Spring cleaning time.
I have an Epson 960 printer for Mac, along with about $300 worth of printer cartridges, that I can’t use anymore because my current iMac (OS 10.7) won’t talk to it. But if you need a good inkjet printer and you have an older Mac, I’m willing to part with it and the cartridges. Send me $100 for the whole thing to cover shipping and my effort to schlep it to the post office and it’s yours.
Make sure you check the specs for your Mac before you get in touch.
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Sequester-related budget cuts to air traffic control could cause big delays at Los Angeles International Airport.
Alan Gardner produces a cartooning-news blog called The Daily Cartoonist. It’s painfully boosterish and unprofessionally written, which is why most professionals have stopped posting, or reading, it. Today, in an incredibly tacky move – even for a guy widely known throughout cartooning as a miserable hack – he runs interference for Daryl Cagle.
I’ll let you be the judge of whatever sins Daryl is guilty of.
Well, not really. Gardner has barely scratched the surface of the allegations.
He certainly has critics and detractors in the business, but in this case I find no evidence that this was a premeditated effort to capture more market space or syndicate dollars. For those cartoonists who profess to be journalists, whatever happened to asking questions, and getting context before rushing judgement to the presses?
Well, Alan, those of us who profess to be real journalists might start by seeking comment from people like me and Matt Bors, who have been at the forefront of the movement to restore professional ethics to editorial cartooning – you know, instead of childishly denying me the “privilege” of a link (it hurts, it hurts!).
Cagle has zero credibility. And now, neither does Gardner.
At the same exact time, Daryl released this ACLU-friendly version of the same cartoon:
Daryl isn’t a good cartoonist, and does not have the respect of his colleagues, yet he is an extremely powerful man in the profession. This is because his aggregated syndication package, Cagle Cartoons, is so cheap that it is sold to about 800 newspapers (out of 1400 total) in the United States, and also overseas. His blog, which encourages cartoonists to self-plagiarize, is widely read by younger cartoonists and very influential. So this sort of thing could easily catch on. After all, who wouldn’t want to double their marketshare with a few strokes of Photoshop?
Fortunately, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) will consider taking a stand against this sort of thing at its annual convention in Salt Lake City in June. A strong code of ethics will be discussed and possibly enacted. In the meantime, however, we are seeing cartooning at the precipice of disaster, commodifying a once-proud profession dedicated to political ideas into a meaningless pile of plug-in-your-own-beliefs garbage.
Another day, another dollar, and the not-so-great cartoons keep pouring in.
What, no sanitation workers? They had a hell of a mess to clean up after the bombing. More joyless pandering from American editorial cartoonists richest plagiarist. Again, remember the test for an editorial cartoon: if it doesn’t make any political statement, if there wouldn’t be a substantial number of people disagreeing with what it has to say, it isn’t a political cartoon, it is a greeting card. Calling first responders heroes has been standard operating procedure for lame political cartoonists ever since 9/11, and apparently it’s going to go on until the last crappy cartoonist dies.
I hate to pick on Nate Beeler: He’s a nice guy and a good sport. Just the luck of the draw this week. Again, this one is a combo cartoon – one that praises our saintly first responders – what a risk! – But also one that makes kind of a silly point. There was a lot of reason to think that the bombings were carried out by domestic right-wing terrorists: Boston, tax day, Patriots’ Day. Those Tea Party types, they don’t like paying their taxes. You can hardly blame the media for looking into that connection.
Not an editorial cartoon. An illustration. All it does is tell you what is going on. It doesn’t take a stance. It doesn’t come out against or for anything. There are lots of threats. Yes. We know this. Big problem: anything that appears in a newspaper should tell you something that you didn’t already know.
Now here’s something you don’t see all the time – a thoughtful, intelligent mainstream editorial cartoonist. Naturally he was recently laid off by his newspaper.
