A few days ago, I listened as Norman Mailer immolated himself on Sean Hannity's radio program, trying to penetrate--with plain but resolute language--the Adamantium hair helmet of Rush Limbaugh's bottom half. Mailer portrayed in frank, non-partisan language, the truth that America is trying to hide from; that we have been set on a course for more war than we signed up for, and the government is not asking the opinion of the people.

No one wants to hear that the war in Iraq is not over, that people are still there, shooting, dying, killing.

They don't want to hear that countries may still need to be "liberated" based on no more evidence than a Colin Powell Power Point slide show. Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom....anyone for Iranian Freedom?

At the end of the speech, as Hedges leaves the stage, someone jeers "Why don't you go back to France?" That's really less of a joke nowadays, ain't it? People actually hate the French a little more than before, just for not voting with us! They have become the Dixie Chicks of the Western World.

And I think I've been forthright about my opinion of the cow-tipping gee-raj moo-kanicks who make up the Dixie Chicks' fanbase. Southerners ain't usually the brightest bulbs in the scoreboard, see. and their patriotism should be cause for concern if left to boil. Times like this the South gets all LIQUORED UP about fightin'! They get the country all excited too, because if there's one Direction that knows about keepin' nigs in their place, it's the South! So when America's problem is a horde of crazy Mooslim catbox turds, having a cowboy at the helm--and a buncha crazy sons of the soil behind him ready to burn a cross in the enemy's capital--feels like just the tonic the doctor ordered!

And we hardly need to fulfill a single one of our alleged objectives to declare victory nowadays, do we? Finding bin Ladin, or WMD's, or breaking the back of a terrorist network? Who cares! It's all good, so long as you can show even a single photo of a storm trooper handing a funsized Milky Way to a little Jawa child.

Plus we gots us a BORN AGIN cowboy for president, so we can also expect lotsa help from God on this one! Notice how lately it's become "may God continue to bless the United States of America" when Tom W Cruise speaks? Yessir, America is on a crusade for goodness! Moral clarity commands it! The Great Eye has opened above the White House, and that means that somewhere a hobbit's quest is beginning.

We better speak up now while there's still a chance to get a presidential campaign with some balls, instead of the congratulatory blowjob that Election '04 is shaping up to be. What does this prez do besides give speechs, again?

5/16/3
Well, my schedule continues to be as scrambled as a three egg omelet. And though my convention hopping is done for the immediate future, I remain as flummoxed and confounded as a mother hen looking for her three precious baby eggs.

Such is the life of the cartoonist/freelance illustrator. No money, no health insurance, no security of any kind. Just insect-like preoccupation with eighteen projects at once, of which perhaps one may generate enough money to keep the electricity turned on in my hive for another month.

So why choose this penniless existence? A life spent living from peril to peril like one of those silver marbles in the wooden maze game, the kind that you have to tilt and twist to keep the ball from falling into the holes? Why, It's all so I can sleep until noon every day! It's funny when you realize that something like a penchant for late nite television programming developed early in life is what poured the cement for your entire adulthood.

Everyone with an opinion seems to like Shock and Awe, which means that I wring my hands daily because other obligations prevent me from producing more of them as quickly as I'd like. And yes, one of those obligations is my extremely funny comic book which I hope lots of you are spreading the word about!

Well, no more spastic work output! I declare the summer of Deep Fried to be officially ON! And that doesn't just mean the best in bottom-feeding humor for you loyal troglodytes, oh no! Those aimless college kids who protested Iraq and who are now, in the face of overwhelming blitzkrieg-style victory, left drifting without a political clue because their concept of youth radicalism was based primarily on Revenge of the Nerds; those wastrels now have me to look forward to!

Starting in August with the premier of Deep Fried: Birth Defect I will begin my new career as the voice of the Pepsi Twist generation! Same sweet, carbonated dedication to consumerism and frivolity, but with a disgusting lemony aftertaste of social provocation!

And the first thing the Deep Fried agenda will do for the protest movement is to jettison that "no blood for oil" chant. I know it sounds clever, and the Harvard Crimson editor who thought it up in '91 must have fancied himself quite the wit (betcha a dollar he's currently writing Chevy commercials for Ogilvy & Mather), but it's failed us now in two Gulf Wars. Those Deep South butt plugs who make up the conservatives' power base probably chant it like a football cheer while they're gangbangin' Betty Lou down at the Crawdad on Friday nights after the turtle derbies (Go, Snappy!)

No, we'll need something a little more?pre-emptive. You see, the Right already has the war thing in their corner. We just took over an Opec nation, see, and it only cost us about 130 dead and maybe a few injured! (and fuck the crippled soldiers anyway. The dead are martyrs and the living are icons, but the injured are the scratch-and-dents of our culture.)

So No Blood For Oil, or at least very little blood, is actually the Bush strategy. America just scored herself a bargain, son! GREAT SAVINGS! And always getting more than you paid for is the preeminent American virtue, one we are taught to cherish in a thousand 30-second lessons every day. Bashing the party atmosphere after such a clear-cut victory would be like shitting on an apple pie and then wiping your ass on mom's apron. No one's going to thank you for it.

"But what about the open-ended occupation? The suicide reprisals? The fact that they're saying the war is over when it isn't?" Patience, my McNuggets. We are indeed living in the Twilight Zone, but take heart from the fact that the enemy's strategy is a little too blatant to be foolproof.

That doesn't mean we don't have our work cut out for us, though! The problem with patriotism is it numbs your math skills. The following conversation with a hypothetical Bush booster demonstrates the difficulty of trying to get certain people to add two and two.

"Hey, uh...Cooter. Remember the dire warnings of coordinated al-Qaeda attacks that were meant to occur during the war? Did any of them happen, thus distracting the public from our easy, just-a-little-pin prick victory? "

"Well sugar my ham hocks! I guess they didn't!"

