June 2006 Archives
All right, this is my last swipe at the Democrats for a little while, I promise. After all, the self-perpetuating buffoonery of the party is disgusting enough to watch without me pissing endlessly upon it. Besides, I'm starting to feel like I'm trying to put out somebody who's on fire using an ice pick and vulgarities shouted at the top of my voice.
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All right, this is my last swipe at the Democrats for a little while, I promise. After all, the self-perpetuating buffoonery of the party is disgusting enough to watch without me pissing endlessly upon it. Besides, I'm starting to feel like I'm trying to put out somebody who's on fire using an ice pick and vulgarities shouted at the top of my voice.
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Who can rest when the future of the world seems to being resting on the courage and competence of a Democratic Party more suited to the mismanagement of a miniature golf course than to the revival of a democracy more dead than alive?
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Who can rest when the future of the world seems to being resting on the courage and competence of a Democratic Party more suited to the mismanagement of a miniature golf course than to the revival of a democracy more dead than alive?
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Here's the cartoon I did in Little Rock done with a pencil.
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No cartooning today (or HE CALLED HIMSELF A PROGRESSIVE AND I ALMOST SWALLOWED MY PRIDE)
by Mr. Fish
June 18, 2006 8:57 AM
Just in case you were wondering, Bill Clinton, judging from what he said during the keynote luncheon at the closing of the AAN Conference here in Little Rock today, is something of a charming, high-functioning douche bag. Sure he’s got a lot of well-intentioned managerial ideas about how to curb America’s ever-accelerating contribution to the environmental collapse of the planet (presented, I should add, with all the passion of a depressed and aging uncle with the perfect plan for forever keeping his tomatoes safe from ladybugs), but none of those ideas mean a fucking thing when they’re interspersed with the vague rhetoric that I always hear from celebrity politicians who praise the virtues of our pursuing a domestic and foreign policy that serves our American interests, as if the phrase, simply by containing both the words American and interests, were God blessed and noble and worthwhile.
Of course, one need only look at history to see that any nation interested in pursuing its own national interests as a priority, besides being eerily tribal, is usually a nation whose national interests are being determined by its business sector, which is the sector, particularly in modern times, that is most dedicated to the most brutal and anti-democratic and totalitarian tactics available to the cruelest members of humankind; tactics, of course, that are anything but God blessed or noble or worthwhile. In fact, green-living and peaceful coexistence as a business proposition can never be a lasting green-ness, nor can it be a lasting peace; it has never been cost effective. So what is there to look forward to in Clinton’s vision of the perfect Democratically led future? A plutocracy that runs on corn perhaps. Fan-fucking-tastic.
Another thing he said was that, rather than rely on the two-dimensional cartoon version of politicians we should all do our best to judge the intentions of those who serve us in government, to which I say,” You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” In fact, the idiocy of a remark that cravenly insipid is so embarrassing that I refuse to address it, except to say that Clinton’s intention to strike a blow against terrorism by selling helicopters to Israel for the singular purpose of slaughtering Palestinians, or blowing up a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in 1998 and effectively eliminating access to live-saving drugs for countless millions of people in a devastated region of Africa, or to guarantee that sanctions against Iraq remain during the length of his entire presidency, despite the fact that they were killing hundreds of thousands of civilians -- by some counts millions, mostly children -- for the sake of fighting terror. That said, Bill Clinton can take his intentions and shove them up his smug fucking ass.
He also said, remarkably unaware of how the Democratic party is seen by the large majority of real liberals in this country, that the prevailing two-dimensional cartoon version that the public has of Hillary Clinton is that of a “left-wing kook.” As a political cartoonist I nearly fell out of my chair. I only wish I were able to draw Hillary Clinton as a left-wing kook. I wish I were able to draw any leading Democrat as a left-wing kook. In the end, I guess, Bill Clinton is to left-wing politics what his very own saxophone is to jazz: Legitimate only to the least critical ear and the dimmest political wit under the tent.
