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Color Blind
Reference material for this cartoon: this ThinkProgress post detailing the “Top 12 Conservative Freakouts After Obama’s Race Speech.” The tweet in the first panel is real; the tweet in the second panel is taken verbatim from former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), substituting “MLK” for “President Obama.” The other two I made up, but frankly it’s hard to get more extreme than this marvel of vacuousness from Breitbart.com’s John Nolte:
“I like living in a country where a black president elected twice complains about racism.”
I read these comments before I got around to watching the actual video of Obama’s remarks. Far from being inflammatory, the speech was sober and circumspect. There’s simply no hope for anyone who found it “racist” — they are lost at sea. And anyone trying to twist this sad story around to make Trayvon the aggressor: really? I guess only certain people are allowed to stand their ground when they feel threatened.
Big-Bucks Trucks
Given the extreme droughts, wildfires, and other assorted weather oddities over the past few years, you might think some sort of inkling about climate change would be permeating the public consciousness, causing at least a few more Americans to pause before purchasing a whale-sized vehicle. And yet here we are, with full-sized luxury pickup truck sales booming and sedan sales sinking, making the SUV heyday of the early aughts look almost quaint. As WaPo’s Wonkblog notes, affluent buyers are snapping up plush $60,000-and-up land barges with heated leather seats and, yes, fiddleback eucalyptus wood trim (I did not make that up). Apparently our brief period of recession-induced humility is over:
“During the recession, if you could afford to buy a fancy new truck, it was not socially acceptable to flaunt it,” said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst at AutoTrader.com. But “the acceptance of conspicuous consumption is back.”
For those who think these overappointed behemoths have utilitarian value, I will let Mr. Money Mustache set the record straight on their usefulness as work trucks.
Reprints
With a hard-hitting yet whimsical take on politics, technology, and cultural trends, Jen Sorensen’s comics have won numerous Association of Alternative Newsweeklies awards, including First Place in 2005, 2012, and 2014. Sorensen was also named a Pulitzer finalist in 2017.
The comic is sent every week by email, and is available in both B&W and color. Rates depend on your publication’s circulation. Contact jensoren at gmail dot com for more info!
Newish Gigs
Some exciting new developments: As of a couple months ago, The Nation began publishing comics regularly in the print edition, as well as online, and I’m honored to be in the rotation. Here’s a recent strip of mine in Comix Nation.
I’m also happy to be part of Medium.com’s stellar new cartoon lineup, which you can check out here. My strip will appear on The Nib on Thursdays.
Contact
To contact Jen, email: jensoren {at} gmail {dot} com
While I do read all my email, I regret that I can’t respond to most of them, or I’d never meet my deadlines. An increasing number of people have been sending cartoon ideas lately, which is flattering, though to be clear, I don’t use ideas from readers. This is partly because my comics have a particular format and voice, and I prefer writing them myself.
You may repost occasional cartoons to your personal blog as long as you link back to this site. For all other uses, kindly email me.
Please be polite, or be deleted. In the trash folder, no one can hear you scream.
What’s Up With This Site?
I find myself in the curious position of being “in between websites” at the moment. Rather than wait to unveil my new site (this one) in all its perfect, finished glory, I’m going to be polishing it up publicly. Of course, I intended to do this a couple weeks ago, but found myself suddenly slammed with freelance work. So if you’re looking for anything beyond my current strips and blog posts right now, please visit slowpokecomics.com. And one of these days, I’ll get things fixed up around here.
This Week’s Cartoon: “Drooly Julie in ‘Hard Science'”
OK, so I couldn’t resist the Weiner story. But at least I tried to address the larger issue of the media’s obsession with sex scandals, as opposed to drawing something that basically said “Haw haw! Politician can’t keep it in his pants!” Unlike the lawmakers who supported the Iraq War, Weiner never cost anyone his or her life. Nor was he hypocritical like so many “family values” politicians who try to micromanage other people’s sex lives (as Dan Savage put it) while taking liberties with his own. Plus, the boniferous crotch shot had a certain je ne sais quoi.
Seriously, though, it’s a huge problem for our democracy that the important issues — especially ones involving money — tend to be too dry and complex for mass appeal. Because that’s really where the action is. Not in Weiner’s underpants!
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This Week’s Cartoon: “World War III: In It For the Money!”
It’s remarkable how little the self-proclaimed deficit hawks seem to talk about trimming our pork-encrusted military expenditures. I see on CostofWar.com that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have surpassed a trillion dollars. I’m not sure I feel a trillion dollars safer. For a trillion dollars, I expect the nation to be covered in a climate-controlled biodome that vaporizes terrorists upon entry. Given that we can’t even get Star Wars right, and it took us nearly three months to plug a hole in the ground, I’m guessing a biodome is not in the cards.