"And now, with the confetti and streamers already swept up following what has to be the world's shortest victory dance?"

"Hey! Them Alkaydans are blowin' shit up again!"

"Correct! (toss Cooter a "Liva Snap") So, the country gets back its war woody right after a major victory! What does this timing suggest?"

"Go Falcons!!!"

Now, connecting these dots is a simple matter for you, the Deep Fried adherent, but five minutes listening to talk radio will shortly remind you that a large proportion of our voting public is made up of Cooters, crazy cat ladies, middle management tyrants and people nicknamed "the Chugmeister." Dickheads, to put it succinctly. People who follow the sweaty musk of whatever Alpha Male is waving the flag the hardest. The Left has its own variety, namely the pro-choice movement, but at least they are usually stumping for reducing the size of the nation instead of expanding it.

So what then can halt this juggernaut? Well, if we wait it out, we may catch a break in the form of a bloody, prolonged stalemate that reminds the audience what police actions are really all about. People are fickle, and if you think about it, wasn't Saddam actually right about us not having the belly for a war with real casualties?

Consider the press, God bless 'em, who before the war did nothing but salute every time Rumsfeld walked into a press conference. They wasted no time shouting "quagmire!" almost as soon as our cruise missles had turned the first Iraqi families to jelly. The press are worthless as far as probing inquiry, but they can sure smell blood in the water. At the first sniff of a war with repercussions lasting longer than half a TV season they are liable to get the ball rolling against the Bush Crusade mighty quick, y'all.

Of course, The manly thing to do is to take the fight right to the enemy. The Right wing, far from being made up of rugged iron cowboys, are mostly noodle brains willing to snap at whatever bait is dangled in front of them by the Left. Witness Michael Kinsley's pointless besmirching of William Bennet for a fine recent example of this. Simply point out in a public forum what we all know, that people are only human (Bennet's vice: gambling) and pretty soon you've got trailer park Republicans calling up their favorite yak shows and demanding their erstwhile hero's head on a platter (which he granted!) Score one for the Dixie Chicks!

And what, if not No Blood For Oil, will be the expression of discontent with which to announce to our opponents our majority report on the president? What slogo, what memetic Nike Swoosh, will encapsulate the real objective to which we must turn our attention? What one term?

One Term.

5/4/3
Busy. Soooo busy. But I broke away from my rent-paying obligations to let you know that I still love you. Don't give up on me baby! Other people update their web content more frequently because all they have are tribute pages to Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, or sightings of Lara Flynn-Boyle picking her nose. In other words, they don't have JOBS!

So just be patient, sugar. I know I go to too many convention instead of staying home and coming up with new animated parodies for you, but if you really feel like letting me have it, come to Herkimer, New York this Saturday and hurt me 'till it loves at the Mighty Mini Con.

I'll be back to my old shenanigans after this week, and then you'll be glad you stuck with me instead of jetting off with that guy who does Get Your War On. So just sit back, join the mailing list and write my name inside of hearts in your notebook for a few days, and I'll let you know when I'm back and ready to give you the attention you deserve.

XOXO,

-Jason

P.S.-Make sure to tape that last episode of Buffy for me.

4/19/3
Gawrsh. I switched to this blog-o-rific format from my old all-Flash style home page so that I could make updates more often. Instead, I seem to be putting the same huge gaps between opinions that I always did!

Ah well. Better these infrequent, pulsing spurts of wisdom than a long, golden flow of nothing worth reading.

Frankly, I am tired of war yak, which is good, since Operation Jiffy Lube wrapped quicker than a mid-season replacement on NBC.

It's funny when you think about it. Over a year of anticipation, replete with begging, pleading, buying pretty things for Qatar and Turkey, all just so we could get into the Middle East's panties. And then a few quick thrusts and it's finished! There's probably some sort of metaphor I could use here, but it eludes me.

Anyway, my cartoons speak for I better than me do, and my more cunning observations about this entire circus can now be found in Shock and Awe. Ain't watched it yet? WHY NOT? There's a link at the top of the page, you spud!

I'd planned on doing Shock and Awe twice a week when I started. When the hell am I going to realize how long these things actually take to execute? Thank God the cartoons are generating SO many extra purchases for my comic book, or I'd be afraid I was just stroking off.

One comment on something I heard on the radio today: Bill O'Reilly, one of those big-mouthed celebrities who think they aren't celebrities because they appear on radio and television but not in movies, made some matter-of-fact comment about the morality of crushing the uppity Iraqis who already want America and our hand-picked Saddam out so they can, almost certainly, put one of their own back in. O'Reilly's comments included something about Iraqi ingratitude, and the sacrifice America made in the form of her 126 casualties.

Now, 126 dead soldiers is certainly nothing to be happy about, but all the same, that's really more like a Sunday matinee audience for The Wild Thornberries movie than the kind of thing that puts one in mind of black granite walls. So far, my generation has never known a war where the spilled gore couldn't be replaced in one afternoon with a single charity blood drive at the Knights of Columbus on Delaware.

Should we be happy that our military is so efficient and capable that our losses make this war less memorable than the last Super Bowl? Damn straight! Better to win easy than lose slowly my Grampa always used to say (well, he didn't really, but that's the kind of back porch logic I'm sure he was capable of)

Nevertheless, before we let the talk show hosts paint a picture of platoons of Marines wading ankle deep through trenches filled with their best friend's intestines, let's not lose sight of the salient point of Nintendo combat. However minimal the loss of life was in this, the first stage of our likely decade long engagement in Iraq, we still killed roughly 13 civilians for every one soldier we lost. Add in the dead Iraqi soldiers and we're coming close to a 50-1 ratio.

We can thank God for the luck, but it also helps that the enemy never had a prayer.



By the way, a picture of yours truly, Joe Cool, at the SPACE convention.


.....................



3/28/3
To paraphrase the Who, "we just got fooled again."

