Chan Lowe

A skunk by any other name...

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:19:20 -0500

lumpenproletariat is so dense it won't catch on. The government is raising "fees." A "fee," you see, is a government charge for things people use. As opposed to a "tax," which is...oops...the same thing. Oh, well, as long as they didn't raise taxes.

The Great American Vacation Ripoff

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:28:48 -0500

We're all feeling a bit spent after the mass Michael catharsis, and our president is overseas, although nobody seems to care. The only item of interest to come out of the G-8 meeting (snore) is that the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is a proud, in-your-face skirt-chaser, and he's not holding any teary-eyed press conferences, thank God, to justify his behavior. They're much more civilized about these things in Italy. It's the dog days. Al Franken joined the other comedians in the U.S. Senate... at least he's honest enough to admit to his calling. Sarah Palin's flash in the pan has sizzled out. I'm drawing cartoons about the fact that theme parks nickel and dime you to death once you've paid the steep fee to get in the gates. Anybody who goes to a family attraction should expect to get fleeced. What makes it special is the fantasy. The kids get to imagine themselves in the midst of a charmed wonderland. The parent footing the bill gets to imagine that he or she is a small shopkeeper in Bedford-Stuyvesant getting shaken down by the neighborhood gang in exchange for their not smashing his plate-glass windows. That's why they call it the Magic Kingdom.

Michael Jackson--on to the dark side

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:00:28 -0500

I was just talking to a man whose son, a U.S. Marine, was involved in one of the largest helicopter assaults since Vietnam (four thousand troops), which took place on Wednesday, July 1. He said that a lot of Marine parents get together on a web chat site to support each other when they know a major operation is going on. In this case, they agreed between them to watch all the available TV stations and let everybody else know if anything about the assault was mentioned. Between coverage of Michael Jackson and Gov. Mark Sanford, over an hour passed before he was able to tell the others to tune in to a network. It was the BBC. Now, you can't blame the media for all of this. They do their homework, and they look at their instant ratings. If war were still a hot seller, we'd see a lot more of it on TV and the front pages, so we're collectively responsible as members of a nation that happens to have an incredibly short attention span. Which brings me to this cartoon. With this memorial extravaganza, the age of innocence is over. We're about to be treated nonstop to the sordid, seamy underbelly of the Jackson saga. The parasites are coming out of the woodwork. They were always there, but this is their moment in the sun. My advice: If you are the type who wants to keep Michael's spirit of love, harmony and peace alive, this would be a good time to go read a book.

Sarah Palin bails

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:03:57 -0500

I'm waiting for the other snowshoe to drop. It's hard to believe that someone as politically ambitious as Sarah Palin would bail out of her first term as governor unless there were extenuating circumstances that we have yet to hear about. If there is no scandal waiting in the wings, then Gov. Palin deserves to be thought of as a flake not fit for the presidency, regardless of one's political point of view. Some of her admirers among the Conservative chattering classes are calling this a bold masterstroke, clearing the decks for her to come down here to the lower forty-eight and tour the cornfields of Iowa as well as the mill towns of New Hampshire. She says she quit to pursue a higher calling. The irony is that another Republican governor, Mark Sanford, chose to pursue a lower calling, and he's still in office. I suggest we sit tight and wait to see if this calling comes in the form of a subpoena.

The Sanford soap opera

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:07:31 -0500

I've said this before about other pols, but I really mean it this time: This guy is the gift that keeps on giving. The only conclusion I can come to at this point is that the Republican Party has a secret strategy, which is to let the man talk himself into such a black hole that the general public can only conclude he's a rogue nutball and not representative of the Party as a whole. It's fun watching all the TV talking heads try to keep straight faces while they recite the direct quotes. This could be a bodice-ripper romance novel, except that the little I ever read of one that was lying around in a doctor's office was much better written.

Hard times Fourth of July

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:58:43 -0500

Americans are having trouble coming to grips with all the ways the recession affects daily life. Sure, we trim the budget at home, but when local government makes painful cuts that we feel down at the grassroots level, we get resentful. Take Independence Day fireworks, which we feel is our right as Americans to enjoy. Somehow, they just happen. It's this preconception that causes civic leaders to swallow hard before they take away something so highly visible. They're afraid we'll take it out on them later at the polls. On the other hand, how would you like to be a city worker who's been doing his or her job for decades, and doing it well, when some councilman comes to you and says, "Sorry, but we had to lay you off so we could save our own butts by blowing up a few thousand dollars in the atmosphere this year?"

