It’s over for “The Boondocks” comic strip, at least for now. After six years — a remarkably short run for a strip that found its way into 300-plus newspapers, including The Washington Post — Universal Press Syndicate told subscribers yesterday they should start looking for someone to replace political/social satirist Aaron McGruder.
McGruder, a Columbia native who in his twenties became the Garry Trudeau of the hip-hop generation, took a sabbatical six months ago to recharge. The syndicate kept checking with him, reminding him that its newspaper clients needed several weeks in order to prepare for his return or his departure.
Apparently, the mind behind young black radicals Huey and Riley Freeman has gone Hollywood, or at least has further hopes of doing so, and has decided he can’t devote himself to the grind of a daily strip. His late-night animated show, “The Boondocks,” on the Cartoon Network was recently renewed for another season, the first-season DVD is out, and a film is reportedly in the works.
Perhaps for McGruder, whose broad and sometimes outrageous characterizations forced readers to confront racial stereotypes and caused cartoon editors to blanch, the future of the funny papers is in pixels rather than picas.
Story here. I can tell you from personal experience, this comic strip racket is indeed a grind. And I’m on a much more human schedule, doing only one a week — though the the very fact that I only have one spot a week means that I spend a hell of a lot of time researching and writing and obsessing over each cartoon, hoping to hit that moment of perfect pitch that resonates so well that the cartoon takes on a life of its own. A cartoon that works, especially when you’re trying to do work that’s about more than just delivering a joke, is a delicate balance of words, images, timing and information, and you can beat your head bloody against the wall trying to get there. It takes time, even if you’ve got somebody else drawing it for you, as MacGruder reportedly did. And every time you finish, you’ve got another deadline staring you down. It’s an endless exhausting cycle, and I don’t know how somebody does it on a daily basis, especially if they’re working on television and movie projects. And at least those projects have some recuperative time factored in, unlike the comic strip grind. At your job, whatever you do, chances are you get time off for holidays, vacations, and so on. The work load probably eases, or someone else picks up the slack for you, or else there’s just a tacit understanding that the work will wait until you get back. Newspaper cartoonists don’t have that luxury. If a cartoonist wants to do something crazy like, say, spend a week with the family at Christmastime, he or she has to do an extra week’s work beforehand to cover the week off. And if they get sick, well, that gets pretty complicated too. And this is just how it always goes. To a certain extent, I have an astonishing degree of autonomy — I don’t have to be at work at nine a.m. sharp every morning (though as it turns out, I usually am), and if my work is done for the week, I can take a day off if I want (though in reality that rarely happens). But I am also destined to go through life chained to the reality of relentless deadlines. (And as for taking a break, giving the muse a chance to rest and regenerate, forget about it. You want to know what happens to an altweekly cartoonist who takes six months off? He gets replaced.)
Don’t get me wrong, there aren’t many jobs I’d rather have, or would be better suited for. And I’m well aware that I’ve got a job that plenty of people would like to have. But burnout is nonetheless an occupational hazard, constantly hovering at the edge of awareness. I have nothing but sympathy for MacGruder. I can imagine all too well the sense of dread he must have felt as the end of his sabbatical drew near.
(Edited — I thought the Post made a mistake about Bill Watterson’s sabbatical, but as it turns out, the error was mine.)
Atrios has some good advice for the group Faithful Democrats (and other such organizations) :
If I had a somewhat insidery new organization for religious Democrats and was thinking about an issue which would be true to both (what I imagine to be) religious principles and liberal principles, and where the debate could perhaps be shaped (for better or for worse) by religious argument and language, I’d think about jumping on it.
So, how about a little torture talk, guys.
Lemme second that one. Maybe they can take their cues from the faithful non-Democrats at Christianity Today.
Every inch of the human body and every aspect of the human spirit comes from God and bears witness to his handiwork. We are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28). Human dignity, value, and worth come as a permanent and ineradicable endowment of the Creator to every person.
Christians, at least, should be trained to see in every person the imprint of God’s grandeur. This should create in us a sense of reverence. Here, we say—and we say it even of detainees in the war on terror—is a human being sacred in God’s sight, made in God’s image, someone for whom Christ died. No one is ever “subhuman” or “human debris,” as Rush Limbaugh has described some of our adversaries in Iraq.
Because they are human, people have rights to many things, including the right not to be tortured. Christians sometimes question the legitimacy of “rights talk,” correctly so. Just because someone claims a right does not mean that it really is a right. But among the most widely recognized rights in both legal and moral theory is the right to bodily integrity; that is, the right not to have intentional physical and psychological harm inflicted upon oneself by others. The ban on torture is one expression of this right.
. . .
In the Scriptures, God’s understanding of justice tilts toward the vulnerable. “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt. Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry” (Ex. 22:21-23). Primary forms of injustice include violent abuse and domination of the powerless.
One reason our legal system has so many layers of protection for the accused and imprisoned is their powerlessness. This is important in any legal system that has the power to deprive people of their liberty and even their lives. The 83,000 people who have been detained by our government and military in the last four years are, as prisoners, vulnerable to injustice. Those who have been tortured are victims of injustice.
