Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, May 22, 2010

Yeah, I had a few misgivings about this week’s comic. I mean, it’s true enough that Michigan’s governor’s race is ramping up to nasty here in Michigan. With a logjam of well-known and well-funded candidates, the Republicans in particular must differentiate themselves to voters. And the easiest way to do that is to slag your opponent. So the mudslinging, from passive-aggressive to overt, has begun. Of course it will be curious when, after the party candidate is decided, these same people will dismiss or deny all the harsh words. “What? I called him a thieving moral degenerate? Oh, ha ha! I don’t think I said exactly that! And besides, his election opponent is a witless, mouth-breathing buffoon.” That’s how it works, you know. Re: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
 
No, my slight queasiness comes from potentially making light of the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean, Michigan is nothing if not water-based, and I can’t imagine the absolute devastation a minor oil spill would cause to our beaches and wetlands, let alone something on the scale of this one. My intent was not to belittle, but to simply employ a cartooning trick of using a more widely understood issue to give context to a less well-known issue. So I’m asking to be granted absolution, although I’m not really sure from whom. I guess if you think I’m a jerk, can you let this one slide? Thanks!

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, May 15, 2010

In Michigan it seems our lack of education is causing a lack of education….

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, May 8, 2010

When I was nine years-old we moved to Michigan from South Carolina. In South Carolina, folks followed football and stock car racing. Baseball was played, but it wasn’t followed. The Atlanta Braves were the nearest major league team, but I don’t recall ever hearing about them. We arrived in Michigan in April. Our next door neighbors were the Kidles, a husband and wife in their late 80s. Their house was one of the only styles in our subdivision that had a front porch designed for occupying. (Unlike our two-story colonial that had a small cement block designed only for barely avoiding impact when the screen door was opened.)
 
When the warm summer evenings arrived, the Kidles would set up a transistor radio on the porch and listen to the Tiger game. Eventually I started to drift over there, and I’d listen, too. Sometimes we’d talk, and sometimes they would tell stories, but mostly we’d sit quietly and enjoy the game. It’s funny how there was such a rhythm to it. You could be mid-sentence and instinctively know Ernie Harwell or Paul Carey was going to say something important — you’d pause, listen to the action, maybe whoop up a Willie Horton homer or Micky Lolich strikeout — then continue without missing a beat. The Tiger broadcast was an integral part of a summer evening.

But you know what? To celebrate Ernie Harwell is not to look to the past — it’s to look to the future. Of the many incredible things I read or heard about Ernie Harwell over the past couple weeks, none was greater than the short article Michael Rosenberg, from the Detroit Free Press, wrote in Sport Illustrated this week. It pointed out that, for the most part, Ernie disliked nostalgia. For him it was all about learning and embracing the new. This is beyond impressive for a person born in the Deep South in the early 1900s. And it explains a lot about why he was so universally loved by generations of Tiger fans. I’m already celebrating Ernie by nearly jumping out of my skin looking forward for this summer!

This post actually has to do with the cartoon that will be in tomorrow’s Grand Rapids Press, but I couldn’t hold off.

The day before my deadline I was noodling through what to say about Erik Prince, the founder of the controversial security contracting firm, Blackwater. Prince was born and raised in Holland, Michigan and was invited back to give a speech at luncheon that traditionally kicks off Holland’s Tulip Time festivities. It is not extraordinary to honor a famous and successful native son in such a way, especially when his parents were largely responsible for rebuilding downtown Holland after the mall was built in the 1990s and the big stores moved out. However, it was fairly extraordinary to invite a fellow whose company has made massive profits off our two ongoing wars while killing innocent people in the process. And to have him kickoff your town’s marquee event, which typically gets no more edgy than the possibility of one of the Oak Ridge Boys’ colostomy bags accidentally falling onto a stage. Further, up till the day of the speech, Tulip Time organizers had agreed to Prince’s request to exclude all media from the public event, eventually allowing the press but no recording devices. Yes, Prince is very clever, but not very, well, nice.

Then Tuesday night Ernie Harwell passed away and my attention shifted to him. (Buy a paper tomorrow — it’s a pretty good cartoon.)

This morning I was again thinking about Prince and Harwell, and one of my favorite movie quotes popped to mind. It’s from the Jimmy Stewart movie, “Harvey,” and it seems to sum it up well:

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, May 1, 2010

This is obviously (I hope obviously) a play on the movie Julie & Julia. The back story is that Democrat Governor Granholm is trying to appoint political allies to boards of several public universities, even though their terms would begin after Granholm is term-limited out of a job in November. Republican Senate Majority Leader (and current gubernatorial candidate) Mike Bishop was shocked SHOCKED! to uncover such nefarious maneuverings and is vowing to right the wrong. Of course Granholm is only doing exactly what her predecessor, Republican John Engler, did at the end of his last term. (Something to remember the next time your favorite Democrats attempt to impress you with their “moral superiority.”)

And yes, yes, yes, I know — the movie is, like, a year old and the Oscars were months ago. Not exactly on the cutting edge of topicality. But, dangit, the names fit so well, and I so miss gettng to draw Engler!

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, April 24, 2010

I typically don’t go for the “labeling” approach of editorial cartooning. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it wasn’t uncommon for a newspaper editorial cartoon to have 20 or more callouts with arrows and signs and whatnot. And this worked because readers generally spent some time going over the cartoon and cartoonists didn’t necessarily expect everybody to get each jab and joke, so they tended to include something for everybody. Over the past 100 years cartoons have trended toward simpler, single-idea pieces and labeling has become kind of passé.

