Optimism in the Age of Suckitude
It's the end of the world as we know it and, while I can't say I exactly feel fine, it's all too easy to dwell on the downward spiral of our job prospects and 401(k)s. Even in the midst of economic collapse (possibly presaging political disintegration and ultimately social chaos), there's cause for optimism. And so, in the same spirit of contrarianism that drove me to declare the boom economy of the late 1990s a sham we'd all live to regret, here are nine good reasons not to kill yourself over the economic meltdown:
1. Bushies Will Pay. President Obama is inclined to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards" when it comes to investigating Bush and his minions for torture, war crimes and spying on Americans. Fortunately, one of Obama's first acts as president ensures the bastards will probably get what they deserve.
Obama has ordered government agencies to revitalize the Freedom of Information Act, which requires that declassified government records be released to the public. Under Bush, the flow of documents slowed to a trickle. New FOIA requests will enjoy "a clear presumption" that "in the face of doubt, openness prevails." Investigative journalists will now be able to use FOIA to uncover Bush Administration officials' nefarious deeds, forcing Obama's Justice Department to prosecute.
Should they waterboard Rumsfeld? Only if it's on pay-per-view.
2. Conservatives Are Discredited. Your fat chain-smoking doctor may give you good advice, but will you heed it? So it is with Republicans. They're right about Obama's fiscal stimulus plan: it won't do much to help the economy and will drive the deficit even higher. But no one's listening. "Most of the people who are complaining about Obama's fiscal irresponsibility today uttered not a peep of complaint about Bush," writes John Chait in The New Republic. America needs a loyal opposition.
But the Republicans aren't cut out for that role. The collapse of free-market capitalism calls for a dramatic realignment. This new political landscape should place Obama's ideas on the right, with new parties emerging to his left. The Republican Party, obsessed with gay marriage and flag burning and school prayer, was always an irrelevant distraction. Now everyone knows.
3. Heck of a Job, Barry. After three insanely wasteful false starts, Obama is finally on the right track vis-à-vis the mortgage crisis. His economic team still doesn't get that what we need is "trickle up"--bailing out homeowners means banks get paid and toxic assets get revalued--but they're getting there.
Thank God, it's finally possible for squeezed homeowners to refinance their mortgages before getting foreclosed upon or, as was required previously, messing up their credit by missing two payments. "If you can illustrate that your income is no longer enough to meet your mortgage payment--because your paycheck shrunk, your expenses rose or your mortgage is about to reset to a higher payment--you may qualify," reports The New York Times. About time.
4. Retail is dead. Long live retail. Big retail outlets like Circuit City and Virgin Megastore are going out of business, leaving tens of millions of square feet of commercial space vacant and tens of thousands of workers unemployed. Granted, the reasons for some of these closures are kind of dumb. Virgin's store in New York's Times Square, the highest-volume music outlet in the nation, earned $6 million a year in profit. But because Virgin only paid $54 a square foot at a location where the going rate was $700, they were kicked out in favor of a women's clothier, Forever 21, that analysts say probably won't last either. Stupid.
Nevertheless, this nascent Depression will no doubt repeat the historical formula that favors smaller stores over big ones. Those of us who mourned the loss of mom-and-pop hardware stores and their individualized service and community ties may live to see them again.
5. Small Big-City Newspapers. When there's talk of losing an iconic powerhouse like The San Francisco Chronicle, you know the model of the traditional big-city paper, employing hundreds of union-represented reporters working out of a big hulk smack in the middle of downtown, is in trouble. But there's still a future in print. Why? Because that's still where the money--subscribers willing to pay for news and advertisers eager to reach them--are. And because people need reliable originally-reported info (yes, I'm talking about you, bloggers).
Look for new, lean and mean dailies to spring from the ashes, mixing the stripped-down content of free commuter dailies like The Washington Examiner with the low-budget staffing of alternative weeklies. Hire 30 or 40 people (most of whom type their stories at home), buy a lot of syndicated and wire service content, rent a tiny editorial office in the slums, and voila! The rebirth of print.
