SlowpokeBlog

Re: this cartoon, in which I suggested hipsters were resorting to extra-large, ironically-huge glasses frames to distinguish themselves from the bourgeoisification of small glasses, I noticed while strolling around the grounds of the University of Virginia yesterday that a startling number of female undergrads are now wearing giant '70s sunglasses -- so many that I would posit the huge glasses trend has officially passed from the hipstersphere into the much larger preppisphere.

[UPDATE: Fellow cartoonist Matt Bors correctly notes that celebrities have been sporting ironically-enormous shades for quite some time. As I said to Matt, they only started showing up en masse among the sorority girls on the ultra-preppy campus of UVA this fall. I would say the preppisphere doesn't necessarily represent the mainstream so much as the ultimate endpoint of a trend; that is, where something that started in the hipstersphere goes to die, much as grunge did in the early '90s, when sorority girls began sprouting flannel shirts.]

A couple weeks ago, the NY Times had an article about the civil war in Uganda, in which children were conscripted to commit horrifying acts of violence. Among them was grinding babies to death with a mortar and pestle, which has to be about the sickest form of homicide I've ever heard about. So that's where the idea for "terror grinders" came from -- not that I'm trying to make light of the situation in Uganda.

As the use of torture has been debated in the U.S., I have wondered what, if any, act of inhumanity would actually give the torture advocates pause. Sadly, if we really were grinding detainees into mush, I'm sure many would rise to the defense of the practice and cast the rest of us as "terrorist coddlers." (We have, of course, beaten some to death, which doesn't seem to bother the pro-torture crowd.) Already I have seen some totally irresponsible cartoons such as this one depicting Geneva Conventions-supporting senators pampering a detainee, feeding him grapes and fanning him with a palm frond while he reclines in a beach chair. I consider this a dereliction of a cartoonist's duty. Our job is to inform, using exaggeration to shed light on an issue -- not to obscure it. To draw torture opponents as people who wish to give the spa treatment to terrorists is not an exaggeration; it is simply wrong, and it only serves to mislead the public about the terms of this ridiculous debate.

On a lighter note, as I was writing this cartoon it occurred to me that placing the word "terror" before just about any noun makes it funny. Think about it. "Terror pants." "Terror balls." A recent Ted Rall cartoon contained the phrase "terror tots", which made me chuckle. My cartoon from a couple years ago about terror-fighting hats also somewhat relied on this principle.

This is great. Apparently there's someone doing time down in Texas with a subscription to the Funny Times. Sadly, they were denied a recent issue of the magazine because my "Rid-Mex" cartoon was deemed "designed to achieve a breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots." Here's the denial notice they sent to the Funny Times (click to enlarge):



And here's the offending cartoon:


It's hard to say whether the prison administrator wildly misinterpreted the cartoon or just didn't like the message. In any case, you never know when a comic making fun of bigotry will cause violence and mayhem!

While doing some Google research for this cartoon, I came across some online communities I didn't know existed, like Snubster, a kind of anti-MySpace where people diss other people and things they hate. And yes, there really is a Hamsterster, which at this writing contains the profiles of 1,449 hamsters.

Someone apparently set up a SlowpokeBlog feed for LiveJournal users a while back, which I only discovered recently. The feed URL didn't get updated when I moved my website, though, so I have recently updated it. Here's the link for those interested.

I received a fair amount of email over my "Two Memorials" cartoon, most of it positive like the note below:

The message in your cartoon really hit home. Hardly anyone thinks about the rescue workers and the people living in the nearby neighborhoods, who were told the lies of clean air. I'm a respiratory therapist and I wondered about it. We have had forest fires here in Colorado that are 30 miles away and we get problems from the smoke!! More people need to realize there were a lot more victims... thank you for the 'toon that speaks a thousand words!!

Here are a couple, however, from the Department of Dumbass:

Subject: It's your fault too.

You are a simple minded political pawn.
911 isn't that simple.

Um... it was my fault that 9/11 happened, or that the EPA lied about the toxic air? I guess I'm just too simple-minded to understand!

This one could have been intended as Colbertish irony, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't:

Hell!!, Mr. Bush should have told the clods that the air was dangerous to breath, then they could have stopped breathing.

Right. Because respirators haven't been invented yet! And what's up with calling the rescue workers "clods"!?

It's hard for me to understand how anyone could defend a lie that will cause the suffering and death of the heroes of 9/11 and many innocent civilians, but I think these people don't know how to process the fact that their government did this. It just doesn't fit into their rosy reality at all. They become confused and angry, and lash out at the messenger.

OK, so I did a 9/11 cartoon after all. I broke several of my own rules with this one -- namely, the "show-don't-tell" rule, and the "try to be funny" rule -- but this was a special occasion. Also, I know other cartoonists have done monument gags and used the phrase "Never forget" facetiously, but it had to be done. And it should be done again.

