Note: Sorry,
again, for the technical snafus with the donation page.
They should be all jiffied up now. If you have been thwarted
in previous efforts to give me money I apologize and
earnestly entreat you to try again.
Addendum to last week’s
artist’s statement
The panel of last week’s cartoon
depicting Obama eating a Palestinian baby stirred up
some trouble: not only a lot of cries of anti-Semitism
at a message board where it was linked to but also
an outraged letter-to-the-editor of the City Paper from
the chairman of an organization called Jews Against
Obama. There was a lot of talk about “blood libel,” which
is apparently to regular old libel what blood money,
blood feuds, and blood sausage are to regular money,
feuds, and sausage. There is, as I recall now, a grim
history of hysterias in which the Jews were accused
of infanticide and cannibalism. Just F.Y.I., the allusion
to the whole baby-eating calumny was inadvertent; infantophagy
as satiric trope goes back at least to Swift. (I was
thinking more of B. Kliban’s “Cheesebaby/
Cheesebaby with Our Special Sauce,” if you want
to know the truth.) This regrettable resonance was
admittedly a boneheaded oversight on my part, but it’s
less a symptom of some shamefully sheltered ignorance
or insensitivity on my part than just a consequence
of having grown up in America in the late twentieth
century, when such rumors were not exactly rampant
among my grade-school classmates in Harford County,
Maryland. They were, at best, kind of a vague story
about stuff people used to believe in the Middle Ages,
like bodily humors and basilisks. And even though real-life
people suffered persecution and torture and pogroms
as a result of those beliefs, it seems to me that to
refrain from drawing a cartoon like this for the reason
that there is an actual history of such beliefs would
be, in a sense, to take those accusations more seriously
than they deserve—kind of like refraining
from drawing cartoons about the Devil lest people take
offense at the implication that their deceased loved
ones are even now being tortured by a dude with horns
and a tail.
Several readers also pointed out that
serving meat and dairy products together is not kosher.
I am well aware of this, being a frequent patron of
Katz’s, where asking for cheese
on your pastrami is a serious whatever the Yiddish
word for faux
pas is. I did consider making the sandwich “w/
mustard,” but in the end I went with “w/
cheese” simply
because cheese is inherently a funnier word.
If I had it to do over, I would draw the sandwich with
mustard, and a pickle on the side. Maybe some black
cherry soda. Mmm. Black cherry!
Artist's Statement
That’s my friend Steve’s
daughter Emma in panel 1, the token child I like. Emma
really did once sit down on my couch and say, “Let’s
see if we can find something inappropriate to watch
on television.” She also once told me, archly, “I
think it’s going to be very difficult for you
to find a girlfriend, Tim.” Emma and her sister
are the only children I have ever agreed to babysit.
I originally drew myself listening to
the Kyrie section of the Latin funeral mass
in panel 2—I spent a lot of this winter listening
to John Rutter’s Requiem and liturgical
music by Arvo Pärt on the subway and feeling all
benevolent and compassionate toward my fellow passengers—but
at the last minute I wisely substituted “A, B,
C” by the Jackson Five. Despite one of their
members’ later rise to the position of Most Famous
Child Molester on Earth, the Jackson Five cheer me
up against my will every time I hear them, as do a
number of other equally vapid performers, such as The
Association and even Madonna, whom I dislike as a cultural
icon/phenomena but whose songs always seem to make
everyone at a party happier in some irresistible Pavlovian
way no doubt calculated down to the hemidemisemiquaver
by music industry behavioral biologists.
The background characters in this panel
are composed of some familiar faces from my cartoons
as well as some characters I used to draw when I was
a kid—the Man in Charge, Bubba, the Man Who Kisses
Things, and one of the Old Men who got me into such
trouble in Mrs. Derbyshire’s Algebra class.
Obviously I am not a little bunny rabbit.
This is a purely nonsensical panel with no meaning
whatsoever. There is no point in even wondering about
it so stop it right now.
Webmaster Dave and I have a long-standing
date to drink beers in the Earthlite Lounge on the
Moon one day. This dream is not as pure a fantasy as
it may seem. Dave is currently in charge of designing
communications to NASA's projected moonbase, so there
may in fact someday be legitimate reason to send Dave
to the Moon. (For me, we’ll probably have to
do the old whonk-an-astronaut-over-the-head-with-a-wrench-in
the-locker-room-at-the-last-minute-and-put-on-his-spacesuit
deal, unless I start doing a lot of space cartoons
and become as revered an artistic inspiration among
space wonks as Arthur C. Clarke.)