6. Culture Gets Cool Again. American fiction peaked in the 1930s, rock music while riding the economic rollercoaster of the 1970s. The roaring 1990s weren't so awesome. Historians say there's an inverse relationship between the vitality of popular culture--movies, music, literature--and the economy. (So the Bush years were fiscally sound. Hm.) Rising unemployment, furloughs and decreased business activity give people more time to be creative. Where stability ossifies, uncertainty inspires. Even contemporary art, competing with the fashion industry for the title of most vacuous, could conceivably stage a comeback.
7. Tough Times Are Interesting. My mom grew up in Nazi-occupied France. As you'd expect, it sucked--a fact that she constantly reminded me of via incessant hair-raising stories over the years. Recently, however, she had an epiphany. "It was hard," she said, "but they were exciting times." If you survive the meltdown, you'll dine out on your tales of fear and deprivation for the rest of your life.
8. Rich People Still Have Money. Where would you invest your money if you were rich? Savings accounts are a joke. The stock market has lost over 50 percent of its mid-2008 value. Foreign markets are worse off than ours. Real estate? Don't even start. If you had money, there'd be only one logical place to park it: in a new business. Venture capital will plant the seeds for the next wave of employers.
9. Everything Could Go To Hell. If all else fails and numbers one through eight fail to materialize, Rush Limbaugh could get his way. Obama could fail. The United States could collapse. Our economy could evaporate. Which would be OK, too. Because if everything goes to hell, we will enjoy a rare opportunity to transform our society and economic system from one that works for a few to one that benefits everyone.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Cartoon for March 8, 2009
The collapse of the New Economy leads to a reversal of the old conservative report to the downtrodden.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Cartoon for March 6, 2009
As Obama revs up his Afghan surge, let us all take a moment to salute the true heroes who have been fighting the war since 2001.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Cartoon for March 4, 2009
Obama's economic stimulus plan calls for higher taxes on people who earn over $250K after 2011. Will anyone earn that much by then?
THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Suicide via Conformity
How Top Newspapers Are Killing Editorial Cartooning
An editorial cartoon is like nothing else in a newspaper. Editorial cartoonists don't need any special degrees. Unlike reporters and editorial writers, they don't even have to pretend to be "fair." Moderation in what Jules Feiffer called "the art of ill will" is the ultimate vice: boring.
A great political cartoon can do things no news article or editorial can. It can expose hypocrisies and ideological contradictions with the stroke of a pen and the flash of an eye. It can connect seemingly unrelated events to point out a theretofore unnoticed trend. At its best, an editorial cartoon can prompt readers to rethink society's basic assumptions.
But American political cartoonists are an endangered species. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists estimates that there are fewer than 90 full-time staff cartoonists left in the U.S., down from approximately 280 in 1980. A dozen have lost their jobs in the last year alone. Syndicated cartoonists have seen their income drop by 50 percent or more. Discouraged and broke, young cartoonists are abandoning the field.
Editorial cartoonists face the same enemy as the newspapers where they appear: the more widely their work is disseminated on the Internet, the less they get paid. Particular to graphic journalism, however, is the seeming determination of editors and publishers to render editorial cartooning irrelevant--by promoting hack work over quality.
We Americans live in a golden age of editorial cartooning. Never have has the profession been as ideologically, stylistically or demographically diverse. Never has the art been as daring or ambitious. Never have cartoons been as popular or, thanks to the Internet, as widely read. Yet American editorial cartooning is in danger of disappearing entirely--murdered by editors and publishers at the major magazines and newspapers.
The state of political cartooning in 2009 mirrors that of radio in the late '70s. Music was awesome, but the good stuff wasn't on the radio. Punk, new wave and postpunk took chances and redefined popular music, but the only way to get it was to buy LPs at a record store.
Similarly, editors of the big daily papers and the newsweekly magazines know what makes a good cartoon: they post them on their walls and in their cubicles. What they run in their publications, on the other hand, is what we cartoonists constantly refer to as the worst of the worst: dull clichés, hackneyed metaphors, idiotic gags about the news reminiscent of Jay Leno's middle of the road comedy style. They're safe. They don't anger readers. But they don't matter.
