Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 7/20/05

Artist's Statement

Before we get on to this week's artist's statement, an announcement and a request: I will be giving a slideshow and reading at Ravenna Third Place Books at 6504 20th St. NE in Seattle at 7:30 P.M. on July 28th. If anyone out in the Seattle area has access to a digital projector I may use for the evening, it will save me the considerable expense of renting one. In token of my gratitude I will gladly give you a copy of my new book, warmly inscribed to you, my new best friend.

For reasons complicated to explain, I am writing this from an internet cafe somewhere in the Idaho panhandle. I no longer even have this week's cartoon in front of me and will have to reconstruct it from memory.

Like many knee-jerk bleeding-heart, do-gooder, Bush hating East Coast Ivory Tower liberal elites, I was delighted to have my assumption confirmed that Karl Rove, or surely one of his lackeys, was the source of the Valerie Plaine leak. (I have also always assumed that it was Rove who saw to the manufacture and leak of that National Guard memo to Dan Rather. I know this sounds paranoid and wacky, but it is a tried-and-true Rove tactic--he also fed disinformation to the author of Fortunate Son in order to discredit that book's accurate and damning claims about George W. Bush's police record.) Doubtless nothing will come of this revelation--indeed, it seems likely that Bush will react in the way he always does to the exposure of bungling or criminality among his underlings, by rewarding them with promotions or medals--one of my readers suggested, not entirely playfully, that Bush might select Rove as his Supreme Court nominee. But the consoling thought did occur to me that, as I wrote in this cartoon, among all the enemies you really ought to try to avoid making in life, the C.I.A. is near the top of the list. (At the very top of the list is my neighbor Michael.) The first reprisals that I imagined were relatively simple and obvious--someone waiting in Rove's darkened apartment with a gun seventeen years from now, or a flood of disclosures, exhaustively documented, of Rove's idiosyncratic sexual predilictions. My friend Ellen in Boston is the one who envisioned Rove's head being presented to some foreign power (I cannot explain why I chose to make The Red Skull the official representative of this power), and it was my girl Friday Isabelle who proposed, succinctly, "nanobots." I do take comfort in the knowledge that for all the power and influence Rove wields in the world today, he remains, and always will be, the little fat boy that nobody ever loved. You know why nobody ever loved you, Karl? It is not because you are fat. It is because you're an utterly unlovable little shit.