We actually fell for it! We let a millionaire mouth-breather convince us that a fifth-rate nation with an army and an economy less than toilet paper is the greatest threat to world security since the Munich Putsch.

We let a president who probably mouths the words "the rabbit runs around the tree and into his hole..." while tying his shoeslaces sell us a military doctrine that was last seen in Poland in 1939.

We were told that we had no choice. Saddam would never disarm. "Oh, we'll go through the motions, but they'll never work." we sez. Saddam can avoid war and certain defeat, but we just know that he won't see the writing on the wall. No way.

Funny how foregone conclusions have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, huh?

We didn't think twice when they told us that a fiercely nationalistic and tribally factionous country would simply get up on it's haunches and drool over their "liberation" like a dog angling for a Beggin' Strip.

And now, less than two week's in? Seems the war's gunna take h'ever long it's gonna TAKE, a-hyuk!

Where are the Weapons of Certain Destruction? Where are the mobile chemical labs? Where are the balsa wood doomsday drones? I'm not even gonna bother asking where are the rose petals that were supposed to be strewn at our soldiers' feet.

You'd think a country of consumers would have thought to ask for a written estimate on this job. I'm willing to bet that next the Prez will tell us that the coupon we clipped from the yellow pages is only good in months that end in R.

Hey, maybe this will turn out for the best. After all, with a century of Mid East polliticking and nation building behind us, we have so many success stories to point to! There's Israel...sorta. And there's Egypt...a little?

Actually...No! Wait! What was that really good one, where we showed the common man how to throw off the shackles of foreign-imposed tyranny and blaze a new trail of self-determination through popular revolution, just like we did in 1776?

Ah yes! IRAN! And if the good people of Iraq can just learn that lesson too, I think we'll be all smiles when the dust finally settles. Onward, Christian soldiers!

3/7/3
"I broke my own rule. I started to give a fuck." says Bruce Willis, hero of what must be the biggest cinematic crapfest of this or any season, Tears of The Sun.

I assure you that watching this film will not leave any movie patron similarly burdened.

How bad is it? Let me put it thusly: If two turds married and bore young, this movie is what you'd find in the baby turd's diaper after feeding it a jar of Beech-Nut chili.

In any other era, Tears would merely be the latest regrettable entry into the action/running firefight genre of film. It's a Bruckheimer-brained ovation to squibs and shell casings masquerading as a Good Samaritan parable, and calling it a war movie is an insult to that time-honored sport of kings.

Unfortunately, we are now living in the United States of Post-9/11, and the subliminal jingo of Tears of the Sun cannot be ignored, especially since it is not subliminal at all.

In a nutshell: Bruce Willis (played by Bruce Willis) leads Sgt. Rock's Easy Co. on a rescue mission to Nigeria, whose democratic government has just been toppled by frenzied guerillas. He saves a sexy set of tits from a Catholic mission as the rebels close in, then spurns authority (Tom Skerrit, as usual) by choosing to lead a ragged mob of refugees to safety in Cameroon.

Blink during the exposition and you'll miss the one reference to the bad guys' Islamic identity That's the filmmaker's nod to Political Correctness. However, lest we forget that it was the Pentagon who loaned the studio all those cool helicopters, the movie does double duty hammering it into the audience that the good guys are 100% wine-and-wafer Christians.

No action flop convention is spared as Bruce phones in a performance that even Ahnuld would have called one-dimensional. The bad guys are portrayed as slightly less human than Orks as they lop off missionaries' heads, sneer at crucifixes, murder children and slice off women's breasts. When a howling villager cries "what kind of people can do this?" there can be no doubt: Not OUR kind. Our kind leads the desperate masses out of the desert of war, only interrupting their fighting to recite the Lord's prayer over the dying victims of...who's that enemy again?

And what bulletfest would be complete without lines like "I can't look at them like packages anymore," "It's not supposed to be like this!" and "I WILL COMPLETE MY MISSION!" (shouted over a radio to Tom Skerrit, who spends the entire movie on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier with a finger in one ear), all delivered with a faux-Platoon music score looping in the background. The last time I saw tripe like this it was the Butcher Block special at Tops Friendly Markets.

It's Three Kings without a trace of cleverness, irony or wit. The movie's over-the-top gruesomness, far from shedding any light on the true face of human brutality, only serves to underscore the robotic performances of the cast and the naked pandering of the flag-waving screenplay.

At the end, an African women with the whitest teeth ever seen in a Third World mouth declares that God loves Bruce Willis and the refugees love the heroic Tits. Unable to resist laying it on one inch thicker, the movie fades to black as Edmund Burke's famous quote, "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," fills the screen.

People

actually

clapped.

Unable to reconcile the popularity of such cinemafare with an educated, ultramodern society such as our own, my friend and I came up with a perfect convention-busting ending that would have put this wad of bolus in league with the greats: Giant ants.

Picture it: You're Joe Cinemagoer. You've just stroked out thanks to this blood clot of a movie, and are simply counting time until the cool part, where the inevitable ball of flame swallows the villain, so you can go drain those 74 oz of Mister Pibb that are sloshing around in your bladder. Any moment now the leads will share their lip lock, after which you will leave the theater, conceding to yourself that you really should have rented Sleepy Hollow on DVD after all, when suddenly....GIANT ANTS!

Giant ants stampeding over the horizon! Ants devouring the leader of the Pikachu tribe that Bruce Willis just lost his best friend protecting! Ants!

Tight shot on the stubbly granite of Bruce's face, as incredulous as the faces of the theater audience! Ants?!

Pan down--a rivulet of urine runs from Bruce's pants leg as everything this steel hard Centurion thought he knew about the world is blown to the wind like ash from a cigarette!

Ants!

FUCKIN' ANTS!!!!

I'd remember that at Oscar time.


2/24/3
So there I am last Wednesday, sitting in a friend's living room, watching a person who has had their gender surgically altered play a childrens game where the goal is to murder prostitutes and kick ambulance drivers to death.