I'm dismayed that hardly anyone is talking about the EPA's lie to New Yorkers that the air was safe to breathe after 9/11 when its own scientists suggested it was not. I think this was one of the most mendacious acts of the entire Bush era, and if Americans really knew what happened, they would be livid. I insist that you read the following: this NY Daily News column and this Newsday article via Common Dreams.

Former EPA chief Christie Whitman took the fall for the Bushies, a U.S. District Judge calling her actions "conscience-shocking" earlier this year, but little has been made of James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who scrubbed the reports of EPA's own officials. Connaughton's bio on the White House website neatly euphemizes his past as a corporate lawyer who battled the EPA in its efforts to hold GE and Atlantic Richfield responsible for cleanup of Superfund sites. For the truly curious, there's more on his background here. Laughably, Connaughton said the EPA did "an incredible job" with the World Trade Center cleanup, preceding Bush's famous "Heckuva job, Brownie!" by two full years.

The thing is, this is not a "left" or "right" issue. It is an issue of basic morality. They even deleted the EPA scientists' warnings for vulnerable segments of the population such as children, the elderly, or people with lung conditions, for chrissakes! This is something that happens in communist China, not America.

Why did they do it? According to EPA's inspector general, it had to do with national security concerns and reopening Wall Street. Well, adding to the terrorists' death toll sure showed them how strong we are, didn't it? Heckuva job, Connie!

Isn't it interesting that you're hearing about this from a cartoonist instead of on TV?

For what it's worth, I thought I would post an excerpt from former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, which makes a compelling case that the Pentagon's open hostility towards Clinton, and an overcautious CIA, impeded Clinton's efforts to fight terrorism rather than the other way around. Clarke's book is a gripping read; he has worked under both Republican and Democratic presidents, and is no pacifist. There are many juicy parts to choose from, but here's a bit about the cruise missile attack on bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan:

Our response to two deadly terrorist attacks was an attempt to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mill and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about finding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps.

What was particularly frustrating was that Clinton had pulled Joint Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton and me aside after the Cabinet Room meeting, saying to the former Special Forces commander, "Hugh, what I think would scare the shit out of these al Qaeda guys more than any cruise missile... would be the sight of U.S. commandos, Ninja guys in black suits, jumping out of helicopters into their camps, spraying machine guns. Even if we don't get the big guys, it will have a good effect." Shelton looked pained. He explained that the camps were a long way away from anywhere we could launch a helicopter raid. Nonetheless, America's top military officer agreed to "look into it."

I make no pretense of knowing anything about military strategy, but it's an interesting quote given the blather about Clinton being unwilling to put boots on the ground.

I assume most readers of this blog have been following the controversy surrounding ABC's swift-boating of the Clinton administration. (ThinkProgress has been tracking the story round the clock if you want the latest.) While the networks have been irresponsible on countless occasions, I'd say "The Path to 9/11" represents a dramatic step forward into the abyss. I honestly can't imagine ABC doing something like this, say, ten or fifteen years ago. To go forward with a re-enactment filled with slanderous falsehoods about a former president and his staff -- and to scoff at the objections of said officials, prominent historians, members of the 9/11 Commission, and the public at large -- well, I think a major network would have viewed this as an embarrassment in the past. But clearly ABC is more interested in staying in good graces with the Bush administration than it is with public perception, or an ethical duty to tell the truth. I find this development utterly chilling.

This just in from ThinkProgress -- first showings of the film in New Zealand reveal minimal editing to the wholly invented scene showing Sandy Berger slamming the phone on George Tenet. [Update: apparently this scene was edited out in the US.]

The NY Times has a major article about tens of thousands of people suffering post 9-11 illnesses from the dust and debris, yet it does not mention the EPA's announcement that the air was safe to breathe even once.

To read about the EPA, you have to go to the article's blog comments, where a number of New Yorkers discuss their ailments and their outrage at the federal government for its false reassurances.

I was thinking that I should do some sort of September 11-related cartoon for this week, since next week's strip will run in papers after that date. Specifically, I wanted to highlight the gross negligence of the EPA -- under White House pressure -- in pronouncing the air in lower Manhattan safe to breathe when it was filled with dangerous toxins that continue to plague the health of rescue workers and who knows how many thousands of others. But I had trouble coming up with a way to make this funny, and eventually decided to avoid the subject altogether. I figure there will be more than enough discussion in the media of 9-11 in the days to come.

The Museum of Lost Formats is an idea I've been kicking around for years now; it had actually become something of a running joke between Mr. Slowpoke and myself whenever I got stuck. "Well, there's always the Museum of Lost Formats," one of us would say wistfully. And then I would proceed to do something else. So, you see, this strip is somewhat momentous. Now I need a new idea to joke about doing when nothing else seems to work.

I love this. The first European spacecraft to reach the moon ended its mission with a controlled crash into a plain called the "Lake of Excellence." Don't we all wish we wound up in the Lake of Excellence?

A bunch of us altweekly-type cartoonists featured in Ted Rall's Attitude series have formed a new collective called "Cartoonists With Attitude." Go check out our website, which aggregates all of our blog feeds into one giant übercommentary!