Peruse the highest profile venues--USA Today, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times' "Week In Review" section--and you'd never guess that there were entire genres of cartooning going unrepresented. Draw in more than one or two panels, and you'd might as well chuck your scribbles down George Orwell's memory hole. And God forbid if you express an actual opinion!
Out of notice of the Pulitzer Prize committee, cartoonists at alternative weekly newspapers--a genre which into its own during the 1980s--became the front line of criticism of the Bush Administration after 9/11, when the mainstream media was still swallowing every White House press release hook, line and WMD. Staff cartoonists at family-owned independent dailies change hearts and minds by viciously skewering local and state politicians and their policies, yet languish in obscurity.
Even cartoonists whose work make the big round-ups complain that their hardest-hitting cartoons are repeatedly passed over in favor of material so bland a reader would be hard-pressed to know whether its creator was liberal or conservative.
"Too much editorial cartooning today is opinion-free gag writing--uninformed, unenlightened, largely unconscious," says Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Newspapers, says Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News, encourage "bland, gag-oriented cartoons rather than hard-hitting ones." Pett and Wilkinson, both Pulitzer winners who served as AAEC president, have been rebuffed when they've drawn editorial attention to cartoonists' complaints. The Times even redesigned its cartoon section to appear next to quotes by such late-night comedians as…Jay Leno.
Times editor Katy Roberts' snide 2007 response to these complaints was typical. "Most readers don't know this," she wrote, "but a whole subculture out there is permanently aflame over the syndicated cartoons chosen by us and other national publications like Newsweek…The complaint is that we like cartoons to be funny and witty."
Not at all. The trouble with the Times' selections is that they are bad. They are not funny. They are not smart. They express no opinions, no thoughts, few insights. If these are the nation's best cartoons, readers conclude, cartoons aren't worth reading.
Oh, and: "Subculture"?
For a long time, cartoonists were happy just to have a shot at appearing in prominent outlets like the Times and Newsweek. In recent years, however, many have concluded that elevating lameness is self-perpetuating and destructive. It justifies decisions to lay off cartoonists, including those who do great work. Imagine if the Oscars were repeatedly awarded not just to films that weren't the best of the year, nor to films that weren't that great, but to total turkeys. Filmmakers would be up in arms, and rightly so.
Newspapers are under financial stress. But they won't survive by selling a diet of bland and boring to consumers who have more information options than ever before. Refusing to embrace what was cool and relevant in the '70s set the stage for the death of music radio in the '80s and '90s--supplanted by news talk and satellite. Whether it's cartoons or music reviews or political analysis, playing it safe is suicide.
(Ted Rall, an editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.)
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
An editorial cartoon is like nothing else in a newspaper. Editorial cartoonists don't need any special degrees. Unlike reporters and editorial writers, they don't even have to pretend to be "fair." Moderation in what Jules Feiffer called "the art of ill will" is the ultimate vice: boring.
A great political cartoon can do things no news article or editorial can. It can expose hypocrisies and ideological contradictions with the stroke of a pen and the flash of an eye. It can connect seemingly unrelated events to point out a theretofore unnoticed trend. At its best, an editorial cartoon can prompt readers to rethink society's basic assumptions.
But American political cartoonists are an endangered species. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists estimates that there are fewer than 90 full-time staff cartoonists left in the U.S., down from approximately 280 in 1980. A dozen have lost their jobs in the last year alone. Syndicated cartoonists have seen their income drop by 50 percent or more. Discouraged and broke, young cartoonists are abandoning the field.
Editorial cartoonists face the same enemy as the newspapers where they appear: the more widely their work is disseminated on the Internet, the less they get paid. Particular to graphic journalism, however, is the seeming determination of editors and publishers to render editorial cartooning irrelevant--by promoting hack work over quality.
