Stephen Lemons

“Yeah, I guess that’s my calling card now,” Crew told me on one of my trips to the C.I.A. “There were other films I was involved in I liked better, but that’s the one people always mention.”

Crew’s been a friend of mine since I began going to the indie rock/performance art venue five years ago, when it was underground and served liquor without a license. The police eventually raided the C.I.A., closing the dimly lit nightspot for a few years. When Crew and co-owner Robert Ferguson reopened it in 2001 — all operations above board — the once-black interior was painted in garish reds and yellows and decorated with a circus sideshow motif. Crew, a freak show fanatic, put his vast collection of sideshow exhibits and paraphernalia on display. Vintage banners advertising Sweet Marie, a 643-pound femme fatale, share space with the severed arm of a French nobleman, a dead fairy, the skull of the world’s smallest Freemason and the hirsute, severed head of Sasquatch.

Most of these are classic sideshow “gaffs,” or fakes, like the two-headed baby nailed above the bar or the “merman” enshrined in glass nearby. But the clown, according to Crew, is quite real.

“This attorney friend of mine called me up one day on a speakerphone with all his lawyer pals around and goes, ‘Carl, how would you like to lease a dead clown?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? Of course!’ All the other attorneys just roared with laughter. It took like four months to get the paperwork done, but now I have him for six months. I won’t tell you how much it cost me, but it wasn’t cheap,” Crew said.

I was skeptical he would ever get this clown; once he got it, my incredulity was slow to fade. Sure, lying there under glass in red vestments, a Shriner’s cap and long-faded greasepaint, the brownish body did look like a well-preserved cadaver. The fingernails showed sign of decay, and there was bushy, black hair in the nose — details that would be difficult to fabricate, but not impossible. We were in Hollywood, after all.

I could find nothing online about Achile Chatouilleu, so I pushed Crew for some corroboration. It came in dribs and drabs. Nothing incontrovertible, of course, but enough to make me think that Crew had perhaps produced the genuine article. There were photos, said to be of Chatouilleu while he was still alive, and a ragged, blue turn-of-the-century poster for “The Great London Circus” at Madison Square Garden with Chatouilleu’s name on the bill. Finally, Crew came through with the photocopy of a death certificate stating that Achile Chatouilleu, a “retired clown” born Feb. 3, 1866, died of “chronic nephritis” on Jan. 13, 1912.

Crew asked me not to reveal where Chatouilleu died or the names of his parents, listed as immigrants from Scotland on the death certificate. Chatouilleu was not the clown’s birth name, and supposedly his descendants, who live on a ranch near Yosemite, wish to remain anonymous. But the death certificate and the rest of it could be forgeries. I remained unconvinced.

“You still think it’s a hoax?” asked Crew. “What do you want me to do, slice it open like a pumpkin for you?”

Actually, yes, but since Crew says the body was embalmed in mercury, arsenic or a combination (something mortuaries did long ago, one medical examiner told me), the pumpkin slice would likely prove lethal. I contacted Christine Quigley, author of several tomes on death, including “Modern Mummies: The Preservation of the Human Body in the Twentieth Century” (McFarland & Company). What she had to say might make old Chatouilleu sit up and throw confetti.

“More likely than not it’s a preserved body,” says Quigley. “Because it would be harder to fake something like that than it would be for it to be real. What’s most unlikely are the stories in these kinds of cases. Now, I’ve never heard of this particular mummy, but generally I’ve found that the stories tend to be fabrications because they’re in the carnival circuit. Sometimes carnies bought these mummies from the local funeral home director, who kept them for years hoping the family will claim them. It doesn’t happen anymore, but they used to over-embalm these bodies. That’s why they’ve lasted so long.”

Quigley says that often the bodies became local attractions which people would visit on Halloween, for instance. A carnival operator would come through town, hear of the body and make the funeral director an offer. The corpse then became part of the traveling road show, with an outlandish legend concocted to draw in a paying crowd.

“Sometimes the mortuaries held on to them. There’s one case of a funeral home out in the Midwest which still has the body of this guy George Stein, who died in the ’20s. In fact, they moved recently and took the body with them instead of interring him,” says Quigley.

Indeed, Quigley explains that though the retail sale of corpses no longer occurs legally, there’s nothing necessarily illegal about having one in your possession. Though funeral homes have guidelines to follow, the law regarding what you can and can’t do with human remains can be a gray area, according to the author.

Quigley cited several cases where human remains were used as sideshow attractions. In 1976, during the filming of an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man” in Long Beach, Calif., the TV crew discovered the mummified body of Old West outlaw Elmer McCurdy in a decrepit fun house where he had been used as part of an attraction. There’s also Marie O’Day, whose body was supposedly preserved naturally in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. A murderess named Hazel Farris is on display in Alabama, and somewhere out there is a corpse with one gold tooth — “Gold Tooth Jimmy.” For Quigley, Crew’s dead clown was one in a long line that includes Mao Tse-tung and Lenin.

But the clincher was my conversation with veteran sideshow operator Jeff Murray, who along with his wife, Sue, has operated sideshows for the past 20 years throughout the United States. His company, Harmur Shows, is based in Ahwahnee, Calif. — also in the Yosemite area, not too far from the circus family that owns Chatouilleu’s body. Murray claims that while on the sideshow circuit he ran across a member of this family who tried to interest him in an odd exhibit.

“They’re basically a gypsy family,” Murray says of the clown’s caretakers. “I don’t even know their last name, but they’ve been around for years. I used to see their son Danny down at Leg Lake when I opened for the spring. His wife was a midcamp, which is the carny term for a palm reader. She always had a booth there. I found out they live not too far from here. He mentioned this stiff they had, but I wasn’t that interested. See, we used to have a show of two-headed babies. Real ones, preserved in formaldehyde. But a lot of showmen started to get busted for transporting them across state lines, so we sold them all to collectors. So when he started talking about this dead body, I had no interest at all because I’d just gotten rid of the ones we had.”

Murray’s never seen the body, but he’d encountered “stiffs” during his travels and had no reason to doubt him. Back in the day, he saw Gold Tooth Jimmy, shrunken heads and pickled babies. He knows the whole history of Marie O’Day and can relate in minute detail other cases of sideshow mummies.

“I thought it was a little strange that they had a dead body, but they said it was a family member, and of course you never know with gypsies. It could be one of those situations where they ended up with this body somehow and made up a story to go along with it,” Murray says.

Taking into account what Murray and Quigley have to say, as well as the condition of the body itself — the way it’s dressed and the documents Crew has for it — I lean toward accepting the artifact as authentic clown carrion, even if part of the clown tale turns out to be myth. Fortunately, Crew says, forensic science may be the final judge. He’s been approached by producers for National Geographic TV’s popular “Mummy Road Show,” who want to X-ray the corpse. Right now it’s up to the family to decide. As for Crew, he’s already on to his next acquisition.

“It’s the body of Alligator Boy, and in mint condition,” he squeals. “Now don’t tell me you want a death certificate for this, too!”

Even if some critics hailed early flicks like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” by the early ’80s most seemed to agree with John Simon’s acerbic assessment that Bogdanovich’s “entire filmmaking prowess is not much more than a mnemonic feat.” Whatever; in person, the 62-year-old is thoroughly charming, and lacks the pretense so often ascribed to him by caricaturists. Can a guy who schleps his own water around with him in a tote bag be all bad?

