Book Review: Osama Tio Sam

Title: Osama Tio Sam 

Author: Eduardo del Rio, "Rius"

Date: 2005

Publisher: Grijalbao

ISBN: 0307274047

Length: 192 pages

Quote: “Es dificil expresarle al Tio Sam el agradecimiento por todo lo que le ha dado al mundo.”

Did the cartoonist known as Rius seriously believe that the evil U.S. government funded the 2001 attacks on the U.S.? Probably not. Did he have a following who expected him to entertain a few conspiracy theories in a way that would make them entertaining even for U.S. readers? Absolutely. Did he have the sort of mind that could do that? Definitely. Did you want to check out the proof while eating or drinking? Definitely not if you'd borrowed the book from a public library. Though far below the comedic standard that made its author internationally famous, this book is still a coffee-snorter.

Rius had just passed age 70. (His drawing hand was slipping, visibly. In 2005 this book made readers sad.) "Communism" had been the religion of his youth. He had never missed a chance to bash the U.S. government or, for that matter, to laugh at the clueless gringos of the North, even in books he wrote with the serious intention of educating his Mexican readers. There was self-parody in his cartoon characters' exaggerated loyalty to all things Mexican (or lack thereof), but underneath the self-parody, yes, he chose to live in Mexico. Conspiracy theories existed in 2001 and it's likely that, underneath the self-parody of this book, Rius thought there might have been something in them. The book is still satire. Rius satirized everything and everybody.

In Osama Tio Sam regular readers recognized Chon and Gumaro and the other "Agachados" characters, but they weren't drawn as well as they used to be. When hand lettering was used the letters were bigger and sloppier than in Rius's earlier books. More of the lettering was done on a computer. The computer allowed more source material to be pasted in. Rius's books had often been collages, with source material copied and pasted in the original languages. (Rius always wrote in Mexican Spanish but often read and quoted things printed in English, French, Italian, and other languages.) His readers apparently welcomed the assumption that they could read material in any language for themselves and needed translations only when Gumaro could translate something into slang in his amusing way. Did they welcome the violence of some of the cartoons pasted into this book? Rius's early books were always provocative, with no sympathy for the richies who kept Gumaro underpaid, but they weren't violent or vulgar. Some of the cartoons pasted into this book are both.

Despite his fluency in English and his U.S. fans, Rius chose not to write in, or have his books translated into, English. If you have the choice, courtesy requires you to use the language of the country you are in. Rius's readers were visiting a fictional town in Mexico and Rius agreed with his character Gumaro, the lovable idealist schoolteacher, that people learn best when lectures target the advanced students, motivating the others to try to catch up. If you wanted to know what his characters were saying you would study Spanish beyond tourist level, would recognize sources and song lyrics and slang. Amazon now offers some translations. I feel that these translations violate the spirit of books in which Gumaro exhorted his audiences to eat a "Mexican" diet of natural corn and beans and pepitas rather than the richies' and gringos' contaminated carne. 

(And yet I find myself remembering that cartoon sequence in the English my mind supplied rather than the Spanish in which it was printed. "What you got against carne," flesh, growls a young woman whose C-cups appear to be struggling to get out of the child-sized T-shirt she's wearing. "Er, um, nothing!" Gumaro blushes, in such a way that you know that, as a good child of the 1960s, he'd eat a possum if one of his students' parents had cooked one, and he'd never withhold the comfort of a manly embrace from a girl who seems to want that as desperately as she needs an adult-sized shirt...but, when he's able to buy his own food with his scanty salary, he's a vegetarian.)

Gumaro was like the young Pete Seeger. You were free to think his politics were a load of toxic waste, but you had to like the misguided young man. And in this book, it seems, Gumaro has been fully convinced of some of the wildest conspiracy theories. 

“The North American people are the least well-informed in the world...they ignore all the things their government does...ignore everything that happens outside of their borders,”'Rius explained in the blurb on the back of the book. He didn't usually bother apologizing to his U.S. readers. He wrote for the sort of people he could trust to roll their eyes, but not take offense, when gringos was used to mean them while americanos was used to mean everyone else but them. That sort of USAmericans can be trusted, also, to accept this accusation. We sort of do ignore what happens outside of our borders. We know it's all being reported in ways that serve people's interests so, unless we know people in a certain country well enough to feel that their interests are ours, our usual response to foreign news does tend to be "Whatever." 

Rius's goal, I think, in confusing William Walker with George Herbert Walker Bush, and similar unlikely "mistakes," was not to say that either Rius or Gumaro knew nothing about the U.S. history being mangled in the book, but to motivate readers to look up the facts in serious books.  Socialism might have worked in Russia if we hadn't pushed them into an unsustainable arms race,  federal employees killed both John and Robert Kennedy, and the West Was Won with the participation of John Wayne...we know he's getting these things wrong, so maybe we'll look them up and get them right.

I think the facts of both the 2001 attacks and the Kennedy murders are bad enough without adding unsubstantiated rumors to them. Rius actually admits, in the text, that his charges of collusion between Osama and Tio Sam are only rumors. So why bother even typing them out? Possibly to review the history of U.S. relations with Mexico; to understand why, when they hear this kind of rumors, some Mexicans would hardly put anything past their Uncle Sam. Our relations with Mexico have been, on the whole, neighborly, but...self-serving. Very very self-serving. 

As when, last year, U.S. corporations wanted to go on making and selling more glyphosate products, despite abundant evidence that glyphosate is making millions of people ill or sick, that glyphosate is the reason why today's youth really have lower median scores than we had at their age, and that glyphosate certainly encourages cancer. But they ran into a problem: Glyphosate has become less useful for its intended purpose every year, as the poison sprays always do, and meanwhile people have become more aware of the harm glyphosate does. A few people really are evil enough to say "Well, if glyphosate actually cripples or kills my neighbors instead of only making them feel discouraged with their gardens, then I ought to be able to acquire their land at even cheaper prices." My neighborhood happens to have been cursed with one of them. But most people would actually prefer to have less breathtaking roses than to "weed'n'feed" their roses with stuff that gives their daughters migraines and makes their grandchildren forget what they've studied on exam day. So...in Europe the farmers say "Send it to Africa," of things they don't want. Some of us say "Send it to Mexico." Not the ones of us who do our own grocery shopping and notice where our fruit and vegetables come from, but, unfortunately, we do allow people who lack that basic life experience to conduct trade negotiations and make deals that depend on Mexicans buying that nasty "Roundup-Ready" corn we no longer want to burn in our car motors. Some of us forget that what goes around in Mexico has a way of coming around here in just a few hours. Possibly the thinking was "At least Mexican people aren't Irish," though some of them are, "so they won't be suffering from celiac sprue," but the reality is that (a) though only people of Irish descent have the celiac gene, people of all ethnic groups can have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate, and (b) people who don't have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate have other reactions, some of which may be more life-threatening. 

Mexicans are quite right to distrust us. People with names like Biden (Bidens are weeds) who demand that Mexicans honor "deals" like that? Mexicans are providing excellent models of civic virtue by letting them live. We should know better than to trust people like that, too. We should insist that our government show due respect to our kind, patient, generous neighbors.