Artist's Statement
Another cartoon inspired by an artist’s
statement (see statement accompanying “My Dirty
Little Secrets,” 6/11/08). I’m afraid I
should’ve waited another few weeks or months
for this premise to ripen, but I found myself up against
a deadline with no better ideas and I had to force
it. I would advise young cartoonists against this bad
habit. It feels like trying to sculpt a pieta out of
brie. You can bring all your craft and experience to
bear on something and maybe pull off a B+ effort, but
it’s no substitute for inspiration. As I’ve
tried to explain many times, being lazy actually ends
up being far more work than being hardworking. I’ve
always liked the story of Rossini, who composed in
bed, accidentally dropping a page he was working on
and rewriting it from the beginning rather than get
out of bed to retrieve the old one. Rossini was my
kind of guy.
This cartoon illustrates a problem I
will hopefully have to grapple with in the future,
assuming the Democrats win back the White House and
my own life continues to improve: how to make good
things funny? Humor is generally something you use
to endure adversity; how to employ it in the service
of happiness? I’m afraid I mostly put the question
off this time. In at least two of these panels I defaulted
to the attitude, which used to be my authentic conviction
but at this point has become more of a pose or shtick,
that what looks like technological or societal progress
will inevitably, given human nature, be more of the
same. Frederic Raphael, in speaking of Stanley Kubrick,
described this as “an amused pessimism at the
idea that people are capable of change.” I have
to confess I am feeling hopeful about the future right
now, perhaps only because of Obama’s candidacy,
or all the Bary White and Stevie Wonder I’ve
been listening to, or because I have a perscription
for Percocet because of a root canal. Will humor become
obsolete in The Future?
I do tend to be genuinely curmudgeonly
about the new communications technologies. I was one
of the last people I know to give up writing letters
on paper and get an email account; I still have a rotary
dial phone at my Undisclosed Location. I get just as
addicted to this crap as anyone else but I’m
still not convinced that anyone actually needs a cellphone
more than twice a year, or that the internet is inherently
superior to the World Book encyclopedia as
a source of information.
Interested readers may look up pica for
themselves. For the record, the word I was looking
for is either cthonophagia or geophagia.
Although it’s a disgrace that
we still deny full civil rights to some of our citizens
in this country, I have to say that, as I have written
previously, it does seem curious to me that homosexuals
are clamoring for entry into our society’s most
restrictive and trammeling institutions, marriage and
the armed forces, from which they have always been
happily exempt. Being legally barred from marriage
would have served me as an airtight excuse on more
than one occasion. Doubtless homosexuals will find
marriage to be just as rich and fulfilling a journey
as heterosexuals have always found it to be. I believe
it’s in “The Kreuzer Sonata” that
Tolstoy likens marriage to the bearded lady tent at
the carnival. A hawker outside is loudly proclaiming
this to be the most astonishing sight you will ever
have beheld, trying to entice the crowds in, and after
you’ve paid your money you see the bearded lady
and it’s obviously a woman in a fake beard. But
as you walk out, feeling like a sap, knowing you’ve
been taken for a rube, the hawker accosts you in front
of the crowds: “Sir! Was that not the most incredible
thing you have ever seen?” And you say: “Yes… yes,
indeed, it was extraordinary! Amazing!” Because
the only consolations available to you now are to fool
yourself into believing it really was something, after
all, and to bilk others into following you. Come to
think of it, I think this must be how the armed forces
keep recruiting generation after generation, too.
Another conundrum I’m hopefully
going to have figure out, if I continue drawing political
cartoons, is how to make Barack Obama a figure of fun
without succumbing to racial stereotypes. For example,
I decided he should be saying “the state of the
Union is fucked up” not because blacks are any
more profane or vulgar than anyone else but because
he’s the first candidate who’s actually
won his party’s nomination whom I’ve ever
heard say anything that was 1.) taboo but 2.) obviously
true. Like that someone can be a racist and yet not
a thoroughly reprehensible person. No president in
my lifetime has ever begun a State of the Union with
any words other than “the state of the Union
is strong,” no matter how hopeless and doomed
things have actually seemed.
So I drew this cartoon in restless little
sittings at the dining room table of my friend Jenny
Boylan’s lake house in Maine. I was up visiting
Jenny on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday. We
went for boat rides on the lake and saw a rare scarlet
tanager, looking gaudily tropical in the dark, coniferous
Maine wetlands, like a movie star dressed for a red
carpet premiere fueling up at a 7-11. We ate waffles
and spare ribs for breakfast. We broke open a celebratory
bottle of my homemade dandelion wine, which caused
Jenny to dance to the Grateful Dead and then lie in
her inflatable pool chair on the floor, as if drifting
down a lazy river in her mind. I ate half a flaming
duck. I ended up trying to capture my surprisingly-difficult-to-draw
colleague Tom Hart’s likeness while drunk on
Margaritas and watching Singin’ in the Rain with
Jenny and her family.
I’m afraid a certain antisocial,
borderline autistic, obsessive-compulsive tendency
might be, if not quite indispensable, definitely as
asset in becoming a really first-rate cartoonist. And
the truth is that I enjoy real life a lot more than
drawing cartoons. I am torn between 1.) my desire not
to draw cartoons but to go and have drinks with friends
or do something else fun and 2.) my cringing dismay
at having to look back, years later, on the hurried,
indifferent, half-assed work this slovenly ethic produces.
But since the rewards of blowing off work and going
out for drinks are immediate and the punishment of
regretting your substandard work lies years in the
future, it’s the former that usually wins the
day.
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