Moreover, his latest picture, “The Cat’s Meow,” is an elegant, entertaining little film detailing the famously puzzling 1924 cruise aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida; just a few days after, one of the passengers died mysteriously. Among those who were onboard: Hearst (Edward Herrmann); his paramour Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst); her aspiring paramour Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard); and the fly in the ointment, conniving producer Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes). Gossip maven Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly) and novelist Elinor Glyn (Joanna Lumley) round out the ship’s manifest. And Bogdanovich plays them all like a sly maestro. “Citizen Kane” it ain’t, but it’s fun to watch. Give the devil his due.

Do you think your old friend Orson Welles would have liked the film?

I hope so. I certainly felt his spirit around when we made it, watching. I don’t know about guiding me, but I think he was on our side. He was the one who told me the story in the first place. He told it to me over 30 years ago as an example of how different Hearst was from Charles Foster Kane. The general misunderstanding about “Citizen Kane” is that it was supposed to be about Hearst, but it wasn’t.

Charles Foster Kane was a composite character based on three or four press lords including a famous one in Chicago named McCormick, who built the Chicago Opera House for his girlfriend, who was a singer. That whole aspect of Kane had nothing to do with Hearst. And Orson didn’t play it like Hearst. Hearst was a kind of pear-shaped fellow who had a high voice and whose hair fell down over his forehead. He looked a lot like Edward Herrmann, but not as handsome.

How did Mr. Welles come to tell you the story?

I was interviewing him for the book we did, “This Is Orson Welles,” but we didn’t use it in the book because at the time, it seemed a bit incendiary. Interestingly enough, he heard the story from a member of Hearst’s inner circle — Marion Davies’ nephew Charles Lederer, the screenwriter. I talked to Charlie Lederer a few years later and he confirmed it. Charlie had known it since he was 12. That’s about how old he was when it happened. He confirmed this as fact, that there was this “accident” during the cruise.

How ironic that after Welles told you that story so long ago, you wound up directing this picture.

Yes, it was ironic. The script arrived on my desk 30 years later and neither the writer nor the producer had any idea that I knew anything about it … I don’t know if I would have read it with as much interest if Orson hadn’t told me. I often don’t read scripts that are sent to me, I have someone read them for me. This one I read on my own. I saw these characters in it and I thought, “My God, it’s that story.” So I owe it to Orson. If it hadn’t been for him, I might not have done it.

Your Hearst seems rather likable in some ways.

Actually, he’s pretty ruthless. But he’s human. It’s the humanity, I think, that makes you understand him. When you understand someone, it’s hard to hate them. If you get to know anybody, I suppose, you discover that people are good and bad and all the shades in between. Nobody’s all one thing.

Do you think people have changed much since that era, or do you think we’re all pretty much still the same?

Human nature stays the same, but maybe certain aspects of it get exacerbated. I think we’re in a more cynical era than ever before, and I think that the audience for movies, for example, has been somewhat debased and brutalized by the enormous amount of violence and slaughter on the screen. You sort of say, “Well, 30 people just got killed, so what’s next?” Having been, I’m afraid, part of a murder, when Dorothy Stratten was murdered, I can tell you that one murder reverberates for the rest of the life of the people who were close to that person. That’s one of the things about this picture, it’s about a murder that changes everything. One murder. Not three, not 10 — one.

So we’ve been “desensitized,” as they say.

Yes, a little. On the other hand, you take any individual out of that audience and have them exposed to the murder of someone they care about, they won’t be desensitized. We’re only desensitized to the spectacle of it.

Did Ms. Stratten’s death change the way you look at violence?

Yes, it did. I never particularly liked violence in movies, but I didn’t have the same reaction to it that I do now. I think it’s all handled by people who don’t know what it’s really like. It’s just people making movies, and saying, “OK, well, this guy gets killed, and then we go over here and this guy gets killed,” and I’m thinking, each death counts.

Is there any solution to that problem, or is it something we just have to accept?

I think it’s everybody’s personal responsibility. Filmmakers have a responsibility to the audience and to the work, and I wish they felt that responsibility more, especially to what’s true in life. The tragic events of September brought knowledge of premeditated murder to an awful lot of people who didn’t know about it.

I watched those people on TV afterwards, and it broke my heart. I knew where they were coming from. And I knew they were in for a life of it. They talk about closure and getting past it — Christ, it doesn’t ever happen that way. These poor people on television a week later talking about it, thinking that they’re dealing with it. You know, it’s a truism for people who’ve been through this that the fifth year is the worst. It happened to me. For some reason after five years, it’s like it’s just happened again. It’s also something you don’t recover from, you learn to live with. You don’t get past it, you learn to move on with it as part of your life.

You have to think of it in this context; the murder in “The Cat’s Meow” affects everyone there for all their lives. I don’t know that Marion would have stayed with Hearst had it not been for the murder. I think she felt guilty that she was kind of the cause of it.

Then it’s established that Chaplin and Davies actually were fooling around?

Well, nobody was under the bed. But that gossip item that’s referred to in the film linking Chaplin and Davies actually appeared in the Daily News that weekend. I have a copy of it. Chaplin was a notorious philanderer. And Marion evidently had some affairs with other people. We presume it happened.

Of all the characters in the film, who do you identify with?

That’s an interesting question. Really, I can identify with all the men. I’ve been down and out like Ince. I’ve been obsessed with a woman like Hearst. I’ve been lookin’ to get laid like Chaplin. So, I understand where they’re coming from. And I understand, as I said, what a murder does. My sympathy, if you want to ask that, is with Marion, which you can see in the picture to a degree.

It’s her tragedy, I think. It’s a woman’s story — she’s trapped between powerful men. In 1924, women had only been able to vote for the second time. I made a reference to that in the film, because it’s fairly shocking to remember that. It was November of 1924 and the election had just happened. Nineteen-twenty was the first year women were allowed to vote. It’s about a woman who seems to have everything, but doesn’t quite. “I have me,” she says. But she’s not really right.

If you could go back in time, which decade would you want to go back to?

If I had a time machine? I’d pick the ’30s. I’d want to be a filmmaker under contract at Paramount as Lubitsch was head of the studio.

So you might’ve been one of Mr. Welles’ colleagues?

I would’ve met him, yeah. I looked it up one time and I told Orson, “You know the day you started shooting ‘Citizen Kane’ I was 1 year old?” And he said, “Aw, shut up!”

You think about him often, don’t you?

He was a very dear friend for most of our association, and yes, his spirit ranges over everything. He was quite extraordinary.

You speak of Mr. Welles’ spirit. I’m curious, what do you think happens to us after we die?

Kind of a personal question. I don’t think the spirit dies. I think the spirit is imperishable, that it remains, and is around or not, depending on different things. I don’t know about murderers, though. I don’t know where they go. I keep feeling that the murderers who blew up the World Trade Center are doomed to haunt that area for the rest of their lives.

It was at this point that Hitler, falling back on his belief in the occult, called the most renowned clairvoyant in the land to his headquarters at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin for a private session. The man Hitler met with that day is the subject of a recent biography (the first in the English language), “Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant,” by Mel Gordon.

Hanussen, 43 at the time of the Hotel Kaiserhof session, was a man whose name was synonymous with psychic phenomena in Central Europe. The Vienna-born con man/celebrity seer was known for predicting the future, casting prescient horoscopes and astounding audiences with his feats of hypnotism and mind reading. In Berlin, Hanussen was a rock star before there were rock stars, with a vast business enterprise trading on the voracious German hunger for all things paranormal.

Hitler became a Hanussenite when in March of 1932 the psychic’s own weekly newspaper, Erik Jan Hanussen’s Berliner Wochenschau, printed the startling prophecy that within one year’s time the future Führer would become Reichschancellor. Most Berliners scoffed. For many, Hitler was a megalomaniacal clown.