Setting aside the ridiculous politics – it’s not like there haven’t been true blue American born domestic terrorists – this is a cartoon that reflects the thought process that helps ensure that there will be many more terrorist attacks against the United States in the future. Plus not try to understand what motivates these people. Let’s just dismiss them as misguided, fanatical, zealous, wicked, and my personal favorite, ungrateful. Out of curiosity, why should anybody be grateful to a country?
Again, an editorial illustration. A lot of people feel united with Boston. Sports were a way for people to express that. That’s what this cartoon reflects. But it doesn’t make any statement. (Finalist for 2012 Pulitzer Prize)
When You Ask “Why?,” Mean It.
Why?
Why would anybody want to kill innocent people?
That’s what Americans — led by the media reporters and pundits who set the agenda for discussion — ask after every terrorist attack, particularly those carried out by foreigners.
Our mystified national cluelessness begs the question. Why do people blow up our embassies, bomb our ships, fly planes into our buildings, (try to) blow up their shoes and their underwear? They do it (partly) because we can’t imagine why anyone would do such a thing.
Studies, particularly the ones the media trots out at times like these, point to a number of factors. Some of these may help trigger the kind of violent “self-radicalization” that initial reports indicate may have led Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Kyrgyzstani brothers of Chechen descent, to detonate a pair of bombs at the Boston Marathon last week.
Was it psychological alienation? “I don’t have a single American friend,” Tamerlan, 26, supposedly the instigator of the attack, said. A traumatic event, like a job loss or the break-up of a romantic relationship? Some studies find that some self-radicalized (as opposed to those who are recruited into an organization) terrorists are made after they suffer a disappointment that sets them off, causing a person with political rage to graduate to violent direct action. After the Fort Hood shooting, the Pentagon concluded that substance abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome or brain injuries sustained in an IED blast could be triggers. Some even blame the involvement of Dzhokhar, 19 and suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, on reports that he was a pothead.
But hey, one could just as easily ask what drove state terrorist Barack Obama to murder thousands of innocent people with killer drones. Was the president sad after failing to win a second Nobel Prize? Did Michelle stop putting out? Did cocaine and/or marijuana scramble his right temporo-parietal junction, the part of the brain that controls the moral judgments of human beings? It’s pretty safe to say we’ll never be able to point to one, or two, or 17 discrete factors as the “causes” for the conscious choice to kill another person.
Like the drone war, the Boston Marathon bombings were a political act.
At this point, my best guess is that this was an attempt to strike back at the U.S. in its post-9/11 “great war of civilizations,” or Christian “crusade,” as George W. Bush called it. Authorities who questioned Dzhokhar in his hospital bed say that he and Tamerlan wanted to defend Islam from attack.
You can argue that the Tsarnaev brothers’ politics were wrong. That their tactics were counterproductive. That they were just “losers,” as their uncle called them. But we can’t understand why unless we dig into those politics.
Which is something that, 12 years after 9/11, the American media still refuses to do. Which increases the odds of future attacks.
Terrorism is not prima facie the act of a nut. Serial killers don’t detonate bombs. Terrorists don’t terrorize for fun.
“Terrorism [as opposed to state terrorism, like the drone wars] is the tool of the weak, used by disaffected groups or minorities to oppose the rule and (as they see it) the oppression of an established and militarily superior power,” Mark Nicholson wrote. “Because it is resistance on the cheap, terrorism often emerges out of civil society rather than state sponsorship, because oppressed civilian groups, lacking control over governmental machinery, can summon little or no regular military force able to confront their ‘oppressor’ in conventional military terms.”
We like terrorists. Some of them, anyway. During World War II German occupation forces characterized the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising as “terrorists.” We view these doomed Jews, who fought to the death, as noble. The Afghan mujahedeen who struggled against the Soviets during the 1980s were terrorists to the USSR, “freedom fighters” to Ronald Reagan. The French Resistance assassinated public officials and robbed banks and bombed trains, and we love ’em for it. In movies like “Red Dawn,” we cheer the patriotic American “terrorists” who wage guerilla warfare against the invaders.
