Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: The Tarheel Taliban

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Mike Peterson Published: May 10, 2012 1 minute 7 comments

The gay marriage issue has divided editorial cartoonists this week.

Not so much between "For" and "Against" as between "Timely" and "Whoops."

After Joe Biden's remarks Sunday, there were a raft of cartoons criticizing Obama for not also speaking out in support of gay marriage. And then, on Wednesday, just about the time all those cartoons were posted but before any papers could run them, he did.

Whoops.

But Kevin Siers gets a "Timely" award for this fitting commentary on North Carolina's vote to outlaw human rights, in which Liberty and Justice are driven from the state. 

This whole notion of voting on human rights is distressing, and I have thought more in recent months of Lester Maddox than I wanted to.

For those too young to know who he was, that link will tell you, but the capsule is this: Maddox owned a Georgia restaurant and refused to allow black people to eat there, despite the Civil Rights Act. He showed this by brandishing a pick handle.

And how did the good people of Georgia react to finding such a loud, embarrassing throwback amongst them?

They elected him governor.

Which leads to two thoughts:

One is that the federal government in those days had a lot more guts than it seems to these days. When people swore to uphold the Constitution back then, they actually did it.

The other is that Maddox didn't prove to be the one-dimensional racist most people expected. He was a multi-dimensional racist, but not a bad governor after all.

And the depressing takeaway on that is that, as in the case of Richard Nixon, even our foulest villains in those days were reasonably honorable in their own ways. Nixon didn't destroy the tapes and Maddox didn't re-institute Jim Crow.

This does not make either of them "good" except in contrast to what we've got on our hands now.

Which is a mess. And the obvious conflict with people who insist on small government also demanding that government enforce their religious codes and sexual mores is only part of the problem.

Still, it's a problem to be addressed. You don't vote on civil rights. They're in the Constitution. If you want them out, amend the document.

Or support a presidential candidate who will appoint a few more Christian Taliban activists to the Supreme Court.

Which you can do by default, by refusing to support his less-than-perfect opponent.  

Which is its own form of Talibanic moral purity.

Now, having praised Siers for this fine cartoon…

… let me say that no apologies were necessary.

Siers was in no real danger of getting a cease-and-desist letter from the law firm of Medici, Medici, Borgia & Savanarola, LLP, charging him with violating the copyright of their client, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, dba Michelangelo, given that 500 years have passed since he painted "The Expulsion."

While I am not an intellectual property lawyer, I suspect that his rights have run out.

Besides, it was done as work-for-hire. Apologize to the Pope.

The first time I ran into the whole "with apologies to" thing, I was in ninth grade and had just read John Lennon's "In His Own Write." In a flurry of admiration, I wrote a malaprop-laden essay for my English class in what I hoped was an equally humorous vein.

My father read it and laughed, but said I should add "with apologies to John Lennon" so that my English teacher would know what the hell was going on, which was that I was consciously mimicking Lennon's style. And so she would know that I wasn't simply copying a piece John Lennon had written about Robert Kennedy's race for New York's Senate seat. As if.

I think mostly so she'd know what was going on. 

A few weeks ago, somebody got prissy over a political cartoon that riffed on the "Lucy pulling away the football" theme and said the cartoonist should have added "with apologies to Charles Schulz."

So that nobody would think Sparky had risen from the dead to comment on current events.

Or so nobody would suspect that the cartoonist in question expected them to believe he had invented the characters himself.

Or so they would get it. In case Lucy pulling the football away were such an obscure reference that they would have to research it to understand the cartoon.

In which case, it would have been a poor choice for a political cartoon, n'est-ce pas?

Anyway, I got it. Michelangelo. The Expulsion.

If you're going to apologize for anything, apologize for insulting my intelligence.

Or for surrendering to the latest prissy trend in editorial cartooning.