But if the average Berliner thought Hanussen’s prognostication absurd, Hitler certainly didn’t. When Hanussen came to him that cold day in January, the Nazi leader was filled with dread anticipation, and kept the meeting secret should the results be negative. Hanussen placed Hitler on a seat in the middle of the room, examined his hands, counted the bumps on his head and sank into a mystical trance. The words he spoke filled the Führer with elation, says Gordon.

“I see victory for you,” Hanussen said. “It cannot be stopped.”

By the end of the month, Hitler had cut a deal with his enemies and become titular head of a coalition government. Hanussen’s vision had given him hope in his hour of uncertainty. One can only wonder the intensity of his rage, if the raving anti-Semite had known at the time that the man he had adopted as his personal soothsayer, the chap nicknamed “the Prophet of the Third Reich,” the decadent mystic who had just run his hands through his Aryan locks, was in fact … a Jew. According to Gordon, a professor of theater arts at the University of California at Berkeley and author of such colorful tomes as “The Grand Guignol: The Theater of Horror and Terror,” and “Voluptuous Panic: the Erotic World of Weimar Berlin,” Hanussen started life as Hermann Steinschneider, with a birth certificate that read “Hebrew male.” An unlikely beginning for one destined to become Hitler’s favorite fortuneteller.

Gordon’s complicated, fascinating tale is one familiar to many Germans, but completely unknown to Americans, save for some devotees of magic who regard Hanussen’s name, acquired while his career was in its infancy, with a reverence second only to that of Harry Houdini’s. Despite the 1988 film “Hanussen” by Hungarian director Istvan Szabo (starring Klaus Maria Brandauer in the strangely Aryanized title role), and a number of articles written in English by German imigris in the 1930s and ’40s, Americans have had almost no exposure to this bizarre tale of a Jew who played the part of psychic advisor to Hitler. No wonder the uninitiated roll their eyes when Gordon starts to talk about it.

“It’s like saying, ‘Hitler’s favorite rabbi,’ people are waiting for the punch line,” confesses Gordon. “But it’s not a joke. Hitler and Hanussen did meet about a dozen times between 1932 and 1933. Of course, if Hitler had known that Hanussen was Jewish, he would have disposed of him as fast as he could have. But it’s not so much later that he was disposed of. After the Reichstag fire, everything changed.”

The burning of the Reichstag on Feb. 27, 1933, for which German communists took the fall, paved the way for the consolidation of power in Hitler’s hands and the suspension of all civil liberties. Eerily, the day before, Hanussen had predicted the event through a medium during the opening soiree of his newly minted pagan temple, the Palace of the Occult, a marble and gold-decked Taj Mahal of the black arts in Berlin decorated with astrological signs and religious statues. There, in the presence of Nazi officials and assorted VIPs, the seer claimed to see a “great house” in flames during a siance in his sanctum sanctorum, the Room of Glass. Hours later, the Reichstag was engulfed in a mysterious conflagration. “The Reichstag fire is such a big story — the first mystery of WWII. It’s still not resolved to this day,” says Gordon, “sort of like a European Kennedy assassination question. Did Goebbels somehow have a communist patsy, Marinus van der Lubbe, ignite the Reichstag? Did the communists do it, or is there some other story? Something that started leaking out from the Nazi side from the very beginning was that Hanussen was responsible for it or had something to do with it.”

Despite his Semitic origins, Hanussen had extremely close ties to the Nazi party, especially since his fateful augury that Hitler would somehow become Reichschancellor. He had lent hundreds of thousands of marks to high-ranking leaders of the Nazis, like Hermann Goering, and held IOUs from them. He had befriended Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, the sadistic, depraved commander of Berlin’s SA, and referred to Hitler as “my pal Adolf.” Certainly, Hanussen could have had inside information of a Reichstag plot. Or perhaps he was even more directly involved.

Gordon relates that some conspiracy theorists believe Hanussen may have hypnotized the fall guy van der Lubbe to do his bidding, either with or without the help of Nazi conspirators. As far-fetched as the possibility sounds, one suddenly sees how the presence of Hanussen in this story becomes an uncomfortable dilemma for historians. To dwell too much on Hanussen’s involvement smacks of indirectly tainting the primary victims of the Holocaust with assisting in Hitler’s takeover of Germany and, subsequently, their own destruction.

Perhaps this was the reason Istvan Szabo’s cinematic treatment of the Hanussen tale conveniently omits Hanussen’s Jewishness. And it could account for the dearth of information on Hanussen in English-language texts. However, Gordon, who is himself Jewish, asserts his belief that Hanussen somehow participated in a plot to set fire to the Reichstag.

“My personal feeling is that all the evidence points to the fact that at the very least Hanussen was involved or he couldn’t have known about it. Unless you believe in clairvoyance, which I don’t. The other story is why he was killed. That is, he had to be eliminated because he knew too much,” says Gordon.

There were other reasons why the Nazis wanted Hanussen dead. Goebbels and Goering both saw him as an interloper and a potential rival for the Führer’s attentions, and there was the little matter of all those IOUs Hanussen had collected. Hanussen also, supposedly, had film footage of SA members involved in homosexual orgies. But perhaps more than anything, it was his Jewishness that made him a liability. The communist press had long published reports that Hanussen was Jewish, but it wasn’t until the Reichstag fire bequeathed totalitarian powers to the Nazis and allowed them to eliminate the communists as a threat that they had the time to focus on Hanussen’s bloodline.

Hanussen’s time was up, and he knew it. In a missive written in invisible ink, he informed a colleague, “I always thought that business about the Jews was just an election trick of theirs. It wasn’t.” On the morning of March 25, 1933, Hanussen was arrested by the SA and summarily executed. His lifeless body was left in a field on the outskirts of Berlin.

So ended Europe’s greatest oracle since Nostradamus. But questions endure. For instance, why would any Jew, even an assimilated Jew, collaborate with a pack of power-mad racists filled with hatred for his people? Moreover, is there some possibility that Hanussen possessed a sixth sense that allowed him to correctly predict Hitler’s rise and the Reichstag blaze while blinding him to the inevitable consequences of his own dalliance with the fascists?

“One fellow Jewish clairvoyant Fred Marion asked Hanussen if he was afraid that if the Nazis came to power they would kill him if they found out he was a Jew,” says Gordon. “Hanussen told him it was a problem, but that he wanted to convince Hitler that there are good Jews like us who aren’t communists or capitalists. A vain thought, but he believed Hitler just needed his friendship to learn that there were good people everywhere.”

As for Hanussen’s purported extrasensory perception, Gordon ascribes Hanussen’s psychic home runs to an amazing perspicacity on the part of “the Prophet of the Third Reich,” which evidently failed him when it came to foreseeing his own demise. For Gordon, Hanussen also represents the mania for the occult that swept Germany at this time, as well as the dilemma of assimilated Jews when faced with the virulent anti-Semitism of Nazism.

“It’s such a bizarre story that people wonder why they haven’t heard of it before. They think it’s either a Hitler diaries forgery or some great exaggeration of some tiny little thing of no consequence,” says Gordon. “That’s why I include so many pictures and inserts from Hanussen publications in the book. In Germany certainly, it’s not a lost story, there’s all kinds of stuff all the time on it. But in America, the typical person who watches the History Channel is unaware of it. That’s why I wrote the book.”

The Bambi is not the only repository of such neo-noir visual poetics. Nearby, there’s the Brookside, Motel One, the Homestead and others. It’s a realm of half-full ashtrays, shot glasses brimming with bourbon and dames in horn-rims and bullet bras.

