Ultimate Wingnut Challenge: Special Cartoonist Round
A very intelligent reader (whose name I can't recall right now) suggested that we include a conservative cartoonist team in the Challenge. That sounded like a good idea in theory, but too much trouble in practice, since it would involve me actually seeking out these strips online (since my local paper here in the heart of Red-State America doesn't feature any of them), waiting for them to load (since I have dial-up access, this can take a while), and then possibly reading them. So, I discounted the idea. But then today, I came across this City Journal article, Laughing at the Left; it includes interviews of the Mallard Fillmore guy, the Prickly City guy, and the Day by Day guy, plus discussions of their work (additionally, a history of Conservative Comic Strips Through the Ages, but that's for another time). And I realized that there's enough material in this one piece to allow us to judge these cartoonists on their wingnuttery skills, and maybe add one of them to our roster of contestants.
But before we do that, I should probably advise you that the piece is by Harry Stein, the author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy : (and Found Inner Peace), which is one of those stories about how the author used to be liberal, but was forced to become a conservative when he realized that he no longer cared about other people. So, don't expect this article to be objective or anything. Secondly, you should know that, per the blurb at the top of City Journal's home page, Peggy Noonan thinks CJ is "the best magazine in America."
You've been warned.
Now, here's the challenge I came up with, based on this CJ article. First, each cartoonist must tell an anecdote which demonstrates that the left, which is supposed to be tolerant, really isn't!! Then they must make at least one wingnutty claim. And to complete their challenge, they must provide some examples of their work, the wingnuttier the better. (Actually, we'll let Mr. Stein select what he thinks is some of their best work, and have him describe it -- it's easier that way).
Anyway, now that we have the preliminaries out of the way, let's meet our cartoonist contestants.
1. First up is Bruce Tinsley, creator of Mallard Fillmore, a comic strip about a duck who works as a reporter (or something -- I haven't read this strip in years). Per Stein, in 1998 Tinsley received a fan letter from George H.W. Bush, thanking him for taking on “that horrible Doonesbury” and its creator, Garry Trudeau, “a guy that tore me up in a vicious, personal way strip after strip.” So, Tinsely is already off to a good start for having taken shots at the guy who made ex-President Bush cry.
Now, for the Anecdote About the Intolerance of Liberals:
Now 46, Tinsley claims that his right-of-center political views began to take shape back in the early 1970s at his Kentucky middle school, where almost all the teachers were “around 22 years old and right out of the sixties." [...] He recalls a particularly galling incident. “One time, a girl sheepishly admitted that she wanted to be a homemaker—and she was ridiculed not only by most of the other girls in the class, but by the teacher. These were the people who talked about ‘totalitarians’ and ‘thought police’!”
Yes, those liberals, most of whom are 22-year-old hippie middle school teachers, can be vicious -- no wonder we hate them!
Bonus intolerance examples:
The reaction to Mallard Fillmore has been predictable: conservatives love it—and liberals loathe it. The strip is “usually hateful, nasty, ill-informed, or mean-spirited,” growls one correspondent to the Boston Globe. “Remove this stupid comic from the paper!!” thunders another. Tinsley even gets death threats. “These liberals are so sweet and gentle, they wouldn’t harm a baby seal,” he laughs. “But I guess I’m fair game.”
Of course, there are calls all the time to remove Doonesbury from the paper, and Trudeau undoubtedly gets death threats (and remember what happened to Ted Rall), but one expects that kind of thing from the right, so you can't use it to make political points.
Wingnutty claim:
Mallard’s Tinsley rightly points out that liberal elites, even as they continue to rail against the Establishment, have been the Establishment for 30 years now, culturally if not always politically. Those who are truly rebellious these days, he believes, are usually on the Right .
You know, the last good railing at the Establishment I can recall was on "The Mod Squad" -- I think the Captain asked Pete, Linc, and Julie to narc on the counter-culture flower children, and the teens really let him have it. But if Tinsley says that liberal elites continue to rail, I guess I'll have to take his word for it.
Bonus wingnutty claim:
“You ever notice how often liberals seem to think that, because they hold these lofty social views, it excuses them from having to be civil to bellboys and cabdrivers? I really think that by and large conservatives are just much nicer.”
"Bellboys who were treated rudely by intolerant hippie liberals: today on Oprah."
Now, here's an Example of his Work:
Clearly provoked by Harvard president Larry Summers’s shameless groveling before the school’s forces of political correctness, the strip depicts a Noseworthy horrified to discover that he has “inadvertently made a remark that could possibly be offensive to some racial, ethnic, gender, or other community with the word ‘community’ after its name. . . . And now I could get FIRED.” Noseworthy frets aloud: “Should I grovel, blubber and then apologize. . . . or apologize, grovel and then blubber?”
