Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, March 5, 2011

Back in my college days, I spent a summer as a supervisor in a General Motors foundry in Saginaw. I was a 20 year-old kid supervising adults at least 12 years older than me. (Because of seniority rules, anybody younger than that was laid off.) I didn’t know what I was doing, which was okay because I didn’t actually have anything to do. Well, not anything beyond filling out time cards and searching for bins of parts hidden by the previous shift somewhere in the massive plant. And then there were the cat and mouse games like the one with the raging alcoholic who also happened to be a forklift driver. I felt obligated to find him after the first break to make sure he wasn’t drunk. Generally he was, and I would have to talk him into going to visit the medical office because he was “sick.” (I couldn’t actually demand that he go — even though he was a really nice guy and an amiable drunk; ordering him to go would reflexively trigger the union vs. management dance, and that would keep him on the forklift for the whole night.) So you might assume from that experience that I am anti-union….

One day after getting the besotted forklift driver to sleep it off in the med office, I was sharing my situation with a fellow supervisor — a real one, not an intern. We were up in the supervisor offices high off the plant floor. I hadn’t met many alcoholics and I was not quite sure what to do to help, but I was aware of programs and inquired how I might be able to make this happen. The unhappy with his life supervisor glanced up from his porno magazine (not the girly kind, the horrific gynecological kind), surveyed the room to make sure only the right color ears would hear what he as going to say (re: White), and offered, “F him. Good thing they have a union. If they didn’t, I’d fire all them fing n*****s.” So you might assume from that experience that I am pro-union….

Like most things where humans are involved, management/labor situations are more nuanced than sound bites would lead you to believe. Throw government and taxpayers into that mix, and it gets even more involved. I think it’s better to try to understand the full story and, you know, not assume.

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, February 26, 2011

Originally, I used the word “crappy” instead of “lousy.” I liked “crappy” better but ultimately felt (along with my editor) that it drew too much attention to itself. That is, some readers would miss the point by focusing on it (whether being offended or enthused about seeing a semi-naughty word it print). I only tell you this because I quite literally have lost hours of my life (mostly sleep) trying to sort out these type of word issues. Most writers have, so it’s nothing special. It just occurs to me now, though, if I could have invested that time more productively, perhaps my family’s medical insurance wouldn’t be so crappy. Eh. Probably doesn’t matter — we all seem to be heading in the same direction.

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, February 19, 2011

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, February 12, 2011

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, February 5, 2011

Quickly: Our new governor is proposing to repeal a Michigan law that requires all items in a grocery store to be individually marked. His argument (and it’s a good one) is that it needlessly adds costs — it’s a lot of work to mark all those items. But it is nice to know that the price on the shelf matches the price on the item. So, yeah, could go either way, right? Well, the clincher argument is that Michigan is the only state that has a requirement this strict. If the other 49 states do it a different way, why shouldn’t we be like them? Make sense to me.

Now you tell me: Why is the United States the only advanced, industrialized country with a healthcare system that allows its citizens to fall into bankruptcy if they are unfortunate enough to contract the wrong disease? Shouldn’t we want to be in step with other countries on this, too?

Anyway, that’s my two minute thought. I’m a bit late posting again. Been preoccupied with work, and life, and (not least of which) our two new kittens:

That’s Jooniper on the left and Zoobin on the right. They are such sweet babies they make my uterus ache. (And I’m pretty sure I don’t even have a uterus.)

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, January 29, 2011

So Newsweek magazine came out with a list of “dying” cities, based on census data from 2000 to 2009. It ranked the city of Grand Rapids at #10. No reporter came to visit GR; nobody researched additional information about actually living in GR; and there was no consideration for the metropoltian area as a whole. Flint and Detroit were slightly higher up on the list. (And there is nothing that riles a West Michigander more than being put on a list with Flint and Detroit.) 

Like most of these listy sort of things, it was a snapshot of highly selected data and sold with hyperbole (Dying! For God’s sake! They are DYING! Oh the humanity!!!!). It is really not to be taken seriously. (Likely list for next issue: American cities with the best cupcakes!)

The irony here is that I’m a subscriber to Newsweek. (I like it. It’s a perfect read during work-day lunches.) But it is very clear it is going downhill quickly. It was spun off from the Washington Post last year, lost its editor and several key writers, is hemmorhaging advertisers, and (worst) has redesigned to print only one editorial cartoon per issue (used to be three). Dying, indeed.