This sexually charged alternate universe is the purview of Ohio photographer Chas Ray Krider, who refers to his adult fantasyland simply as “motel fetish.” For the past five years, he’s explored this lamplit twilight zone in spreads for erotic magazines like Taboo, Libido and Leg World as well as for book compilations such as “Love, Lust, Desire,” “Femmes” and “The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Erotica.”

Krider’s creations, which he also produces for the amusement of himself and his collectors, sweat lounge-era exotica from every pore, transforming the otherwise mundane atmospherics of dusty motor inns into scenes echoing the work of Edward Hopper or Alfred Hitchcock. Imbued with warm, rich reds, greens and yellows and accented with décor from a bygone era, Krider’s vignettes reflect an imagination molded by a town such as Columbus — a town that, similar to other parts of Middle America, retains an odd “Peyton Place” feel to it.

Like Krider’s enticing, blank-faced models, these Columbus motel rooms seem trapped in amber and only lightly touched, if at all, by more recent conveniences and fashions.

“I’m drawing on my precognizant view of life — that kind of ’60s square life,” explains Krider, who declines to give his age. “In high school, I worked in a record store, and I was interested in the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But we sold tons of this easy-listening stuff. It was crap, I thought. I’d hear it all day long. I’d be so bored, I’d be flipping through the album bins, looking at these easy-listening album covers that have the most fantastic photographs on them. Very sexy, very seductive imagery. Today I find all of that precognizant input much more interesting and worth exploring. So when I go to a motel, I have in my mind a place where you could have a sexual encounter that’s neither pornographic nor that Sports Illustrated swimsuit mentality that we have today.”

Though Krider finds most of his motel room settings in Columbus, where the near-retro interior comes complete with the low daily rate, he does occasionally have to create or tweak the atmosphere to get the look he requires. If there’s a model in another city he wants, or if he’s doing commissioned work in Los Angeles, he travels knowing that the ingredients for his particular aesthetic recipe will be readily available.

“One day in L.A., we scouted 30 motel locations, and they all sucked. So I picked one, and I went to the thrift stores and bought some cheap carpet and some bad furniture and built a set. I can put in the kind of color, ambiance and the right forms I need. On location, it’s hard to find motels that haven’t been redecorated in the ’80s when you end up with something like a Southwestern, mauve theme,” he says.

Krider says he’s not trying to re-create any particular period, but rather a timeless quality based on memories of his youth. Sometimes he’ll even throw in an anachronism like a CD walkman to disrupt the idea that he’s manufacturing a sort of diorama of Kennedy-era leisure culture. His models often mirror this odd mixture of decades, sometimes wearing a girdle or see-through panties that Krider has salvaged from vintage clothes outlets, and matching them with their own shoes from the present and perhaps a recent bra from Victoria’s Secret.

The result is a time-warp that, in light of the ongoing interest in retro-lounge culture by young adults, creates certain visual conundrums. Take one photo of a woman’s legs and hips: She wears white undies, a black pump on one foot and the other bare save for beige nylons. Her velvet-gloved arm rests provocatively on her groin, and two cocktails sit on the floor before her. The image could double as cover art for novels by Raymond Chandler and Haruki Murakami.

Another of a woman standing next to a dated table lamp set on the floor, her hands tied by what looks like a black electrical cord might be a still from “Blue Velvet,” or an interpretation of some classic Irving Klaw bondage pic.

“Most of the things in my motels are really ’70s and early ’80s furniture and props,” Krider says. “But my whole sense of color really throws it back. People will always say it’s the 1950s. That’s maybe because it has what I call the warmth of the past. Also, my use of light and shadow is very film noir.”

Krider’s work contradicts the concept that everything interesting and original comes out of New York or L.A. Though Krider has 20 years of experience with fine art photography, much of it invested with the phycho-sexual tension of his “Motel Fetish” compositions, he is largely self-taught, having graduated from Ohio State with no specific major. He’s lived most of his life in Columbus, leaving only for a bit of hitchhiking after college.

And with the exception of some models like the inimitable Dita von Tease, who lives elsewhere and has her own following, most of Krider’s ladies are homegrown nonprofessionals with far from perfect bodies (as judged by Hollywood standards). These women, attractive yet somewhat ordinary, lend Krider’s compositions authenticity, and help sustain that suspension of disbelief provoked by the narrative aspect of the photos.

“I became an artist because I was interested in art as a vehicle through time and space,” he says. “Everyone’s actions should take them to a state of higher consciousness. The motel work for me is a kind of tantric yoga exercise. I’m taking these low sexual energies, and slowly, methodically moving them up to a higher plane. Basically, I’m building a still life, and the model is one part of that. Eventually she gets to her lowest emotional level, her true self. They just sink into this nothingness they’re in.”

What becomes frozen in time is “that moment when you have the anticipation you’re going to have this sexual fling,” says Krider. There’s also the potential for violence, perhaps even what the Germans call lustmord, or lust murder. And if Krider occasionally shows us what might be the pause after the storm, it might also be the stillness following homicide, with the killer outside the frame.

Krider is paused before a storm of sorts, having recently signed an agreement with Taschen for a motel fetish book due in October of this year. Though he dreams of having a film based on his art and directed by, of course, David Lynch, Krider probably won’t leave Columbus anytime soon. He seems a very precise individual, one who wants to be in total control of his environment and destiny. Columbus is the perfect setting for that.

“I’m living this strange motel-gothic existence,” he says. “You couldn’t do this thing in L.A. without getting into the industry and being part of the business. Here, it’s a completely fabricated kind of existence, because life here is that uninteresting. So you’ve got to go down deep inside to make a more rich environment.”

In one particularly sinister, oft-used head shot, a defiant Brady looks like he could give suspected terrorist mastermind Mohammad Atta lessons in ghoulishness. On February 29, 2000, the Sun took up the whole front page with this picture and the bold legend “Brady: Let Me Leave This Cesspit in a Coffin.” The story told of the murderer’s campaign to starve himself at Ashworth Mental Hospital, near Liverpool, where he’s a permanent resident. So far British justice has been unwilling to intervene, and his keepers have been force-feeding him.

The most chilling photo is from 1987. In it an older Brady, in sunglasses and surrounded by policemen, returns to the Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester, to help find the grave of his very first victim, the lovely, 16-year-old Pauline Reade, whom Brady had consigned to the earth some 20 years before. When they uncovered the corpse, it was apparent that her throat had been cut and that she had been sexually assaulted. To this day, the body of one other victim, 12-year-old Keith Bennett, has never been located on the moors where Brady says he buried him.

Given the recurring simulacra of horror, it’s understandable that all hell broke loose in Albion once American publisher Adam Parfrey of Feral House revealed that he would be releasing a manuscript the child killer had produced under the tutelage of acclaimed crime and occult writer Colin Wilson. Titled “The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis,” the book is a mixture of sociology, psychology and philosophy wherein Brady theorizes that serial murderers rise above the “bovine conformism” of the human herd. He then goes on to dissect the work of his peers: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Peter Sutcliffe (aka the “Yorkshire Ripper”), among others.

Here in the States, where few but the most ardent crime buffs know about the homicides Brady and his paramour Myra Hindley perpetrated in the early ’60s, the book has been selling online since September. The book’s journey to the shores of Brady’s homeland has been far more tortuous. Ashworth Mental Hospital initially objected on the grounds that their privacy rules had been violated, but they eventually relented. Relatives of the victims called the book obscene on principle, and pundits raised Cain because Parfrey paid a $5000 advance.

