving for their lost husbands. Post-Abu Ghraib, in May ’04, he declared in his syndicated column that “troops occupying Iraq have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS.” Whether he’s praised for his steadfast radicalism (Rall was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1996) or denounced as “an utterly worthless political cartoonist” (The Comics Journal ), whenever Rall puts pen to paper, controversy follows. His most recent book, Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East? , collects essays and cartoons from the author’s travels through Central and Southeast Asia, where even corrupt cops and paralyzing diarrhea are viewed with a degree of romanticism. The New York City-based cartoonist , who is published in more than 100 daily and weekly papers by Universal Press Syndicate, will be in town for the Stumptown Comics Fest this weekend, though he says he has never (“like, ever”) been published in Oregon.

WW: When did you get serious about cartooning?

Ted Rall: Throughout the ’90s I did a lot of op-ed work for the New York Times , both cartoons and columns, and then, of course, after 9/11 I was banished from the op-ed pages. That won’t change until the twit we have in office is gone. It’s ridiculous if you really think about it—you don’t really need Ted Rall in the Clinton years, you need him now.

There’s a lot of thinly veiled anger in your strips. Why do other political cartoonists try to hide that?

If you seem like the detached observer....you’re not as dangerous as someone who stands up and is like, “You suck, you’re scum and you should die.” People are always like, “Whoa, you’re angry.” What’s wrong with being angry, especially when someone does something really terribly wrong? We’re talking about murder on a mass scale. I mean these same people, the truth is, they just don’t care. If someone came in and shot their wife in front of them, no one would say, “Dude, don’t be angry.” They’re gonna go apeshit, right? The truth is they just don’t care when it happens to somebody else...I’d love to talk to a sociologist or an anthropologist about why Americans are missing an empathy chip, but they are.

Who is your characterization of George W. Bush based on?

Pinochet. He is [former Chilean president Augusto] Pinochet. It started on Dec. 20, 2000. The Supreme Court ruled in Bush vs. Gore and I was like, OK, this is a coup d’état , this guy is going to be a banana-republic dictator, and so I went into my photo files...I had a file named “DICTATOR,” and I found a Time magazine portrait of Pinochet. It was like, that’s the guy, with the hat, the medals, the sash. The sash is the best part...after 9/11, it was like, that’s the best thing I ever came up with as a cartoonist. It just sort of operates on multiple levels, but it was a happy accident.

You keep drawing him uglier.

He gets uglier and uglier. There’s a lot of ear hair going on, and the coke snot came in. Oh, he’s going to get uglier and uglier. And there will be no forgiveness, even when he leaves office—if he leaves office—there will be no forgiveness. Even if he dies, there will be no forgiveness.

Do you think he’ll ever own up to anything?

No. No way. And he’s really right. This is something lefties don’t like to admit, but he’s absolutely correct to not apologize. The worst thing that ever happened to my career was apologizing for a cartoon. It was a cartoon I did about the [2004] election and I kind of compared the American public to a classroom where a mentally disabled kid had been not only mainstreamed into the class, but, on top of that, was teaching it, and like no one had a problem with it. The last thing parents of disabled children need is Ted Rall picking on them, and it was wrong, it was terribly wrong. And I felt just so badly about it and when they called me on it I apologized. Well, that apology precipitated all sorts of cancellations, I lost the Washington Post , I mean I should never have fucking apologized. I should have just been like, “Fuck you, I was right.”

Were you radicalized by 9/11 ?

It just exposed what I knew all along, which is that people are stupid. It brought it in such sharp relief that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Politics are tribal, you know, there’s people who get things and there’s people who don’t. And really, during good times, the people who don’t get things have the good decency to shut the fuck up. But then...they get one of their own in power and then suddenly they’re emboldened to not only have and express their stupid opinions, but to try and pressure people to put them into practice.

What happened to your syndication numbers after 9/11?

It’s been a steady slide down. I’d say about two years ago it started to level off. I really took my licks after 9/11, because frankly I didn’t want to be as much of a pussy as other cartoonists. I think every editorial cartoonist who ever did a Saddam with a smoking mushroom cloud over New York...those guys should never be allowed to work again. They should all be selling hot dogs somewhere. They are scum and worthless and I have no respect for them at all. I mean, c’mon, there’s no qualifications to being a political cartoonist—just your brain. And if your brain is no good [laughs], why are people buying your cartoons?

But you got death threats after 9/11. That didn’t scare you into—

Into stopping? Yeah, I’m probably really dumb.... I mean, I’m scared, I just don’t allow it to change my behavior. My favorite moment was, I see caller ID and it’s a police precinct in Brooklyn. A guy calls up and says, “I’m sergeant blah blah blah,” he leaves his name and number, and says, “And I’m coming to slash your wife’s and your throats.” So it’s like, who am I gonna call [laughs]? The police? But I’d rather have some psycho kill me than to have to live with the fact that I was a wuss for the rest of my life. I’m not going to be Salman Rushdie, you know, hiding out. I’m like, bring it on, fuckers.