I would like to propose a moratorium on the terms "values voters" and "moral issues." These are nothing more than Big, Fat Right-wing Euphemisms, and the media seem perfectly happy to deploy them uncritically. Such language falsely implies that progressives don't have values and don't care about morality, and that morality itself is pretty much limited to the circumstances under which people can bump nasties. As opposed to, say, dooming thousands of people to premature death every month from air pollution.
American cartoonist
Jen Sorensen (born September 28, 1974) is an American cartoonist and illustrator who authors a weekly comic strip that often focuses on current events from a liberal perspective. Her work appears on the websites Daily Kos, Splinter, The Nib, Politico, AlterNet, and Truthout; and has appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Progressive, and The Nation. It also appears in over 20 alternative newsweeklies throughout America. In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Herblock Prize, and in 2017 she was named a Pulitzer Finalist in Editorial Cartooning.
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This strip refers to the "War on Christmas," the rabble-rousing myth Fox News perpetuates every year, condemning those who dare to wish someone "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Interpreting a small effort to be inclusive of, say, Jews celebrating Hanukkah as a declaration of war on Christianity is simply the height of chutzpah.
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I'm also tired of being called a "radical," a word that even many otherwise-astute progressives apply to themselves. Since when is it radical to not want mercury in my tuna salad? Or to have an aversion to killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians unnecessarily? I'm the normal person here. The people running the country are the off-the-meter nutballs.
Trump (and Bannon and other right-wing authoritarian leaders around the world) is often referred to as a "populist" because he displays faux concern for the working class and a resentment of science and education, but his policies are in fact grotesquely elitist. If by "populist" we mean whipping up resentment against immigrants and people of color, then we should say that. Otherwise, "populism" is just a lazy euphemism for racism.
I’ve always been interested in politics, but when I first got out of college I just wanted to have fun and do non-political work. What happened was the Bush vs Gore election and the Supreme Court [decision]. That was the event that really shocked me into starting to do political cartoons. It was just so outrageous at the time. Then 9/11 and the Iraq War. I prefer doing a mix of straightforward political cartoons and more cultural cartoons about trends and facial hair and things like that. Now I feel silly doing a strip about beards. [laughs] Maybe things will calm down and I can go back to doing cartoons about facial hair. As time went on and politics became more and more dire, that’s what really sent me down that path. Also I started picking up more and more clients that are explicitly political, like dailkos and The Progressive Magazine and once in a while The Nation will run a cartoon. That pushed me in a more political direction as well.
A lot of my comics are informed by my background in cultural anthropology. That's what I majored in during college. I thought I was going to go to grad school and become a professor. There's a fair amount of overlap between cultural anthropology and cartooning, in that both are about observing culture and deconstructing all these things that we think are normal and set in stone. I've always found it fascinating to look at how we live and question why we do what we do. In college I started reading underground comics by Robert Crumb and Peter Bagge, and I was exposed to Matt Groening's Life in Hell and Roz Chast and Tom Tomorrow for the first time. I actually wrote my senior thesis about a womens' underground comics collective called the Twisted Sisters. One of my favorite cartoonists from this group was the awesomely funky Leslie Sternbergh, who I had the pleasure of befriending years later. Eventually, I got tired of writing papers and burned out on academia. I started to think that maybe I wasn't going to go to grad school, I was just going to draw cartoons.
The presidential primaries are not for the thinking person. All the nonstop chatter about the candidates' temperaments makes me wonder why I even bother to learn about things like, you know, issues...In this precarious time of war, global warming, a health care crisis, and economic woes, this is how we decide the leader of the most powerful nation on earth?
The GOP spends a lot of time trying to paint progressives as out-of-touch, ivory tower elites. But if anything, that distinction goes to the so-called "neocon intellectuals" like Norman Podhoretz, the inspiration for Dr. Plonk. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial, Podhoretz said he prays "with all his heart" that we will bomb Iran, making the usual facile comparisons to World War II
As I mention in the strip, I'm not saying Iraq isn't important. It's pretty damn egregious if I say so myself. But as John Edwards has said, "It's time for us to be patriotic about something besides war." The news media tend to elevate the importance of military matters above domestic concerns (that is, whenever they aren't talking about coked-up celebrity bimbos). Issues that affect millions of Americans, like the bankruptcy bill, receive comparatively scant coverage.
I’m doing a lot of worrying about humanity destroying itself these days. I think it is an important role of a political cartoonist. I think sometimes it’s probably more acute than others. It’s something that’s hard to deal with sometimes. Right now I find that these aren’t really funny times. There are ludicrous characters and you can make fun of Trump and these ridiculous nominees, but at the same time I don’t want to normalize him. I find myself not even wanting to draw him. I mean, I do and I will, but I don’t want to treat him like any other President. I’ve been struggling with that. How to be humorous at a time when things are just very serious. I guess what I wind up doing is somewhat darker humor, darker cartoons, and more informative cartoons that say, this is what’s happening, can you believe it? With the Bush administration things were terrible and there were definitely some dark times, but I felt like you could make fun of Bush for being a buffoon and the implications just weren’t quite as grave. It’s a different time now.
At first, my strip wasn't very political. But after the 2000 election and then 9/11, the news was so intense that it felt weird to not talk about it. That's when my comic started taking a more political turn. I wish I could do more cultural strips just commenting on everyday life, like facial hair and clothing. But nowadays, with everything so apocalyptic, I feel like I'm being frivolous when I do observational humor, although I still try to slip it in now and then. Politics for me is not so much about individual political figures. It is about these larger cultural phenomena. I feel conflicted about using Trump in cartoons. At first, I didn't even want to draw him. I don't want to normalize him. But then I developed this Trump caricature that people really seem to like... But I think he's more of a symptom of a larger process. I don't want to isolate him as the problem because he's just the tip of the iceberg.
It must be nice to live in a world where the truth is whatever you want it to be. In addition to the former oil lobbyist's edits shown in the first panel, the Bush administration also watered down a 2005 G8 statement on global warming. One of the changes was the deletion of the opening statement, "Our world is warming." Global warming is a perfect example of something often treated as a "liberal" issue, one side of a two-sided argument. But it's not, unless you're pro-drowning the people of Tuvalu.