“Ian Brady doesn’t see a cent,” asserted the L.A.-based Parfrey when asked about the deal. “The proceeds go to Benedict Birnberg, Brady’s solicitor, who has reconfirmed to me that the money goes to Ian’s 90-year-old mother. [Brady] has no way to spend the money; no commissary accounts, nothing. After all, he is trying to kill himself.”

A British court cleared the way for the book to be released in Britain, where it became available in stores on Dec. 4, but that only provided more fodder for Fleet Street’s insatiable minions. British journalists leap at any opportunity to write more about their caged pet demon, now 64 and decrepit. In the ’60s, when both Brady and accomplice Hindley escaped the hangman’s noose by a few months because of the abolition of the death penalty in Britain, reporters clamored for blood. More recently, when Brady’s appeal for the right to stop eating failed, one cheeky tabloid started a “Post a Pie to Brady” effort to “keep the evil bastard alive.” Even the far more sophisticated Guardian ran a commentary by columnist Hugo Young on March 2, 2000, in which the author demanded that both Brady and Hindley rot in their cells.

“The Moors Murderers have no parallel in the culture, no equal in the almanac of foul, remembered crimes,” wrote Young. “A vast publication industry has been built on their continued existence unhanged, after butchery which 10 years earlier would have sent them to the gallows.”

This national obsession strikes me as a sort of fetish, like the mania for Nazism that an endless march of films, books and documentaries will never slake. But why Brady and not some other notorious psychopath? Certainly there have been more successful killers in Britain and in the States, murderers far more monstrous in their modus operandi. For example, Charles Manson, though iconic, doesn’t get nearly the amount of spilled ink in America that Brady gets in England.

Part of this intense hatred has to do with the nature of the crime itself and the climate in which it took place. The early ’60s was a more innocent time, in some ways, or at least better about keeping its hypocrisies hidden. Both Brady and Hindley were young and good looking, and on the surface they seemed like any other working-class couple of the era. With Brady, then 27, dressed in collar and jacket, and Hindley, then 23, in her bleached-blond bouffant and go-go attire, the two of them together could have been up to nothing more fiendish than a hot time at the local disco.

They met while working for a small chemical corporation near Manchester. Brady was a stock clerk with a criminal past, having done some time for petty thievery. He planned to execute future criminal enterprises, and maintained connections to Britain’s underworld. More significantly, Brady was an intellectual with unusual predilections. Hitler, Dostoevski and De Sade were a few of his favorite authors; “Crime and Punishment” and “The Possessed” were his favorite books. Already he had declared himself an enemy of society, and he was but one step away from the Dostoevskian hypothesis that if God is dead, all things are permitted.

Myra Hindley, however, was nothing close to an intellectual. By all accounts, she was a completely average young Catholic girl with an affection for animals and children, perhaps a bit more naive and easily led than most. Not long after she went to work at the same firm as Brady, she fell in love with him. He spurned her for some time before coming around, but once he did, Hindley became slavishly devoted. Brady introduced her to S/M and amateur pornography, and filled her credulous noggin with his peculiar blend of moral relativism and the Marquis de Sade. She became his willing apprentice, his faithful servant. When his talk of criminal enterprises turned to talk of murder for pleasure, she procured his young victims for him, offering them rides or otherwise luring them in for the kill.

Together Brady and Hindley used the young boys and girls they abducted for sexual gratification, on occasion forcing them to pose for pornographic shots before raping and killing them. They buried the bodies on the moors, and sometimes even enjoyed picnics and tea parties on the graves. The snapshots they took of themselves in these gay vignettes later led investigators to the graves of 10-year-old Leslie Ann Downey and 12-year-old John Kilbride.

What gave the pair away was their attempt to recruit Hindley’s brother-in-law David Smith. Smith walked in on Brady as he was finishing off 17-year-old Edward Evans with an ax in the council house Brady and Hindley shared with her grandmother. But instead of joining their homicidal cabal, Smith went to the cops, and that was the end of the duo’s bloodstained adventures. On May 6, 1966, they both received life in prison for their crimes.

For many years, Hindley insisted that Brady alone killed their victims and that she was an unwilling accomplice. She later changed her tune and expressed sorrow for her deeds, all in the hopes of winning parole. But whenever the parole idea has been floated in the press, it’s immediately been shot down. Brady for his part has demonstrated very little remorse and a longing to die unless his situation in the mental hospital improves. At one time hospital administrators allowed him access to a word processor and let him transcribe books into Braille for the blind, but no longer.

In his introduction to the book, Colin Wilson quotes from one of Brady’s letter to him, part of an ongoing, 10-year correspondence between the two:

My life is over, so I can afford honesty of expression those with a future cannot. If I had my time over again, I’d get a government job and live off the state … a pillar of society. As it is, I’m eager to die. I chose the wrong path and am finished.

Brady comes off as far more bellicose in “The Gates of Janus.” Janus is the two-faced Roman god of doorways and beginnings, the entity from which January derives its name. The choice of this title implies several layers of meaning: Brady looking backward at his own actions; Brady as a duplicitous man with two sides to his personality; and so on. Janus’ temple in the Roman Forum was a double-gated structure with high symbolic value to the Roman state. When the gates of Janus were closed, the Roman Empire was at peace. When they were open, it indicated that Rome was at war. In Brady’s book, at least, those metaphorical gates are open, and it is with civilization that he does battle. Hence Brady’s quote from Shakespeare’s “King Richard III” at the beginning of the first chapter: “Let us to it pell-mell; if not to Heaven, then hand in hand to Hell.”

Like a modern-day incarnation of Milton’s Satan, Brady delivers a discourse that is twisted, self-serving and strangely persuasive. Quoting liberally from the likes of Dylan Thomas, Byron, Nietzsche, Sun Tzu and Buddha, Brady mocks what he regards as the rank mendacity of the status quo. Society’s laws and morality derive from the ruling classes and their need to maintain their collective position at the pinnacle of the food chain, according to Brady. In his eyes, these assorted generals, politicians, lawyers and so on are just as rapacious and cruel as any serial killer. He asks:

How many centuries would you suppose it would take for freelance “criminals” and “madmen” to equal the numerical carnage the “law-abiding” and “sane” can achieve in such a comparatively short span of time? One should cultivate discrimination in accepting or respecting one’s moral “superiors.” So often they certainly are not.

Brady may be technically correct here, but with a few more Osama bin Ladens in the world, freelance psychopaths might one day even the score. This skewering of modern mores takes up the first half of the book, with the second half given over to a far more intriguing section wherein Brady examines the crimes of his fellow serial killers. Like a literary critic analyzing his favorite novels, Brady takes on the mantle of a murderous eminence grise — a professorial Hannibal Lecter holding forth on the practitioners of his métier.

Speaking of Richard Ramirez, known as the “Night Stalker,” Brady in fact compares serial killers to writers, as they both pursue “the quest for immortality” with serial killers using “a knife rather than a pen, skin rather than paper.” He further states that “anything less a medium than human material” is no substitute for the “actual experience of writing on living and breathing pages.” Considering Ramirez’s delight in raping and humiliating his victims before consigning them to oblivion, this commentary is especially chilling.

Brady is quite clear that he regards a certain class of serial killers to be superior beings, gods by their own choice. For him, John Wayne Gacy was “the perfect psychopath.” And Ted Bundy takes on the mantle of some bloody demiurge:

Life was too short to be restricted and deformed by the selfish designs of the already privileged. [Bundy] would thoroughly enjoy giving them a lesson in idiosyncratic “justice,” and lead them on a dance worthy of Zarathustra, “lover of leaps and tangents,” monster of divine laughter! A Dionysiac demon was rising from the abyss of his subconscious, eager to take flight, sink talons and teeth into living flesh, savor the blood, rip out the soul.

