Note: There’s
a brief interview
with me at the Cartoonist’s
League of Absurd Washingtonians (C.L.A.W.)
website, if that’s anyone’s
idea of a good way to spend your time.
Artist's
Statement
Apparently Rush Limbaugh
slew the crowd at the Conservative
Political Action Conference with jokes
I remember my father telling when I
was a kid, except with himself inserted
as the punchline (a joke, in this context,
ostensibly self-deprecating but in
fact self-adulatory), and one-liners
(well, fumbling two and a half-liners)
like "I don't know why people
are afraid of liberals. People are
always afraid of liberals... but why
be afraid of the deranged?" Michael
Steele later insulted Limbaugh by referring
to him as an “entertainer,” but
this is hardly fair; he’s not
entertaining. This sort of thing doesn't
really qualify as humor--it's just
an allusion to a common set of assumptions
(liberals are scary, liberals are crazy).
You could substitute any other group-name
and it would be funny to anyone who
reviles that group—conservatives,
the Quebecois, Presbyterians.
Offering himself up
as an alternative visionary for the
moribund party is Clinton-era villain
Newt Gingrich, who was famous for re-introducing
the concept of public orphanages and
poorhouses back into the national discourse.
Gingrich appeared on the cover of the New
York Times Magazine two weekends
ago, lit much like Baltar from the
old Battlestar Galatica show,
and when I was visiting my friends
Jim and Sarah we had to turn the magazine
face-down so it would not blight our
Sunday morning brunch. Gingrich likes
to think of himself as an intellectual,
a thinker, conservatism's big idea
man, although so far his main contributions
to the ongoing discourse of Western
civilization appear to be similar to
those advocated on ballcaps sold in
truck stops: "God, Guns & Guts
Made America Great (Let's Keep All
Three)".
Rush really did define
conservatives by saying that “we
love people,” and Gingrich did
in fact bemoan the Republican's lack
of nastiness around the same time they
attempted to tear down the Clinton
Presidency over fellatio. These quotes
reminde me of an online post I once
read by cartoonist Darryl Cagle in
which he attempted to articulate the
crucial difference between liberals
and conservatives by explaining that “conservatives
trust people.” I couldn’t
imagine who he thought he was talking
about. The same people who want to
outlaw abortion, who support illegal
wiretapping and torture? The conservatism
he admired existed solely in his own
head, and bore no resemblance to the
kind from the real world. Who knows?--maybe
Rush Limbaugh’s heart really
is full of love, maybe he is a big
harmless fuzzball, as he described
himself in a recent interview, despite
having constructed a public persona
and built a media empire founded on
hate. (I myself am a nicer person that
one might suppose from reading my online
screeds.) But these statements illuminate
an almost grotesque disconnect between
these conservatives’ self-image
and conservatives’ actual agenda,
one it’s hard to attribute to
anything but denial and projection.
It's a losing game trying
to parody conservatives. While researching
this cartoon I came across a
column on Portfolio.com arguing
that poor, unjustly maligned Mr. Potter
has been proven right after all, and
that it was that fiscally reckless
sentimentalist George Bailey who was
the real villain of It's a Wonderful
Life--a reiteration of the plutocratic
talking point that the recent housing
crisis and collapse of the economy
should be blamed on irresponsible poor
(minority) home buyers instead of on
the deregulation and total lack of
oversight of the credit default swap
market.
Frankly I am very pleased
to see Limbaugh and Gingrich and the
rest of these irrepressibly loathsome
characters try to appoint themselves
the new Voices of the Republican Party.
The more the Republicans are viewed
as the party of fat, balding, aggrieved
and rancorous old white men, the more
inevitably they are doomed to marginality
and senescence. So bring on Rush and
Newt and the rest of the bottom-of-the-barrel
crew of hilariously cruel, blustering
Dickensian villains. As the last eight
years have demonstrated (alas, to all
our detriment), the best way to ensure
conservatives’ destruction is
to allow them to say clearly and unambiguously
what they believe and enact those ideas.
Of course the Republican
Party will be resurgent sooner than
anyone would like to think. Like herpes,
conservatism lies dormant in the nervous
system of the republic, waiting for
our resistance to weaken, when it will
erupt hideously anew. And when that
day comes I’ll draw more cartoons
about it. But hopefully this is just
a brief dip back into politics for
now, a fondly contemptuous look back.
For the most part I’ve stopped
paying attention, and shifted my focus
instead to lurid and sensational stories
like the chimp attack, with which I
remain unwholesomely fascinated. (Please
do not forward me any material about
this story—it is not good for
me.) Recently I found myself on a right-wing
blog*--the kind where it is a foregone
conclusion, no longer worth debating,
that Obama is a closet Marxist--and
it made me feel almost physically contaminated,
not so much by their particular brand
of delusional ideology, (distasteful
as it is), as by the whole armchair
ideologue's attitude--the hysterical,
spittle-flecked rhetoric, the grimly
complancent assurance of apocalypse
just around the corner, the uninformed
dingbat certitude of it all. Enough.
I don't want to know about those people
anymore, and I definitely don't want
to be one of them.
Next week, back to the
things that truly matter: a bathroom
tile miraculously imprinted with the
image of my own face, in my cartoon
style, has appeared in a shower stall
in Seattle.
*I was doing a google
image search for the adult Kim Richards,
formerly child co-star of Escape
From Witch Mountain, on whom I
had sort of a protosexual crush when
I was eight, if you must know. I am
way less embarrassed to admit this
than I would be to having purposely
sought out a right-wing blog. Although
I didn’t agree with anything
said on that website I did appreciate
their posting a signed poster of the
grownup Kim wearing a white one-piece.
This is one of those issues on which
we can put petty partisan differences
aside and truly come together as Americans.
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