A
t once rueful and hilarious, this collection by widely syndicated, Berkeley, Calif.–based, Muslim American political cartoonist Bendib graphically illustrates the Orwellian relationship between the rhetoric of freedom among the powerful and the realities faced by those on the receiving end. These topical single-frame tableaux, mostly drawn from 2003 to this year, are ingeniously detailed and only occasionally dated. One shows a military graveyard with headstones converted into filling-station pumps, while another presents the Statue of Liberty as pregnant with political prisoners, the world’s largest penal population and detainees in U.S.-sponsored camps and secret prisons worldwide. Bendib is an equal opportunity offender who connects the dots with gusto—whether dogging the Bush administration’s blunders in Iraq or post-Katrina New Orleans; nuclear proliferation; racism in the U.S.; corporate welfare and waste; Islamophobia; the faux democracies of Middle Eastern autocrats; or Israel’s continuing occupation and colonization of Palestinian land (one memorable image has Bush in Siamese twinship with Jerry Falwell’s Christian Right, lecturing Palestinian voters on the democratic necessity of separating church and state). Those inclined to see the Bush administration’s “war on terror” as an excuse for imperial aggrandizement and corporate greed will find Bendib’s no-holds-barred satire fiercely funny. Those not so inclined, beware. (June)
