Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
February 23, 2014

A week ago Jane and I were at O’Hare after visiting Chicago. As you walk and sit and meander your way around an airport, you can’t help but to catch snippets of news from the millions of monitors broadcasting CNN. (In fact, I get this Pavlovian response when I flip by CNN when I’m at home — I get this anxious feeling I’m in an airport — and an even more anxious feeling that I don’t have my ticket.) It seemed every time I paid a bit of attention, there was some southern lawmaker either actively saying something insulting or being reported to have done something insulting. It was all in regards to a union vote at a VW plant in Chattanooga. The UAW had been trying to organize the plant and called for a vote. The southern lawmakers, led it seemed by Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, had been doing everything in their power to avoid this (and not feeling particularly bounded by fairness or truth).

So it was a pretty easy cartoon to draw from that experience. I felt myself sympathetic to the UAW — not because I’m necessarily pro-union. (In general, I believe in the purpose of unions and the positive benefits they can have; but I believe many unions — the UAW among them — are stuck fighting battles from the last century and need to modernize to be more relevant.) But because Bob Corker et al can be such hypocritical turds. I just hate it when those guys win (or think they won).