The Staying Power of Mullets
Also, some interesting stuff about teenagers and Robert's Rules of Order...
Under the heading of “Stuff You Don’t Care About, But Affects Me” is the fact that the people who distribute my cartoons to client newspapers want them by 11 AM their time which is 10 AM my time and having a cartoon ready to go by 10 AM my time isn’t feasible unless I adopt the same lifestyle as a vampire, heroin addict or any teenager in the History of Teenagers, which is much shorter than you might think.
Just so you don’t go home empty-handed information-wise; according to the internet the word “teenager” was not popular until LIFE magazine did a story called “Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own” and that was in 1944 so before that we had to call kids between 12 and 20 by their traditional name: “Ungrateful Little Shits.”
When people ask how long it takes to draw a cartoon they usually mean the actual drawing part and not the reading and thinking part (which is where the ideas come from) or the Photoshop part (which is where the mistakes you made in the drawing part get fixed) and for me a typical day might start at 5 AM and end at 2 or 3 PM which is pretty depressing because if I did the math right that’s 9 or 10 hours and I wanted to be a political cartoonist to avoid actual work and just now realized by that lofty standard my career has been a colossal failure.
In any case, if the cartoons have to be sent by 10 AM my time that means drawing them the day before and that means picking subjects that will hold for 48 hours because the cartoon I draw on Wednesday will be sent out on Thursday and the soonest it could appear in a newspaper is Friday.
Which reminds me…
If you buy a printing press you don’t buy one that can handle your biggest newspaper – which would be Sunday – you buy one that can handle your average daily paper and then preprint parts of that big Sunday paper (like the Opinion section) and early in my career I made the mistake of criticizing some dictator in the cartoon I drew on Wednesday and by the time readers got the newspaper and saw my cartoon on Sunday the dictator had been assassinated so it was the Moral Equivalent of showing up at someone’s funeral and announcing:
“Let’s not forget he was an asshole.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve attended a few funerals that would have been vastly improved by that announcement so feel free to do it at mine because if I understand the process I’ll be D-E-A-D and won’t give a shit which is remarkably similar to the attitude I had while still breathing.
So where were we?
Right…on Wednesday I wanted to draw about George Santos because he was facing a vote on his expulsion from Congress on Thursday and even though he vowed to not resign before then, George’s picture does not appear next to the word “reliable” in any dictionary.
BTW, I’ve got a test for measuring someone’s reliability and here it is:
If you went on a camping trip would you trust them with the car keys?
If we hike five miles in and five miles back, dragging all the shit we need (and in my personal camping experience, a bunch we didn’t) and we finally get back to the car and ask George where the car keys are, who knows what kind of crap we’d hear that wouldn’t include the words, “Right here.”
So not knowing for sure what would happen in the next 48 hours, I needed a caption that would work if George resigned and if George didn’t resign or George got expelled or George didn’t get expelled and it took a while to come up with the right line which assumes you and some editor I’ve never met agree that the line works.
See?
This is just the kind of thing that takes me 9 or 10 hours and the fact that I earlier referred to this as “work” makes me glad I don’t know any coalminers because I feel fairly confident that right about now he (and/or she) would slap the shit out of me for thinking this crap is work and then cough up a lung from the physical exertion.
There are drawbacks to being a political cartoonist; Black Lung Disease isn’t one of them.
(P.S. I’m writing this addition Friday morning and despite their announcement that they’d take a vote on Thursday, Congress didn’t do jack shit yesterday and I now realize I should have counted on the fact that they move slower than my 98-year-old mother when faced with a set of stairs and if you told Congress there was a bomb under Kevin McCarthy’s chair, set to explode in 10 seconds, they’d have to consult Robert’s Rules of Order, take Roll Call, read the Minutes of the Previous Meeting, ask for a Motion and for someone to Second that Motion, before voting on what wire to cut. )
BTW: I got curious and wondered who the hell Robert was and just how big a pain in the ass he’d be to live with (“Yes, I’m aware you asked me to pass the salt, but does anyone second that motion?”) and turns out he was a U.S. Army officer named Henry Martyn Robert and his Rules of Order were first published in 1876 and have guided the actions of Pedantic People With A Stick Up Their Ass ever since.
As I pointed out in a previous cartoon, Republicans are mortified by the actions of George Santos who at last count faces 23 federal charges, so they want him expelled, banished and if at all possible, exiled on Elba, but are OK with Donald Trump who faces so many charges (over 90) numerous news organizations produced guides to all those charges so Trump-Watchers could keep them straight.
