Jen Sorensen Quotes

I'm ethically conflicted about eating something smarter than my dog

overzealous worship of the 'magic of the market' becomes a religious belief system

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.

One of the worst Bush administration acts you haven't heard about is their giving the green light to mountaintop removal mining.

[Editing has] been a real learning experience. I think it makes you a better writer. Suddenly viewing things from that editor’s perspective it makes you aware of so much. I guess I like it. I feel like years of doing comic strips and constantly having to simplify them to fit everything into four little panels has given me tools to look at a piece and cut out excessive verbiage and to get things as concise as possible. It has been really interesting suddenly wearing the editor’s hat and realizing how involved an editor’s job is and how many details they have to keep track of. It’s certainly made me more sympathetic to editors. We cartoonists like to complain about them, but it is a tough job.

That so many people get their knickers in a bunch about other people's purported "laziness" while being grossly misinformed themselves has always struck me as a tremendous double-standard. Personally, I prefer the thought of my taxes going to some poverty-stricken place in rural America (where a majority of welfare dollars are spent) than to crooked contractors in Baghdad. But that's just me.

I, for one, think good political cartoons retain their value for decades. You can learn a lot from those old "Doonesbury" books. I might add that we cartoonists who lambasted the Bush administration from the beginning have been proven more accurate than most of the highly-paid gasbags you see on television. Historians and television producers, please take note.

one of my biggest pet peeves is the term "political correctness," a destructive, right-wing phrase that is parroted even by many socially-conscious types. It is a label loaded with bias, frequently applied with a broad brush to anything progressives stand for. In reality, right-wingers are masters of "political correctness": ridiculous euphemisms and denunciations of anyone who does not parrot their insane ideas. I find this political correctness, with its insistence on blind patriotism, to be far more pernicious.

There have been exceptions, but most of the time the effort to reclaim a regressive epithet fails as a political strategy. Among the worst is "tree hugger." Not wanting climatic catastrophe has little to do with the quasi-spiritual groping of conifers, yet that is how those of us concerned about the environment have been stereotyped. I mean, I like trees as much as anyone, but the term "tree hugger" is dripping with connotations of hippie-dippy hysteria. Using it ironically to reclaim it from the anti-science crowd may make us chuckle, but it's still letting them define us on their terms.

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.

Very Serious Thinkers are still churning out hacky columns using this dumb binary of "big" vs. "small" government. I saw an ad for The Economist bemoaning the unfortunate necessity of "big government" during the coronavirus crisis. As though the specifics of context and what that government is doing and who it benefits is secondary to some abstract notion of "size. The more relevant divide is "good government vs. bad," or "smart vs. stupid/sadistic."

Not too long after the Iraq War began, I read an article that quoted a Hummer "patriotic." I guess that's what counts as sacrifice for the war effort these days: driving an overpriced, gas-sucking monstrosity that resembles a military vehicle. I'm sure the troops appreciated this show of solidarity.

People are suckers for plausible narratives that confirm stereotypes, no matter how untrue they may be.

It's appalling how the puritanically correct in this country fixate on homosexuality to the exclusion of grave moral issues like the suffering of innocents in Iraq.

I know it's my job to find humor in the gradual destruction of America as we know it, but I sometimes reach a point where I am so repulsed by the Bushies, and so exasperated by the Democrats, that I can hardly stand to draw cartoons about them. So I drew a cartoon about being sick of politics. Yes, even we cartoonists get discouraged.