Auchtoon!

Any recent resident of Michigan knows Coleman Young. He was the perpetual mayor of Detroit in the ’70s and ’80s. And while initially he served an important role as a black person in a mostly black city, he eventually became something of a tyrant who did nothing but drive wedges between Detroit and the rest of Michigan. Now in the past few years, Michigan cities in general and Grand Rapids in particular have been getting boned by the state. This is understandably upsetting and a few have raised the possibility of fighting back with angry words and obstinate actions. Understandable, yes. Helpful (as Coleman Young has shown us), no.

This week’s comic was pretty much my reaction to the Danish cartoons on Muhammad. Have you seen those cartoons? Not many people have. Very few American newspapers have reprinted them, which is disappointing and telling in and of itself: The newspapers are eager to report and pontificate on the events triggered by the cartoons and have gone to great lengths to describe the cartoons, but stop short of actually showing us. It’s, it’s as if editors and publishers would rather describe cartoons than print them…. Or they don’t really like cartoons…. Bingo.

Do some web searching and you’ll find them. Sorry I don’t have a handy link. (I don’t save links anymore because they just pile up.) Some of the cartoons were good; some were not. And it was easier to enjoy the good ones that were offensive. That’s generally how it goes. And that’s the difficult thing about supporting free speech. Drawing Muhammad with a turban made of bombs seems to me to be needlessly provocative. Drawing Muhammad frantically waving away a line of suicide bombers at the gates of heaven saying, “Go back! Go back! We’re out of virgins!” — now that’s worthwhile.

But the harmful thing about free speech is how people react to it. And in this week’s comic all I’m saying is that mixing fanaticism and religion is likely to produce a bad reaction. There were two additional thoughts:

The first aside has to do with drug advertisements, following up “genocide” with “mild cramping.” By law, drug companies have to list side effects. Thank goodness. But they don’t necessarily have to list them in order of severity. So you get things like, “side effects may include loss of appetite, projectile bleeding from the anus, blurred vision, —” Wait! What was that second one, again? They simply drop in these horrible, horrible things here and there as the voice-over matter-of-factly makes its way through the list. It’s like, you certainly aren’t going to sweat diminished hunger if your major organs just might turn to jelly and fly out the nearest orifice.

Second, for the “Keep out of reach” bit, I was going to follow up with “politicians” in general. But that seemed kind of weak. So I went with Tom Delay because he is the best, latest example of a politician who got in trouble by drinking too much of his own Kool-Aid. The dude would cut your money and not even talk to you if you didn’t do exactly what he told you to do. And that was to people in his own party. His friends. Delay was poppin’ Fanaticism like Rush on painkillers. (Or like Michael Moore on grilled cheese sandwiches, for those of you who demand “fair and balanced.”)

This week’s comic is about our representative from Grand Rapids, Vern Ehlers, being brought to the forefront to sort out this lobbying scandal business. Rep. Ehlers is very much in the mold of one of his predecessors, Gerald Ford. That is, he’s a righteous fellow who prefers to work behind-the-scenes but will loyally, if reluctantly, do what his party asks him to. In this case, as with Nixon and Watergate, the power-hungry GOP stinkers need their good brother to post bail.

The fact is that there are only so many jokes in the world. And when I say “the fact is” I mean, “I don’t really know if this is true, but it sounds more authoritative when I say it that way.”

I’m guessing musicians run into a similar dilemma — there are only so many notes, a seemingly limited number of variations of pleasing combinations; how can one expect to come up with something completely new? It’s intimidating. And so it is at times with cartoonists and a blank sheet of paper. How am I possibly going to come up with something new?

Well for this week’s comic I was in this very spot. Coming off a lovely and relaxing holiday break, my mind was at ease, I wasn’t particularly uptight about anything, and I actively considered taking up the practice of afternoon napping. (Soon thereafter, the boot hard drive on my work computer crapped out and I quickly returned to uptight, angry, and sleepless.)

But in my happy state, no new ideas were coming and recognizing the futility of forcing it, I defaulted to the trick of using an old joke a new way. And it’s pretty appropriate anyway because the subject itself is something of an old joke: a big city public school system, facing declining enrollment and state funding, must make some tough decisions to stay afloat and relevant. Invariably, strong personalities clash over how exactly to go about this.

So there it is. Not the best comic I’ve ever done, but a reasonable effort. What more can I say? Take my comic … please!