Giving Iraq back to its owners

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:16:08 -0500

The talking heads use various metaphors: "It's going to be a hard road ahead." "We're only entering the fourth quarter." Well, we're giving the Iraqis back their country, for better or worse. Mostly worse. We've already been over how misbegotten this whole foray was, how it was the wrong war for the wrong reasons, all the blood and treasure lost in the sand. The hard line rear guard Bush administration apologists claim that, regardless of all the bloodshed, the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam. I wouldn't know, since I'm not there on the ground. I have a feeling they don't either. As we stand back and observe the inevitable sectarian score-settling, favoritism, corruption, and the other symptoms of a failing state as the Iraqis--who never thought of themselves as a "people," but a collection of tribes--jockey for power, we'll probably see a strong man emerge. A populace grown weary of undending violence will turn to him for stability, and gladly trade in whatever trappings of "democracy" we bequeathed upon them at the point of the gun. The new strong man, after all is said and done, will remind us a lot of Saddam Hussein. Maybe he won't look as ridiculous in a fedora. He'll probably deal with us on oil, because he'll need the money...which was what the whole thing was about in the first place.

Madoff Sentencing

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:57:42 -0500

An armed robber goes into a convenience store to steal money out of the cash register. He pulls out a pistol and points it at the store clerk. He has no intention of using it. He just wants to show the man he means business. The store clerk, upon seeing the weapon, involuntarily recoils. He slips on a puddle of Mountain Dew and his head hits the tile floor. He dies of a cerebral hemorrhage. The robber is apprehended, and charged with something called "felony murder," which is to say that even though he never intended to take a life, he embarked on a series of activities that directly resulted in the death of the clerk. How is Bernard Madoff any different than this guy, when his theft resulted in several suicides by people whose entire life savings had been wiped out? He's lucky all he got was 150 years, and not the magic mojito I.V. As it is, I heard that he's not going to a country club prison. Thanks to the enormity of his crimes, he's rumored to be headed for medium security, with rapists, armed robbers, and other unsavory types who are also serving life sentences with no possibility of parole. In other words, the system has no way of disciplining them if they should happen to visualize their own grandmother in the place of some little old lady who is now forced to survive on cat food, and decide to take appropriate action. That's what it feels like not to know if you're going to make it through the next day, Mr. Madoff.

A great pitchman silenced

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:56:25 -0500

I like to think that when people die within a short time of each other, they share a bus to the next life which departs only once each week. It's a pretty long trip, so the passengers get plenty of time to talk to each other on the way to the end of the line. If you think of it this way, it makes for some fascinating speculation about what conversations might be taking place during the journey. Imagine Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and Billy Mays having an impromptu bull session in the back. After Ed introduces everybody, Farrah and Michael discuss all the fashion trends they've set between the two of them, and Billy, with his inextinguishable enthusiasm, shows the King of Pop how to get rid of that stubborn stain on his glove. The quartet have one thing in common, and it is the thing that reserves for each of them a special place in our hearts: they really, really loved their work. What a pleasure it was to watch them do (and so deftly, at that) exactly what they were born to do. We should all be so lucky.

The Michael Jackson media circus

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:23:55 -0500

Editorial cartoons are a clunky medium for doing tributes. It's difficult to tread the line between sincere and sappy, because brevity is the soul of an effective cartoon, and you have to hit the sentiment just right or it blows up in your face. While I respect Michael Jackson's work, I am not a fan; so at first I decided to pass on the subject. That was before, one by one, my colleagues came by asking what I was planning to draw in response to his death. It became apparent that this is one of those mega-topics you cannot avoid, because it is so much a part of common existence that it demands commentary. Fearing that my lack of requisite grief would cause a tribute to ring hollow, I decided that the best way to honor Jackson, the man and the artist, was to comment on my own profession and the way it is exploiting his demise (being mindful of how the Princess Di extravaganza eventually played itself out). Endless electronic wallowing on the air, in print and on the Internet seems to be the modern way of mass grieving. Many people must need it, or it wouldn't pump ratings, circulation and net hits the way it does. I do not argue with that. It's just a shame that taste always has to be a victim in the race to be the most saccharine. It debases us all. And another thing: Poor old Farrah Fawcett, a figure equally worthy of our respect, has been all but forgotten in this orgy.

Mark Sanford's last tango

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:24:23 -0500

This is happening so regularly now that it almost isn't worth commenting on. After all, we'd just gotten over Senator John Ensign of Nevada last week when Mark Sanford obligingly added his name to the rapidly growing list of Politicians You've Probably Never Heard Of Until They Cheated On Their Spouses. This latest sex scandal borders on the garden variety (everything seems rather ordinary after Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards), except that there's a certain deliciousness to the self-immolation of someone who was so quick to condemn Bill Clinton for the same behavior. Hypocrisy is the spice that livens up an otherwise mundane dish. And besides, as I've pointed out in the cartoon, what's wrong with nice, red-blooded American girls? What are our womenfolk, chopped carne asada? It's an insult to the locals, like joyriding around Detroit in a Hyundai.

