For Your Consideration

DMZ, issue 5: "Body of a Journalist"
Brian Wood

This is from the introduction to Brian Wood's DMZ: Public Works by Cory Doctorow.

There are two sides in every war: combatants and non-combatants.

There's not much ideological distance between, say, a bunch of bearded religious fanatics who want to suicide-bomb skyscrapers and a bunch of suited fanatics who want to wiretap, RFID-tag, and imprison every human being on earth and deny the right to travel to t anyone whose name sounds anything like the name of anyone who ever said anything nice about terrorism.

At least now when compared to the ideological distance between both of these packs of sociopathic monsters and the rest of us people who just want to get onto an airplane without having our colons examined, who want to go to work,church, or a mosque without having some nutjob daisy-cutter us for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The real "other" isn't brown people with turbans: it's people of all colors with guns, airplanes, and wiretaps, no matter what side they fight on.

And tell you what, it's mutual. They hate and fear us like anything, those small people with small ideas, the authoritarians who know better than we do. They blame every single problem in their lives on us, the nebulous other who comes to their town, takes their jobs, speaks some foreign tongue. A rape? That migrant worker looks suspicious. A theft? How about that out-of-towner with his big-city ways? Poverty, disease--even traffic jams--all the fault of some other who needs to be ethnically clensed to restore us all to our pre-lapsarian glory.

Which is not to say that they're above sticking up for us if it gives them the excuse to tighten the noose. Islamic fanatics who thought of Saddam Hussein as the devil incarnate are delighted to his toppling as the excuse to inspire another generation of jihadists. Just like the shitkickers who wouldn't have pissed on Manhattan if it were on fire and are nevertheless proud to stick a yellow ribbon magnet on their Hummers and proclaim Never Foret, evan as they forget that the 9/11 attacks were directed at Sodom on the Hudson, a city filled with gays, women in bifurcated garments and brown people who smell like curry.

DMZ is a special kind of angry comic, the kind of angry war comic that tells the story of the other side in the war. Non-combatants aren't just cannon fodder or collateral damage. We've got every bit as much agency, as much control over our destinies, as the guys with the guns and the stellite photos. But you wouldn't know it from how we're depicted in the press--instead we're the bodies blown apart on street corners, the shoeless sheep having our hemorrhoid cream confiscated at the airport.

DMZ is an inspiration to we who refuse to be dismembered and unshod. It's a wake-up callto stop letting greedy profiteers sell fresh wars to cement their authority and profitability.

If I had my way, this comic would be required reading in every civics class in America.

Cory Doctorow is an award winning author, blooger, journalist, and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. His novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.