Note skippable by all but my fellow (or
aspiring) artists: As is pretty much S.O.P with me I put
off doing anything or even thinking about this cartoon until
the last possible minute. I was utterly uninspired this week,
sick of the presidential election, which now feels like it’s
been going on since I was about seventeen, out of ideas about
the economy, which I can’t begin to pretend to understand,
and feeling underappreciated and like cartoons are kind of
a big dead end and not worth it. It was going to be one of
those weeks where I finally just have to break down and draw
my least unfunny idea and turn in a cartoon I know is only
a C+ effort. I hate those weeks. On Sunday, the day when
I absolutely have to draw the cartoon, no putting it off
any longer, I sat at my desk feeling wretched until early
afternoon, when I finally decided, you know what, fuck it,
I might as well admit that I’m not doing anything and
instead of sitting here worrying about not working, just
go for a bike ride instead. So that is what I did. I took
my bike on the subway and went for a ride around Central
Park. It was a beautiful Indian Summer day in New York. And
on the subway ride home, as I was pleasantly tired out and
thinking about nothing at all, the whole cartoon came to
me effortlessly, like it always does. I started off the working
process feeling like a burned-out failure and ended up a
double bacon genius burger. When this happens it feels like
a marble dropping down through the ramps and grooves in one
of those labyrinthine puzzles--everything just falls inevitably
exactly where it should. You just have to keep the pathways
clear.
Artist's Statement
This cartoon is completely unfair to John
McCain, who, to his credit, has specifically ordered his
campaign to refrain from raising the whole Reverend Wright
business for fear of appearing to use racial divisions
as a wedge. However: John McCain in blackface? How could
you think that up and not draw it? I do try to be fair,
but when you are cursed with a puerile and inventive mind
you sometimes come up with shit you just gotta draw no
matter how wrong it is.
(Also unfair: the last panel making a joke
at the expense of McCain’s age and unfamiliarity
with newfangled technology. Come to think of it this is
not only too easy, a gag beneath my general standard of
humor, better left to the kinds of mainstream editorial
cartoonists who win Pulitzers—“Wow, that McCain,
he’s sure old!”--but also blatantly hypocritical,
since I myself could care less about all that shit the
kids are into like iPods and Twitter and Wii. I'm even
thinking of ditching my cell phone, since they're expensive
and intrusive and they don't work. I only ended up drawing
this panel because it had a certain rhythmic inevitability
to it and allowed me to refer to poor H.A.L. 9000.)
My ex-Marine neighbor down at my Undisclosed
Location has been in the know about this Bill Ayers thing
for some time now (he’s on the other side of the
political fence from me, and, like me, tends to access
news sources that confirm his already-existing worldview,
so that he and I basically inhabit separate, parallel informational
universes) and he’s been wondering why the Republicans
haven’t been making a bigger deal of it. My own guess
is: because it’s just not that big a deal. It’s
desperate. This lame harping on Obama’s tenuous connection
to a long-ago “domestic terrorist” (which isn’t
an inaccurate term but is sort of anachronistic—back
in the day they called them “militant radicals”),
and trying to morph that into some mental image of Obama
playing backgammon with Osama, is an indicator of the paucity
of dirt there is to be dug up on Obama. This is the one
measly metatarsal they could find way at the back of his
closet? As Matt Taibbi writes, “We've become trained
to look for the man behind the mask, for in real life there
is no one whose emotional life is confined to a lifelong,
passionate love for his high school sweetheart wife and
their two children, an undying appreciation for the sacrifice
of soldiers, awe before the flag and concern for the future
of the middle class.” […] But I'm not sure
there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds
crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn't-possibly-exist
guy, inside and out.”
There really are
emails going around warning that Obama is the Antichrist.
This email’s most compelling argument is that the
book of Revelation describes the Antichrist as a man in
his forties who is Muslim, which would indeed be uncanny
if a.) Obama were a Muslim and b.) this were true. But
in fact it isn’t. The Revelation of St. John was
composed either 68 or 95 AD (apparently a big biblical-scholarship
controversy) and Mohammed was born in 570 AD, so you figure
it out. Obama also differs from the “Beast” described
in Revelation in a number of significant respects, such
as having only one head. He is somewhat similar to the
Antichrist in the Left Behind books, which have
perhaps become canonical in certain circles, in that he
is charismatic and speaks more than one language, always
a suspect sign among Godfearing folk. About the most striking
similarity between Obama and the Antichrist is that they
are both very popular. (I'd wanted to work in some reference
here to the Book of Mormon, which as I once learned in
a hotel room describes a number of evil people as being
being afflicted by God with “a skin of blackness” but
regrettably it just didn’t seem pertinent.)