I was patiently salavating for my own turn with the joypad, and soon enough I too was running down artificial lifeforms in a stolen Faggio while tuning in "Baby What A Big Surprise" on the game's virtual radio station.

One by one the other guests arrived, and before long we were eating tacos in rapt silence as we partook of a television drama about lesbians who sleep with vampires and tear people's skins off.

Have you noticed that sci-fi movies don't seem to have the sense of wonder and horror that they used to? It's because we're living in one.

2/22/3
People interested in the FRIKKIN' CONSTITUTION may want to download this PDF file of a memorandum circulated in secret among high administration officials about a bit of potential legislation that Bush is considering. You may have heard it referred to as PATRIOT 2, i.e., a sequel to the USA PATRIOT Act, which thwarts terrorism by letting the FBI check what you are borrowing from the library without getting a warrant.

PATRIOT 2, as you will see, proposes all sorts of wonderful new ideas to keep us even safer than we are today under Christ's watchful gaze. Among the innovative new techniques in modern justice are expatriation of American citizens suspected of terrorism (which is redefined to include just about everything), limitations on the Freedom of Information Act, and--lucky lucky!--reduced duty for chemical com-
panies and other polluters to make clear the consequences of industrial accidents upon local populations! Can't let them terrorists know what could happen if WR Grace suddenly started leaking benzine into the water table, can we?

And of course, the idea that the first PATRIOT act's five-year sunset clause should be struck is also floated.

I'd also encourage you to visit MoveOn.org and participate in the upcoming Virtual March on Washington, for those of you who have not attended one of the under-
reported real ones.

Remember kids, the extra-Constitutional activities of this administration are largely based on the "war window" that 9/11 opened. While it lasts, you can expect Cheney and Co. to try to cram all sorts of crap down our throats that closet fascists wait a lifetime to get away with, things that would never have flown with the public before this unprecedented excuse for national paranoia dropped in their laps. Everybody owes it to themselves to dig the sleep out of their eyes and pay attention to what is being done in the name of our "safety."

This is a dangerous time for our liberties. Only a crisis like the one we are in now permits such extravagant re-engineering of the law to pass with so little argument, and we will all reap the whirlwind for the excesses we permit today out of blind fear and apathy. You liberals out there who have always talked a fair game but never thought to get involved? This is where the rubber hits the road, chums.

2/16/3
So you hear? Turns out that our recent Orange Alert was actually based on false information.

I think I see Tom Ridge's strategy here. I mean, everytime he issues one of these orange herrings it must confuse the hell out of Al-Qaeda.

Terrorist 1: "What the...? Did you plan an attack?"
Terrorist 2: "Not me! I'm just in charge of coffee this week!"
Terrorist 1: "Well somebody must have something planned! Those Americans don't jump at their own shadows, you know!
Terrorist 2: "I bet it's those screw-ups in Delta Cell! If they spent as much time praying to Mecca as they do organizing wet T-shirt contests..."
Terrorist 1: "Well we better prepare an audiotaped respose just in case. Get Kamil. He does a pretty good Osama."

Meanwhile, millions of people worldwide have apparently contracted anti-war fever, which the Bush administration believes was concocted in a mobile weapons lab in northern Iraq. Preparations are underway to innoculate the entire population against further outbreaks with a big fucking war.

Incidentally, if you have ever found yourself swayed by the patriotic drum-beating of the war pigs, conservative columnist James Lileks (my self -appointed arch nemesis) has inadvertantly provided all the refutation of the hawks' position on Iraq that a free-thinking humanoid will ever need, with a little help from yours truly. To see Right once again proven to be Wrong, read this.

2/12/3

Bummer about that shuttle, huh? Yeah yeah, I know it's already yesterday's news. I couldn't update this page until now, having just pulled up stakes and moved from Buffalo, the Afghanistan on the Lake, to new digs in Rochester, New York. Now I am settled in and ready to spew anew!

Listening to the coverage of the tragedy as it unfolded, the thing I remember most was not the human loss, or that asshole Stern fan who "baba booeyd" Dan Rather on live TV before the astronauts bodies had even hit the dirt. It was the fact that while listening to NPR's coverage of the disaster on the radio, the announcer, apropos of nothing, pointed out that payload commander Michael Anderson was "an African-American."

We sure have come a long way, haven't we? The well-intentioned language experiment that was Political Correctness has left a mark on the way we communicate that is so insidious that few conscience-laden libs even realize that we've arrived safely back at square one, and still as melanin conscious as ever. Only now, instead of using someone's color as a pejorative, we point it out reflexively to draw attention to how commendable they are!

You can be certain that the same announcer did not highlight the fact that payload specialist Ilan Ramon was a Jew, but if a guy is black and successful, hell, shout it from the hills! Even the bleeding hearts can't believe a darky made it into outer space!

And what about the rest of the crew? Did pilot Willy McCool have a half-Cherokee grandmother we weren't told about? The left wing eugenicists certainly had a right to celebrate the journey of historically oppressed RNA into space if it's true!

(The ethnic makeup of the Columbia crew puts me in mind of a classic Archie Bunker moment from "All in the Family". Paraphrasing: You got an Indian, a woman, a Jew, A black guy and three regular Americans. That's what I call a balanced tragedy!)

It's wonderful to be white, it really is. Never mind that attaching the glittering color white to your social class imbues you with a Christ-like sense of priority. It also means that whether you are on the right or the left, the soothing balm of self-forgiveness is never more than a slogan away. We don't call them coloreds anymore! They're African-Americans! Look at that African-American dying alongside those real Americans! What a credit to his race!

UPDATE: Seems I spoke too soon! The NPR announcer may not have noticed that the one astronaut was Jewish, but the editorial cartoonist community picked up that ball and ran with it!

