The Sorensen Monologues
What I’ve Been Up To: Reubens! Travel! Lightbulbs!
It’s been a while since I babbled about myself in this space, so here’s a giant autobiographical news dump for you. Last month I took a trip to the Pacific Northwest to get my stuff out of storage, and am happy to report that I have a proper drawing table again after many months of using any available surface. My office is slowly shaping up, as I make my way through a giant crap pile in the middle of the floor. My main problem is that I have no place to put the crap, meaning I need to go out and buy some more crap to put the crap in, and I really have no patience for that sort of thing.
Upon returning from the Northwest, I took off for Pittsburgh for the National Cartoonists Society annual Reubens Weekend. I almost didn’t go, but am very glad I did, because I won the NCS Award for Best Editorial Cartoons! The Reubens are often referred to as the Oscars of the cartooning world, except with none of the media coverage of the Oscars. Here I am holding my lovely plaque, which I look forward to hanging in my office as soon as I buy some nails.
I also had the pleasure of appearing on a panel that weekend with several luminaries from the daily strip world. From left is moderator Hilary Price (she stood on a chair while orating at one point, a technique I will have to try on a future panel), Terri Libenson, me, Cathy Guisewite, and Lynn Johnston.
Photo by Barbara Dale
Never in my wildest imagination as a wee youngster reading the comics page did I think I’d be sitting beside THE Cathy and the creator of “For Better or For Worse” at a conference someday. Afterwards, some of us went out for delicious sandwiches with french fries in them at Primanti Brothers.
A day or two after the Reubens, I found out that I am a finalist in this year’s Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards. I can really get behind this award-a-day plan. At risk of excessive horn-tooting, around this time I was mentioned in the New York Times, in a review of Victor Navasky’s book on political cartooning. I’m listed as an omission from the book, along with several prominent cartoonists whose absence from any book on political cartooning is frankly bewildering.
Right now I’m knee-deep in freelance work and home improvement projects without end. I did manage to successfully change the lightbulb in my refrigerator the other day, and now I can see my food again. This has been my greatest recent accomplishment, aside from the NCS Award.
Next week I’m off to Utah for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention. Yesterday, I was the “guest cartoonist” for my colleague and all-around good guy Pat Bagley in the Salt Lake City Tribune; they ran my gun control strip from a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for further developments from the Beehive State.
Surveillance Bait
I find the NSA Prism program — what I know about it, anyway — to be problematic. But it does seem there’s a disconnect between public reaction to this particular scandal and our tolerance for the selling of highly-personalized data by tech companies in the private sector. I’ve read over the years about evolving technologies to offer individuals different prices and interest rates based on data collected through the internet; I have no idea how much this is actually happening, but the potential for abuse seems vast.
I’m not trying to suggest an either/or situation here in which government spying is OK and private sector data mining is not. The potential for abuse by the state is enormous and well-precedented. But Silicon Valley is no saint here; many tech libertarians seem to overlook this. Private data could be used to deny people health insurance and harm their credit — it goes beyond mere advertising. The arrangement with the Prism program just seems to me like foxes working with foxes guarding the henhouse.
Somewhat amusingly, while I was working on this very cartoon, I watched a music video on YouTube — The New Pornographers’ “Slow Descent into Alcoholism” — and immediately afterward was served Google ads for various detox programs. So there’s one particular data point on my record that might not be so accurate. At least, not currently.
Loan Bone
Interest rates on Stafford Loans could double from 3.4% to a usurious 6.8% if Congress fails to act by July 1. Many Senate Democrats want another extension of the current rate; Republicans want a variable rate pegged to the market at a higher figure. As Elizabeth Warren put it as she argued for giving students the same rate as banks:
“Right now, the US government is out there investing in large financial institutions, offering them money every single night [for] three quarters of 1 percent, and yet our students, if the government doesn’t do something, will be paying nine times that much,” Warren said to an audience of about 70 students and staff at the Northeastern Visitor Center.
Adding to the debt of poor college students at a time of ever-increasing economic inequality (and record low interest rates) while companies like Apple practice massive tax avoidance is simply ridiculous.
