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Artist's Statement
Fuckin’ W______s,
man. What can I say? It was a busy week. I had a
deadline for a 2-page cartoon story, and underestimated
the sheer number of drawing-hours involved in doing
a story as opposed to 1- or 4-panel cartoon, and
then my computer chose the day before the deadline
to go on the fritz, shutting down once every minute
or so, so by Friday I just didn’t have the
energy to draw anything else and I remembered an
idea for another W______s cartoon in my little notebook.
Thanks to my friend Ellen, who suggested the punchline
to the cartoon, without which it would have been
even stupider. But what do I know? I always feel
like a shameful failure whenever I must resort to
the W______s but then always somebody writes in to
say they’re hilarious and they’re their
favorite cartoons. You people—you love the
fuckin’ W______s.
And
why not W_______s? There’s not much news to
speak of right now anyway. The media will have to
try to make this election seem like a thrilling neck-and-neck
race for the next five months just to sell papers
and ad slots, but I remember they tried to do the
same thing with Carter/Reagan, Reagan/Mondale, Bush/Dukakis,
all of which were lamely presented as Anybody’s
Guess until the in-retrospect-inevitable landslide.
My feeling is that it is, as of last week, over.
A young, handsome, charismatic, eloquent black man,
an embodiment of hope and optimism and an opportunity
to symbolically redeem our nation in the eyes of
the world, vs. the same warmongering old white man
who’s been botching up the world for the last
five thousand years. And in the end every election
comes down to the economy: if it's doing all right,
the incumbent stays in; if it's in the crapper, he's
out. Obama would have to get caught in bed with Hannah
Montana on TV to lose this election
(although given
some
of
the
porn that’s popular online, I’m not sure
that wouldn’t bring a few swing voters around
to his side). It’s (kind of) a shame; McCain’s
a heroic figure, an independent thinker and an amusing
gadfly, and anyone who’s mistrusted by evangelicals
can’t be all bad. (Although on the subject
of Iraq he is like one of those Japanese snipers
still holed up in a palm tree awaiting the American
invaders in 1963, and recently he
has shamefully reneged on his previously sane stance
on torture.) He should’ve been the Republican
nominee in 2000, but once Karl Rove spread the word
in South Carolina that he’d fucked a black
lady it was the end of him. But then, McCain was
running for the nomination of the Racist Party, and
he even feebly defended the Stars and Bars in South
Carolina in an embarrassing effort to suck up to
the Klan vote, so he deserved what he got.
Obama
really has insinuated himself into the national consciousness;
there’s a website called "Idreamofbarack” where
people submit their dreams about Barack Obama. These
are endlessly fun and touching to read. I remember
my colleague Megan talking about the national mania
for Spider-Man back when the first of those movies
came out, how it seemed to be something more than
the usual multimedia hype--people really loved Spider-Man.
It was something everybody could feel good about
post-9/11. Barack Obama is the new, real-life Spider-Man.
It's only (or mostly) symbolic, I know, but having
this inspiring young black man become our President
gives me a sense of possibility about our emerging
from the awful Bush years of dumb, stubborn, belligerent
denial, of actually facing our problems and figuring
them out and changing: Iraq, the economy, global
warming, peak oil, etc. It's the kind of superficial
change that portends a deeper one, like how they
say women who want to change themselves first change
their hair. Anyway, it's a relief to know that
I still have some reservoir of political passion
left, and didn't
blow my whole wad on that useless stuffed shirt John
Kerry.
But
hm, now comes Matt
Taibbi’s latest piece, an ominous reminder
that we still live in a nation full of unimaginably
stupid racist shitheads, and that hate and fear are
time-tested, sure-fire electoral techniques. It’s
easy to forget that we live in a cultural bubble
here on the East Coast (what Taibbi, with hilariously
and embarrasing accuracy, dismisses as “a bunch
of ineffectual bourgeois New Yorkers sitting around
watching Stanley Kubrick movies and eating whole
foods while conservatives took over the world.”)
We have, after all, gotten our hopes up before, only
to have them obliterated by the immense forgotten
mass of Jesus cultists and fag-bashers back in that “vast
obscurity beyond the city.” Perhaps my sense
of things has been skewed toward the unrealistically
optimistic by listening to so much Stevie Wonder.
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