FPL rate hike

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:01:23 -0500

I speak here as a disgruntled FPL customer ( Is there any other kind?). What ticks me, and probably others, off as much as the rate hike is the way they insult my intelligence with their lame corporate rationalizations. FPL says that lower fuel charges and increases in efficiency will more than offset the new kilowatt-hour base rate increase, in fact lowering our total bills. If they're doing so well with all these economies, what do they need to raise our base rate for? They say we pay less per kilowatt-hour than customers of other Florida utilities. Could this be because FPL is the biggest, and benefits from economies of scale? And, just because other utilities rip their customers off more than ours does, is that a valid reason to increase our rates? It wouldn't be quite as bad if our service weren't so spotty. A storm doesn't have to be a hurricane to douse the power at my house. Probably true for yours, too. On top of all that, they're picking a lousy time to do this. By further strangling homes and businesses in an already stumbling economy, they make it that much harder for their customers to claw their way back to prosperity someday. Less money for them, in the long run. To put it kindly (and there's no reason that I should), this business tactic lacks foresight.

How to pay for health care

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:54:31 -0500

Common sense and good politics have always made awkward bedfellows--that is, at those times when they can even get into the same bed together. In a perfect, non-political world, the best way to pay for health care insurance would be to tax the hell out of the things we consume that harm our health. We could pay for our own upkeep with our vices. As the social engineering took hold, and we began to consume less of these things, the revenue from them would, of course, drop. But, by then, we'd be correspondingly healthier as a nation, and would have less overall need for medical services. Our race of super-healthy ubermenschen could march happily off into the future. Well, that isn't the American way. Only a politician getting ready to retire anyway would be nuts enough to suggest something so sensible. Besides, this isn't Scandinavia. Rugged American individualism requires that we be free to eat, drink and smoke ourselves to death if we want to. It is our right, and if it isn't somewhere in the Constitution, then, by God, it should be.

Walking the tightrope on Iran

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:03:15 -0500

It's very easy to say all kinds of nutty stuff designed to please your base when you're (a) campaigning for something, (b) holding an elective office where what you say on a particular subject really doesn't matter to anybody, or (c) a non-elected political big shot standing on the sidelines. Barack Obama is certainly guilty of transgression (a) regarding a raft of subjects, including gay rights, Guantanamo, and the Iraq War. The scales fell from his eyes when he got in the Oval Office and realized that to make good on all those reckless promises, he would basically torpedo his presidency before he even got out of the gate. "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven," to quote Ecclesiastes. Guilty of transgression (b) are those who, from the safety of their armchairs, would take a tougher line with Iraq in its electoral crisis, like members of Congress who have the luxury of not representing the official American line with every word they utter. Guilty of (c) are smart-mouthed ex-pols jockeying to be presidential nominees in 2012 and broadcast types seeking to boost ratings. I think Obama is handling this one correctly. Rash statements now will only serve to unite the Iranians against the Great Satan. Don't confuse the protesters with Yankee-lovers. It has nothing to do with us. But it could if we muscled in there and tried to interfere. Besides, what would we plan to do to back up the tough talk? Use Iraq and Afghanistan as staging grounds for Operation Iranian Freedom? The Pentagon would probably have something to say about that.

The Stallworth wrist-slap

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:03:15 -0500

When a crime is committed, the people's interest in an ordered society is represented by the prosecution, which pursues its task (without passion or prejudice) within an accepted and respected framework of law. Our reverence for the law and the assumption of its equal application (at least in theory) are part of the social contract that holds us together as a society. When that contract is violated, it's an affront to us all. That is, I think, what lies at the root of the anger at Donte Stallworth's punishment, or lack thereof. We call the punishment of a crime the perpetrator's "debt to society" for a reason. It is not his or her "debt to the victim," because in theory, it is society and its code that have been wronged. This is what keeps our system from descending into "eye for an eye" justice. The legal system is there to protect us from ourselves, from each other, and from our natural revenge instinct. Without it, we'd all be killing each other off in vendettas. The redress of personal grievances is settled lawfully in civil court. The fact that Donte Stallworth made a financial settlement with the family of his victim should have no bearing on his criminal sentence. We know this, if not because we are familiar with the law, then because we feel it in our guts as members of a collective group with a stake in preserving our code.