I've had the idea for this
cartoon for weeks and weeks now, but, even though I thought the premise was
funny, I kept not being able to figure out how to make the cartoon itself
funny. I am indebted to Jesse Fuchs for sitting down with me over some Stella
Artois last week and not getting up except to pee until we'd pretty much outlined
the whole thing panel by panel. The one panel I wanted to include but never
finished was about a pop country hit about gay terrorism, called "Straighten
Up and Fly Right." The only couplet I'd come up with was "Like the
Lord rained fire on Sodom,/ We're gonna rain fire on Bin Laden..." You
get the idea. Maybe I'll finish it in the version for the book.
In last week's artist's statement I called this "gay marriage" amendment
a "non-issue." What the President meant to say was: constitutional
amendments are very hard to pass and it's not likely to amount to anything;
the whole point of introducing it was to get everyone arguing shrilly about
this instead of the President's single-handedly wrecking the economy and lying
us into a quagmire in Iraq. It's just a divisive symbolic issue Bush is using
to suck up to his core constituency, ignorant Fundamentalist bigots. Except
unfortunately it's not entirely symbolic; it also threatens to abridge a basic
human right of American citizens. The fact that Bush is so ready to deny Americans'
rights and institutionalize discrimination, that he would dare to put his
greedy little simian fingers on our Constitution, all as a cynical election-year
gambit--the more I think about it the more hateful it seems. I mean it's one
thing when he kills a few tens of thousands of foreigners for sheer profit;
now he is fucking with my friends. Up until now, for reasons perhaps
better left unexamined, I've always drawn Bush with a kind of perverse sympathy,
depicting him as a hapless fool, anxious that he not fuck up and that Mister
Cheney not yell at him. It was the only way I'd found of making him funny.
But now I'm like, fuck that: No More Mister Nice Guy. George Bush is no better
than a smirking Klansman, a traitor to everything that was ever decent, fair,
and great about this country. Yesterday in a diner I overheard a woman wondering
aloud why someone didn't just "do a drive-by on him." I spoke to
her for a while and said that, pleasant though such fantasies might be to
indugle, and even though I might agree with the sentiment, I had to respectfully
suggest that what we really needed to do was cave his fucking skull in with
a shovel. Ha, ha! Ha! Joking there! A joke, only. No, as it is I'm afraid
the best we can do is forcibly evict him and his owners from the White House,
and then send in the fumigators.
I just heard last week, by the way, that some Texans are boycotting Girl Scout
cookies because the girl scouts gave a "Woman of Distinction" award
to an employee of Planned Parenthood and handed out literature about masturbation
and homosexuality. Shitkickers. The best thing any Texan ever did was get
killed by a bunch of Mexicans.
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