A phrase I’ve been hearing lately—whenever
someone looks up directions on their iPhone or confirms
a bet over whether pandas are ursidæ or procyonidæ via
the internet (they’re the former)—is: “We’re
living in the future.” It’s one of those
things in the air. As friend of mine recently wrote
me:
• there's a spaceship on mars http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080530.html
• we're all watching a black
presidential candidate tromp one of the most detestable
democrats around
• despite all the annoyances,
cell phones and the internet are both way better
than the communication and research devices available
to us in the 20th century
I conclude that despite the lack of
flying cars and pocket lasers I am living in the
future, and I like it.
I, too, resent the fact that most of
the technological innovations these days are in the
realm of what I’d consider consumer toys and
that all the truly cool shit like personal rocket packs
or bubble domes on the moon never came to pass... and
yet even an irascible old nay-sayer like me has to
concede certain undeniable improvements in my own lifetime.
For example, it is now possible, in a lot of places,
for gay high school students to be “out” among
their peers. In the time and place where I grew up—which
wasn’t some barbaric shithole like Kansas but
a public school in suburban Maryland--this was unimaginable.
(To give you youngsters an idea of the general level
of sensitivity to such issues in my day, at recess
in grade school we played a game called “Smear
the Queer”—a.k.a. “Kill the Guy With
the Ball” in some regions. Of course we were
all preadolescents so the literal meaning of “queer” was
theoretical at best to us, but still, it’s on
par with the now-literally-unspeakable “eenie-meenie-miney-moe” variant
as an indicator of societal mores, and has hopefully
joined it in cultural exinction.) For all conservatives’ sneering
at the schoolmarmish priggery of political correctness,
diversity awareness, and sensitivity training, if fewer
kids are being called faggot and getting beaten
up in this country, it’s all been worth it.
Also, stadium seating in movie theaters!
It may be that my friend Rob is right,
that we’re all fucked and the best thing to do
now is hunker down, rig up some solar panels, and start
seriously gardening. I am still haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s
comment that if you could have told a group of intelligent
people in the year 1900 what the coming century would
bring, their response would’ve been: “You’ve
got to be shitting me.” But I tend to subscribe,
believe it or not, to the scientific and political
optimism of science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson,
who in his books frankly acknowledges the seriousness
and complexity of the problems we face but also envisions
a future in which we use our intelligence and technology
to solve them. As he writes in Antarctica,
optimism is not some easy, empty-headed, cheerleaderish
denial of the facts, but a stubborn, willful act of
faith in the face of hopelessness. He predicts, “It
will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't
think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill
themselves off.” Robinson envisions futures in
which no one is hungry or homeless, in which health
care is a right, no one owns land, there’s
a cap on personal wealth, and women have truly equal
status. Which I suppose may sound like some hippy-dippy
California liberal utopia. But we live in a country
where slavery is illegal, suffrage is universal, people
can practice any religion they want and say anything
they want against the government. Europe is unified
and at peace; the Soviet Union disappeared without
a fight. Not very long ago this would’ve seemed
like an implausibly utopian vision. Eli Sagan writes
in Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form:
Throughout history, human beings demonstrate
an equally extraordinary capacity to renounce aggression
and to widen the definition of human to include more
and more of the people in the world. Christianity
puts an end to the barbarism of the Roman arena and
proclaims that even a slave has a soul. Islam puts
and end to female infanticide, slavery practically
disappears from the world, the barbarisms of early
industrial capitalism are renounced, democracy asserts
the individual worth of all in society…
We live, in fact, on the verge of
a great moral revolution. For the first time in the
history of the world, a large number of people—not
just a few moral geniuses—are willing to assert
that the idea of human is to be extended to all human
beings, that no one is to be excluded from the human
definition. This has never been true before.
Or, as no less a Polyanna than William
Faulkner said: “I believe that man will not merely
endure; he will prevail.”
Not sure what accounts for this creeping
feeling of hopefulness and goodwill. Maybe it’s
the final defeat of the gutless and hectoring Hillary
Clinton, the incredible ascendancy of Barack Obama,
and what looks to me at this point likely be an embarrassing
Bob-Dole-like no-contest campaign for John McCain.
The sense that this country might finally, after seven
unendurable years that bottomed out my capacity for
outrage and gutted my faith in my fellow Americans,
be emerging from the Era of Darkness. I’ve also
taken up a number of new habits in the last year—meditation,
cigars, and the Saturday New York Times crossword—but
it’s not clear which of these might be a determining
factor. Dating someone
who is kind and sane certainly doesn't hurt. And I
just spent an idyllic week back at my undisclosed location
on the Chesapeake Bay. You don’t realize how
stressful New York City is every second until you go
someplace where there aren’t any other people,
and it’s quiet. It’s a place where a man
can stand naked in his own lawn looking out over the
water. There are Great Blue Herons there,
and canvasback ducks and Canada Geese and their goslings,
and black vultures and bald eagles drift on the updrafts
high overhead. And at night, you can see the stars.
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