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, January 22, 2011

Hey, if you guys need some fun reading material to help pick you up and get you through the winter blues season, may I suggest a book by Louis Sachar? Sachar is a brilliant author who is probably most famous for the book, “Holes.” What an awesome book — a tapestry of interweaving stories. Completely original. Sachar has also written a series of books called “Sideways Stories from Wayside School.” These are just plain fun and tap into your inner 8 year-old and the memory of just how ludicrous elementary school could be.
 
I was thinking about Sachar because of an interview I had once read with him. He spends an hour or two every day as “writing time.” During writing time, there are no interruptions. No phones, no emails, no texts, no visits, no nothin’. He sits in his office and is completely secluded. He writes. Or just thinks about writing. But nothing else. Otherwise, he’s an affable, approachable, communicative guy. But writing time is writing time.

I really like that notion and was thinking about it when I was trying to come up with this week’s comic (in between emails and phone calls and my own errant thoughts). We’re all so easily distracted (myself certainly included) that it seems counterproductive to allow ourselves to be so readily interrupted. And I think, at least for me, the consequence is that it’s the shinier distractions that grab my attention and my thought processes become much shallower. So it’s easier to be caught by the story of somebody abusing the welfare system and stay at the surface instead of going deeper to understand the context for why it happened.
 
We could all use some writing time….

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, January 15, 2011

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, January 8, 2011

Even though I drew this cartoon last week Wednesday and it was published before the story of the Arizona tragedy broke over the weekend, I still got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Had I stepped over a line? The comedy comes from two partisans losing control in a highly exaggerated way. (Our new governor in Michigan, Rick Snyder, has gone to great lengths to emphasize the need for all Michiganders to work through our political differences.) I agree with Snyder and am optimistic, but I also have some doubts. This cartoon, I hope, is a fairly honest expression of that. Thank goodness I didn’t decide to have the man and women draw guns in panel three.
 
But I’m pretty sure why I would never do that, and the reason is sort of sad. Two cartoon characters drawing guns on each other just isn’t enough of an exaggeration. Which is to say, it’s much too believable for it to happen in the United States. Nothing funny down that road.

Related to this, there was a lot of discussion among editorial cartoonists this week about the quality and appropriateness of the cartoons drawn about the Arizona incident. Unique to editorial cartoonists, the first thing was to take to task those who draw the “weeping Statue of Liberty” type of cartoon. (It’s a hack move.) But then like any other online discussion, it quickly devolved into “sides” accusing “sides” of taking “sides.” (To be fair to cartoonists, it’s generally the non-cartoonists who take the discussion there.) This was my reaction and quite possibly, my manifesto:

I don’t know about you, but I get really tired of people trying to pull me into the infernal “sides” sinkhole. I mean, Palin used gun sites on a map for targeted congressional districts. There is no right or left to that — it was willfully reckless and can be addressed on that alone. There is no other “side” you are supporting by editorializing that Palin needs to act more responsibly. And it’s becoming fairly clear that the central issue with Loughner was the ineffective treatment of his mental health issues — drawing about that shouldn’t require a supposed conservative or liberal spin. Cartoons created solely to allow your grouchy friend with the cable news addiction to identify your “side” start to make a weeping Statue of Liberty look not so bad.

By the way, if you want to see what I think is the best editorial cartoon that came out of all this, check out Nick Anderson at the Houston Chronicle.

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, January 1, 2011

The SciFi Network (yeah, I’m a little chagrinned that I know this channel exists and a bit more that I know where to find it) was running a Twilight Zone marathon New Year’s Day. The family watched a few. Some were scary. Some were pretty campy. But on the whole, they were much less scary and sickening than watching Michigan/Michigan State football.
 
One of my favorite Twilight Zones is called “The Man in the Bottle.” It’s the one where a poor guy finds a bottle with a genie and is granted several wishes — each with unanticipated consequences. Pretty standard stuff, but the one that always gets me is when he wishes to be leader of a great nation with no chance of being voted out of office. Poof! He turns into Hitler in his Berlin bunker in the closing days of World War II. Can you imagine anything worse? Well, having to be Jennifer Granholm as Michigan governor these past eight years would be a close second….

And as long as we’re confessing, I’d like you all to know that I watched most of “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” on Christmas Day. Shirley Temple, Randolph Scott. I enjoyed it, thank you very much. Don’t judge me.