The Accidental Artist

“This is a new thing, the overhead transparency projector,” Rees told his audience at the Knitting Factory, where he shared a lunch bill with jazz musician Les McCann. “It’s not scheduled to debut until MacExpo 2009. I‘m looking forward to getting to know this fella.” With the transparencies loaded and the overhead projecting, Rees proceeded to introduce a new satirical effort, “Get Your Civil War On.”

“What if the death toll reaches 20,000?” says one clip-art character to the next. “Then I say congratulations death toll! You’re one-thirtieth of the way there!”

Rees went on to plumb the depths of his political rage, displaying for his audience‘s grisly amusement an advertisement from Royal Caribbean Cruises locating its post-911 emotions in each compartment of a very big ship, and a letter of sympathy “from the angels” that ran in The New York Times: “Look,” Rees points out, “you can tell it’s from the angels because of the handwriting. But wait! What‘s this in the corner? Here, it says, ’Sincerely, the Phillips Company!‘ That’s when I thought, ‘You know what? The angels didn’t write this shit! This is the work of a multinational petroleum concern!‘”

In an article for The Nation magazine, writer Gene Santoro categorized the singer and songwriter Ani DiFranco with references to Kurt Cobain and David Rees, with whom she “shares [an] ironic-punk sensibility.” The comparison seemed almost artificial, as if Santoro simply wanted an excuse to plug Rees’ book, which he did in the next parenthetical sentence. But it did place Rees in a new pantheon: He is now a bona fide cultural marker, singular enough to be used as a reference point by critics.

I asked Carol Wells, director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, whether she thinks Rees‘ notoriety will endure. “The strip seems like the kind of thing that might be important to historians in the future, if for no other reason than that it shows that we have dissent in this country at this moment,” she told me. “But even if it doesn’t last, it‘s an incredible inspiration right now. He’s pulling together ideas that people have trouble connecting without having to read a whole article in the Op-Ed page.”

Rees has no illusions about the strip‘s importance; in fact, he almost gave it up altogether after the summer, but started again when the Bush administration made the staggeringly vulgar decision to hire Henry Kissinger to investigate the events of September 11. “When that happened,” Rees recalled, “I sat down and said to myself, ’Okay, let‘s see if I’ve still got it.‘”

He did: “Does Bush even know who these motherfuckers are?” asks one of the strip’s generic office workers while talking on the phone. “Didn‘t he get suspicious when he saw Kissinger and John Poindexter licking the blood off each other’s hands?”

As expected, the episode got several million hits. “Get Your War On” has been attracting that kind of traffic since two weeks after Rees started it, a heavy load for the servers at his Web host. Frequent crashes have led some to suspect that Rees has been censored by the FBI, the CIA or the not-yet-extant cultural-control department of the Office of Homeland Security. “I start getting e-mails and phone calls from people saying, ‘Oh my God, they finally got you! Just let me know where you are and what you need and I’ll spring you.‘ And I’d have to tell them, ‘No, I haven’t been censored. It‘s just my fucking Web host.’” And despite rumors of hate mail, Rees says the response to the strip has been almost unanimously encouraging. “The positive outnumbers the negative 30-to-1,” he said. No one has made the slightest move to shut him down. “This is an awesome country!” he exclaimed. It‘s hard to be sure whether he means it.

On the other hand, it’s possible that Capitol Hill has just not yet noticed Rees. “It takes like 400 years for culture to get there,” he observed. Hollywood, television producers, and filmmaking students at NYU, however, have been after him all year. But Rees remains obdurately non-mercenary about his political comic-artist future. “I‘m trying to keep it very personal and to make sure I’m doing it because if I don‘t I’m going to tear my hair out,” he said. “It helps me feel less alone.”

For more Get Your War On info, visit mnftiu.cc