Cover your Judges

When the clothes mask the man, when the other name is rose, when you step into the same river thrice and when cigars are always cigars then the time has arrived to trust whatever remains - Joe Sacco.  So he names his book Footnotes in Gaza, which leads folks like me to assume it is indeed a footnote, possibly to Palestine - a kind of B side comic book.

Except it's not the idiot's drowning fury, it is instead an understatement of itself, a self depreciating wink contained within the brutal seriousness of a conflict that no one can keep straight.  How many dead today?  How many bulldozers?  Who is supplying missiles to who?  How young were the suicide bombers?

Ted admits it and so do I, the news is just another showing of our comedic information overload combined with tragic desensitizing to violence.  Yet when Sacco does it the news matters.  Why?   Beauty may skin the deepest among us but digging into the humanity of the oppressed is this man's specialty.  He tells stories within stories all framed in a silver hammer that taps the skull lightly with that horrible rhythm that makes us question our lives, our psyches and our philosophies.

Tragedy plus time rubs us all down to footnotes, down to faded elegies and down to dark humor in the face of fate.  Smile, you are a captured camera.