Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 8/14/02
Artist's Statement
I was going to go to New York for
a long weekend and wanted to get a cartoon done on Friday, before I left,
so I wouldn't have to worry about it on my trip. I spent most of the day putting
it off, running errands, packing, trying to think up funny ideas, and, as
I do every week, bitterly cursing the bastards who make me do these cartoons
and wishing I could just quit. Somehow this seems to be an indispensable part
of the creative process for me. I really don't remember how it occurred to
me to do a Presidential "to-do" list, but I knew right away what
should be on it, and then the little doodles, which are the best part of the
cartoon, began to appear. Note to aspiring cartoonists: it wasn't until I
sat down and started doodling the cartoon that the ideas began to come to
me effortlessly, cracking me up likealways. I don't know why I always forget
this lesson: don't pace around moping and racking your brains trying to come
up with a funny idea; you just sit down and draw and somehow it just happens.
Like most sane and thoughtful people I can't even understand this insane plan
to launch a war on Iraq, which, assholes though their despotic government
may be, had no connection to the attacks of 9/11--which is, if I'm remembering
this right, the whole reason we're supposed to support this perpetual war
on all the shifty-eyed brown people of the world in the first place, right?
The "to-do" list as I've draw it really does seem to reflect the
entirety of their thinking on this matter. It seems obvious to me that the
only reason the Bush administration has for attacking Iraq is because they
have to do something about the whole terrorism thing, and still haven't
figured out how to fight an enemy composed of a few thousand guys of different
nationalities dispersed in a decentralized network throughout the world because
their intelligence agencies are a bunch of infighting bureaucrats who have
a total of like three guys who even speak any Arabic languages and the military
is still trained and equipped to defeat the Soviet Union in a conventional
land war in Europe, so they figure they'll just flatten some third-world nation-state
we never liked anyway and it might get them re-[sic]elected even if the economy
goes to shit. Plus, hey, oil!
I don't know why George W. Bush has become a figure of pathos in my cartoon
world. In reality he is clearly a hateful person: a dumb, arrogant frat boy
who blew off an Ivy-League education a lot of working-class kids would've
done anything to get, had everything, including the Presidency, effortlessly
given to him, never questioned a single thing in his life and always done
exactly what his daddy's big-business cronies told him to. He makes me want
to beat him up. In political terms, he's nothing, a figurehead not worth paying
attention to, much less satirizing; it's the corporate gangsters and war criminals
who've hired him as their spokesmodel who ought to be mocked and pilloried.
But in my cartoons he's this earnest, feckless character that I feel almost
sorry for, stuttering through mistranscriptions of his prompted speeches,
choking on his popcorn in outrage as he watches Spider-Man, getting
yelled at by mean old Mister Cheney. I've always felt sorry for Nixon, too.
I am a disappointment to my country and to myself.