A Cartoonist Who's Quick On the Draw

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Finally, Peter Bagge made the cover of Reason magazine, but he looks dreadful. His bloodshot eyes are bugging out, his face is dripping with nervous sweat and he's gritting his teeth in naked fear. The fact that he's holding a smoking bazooka does not seem to have eased his chronic anxiety about life in these United States.

But it's all his own fault. Bagge drew this cover picture himself. Reason's resident "cartoon journalist" is an honest man, so he caricatured himself with the same comic brutality that he uses when drawing politicians, panhandlers, avant-garde artists, Christian rockers and his favorite target, self-righteous liberals.

Reason is a libertarian magazine and Bagge is a libertarian cartoonist, always eager to satirize the war on drugs or gun control laws or other governmental restrictions on personal freedom. But he doesn't just sit around drawing cartoons. He goes out and covers events like a reporter, jotting down quotes and sketching in his notebook. Then he turns his observations into multi-page comic-strip essays that are funny and smart and surprisingly nuanced.

"I call it cartoon journalism," Bagge, 49, said in a phone interview from his home in Seattle. "I don't know what else to call it."

Over the past six years, Bagge has covered political campaigns, protest marches and, in one hilarious piece, a very earnest convention of polygamists, swingers, sadomasochists and transsexuals, where a panel discussion on legal issues inspired a rather dumpy woman to ask this question: "If I adopt my live-in lovers, would I be violating incest laws?"

Bagge's drawing of that scene shows him falling out of his chair in astonishment.

Bagge's titles are almost as much fun as his drawings. His piece on the hypocrisy of baby boomers was titled "Do Your Own Thing Unto Others." His attack on using taxpayer money to pay for sports stadiums was titled "Let's All Give Money to the Rich Man!" And his piece on Amtrak -- inspired by a disastrous trip through California that arrived six hours late -- was simply called "Amtrak Sucks."

My favorite Bagge piece, titled " 'Real' 'Art,' " was inspired by a foray into a Seattle art museum, where he found himself looking at a few too many pompous avant-garde artworks. He responded with a wonderful illustrated rant: "My feelings toward the contemporary fine art world have always been a mix of bemusement, resentment and contempt," he wrote. "95% of what they're hyping is pure [drivel], yet if you dare say as much out loud you'll be looked upon as a clueless philistine!"

Bagge isn't afraid to be called a philistine. Not only does he denounce government grants to avant-garde "artists," he also attacks government grants for Shakespeare plays. "Now there are all these Shakespeare companies currently plaguing the nation," he wrote. "Heaven forbid a single community should live without the bard's hokey, unintelligible 400-year-old situation comedies."

Ah, you've got to love a man who's willing to shoot a spitball at Shakespeare. Like all good political cartoonists, Bagge can be cruel. But he's also willing to skewer himself when he deserves it. Shortly before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Bagge, who opposed the invasion, covered an antiwar rally and drew a cartoon called "Observations From a Reluctant Anti-Warrior," a savage mockery of the pretensions of the protesters. A year later, haunted by what he termed "a deep sense of shame" about that cartoon, he drew "Confessions of a Lazy Anti-Warrior," eviscerating himself for attacking the protesters.

"I knew at the time that I was being counterproductive," he wrote, "but I couldn't help myself. I couldn't stand those people!"

Ah, you've got to love a man who'll shoot a spitball at himself.

In the current Reason, the one with his hideous self-portrait on the cover, Bagge travels to a gun show, interviews people on both sides of the gun control issue and ultimately concludes that, yes, an American should be able to own a bazooka: "If I don't hurt, threaten or disturb anyone with it, then why can't I own one?"

His reasoning failed to convince me, but I enjoyed the piece anyway. Arguing with Bagge is part of the fun of reading Bagge. As libertarian polemicists go, he's a lot more fun than, say, Ayn Rand.

Bagge says he's coming to Washington in September to cover Congress. Perfect! For a man of his gifts, caricaturing our elected representatives will be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel with that bazooka.

Halberstam's Last Stand

Before he died too soon in a car accident in April, David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and prolific popular historian, wrote one last magazine piece for Vanity Fair. Titled "The History Boys," and appearing in the magazine's August issue, it is a scathing attack on the Bush administration.

Halberstam was primarily a storyteller, not a polemicist, but this piece is an angry rant, albeit an erudite one. Obviously, Halberstam was spitting mad when he wrote it. He was angry about the war: "Going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world." But he was even angrier that George Bush and his cronies have dared to compare our current president to Harry Truman. Halberstam has written extensively about Truman and he knows that Bush is no Truman.

"If Bush takes his cues from anyone in the Truman era," he wrote, "it is not Truman but the Republican far right."

Like many rants, this one jumps from topic to topic without fully fleshing out its arguments. Perhaps Halberstam would have fixed that flaw if he'd lived. Still, Halberstam's fans, and I'm one of them, will enjoy the nostalgic pleasure of reading some classic Halberstamian sentences that rumble on like rolling thunder. Here, for instance, is his lead:

"We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over -- indeed before it really began -- and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history."

Ah, they don't write 'em like that anymore, do they?