Each week, the Comics Curmudgeon helps explain Today's Cartoons.
America: What are you thankful for? If you're reading this blog instead of enjoying some relaxing time with your family, you may be one of the damned souls forced to work on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and thus may not be thankful for much of anything. Conversely, you may hate your family with a seething, burning passion and may be glad to be locked in your room and surfing the Web rather than interacting with them any further (and by "interacting with them", we mean "finally breaking down and strangling them all"). We at Cartoon Violence are thankful for things, too, obviously. For instance, we're thankful for the timeless, comforting rhythms of the holiday season, the little rituals that ground us in tradition in this all-too-fast modern world. And, as you'll see after the jump, any number of political cartoonists are thankful for these traditions too, because they get to use them as an excuse to draw elf corpses and Rudy Giuliani's grotesquely swollen head.
Hallowed tradition: The beheading of the noble turkey, necessary because Americans would be less thankful for the bird's gifts of succulent flesh if they could see its beady, terrified eyes.
Political angle: I don't spend a lot of time around abattoirs, but I imagine that there's a certain jostling for position among the doomed birds, as their tiny pea brains are unable to understand that whether their at the front or the back of the nightmarish trip down the chute, they're still going to end up face to face with the automated blades. In this sense, they resemble our political classes, desperate to rule over a nation of fickle morons who will complain about everything they do and ultimately vilify them for participating in a system they didn't correct. I also imagine that turkeys do not sit around chatting about developments in the Virginia Senate race a year in advance of the voting, nor do they express sympathy for some bushy-eyebrowed dude who will spend millions in other people's money to lose and go home to his nice pension government pension.
Hallowed tradition: Shuffling through an grubby, overcrowded airport like a damned soul being prodded through hell with a pitchfork, simultaneously bitching about the long lines at the security gates and feigning shock and surprise when you get to the metal detector and discover that you have to take off your shoes and belt and put your laptop in a separate bin and what do you mean, this is four ounces of personal lubricant?
Political angle: How dare you suggest that there's anything even remotely political about being led to believe that only the uniformed government employees can keep you safe from terrorism, despite the fact that they're paid very little and are mainly enthusiastic about yelling at people who God forbid want to bring bottled water through the gates? Sir, do you have a turkey under that shirt? Sir, I need you put that turkey on the conveyer belt. Sir, I don't make the rules. No, you can't speak to my supervisor. Sir, just put the turkey ... sir ... all right, don't make me tase you!
Hallowed tradition: Celebrating nature's bounty and having survived another year by gathering with our closest friends and families and gorging on so much turkey meat that our body sends blood intended for our brains to our stomachs in a sad and desperate attempt
to digest it all, and we pass out with gravy dribbling down our chins.
Political angle: Oh, the Chinamen! Yes, that's why I fell asleep in front of the TV instead of helping clean up! It was those sinister Celestials! I know last year I said it was illegal Mexicans but now I'm pretty sure it was the Chinese. What won't they do to destroy our way of life?
Hallowed tradition: Watching the grossly overinflated simulacra of America's most beloved fictional characters float surreally through the man-made canyons of Manhattan in an attempt to convince Americans to go deeper into credit card debt at approved locations.
Political angle: As politicians find it impossible to communicate with 300 million Americans through any means other than television, who is to say that it isn't entirely appropriate for Rudy Giuliani to drift through the polluted New York air right next to Snoopy or Garfield or Kermit the Frog. Who's to say that one is somehow "real" while the other is merely a fiction? Wait, I'm here to say it. Kermit the Frog is very real. He embodies all that is sweet and noble and graceful and self-effacingly charming in this world. Rudy Giuliani, on the other hand, is dead-eyed fanged ghoul, and we all know (or hope and pray) that those don't really exist.
Hallowed tradition: The War on Christmas, which just starts
earlier and earlier every God-damned year.
Political angle: This year the Chinese strike the first blow for the forces of atheistic humanism, killing an innocent elf with their dastardly lead paint. DAMN YOU, CHINAMEN! WHY DO YOU FORCE US TO BUY YOUR DEADLY POISONOUS PRODUCTS BY MAKING THEM SO VERY ENTICINGLY CHEAP? --THE COMICS CURMUDGEON
