I read Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, Rant: an Oral Biography of Buster Casey, on the strength of a description of its plot. I thought it might raise some interesting bioethical issues. I suppose it does. Mostly it makes me want to take a shower.

Honestly, I have no idea what to think about this business, but . . . here goes:

Rant is a pseudo oral history of the life and exploits of the title character, Buster “Rant” Casey. Palahniuk delivers over 300 pages of short-paragraph-length observations from peripheral characters describing their interactions with him from overlapping and mismatching perspectives. (The book reads quickly because, given the large amount of white space between the “recollections”, it’s probably closer to 250 pages of real text.) We’re supposed to reconstruct the events described on the basis of which stories we believe. When you solve the puzzle, you get a picture of a dysfunctional and paranoid society suspiciously like our own, in which the government has vacated all civil liberties, imposed lifetime detention without trial for undesirable elements, and sequestered half the population in a dark underworld in which they are doomed to menial, marginal existences, receive a grudging minimum of social services, and can be shot on sight for being caught in the wrong place with the wrong paperwork; the justification for all this is . . . (wait for it) . . . the security of the nation, in the face of an existential threat from an invisible but omnipresent enemy. Young people respond to this with desperate nihilism, engrossing themselves in bizarre and self-destructive practices, as well as drugs, mindless sex, and violence. Behind the scenes are shadowy conspiracies enacted by powerful individuals who maintain the danger and the resulting oppression for their own interests: corporate, political, or religious.

Palahniuk’s take on this otherwise none-too-fictional theme is that the danger in question is not terrorists or traitors, or weapons of mass destruction, but biology. The world is driven to the brink of collapse by an unstoppable epidemic of rabies, passed mouth-to-mouth through close, casual contact, through sex between unknowing partners, and sometimes by those who deliberately seek infection as an act of rebellion. Rant Casey is the source of the infection, and of much else that goes on in this strained and tortured world.

[Spoilers Follow]

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Chris Muir is the bizarrely unfunny cartoonist behind “Day by Day” - a conservatively-themed Webtoon that is so consistently incomprehensible that it has spawned an entire cottage industry consisting of the reworking of his strips by liberal bloggers on a desperate quest to force them to make some sense. Adding to the through-the-looking-glass fun are Muir’s many signature artistic tics: utterly non-sequitur dialog, references to Muir’s personal political hotbuttons that are so obscure many of the cartoons appear to have no recognizable content, a cast of characters that consists of weirdly-drawn urban hipsters spouting conservative cliches while striking pointless poses, a female cast that consists exclusively of huge-breasted slim-waisted sexpots with low necklines and bare tummies, artistic skills so marginal that his human poses often simply leave out major body parts or appear deformed, and a strange penchant for showing dialog balloons emerging from implausible parts of the speaker’s body. Plenty of nutty goodness there for those who have the time and energy to wade through it, which I rarely do.

This week, however, Muir joined the creepy talking-fetus brigade of conservative ‘toonists. It’s been discussed before, but it’s apparently a growing meme on the right wing - fetal “personhood” taken to such a bizarrely literal extreme that they imagine fetuses as having fully-functional adult personalities, and sometimes adult bodies (and why not? - with all the retrograde scientific claptrap the right wing has latched onto, the homunculus theory is hardly out of place). This can’t be a coincidence. Literalizing the claim of fetal personhood distinctly changes the relationship between, and relative moral standing of, a woman and her fetus, to the detriment (need it be said?) of the woman. That this delusional characterization of pregnancy has become so common and so widespread of late signals another move in the ongoing assault on the effective moral personhood of women. Here is Muir’s contribution to the war:

 Classic Muir. The first panel makes no sense. (Emphasizing the word “must” makes the second woman’s response seem like a logical deduction from the first woman’s statement - but it’s non-sequitur. As commentary on the immigration bill issue, it’s equally nonsensical: who is legal? why “must”? what the hell is he talking about?) He hits bottom in the second panel, when the woman’s fetus addresses her directly and declares itself to be an “illegal immigrant” in a voice loud enough to be heard by the woman next to her. This panel’s a three-fer: creepy fetus fetishization, self-contradiction (the fetus appears to be claiming solidarity with illegal aliens, which is against Muir’s own point of view [does he not actually read his own strip?]), plus nutjob rhapsodizing about marriage that is both false and idiotic (there’s nothing illegal about being conceived before your parents were married, as this fetus is said to have been; he’s somehow elevated a right-wing obsession with adult women’s sex lives to the level of a criminal act on the part of the fetus, which is impressive doing even for Muir). The third panel is just dumb. (What has late-night TV got to do with a talking fetus? Is she hallucinating the voice? That would undercut the fetus-fetish message, plus the other woman seems to hear it, too. Is the fetus watching TV? That’s even creepier.) It’s like he feels no responsibility to relate the content of one panel to another, let alone make his weird asides and personal in-jokes make any sense to anyone else.

The bottom line, though, is the talking fetus. No matter how dumb the rest is, talking fetuses are weird, scary, and implicitly misogynistic.

Which means, of course, that it’s time for another Chris Muir cartoon upgrade project. I’ve posted my weak efforts below the cut. Feel free to pile on. (Add your edited cartoon in comments, or just quote the dialog for the balloons.)

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