SlowpokeBlog

I'm sure others have pointed this out elsewhere, but this is a classic Bushism:

"I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."

Article here.

For many years I avoided the watching the Olympics, pooh-poohing the crass commercialism and treacly human interest stories shot in soft focus and accompanied by tenderly-inspiring piano ballads. And while I still find all that crap annoying, I must confess I enjoy watching the winter games. Except for the melodramatic horror show that is ice dancing. I like the fact that for two weeks, the living rooms of America are filled not with stupid reality shows and hackneyed crime dramas, but with obscure Nordic sporting events featuring athletes with names like "Roar." (See Roar Ljoekelsoey, ski jumping).

It seemed only appropriate that I did a cartoon on the Slowlympics. It occurred to me that someone has probably done this concept already, but I couldn't find it on the web, and as the creator of a strip called "Slowpoke" and practitioner of slowpokedom, I figured I have a special license to do it anyway.

The Finnegans Wake reference is drawn from real life. My grandmother-in-law, an avid Joyce fan, has been reading and dissecting Finnegans Wake for several years with a friend. I hear she has seen the cartoon and is delighted.

Former bond trader and author of Is the American Dream Killing You? Paul Stiles:

"It's so painful to see. The sprawl, the greed," he said in a telephone interview, speaking of the United States. "It's like an inward collapse of what we once were. I can't take it anymore. You see McDonald's and it's like you are getting shot."

Now there's some disillusionment.

... as opposed to the not-so-well-informed sort discussed two posts earlier.

O.S. writes:

You're right about the global warming problem, but not about that last bit, that humans will become extinct while other animals adapt.

Unfortunately, we are better suited to adapting to rapidly changing climate and rapidly changing ecosystems than most animal and plant species. This is partly due to the fact that many species are adapted to specific climates, food, rainfall patterns, and so on, and normally they could react to change by migrating, but thanks to humans' love for massive development and destruction of natural environments, we have isolated many species in "islands" (surrounded by such things as the Seas Of MiniMall, Sprawlville, Megafarms, and Wal Marts) from which they will not be able to migrate. Thus local/climate specifically-adapted species will simply disappear when thier local climate and ecosystems change - what we are already seeing, for example, with tropical frog species in Central America.

On the other hand, humans have spent the better part of the last 200 years remaking the Earth to suit ourselves and our little preferences. We will surely have problems, and of course lots of poor mostly brown people will die of starvation and conflicts over dwindling resources (but like anyone cares about them, right?). But by and large, humans will almost cetainly survive even rapid, drastic climate change - and in fact we'll likley react by manipulating the earth even more into a relatively undiverse, human-supporting, homogenous factory for the few things we really like - fossil fuels or other shit we can burn easily, genetically enhanced corn, and hamburgers-on-legs.

The only other species likely to do as well or better than us, of course, are cockroaches and rats. Maybe mosquitos.

Hooray for the future, it's going to be great!

I'd say I agree with this projection; I would add that the cartoon was not meant to be a realistic statement so much as a playful (if somewhat grim) exercise. It was partly inspired by the David Attenborough nature documentaries that Mr. Slowpoke and I have been watching off and on over the past year. Did you know there are virtually no birds in Guam because of human-introduced brown snakes? Now you do.

Regarding the "Freedom vs. Freedom" cartoon from Jan. 23, Peter writes:

I just read your "freedom vs. freedom" strip. What a hoot!
Unfotunately, nothing has ever been said for the first time. Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called "two concepts of liberty" a while ago which deals with this very issue. Here is a link to it:
http://tlrdoc.free.fr/pages/berlin.htm
Just thought you might be interested.

I had heard about the concepts of "positive" and "negative" freedom, so I was aware the strip was expounding on an old idea, but didn't know it was Berlin who had written about it.

Anyway, I appreciate the intelligent feedback.

I was recently interviewed by the Charlottesville Podcasting Network about the Danish cartoon controversy. You can listen here.

As a political cartoonist -- of Danish descent, no less! -- I would seem like the perfect candidate to have strong feelings about the matter. While I find the uproar culturally significant, I think it has a lot less to do with cartooning than with other issues. A fascinating tidbit found via Tom Tomorrow's site: the culture editor of the Danish paper is a close affiliate of the radical neocon Daniel Pipes, the man behind McCarthyite group Campus Watch, which was the subject of this cartoon from a couple years ago. Here's the actual post by John Sugg.

Regarding this week's strip, a reader writes:

since the usa didn't do anything about the other global climate changes such as 12 ice ages 12 warming periods over the last huh 100 millions years they happened as well it's shear arrogance that people like you think man has so much influence that they can stop or start any climate change

So that explains it. NASA's top climatologist -- the one being censored by the Bushies -- is just being "arrogant."

Actually, I'd say thinking you know more about this issue than the entire scientific community smacks just a bit of arrogance.

I find it remarkable that anyone could possibly get pissed off at this week's cartoon, but I suppose anything is possible in this era of gross disinformation.

I sketched most of this strip on the flight back from LA. I can only imagine that the woman sitting next to me saw the Yellow-Bellied Skullpecker and wondered what the hell I was doing. Then again, I was flying from LA, where such wackiness is the norm. Of course the person in front of me insisted on reclining as far as her seat would possibly allow -- about an inch from my nose -- thus slightly crowding the drawing process. My advice to all of you is to recline only halfway, because you never know when the person behind you is trying to draw a cartoon.