This, of course, is how radical Islamists see themselves: as heroic fighters in a resistance movement against a rapacious, cruel oppressor. (And if they prevail, that’s how history will read.) They’re not psychotic. They’re principled, willing to sacrifice everything for their cause.
Since 9/11 our leaders have repeatedly told us that “they” “hate our freedoms,” but of course this is nonsense. As Osama bin Laden remarked, if the Islamists resented liberal societies, if they wanted the world’s women all under burqas, Amsterdam would have been blown to bits. “We only killed Russians after they invaded Afghanistan and Chechnya, we only killed Europeans after they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq,” bin Laden wrote in 2004.
To ask why Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did what they did (if indeed they did it), to research their political motivations with an open mind, without dismissing them as random (friendless, stoned, loser) crazies, does not legitimize their tactics.
Self-styled Islamist resistance organizations like Al Qaeda haven’t garnered widespread support because terrorism against civilians is counterproductive. As Ché Guevara wrote, “terrorism [is] a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution.”
However, as Ché continued, terrorism directed against government or military officials can be legitimate: “Terrorism should be considered a valuable tactic when it is used to put to death some noted leader of the oppressing forces well known for his cruelty, his efficiency in repression, or other quality that makes his elimination useful.” After 9/11, for example, even some Americans viewed the Pentagon as a legitimate military target. Conversely, arguments that the World Trade Center, as a hub of a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire,” was an acceptable target, were rejected. The WTC victims enjoy an exalted sainthood in popular culture; grief over the Pentagon victims has always been relatively muted.
No would-be revolutionary who knows history would have targeted a civilian target like the Boston Marathon.
So, let’s agree that the brothers’ tactics sucked. That what they did was evil. But what of their political motivations?
One would have to be blind not to understand why Muslims are enraged at the U.S.: Gitmo, drones, propping up dictators, Palestine, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, Iraq, the list goes on and on…and yes, Chechnya — where the Russians slaughtered thousands of innocents while their American allies silently cheered them on.
But few of us know about that. Because our media didn’t report it.
Which gets us back to:
Why’d the Boston bombers do it?
To get us to pay attention.
So we’ll force “our” government to stop what they’re doing in Muslim countries.
But that’ll never happen until we know “we’re” doing.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
So we know what shitty editorial cartoons look like. How about good ones? What makes the best cartoonists in the profession different than the dross that wins most of the prizes and hold all of the jobs? Let’s take a look.
Tom Tomorrow is the undisputed king of desconstructing right-wing and Republican talking points. His retro-1950s-esque art style has traveled well from its late 1980s origins, oddly reminding us how far we’ve come from a country that once had certain democratic traits.
Ruben Bolling is a cartoonist’s cartoonist, the person the best of the best point to when asked “Who’s better than you?” Seeking to reinvent the form every week, he takes artistic and compositional risks. Personally, I love his social commentary work even more than his political stuff. But it’s all worth reading.
Shannon Wheeler does the best gag cartoons published by The New Yorker. Here is his strip. You really feel like you’re in the hands of a seasoned humorist when you read his stuff.
What I want to know is: Why doesn’t the Pulitzer committee reward this kind of work? Why isn’t there a single newspaper in the nation willing to hire these artists?
I am one of several cartoonists who contributed work to a new video called “Cartoonists Demand Action,” which calls for increased gun control in the wake of the Newtown shootings in Connecticut. Organized by the brilliant Ruben Bolling, the other cartoonists who participated include Tom Tomorrow, Garry Trudeau, Mo Willems, Lalo Alcaraz, Steven Brodner, Peter Kuper, Stephan Pastis, Lincoln Pierce, Mike Luckovich, Mike Peters, Jerry Scott, Dan Piraro, Roz Chast and – get this – Art Spiegelman.
This is definitely the first-ever joint Spiegelman-Rall appearance.
