Thursday, October 23, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Thought bubbles

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall happily sounds off

By Andrew Kiraly

Ted Rall supports the Second Amendment. Ted Rall is against late-term abortion. Ted Rall thinks the welfare system attracts plenty of parasitic bums. Ted Rall thinks we should have bombed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia into rubble--not Iraq. Ted Rall thinks the yawning wage gap between your average CEO and your average janitor should be slammed shut by the government. Ted Rall--the syndicated editorial cartoonist (and columnist) who regularly flies bombing missions from the left--thinks lots of things you wouldn't expect.

"I mean, I'm an absolute Marxist when it comes to economics," he says from New York. "I don't believe a CEO does any more work than a janitor. All labor is worth the same. I've worked under many a CEO in my life, and these guys are not smart. But generally, I'm more into thinking for myself. I don't do what Michael Moore or Molly Ivins does, who are more invested in whether the Democratic Party comes back to power. From my view, most of these guys don't go far enough."

If you think you know Ted Rall from his insightful and venomously cynical political cartoons, think again. A phone conversation with the 39-year-old straddles stereotypes, avoids party lines like live wires and--yes, the cliche actually applies--displays plenty of brain time spent outside the box. A portrait of a true freethinker emerges, perhaps best evidenced by the fact that Rall, whose cartoons appear in more than 140 publications, frequently outrages left and right alike.

Case in point: his infamous cartoon skewering the handful of 9/11 "terror widows" who promptly took up the "Oprah" and People magazine circuit after the 2001 attacks. Blasted from all sides, Rall stands by the piece.

"All the targets had it coming," he says. "There were people who looked at it and thought, 'Well, this is making fun of those whose husbands died on Sept. 11.' That's not true. If anything, those people's behavior in the cartoon continued to become worse and worse."

A chat with Rall--currently at work on a book, Wake Up Your Liberal--quickly froths into a wide-ranging monologue on contemporary politics, a grumbling discourse on who's "rad" (Rall's shorthand for political radical), who's bad--and why Rall himself isn't necessarily the neoliberal everyone thinks he is. Rather, he insists, he's just a moderate in a world goose-stepping to the right.

On the '04 presidential race: "If anything, most of the Democratic candidates don't go far enough. Howard Dean, for instance, his politics are pretty much like Clinton's. He's not as willing to be pushed around as, say, Dick Gephardt, but he's no rad. But if nothing changes, I really think Dean has the nomination locked up. He's ironically the best nominee according to my theory about American voters, which is that they vote for the guy they can best imagine playing the role of president on TV. Howard Dean is that guy."

On why he's voting for Dean even though he doesn't like him: "I've always voted based on principle, but this year, it's different. I'm turning 40, Bush is the most repulsive turd I've ever seen in American politics, and he must be defeated at all costs. I voted for Ralph Nader and I do not regret those votes, but you've got to recognize a crisis when you see it. Back in 2000, I thought Bush was like his dad; I didn't realize he was a radical. If I'd have known he was a guy hell-bent on world oil domination and would use 9/11 to promote a partisan political agenda and completely fail to go after the perpetrators of 9/11, I would've voted differently. 2004 is not a normal election."

On why people love Rall...to a point: "I gave a speech in Virginia, and it was a big love-in for Ted Rall. At one point I referred to Bush as a pussy for not having gone to Vietnam but living to send other people off to bad wars, and afterward a group of women came up and chastised me for using a sexist expression. I'm like, 'Look, you know what? I never said I was PC. I'm violently feminist, but if I can't use the word pussy, then fuck you.' I don't believe in all that politically correct bullshit. I get that so much. 'You're not who I thought you were!' I'm not beholden to any ideology, not even my own. I haven't developed Rallism. It's a variation of the girlfriend who loves you because you're so wild and then tries to change you."

On the abundance of easy targets today: "People always think it's a good time to be an editorial cartoonist because there's so much material. But I came of age in the Reagan and [George] Bush administrations, when there wasn't a hell of a lot going on. I'm more used to that kind of political atmosphere, where you have to dig deeper. Now we're back to addition and subtraction. It's like, `No, Ann Coulter, McCarthy was a bad person, that was settled in 1957.' I find it annoying. It forces me to do work that's maybe more pedantic. I was much more interested in calculus."