If you visit this gallery of published Columbia cartoons, you will notice that besides the predictable gimmick of showing seven bright stars in the sky, another prominent theme emerges: that of making one of the stars a Star of David.

Now, this does not bother me from a political standpoint, since they might have done it because the guy was Israeli, not Jewish. But artistically it's the height of laziness.

I know the temptation to use the Magen David must have been great for these cartoonists. I mean, there you are at your desk, the deadline for the morning edition closing in. You want to be both sentimental and momentous-- every newspaper cartoonist in the country is gonna be aiming for the Pulitzer on this
one--and suddenly it occurs to you: "That Jewish star thing can be my hook! This will be even better than my 9/11 cartoon where I drew the Statue of Liberty driving an Abrams tank!"

As the numerous duplicate cartoons demonstrate, this is the kind of idea EVERYONE comes up with at the beginning of a brainstorming session, which is why smart editorial illustrators always jettison their first few brilliant concepts before commiting one to paper.

And really, singling the lone astronaut out for pointless distinction...why?

1/28/3

Just watched the State of the Union Awards. As usual, the President hogged the whole show. I kept wondering when they were going to cue the music and get Nick Nolte or Cameron Diaz to shoo him off the stage.

And is it just me, or has Congress pretty much forgotten that not everything that falls from a president's mouth is worth a standing ovation? Applause, sure. Why not? When a guy like Dubya makes it all the way to the White House it's only natural to cheer him as often and as vigorously as one might cheer, say, a Downs Syndrome pentathlete at the Special Olympics.

But let's not overdo it, folks! It seems like the crowd gave that guy a standing O for every sentence he didn't trip over. With that much over-enthusiasm even a Mongolid Olympian would have realized he was being patronized.

Speaking of which, here are two noteworthy flubs from Dubya's speech:

First, in his opener, the Prez addressed "distinguished citizens and fellow citizens." After that I would not have cared if next he had flawlessly recited the chemical formula of the cure for cancer. When you fuck up the first paragraph of your State of the Union speech, THAT DOES NOT INSPIRE CONFIDENCE.

Secondly, towards the end of the speech when Bush announced the February fifth date with destiny he has scheduled to take place at the UN, he stumbled over the words "Iraq's illegal weapons program," the evidence of which he was promising would be laid out by Colin Powell.

Was the president choking on his own bullshit? Is Dubya's conscience trying to sabotage his own efforts to concoct a phoney justification for this unnecessary war?

If so, he had made peace with his scruples by the very end of his address when, among the laundry list of boons he promised would await the Iraqi survivors once the bombs stop falling, he included the words "...and freedom," and said it with such sincerity that you could almost have hugged your TV.

Could it be that George is bothered by the hawkish horde that has hijacked his presidency? Has Paul Wolfowitz promised that "freedom" will be worth all the bloodshed it will take in order to accomplish Job 1: putting those unexploited oil fields "in trust?" for the Iraqis?

One suspects that with all the God rhetoric the president threw into his speech, Theoden Bush might be hoping for Gandalf the White to burst in on his next strategy session and clear out the Wormtongues. Watch out! Don't let Richard Perle take his staff!

By the way, did anyone notice which terrorist madman didn't earn a single mention in the whole speech? This dovetail's nicely with the sentiments I express in this week's cartoon.

1/25/3

You hear about that four-winged dinosaur they discovered in China? How do you think that sucker would taste with a little moo shoo sauce, huh?

Four wings! Had anyone even thought of that? I watched the animated classic Fantastic Planet last week and even that movie didn't boast four-winged fauna, and they had giant flying anteaters and snails that could knit togas!

Speaking of things that do not belong in nature, feast your peeper on this abomination! I shot this subject at SPX 2000 in Bethesda, and only recently felt that the spying eyes of CIA anthropologists were no longer upon me and had the film developed. Rarer than Bigfoot, more evasive than Champ, it's...THE HUMAN BEEPO!


.......................


I have put that soft corona of light around its head not to deify it, though the coming of Beepo is the third revelation of Fatima, but to distinguish its hair from the dark background. I shit you not, this is its actual plumage.

I wish I could say that Homo Beepus had done up its hair to flatter my comic book, but alas, it hadn't even heard of Deep Fried. Apparently this ostentatious crest is common to its species, and is used to discourage interested females.

...

In other news, It seems that W's poll numbers are sinking faster than a Spanish oil tanker! Could it have something to do with him being an organ grinder's monkey for the millionaires he keeps heaping tax cuts on?

Keep up the pressure! Call your senators and congressmen today! Tell them this guy belongs back at whatever dinner theater the RNC found him in and help save some lives!

1/15/3

You know, when life imitates art, it frequently sucks. And when it imitates a cartoon about the friggin' Trix rabbit, well, go ask your preacher to explain it. I certainly can't.

Tim Butler, my step brother, was struck by a car and killed while jogging on January 14th, 2003. He was 15.

Tim, you are missed.


.......................................


1/12/3

Here I am watching SNL (Saturday Night Live, though I'm sure you are all as hip as I) and it occurs to me that this show is now almost entirely based on the "Waynes World" premise. It's nothing but sketches about people who shouldn't have television shows who have television shows.

There's Tracy Morgan's retarded talk show host "Brian Fellows", there's the dorm room stoners with the webcast, the elementary school AV kids, the teen couple who tape themselves during school field trips and so forth. And that's not even counting Weekend Update (comedians as anchor people, which falls into the same category), and the exaggerated parodies of people like Chris Matthews and that "Inside the Actor's Studio" guy (I've never seen the show, but an identical parody on the Simpsons confirmed it's existence.)

Every episode they float a couple new "Cuckoo TV Host" concepts," like the one I just left the room in the middle of. It was about a queer loser whose mom sells tapes of his television show from out of her car. They really aren't turning down any premises these days, are they?

