Huh. It’s only been a month since I posted anything here. Feels longer.
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I’m not going to delete this blog, but to the humans among the 1,700+ followers I have I will say thank you, but... don’t expect this place to come alive again anytime soon.
I find it pointless, to be blunt. For one, I don’t pay close attention to anything on Tumblr. I have an RSS reader I check maybe once a week, so I’ll see posts from A Good Cartoon or Grading Gorrell, but this site hasn’t been on my radar in years.
More to the point, it gets tiresome reiterating the same general points again and again. Especially as things have gotten worse while the media at large tries to act as if this is all normal.
The acquittal of Trump earlier this week should, to any reasonable person, cast aside once and for all the idea of the moderate Republican who will stand up to the threat of fascism. Mitt Romney’s one vote aside, the party has embraced not simply its status as a cult of personality around Trump, but around all the worst impulses Trump represents, such as a disregard for the rule of the law and an embrace of authoritarianism (I don’t see any Republicans racing to condemn Trump firing in retribution the people who had acted against him). And they have done this while enabled by a media that is dedicated to normalizing everything that happens in order to maintain a ‘both-sides’ narrative that the two major parties are of equal partisanship and demeanor.
As that relates to this blog and its mission statement, the world of editorial cartooning over the past four years has seen an almost impressive stagnation. I mean that, it must have taken legitimate effort to remain as milquetoast and nonpartisan as you were during the Bill Clinton administration in an era where one of the more significant long-term stories has been white supremacist organizations being emboldened by the president’s own rhetoric. To look at an administration putting kids in cages and instead bemoan the ‘divisiveness’ of our country requires a god-level amount of blinding privilege.
This is all referring to the middle-of-the-road, neither truly liberal or conservative cartoonists, to be clear. Conservatives cartoonists like Lisa Benson and Michael Ramirez and Steve Kelley and Gary Varvel, they’ve gone all in on Trump. He’s their guy, and everything he says or does they will defend.
A couple, like Scott Stantis and Ken Catalino, have actually been critical of Trump. For what that’s worth. Personally I see them as Romney-esque; they’re still right-wing, but Trump goes too far for them. At least they have limits, though.
On the left, I have to give respect to Clay Jones and Rob Rogers for actually stepping up in these times. I can’t rightly say I remember too much about their work pre-Trump (cue jokes about how that era feels centuries ago), but Jones has done brilliant work and Rogers lost his job rather than soften or abandon his anti-Trump stance. And it’s not just ‘make fun of the guy in power’ opposition; they’ve highlighted the worst facets of Trump and his followers, especially the racism.
But there’s only so many times I can take a cartoon that tries to draw the false equivalency, or worse tries to go harder on the Left than the Right because the media is afraid of conservatives, and either complain or try to put a wry spin on it. I’ve developed a contempt for certain criminally non-partisan cartoonists such as Dave Granlund, but even spotlighting or managing a running catalog of their worthlessness as commentators (or in the case of Granlund, who I’m convinced copy and pastes his own caricatures as much as Gorrell does, as an artist) feels like too much effort for how little attention they deserve.
Because even when I’m not posting regularly here I am still looking at dozens of cartoons a day. I have a subscription to a comics service that includes a number of editorial cartoonists, and I follow an RSS feed of Daryl Cagle’s aggregator. I haven’t posted even one percent of all the right-wing shit I’ve seen over the better part of the decade that I’ve been running this place, and while it’s true that so much of it passes in front of my eyeballs and is immediately forgotten, it still adds up.
How many cartoons infantalizing Nancy Pelosi for ripping up Trump’s speech did I see? For that matter, how many trying to use that empty gesture as equivalent to all the shit Trump has done and therefore blame both sides for the division in American did I see? A week from now we’ll all have forgotten about that moment, but that cycle has been repeated so many times. Something visual or easy to analogize happens, and every cartoonist rushes to put out something referencing it, but not saying anything of substance about it.
It’s tiresome. And I don’t have anything to say about that incident that I haven’t said before with other things we’ve all forgotten about.
As I said above, I don’t think most of these cartoonists deserve attention. Given the laziness of Gorrell or Granlund, given the shameless slavish devotion of Benson, Kelley, Ramirez, et al, why should I or anyone waste even a few precious seconds to ingest their work?
I may be a bastard for saying this, but I like the thought that if the newspaper industry is going to continue to die off, then more and more people are going to lose jobs they don’t deserve. The state of editorial cartooning today can not be completely summed up by the stagnation of the careerists who have been syndicated for decades while recycling the same trite observations and hackneyed premises; The Nib has been working to create its own renaissance, with both single-panel topical pieces that actually say something and long-form comic journalism. And there are, as I mentioned above, cartoonists who care to speak truth to power in their own way. I don’t want to see, say, Clay Bennett or Darrin Bell hang up their pen for good. But if the medium is going to make it through the entirety of the Trump administration while still pretending that a man and a woman sitting on a sofa, watching TV and one says ‘They should put a Surgeon General’s warning on the evening news’ is somehow acceptable work for a grown adult whose job is to comment on current events, then don’t expect me to mourn.
Don’t expect me to feel anything. I do have a sincere appreciation for the craft of editorial cartooning. I wouldn’t have started this blog if I didn’t care on some level; shitting on someone’s work just for the sake of shitting on them has never been my idea of fun. That love has been tested, and, yes, beaten down and dried up over the past decade. But it still remains.
Just not enough that I can get worked up enough to want to comment on anything I see. For a long time I haven’t really cared about what I do here. So many posts have been done out of a sense of obligation. ‘I should post something just to keep this place alive.’
But now I don’t even care about that, so...
Thanks to those of you who have engaged with me, but I’m stepping away.
The rant accompanying Garrison’s latest cartoon is attributed to ‘A Canadian patriot,’ and it’s clearly him. The ‘guest post’ is just Garrison, not even trying to change his voice.
I haven’t been paying too close attention, but I think it’s been a while since his wife ‘Tina’ did a cartoon. But he hasn’t stopped creating sock puppets.
How do we get across that holding Trump to account for breaking the law is ridiculous? Let’s compare the impeachment to when we obsessed over Clinton getting a blowjob. That won’t expose our own hypocrisy!
But I fucking love the fact the entire Ukraine scandal (now possibly bringing down Devin Nunes) began with Trump thinking Joe Biden was going to be the nominee.
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