I found out about Ariel Sharon's second stroke on Thursday morning, just as I was leaving Los Angeles for a three-day trip to Philadelphia. The circumstances necessitating my trip were sad. They involved the terminal illness of my father-in-law whose sickness seemed to disprove the existence of an empathetic God while simultaneously proving the existence of a God too petty to coexist in a universe alongside my father-in-law's much wiser and sweeter and altogether vastly more humane and humorous Jewish atheism and I was traveling without any extra amenities above a single change of clothes and an iPod. Knowing, however, that the death of the Prime Minister of Israel (known as “The Butcher” by the surviving friends and relatives of those mutilated and killed by 40 years of his brutal politics) might warrant some sort of response by an editorial cartoonist such as myself - a cartoonist who found the glorification by other editorial cartoonists of Pope Paul II after his death putrid and disrespectful to those most victimized by the Vatican’s active dislike of un-ordained pedophiles, un-enslaved women and freethinking riffraff, (I won’t even go into the bogus accolades thrown like olive branches upon the casket of Ronald Reagan) - I couldn’t stop myself from conceiving of the cartoon below, drawn, upon landing, onto a piece of crappy typing paper with a pencil one might otherwise use to cheat an accompanying nine-year-old at Putt-Putt. For forty-eight hours I moved from house to house, visiting relatives and carrying the cartoon, asking, in between bouts of both laughter and tears, if anyone had a scanner that I might use, fearing that Sharon would die and I’d miss my opportunity to disrespect the fucker in print thereby allowing him one final parade through the American public mind as a world renowned peacenik and a defender of democracy and staunch foe of terrorism. Luckily, he did not die before I was able to get back home to my own scanner. Now I sit hovering over the “Send” button on my computer waiting for the moment when one man draws his final breath in time for another man to say, “Nicely done, son,” before drawing his.
I found out about Ariel Sharon's second stroke on Thursday morning, just as I was leaving Los Angeles for a three-day trip to Philadelphia. The circumstances necessitating my trip were sad. They involved the terminal illness of my father-in-law whose sickness seemed to disprove the existence of an empathetic God while simultaneously proving the existence of a God too petty to coexist in a universe alongside my father-in-law's much wiser and sweeter and altogether vastly more humane and humorous Jewish atheism and I was traveling without any extra amenities above a single change of clothes and an iPod. Knowing, however, that the death of the Prime Minister of Israel (known as “The Butcher” by the surviving friends and relatives of those mutilated and killed by 40 years of his brutal politics) might warrant some sort of response by an editorial cartoonist such as myself - a cartoonist who found the glorification by other editorial cartoonists of Pope Paul II after his death putrid and disrespectful to those most victimized by the Vatican’s active dislike of un-ordained pedophiles, un-enslaved women and freethinking riffraff, (I won’t even go into the bogus accolades thrown like olive branches upon the casket of Ronald Reagan) - I couldn’t stop myself from conceiving of the cartoon below, drawn, upon landing, onto a piece of crappy typing paper with a pencil one might otherwise use to cheat an accompanying nine-year-old at Putt-Putt. For forty-eight hours I moved from house to house, visiting relatives and carrying the cartoon, asking, in between bouts of both laughter and tears, if anyone had a scanner that I might use, fearing that Sharon would die and I’d miss my opportunity to disrespect the fucker in print thereby allowing him one final parade through the American public mind as a world renowned peacenik and a defender of democracy and staunch foe of terrorism. Luckily, he did not die before I was able to get back home to my own scanner. Now I sit hovering over the “Send” button on my computer waiting for the moment when one man draws his final breath in time for another man to say, “Nicely done, son,” before drawing his.