But I had this wonderful vision of a wiener dog chasing its own tail. And because it’s a wiener dog, the chase is an exercise in futility — it is physically impossible to catch its tail. It seemed the perfect allegory for Michigan’s chasing a sustainable budget with a revenue structure created back in our manufacturing economy era. It’s not going to happen, so it’s time to make some decisions. It will be difficult — some people will have to pay higher taxes!!!!!!!!!!!! — but it’s the sensible thing to do.

This allegory actually carries further with my life. When I was two or three, my uncle gave our family a dog: Charlie Brown. And (Mom and Dad, correct me if I’m wrong) if he wasn’t exactly a dachshund he was dachshund-ish. Charlie Brown loved my Mom. I loved my Mom. Charlie Brown did not love me. I did not love Charlie Brown. Fighting ensued. I can remember Charlie Brown latching onto my arm and the feeling of me punching Charlie Brown in the face. Clearly things were not working, nor were they going to get better. So my parents had to make a difficult decision. Understand that my Mom — aka, St. Francis — did not want to get rid of Charlie Brown. It might have been timely successes with potty training that tipped the scales to my favor, and I got to stay. (I have no doubt that Mom and Dad had their second thoughts when several years later the bills for my orthodonture work started rolling in.)

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, April 17, 2010

For this week’s cartoon, I’m proud of myself for showing a little restraint. But I don’t know if it made for a better cartoon. See, the more I draw, the less interest I have in participating in (and therefore promoting) the idea of sides. You know, that every issue has a left and right side, or liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican, Socialist/Fascist, and so on. Beyond the fact that most issues are more nuanced than having clearly definable sides, this sides business quickly devolves to stereotyping and name calling. When you chose your side, your focus becomes defining the other side as clueless, demonic, ill-mannered, stinky, etc., and not so much with the articulating and advancing your point.
 
But this presents a bit of a dilemma for an editorial cartoonist. Stereotyping and name calling happen to be basic tools of the craft. They are shortcuts that the readers recognize without labels or other additional context. So when I was thinking though this week’s topic (Michigan’s soon to be implemented ban on smoking in restaurants and public gathering places), I naturally wanted to use shortcuts. I wanted to draw older white dudes in trucker hats hanging at the VFW complainin’ about the galdurn govermunt takin’ away their God-given right to freely enjoy their tobacco addiction.

That would have made the cartoon easier to digest at a glance. But it also would have come across as a left-wing attack on the right-wing, which had nothing to do with the point I was trying to make. And that is point was: we all seem to tolerate government up to moment it doesn’t allow us to do what we want to do. Then logic (government can’t be both evil genius and complete idiot) gets thrown out the window. (I do, however, reserve the right to stereotype and name call at any point in the future. If that’s what I want to do….)

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, April 10, 2010

When my family moved from South Carolina to Michigan when I was nine, there were lots of things I didn’t understand. First, everybody’s Dad worked a shift at a plant. My Dad sold chemicals to those plants, so I knew what they were, but I didn’t get the concept of a “shift” and what “first, second, third, split, double, etc.” meant. My first summer, I didn’t understand where everybody went on the weekends. My neighborhood would seriously empty out. I was told, “They went UpNorth.” That didn’t help — where the heck was UpNorth? “It’s where people have their cabins.” Oh. I still didn’t understand, but at a certain point — if you want to have any chance of not being a pariah — it’s best to say “oh” when something is explained in a way that strongly implies that it is common knowledge. I came to accept that cabins were some sort of vacationy things.

I was starting to get my bearings but then come fall, just before Thanksgiving, there was another mass migration up north to cabins, but this time it was just Dads and they all had (!) guns. What sort of shift was this? Deer hunting shift, apparently. Oh. Again, I didn’t get it right away. That was until my friend Joe’s mom picked me up to take me to a 5th grade basketball game. Mrs. Peltier had car pool that night, and the only vehicle they had big enough to take us five or six Holy Redeemer boys to the game was their Suburban. It was enormous. Big enough to carry all of us boys plus a dead, bloody deer in the way back. I know this because on that particular day, there was one back there. Mrs. Peltier apologized for not having time to pull it out — Mr. Peltier had just returned from hunting. None of the other boys seemed bothered by this. It was just a Michigan thing.

So, yeah, there are some special things about Michigan, and one of them happens to be the popularity of tromping around the rural landscape with guns, which — and I’m being perfectly sincere — is great. I don’t hunt. I think there are two reasons for this. One, my family didn’t vacation UpNorth or have a cabin. Second (and I think this is the bigger reason), I don’t like to be cold. And having to sit perfectly still for hours in a deer blind on bitter November mornings — not enticing. But I get hunting. I get why there is a Michigan culture that supports hunting and related lifestyle. Unfortunately, I also understand why there are a very small percentage of zealots who take the guns and rugged independence and separate society to an extreme, and that’s why we end up with groups like the Michigan Militia from the 1990s and now the Hutaree of today. They shouldn’t define Michigan, but radicals always seem to get a disproportionate share of the attention. I don’t understand why that has to be, but, ya know, you have to move on.

Some things I get right away (Ernie Harwell), and some things I never will (Bob Seger).

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, April 3, 2010

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, March 27, 2010