But the “terrorist” business
is harder to dismiss as a figment of the dingbat fringe—it’s
an effort to associate Obama with something subversive,
anti-American, foreign, dark… After all,
he was born abroad, educated at Muslim schools. All these
things seem suspect and sinister to dumb whitebread Wal-Mart
Americans who’ve only ever left the country in Epcot
Center--the same people who can't quite put their fingers
on the indefinable something they just don't trust about
Obama. These inuendos go about as far toward racism as
they can without speaking the forbidden n-word, sort of
like horny abstinent teens who've vowed to remain technically
virgins 'til marriage but have decided anal doesn't count.
It reminds me of the climactic scene from Robert Stone’s
prescient first novel, Hall of Mirrors, in which
a right-wing radio station sponsors a rally that (intentionally)
turns into a race riot, during which a con-artist clergyman
delivers a crazed and furious prayer that ends with his
frenziedly invoking the word “black” or “blackness” half
a dozen times. (Unfortunately my copy of the book is back
at the Undisclosed Location but if I can track this passage
down I'll quote it here later--it is amazing and hilarious.)
These tactics seem to be roiling up the noisome waters
at the very bottom of the Republican base, where fat brainless
open-mawed things thrive on a diet of pure shit. Probably
most of you have heard about the disturbing things being
hollered out by mobs at McCain/Palin rallies, things like: “Traitor!” “Kill
him!” “Off with his head!” A black cameraman
was called “boy.” Things are getting ugly.
So on the other hand, fuck John McCain—he
deserves my unfairness. McCain was himself the victim of
a racist smear campaign at the hands of the conscienceless
George Bush in the ’00 primary in South Carolina,
where folks still go for that sort of thing,* and he has
now hired some of the same thuggish campaign managers who
slandered him then to deploy the same sorts of tactics
against Obama. So now we’re seeing the old scummy
tricks like repeating lies about Obama’s record,
twisting his words into sound-bite scandals, pointedly
using his villainous middle name, and these implications
that he’s secretly some sort of Muslim/terrorist/negro.
McCain isn't a racist, but he’s apparently not above
exploiting racism if it’ll get him enough votes to
win this thing. A politician with a shot at the Presidency,
as Hunter Thompson described it, “is like a bull
elk in rut season.” He loses all dignity, all integrity,
he'll do anything, he can think of nothing but the Prize.
It’s a sorry thing to see a man forfeit his honor
for glory. The finest thing McCain could do now would be
to call off his slavering pit bull and run a decent, genial
campaign like Bob Dole’s in ‘96, who considered
having been nominated by his party the highest honor of
his life. I always admired Dole for saying, in one of his
debates: “If you hate, I don’t want your vote.”
With less than a month now to go before
election Day and the country in a shambles, Obama is ahead
in all the polls and even I am cautiously, against my better
judgment, starting to hope that maybe, just this once,
the shitheads will not win. Of course I’ve hoped
this several times before, only to be sucker-punched and
laughed at by the Shithead Nation. Which could well happen
again if enough people secretly turn out to be racists
behind the electoral booth curtain. Even if Obama does
win, it still feels like a depressing confirmation of one’s
most cynical and misanthropic suspicions that things finally
had to get this bad—the country in ruin, mired in
two losing wars and on the brink of a global Great Depression--before
people would grudgingly consent to vote for someone intelligent
for a change. It’s hard to believe we might actually
have someone smart running the country again; as my friend
Megan said, “It seems almost bizarre.” No doubt
as soon as we’re at peace and running a surplus again
the shitheads will vote for another hawkish, tax-cutting
demagogue, like an alcoholic with a few months’ sobriety
under his belt who decides that things are going so well
that a coupla beers aren’t going to hurt anything.
*For you youngsters, the Bush campaign made
phone calls implying that McCain had fathered an illegitimate
black child. In fact he and his wife had adopted a girl
from Bangladesh. This is the so-called “genius” of
Republican campaigning as perfected by the subhuman Karl
Rove; find the very best, most unassailable thing about
your opponent and vilify it, turn it into a thing of
shame.
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