. . .
Given human sinfulness, not only must people be told not to torture, we must also strengthen the structures of due process, accountability, and transparency that buttress those standards and make them less likely to be violated. This is what is so dangerous about the discovery of secret CIA prisons in Europe and “ghost detainees” who are located no one knows where. As Manfred Nowak, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said at the time the cia’s secret prisons were revealed, “Every secret place of detention is a higher risk for ill treatment; that’s the danger of secrecy.” It is not enough for U.S. government officials to say they can be trusted to act “in keeping with our values”—not without due process, accountability, and transparency. No government is so virtuous as to overcome the laws of human nature, or to be beyond the need for democratic checks and balances.
. . .
It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.
Conservatives everywhere take pride in George Bush for his outward expressions of his faith, but if the fear of another terrorist attack has caused them to compromise their moral framework then they’re nothing more than unrepentant sinners and gutless cowards. Throwing away your values isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of weakness.
On the partisan front, it’s especially pathetic to see the Democratic leadership cede the moral high ground to the Republican “rebels” and Christianity Today. You’d think showing strong opposition to an unpopular president would be second nature at this point, but instead the Democrats are once again sitting on the sidelines with their fingers crossed. Keep up the wait-and-see act, guys. It’s worked great so far.
I’m supposed to be on a program called Open Source Radio this evening talking about one of my personal heroes — the late, great independent journalist I.F. (”Izzy”) Stone…
Open Source’s host, Chris Lyndon, tells me tonight’s guests will include former Washington Post reporter Myra MacPherson, who just published a biography of Izzy, and former Washington Post national editor (and Stone intern) Peter Osnos, who’s edited a new compilation of Izzy’s articles, The Best of I.F. Stone…
MacPherson and Osnos are supposed to discuss Izzy’s life and times, then I’ll come on for a few minutes and bloviate about Izzy and the blogisphere — i.e. are bloggers the true and legitimate heirs to Stone’s stubborn independence, or just a feral pack of blogfascists in search of a few cheap thrills?…
Anyway, if you want to listen in, here’s a list of public radio stations that carry the program. The podcast link is on the same page (itunes required).
I’m genuinely curious to hear what Billmon sounds like. What I think would be great is if everyone listens and it’s clear he’s actually Joe Lieberman, filling an anonymous blog with all the razor-sharp progressive political analysis his handlers won’t let him say out loud.
Here’s a question you might ask Tony Snow at one of those little get-togethers you have:
Tony, as you know, Dan Bartlett said back in July, 2003 that President Bush didn’t read all of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq before he took the country to war.
This sounds like a poorly thought out plot element from a bad movie:
Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.
But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.
These are New York’s town and village courts, or justice courts, as the 1,250 of them are widely known. In the public imagination, they are quaint holdovers from a bygone era, handling nothing weightier than traffic tickets and small claims. They get a roll of the eyes from lawyers who amuse one another with tales of incompetent small-town justices.
A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”
A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed when his accuser described him in court as “that colored man.” But the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high school graduate, denied his objections and later convicted him. “You know,” the justice said, “I could understand if he would have called you a Negro, or he had called you a nigger.”
And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog’s running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog killed.
“I just follow my own common sense,” Mr. Buckley, in an interview, said of his 13 years on the bench. “And the hell with the law.”
Kidding aside, I haven’t spent anywhere near enough time in the city of Seattle. The first time I was there, I was in my early twenties, at the tail end of a cross country Greyhound bus trip. And if you’ve never experienced the particular intersection of poverty and wanderlust that leads one to voluntarily travel cross country via Greyhound you should consider yourself lucky, but that’s another story. All I really remember about Seattle from that trip is that I stayed in a fleabag hotel above a strip club, and that it rained the entire time, and that I didn’t actually have enough money to do crazy tourist things like, you know, eat very much.
I hadn’t been there since, until this last year, when I made it out twice — once to give a talk for an ACLU event, and once for a booksigning at Elliott Bay. This time around, each time, I felt like an honored guest. KUOW in Seattle was one of only two NPR stations that gave me airtime on the last book tour (the other was WNYC in New York) — for whatever reason, NPR stations tend to give me the cold shoulder, but at KUOW I was greeted with open arms. They went so far as to record audio versions of several cartoons, which were mixed in during the live interview (there’s a podcast here, but you have to listen to the whole interview to hear them). The crowd at Elliot Bay was one of the most enthusiastic I’ve ever spoken to, and later that night I shared a hotel elevator with Stephen Hawking. All in all, much more fun than the whole Greyhound bus/fleabag hotel experience.
And of course, you can’t discuss Seattle (if by “you” I mean “I”) without giving a shout out to one of its greatest cultural treasures.
There’s really a sense of helpless fury, for the millions of us who saw this disaster coming and tried to raise our voices in warning, only to be shouted down by dimwits and thugs chanting poorly-reasoned slogans and waving flags.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.
