CSotD: So long, Ahmed, see you in St. Louie
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Maybe it's because I mentioned the fall of Saigon yesterday, but today's Doonesbury struck a particularly responsive, if dark, chord.
As with Syria, I don't have a solution for Afghanistan, but, then, nobody ever has. Well, Alexander the Great, but that was a long time ago and that didn't last indefinitely, though it eventually became part of a terrific movie that did not much flatter the Afghans.
Kipling set the mood for the novella that inspired it by creating for it the imaginary country of Kafiristan, a portmanteau name built upon an epithet that ranks on the same level as the N-word despite the limes, which are sometimes called something else for just that reason.
And he also wrote – this time without disguising what country he meant — of the futility of attempting gunboat diplomacy in a country land-locked metaphorically even moreso than geographically:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your Gawd like a soldier
Which is to say that even Kipling, who found very few countries in the world that wouldn't be improved by coming under British rule, was hard-pressed to find any reason to be in that one.
Which is further to say that, while I felt — and still feel — that knocking out the Taliban government was a worthy cause, we're long since past the point where we should be resisting our dear, dear friend the freely-elected head of state's request that we bugger off.
I mean, even Rex Morgan's hapless high-school buddy has finally figured out that, when your wife shoots you in the forehead with a nail gun, you need to start thinking of an exit strategy.
Which is all very amusing, but the flashback to Saigon is not:
In the fall of 1968, when I was just starting my sophomore year in college, a large number of my friends from high school had gone through their training and were in Vietnam, including a couple of very close friends who had popped up in a TIME Magazine photo that summer at Khe Sanh.
Our pal Mike Reynolds, by contrast, was the subject of much laughter, because he was a noted wiseass and scapegrace and all around good fellow, and somehow the lucky bastard had managed to avoid the war and get himself assigned to Korea, and we thought that was hilarious and typical: We worried about everyone else, but you sure didn't have to worry about Mike.
My reaction, once the kick-in-the-gut response had faded, was that, God damn it to Hell, that wasn't our war. That was our fathers' war.
And I began to wonder if one of my kids would some day get the chance to die in Vietnam.
So let me you this: Ahmed Karzai does not have to drive a freaking nail into my forehead to make me walk out on him.
On a much more pleasant topic:
Tom Spurgeon linked to this collection of Alex Raymond art the other day, on a website that ought to keep you out of trouble for a little while. That is Pagan Lee, inamorata of the incomparable Rip Kirby, who is perhaps my favorite stop every morning, over in the vintage collection at King Features' Comics Kingdom.
And for more current fare, Johanna Draper Carlson revealed her Best Graphic Novels of 2013 the other day.
I find her site, Comics Worth Reading, lives up to its name pretty well. She certainly devotes plenty of bandwidth to superheroes, because they do have a major place in the genre, but she doesn't worship Spandex and has wide tastes worth keeping up with.
And I would say that even if she hadn't listed the Fantagraphics' reissue of Barnaby's first year at #5 on her list.
Not only do I use Mr. O'Malley as an avatar, but Barnaby was my first favorite strip, and a much less quality re-issue of strips in cheap paperbacks was the hook I used to turn my eldest granddaughter on to comics.
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