I am double-dipping this week; this was originally
comissioned as an illustration about something or other for Lip,
an intelligent leftie magazine that runs my cartoons and never pays me anything.
But since I am paid an insultingly low sum per week by the Baltimore City
Paper I have no qualms about this. This cartoon seems like a bracing
antidote to last week's uncharacteristically affirmative fighting spirit.
(Plus it happens to tie in with the release of Revenge of the Sith,
about which I am ill-advisedly excited.) My friend Carolyn wrote me about
last week's cartoon and the accompanying artist's statement:
I have just recently starting thinking it's time to give up. We are the
minority and they have the country. I am in lying-low mode. Hey did you notice
that your examples of negative American role-models are alive but the positive
ones are dead? Lying low.
I had to admit she had a point.
This cartoon illustrates my greatest complaint about the Left in this country:
that they're completely fucking useless. We've been playing drums and building
giant puppets and "adbusting" while the Right has taken control
of all three branches of the government and the media. As regular readers
know, I went to my share of protests before the war in Iraq. History has shown
that they accomplished jack shit. Protests are an obsolete tactic, routine
and impotent now, and the media renders them invisible by pretending they
never happened, anyway. Letters to our elected representatives have the same
effect on public policy as prayers to Jesus do on cancer. The Right is no
longer playing by the old rules. They don't give a shit about the rules at
all as long as they win, of which callous disregard the current fight over
filibusters is only the latest, most blatant example. They change the rules
at their conveneince to expedite whatever it is they happen to want to do--in
this case, pack the Federal Courts with foaming far-right crackpots who'd
uphold the Dred Scott decision.
Some people argue that the Democrats have to move farther to the right, which
will ensure that they become even more namby-pamby and irrelevant and scorned;
some argue that they need to return to their populist roots and appeal to
the middle class's enlightened self-interest, which might work if the American
people hadn't stopped paying attention in class sometime in fourth grade and
had heard about anything that wasn't on TV this week. What I think the Democrats
need to do, as I have argued before and will again, is out-Tory the Tories:
fight dirty, conduct smear campaigns and character assassinations, saturate
the media with outright, shameless lies, go for the jugular, take no prisoners,
kill the women and children and seed the ground with salt. Why must we be
so timid and polite? Even far-right hard-liners would respect the Democrats
more if they declared war than they do for their feeble, unconvincing efforts
at sucking up to their (Republicans') core constituency of bigots and fanatics.
Why not just give up on those cretinous freaks and just come out and say all
the obvious truths: George Bush is a liar, Jesus isn't real, Iraq's a fiasco,
guns are for cowards, abstinence is for ugly people, and, hey, screw the unborn.
I realize that this is an example of Gresham's law, which states that all
political parties sink to the level of the worst one, and that by so doing
we will become the very thing we affect to despise. Yeah whatever.
This is a war for the soul of our nation between, on the one hand, a coalition
of fanatical Fundamentalists and cynical Fascists, and, on the other, those
dwindling few of us who are still willing to fight for a pluralistic, secular,
free society. Our enemies do not want a dialogue; as the aliens in Independence
Day said, they just want us to die. Me, I want to win. I want those fuckers
beaten, humiliated, disgraced. I want to see them as furious and defeated
as I feel every day. I want the Ten Commandments out of the courthouses and
back in the children's books where they belong. I want to see gay men getting
married on Martha Stewart. I want to see Republican ladies in red dresses
and pearls weeping on TV. I want to see the local rednecks slumped over their
beers as if gut-shot, angrily wondering what the hell ever happened to this
country.
The Death Star is in firing range. We have thirty snub fighters and a two-meter
target. Who's with me?