Pat Tillman

[grinninfoole]

This is a link to a cartoon by Ted Rall about the late Pat Tillman. http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/2004/05/03/

Mr. Rall has apparently received a lot of criticism about it and MSN has decided that this might make them look unprofitably bad, so they have pulled it from their website (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ep/20040504/en_bpiep/rallstillmancartoonpulledbymsnbccom).

I agree with Mr. Rall's overall criticism of the war on terror (or at least, Mr. Bush's handling of it). However, the obituary I read of Mr. Tillman, which interviewed friends and colleagues, made him sound like a very private person. I am uncomfortable with impugning Mr. Tillman's motives for enlisting in the army. I agree that, as a means of service to his country, it wasn't the best choice he could have made, but I don't think that he should be mocked because of it. He has paid for his misplaced loyalty to a corrupt presidency with his life.

Comments

[girl-in-reverse.livejournal.com]

i think your critique of the cartoon is right on target. the artist could have gotten the same point across by using any recent army recruit. perhaps the artist felt that the ends (publicity generation) justified the means (exploiting name-recognition and implying sinister motives regardless of accuracy). personally, i also find the fact that the mocking nature of this cartoon was directed at one particular person inappropriate. i feel sorry for the man's family. it would have made more sense to focus the cartoon's criticism on the questionable recruitment tactics of the military and the bush administration in general than to include the 'do we get to kill arabs?' on the part of the recruit himself. i can't imagine that any (well, ok, many) people sign up for the armed services with thoughts like that in mind. thanks for sharing this.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Well, I can sympathize with Mr. Rall, too. I have gone over the line for art a few times, and I respect for standing by his work. Especially if he is now, in retrospect, squirming about it.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

One tiny problem. Tillman was in Afghanistan, and he joined well before Iraq, as a reaction to 9/11. Which means that a good chunk of Rall's cartoon makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Afghanistan got UN approval, and even people really critical of the US action in Iraq are not so critical of things in Afghanistan. Spain's new government is an example. They've pulled out of Iraq, but have made it quite clear that they're staying involved in Afghanistan.

This isn't the first time Rall has taken a really cheap shot and then made half-apologies afterwards. His Terror Widows cartoon pushed some of the same territory. (One of those widows wrote (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/03/15/widow_wrath/) about her feelings in Salon.

Go ahead: Read the hype, but don't believe it. Those of us who were wounded to the core by this tragedy are sad and angry and frequently lost. But we are not ungrateful opportunists who have welcomed the death of loved ones as an opportunity to get rich. That person is Ted Rall, and I pity him, more than anything else.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

An excellent point. I must come clean and admit that, in retrospect, the Bush administration seems to have handled the attack on al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan pretty well. I know that there are loads of problems there now, because the country is shot to hell, everyone is out for themselves (and that's just good sense at this point), and the people we are working with are thugs, basically mobsters profaning Islam with their sins instead of Catholicism.

Nevertheless, at the time, I was deeply suspicious of the invasion of Afghanistan and pessimistic. As Mr. Tillman's case demonstrates, my fellow citizens are still there, still dying, and still struggling to destroy our enemies, and maybe even make that devastated land a little better. (Short of nuking it, I doubt we can make it worse.) Still, my misgivings about moving into Afghanistan, unlike my misgivings about Iraq, have proven wrong, as have my doubts about the appropriateness of acting so vigorously. And, one of the nastiest tyrannies around got what it had coming. So, I have to say, chalk one up for the Bush administration.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I actually think Afghanistan could have been handled better, but I agree with you that it's mostly gone well. (One of our problems there is with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/dossier/hekmatyar.html), a guy who at one point had close connections with the US.)

It could have been way worse: former Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger was on TV the night after 9/11 ranting about sending B-52s to flatten Kabul.