You mean Hannity isn't already part robot?
I think Jim will agree, if for all the wrong reasons, that Liberality For All is going to be the best comic ever.
"It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It is up to an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North to thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden's plans to nuke New York City ...And wake the world from an Orwellian nightmare of United Nations- dominated ultra-liberalism."
Check out the synopsis and preview and tell me it doesn't look like, in the words of Tom Tomorrow, a camp classic.
It's also a prime example of victim politics on the right — the attitude, formerly reserved for the PC left, that the best way to achieve your goals is to whine about all the terrible things people say about you.
I vaguely recall as a kid in the Reagan years reading Anarchist Comix about a robotic Ronny R as a Big Brother figure in the not-too-distant future, so obviously neither side has a monopoly on this kind of fun and games. But the distinction is that in the Reagan years, Reagan was running the effin' country and the lefty comic writers were creating satire based on extrapolations of their actual experiences. Today, the whiny wingnuts who want to wallow in their powerlessness have to start by creating a fantastic alternate reality in which they aren't in fact running the world. That it's so wildly implausible is simultaneously the most entertaining and frightening thing about this comic.
If Liberality can tap into the same mindset that keeps conservative Christians coming back to end time thrillers about a bizarro world in which Christians are persecuted outsiders, it should be a monster hit.
By the way, in 2021, G. Gordon Liddy will be 91. What's his superpower, holding his chin over a drool cup without flinching?
Comments
I agree that the politics here are ludicrous and paranoid, but are they any more so than those of mainstream hits "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen"? If anything less so, because it's so obviously over the top that it has to be a joke, whereas in the other books one got the sense that it really was believed that Nixon and Reagan wanted to set up a fascist America.
Posted by: Ted | August 5, 2005 6:20 AM
Good point. Futuristic paranoia is a classic theme in comics (and film and literature for that matter). But if you read the rest of the Liberality site you'll see that these people are absolutely not joking. True, they have a sense of humor, but they're not going for camp, not when they promise that "10% of the profits of the series are to be donated to the Freedom Alliance Scholarship Fund, founded by Oliver North and heavily supported by Sean Hannity." If anything, they're more serious than the anti-Reagan left was. Which is probably why they win. Ironic detachment was always a tough platform for launching a political movement.
Posted by: radosh | August 5, 2005 8:13 AM
That really is amazing. I don't understand how much control they need to have before they stop feeling like victims of the massive liberal hegemony. The presidency, both houses of Congress, more and more of the judiciary, most governorships and statehouses, the leading cable news channel, the most popular talk-radio shows ... yeah, poor conservatives. We're clearly just inches away from a UN-dominated world government that fetes Bin Laden. Words fail.
Posted by: John | August 5, 2005 11:40 AM
Not to mention that people like Liddy created Bin Laden in the first place.
Posted by: radosh | August 5, 2005 12:11 PM
I'm not sure why you singled me out, but that comic looks stupid as hell.
Posted by: Jim Treacher | August 14, 2005 8:46 PM