Brady wanted his book to be published under the pseudonym “Francois Villon,” the renowned 15th century criminal/poet of France, but his publisher persuaded him to use his own name. Brady barely touches on his own crimes, and Feral House’s Parfrey says Brady’s solicitor has an autobiography under lock and key. One wonders if Brady is toying with us from his living grave at Ashworth, trying to whet the public’s appetite for his life story, to be published on his death.

Certainly, Brady commands an audience. Something about the mournful poetry of the moors and the folie à deux between Brady and Hindley has snared the imaginations of many in Britain and out. Manchester-bred rock star Morrissey wrote a controversial Smiths song, “Suffer the Little Children,” wherein Brady’s victims call out from the grave, “Oh, find me … find me, nothing more/We are on a sullen misty moor.”

American novelist Peter Sotos makes incessant references to the case in his work, and on the cover of his book “Tick,” there’s a picture of Pat Hodges, a little girl Brady and Hindley enlisted to read newspaper accounts of the children they had “disappeared” into a tape recorder. Painter Marcus Harvey incurred the wrath of visitors to the much-maligned 1997 “Sensation” show in London with a portrait of Hindley that viewers pelted with eggs.

Brady’s writings, as macabre and vengeful as they are, cannot be easily dismissed, even for those who find them repulsive and repugnant. They offer a unique moral lesson, a glimpse into the abyss of a damned soul as well as an illustration of the reductio ad absurdum of the moral relativism Brady espouses. In the end, that moral relativism is the slipperiest of ethical slopes, leading those who embrace it without hesitation to the sort of self-made hell in which Brady evidently now dwells.

McGruder’s 4-year-old strip does garner laughs, but not without an accompanying sting. The point man in the strip is the pint-size Black Panther-in-spirit Huey Freeman, who recently has been as busy as an anarchist at a WTO meeting. Among his many subversive acts, Freeman has called the FBI tip line to report Ronald Reagan as aiding and abetting terrorism, suggested that the terrorists may be making their bucks these days manufacturing flags and has pointed out the parallels between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden during a Thanksgiving meal prayer. About the only thing Huey hasn’t done yet is strap on a Kalashnikov and set off for Kandahar. But now that John Walker’s bearded mug is on the front page of dailies worldwide, anything’s possible.

A number of the 250 publications that carry “The Boondocks” have taken exception to the sardonic sedition of McGruder’s characters. The New York Daily News dropped the strip for about a month and a half, Newsday in Long Island chose not to run Sept. 11-inspired strips the first week they started coming out and the Dallas Morning News has moved the strip to a separate section altogether from other comics. None of this fazed McGruder. In response, he temporarily “replaced” the strip with “The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon,” where the two symbols sing the National Anthem and talk tough about the U.S. kicking tail.

Angry letter writers have suggested McGruder emigrate, and McGruder admits that he’s so disgusted with his native land he may eventually do just that. Recently, he tore himself away from ranting at the tube in his Los Angeles digs long enough to rant to Salon about the state of the nation.

Your strips post-9/11 have touched a raw nerve with some folks. Did you anticipate all the attention you’ve gotten because of them?

It’s become a story because of timing. You know, the New York Daily News temporarily pulls the strip, and in the middle of this wartime situation, it became a story about freedom of speech and all that. The reality is I get pulled all the time from various newspapers for different reasons. And it’s been that way since the strip started. Usually, it’s a few strips here, a few strips there. Granted, this is the longest I’ve ever been removed from a major paper. But it wasn’t that big of a deal, really. There’s been everything from the National Rifle Association strips that got pulled in Dallas to some strips I did about Bob Johnson [of Black Entertainment Television] … You know, the newspapers make the call. They pull the strips that they don’t want to run, and they put the strips back when they’re comfortable. I’ve gotten used to it. I was somewhat surprised at how big of a story it became, because it’s happened so often.

You don’t feel like you’re under siege, then?

No, because the Syndicate has not asked me to do anything different. And I’m in 250 newspapers, and none of them have asked me to do anything different. So I’ve been doing exactly what I want, and I haven’t felt any pressure to do otherwise.

What’s the status of things now with the Daily News and the Dallas Morning News?

The Daily News said they were going to look at it on a daily basis and decide whether or not to run it. So I have no idea what they’re doing. I heard about the Dallas Morning News moving it to a different section, but I don’t know much about it. Newsday chose not to run a few strips, and I’ve heard some reports of some smaller papers. But I don’t really keep track of stuff like that. With over 200 clients, it would be too time-consuming and more trouble than it was worth to worry about what each one was doing and why. I do the strip, send it out and what the newspapers want to do with it is up to them. It’s between them and their readers.

Was there ever a doubt in your mind that you were going to address Sept. 11 in the strip?

No, the only question was how soon? And that was the big decision that had to be made. My deadlines at the time were falling on Tuesdays. The day the attack happened was the deadline, and then I had a week to decide whether or not I was going to talk about it the following week. And I did.

I wanted to ask you specifically about the Thanksgiving strip where Huey compares President Bush to Osama bin Laden. Do you think that’s crossing the line on a holiday like that after a major tragedy such as Sept. 11?

A couple of things about that: One, I stole that joke from an Internet forward that was going around. I don’t even know who originated it. Two, the best thing about that strip is that it never says G.W. Bush. The reader has to make the connection. If the reader reads what I wrote and thinks about G.W. Bush, that means it’s fucking true! So I didn’t make it up; you came to the conclusion as well. And if it’s true, why are you mad at me? If he’s not all those things, then what are you mad at? (Laughs.)

Have there been strips you’ve pulled back on because of Sept. 11?

It’s always happening. It never happens because I send it in and the Syndicate says we can’t run it. It’s always part of the creative process of me trying to walk that line and say the things I want to say without taking it too far and doing stuff that you’re just not allowed to do in the newspapers. That’s always a challenge.

Why did you decide to target the post-Sept. 11 displays of patriotism in the strip, and essentially mock them with those two characters Flagee and Ribbon?

Because it wasn’t genuine. I thought it was very faddish, and there was no real weight behind it. You know, we just came off an election that was a mess. We still don’t know if the president won the election. We do know that he got less votes nationwide. There’s no question about that. And he may not even have won, legitimately, the electoral contest. There were reports of the massive disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida, which went totally unreported in this country, but was covered widely by the foreign press. There were black people in Florida yelling and screaming, trying to get somebody to pay attention to them. They were saying that they had their rights taken away from them, and they were not allowed to vote. And nobody in this country cared. Where was the flag then?

Where was this embracing of American ideals when people had their rights ripped from them so unjustly? We have a president who was appointed by the Supreme Court, and there was none of this talk about freedom and love of country at that time. So I feel like the deaths of 4,000 people had really nothing to do with love of country or not. This country made giant mistakes and failed to protect its people. We don’t need to be rallying around the government and supporting it, we need to be holding it accountable and being very critical so this type of thing doesn’t happen again. So there are a number of reasons why I was uncomfortable with the whole flag thing.

A lot of folks would argue that no matter what our disagreements are internally, if we’re attacked from the outside, we have to come together and support the current administration even if we have problems with it. How do you respond to that argument?

I don’t think that’s true. Look, they’re telling us these people are bad because they hate us, and they hate our way of life. And they hate our way of life because they hate freedom, and they hate the fact that we have freely elected officials. This is what the president said. Well, he wasn’t elected! We really have to think about that. Considering that people around the world, other people, people “over there,” “bad” people will always try to do bad things, that’s kind of outside of your control. The only thing you can be responsible for is what goes on here. The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy. None. The only thing we can exercise some will on is what happens here domestically. So I think the focus is wrong.

