Announcement: an interview with
Tim Kreider far longer than anyone, even Tim Kreider or Tim
Kreider's mother, could possibly want to read all the way
through appears on the website Walrus
Comix!! You might want to skim the interview for surprising
revelations about Tim's tangles with the law and stint in
rehab, his rumored tryst with Meghan McCain, and his newfound
faith in the Lord.
Artist's Statement
As often happens, this week’s cartoon
was inspired by last week’s artist’s statement.
I sent out an email to my elect circle of Humor Consultants
to solicit humorous ideas for this premise, and I find
myself deeper in gratitude debt than usual this week.
The most elaborate answer came from my friend
Aaron:
Idea 1: Thought it was 44 BC and I was living in Rome. (Other dates could
be chosen, but this is when the republican backlash at Caesar's dictatorship
fomented to the point of assassinating him.)
Idea 2: I thought it would be funny.
Idea 3: Why stop now?
Idea 4: Fuck You. [This is an in-joke between Aaron and me—an infallible
caption for any New Yorker cartoon.]
Alas, this came too late to steal, but it could’ve composed an entire
alternate cartoon.
Panel 1 based on a suggestion by colleague
Tom Hart. I can no longer remember where I first heard
the analysis that most Americans vote against their own
economic self-interest (the working class supporting the
party of Management and regressive taxes) not because they
don’t understand that the Republicans’ policies
favor the rich but because they believe they will themselves
be rich someday.
Do not steal my million-dollar ideas or
you will regret it.
Is Panel 2 perhaps too labored a juxtaposition?
I don't just mean to make the pretty obvious point that,
although all Republicans are not bigots and fag-bashers,
it does seem to be the case that all the bigots and fag-bashers
are Republicans. I just wish everybody in the world would
stop pretending to give a shit about any political ideology
at all. Everybody’s political philosophy is exactly
the same: they want to get what they want. Only a handful
of puds who had nothing better to do in college have ever
bothered to formulate a political ideology, and even they
all abandon it anytime it becomes inconvenient. Let us
look, as an example, to the recent bailout of Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac. (A disclaimer: I do not even really know
what these entities are so maybe you should not pay too
much attention to anything I have to say on this subject.)
All the same Wall Street wankers who believe in free markets
and deregulation and the ineluctible wisdom of the Invisible
Hand are now letting out a vast, shaky sigh of relief that
the despised Government has come to save their asses now
that their various lies and swindles and ponzi schemes
have imploded on them. Nobody actually believes in, or
cares about, limited government; they believe that the
government shouldn’t be able to keep them from running
any scam they can and that they shouldn’t have to
pay taxes, but they also want the government—meaning
taxpayers—to give them a metric shit-ton of cash
when they've accidentally blown all theirs on the high-finance
equivalent of Keno. They are actually not so different
in their political ideology from the sneering teen anarchist
who calls his dad a capitalist asswipe until he needs to
borrow a couple hundred to pay for an abortion.
Panel 3’s scenario would be interesting
only on a purely narrative level. I myself do not wish
to be a character trapped in that particular narrative.
Also, let me make clear, Sarah Palin is no Laura Roslyn.
I admit it: at first I thought she was cute. Then I learned
a tiny bit about her—including her inquiry into banning
library books—and she started looking to me a lot
more like the woman currently at #2 on my enemies list:
a smug, pushy, mean, self-righteous meddler. Also, as my
friend Myla noted, it’s nice to see that the whole
family clearly uses the same method of birth control. Another
thing that would be narratively interesting, and for which
I am kind of rooting, would be the father of Bristol Palin's
child to panic and bolt. Right about now, Myla and I imagine,
that dude’s thinking to himself: Okay, let’s
just keep cool here, they’re probably not going win,
we can ride this out, just wait ‘til after this election
thing’s over and all this crazy bullshit’s
blown over and then just get in the fuckin truck and go—Canada,
Lower 48, doesn’t matter, man, just get a nice little
shack somewhere, do some huntin’, maybe find a cute
little barmaid, yeah, okay, this could all still work out
all right for The Kid.
It was Jenny Boylan who first envisioned
Hillary Clinton in the black robes worn by The Emperor,
saying something Wicked-Witch-of-the-Westish, like “All
part of my plan, dearies,” which image somehow morphed
into the panel you see here. An interesting aside: I turned
to Google image search looking for a suitably surly photo
of Hillary to use as a visual reference, and the one I
chose turned out to be on what appeared to be a Wikipedia
page. But in the course of procrastinating I got to irrelevantly
reading the entry, which proved to be so full of errors,
distortions, forcibly decontextualized factoids and flat-out
lies (example: that Hilary’s famous charge about
a “vast right-wing conspiracy” referred not
to the effort to destroy her husband’s political
career but to the exponential growth of the internet) that
I did a furrowed-brow double-take, thinking to myself,
man, this article has clearly been riddled with disinformation
by partisan wackos, and even the editors of the notoriously
unreliable Wikipedia ought to have been a little more on
the ball. Then I realized that what I was looking at was
a Wikipedia lookalike—the Conservapedia.
I suddenly recalled having heard something about this project
a while ago. As in real life, conservatives, unwilling
to accommodate their political views to the facts, have
decided to abandon the consensual reality we all formerly
inhabited and create their own customized facts to better
conform to their political views. Okay, guys. Fine. Better
you should do it online than in the Middle East.
I am succeeding as well as can be expected
in shielding myself from the daily minutia of the presidential
campaign--all that fake dramaturgy, manufactured scandals
and trumped-up suspense to keep people excited, buying
papers and watching commercials. A reader recently sent
me a survey of polls consistently showing Obama ahead by
between 1 and 9 points and told me to quit worrying already,
but now it seems like Palin has really energized the crucial
Braying Ignorant Biddy Vote, and McCain is reported to
have pulled into a dead heat. My advice, for whatever it's
worth, is to pay no attention to the race in the media,
contribute some money, maybe volunteer some time, and go
and vote on Election Day. If, the next morning, it turns
out that the shitheads truly rule this country, you can,
like Myla, sequester yourself forever in New York City,
or, like me, find out if Corsica is really as pretty as
they say.
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