There are several irritating things going on in this Pete Bagge anti-war cartoon (courtesy of Franklin Harris). First, there’s the generalized contempt for the average American, as represented by the various suburban stereotypes Bagge presents (the dopey talking head, the dopey mother, the dopey college girl, the dopey veteran, the dopey old woman, the dopey blue-collar guy–noticing a pattern here?). Certainly one can feel frustrated with one’s fellow citizens from time to time, but you can’t help but feel that Bagge’s point is that everything would be fine if it weren’t for those boozhwah WalMart-shopping flag-waving automatons, blah blah blah. Man, that shit gets tedious by the end of high school.
Second, there’s the bit about how, if the Iraqis decide to “elect” a fascist or Islamist, we’ll need to “teach them democracy all over again” or whatever. Ha ha ha, stupid American, who are we to decide what’s best for them, if they vote then we must respect them, it’s a different culture, besides, Florida and hanging chads and all that, blah blah blah. But the fact of the matter is, there’s nothing ridiculous about the notion that a “democracy” that elects a fascist or fundamentalist theocrat is invalid (ha ha ha, what about the U.S., Ashcroft, blah blah blah–folks, I’m way ahead of you on this stuff). If, after World War II, it became apparent that democratic reforms in Germany, Italy, or Japan were leading to the rise of another set of nationalistic militaristic demagogues, you can bet your bottom dollar that we’d use the troops in place in those countries to put the kibosh on those elections so fast it’d make your head spin. And this wouldn’t be anti-democratic in the slightest. The thing about democracy is that it presupposes the existence of, ahem, certain inalienable rights–life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness among them. Elect a leader whose explicit goal is to restrict those inalienable human rights, and that election is invalid by definition.
It’s stupid, and actually insulting, to act as though different cultures need not allow for those rights. If you believe in a liberal democracy, as most anti-war folks would claim, you believe that those rights are, in fact, inalienable, meaning you can’t rightfully get rid of them no matter what. Even if 99% of the population voted for a dictator, he’d still be a dictator, because you can’t choose to do away with an inalienable right. For some reason, a lot of people are finding this notion tough to deal with–and that’s a notion I find tough to deal with.