So now the program is almost entirely like channel surfing on Bizarro World. It will probably reach 100% show-within-a-show saturation in about a month. The process is hastened by the fact that Will Farrell recently quit SNL, taking with him not only the lion's share of that show's talent, but also the crux of the other dominant SNL theme, that of "very odd married couples." There have been three recurring examples of this in recent seasons: Chris Kataan and Molly Shannon as the really kinky young couple, then Will Farrell and that one dumpy-looking broad as the hot tubbing kinky older couple, and Farrell again with that pinchy-faced chick as the funky music teachers.

Oh Killer Bees, where is thy sting?

Another thought McNugget with tangy sauce for dipping I had today was this: Torture is kind of the liqueur of moral outrage we are all drinking to assure ourselves that when Sadaam falls, at least we know something bad has ended. No need to boo-hoo about all those Iraqi cities that suddenly look like New York on 9/11, only ten times worse (that is, if we are shown that footage at all.)

Much is made in the media about the fact that Saddam goes medieval on the ass of everyone that looks at him cross-eyed, and then goes to work on their families. Heck, who wouldn't want to see that put to an end?

Well, the Iraqi people of course! They who we have convinced ourselves deserve the "collateral damage" we suspect might be inflicted on them. Just deserts for having al dente spines and not ousting the boogeyman from his throne when they had the chance.

It seems to me that we often overlook that

A) torture is pretty much par for the course in that part of the world. Even our buddies aren't entirely shy about it, and
B) Torture has a few definitions besides the dentist scene in Marathon Man.

For instance, one could argue that seeing your neighborhood (plus neighbors) indiscriminately annihilated is a kind of torture, especially when you're young.

(But wait! We love the little brown ones! That's why we're horrified when Saddam makes human shields of them by placing anti-aircraft guns near their schools, instead of all in one spot at the center of town, like in America!)

Another kind of torture might be having an arm or a leg blown off, a face mangled, a spinal cord severed by a 'stray bullet', and then having to live the rest of your life as a beggar in some shithole desert shanty town because your country has no social safety net. I think a few people might prefer a shock to the balls over that.

Okay, okay. I'm not trying to kid myself. Saddam sounds like an A-1 douchebag and I'll applaud when the guy's bodyguard sees the writing on the wall and decides that the wall is where Saddam's brains oughta be. But let us not be naïve. We aren't going in there to feed the naked and clothe the hungry. Those efforts are the kind of thing we boo and hiss, like Somalia.

Saddam may be a vicious, thumb crushing rape fiend, the stuff that always invokes only our fiercest nightmares of Hitler and Stalin (because in war, nothing less will do), but we didn't care that he was such a precocious imp when he was our friend. Do we really need to pretend that this is what has made him our enemy?

1/4/3

Today as I was walking the soggy avenues of the city going about my errands, I found myself slipping into Terminator mode. The monotony of my obligations had combined with my general malaise and caused my mind to recede towards the back of my skull. My footfalls became slow and deliberate in the Buffalo slush, and my gaze placed glowing red dots on the backs and foreheads of all in my path. If you could read my mind, it would have said 1000110110110110 as it cycled through the onboard weapons directory searching for the appropriate firearm to efficiently end your threat to SkyNet.

I rarely descend into this Schwarzeneggerian state of mind. The attitude is, to say the least, an affectation. If you tuned a radio to my personal Do Not Fuck With station , you could easily mistake it for WYRK, easy listening country FM. I always try to snap to this fact quickly, preferring to burst my own bad ass bubble before I cross paths with a genuine misanthrope who will do it for me. Thus I resumed the role I was born to, that of Sympathetic Crime Novel Pedestrian. I'm sure you've read his story often enough:

Dwayne jingled the coins in the pocket of his jacket. He saw a payphone in front of him, felt a hitch in his throat, walked past it. The next phone, he said to himself. The next one. I will do it.

He thought about the slender brunette he'd stared at across the bar at La Luna the night before. He hadn't even asked for her phone number. She had just given it to him, writing it on a paper napkin and slipping it into his hand without a word. Then she was out the door. Five seconds more and he would have bought her a drink. He knew he would have.

The napkin was still in his pocket, folded into a small square. Dwayne pressed the corner of the square into his thumb and picked out another payphone ahead of him. It was in front of a flower shop where a man in an apron was sweeping the sidewalk. There were white roses in the shop's display window. Dwayne imagined his hand extending those roses to the girl as she opened her apartment door to him. He jingled his coins.

The remainder of Dwayne's intentions exited the front of his skull through a hole the size of a Croissanwich. Behind him in a black Coupe deVille, Diego Esperanto cursed under his breath and chambered another round into his SR-25. He'd been aiming for the flower shop owner.

Yes, Dwayne sounds familiar doesn't he? Oh, but wouldn't it be fun to be Diego for a day?

But we can't! Sometimes we don't even add up to Dwayne, the poor schmuck.

Last night I was reading a crime thriller when a peripheral character, alarmingly similar to myself, made a walk-on appearance in the story. The hero made it clear that my character was the kind of person he'd clean off his shoe with a stick, if he couldn't find any gasoline to burn his shoe with, that is. And I'm still supposed to root for this guy for another 150 pages? It definitely harshed my buzz.

Well, someone has to pay for the smarting my ego took, and that person's name is James Lileks. WARNING: Long, personal vendetta follows.

James is a Minnesota based columnist and author. I've had a link to this guy's site on my links page for years. His well-trafficked Institute of Official Cheer is still one of the funniest Internet attractions I've yet come across, and it has spawned an equally hilarious book, The Gallery of Regrettable Food. I even take style pointers from his writing, although my comedy lodestar is, and shall remain, Bazooka Joe comics.

So why am I picking on this guy when it sounds like I would be happier massaging coconut oil onto his shoulders, you ask?

Well, like the great Shadow War of Babylon-5, the darkness that has descended on our world of late has brought out the best or worst in all of us (except for me. I am always at my worst.) And the fact is, despite a truly commendable wit, I've noticed a dark side to James Lileks, and that is that he never misses an opportunity to suck a little establishment dick. I can no longer allow this to go unanswered.