True to form, the desperate-to-please liberal journalist goes even further. “How,” a disgusted Mallard demands in the next day’s strip, “is apologizing on one foot, in a tutu, wearing underpants on your head, going to help anything?” “It’s going to make me more sensitive to the needs of the Habitually Offended Community in the future,” replies Noseworthy. The last frame shows him in close-up, a pair of Jockeys stretched over his bald pate, as he elaborates: “Primarily by making me want to avoid future apologies on one foot, in a tutu, with underpants on my head.”
That was, as we used to say when I was a kid, so funny I forgot to laugh.
2. Our second contestant is Scott Stantis, creator of Prickly City, which is apparently a comic strip about a girl and a talking coyote. Stein says that Stantis claims to have been inspired by Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, but that "there’s nothing soft about the strip’s politics or in the obvious delight it takes in thumbing its nose at politically correct norms." So, I imagine it's like Peanuts would be if you replaced Snoopy with a coyote modeled on Michael Savage, and threw in Ann Coutler as a Lucy knock-off.
Time for Stantis's Anecdote About the Intolerance of Liberals:
The editorial cartoonist for the Birmingham News, Stantis, like Tinsley, got a stiff dose of liberal hypocrisy growing up—in his case, in Madison, Wisconsin, less than a mile from one of the nation’s most radical campuses. At 13 (he’s 46 today, again like Tinsley), he worked on the Nixon campaign, and “on several occasions,” he recalls, “the peace-loving McGovern types threw bricks through the window.
After all, you can only be so tolerant.”
Several times, huh? I tried Googling "Madison," "Bricks," "windows," and "Nixon campaign," and got nothing that seemed to be about these incidents. In fact, a search for "bricks," "windows," "Nixon campaign headquarters," and "1972" reveals no hits at all, which suggests that there wasn't much brick throwing at any Nixon campaign headquarters in 1972. But I don't doubt Stantis -- I guess the liberal media surpressed the story at the time, and nobody has dared to speak out about it since ... until now. And it sure does prove that the Left is intolerant, all right.
Bonus examples of intolerance:
"I get hundreds of vicious e-mails a week. I mean, the crudity and intolerance of the Left these days is unbelievable; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called a Nazi. But that’s what happens when you don’t have any ideas and the only thing left is anger.”
Yes, the people who dislike Stantis's work are undoubtedly members of the Democratic Party, who, frustrated because they are unable to come up with any ideas on social security reform, resort to calling Stantis a Nazi.
Wingnutty Claim:
Stantis worries about the nation’s moral condition. (Having once studied to be an Episcopalian priest, he says he’s “now looking seriously at Catholicism.”) “It’s not just Howard Stern anymore,” he complains. “It’s smack in the middle of popular culture. When you get a survey that says the majority of 13-year-old girls have either performed oral sex or were looking forward to doing so in the next six months, how can we think this is okay?
A survey showed that? Interesting.
I did some Googling, and couldn't find any such survey. I did, however, find a U of CA study that showed that 19.6 percent of the ninth graders surveyed said they had had oral sex, and 31.5 percent of the kids said they intended to have oral sex within the next six months. But the 31% who planned on having oral sex were not a separate group from the 20% who already had had oral sex -- we're talking about 31.5% of all the kids surveyed.
So, in regard to Stantis's wingnutty claim, well, it's true that one survey showed that almost 20% of American kids (of both sexes, with an average age of 14.5) had had oral sex -- and a total of 31.5 of the teens surveyed said they intended to have oral sex within the next six months. So, not quite what he said.
Stantis is right to worry about the nation's moral condition, but he should also worry about the moral condition of those who cite false survey results to make partisan claims.
Now, here's an Example of HIs Work:
[T]he Seattle Times refused to run a hard-hitting Prickly City series inspired by the Terri Schiavo saga. In it, the strip’s conservative protagonist, a spunky little girl named Carmen, announces that she’s depressed because her favorite team has lost in the NCAA Basketball Tournament; her best pal, a talking coyote named Winslow, decides that he’ll relieve her of her agony by starving her to death.
It's funny because it's just like the Terri Schiavo case -- which was hilarious!
Here are a couple more examples:
- Winslow, the coyote, comes across some exciting legal news from the Massachusetts Supreme Court and, running over to Carmen, exclaims: “Hot dog, we can get married!”
Coyote/little girl sex -- that one must have been for Rick S.
- Carmen, assigned to write a report on a famous woman, winds up in the principal’s office after she chooses to profile Ann Coulter. Told by the principal that she must follow the required curriculum, Carmen shoots back: “So what you’re saying is, you’re all for diversity as long as it’s not too diverse.” “And they say we’re not teaching you kids anything,” exults the principal.
Yeah, it's funny when conservatives don't think they have to follow the required curriculum. And since I saw a survey not long ago indicating that most Americans don't know who Ann is (the lucky bastards), she really isn't all that famous.