We are, in a sense, at the moment of truth. The sadistic and/or bizarre acts committed in Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s secret prisons can be written off as the crimes of a few bad apples with names like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld — or, more charitably, as the consequences of a string of bad and brutal decisions made under emergency conditions by men who were terrified by all the things they didn’t know about Al Qaeda. Either way, they were not acts of national policy, endorsed and approved by Congress after open, public debate. But, thanks to the Hamdan decision, the question is now formally on the table . . . So now we’ll find out, I guess, what we’re really made of as a nation — down deep, in our core.
Whiskey Bar
A Tortured Definition
September 15, 2006
The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.
Washington Post
The Abuse Can Continue
September 22, 2006
And if anyone was still harboring the illusion that the Democratics in Congress were finally going to shed their invertebrate past, that if any issue would inspire them to rise to the challenge of their era, then certainly something as fundamental as a torture bill would do the trick, well — ha ha! Joke’s on you!
Think they’ll ever give up, ever stop trying to rewrite history, to pretend that the guy who ignored the Clintonistas’ early warnings, ignored the Hart-Rudman Commission, and ignored a PDB entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” — think they’ll ever stop trying to pretend that the responsibility for 9/11 lies entirely with his predecessor?
Wallace: When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of e-mail from viewers. And I have to say I was surprised, most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and al-Qaeda out of business when you were president? There’s a new book out, I suspect you may have already read, called The Looming Tower. And it talks about the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said “I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops.” Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the Cole.
Clinton: OK let’s just –
Wallace: May I just finish the question sir? And after the attack, the book says, that bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is always 20/20 –
Clinton: No, let’s talk about it.
Wallace: But the question is, why didn’t you connect the dots and put him out of business?
Clinton: Let’s talk about it. I will answer all those things on the merits, but first I want to talk about the context in which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network. ABC just had a right-wing conservative running their little pathway to 9/11, falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 commission report with three things asserted against me directly contradictory to the 9/11 commission report. And I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who
now say I didn’t do enough claim that I was too obsessed with bin Laden.
All of President Bush’s neo-cons that I was too obsessed with bin Laden, they had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say I didn’t do enough, said
I did too much, the same people. They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in Black Hawk Down and I refused to do it and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations.
OK, now let’s look at all the criticisms, Black Hawk Down, Somalia, there is not a living soul in the
world who thought Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down or was paying any attention to it, or even knew al-Qaeda was a going concern in October 93.
Wallace: I understand.
Clinton: No, no, wait. Don’t tell me that — you asked me why didn’t I do more to bin Laden, there was not a living soul, all the people who now criticize me wanted to leave the next day. You brought this up, so you get an answer. But you — secondly …
Wallace: .. bin Laden says, but it showed the weakness of the United States.
Clinton: Bin Laden may have said it — but it would have shown the weakness if we left right away. But he wasn’t involved in that, that’s just a bunch of bull. That was about Muhammad Aidid, a Muslim warlord, murdering 22 Pakistani Muslim troops. We were all there on a humanitarian mission; we had no mission, none, to establish a certain kind of Somali government or keep anybody out. He was not a religious fanatic …
Wallace: Mr. President …
Clinton: … there was no al-Qaeda …
Wallace: With respect, if I may, instead of going through ‘93 and …
Clinton: No, no — you asked it. You brought it up.
Wallace: May I ask you (INAUDIBLE) question, and then you can answer?
Clinton: Yes.
Wallace: The 9/11 commission, which you talk about — and this is what they did say, not what ABC pretended they said …
Clinton: What did they say?
Wallace: They said, about you and President Bush, and I quote, “The U.S. government took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second or even third rank.”
Clinton: First of all, that’s not true with us and bin Laden.
Wallace: Well, I’m telling … (CROSS TALK)
Clinton: Let’s see what Richard Clarke said. Do you think Richard Clarke has a vigorous attitude about bin Laden?
Wallace: Yes, I do.
Clinton: You do, don’t you?
Wallace: He has a variety of opinions and loyalties, but yes. (CROSS TALK)
Clinton: He has a variety of opinions and loyalties now, but let’s look at the facts: he worked for Ronald Reagan, he was loyal with him; he worked for George H.W. Bush, he was loyal to him; he worked for me, and he was loyal to me; he worked for President Bush, he was loyal to him. They downgraded him and the terrorist operation.
Now, look what he said — read his book and read his factual assertions — not opinions, assertions. He said we took vigorous action after the African embassies, we probably nearly got bin Laden …
No, no — I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him. The CIA was run by George Tenet that President (Bush) gave the medal of freedom to, and he said he did a good job setting up all these counter terrorism things. The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there.
Now if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: after the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden. But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan — which we got after 9/11. The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible. While I was there, they refused to certify. So that meant I would have had to send a few hundred special forces in in helicopters, refuel at night. Even the 9/11 commission didn’t do that.
WASHINGTON - Now the death toll is 9/11 times two. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America’s history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.
Story. Of course, if we step outside of our America-centric bubble and add in the Iraqis who have died in this thing, I don’t know how many 9/11’s we’re up to at this point.