When Clinton finished speaking, John Coltrane was the furthest thing from anybody's mind.
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No cartooning today (or HE CALLED HIMSELF A PROGRESSIVE AND I ALMOST SWALLOWED MY PRIDE)
by Mr. Fish
June 18, 2006 8:06 AM
Just in case you were wondering, Bill Clinton, judging from what he said during the keynote luncheon at the closing of the AAN Conference here in Little Rock today, is something of a charming, high-functioning douche bag. Sure he’s got a lot of well-intentioned managerial ideas about how to curb America’s ever-accelerating contribution to the environmental collapse of the planet (presented, I should add, with all the passion of a depressed and aging uncle with the perfect plan for forever keeping his tomatoes safe from ladybugs), but none of those ideas mean a fucking thing when they’re interspersed with the vague rhetoric that I always hear from celebrity politicians who praise the virtues of our pursuing a domestic and foreign policy that serves our American interests, as if the phrase, simply by containing both the words American and interests, were God blessed and noble and worthwhile.
Of course, one need only look at history to see that any nation interested in pursuing its own national interests as a priority, besides being eerily tribal, is usually a nation whose national interests are being determined by its business sector, which is the sector, particularly in modern times, that is most dedicated to the most brutal and anti-democratic and totalitarian tactics available to the cruelest members of humankind; tactics, of course, that are anything but God blessed or noble or worthwhile. In fact, green-living and peaceful coexistence as a business proposition can never be a lasting green-ness, nor can it be a lasting peace; it has never been cost effective. So what is there to look forward to in Clinton’s vision of the perfect Democratically led future? A plutocracy that runs on corn perhaps. Fan-fucking-tastic.
Another thing he said was that, rather than rely on the two-dimensional cartoon version of politicians we should all do our best to judge the intentions of those who serve us in government, to which I say,” You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” In fact, the idiocy of a remark that cravenly insipid is so embarrassing that I refuse to address it, except to say that Clinton’s intention to strike a blow against terrorism by selling helicopters to Israel for the singular purpose of slaughtering Palestinians, or blowing up a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in 1998 and effectively eliminating access to live-saving drugs for countless millions of people in a devastated region of Africa, or to guarantee that sanctions against Iraq remain during the length of his entire presidency, despite the fact that they were killing hundreds of thousands of civilians -- by some counts millions, mostly children -- for the sake of fighting terror. That said, Bill Clinton can take his intentions and shove them up his smug fucking ass.
He also said, remarkably unaware of how the Democratic party is seen by the large majority of real liberals in this country, that the prevailing two-dimensional cartoon version that the public has of Hillary Clinton is that of a “left-wing kook.” As a political cartoonist I nearly fell out of my chair. I only wish I were able to draw Hillary Clinton as a left-wing kook. I wish I were able to draw any leading Democrat as a left-wing kook. In the end, I guess, Bill Clinton is to left-wing politics what his very own saxophone is to jazz: Legitimate only to the least critical ear and the dimmest political wit under the tent.
When Clinton finished speaking, John Coltrane was the furthest thing from anybody's mind.
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I just drew this on my laptop with my index finger on a tiny tracking pad that is 3 inches by 2 inches. I thought of it today while walking back from a museum in Little Rock, my brain both reflecting on the obvious genius of a Picasso exhibit that I'd just seen and anticipating the political pomposity and nauseating self-congratulation/adulation that I'd be choking down later at the Clinton Museum where I'd be meeting other AAN colleagues for chicken fingers and airplane merlot. I'll probably draw a much cleaner version of it with a real pencil once I return to Los Angeles. Anyway...
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I just drew this on my laptop with my index finger on a tiny tracking pad that is 3 inches by 2 inches. I thought of it today while walking back from a museum in Little Rock, my brain both reflecting on the obvious genius of a Picasso exhibit that I'd just seen and anticipating the political pomposity and nauseating self-congratulation/adulation that I'd be choking down later at the Clinton Museum where I'd be meeting other AAN colleagues for chicken fingers and airplane merlot. I'll probably draw a much cleaner version of it with a real pencil once I return to Los Angeles. Anyway...
