Inspiration versus perspiration
An essay about cartoon creation and severely under-endowed statues...
According to “History” – and yes, those are air quotes – Michelangelo was once asked how he created his masterpiece David (although judging from what’s going on South of David’s Equator, certain hard-to-satisfy women might quibble with the word “masterpiece”) and Michelangelo supposedly said he just chipped away everything that didn’t look like David.
Turns out there’s no evidence Michelangelo actually said that, but it’s still a quote worth hearing because a lot of art is a process of subtraction, not addition – which is worth thinking about if there aren’t any College World Series games on TV – and also describes how some political cartoons are created: by chipping away all the information that isn’t necessary until you have a simple idea you can draw.
Coming up with cartoon ideas using that method is a lot of work and a pain in the ass and you’re never quite sure the cartoons will make sense to anybody else because you spent way too much time thinking about them.
I much prefer cartoon ideas that fall out of the sky and hit me in the head, like this one:
The cartoon you just looked at was inspired by reading a headline that said Donald Trump had been accused of mishandling government documents, so all I had to add was the government document I thought he’d mishandled.
A creative process which reminds me of a barely-related story:
The melody for Yesterday came to Paul McCartney in a dream and when he woke up he immediately played the tune on a piano to avoid forgetting it, but wasn’t sure he hadn’t plagiarized it and kept playing it for people and asking if they’d ever heard the tune before and meanwhile he had to write some words with the right number of syllables as verbal place-holders until he wrote more suitable lyrics and originally Yesterday started off like this:
“Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs”
Which isn’t quite as poetic as the final version, so I imagine we’re all glad Paul kept working on the lyrics, although I can’t help but feel Denny’s lost a pretty decent TV commercial theme song when Paul decided to write about the end of a love affair instead of the Grand Slam Breakfast.
And speaking of sources of inspiration…
When he was being interviewed by Sean Hannity, Donald Trump claimed he could declassify documents “just by thinking about it” – sort of like Dr. Strange and that stuff he does with portals into another dimension – but according to the American Bar Association there’s actually a declassification process that has to be followed and here’s more about that fascinating process just in case you’re currently suffering from insomnia:
What Trump actually said was: “There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it.”
You might want to memorize those last four words because they’re a verbal Get-Out-Of-Jail Free Card useful on every occasion, so when you get pulled over for going 102 in a hospital zone you can tell the policeman, “There is no hospital zone speed limit, as I understand it.”
Or…
“I’m allowed to have three wives, as I understand it.”
Or…
“The banking system lets me write checks I don’t have the funds to cover, as I understand it.”
In other slightly-more coherent words: you shouldn’t be held responsible for following the rules because there’s an excellent chance you don’t understand them which appears to be the founding principle of Australian Rules Football.
Now here’s an article from the fact-checking website Politifact that says legal experts are highly skeptical of Trump’s ability to declassify documents “just by thinking about it” and even if he could do that it wouldn’t make any difference because he was supposed to return all government documents – classified or not – once he left office.
Turns out you don’t get to take the CIA’s Secret Plans for a Time Machine home with you.
The experts get a little squishy on what declassification powers Trump actually has, mainly because it seems like nobody had the balls to pull this bullshit before, which accurately describes about 93% of what Trump does on a daily basis.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/sep/23/could-donald-trump-declassify-documents-with/
In any case…
I started thinking about alternate meanings to the word “declassify” and maybe it was this picture of Donald Trump’s bathroom that pushed me over the creative edge:
The point of the picture was to show the half-assed storage system Donald Trump was using for Top Secret government documents, but a number of people (and I’m one of them) focused on the chandelier in his bathroom, which seems like a feature they might have at Graceland if Elvis had even worse taste.
So I started thinking how Trump must believe that chandelier makes taking a dump extremely “classy” and that led me to imagine Jethro Bodine and Elly May Clampett talking about the cement pond and how it really “classified” their Beverly Hills mansion and from there it was a short mental jump to Trump’s “declassification” of the Presidency.
If you start looking up famous quotes, a bunch of them were supposedly said by more than one person so you don’t know exactly who said what first, but somebody – Theodore Roosevelt or Kurt Vonnegut or possibly Jenna Jameson – said:
“I could carve a better man out of a banana.”
(Feel free to imagine the porn-shoot circumstances that would inspire Ms. Jameson to say that.)
In any case, that’s the quote that came to mind when Republicans started whining about how unfair it was that Donald Trump got indicted for mishandling government documents and according to the Associated Press, a bunch of them admitted they hadn’t actually read the indictment before publicly announcing it was unfair, probably because they didn’t want inconvenient facts to cloud their thinking.
If a Republican wants those MAGA votes, it’s clear he or she has to kiss Donald Trump’s ass and Republicans were fighting over who would get to pucker up first and one of them did me the favor of complaining about the “weaponization of the criminal justice system.”
(My computer doesn’t think “weaponization” is a real word and for once, I agree with my computer.)
Real or not “weaponization” of the criminal justice system didn’t bother Republicans even a teeny tiny bit when people were chanting the anti-Hillary Clinton slogan “Lock her up!” at Trump rallies.
Now here’s an article from what I assume are the Communist and Socialists that work at the Salon website describing how the Republicans went from being the Party of Law and Order (which was always bullshit because Richard Nixon was the one saying it) to the Party of Crooks and Crime:
If you believe in Democracy and voters getting to choose who leads them, January 6th is a dark stain on American History’s Fruit of the Looms because it was just one guy whose ego got bruised because he lost an election, so he lied about losing it and asked his followers to “fight like hell” and if that meant overthrowing the government and using the Constitution for toilet paper, so be it.
People are still being sent to jail for what they did on January 6th and let’s not forget Ashli Babbitt who got shot by a police officer and died because she bought into Donald Trump’s bullshit about election fraud.
None of which seems to bother Donald Trump in the slightest because now he’s trying to get his followers worked up again, this time about his latest indictment and anytime you can use the words “latest indictment” in association with a presidential candidate you know you’re working in a cartoon-rich environment.
BTW: Much like January 6th, the above cartoon is based on a misconception because Humphrey Bogart never actually said, “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca.
Ingrid Bergman said, “Play it, Sam” because she wanted to hear the song that was close to her and Humphrey’s heart which was of course that All-Time Classic, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida as performed by Lawrence Welk and the Lennon Sisters and now that I make that up, I really wouldn’t mind hearing it performed live.
Speaking of which:
I was once having dinner with my son at a Mexican restaurant in LA and he started laughing and I asked why and he said listen to the song they’re playing and it was a mariachi band playing the living shit out of Michael Jackson’s Beat It.
The song was awesome (either that or the margaritas were too strong) but since then I’ve learned not to scoff when someone suggests a weird combination of ingredients like peanut butter and chocolate or rum and Coke or Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie and when I heard that last one I said no fucking way…
But it turns out I was wrong and Billy Bob did out-punt his coverage, so don’t tell me Lawrence Welk and the Lennon Sisters couldn’t do a bang-up version of an Iron Butterfly tune.
Just in case you haven’t been keeping score: today we’ve touched on Michelangelo, the Beatles, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, mariachi bands, the movie Casablanca, Jenna Jameson, bathroom chandeliers, The Beverly Hillbillies, Denny’s, the U.S. Constitution, Australian Rules Football and the Lennon Sisters.
This is the kind of stuff I think about all day every day so I’m pretty damn busy and shouldn’t be expected to remember all my kid’s birthdays, mostly because I have three kids…
As I understand it.
Damn it, now you'll have me scrubbing the internet for a mariachi version of Beat It ... lmao
Great column!