My friend Jenny e-mailed me last week with the
rough version of this cartoon idea: George Bush partying in the French Quarter,
asking, "Hey, wherezza Mardi Gras at?" (an homage to an old self-portrait
I drew of me in dorky tourist wear at Ground Zero, asking, "Hey, wherezza
World Trade Centers At?"). Like me in that drawing, it seems as though
George Bush (who brags about not reading newspapers) was the very last person
in the world to hear about the catastrophe. I immediately refined the idea
to include the slogan, "Show Yer Tits!" and knew that this would
be my next week's cartoon. However, another friend alterted me to the possibility
that I'd been scooped by those bastards at The Onion, who last week
ran a photo of an army helicopter with the caption, "FEMA representatives
call out to survivors, 'Show us your tits for emergency rations!' I sulked
and brooded on this for a time. Was my idea too similar to the Onion gag?
Should I give up and return to the same cartoon I've been almost drawing for
the last three weeks? On Friday morning I was pursuing my usual incredibly
inefficient method of drawing two different cartoons simultaneously to see
which one would prove funnier or capture my interest first. As I drew George,
enough funny details inevitably came to me--"Instant Asshole: Just Add
Alcohol", the famous Hurricane cocktail from Pat O'Brien's, and the crowning
touch, the dorky jester's cap--that I decided it was good enough to stand
on its own. Also, my friend Louise, a novelist and bartender in Austin, Texas,
e-mailed me: "the other night I had a whole slew of overweight soccer
moms from Houston in my bar. They really were soccer moms, here for a tournament
involving 400 teams of girls. Boy, were they pounding the frozen margaritas
and white wine! Anyway, they wanted hurricane coverage on the tv, so I switched
off the baseball game, and they were exactly like the old lady in 'No One
Loves Your Dog.' They all went on and on about how thankful they were that
we have such a strong, forceful and dynamic leader in the White House, how
lucky we are, bless his heart, and if it weren't for the incompetent state
governments of Louisiana and Mississippi none of these problems would be happening.
I, of course, was like you in the cartoon, except that I had to be polite
and refrain from spitting in their drinks. They were terrible tippers, too."
My loathing for the President and his few remaining supporters was too much
to resist.
This is one of those rare occasions, like the first Presidential debate against
Kerry, when, miraculously, the normally oblivious rest of the world suddenly
seems to look up and notice that George Bush is an incompetent, churlish fool.
Once again his non-reality based aproach to governance has run up against
its one weakness: reality. Appointing dumb inbred cronies to prestigious positions
based on political loyalty turns out to be a problem when, sooner or later,
those positions call for some actual expertise. Trying to deny events and
put a positive spin on things doesn't work as well when those events are occurring
not on the other side of the planet, where reporters can be "embedded"
(i.e. gagged and blindfolded) but here in America, where we're all watching
in horror as the corpses of our fellow Americans rot on the streets in broad
daylight. Meanwhile the President congratulates his appointees on "a
heckuva job" and tries to blame the locals. His administration is still
only capable of taking this seriously as an urgent political problem--a P.R.
disaster. Make more trips to the Gulf, stage more photo ops, write more speeches,
impress upon the American people that you understand the situation. "We're
thinking about this every hour." Wow. That must be rough, George,
all that hourly thinking.
It should be clear by now even to fat, shitfaced soccer moms in Texas that
George Bush is useless as tits on a boar. Every single thing he has ever put
his hand to has turned to shit. He has shown the world that the United States
is no longer a power to be reckoned with but a pathetic, lumbering laughingstock:
not only can't we win a war anymore, we can't even take care of our own citizens
in a disaster. The only thing he's accomplished in four years is to pass those
massive tax cuts for his superwealthy owners and run the country into a crippling
defecit. He was getting ready to push for a repeal of the estate tax, which
would only benefit societal parasites like me who've never had to work a day
in their lives, before this dang hurricane thing made even Republicans realize
it might look unseemly. Bush, just like his father, behaves as though he were
the colonial governor of some third-world shithole, and that is unfortunately
what large areas of the United States have turned into on his watch. It's
never occurred to him that government was supposed to do anything but fill
up the bank accounts and investment portfolios of his campaign donors. He's
cost hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens their lives and humiliated us
in front of the entire international community. ("The king of vacations
at his ranch only said, 'You must flee,'" mocked Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez. "He did not say how." You do sort of have to love that.)
It'd be hard not to smile at the poetic justice if some thirst-crazed fourteen-year-old
black girl put a cap in his ass from a rooftop as he toured the sodden ruins
of New Orleans.
Aspiring young artists please note that, because I am a lazy person and never
bother to plan out my compositions in pencil, the perspective in this drawing
is totally wacked, such that George Bush appears to be approximately 37 feet
tall. Let this be a lesson to you: all that perspective stuff is bullshit.
Look at me, screwing it up and still a big-shot cartoonist!