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Who knows if it means anything? The parallels suggest that it deserves at least some mention: I am a twin and when I was two-years-old I had a lousy president who was publicly singing the praises of a war that America couldn’t possibly win and now my twin daughters are two-years-old and they have a president who, now that I think about it, in comparison to mine at their age, might make the parallel seem somewhat less parallel; sort of like me complaining in 1974 that the construction of the World Trade Centers was preventing the otherwise clear view I had of the Statue of Liberty from my Aunt Kelly’s bathroom window in Soho versus my daughters’ much more relevant complaint, when they’re able to make it, that the view of the Statue of Liberty from their great Aunt Kelly’s bathroom in Soho is uninspiring and even a little bit creepy given the contemporary disconnect between what our country might yearn to symbolize to the rest of the world and what our country really is to the rest of the world.
Anyway, I found myself today, while flying from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Arkansas, for the annual AAN (Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) conference where I am a finalist in the Best Editorial Cartoonist category, wondering what sort of affect such societal discontent at having such a shitty president might be having on the mental health of my girls, the same way that I might have wondered how safe the air was if I had lived in Detroit in the mid-fifties at the height of the auto boom; in other words, even though carcinogens, even political ones, are invisible to the naked eye, the diseases that they’re capable of ravaging upon a person are quite often the sort that, once discovered, are too late to cure; or, if cured, they are usually eradicated at a horrible cost to their carrier’s quality of life. I wondered, while sitting next to a huge sleeping fat man (who smelled like what I imagined asparagus set on fire and then pissed on might) if I should leave the country with my family and move to France or Spain or if I needed to live inside this dying American society in order to contract the disease of its agony, eventually succumbing to it, in order to give credibility to the cartoons I create that are critical of it. Does my depression qualify as some sort of expertise in recognizing how bad things really are and will such expertise eventually manifest itself in some way that will enable me to contribute to the curing of certain social ills?
The real question I found myself asking was this: Whose health and well-being am I more responsible for, my grandchildren’s or my children’s? A tough question given the historical truth that one is more likely to affect the future than the present when it comes to political activism.
That said, the cartoon that I was planning to post before I left Los Angeles was one, I must say, that looks spectacular, although the message at a glance might incite real misunderstanding and fury. It’s two panels. The first panel has a Warhol tomato soup can shoved halfway up the rear of another Warhol tomato soup can. The panel bears the caption: God fucking Allah. The second panel depicts the same soup cans, only facing the other way, and bearing the caption: Allah fucking God.
See why I’m a finalist? (And why I might want to move to France?)
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Who knows if it means anything? The parallels suggest that it deserves at least some mention: I am a twin and when I was two-years-old I had a lousy president who was publicly singing the praises of a war that America couldn’t possibly win and now my twin daughters are two-years-old and they have a president who, now that I think about it, in comparison to mine at their age, might make the parallel seem somewhat less parallel; sort of like me complaining in 1974 that the construction of the World Trade Centers was preventing the otherwise clear view I had of the Statue of Liberty from my Aunt Kelly’s bathroom window in Soho versus my daughters’ much more relevant complaint, when they’re able to make it, that the view of the Statue of Liberty from their great Aunt Kelly’s bathroom in Soho is uninspiring and even a little bit creepy given the contemporary disconnect between what our country might yearn to symbolize to the rest of the world and what our country really is to the rest of the world.