I first noticed James' proclivity towards fellatio immediately after 9/11, when his daily web journal updates began to take on a decidedly nationalist tone. Now, I would not have been surprised if Phil Donahue had enlisted as a Navy SEAL that week, but I would have been a bit perplexed had he stuck with it. With Lileks there was no letup. In update after update he regularly flashed his Proud American badge while preening his bald eagle feathers. It was a sharp departure from his previously good-natured essays about Simpson figurines and his little pink marshmallow of a daughter.

I couldn't understand this paradigm shift. Was this the same man whose ironic disemboweling of 50s Americana and made me laugh like a chimp on nitrous oxide? Did he not see himself becoming what he beheld? Could such an abrupt transformation really be brought about by only four suicide hijackings? And if so, what was my threshold? No more than seven, I calculated.

A little digging revealed the awful truth, however. James Lileks is, and always has been, a bourgeois conservative. An archive of hawkish articles he wrote for the Jewish World Review brought this point home like a nun's ruler across my knuckles, but if I had been informed that there was no Santa Claus while simultaneously realizing that my favorite sticky Playboy centerfold was actually a picture of my sister, I could not have been more stunned.

Alright, fine. It was a dark betrayal, but I've ridden those out before. What really chapped my ass was the fact that James was no longer keeping his Limbaugh-esque lifestyle in the closet. The New American Order is a non-stop Mardi Gras for the disenfranchised right, and if James Lileks was cheering the culture of banality from the sidewalk before, he's on a balcomy flashing his tits and collecting beads now.

Take for example this post-9/11 offering from the Bleat, Lileks' daily blog. While discussing a day spent with his daughter, and completely apropos of nothing, he takes a swipe at a favorite recruitment tool of the Liberal Menace (the following has been parsed for your protection):

Later we colored in her book of poorly-drawn bears, which I got at Target for .99. {sic} I'm pleased to announce that she colors within the lines. Perhaps this cliche has gone out of style, but for many years the idea of coloring within the lines was adopted by smug post-adolescents as a byword for conformity; coloring outside the lines was a sign of creativity, proof that one wasn't going to abide by the old-school strictures of your repressive coloring book establishment, man. "Coloring within the lines" was shorthand for internalizing all those rules that kept us repressed. Well. You have to learn to color inside the lines before coloring outside the lines constitutes an accomplishment. The line is there for a reason.

Ouch! Take that, Abbie Hoffman! This stinging assault on the counterculture is somewhat mitigated by Lileks' charmingly confused notion that the virtue of coloring outside the lines was ever used in the context of actual coloring books. But there's more:

In part I liked the Who because you were supposed to, and this seems very odd in retrospect. But the Who were Important, because they'd been draped with this Pop Art / Voice of a Generation mantle, and because Townsend's glum, pretentious self-importance gave rock critics something to write about.... "Hope I die before I get old" is a great line, but also a remarkably stupid sentiment.

Now really, an admonishment to color within the lines AND a dig at The Who, all in one essay? How square can this daddy-o be? Did he come home one day and find his daughter doing bong hits with the Weathermen or something?

If James Lileks is still fighting the last revolution, however, he continues to find comfort in the things that have always made America great, such as getting a hand job from a giant corporation. In this more recent piece, the simple act of ordering a pizza transforms dinner into an Orwellian farce:

I'd called the Pizza Hut that delivers to my house on the way back from work. I was on hold for four minutes. The clerk came back on the line, said "Uhhhh," and hung up. If the window had been open I'd have tossed the phone into traffic. This outlet is doing its damnedest to keep from selling me pizza - two weeks before I'd been on hold for ten minutes, spent nearly as much time placing the order, only to find out that the delivery time was an hour and 40 minutes. The previous week they hadn't answered the phone at all.

Here we see the opening act of a classic man-against-the-system operetta. It continues to unfold in standard fashion:

The clerk hauled out two pizzas,....He opened the box. On the Deep Dish pizza: a smear of sauce. A mere daub. A mouse with tuberculosis spits up more red stuff than this.

Heh. This imagery nearly absolved him in my eyes. But not quite.

"That's not enough," I said. "I had this last week. It had three times as much sauce."

"Next time perhaps you order extra sauce," he said, and he walked away.

Good, good. At this point Lileks is surely recalling the unwritten Amendment, "The customer is always right." He knows the Founding Fathers, whom he has read about in the prohibited texts he is paid to burn, would not have let this stand, and neither will he! But the System ain't done with him yet!

...it wasn't until slice three that I realized something else was missing from my pizza.

Ingredients.

They'd forgotten to add pepperoni and sausage.

That's right. Feel that blood boil! And still the blows keep commin' for poor James!

First I called the store, to see if they'd send by a replacement. They would not, but they offered me a $15 credit for more bad future pizza.

Jimmy must have the patience of an Iraqi weapons inspector! By now, anyone would realize that this was no mere goof up. This is plainly a frontal assault on the guy's manhood! We all know how it happens: a butterfly flaps its wings in the Pizza Hut world headquarters and suddenly an innocent man is taking it up the dirt chute with a Cinna Stick!

So does James reclaim his castanets? Does he drive back to Pizza Hut and stuff the manager's head into a pot of Spicy Buffalo Chicken Kickers while driving a steel toed boot into his groin? What is the happy ending James Lileks takes 1300 words to reach? What is the glowing resolution which actually causes the man to gush "they are everything that is right with America, and I am everything that is wrong with America?"

He calls the customer service line and gets a $10.00 coupon for more shitty pizza.

Ah well. They broke Winston Smith, too.