I don’t think the American people should be worried at all about Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or anybody, because our government is going to do what it wants to do to them regardless of what we want them to do or not. All we can control is what happens here. And what happened here is what allowed those attacks to take place. The intelligence community failed. Security failed. The military failed. Everybody failed at the same time. I can be really nice to them and say, “You guys really messed up and need to check yourself.” Or I could be not nice and say, “You know, I don’t think it’s really probable that all the systems can fail at the same time, which means something far more insidious took place.” People are really afraid to get into that.

Are you suggesting some collusion on the part of our government in the Sept. 11 attacks?

I’m not suggesting that. I’m saying I’m not going there. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re idiots, and not that they had something far more nefarious in mind. However, history does teach us that the government has done things like that before, particularly with Pearl Harbor, where there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that [FDR] was aware of it and lured the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. He literally left it undefended. There’s some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the ’60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba. That’s not even a conspiracy theory. The CIA drew up the plans, even though it never happened. So if I were to go that route, I wouldn’t be crazy. But I’m not going to go that route. I’m just going to say that the American people need to be concerned about what happens here. Forget what happens overseas. That’s out of your control. Be concerned with what happens here. Because honestly, if our game is tight here, we can’t be attacked. If our intelligence community and airports and military are doing what they’re supposed to do, then we should be relatively OK.

This reminds me of the strip where Huey calls the FBI terrorist hotline, tells them he’s got a tip on someone who helped the terrorists, and it’s Ronald Reagan. Do you think there’s been enough coverage of the support our leaders have given the mujahedin in the past?

The media have reported on it. But it’s not so much [that] they said it or not, it’s the way they’ve said it. When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story. Like, anthrax — very, very important. Pay attention, it’s scary. When they report on the U.S. creation of these people, these terrorists, it’s all very matter of fact. Like, oh yeah, we gave them a whole bunch of money, and now on to sports. So a lot of it is not necessarily an issue of it being covered up. In fact, it can’t be covered up — it’s well known. But to me, it’s not given the right emphasis. The question is to what extent is the government culpable for creating the people who have done this? And to what extent should they be held responsible for the actions of terrorists that they have supported in the past? That’s what this is all about. I’m talking about Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., their whole crew, up until the crew that’s in there today. After the embassy attacks in Africa, they were well aware of Osama bin Laden. They were well aware of his location in Afghanistan, his protection by the Taliban, and this Bush administration gave them $43 million this year! And nobody talks about it, and nobody holds them accountable, and that’s wrong.

To be fair, though, I believe even the Clinton administration supported the Taliban in the beginning because they were viewed as a stabilizing force.

Well, to hell with Clinton, too. I’m not a Democrat. I don’t give a damn about Clinton. Hold these people responsible! You know, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported individuals and regimes that have slaughtered millions across the globe. And they need to be held accountable for that.

Your depiction of the news media in your strip makes it out to be almost a cheerleader for the government. Is that a fair assessment of your opinion?

They’ve absolutely been playing cheerleader for the government, to the extent that even they’ve had to admit it. I watch news shows, and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re treating Bush differently now.” I don’t want the news to be patriotic. I don’t want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don’t want any of that. I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism. They’ve thrown that out the window. And because they’ve all thrown it out the window at the same time, it’s supposedly acceptable. No! It’s ridiculous. I don’t need to see that.

This is war. It’s serious. People are dying on both sides. How dare the media just give in when the government says don’t air any of Osama bin Laden’s video messages! What is this? He’s going to rub his nose and something is going to blow up over here? Like terrorists don’t have satellite television, and they can’t watch foreign news and get the same messages. That’s insane. It’s totally and thoroughly irresponsible behavior by the entire institution of the media.

Don’t hold back, Aaron.

I won’t. I was talking to some television journalists about this who gave me some interesting insight. Right now, they’re scared to be critical of the government. Everything is about access. Reporters are afraid that the administration will cut them off. Decades ago, the mark of a good reporter was how much dirt you could dig up. Like the Watergate scandal. They were actively trying to find out what was going on and report the truth to people. Now it’s the exact opposite. Nobody wants to say anything that makes the government mad, and that’s ridiculous. Also, after the attacks, now people think it’s unpatriotic to say anything critical of the government.

Come on, Bush is a moron. There is no doubt about it. And they really didn’t have a problem going there before. But now, nobody wants to call him on it. People get excited because he can speak well. What world is this? When we’re happy that the president can articulate well. That’s something they only used to say about black men. “Oh, you speak so well.” That’s nuts. You don’t say that about the president. We’re supposed to have higher standards. The media are a big part of shaping the perception of the country, and right now, they’re not asking the tough questions. They’re not exploring, for example, the Bush administration’s financial ties with Afghanistan. The fact that George Bush Sr. has financial investments in the area, and those investments become much more valuable when the Taliban government is removed. I’m not talking about getting into a whole bunch of conspiracies. Report what’s actually happening, and challenge the government to explain itself. Why didn’t they ask more questions? Like, how did this happen? How did four planes get hijacked in one day? And who got fired? That’s the question I want to know the answer to, because a whole bunch of people should have gotten fired for what happened on Sept. 11. Report on the fact that G. W. Bush is sealing presidential papers. Indefinitely. His, his father’s, Reagan’s. It’s totally unconstitutional. Why don’t they talk about that?

On the topic of George W’s I.Q., I think that idea is pretty threatening to people right now, because like it or not, we’re stuck with him.

Yes, but living in denial doesn’t help the situation. We have to confront the very scary fact that the president is a moron. He’s really dumb. He’s got some really smart people around him, and people weren’t afraid to say that before. They said it in a nice way, but they said it. It was like, he’s dumb, but he’s got Cheney and he’s got Powell, so we’ll probably be OK. But now they act like he’s done something great. You know, he’s called [the terrorists] “evil.” That’s really some childish stuff. They’re bad, we’re good. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s so incredibly stupid. What do you think they do? They call us “evil.” I just see so many parallels between both sides in this war, and it’s really uncomfortable. You know, they kill civilians, we kill civilians. They say they’re justified, we say the same thing. This is gang warfare on an international level. That’s all it is. And when gang warfare happens in American cities, we say it’s wrong. When somebody loads a gun, goes 20 blocks and kills the guy who killed his brother, it’s not justifiable homicide or self-defense, it’s murder and we put people in jail for it. Why is it acceptable that we do it now?

Do you support the war at all?

I don’t support the killing of innocent people, and that’s what’s happening. What’s worse is that we’re killing innocent people out of retribution for the killing of innocent people. It’s wrong. It’s really wrong.

But assuming that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida are responsible, we have to go in and get them. How do we go in and get them without taking over that country?

I don’t know. But I would ask, how many bombs can we drop to bring these people back? We can’t drop enough bombs to bring 4,000 people back, and we can’t drop enough bombs to ensure that it never happens again. Is it really about Osama bin Laden, or are we narrowing this? The people that hijacked the planes and crashed them are dead. If there’s a terrorist network or a man responsible, yes, we should get them, but when you construct it like a police action or an investigation, and not like a war, then you’re forced to respect the lives of innocents, even if it’s a pain in the ass. I say it’s not worth innocent people dying, even if it takes years and you have to keep sending SEAL teams or whatever in there. What the hell? That’s what they’re trained to do. That’s why they exist. Drop them in there to get one guy. F-18s exist to wipe out towns. It may take longer the other way, but that’s too bad.

But I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of Germany after World War II, and that country was flattened. Japan too. There were countless innocent lives lost.