My participation may come as a surprise to readers who know I am a strong advocate of the Second Amendment. History teaches us that revolutionaries and those to seek to resist foreign invasion rely on guns that were in circulation before the conflicts they fought against oppression and tyranny. This is why I believe that it’s important for Americans to have the right to own weapons.
Guns, it hardly need be said, are dangerous. So I believe that they need to be controlled and regulated the same way cars are. Motorists are required to receive training before they are allowed to drive. They must carry insurance to cover people they injure or kill with their car. They must take new tests, such as vision, to ensure they are qualified to drive. And of course cars are regulated. No one would suggest that cars be unregulated.
Like a car, guns can kill and maim. So people who buy guns should be required to pass a safety test, receive proper training, register their firearms and carry insurance in case they shoot someone or something they shouldn’t.
There is an argument that regulation is a first step toward government seizure. If they know who has guns, they can take them away. Which is true.
I don’t trust the government. No one should. But I’m counting on the fact that, if and when the time comes for armed resistance, it will be possible for patriotic Americans to keep their weapons out of the hands of government agents who seek to take them away. The situation will likely be chaotic and anarchic.
Moreover, we have to live in the present. Right now, as things stand, we have hundreds of millions of firearms in the hands of anyone with a couple of hundred dollars. That’s madness.
I believe in cars. But I also believe in regulation of cars.
Guns are no less lethal than cars.
I don’t know if I will keep doing this, but the reaction to Friday’s cartoon critique was so interesting and mostly positive but I thought I would keep it up with this latest batch. If you’re just joining the program, you probably already know my own work. But what you don’t know is what I’m reacting against: the so-called mainstream editorial cartoons that run in most major newspapers and on most major media websites, almost always to the exclusion of the good alternative stuff. Most artists get into an artform in order to build upon what came before. That’s also true of alternative artists, since our influences come from other places, but in the marketplace as it exists today, we are mostly defining ourselves by not being like this crap.
This is what I call the phony “I don’t care about politics” genre. After all, it’s by a political cartoonist. Someone who lives and breathes politics. Someone who is paid by a large daily newspaper, one that won’t even pick up my stuff for $20 a week via syndication even though I’m from the state that it’s in, and pretends that all he wants do is wallow in escapist television garbage. Sorry, I’m not buying it.
This cartoon illustrates the problems with the metaphor-based form of editorial cartooning. It’s almost like you need that fancy Enigma code breaking machine from World War II to decipher the thing. And then, assuming that you’re smart enough and caffeinated enough to figure it out, you have to conclude that all that work probably wasn’t worth it.
I admit it, this one kind of freaked me out. It’s another metaphor. At first, I thought to myself that since Uncle Sam was involved, he was going to have to climb Capitol Hill and this had something to do with the failed vote on the gun background check bill. Then I realized what it really was, that terrorism would be a hard hill to climb. Again, you can really see how these metaphor cartoons are hard to pull off. I mean, if you follow the analogy, this means that Uncle Sam wants to become more of a terrorist? Or that terrorism is something that were just going to have to get over? I don’t know. Makes my head hurt. And I really don’t understand the whole enormous buried skull.
I am guessing that this was probably an attempt to be emotional, but all it looks like to me is like a 1%er banker is running to the rescue. Did this happen? How did I miss this story? Very strange. Congratulations, by the way, to the cartoonist for winning the 2013 National Headliner Award. He already previously won two Pulitzer Prizes.
No alternative cartoonist – Tom Tomorrow, Matt Bors, Jen Sorensen, Stephanie McMillan, or myself – has ever won the National Headliner Award.
Another two-time Pulitzer winner weighs in with… What? I have no idea. Yeah, I recognize the national anthem. What exactly this has to do with the Boston bombing… What? Editors will no doubt love this.
Bear in mind, I intentionally chose cartoons by people who make a lot more money than I do and have won a lot more awards than I have and are much more successful than the best cartoonists in the business. According to the prize committees and the HR departments of America’s newspapers, this is what I should be doing instead of what I am doing. This is what gets rewarded.
