THIS MODERN WORLD

I lived in California for a long time, and still think of myself as a Californian in exile every time the winter wind blows a little too cold (which is to say, at all). And there were a couple of things that you knew living out there on the edge of the continent, and tried not to think about too much: that sooner or later, the Big One was going to hit, and that sooner or later, Prop. 13 was going to really bite the state in the ass.

You can cross one of those things off the list:

Hard times are ahead for California, and it’s hard not to blame Californians for it. They voted, in 1978, to restrict government’s ability to govern. And they, in pursuit of their own McMansion vision of the no-money-down, option-ARM, subprime good life, fueled an unsustainable housing boom that may have wrecked the state’s economy for a decade or more to come. They even helped launch the political career of Ronald Reagan, the man who, in 1980, won the presidency in part by tapping the same anti-government emotions in the American public at large as did Proposition 13 in California just two years earlier. If you are willing to trace the recent excesses of Wall Street at least in part to the deregulatory impulses set in motion by Reagan, well then, you have to concede, California has a lot to answer for. And it looks like the piper has arrived, looking for his pay.

Perhaps you’ve seen that on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn’t happening. And two days later, Will and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post op-ed page, still won’t explain their behavior.

It must be unpleasant for Will to get used to blogs, because he’s spent his entire career with total impunity. Here’s a funny story of Noam Chomsky’s from the book Understanding Power about a column Will wrote in 1982:

CHOMSKY: [A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971″—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.

I’ve stuck the Understanding Power footnotes, with references and excerpts, over at my site.

What?

If this is a “joke”, maybe somebody could clue me in to the punchline.

about the death of my profession, reports of which I do hope are premature. But this caught my eye:

What are you saving (by dropping comics)? I asked him. He said, “If you added it all up? Jeez, a few thousand dollars.”

Well, there you have it.

See, the thing is, a few thousand dollars is a big deal for a household budget, for a young family trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage. A few thousand dollars is not a significant amount for a large newspaper chain whose advertising income, whose very existence, depends on readers who are in the habit of picking up the paper every week to read their favorite features. In the latter case, a few thousand dollars is about the cheapest fucking investment you can make, if it brings back readers week after week.

I would prefer to continue doing TMW, but everything goes to hell, I’ll move on to other things. (That’s the problem with the overused “buggy whip” metaphor — buggy whip makers didn’t just roll over and die, they moved to to make other things out of the materials with which they worked.) The question here is if the altweekly cartoons, which have contributed significantly to the papers in which they run, can really be tossed aside like yesterday’s garbage when the moment comes to save a few thousand dollars. I would like to imagine that this is not the case, but to paraphrase my earlier posts, consistent, ongoing and increasingly annoyed reader feedback is the only way to prove it. You people are all we’ve got here, if by “we” you mean “beleaguered, disrespected cartoonists.” Which I do.

(Edited, because.)

Despite the nuclear first strike launched at my career by the corporate honchos at VVM — I kid, of course! I’m sure the economy will rebound any moment now and they’ll once again be able to afford the literally tens of dollars it costs to run my work! — at any rate, despite the late unpleasantness, I am momentarily swamped with deadlines. The usual weekly cartoon, of course, but also a couple of other longer-term projects about which I’ll be able to announce at least a little bit of good news sometime soon. But the point is, everything’s happening at once, so for the time being, this blog will continue to suck. My apologies for that, and for any unanswered email.