The Absurd Machine: A Cartoon History of the World
By Bruce Petty
Penguin, 1997, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Global 2000 is in trouble. About to enter the next millennium with five billion passengers on board, it crashes, breaking off its nose-cone and direction finder. With an entire world of people to be delivered from the '90s into the new era, the commander sends out an order for a Navigation Decision Assist Unit. “You get them at the sixties”, he tells Colin, the Speedalot bike messenger who lands the job.

And so Bruce Petty's cartoon history of the world is off and running through a wild, exuberant landscape of inky strokes that condense centuries of history, societies and ideas into incredible, but archly satirical and funny, cartoon machines that are Petty's specialty.

The instructions received by Colin are a little vague, and he finds himself making inquiries about digital navigation nose-cones in the wrong '60s -- like 1066, “with the sound of heavy conquering coming from the central torture district” -- before catching a train “stopping all sixties to the terminus”. He boards the SS Modernism in the 1860s along with passengers “hay-flecked from threshing the rye” who, as they board, are “sprayed with official coal dust, industrialised and their foreheads stamped with 'masses'”.

On board, class struggle and revolution threaten, but the engineers discover World War I, “feeding passengers into the boiler to keep up steam. The bilge starts to smell of dead patriotism.” Dodging lunatics with black moustaches, Colin nears the 1960s, after stagnating a while in the frozen '50s.

Youth and Politics soon take over. Vietnam plays in the Theatre of War (“quite a few death scenes”); there are Ginsberg, the pill, Sharpeville, Asia, gurus, inner peace and the sound of truncheon on skull to be negotiated. Foucault gesticulates from the margins.

Having found the '60s guidance device, Colin marvels at the '70s with its Family of Man concepts (imperialism thwarted and such like).

However, rich gangster types burst in, “armed with sawn-off democracy” and taking a lot of revenge under cover of “the national interest”, paving the way for the '80s theme park run by Maggie and Ronald with its thrills (for those with buckets of money) and spills for the rest of the patrons. The Wall Of Debt offers sheer fear and to “experience the market force with the Deregulator” is an inescapable ride.

Into the '90s and a new enemy in media-info overload -- “the ratings battleground is strewn with people mown down by clever advertising. Medics are rescuing women trapped under midday chat shows. Rapid crisis-footage crushes time-to-think into rubble.”

“The sixties must get through”, declare Colin and his friends, as they dodge “stupefying five-second news clips” and “struggle through heavy studio talkshow fire”.

Mission accomplished, only to find that the Global 2000 commander doesn't want the '60s direction finder any more, what with the end of history and all that. But Colin and his friends from the '60s challenge this.

The climax is somewhat un-climactic, however, because, despite being graphically momentous, it is politically eclectic and fragile, and not at all clear on its theoretical foundations.

Concerning the socialist potential of 1968, too, Petty is a little condescending (“low-budget history being made by amateurs”) and simplistic (1968 marches ahead purposefully but Mao and student violence break its momentum -- true enough but only a part of the story).

For Petty, the cartoonist's line is not the shortest way from here to socialism (the ship of Socialism had sunk many panels ago). Nevertheless, the best of the '60s (which have been present throughout all human history), such as the will to protest injustice and to create a new world ruled by human values of solidarity and love and laughter, endures.

This article was posted on the Green Left Weekly Home Page.
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