Categorical Aperitif

Sir:

Once again, I have opened a "Today's Cartoon" email from Slate only to behold another of your cortex-confounding cartoons. Once again, I struggle to find within it humor—or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Once again, I find myself wondering whether you (and perhaps other right-wing cartoonists as well) are astoundingly ignorant, dangerously insane, or shamelessly dishonest. Let's first look at your exciting spaghetti-Western version of the dispute over the "Protect America Act":

Honestly, I suspect that there were Paleolithic scrawlers at Lascaux who, once taught to read and turned loose upon the internet for half an hour, would swiftly exhibit a richer, more nuanced understanding of the relevant issues here than you have managed. And had you at least gotten close to showing an understanding of the issues, then you might have managed to wring some humor out of this "showdown." Recall one of Henny Youngman's famous jokes: "I met a man who said he hadn't had a bite all week. So I bit him." This is funny in part because, while its "logic" is wrong, it's not totally wrong: it's easy to see how one could go from have a bite meaning "eat" to its meaning "being bitten." It's easy for the hearer to build a cognitive bridge connecting "normal" logic to the joke's logic—and crossing that bridge yields amusement. Your cartoon, however, doesn't bend logic and reality in a cognitively interesting way; like a dimwitted, petulant child playing in mud, it just splatters them all over the walls. Where does it go wrong? Let me count the ways.

I rather like the Old West set-up, so I'll give you the first panel. The problem starts in panel two. Surely you are aware that the disputes over FISA and PAA are not over whether the president can eavesdrop on the phone calls of suspected terrorists. Right? FISA already granted that power; it just insisted, in time-honored limited-government fashion, on reasonable oversight provisions to ensure that this power is not abused—by, say, being used against the president's political opponents rather than against actual terrorists. Thus, in choosing to frame this as a dispute over whether the president has the right to listen in "on a call from a suspected terrorist," you are seriously distorting the issue. And not in a funny way, either.

This problem is magnified in panel three, where your bitchy, black-hatted Senator Dodd yanks the Freedom Wire (that's what we'll be calling illegal wiretaps before long, just watch) out of President Bush's hands. Again, the dispute is not really over whether the president can listen to suspected terrorists; FISA gave him that power already. Thus, your portrayal of Senator Dodd as seeking to protect the communications of terrorists isn't a clever bending of reality, as in Youngman's classic joke; instead, it's just totally bass-ackwards from what's actually happening. Of course, it's bass-ackwards in a way that's convenient if you're a particularly subservient supporter of President Bush—and, let's face it, this isn't the first time one of your cartoons has seemed less a product of critical thought than of submissive urination.

With panels two and three having so thoroughly misrepresented the issue, there's nought left for the rest of the cartoon but to grind its pointless, unfunny way toward its conclusion. I must admit that I rather like panel six—though I can't believe it was your intention to delight readers with the spectacle of a Bush strung up with wire. Alas, to get there we first have to wade through two more panels of cringing and piss-dribbling wherein you try to portray our current president as Protector of the People. This president. The one whose administration failed to stop 9/11, still hasn't caught Bin Laden, still hasn't caught the anthrax mailer, bungled one war, deceived us into another war, threw fiscal responsibility out the window, farted around during Katrina, ignored global warming, spit on the Constitution, legitimized torture—you want us to believe that this president's only interest in having warrantless, unsupervised wiretapping power is to protect the American people. Why not just have Dodd nailing him to a cross in the final panel? It would have about as much resemblance to reality, and it would at least add a certain amount of absurdist shock value to an otherwise sad propaganda exercise.

As so many times before with Bush supporters, we are confronted with three possibilities:

1. You are woefully ignorant—especially for a man who makes his living commenting on matters of public import in the world's most powerful democracy.
2. You are, at least to some substantial degree, insane.
3. You are a shameless hack who will say anything, however silly, stupid, or dishonest, in order to help your side cheat its way to victory.

I suppose there's a fourth, more charitable possibility: you exist as a nexus between alternate universes. In the universe you see, President Bush really is a selfless, white-hatted hero interested only in protecting the American people from dangerous enemies, and Congressional Democrats really are just a bunch of clueless, malevolent fools eager to tie the president's hands and thereby aid America's enemies. In that world, your cartoons are brilliant works of satire that serve the cause of good by holding governmental follies up to biting censure. Unfortunately, your cartoons issue forth not in that world but in this one, where they cannot help but seem products of idiocy, insanity, or mendacity. What a sad ontological plight!

You would be so much more at home in that other world. Perhaps if you pulled up your feet, scrunched yourself up metaphysically, and wished really really hard, you could somehow pull yourself through yourself and plunk all of yourself down once and for all into that good-Bush universe where you belong, and where you could cartoon to your heart's content and not inflict your odd scrawlings on this universe, where we have more than enough to do just cleaning up the messes left by our Bush and his incompetent, kleptocratic minions. You could go there and never come back—except perhaps as a kind of Bushworld Bodhisattva, popping back occasionally to teach other Bush-lovers how to follow you to that world and disappear forever from this one.

Good luck with that.

Labels: editorial cartoons