In the It’s-A-Surprise-To-Me-Too Department I kinda agree with House Speaker Mike Johnson when he argues that Santos hasn’t been found guilty of anything yet and I feel the same way when the NFL or MLB or NBA or CIA (wait, that’s one too many evil organizations) decides they have to punish a player facing criminal charges.
It’s not because they’re so moral – I’m pretty sure the NFL would be OK with Vlad the Impaler if he was a star quarterback – they just want to cover their collective asses and show the public how outraged they are, right before they give players amphetamines and steroids and encourage them to play hurt which they’d still be doing if they hadn’t been caught doing it.
If George Santos is a crook (and the chances are about 99.9999999999999999999999% he is) let the courts take care of it.
Sometimes it takes two news events to make one cartoon and here I combine the news that somebody spent $2.1 million on Napoleon’s hat and all the weird-ass stuff Elon Musk gets up to.
According to the internet, Elon has said he has a “mild form of Asperger’s” but the same article said Asperger’s is no longer considered a separate diagnosis from autism and the term Asperger’s is no longer used in the medical community. Here’s the article if you want to read it yourself:
https://www.totalcareaba.com/autism/does-elon-musk-have-autism#:
OK, couple points worth making here:
What the medical community believes changes all the time and thank God for that.
I just watched Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (it’s based on a true story) and that true story includes a rape and a trial and the medical community of the 1300’s believed a woman couldn’t get pregnant if she didn’t have an orgasm while having sex and if she had an orgasm it wasn’t a rape and during the movie’s hearing scene one of the Medieval Medical Blockheads testifies:
“It’s science.”
Which is good for a laugh unless you’re a woman or a man who doesn’t have his head up his ass.
And if you’re thinking, “Wow, they believed a lot of crazy bullshit in the 1300s, didn’t they?” let me remind you that Todd Akin, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, said something similar:
“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.”
I don’t know what Todd was talking about when he said “legitimate rape” and I’m 101% percent sure he didn’t either, but either way Todd said that in 2012 and the most surprising thing about a Republican believing a medical theory from the 1300s is that Todd Akin didn’t get elected president.
Akin was arguing that rape victims shouldn’t be able to get an abortion because if they got pregnant they weren’t really raped and saying that terrifically moronic thing sunk his chances of being a Senator, but just eight short years later humanity advanced to the point that a political candidate could say that if you’re famous enough you can just go ahead and grab women by the vagina (which sounds like yet another theory from the Dark Ages) and still get elected president.
Anyway…
The point I set out to make and have pretty much ignored up until now, is that during our most recent pandemic critics complained that the medical community kept changing its position which is a dumb complaint because that’s what the medical community is supposed to do: change its thinking as new information becomes available.
And if the medical community doesn’t change we’d still believe that the blood of fallen gladiators could cure epilepsy and donkey shit had healing properties and women couldn’t get pregnant unless they had an orgasm and then we’d wind up fighting Matt Damon in a duel and be embarrassed when we got killed by a guy wearing a mullet.
If you want to read about more weird stuff the medical community once believed, here you go:
https://www.history.com/news/7-unusual-ancient-medical-techniques
The second point I wanted to make (and I had a second point when I started this) is that there is a theory that everyone is on the autism spectrum to some degree (there are people who disagree) and here’s an article that explores both sides of that argument:
https://autisticandunapologetic.com/2019/03/16/is-everyone-on-the-autism-spectrum/
Whatever you believe about autism or any other issue, I find it helpful to think of “normal” as a range of socially acceptable behavior and people who fall outside that range are considered weird (it’s OK to talk to yourself as long as you don’t do it out loud around other people) so maybe people who fall inside that range of acceptable behavior should lighten up and accept people that don’t.
Plus 20 years from now we might look like assholes when the medical community changes its mind and decides (fill-in-the-blank with your favorite outside “normal” activity behavior) is perfectly OK.
For instance…
I haven’t gone blind despite regularly engaging in a practice that I was assured on numerous occasions would result in me wearing Ray-Bans inside, being drug around by a seeing-eye dog and getting really good at playing the blues, but I do need reading glasses for up close work so draw your own conclusions.
OK, that’s it for today and I think I’ve fulfilled my informative duties by telling you that stuff about teenagers, Robert’s Rules of Order and 14th century medical beliefs and if you get nothing else out of today just remember:
A mullet looked shitty in the 1300s and still looks shitty today.
Based on recent comments by The World's Richest Man® it now seems Elon Musk is less likely to have Asperger's than a bad case of Tourette's combined with a horrible business sense virus.
Superb!