Anyway, I found myself today, while flying from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Arkansas, for the annual AAN (Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) conference where I am a finalist in the Best Editorial Cartoonist category, wondering what sort of affect such societal discontent at having such a shitty president might be having on the mental health of my girls, the same way that I might have wondered how safe the air was if I had lived in Detroit in the mid-fifties at the height of the auto boom; in other words, even though carcinogens, even political ones, are invisible to the naked eye, the diseases that they’re capable of ravaging upon a person are quite often the sort that, once discovered, are too late to cure; or, if cured, they are usually eradicated at a horrible cost to their carrier’s quality of life. I wondered, while sitting next to a huge sleeping fat man (who smelled like what I imagined asparagus set on fire and then pissed on might) if I should leave the country with my family and move to France or Spain or if I needed to live inside this dying American society in order to contract the disease of its agony, eventually succumbing to it, in order to give credibility to the cartoons I create that are critical of it. Does my depression qualify as some sort of expertise in recognizing how bad things really are and will such expertise eventually manifest itself in some way that will enable me to contribute to the curing of certain social ills?
The real question I found myself asking was this: Whose health and well-being am I more responsible for, my grandchildren’s or my children’s? A tough question given the historical truth that one is more likely to affect the future than the present when it comes to political activism.
That said, the cartoon that I was planning to post before I left Los Angeles was one, I must say, that looks spectacular, although the message at a glance might incite real misunderstanding and fury. It’s two panels. The first panel has a Warhol tomato soup can shoved halfway up the rear of another Warhol tomato soup can. The panel bears the caption: God fucking Allah. The second panel depicts the same soup cans, only facing the other way, and bearing the caption: Allah fucking God.
See why I’m a finalist? (And why I might want to move to France?)
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I started to do a cartoon today called Ann Coulter Having Her Mouth Washed Out With Soap. The sketch that I did for it, pictured below in b/w, entertained me so that I decided to do some more stuff to it. Forty minutes later I completely abandoned the idea of doing a cartoon, preferring instead to lose myself in my own joy. For a moment I was able to forgot that such an infuriatingly despicable fuckhead even existed in the world, remembering what poet/environmental guru Gary Snyder said about pissing away an afternoon: Never forget how to engage in the serious job of goofing off every once in awhile.
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I started to do a cartoon today called Ann Coulter Having Her Mouth Washed Out With Soap. The sketch that I did for it, pictured below in b/w, entertained me so that I decided to do some more stuff to it. Forty minutes later I completely abandoned the idea of doing a cartoon, preferring instead to lose myself in my own joy. For a moment I was able to forgot that such an infuriatingly despicable fuckhead even existed in the world, remembering what poet/environmental guru Gary Snyder said about pissing away an afternoon: Never forget how to engage in the serious job of goofing off every once in awhile.
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Here's the story: Before going on stage with my band, The End, in Philadelphia, I found myself waiting for my fucking brother to show up so we could agree on the set list. He was always late in the same way that I imagined Liza Minnelli was for her gigs. Anyway, after getting a Sharpie pen and few sheets of cheap typing paper from the management, I noticed a mirror in front of me and I drew the below portraits fast and shoved them into my guitar case. My brother finally showed up and we did a show for a very small number of people - due more to a horrible snow storm that was going on than to our magnificent musicianship and staggering poetics and groovy hairdos. The best part of the night was when I said, after already playing for 40 minutes, "And for our next song..." to which the bartender could easily be heard groaning, Jesus Christ, guys, enough already.
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Here's the story: Before going on stage with my band, The End, in Philadelphia, I found myself waiting for my fucking brother to show up so we could agree on the set list. He was always late in the same way that I imagined Liza Minnelli was for her gigs. Anyway, after getting a Sharpie pen and few sheets of cheap typing paper from the management, I noticed a mirror in front of me and I drew the below portraits fast and shoved them into my guitar case. My brother finally showed up and we did a show for a very small number of people - due more to a horrible snow storm that was going on than to our magnificent musicianship and staggering poetics and groovy hairdos. The best part of the night was when I said, after already playing for 40 minutes, "And for our next song..." to which the bartender could easily be heard groaning, Jesus Christ, guys, enough already.
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