Despite all that outlay of lucre, the economy still sucks, so it’s time for full-scale mobilization! And I mean mobilization, right down to the last able-bodied American. I want to see toddlers plugging rivets into tanks! Dogs hauling bags of bullets! That, my friends, is how to get things moving again. And it’s a hell of a lot more acceptable to the pundit class than, I don’t know, stimulus spending that helps people keep their jobs. Or letting the Bush tax cuts for six-figure earners expire as scheduled. Or helping the unemployed. No, in the immortal words of The Exploited, LET’S START A WAR! But no nukes, please. That would kind of defeat the purpose.
This Week’s Cartoon: “GOP Cleans Up Environmental Laws”
While the nation was distracted with debt ceiling shenanigans, House Republicans did something else that went largely and predictably ignored by much of the news media. They quietly slipped 39 anti-environmental riders, many of them eye-poppingly radical, into an appropriations bill. The riders would do things like: prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases for one year, stop coal ash from being treated as hazardous waste, and block the enforcement of new fuel efficiency laws that automakers have actually agreed to. The money quote from Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID): “Many of us think that the overregulation from E.P.A. is at the heart of our stalled economy.” Oh yeah, that’s it. Fortunately, many of these brilliant ideas won’t make it through the Senate, but you never know, now that we live in a hostage-ocracy.
As I first read about this, it occurred to me that Republicans tend to view environmental protections themselves as a form of pollution. If the GOP fought actual pollution with the same vigor they display in fighting pollution laws, America would be clean enough to lick. Don’t think about that too hard.
Oh, and on a somewhat-related note: it takes a lot to get me to LOL, but this item on TPM did it. Tea Partiers have swallowed a Glenn Beck-promoted conspiracy theory that the UN is going to take away their farms through a sustainability program called “Agenda 21.” To quote Beck:
Some people now have begun questioning and standing up to what, on the surface, seems like a harmless initiative just to save the environment. But it is not… once they put their fangs into our communities, they’ll suck all the blood out of it, and we will not be able to survive. Watch out.
(via Media Matters)
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This Week’s Cartoon: “The Hoodie: Apparel of Peril”
The hoodie is about as universal as blue jeans these days, transcending practically every youth subculture. Considering that some 99.98% of hoodie-wearers are non-thugs, you’d have to be a clueless Fox News pundit to find the garment gunfire-provokingly scary.
I regret that I could not include the Great Hoodie Wars of the 7th century between the House of the Zip-Front and the House of Pullovers, as I unfortunately did not have not enough room to draw a giant battle scene.
Relevant links, as provided by Daily Kos commenters: NRA begins selling hoodies with a handgun pocket
University of Texas cartoonist draws mind-blowingly racist cartoon about Trayvon Williams
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RFK Journalism Award
I’m incredibly honored to announce that I’ve won a 2013 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for political cartooning. Known informally as “the poor people’s Pulitzer,” this award is especially thrilling because you learn of it through a phone call from Ethel Kennedy herself. I happened to be in a flooring store trying to find something to replace an ugly carpet in my house when the call came. Let’s just say Ethel Kennedy was one of the last people I expected to be at the other end of that unrecognizable phone number. Afterward, I completely lost my ability to focus on carpets.
The award is due in part to my comic for Kaiser Health News, “An Open Letter to the Supreme Court About Health Insurance.” Many thanks to KHN for giving me the opportunity!
I’m looking forward to meeting Mrs. Kennedy at the awards ceremony on September 26 — and shooting the breeze with the great economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Book Award.
Advice conservatives never give themselves
Some people blame Sandra Bland for escalating the situation during her traffic stop, suggesting she should have been more respectful to the barking officer. Funny how all this finger-wagging about manners when dealing with law enforcement didn’t seem to apply when the person in question was Cliven Bundy, the freeloading rancher who put up armed resistance over paying grazing fees. Apparently rebellion is virtuous if you’re a highly-armed white cowboy/militia leader/Tea Party activist, but if you’re a black woman who forgot to signal while changing lanes, do not even think about behaving ungraciously towards police, no matter how abusive they are.
Other panels in this cartoon were somewhat inspired by a recent David Brooks column, which was written as an open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates in response his new book. Beneath a veneer of what struck me as patronizing faux-humility, Brooks pretty much slipped into ye olde “why don’t you stop wallowing in victimhood and pursue the American Dream?” line of attack.
