Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It
End?
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Artist's Statement The morning of this writing (Monday the 3rd) I learned that that British teacher who supposedly insulted Islam by letting her students name a teddy bear Mohammed is being sent home from Sudan rather than imprisoned or flogged. So unless some pious douchebag murders her back in England for afterlife extra credit the story on which this cartoon was based is already over. It was in any event only borderline news, the sort of thing that gets perfunctory notice in the Times but makes the front page of the Post for a couple of days, with some outraged pun for a headline and a photo of a teddy bear in a turban. ("Fark" is a word I just learned this weekend, referring to sensational media stories that are of no importance or possible consequence.) But the vein of comedic potential there was too rich for me to pass up. Plus, I’ve had it with the fuckin’ Muslims. I’ve had it Mohammed and all the violence and misery he’s brought into this world. I know it’s only the idiot fanatics who get all the press while the devout who aren’t calling for anyone’s deaths, just unphotogenically praying or ministering to the poor and sick, go unnoticed, but I’ve just lost patience with the world’s religions. Sorry, but they are Not Helping. It’s the same old story: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." We in the west are performing the experiment, for the first time in human history, of living without faith. And we’re a mess. We’re heavily medicated and in therapy, we’re addicted to anything we can get our hands on, fucking everything that moves, buying tons of ugly useless shit no one could possibly need, and making up wonky, jerry-rigged or retrofitted new religions even stupider than the old ones, all in a desperate effort to stop feeling so empty and afraid. I love us. I think we are heroic, even if we’re doomed. We are up against people who suffer no such spiritual malaise: they are flush with clear-eyed certitude, they think they know the mind and will of God, and they are wrong, wrong about absolutely everything. They are ignorant, bigoted, cruel, life-hating assholes. Doubt is no day at the beach, but certitude is more like a day at Dachau. That’s what certitude gets you: the Final Solution, Manifest Destiny, the Great Leap Forward, Jonestown. Evils so enormous it’s hard to believe mere human beings were their agents. We Godless infidels may a bunch of fuckups and addicts and flakes, but we’re better people than they are. If are only alternatives are existential confusion or Assholism, I know which side I’m on. I await the fatwa. |