We Americans live in a golden age of editorial cartooning. Never have has the profession been as ideologically, stylistically or demographically diverse. Never has the art been as daring or ambitious. Never have cartoons been as popular or, thanks to the Internet, as widely read. Yet American editorial cartooning is in danger of disappearing entirely--murdered by editors and publishers at the major magazines and newspapers.
The state of political cartooning in 2009 mirrors that of radio in the late '70s. Music was awesome, but the good stuff wasn't on the radio. Punk, new wave and postpunk took chances and redefined popular music, but the only way to get it was to buy LPs at a record store.
Similarly, editors of the big daily papers and the newsweekly magazines know what makes a good cartoon: they post them on their walls and in their cubicles. What they run in their publications, on the other hand, is what we cartoonists constantly refer to as the worst of the worst: dull clichés, hackneyed metaphors, idiotic gags about the news reminiscent of Jay Leno's middle of the road comedy style. They're safe. They don't anger readers. But they don't matter.
Peruse the highest profile venues--USA Today, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times' "Week In Review" section--and you'd never guess that there were entire genres of cartooning going unrepresented. Draw in more than one or two panels, and you'd might as well chuck your scribbles down George Orwell's memory hole. And God forbid if you express an actual opinion!
Out of notice of the Pulitzer Prize committee, cartoonists at alternative weekly newspapers--a genre which into its own during the 1980s--became the front line of criticism of the Bush Administration after 9/11, when the mainstream media was still swallowing every White House press release hook, line and WMD. Staff cartoonists at family-owned independent dailies change hearts and minds by viciously skewering local and state politicians and their policies, yet languish in obscurity.
Even cartoonists whose work make the big round-ups complain that their hardest-hitting cartoons are repeatedly passed over in favor of material so bland a reader would be hard-pressed to know whether its creator was liberal or conservative.
"Too much editorial cartooning today is opinion-free gag writing--uninformed, unenlightened, largely unconscious," says Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Newspapers, says Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News, encourage "bland, gag-oriented cartoons rather than hard-hitting ones." Pett and Wilkinson, both Pulitzer winners who served as AAEC president, have been rebuffed when they've drawn editorial attention to cartoonists' complaints. The Times even redesigned its cartoon section to appear next to quotes by such late-night comedians as…Jay Leno.
Times editor Katy Roberts' snide 2007 response to these complaints was typical. "Most readers don't know this," she wrote, "but a whole subculture out there is permanently aflame over the syndicated cartoons chosen by us and other national publications like Newsweek…The complaint is that we like cartoons to be funny and witty."
Not at all. The trouble with the Times' selections is that they are bad. They are not funny. They are not smart. They express no opinions, no thoughts, few insights. If these are the nation's best cartoons, readers conclude, cartoons aren't worth reading.
Oh, and: "Subculture"?
For a long time, cartoonists were happy just to have a shot at appearing in prominent outlets like the Times and Newsweek. In recent years, however, many have concluded that elevating lameness is self-perpetuating and destructive. It justifies decisions to lay off cartoonists, including those who do great work. Imagine if the Oscars were repeatedly awarded not just to films that weren't the best of the year, nor to films that weren't that great, but to total turkeys. Filmmakers would be up in arms, and rightly so.
Newspapers are under financial stress. But they won't survive by selling a diet of bland and boring to consumers who have more information options than ever before. Refusing to embrace what was cool and relevant in the '70s set the stage for the death of music radio in the '80s and '90s--supplanted by news talk and satellite. Whether it's cartoons or music reviews or political analysis, playing it safe is suicide.
(Ted Rall, an editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.)
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Cartoon for March 2, 2009
This came out of a conversation with fellow editorial cartoonist Matt Bors. What if Obama were succeeding Hitler? Would he let him off the hook for his crimes too? The parallels are eerie.
Interesting Picture
courtesy of Susan Stark
It's an online hobby of mine to find ridiculous pictures on the internet, particularly in relation to the sex industry. Just thought I'd share this gem with you.
It's an online hobby of mine to find ridiculous pictures on the internet, particularly in relation to the sex industry. Just thought I'd share this gem with you.
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