SOFREP Cartoon: Revolution on Main Street

Like Axl howling into the mic back in ’91, you can feel the riff of this cartoon vibrating through the pavement—raw, unhinged, and begging the question of whether we really need another civil war and if we’ve already staged one.

Main Street Madness

Somewhere between a street fair and a mid-summer night’s fever dream, America’s political theater has spilled into the open like an overfilled beer at a bad carnival. Furries with rifles, socialists with banners, and resistance fighters in Mardi Gras beads march together as if this is the logical next step in civic discourse. Meanwhile, the rest of us stand on the curb like confused tourists, wondering if we’ve stumbled into a costume contest or the opening skirmish of a second civil war.

Bob Lang Cartoon

When the Circus Comes to Town

It’s a strange new age where political activism wears fur suits and plastic fangs, yelling about fascists while clutching signs that look like they were made by a stoned 20-year-old in a college dorm at 3 a.m. The absurdity isn’t in the grievances themselves—real or imagined—but in the presentation. If politics is performance art, this is avant-garde theater with live ammunition, and the tickets are free to anyone walking down Main Street.

Watch Your Step

The cartoon’s (inked by the highly skilled and eminently clever Bob Lang) punchline lands because it feels close to the truth: the noise, the chaos, the sense that ordinary life now runs parallel to a bizarre parade of slogans and costumes. Maybe it’s protest, maybe it’s revolution, maybe it’s just Saturday afternoon with too much caffeine and not enough sleep nor perspective. Either way, it’s happening in broad daylight, right in front of the coffee shop.

Step carefully, America, because the line between satire and reality is thin—and sometimes, it’s wearing rabbit ears.

Advertisement

“I Don’t Need Your Civil War”

Being of a certain age, this cartoon and the cartoonish world surrounding us in general remind me of the 1991 Guns N’ Roses song, Civil War.

Civil War, by Guns N’ Roses

Lyrics by Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
Some men you just can’t reach…
So, you get what we had here last week,
which is the way he wants it!
Well, he gets it!
N’ I don’t like it any more than you men.

Two ways to continue to read this article.

Look at your young men fighting Look at your women crying Look at your young men dying The way they’ve always done before Look at the hate we’re breeding Look at the fear we’re feeding Look at the lives we’re leading The way we’ve always done before My hands are tied The billions shift from side to side And the wars go on with brainwashed pride For the love of God and our human rights And all these things are swept aside By bloody hands time can’t deny And are washed away by your genocide And history hides the lies of our civil wars D’you wear a black armband When they shot the man Who said “Peace could last forever”? And in my first memories They shot Kennedy I went numb when I learned to see So I never fell for Vietnam We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all That you can’t trust freedom When it’s not in your hands When everybody’s fightin’… For their promised land And I don’t need your civil war It feeds the rich while it buries the poor Your power hungry sellin’ soldiers In a human grocery store Ain’t that fresh I don’t need your civil war Look at the shoes your filling Look at the blood we’re spilling Look at the world we’re killing The way we’ve always done before Look in the doubt we’ve wallowed Look at the leaders we’ve followed Look at the lies we’ve swallowed And I don’t want to hear no more My hands are tied For all I’ve seen has changed my mind But still the wars go on as the years go by With no love of God or human rights ‘Cause all these dreams are swept aside By bloody hands of the hypnotized Who carry the cross of homicide And history bears the scars of our civil wars “We practice selective annihilation of mayors And government officials For example to create a vacuum Then we fill that vacuum As popular war advances Peace is closer” I don’t need your civil war It feeds the rich while it buries the poor Your power hungry sellin’ soldiers In a human grocery store Ain’t that fresh And I don’t need your civil war… I don’t need your civil war I don’t need your civil war Your power hungry sellin’ soldiers In a human grocery store Ain’t that fresh I don’t need your civil war I don’t need one more war I don’t need one more war Whaz so civil ’bout war anyway?