Now, James Lileks is not a bad man. The fact that he himself realizes that he is what's wrong with America can be seen as an subtle cry for help. Suburbia knows something is up. Subconsciously, they realize that when their pension funds are looted by billionaires and their sons lined up for slaughter in some desert, things are getting out of hand. But what can they do? They're strung out on bad pizza and TiVo. Sure, their president sounds a little...coached, but hey, you gotta dance with the one that brung ya, right? All they wanted was a tax cut. Was that so wrong?

What James Lileks represents is the face of the satisfied. The national debate is not what it should be, and cozy shlubs sitting in their Shangri-Las have to accept their share of the blame. Right now the country could use a few more people who aren't so comfortable coloring within the lines.

Talkin' 'bout this g-g-generation.

-Jason

12/30/02

Brain still digesting the Invisibles graphic novel I just finished reading, the one that collects the series' final 12 issues ("The Invisibles": psychedelic, existentialist 90s era comic book penned by Grant Morrison.)

I collected this comic briefly a few years ago and just couldn't figure out what the hell Grant was trying to say. Very dense, definitely the deep end of the sensory deprivation tank. Comparisons to The Matrix are easily drawn, but The Invisibles has far more in common with David Cronenberg's trippy thriller Videodrome, and the one-season television wonder Nowhere Man than any mere action movie. In other words, CAUTION: APPROACH WITH ZEN.

Still, since I originally put the title down I have uncorked the green jinni a few times. Now there's a universal translator for ya! Last month I took another crack at The Invisibles, and wouldn't you know that what I lacked the whole time, that thing which unlocked the coded messages inside this otherwise daunting and unapproachable comic, was good ol' paranoid delusion!

Suddenly it's like I'm wearing Rowdy Roddy Piper's sunglasses in They Live! Well OF COURSE the Universe is a hologram built from the secret language of the Placenta God! How did I miss that before?

Having gazed into the abyss beneath the couch cushions I gobbled up every issue of The Invisibles that I missed the first time around, now all collected in handy paperback editions. I actually became quite concerned when the story began to show eerie similarities to a story of my own that I have been crafting for years. The question literally became: do I want my greatest and worst suspicions about reality confirmed? And if that happened, would the transfiguring experience of having my own mind read back to me be a complete stranger, thus confirming the sublime truth of the Buddha Dharma, be muddied by the realization that my own metaphysical soap opera, still sitting in notebooks and sketchpads on my desk, was no longer worth pitching to Image??

Fortunately, the final story arc of The Invisibles was such a muddle that I still feel validated in pursuing my own project. Nirvana will have to wait until after the movie rights are optioned!

There is still the matter of why I found The Invisibles so appealing, however. And though I think it is a worthwhile primer on post-modernism and eastern thought (taken to hysterical extreme), I do not mean to suggest that it is something that most people will find gratifying. However, if these or like subjects intrigue you, then I would like to suggest the following:

Take drugs.

Oh yes, he's serious. I know this rubs up against the grain of many people's new found patriotism, since we all know that Terrorists Don't Blow Up World Trade Centers, Marijuana Does, but gosh darn me, I still think people oughta!

Ah, to be young and glib! My point is, a little futzin' around with the mind's accepted notions of HOW THINGS ARE is actually a good thing, and now more than ever. Nukes are back. Smallpox is back. Think the world is still moving forward? What are YOU smoking?

The Invisibles is a tract written for the culture of subversion, a love letter to anarchy. These are not fawning accolades but a simple observation of what the writer, Grant Morrison, spooged onto every page of his epic. You can take or leave his suspicions as you please. I certainly didn't buy into all of what I perceived to be his subtext. What I realized, though, when I returned to this comic after years of head scratching, is that some works of art require you to be part of the author's hallucination to fully participate in them.

That doesn't mean you have to adopt Hunter Thompson as your personal guru, either. Harlan Ellison is one of the most revolutionary science fiction intellects going, and he despises drugs. But fuck him too. Only means he's got that good stuff flowing through his gray matter already. When we finally get cloning right we'll all be shooting the neurotransmitters of the greats right into our spinal cords!

I am merely stumping for experimentation, nothing more. Do you have an addiction-prone personality? An alcoholic daddy? Fine. You're the designated driver then, and all power to you. The world certainly needs life guards.

There is, however, a whole cannon of art and literature that requires a secret password to really unlock it's power, and it certainly is no crime to speak in tongues once or twice in your life.

And yes, sure. Drugs are easy to abuse. They DO make you stupid and dependant, transporting you to a dreamy land of unlikely circumstances and perspectives, planting outrageous ideas in your head that you feel no urge to resist, forcing you to come back for more before the nonsense becomes too obvious.

How many times did you shoot up today?


-JASON

NEXT: Who is Jim Lileks and why does he deserve what he's got coming from me

12/23/02

It's been a long time in coming, but here it is! The NEW Whatisdeepfried.com.

Okay, Except for this page, it is exactly the same as it was before, but what an improvement this page boasts, eh? A new animated menu and a nifty new bloggy format for tediously wordy updates like this one. All in time for Christmas!

Believe me, this is gonna work out for the best. I don't wanna hear a lot of blubbering about how you liked the old homepage better. I told you, it's now living happily on a farm upstate, a farm with lots of rabbits it can chase all day.

I have been working hard on this relaunch for the past few days, and baby, I am BEAT! I wanted to jump right into what will soon become the hallmark of this new homepage, that being a shrieking, ill-informed rant about things I hate. However, I just don't have the strength.

Suffice to say that my comic strip is no longer large enough to hold the bile of the chemically tainted outrage I feel for just about everything, and this is where the effluence of my self-righteousness will spill.

I've already got my first target lined up in the crosshairs too, and I plan to open up with both barrels in the next couple days, so stay tuned! Meanwhile, bed is calling me! And it is saying "clean my sheets, you scuzzy bastard!

Perhaps I shall, but not before I stink 'em up with 12 hours of my favorite recreational activity! Fare the well, Internet interlopers!


Jason Yungbluth

next blog