Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 3/10/04

Artist's Statement

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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