Those Lazy, No-Good Babies
As Paul Krugman noted in a recent column, the latest farm bill coming out of the House Agriculture Committee would kick around two million people off of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In addition to being a massively-boneheaded austerity measure that hurts the economy, such a move would affect large numbers of children. Ah, those lazy dependents with their culture of dependence! I guess we should make them earn their food by scavenging dumps for scrap metal or something.
And yes, I was thinking of that Free to Be You and Me sketch “Boy Meets Girl” with Marlo Thomas and Mel Brooks as I drew this.
For more commentary on this and our crueler tendencies, Comic Strip of the Day has a good post.
Blog Note + Pittsburgh Appearance
I haven’t been able to write much here lately because I’ve been busy moving into a new home, which has yet to be equipped with wifi. To give you some idea of what my life has been like, I had to send out this week’s cartoon from the parking lot of a local coffee shop at 1:45am last night. (I’m currently sitting inside said coffee shop as a paying customer.) Oh, how I miss the days when people were lazy and/or clueless about password-protecting their wireless networks.
In other news, I’ll be doing an event in Pittsburgh next Sunday, May 26, as part of the Pittsburgh Comic Arts Festival. I am humbled to be appearing on a panel with several legendary comic strip artists: Lynn Johnston, Cathy Guisewite, Terri Libenson, and Hilary Price. Details here.
Gap’s Reputation Collapse
The Independent UK has a good rundown of the Gap controversy. The Savar factory collapse did not involve The Gap, but the company has been outspoken about its opposition to any legally-binding plan to improve conditions for workers in Bangladesh.
Fly Air Air
Reference material for this cartoon: this piece about children growing up in the toxic clouds of Beijing. If ever there was a warning sign for humanity to change its ways, this would be it.
“Comic Strip of the Day” blogger Mike Peterson has written an eloquent post about this cartoon and the well-worn path of industrialists escaping the fallout from industrialization. I’m on the road right now, so I’ll pass the mic to Mike for further thoughts on the issue.
Rick Perry’s Explosion
In case you haven’t heard the backstory to this cartoon, my friend Jack Ohman, editorial cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee, drew a cartoon criticizing Perry’s flagrant opposition to business regulations in light of the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion. Perry has been visiting California, trying to recruit businesses to move to Texas, citing thes state’s lack of regulations and its low taxes. Perry fired back with a letter to the Sacramento Bee, calling the cartoon a “detestable attempt at satire” that mocked the deaths of the victims. Jack got a lot of hate mail, and even I had Twitter trolls accusing me of not caring about the lives of first responders after I defended the cartoon.
As any cartoonist knows, interpretations of one’s work may vary, but there is a point where subjectivity gives way to willful misreading. Anyone who thinks Ohman’s cartoon makes fun of those who died in West is suffering such poor reading comprehension as to be objectively wrong. This cartoon isn’t like a joke from a Jay Leno monologue — it’s serious. Deadly serious. Far from making light of the tragedy, Ohman is condemning Perry’s negligent attitude toward worker safety in the hopes of preventing more deaths in the future.
After prancing into California trying to lure its businesses away to an unregulated banana republic, Perry shouldn’t be surprised when a cartoonist in Sacramento bites him in the butt.
This whole controversy reminds me of the Tom Toles cartoon from 2006 that elicited a letter of condemnation from the Pentagon. Toles drew an amputee soldier to symbolize the worn-out condition of the U.S. Army, and was accused of making fun of soldiers themselves. Free advice for high-ranking officials angered by a cartoon: it’s generally best not to make a stink, lest you draw attention to the fact that you don’t smell so sweet yourself.
Cartoon Flashback: The George W. Bush Library
Given the hoopla over the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library this week, I thought I would dig up this cartoon from 2007. Seeing Bush in the media again brings back memories of how gut-wrenchingly awful those eight years were. I don’t think history will be rewritten so that Bush is remembered as a good president, but it does seem that the extremism and lethal incompetence of that administration might be partly forgotten as time goes by.
After not seeing him for a while, I noticed that Bush’s facial features are becoming slightly exaggerated with age. His nose seems a little pointier and his ears a little bigger. He’s becoming even more of a caricature of himself than he was.
