The Sorensen Monologues
Pepper Spray Cop
Here’s my contribution to the Pepper Spray Cop meme. This is an illustration for the Dallas Observer — their concept, for a political column. Poor John John!
This Week’s Cartoon: “Laziness Craziness”
I swore I wasn’t going to do another Occupy Wall Street cartoon since I’ve done so many of them lately, but I couldn’t help myself. I find that there’s much to say about the Occupy movement and surrounding issues, while I don’t have many exciting insights yet about the Republican candidate-buffoons beyond pointing out that they are, in fact, buffoons. I’m sure they will inspire cartoons as the race heats up.
I feel this one violates my policy of trying to show rather than tell, but it makes a point about something that’s been driving me nuts. (See related cartoon from 2007, “The Mental Welfare State,” about people too lazy to pull their brains up by their bootstraps.)
This Week’s Cartoon: “The War on Vegetables”
As you’ve probably heard, Congress recently blocked new USDA rules intended to improve nutrition in school lunches. Among them was a requirement that pizza slices have more than a 1/4 cup of tomato paste in order to qualify as containing a vegetable. Big food heavies such as Coca-Cola, Del Monte, the American Frozen Food Institute, and the National Potato Council weighed in to preserve the school-lunch status quo.
What you may not have heard about is how large companies and industry groups have also managed to infiltrate conferences for nutrition professionals. The biggest one — the American Dietetic Association conference — is now sponsored by the likes of Coca-Cola, Pepsico, and Mars. I highly recommend this entertaining and appalling report on Food Safety News, which comes complete with photos of a giant can of Goldfish crackers dangling from the trade show ceiling and a Coca-Cola booth bearing the slogan “Promoting the Registered Dietician.” Panels included — I kid you not — one called “A Fresh Look at Processed Foods.”
This Week’s Cartoon: “Starve the Beast”
This cartoon, of course, references Grover Norquist’s famous line about wanting to reduce government to the size where he could drown it in a tub, like some unfortunate critter. One concept anti-government types aren’t too clear on is that waste is hardly unique to the public sector. I’m not saying government programs are necessarily more efficient than privately-run ones (although in the case of health care, public plans are massively more cost-effective). But money out of your pocket is money out of your pocket, whether it’s going to the guv’mint or a corporation.
This Week’s Cartoon: “The Free speech Dimension”
My cartoonist colleague Susie Cagle was arrested while reporting on #OccupyOakland last week. I can assure you, she’s not the sort of person to give cops a hard time. She was standing in a doorway with a bunch of observers from the National Lawyers Guild, trying to avoid a skirmish, when the police came up and arrested all of them. So I got to thinking… if protesters aren’t allowed to peacefully assemble on private property, and they risk arrest or physical injury from overzealous police on public property, where are they supposed to go, exactly? An entirely separate plane of existence is all they seem to be left with.
The 1% have lobbyists, superPACs, and Fox News, of course, so they don’t have to bother with the messiness of occupying meatspace to make their case.
This Week’s Cartoon: “The Seven Billionth Human”
This one was at least partly influenced by the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr (h/t to my colleague Matt Bors), where #Occupy movement supporters of all ages are posting photos of themselves holding hand-written notes explaining their circumstances, many of which are dire. Read enough of them, and twin themes emerge of crushing student loans amd medical bills. It’s an almost embarrassing display of how miserably the richest country in the world deals with its citizens’ education and health care. (And yes, I realize that Baby 7B is most likely being born in a so-called developing country, under different but no less-challenging circumstances, but I took some artistic license.)
One meme that really gets my goat these days is the idea that college kids shouldering massive student loans must have partied their way through school, or were too lazy to work to pay their tuition. Have these critics not noticed what a college degree costs now? Do they really think you can pay for higher education on a library book shelver’s income? (That was my college job.) Sometimes I think these self-satisfied blowhards must have spent the last decade partying, or were simply too lazy to do the work of following basic economic trends.
Cynthia Heimel Comic
Now that the exclusivity period has expired, I can share a biographical comic I drew earlier this year for Bitch Magazine about the great humor writer Cynthia Heimel. Heimel had quite the influence on me while I was in college, and it was a thrill to be able to interview her for the piece.
(Click for larger image)
This Week’s cartoon: “Unsuit Wall Street”
Posting this to the blog a bit late due to travel. I’ve been meaning to do this cartoon for years, and now happened to be just the right time. It has always bothered me that radical ideas are seen as mainstream because they are spouted by bald men in suits. Meanwhile, supporters of the New Deal — a 75-year old set of programs — get dismissed as wacky, dirty hippies.
For your extra amusement: while checking out the Hermès website, I came across — I kid you not — a $1,400 leather iPad holder. The 1% need only apply!
This Week’s Cartoon: “Occupy Womb Street”
The “Protect Life Act” was back with a vengeance last week, not that you’d know it given the scant amount of attention it seemed to get. Maybe Republicans are trying to bore us with their never-ending displays of unborn baby-kissing so that we simply stop noticing when they pass bills deeming women’s lives expendable.
Even though the bill would face an Obama veto, House Republicans apparently considered it a higher priority than a jobs bill. But here’s the real kicker: just one week earlier, the House passed H.R. 2681, which exempts cement plants from the Clean Air Act and encourages the burning of industrial waste. Via Earthjustice:
“Does the House of Representatives think that not enough babies are being born with developmental damage due to mercury poisoning?” asked Earthjustice attorney James Pew. “The House essentially just opened up all the doors and windows in homes across the country and urged polluters to blow their toxic emissions right in.
So evidently we should sacrifice a mother to save a fetus, but pumping that fetus full of heavy metals is just dandy. Okay, then! I really wanted to work this point into the cartoon, but there’s only so much inanity you can address in four panels.
This Week’s Cartoon: “Protest Pointers With Eric Cantor”
I wasn’t sure which aspect of Cantor’s comments, made at the Values Voter Summit in Washington DC, was more troubling: the hypocritical dissing of Occupy Wall Street protesters in language that could very well apply to the Tea Party, or the more general pooh-poohing of street protest in the age of Citizens United. When you have a Supreme Court that considers unfettered corporate cash to be “free speech” every bit as much as a protest sign scrawled with a Sharpie on a piece of torn cardboard, ordinary Americans are up against some tough competition in the political expression department. Maybe we could funnel money to fly-by-night front groups like the big boys if only we had decent-paying jobs. Until then, Mr. Cantor, I suppose we’ll just have to be uncivilized.
On a purely artistic note, this was my first time drawing Cantor’s bony skull-face. I knew this day was coming, and I’m pretty happy with how it came out. He and Rudy Giuliani should have a skull-face face-off. Not sure how that would work exactly, but I’d rather not think about it too hard.
For more on Cantor’s ties to the financial industry (among other things, his wife was a VP at Goldman Sachs), check out this WaPo article.
The Simpsons Beat Me!
In the comments to last week’s cartoon blog post, reader Nick furnished this screenshot from e Simpsons episode, which bears an eerie resemblance to the first panel to last week’s strip.
Pretty eerie, huh? I have no memory of that Simpsons gag, even though I probably saw that episode at some point. But to give credit where credit is due, I thought I’d post them both here. The placement of the well is especially mind-blowing, but I would add that that’s where it goes, composition-wise.
