All credit for this week's cartoon idea goes
to Erik Sunday,
who observed, sometime last year, that he couldn't believe no one had yet
drawn a cartoon of the "Support Our Troops" ribbon as a noose. (All
blame for the unfunniness of its execution, as always, is mine.) It was one
of those ideas that seems so obvious in retrospect that it feels as though
it must be plagiarized, but I haven't found another image of it anywhere.
I resisted drawing it for a long time--not, as my regular readers will know,
out of sensitivity, but because it seemed too humorless and heavy-handed,
too much like something a daily newspaper cartoonist would do if daily newspaper
cartoonists were allowed to draw anything true. I don't know if you urban
dwellers see these "Suppot Our Troops" ribbons on the backs of cars
a lot, but out here in the sticks they are ubiquitous. I still have no idea
what "Support Our Troops" is supposed to mean, really. Just think
good thoughts about them? Hope they don't die? Send them more armor? Get them
out of Iraq, maybe?
I finally broke down and drew this this week because I had no better ideas.
I was at Jim's house on Friday, my deadline, and instead of drawing a cartoon
got addicted to a tabletop electronic game called Bull's-Eye Ball, kind of
like tiny skee-ball, and racked up an inhumanly high score of 131 on 30-Second
Blitz and ended up feeling hepped up and zoned out and jangled like I haven't
since back in the day when I'd blow sixteen bucks' worth of tokens on crazy
Tail Gunner binges at Replay at Tollgate Mall with Michael Kirby.
The news has just been a monotonous, leaden march of evil lately, one piece
of cynical, mercenary legislation after another--the bankruptcy bill for the
banks and credit card companies to squeeze the little guy for every last cent,
the energy bill for George and Dick's friends in the petrochemical industry
to squeeze a few more billions out of the oil economy before we run out, the
ongoing campaign to take back the New Deal, rewriting the rules whenever it's
expedient--all accompanied by rhetoric so hypocritical it makes you physically
sick. All this pious sucking up to the pushy simpletons of the Christian right.
And everywhere the mean backwoods faces of liars and thugs like Tom DeLay
and Bill Frist. Oh, plus--the fucking Pope! Even on days when the goddamned
Pope doesn't do anything he's still on the front page, in his lovely vestments
and shit. There's a whole Pope Section in the paper now. Soon, a Pope Channel.
Enough! Enough with the fucking Pope already! He's not the Pope of me!
I'll be back in form next week, I promise. In the meantime, check out the
cool new collage in the "News & Rumors"
section.