World War II was 60 years ago. I mean, just in terms of technology, we’re not fighting wars the same way. They had special ops, but it was the beginnings of special ops. They didn’t have satellites that could listen to a conversation from space or pinpoint and read a newspaper headline from miles in the air. We didn’t have that. You went to war, carpet-bombed and a whole lot of civilians died. And you know what? World War II was fucked up. How many millions of people died good and bad? Could World War II have been fought differently? I don’t know.

There are few wars where innocent people don’t die.

I don’t know why this had to become a war. A war on whom? This feels like the war on drugs. When does it end? When you declare war on Japan or Germany, you know you can stop when those countries are flattened. When you declare war against the word “terrorism,” when is that over? What does that mean? Stopping terrorism is like stopping rape or burglary, it’s an individual action. Anyone with a gun can go out and commit an act of terrorism, even without a political affiliation. It never ends. So it’s like the war on drugs, and what has that accomplished? Not a goddamn thing but a whole lot of black men in jail for nonviolent crimes, millions of dollars spent and nothing else. And that’s what the war on terrorism is going to do — we’re going to lose countless amounts of money, people are going to die and get locked up, but that’s it. There’s going to be no good coming out of it. We’re going to lose our civil rights, and they’re going to be gone forever.

You don’t buy the argument that the curtailing of certain civil liberties is temporary, that it’s been necessary in previous wars, and that eventually those rights will be restored?

It’s not temporary. Once you give up rights, they’re not going to give them back. This is a war that will never end. When are they going to say they’ve defeated terrorism? No one is stupid enough to say that. Because then when something blows up, they look like dickheads. They can never again come out and say America is safe. They’d be idiots if they did. So given that they’ve set the situation up as a war they can’t win, they’re never giving the rights back. Literally, someone will have to be elected who doesn’t agree with this shit and gives us our rights back. Someone, I don’t know who, will have to get into power and say, “You know, this was all bullshit, and we’re changing the laws.”

What do you think we’ll have to go through for that to happen?

America will really have to understand how corrupt its system is, and they’ll have to get so fed up that they’re ready to make change. And I don’t think that’ll happen because the media are so in line with the government and so invested in the status quo. We have, essentially, a worthless democracy. I hate to sound so extreme, but things are that bad. There’s nothing we have to share with the rest of the world. We don’t even have one man, one vote. And we have so much legal corruption in our political system that no one even thinks about it anymore.

You say that, but would you want to live anywhere else?

I tell you what, I visited Canada, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. This idea that there’s no better place in the world to live, I don’t buy that. The reality is this: Me, I’m comfortable. I make a lot of money. So I can say, America is OK, up until the point that the LAPD pulls me over and knocks out some teeth on some bullshit. That happens enough to black men that it’s a legitimate concern for me. So I have to ask, even with my money, even though I’ve worked the American dream pretty well, is this really the best place for me to be? I don’t know that’s true. When you have money, anyplace is good. I could go to South Africa with what I’m making right now and live like a multimillionaire just off the currency exchange. I could live real well in a lot of different places. If you’re broke, a lot of places suck. If you’re broke in America or Brazil, it sucks.

Are you seriously considering that, or just talking? The reason I ask is that prior to Bush being elected, a lot of Hollywood types were talking about how they were going to move to Europe if Bush won and they’re all still here.

You know, they’re Hollywood types, fuck ‘em. They’re irrelevant to the conversation. Yes, I have thought about leaving. Right now, I can’t even find the time to get an apartment in L.A. So when my life settles, and I have to think about where I’m going to raise my kids, when I have them, Canada will be the first place I look. I’ve never had the opportunity to go overseas because I was broke up until a couple of years ago. Now that I have money, I have to find time to really see the rest of the world. I can’t say this is the best place on earth because I haven’t been enough places. But I know that in Toronto and Vancouver there are all the comforts of America, and yet there’s a difference in the people, and I had health care. When I visited Canada, I didn’t have health care here. I go there, I have health insurance. And the air was cleaner — sparkling, even in downtown Toronto. People say Canada’s just like America. No! I’m out of the country, and you know what? It ain’t bad.

Yet what makes your strip successful, I think, is that it’s going against the grain of American society. Don’t you think you would lose that if you were living in some other country?

I don’t need to live here to know how stupid this place is. I don’t know G.W. Bush. What I know, I get from the television and the newspapers, and I can get that anywhere. I have been successful to a large degree because of controversy, but I have no intention of living my life mad. And I’m not so in love with making people mad that I want to live my life around it. Trust me, I would rather the attacks had not happened and not have anything to talk about. Sure, the U.S. of A. gives me lots of material, but I would rather things be good. So in the abstract, I would leave. I haven’t had the chance to seriously explore it. But I’m 27, so I have some time. This is just not the best place in the world for black people, even the U.N. knows that. They did some study ranking living conditions by ethnicity, and white American men were No. 1. I don’t remember where black American men were, but they were a little bit further on down.

Do you think your strip reflects in any way a certain skepticism among black Americans toward the government?

I cannot be made into the commentator for the unspoken black masses. But I will say that the strip represents a political perspective that people black and white hold that is not being put out in the mass media. I just happen to have incredibly wide distribution in a medium that doesn’t draw a lot of attention to itself. It’s not like Bill Maher, where you say the wrong thing and the powers that be can just pull the plug. Comic strips don’t really work that way. The message gets out there 20 million times a day, but it’s still very subtle and very small. The medium itself, not just me.

I’d give you more credit than that. Because most comics don’t deal with political issues, it makes you and “Doonesbury” pop out.

Yeah, we pop out, but it’s not a dynamic medium. It’s not TV, it’s not movies. In that sense, it doesn’t capture people’s attention in the same way. What happened to Bill Maher is a good example. His show is done, I think.

What do you mean? You think “Politically Incorrect” is a goner?

I think it’s going to be soon. I’ve heard things, but I don’t want to say. I think they already know it’s not [going to survive]. Maybe I’m wrong. I watched “Politically Incorrect” recently, and I felt like I was watching “Crossfire.” The jokes were gone. It was like, everybody was nervous. Nobody wanted to say anything. You can’t have a show called “Politically Incorrect,” and have everyone be afraid to be politically incorrect. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, I’ve been on the show before back when the strip launched, and I think Bill Maher got a raw deal. But that’s the difference between TV and comic strips.

You’re working on a “Boondocks” TV show now. Will your show still retain the political flavor of the strip? Will this be on Comedy Central?

Well, it’s going to be prime time cable as opposed to being network. I can’t say the channel, because we’ve been through this with three networks and every time we think it’s going to happen it falls through. But with a year lead time, you can’t talk about current events. So the show’s mainly going to be about the characters. It’s still going to have a heavy political slant to it, but it’s not going to talk about specific incidents.

Doesn’t “South Park” do stuff that’s timely?

Yeah, but we’re talking about animation of a quality that’s far superior to “South Park,” so it takes a long time. I love “South Park,” but it’s animated very simply.

By the way, here’s one vote for you not moving to Canada. Huey in Toronto just wouldn’t be the same.

Thanks, but no matter where I live, it’s more an issue of how much longer I want to do this. It’s a very demanding job. How long am I going to feel like I have something relevant to say day in and day out? How long before I get bored with it or get fed up with the deadlines? A lot of guys who do this job do it for 50 years. That’s not me. I don’t feel like I’m going to be a lifer. There are weeks where I hate the strip more than anything. And then there are times, like recently, where everyone else is out of work, and I’m like yeah, I’ve got a job, woo-hoo! But am I going to do this another week, or am I just going to quit now and hope this Hollywood stuff pans out? It’s always a debate.