I think Stantis has succeeded in his aim of turning "against liberals the tools they’ve been using to batter conservatives for decades—irony, sarcasm, humor, and belittlement.” Now, if only he could be funny.
3. Our third contestant is Chris Muir, creator of Day by Day, an online-only, computer-generated ("Muir simply pastes the heads and facial expressions on pre-drawn figures") strip. So, it's more of a "Caption This" than a comic strip, but it is conservative, so we should let Chris compete in our game.
Anyway, Day by Day is allegedly about "youngish hipsters, including "Damon, a young, self-made black software entrepreneur, with zero patience for the standard liberal truisms about race, economics, foreign policy, or much anything else (the strip reflects Muir’s real-world experience as a Florida-based industrial designer)."
But now for Muir's Anecdote About Intolerant Liberals::
Knowing how few newspaper editors share his conservative politics, Muir flatly declares dailies are “the antithesis of what I want to get involved with.”
Okay, that wasn't much of an anecdote -- but Stein gave Muir short-shrift in his piece, and so I don't have much to work with.
However, I found this MensNewsDaily interview of Chris, and fortunately it gives us some more material. Here goes.
Anecdote Revealing Liberal Intolerance:
There has been, in total, over 2000 comments concerning “Day by Day”, and only one negative comment on Damon. I am frequently asked if I am African-American (not to mention if I am a Christian). There is so much more that unites Americans than divides us.
Not that great of an effort on Chris's part -- he sounds pretty reasonable here.
And from the MND interview we learn that Chris is 45, and so would have also had those hippie teachers who made fun of girls who wanted to be homemakers (when they weren't throwing rocks at Richard Nixon), but his comments about being part part of the tail-end of the Baby Boomers don't reveal the proper level of hippe hating, IMHO.
My generation had it easy compared to the previous one. Perhaps they were spoiled? Perhaps they were radical because no great mission awaited them, the whim of the useless? And yet, they did great things-music, art, literature, protesting a war that was not being fought to be won by the government... Societies have cycles, I don't see any great social damage here--
Come on, Chris. At least bash Clinton!
- though as to the Nation's security, the Clinton administration sold missile technology, ignored Bin Laden four times, and stripped any vestige of ethics and law from public expectation.
Okay, not too bad, but still, not what I'd call an anecdote.
Wingnutty Claim:
BC: What issues do you find yourself most passionate about? Are there certain topics that raise your blood pressure more than others?
CM: The Second Amendment for one as government should only recognize the rights of the people. As for Affirmative Action, it's racism, pure & simple. Media Monopolism is another. It’s time for our revolution from the 'elites'. Feminism is something that used to be valid, but has now twisted into Misandry. I believe that the Democratic Party has become a front for Big Business, Foreign influence, elite families like the Kennedys, Hollywood hoi-polloi, and the rich & connected (Marc Rich, McAuliffe, Soros,etc.etc.), and most of all, against people who say one thing, and do another, and I'm afraid at this moment of time in our history, The Democratic Party is the number one example of this. Russia had its' Revolution-now it's our turn.
So, Chris is asking us to execute our country's Democratic czar and his family, which would, would be, uh, the Deans. And with them gone, we can enjoy the Workers Paradise that Marx promised us.
Now, back to Stein's piece, for a couple of Examples of Chris Muir's Work:
When Newspaper Guild president Linda Foley recently claimed that the U.S. was deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq, for instance, Muir’s scathing strip was the first many readers had even heard of the appalling charge. “I was careful of not saying ‘troops,’ ” the strip quotes Foley’s lame self-defense. “I said, ‘the U.S. military.’ ” Muir follows this with a panel showing a pair of American soldiers on patrol in Iraq. “Great news,” one says. “Linda Foley’s got our back.”
Um, fine. Very amusing.
“Funny,” as one of Damon’s white pals remarks to him in one recent strip, “Dean says you white Christian Republican boys all look the same.” Sardonic as ever, Damon replies: “He’s just worried Rove’ll take the medical stash he’s been smokin’.”
Actually, slightly funny (I like the idea of Rove trying to smoke Dean's "medical stash" of beta blockers) -- but not a point in your favor, Chris. You should have had Damon and his pals plan a workers' revolution against Dean.
And those are are three contestants. Bruce Tinsley/Mallard Fillmore; Scott Stantis/Prickly City, and Chris Muir/Day by Day. Reflect on their andecdotes of liberal intolerance, their wingnutty claims, and the examples of their work (and anything else you know about them), and then vote for ONE to be the Ultimate Wingnut Cartoonist. The winner might get to join one of the other teams, and fight for the title of Ultimate Wingnut, depending on how sick we get of the other contestants.
(We dedicate this post to Family' Circle's Bil Keene, the greatest cartoonist/prophet of his generation.)
6:39:51 AM 
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