Books 27 Mike Loew is a writer and graphics editor at ...

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Mike Loew is a writer and graphics editor at the Onion. Together with Joe Garden (also of the Onion) and Randy Ostrow, he is the author of Citizen You! Helping Your Government Help Itself (The New Press), a blistering satire on the "war on terror" and America's New Patriotism.

Why not publish this as an Onion book, since two of you are associated with the paper? Working at the Onion is a great thing, but it is kind of hard to work with nine other people all the time. People kind of spin off and do their own thing. One guy wrote a comic book and another guy's doing something else.

One of the scary things about the book is that some of the spoofs could be real. I wonder if there's a point beyond which a book like this is just no longer possible. Right. Yeah, there's comedy concepts, and then there's "let's have a little game that bets on the future of terrorism." That's what they wanted to do. You know, the policy analysis market about betting on which country's going to fall next and which foreign leader's going to get assassinated. Back in the day, you would take what the politicians were doing and inflate it, but Bush has already beat you to it, so we felt we had to take the extra step of being them and trying to surprise readers even more with what is possible, with what they have in mind for their agenda.

Were you always political? During the Clinton years everything seemed fine. You know, our president played saxophone. But when Bush came into office the tone definitely changed. I have always been more of a pro-human person than an anti-human person. I'm sort of tired of liberals and conservatives. I think we've entered a time where you're either pro-human or anti-human, so watching the mass death and torture that's occurred over the last four years, I felt like I had to respond some way, and so humor's the way that I did that.

The book gets pretty serious at the end with the questions about 9/11. It's incredible stuff. There's so many incredible questions.

Especially the Pentagon. Especially the Pentagon. The Pentagon is such an Achilles heel in the official story. Everybody is ignoring the fact that the initial hole in the Pentagon was 12 to 15 feet wide. It's the elephant in the room.

What do you expect for the RNC? It's going to be bad, man. I think it's going to get rough. I think we're going to see some heads cracked and a lot of people tossed in jail.

Is Citizen You! meant as an intervention in the election? Yeah, it's all about attacking Bush. But we felt that railing against it from the outside would be a little too Mother Jones-y. The way to do it is put the mask on, adopt their voice and adopt their tone and speak frankly about what they're doing.

Alexander Zaitchik