Drawn That Way

Quote of the Day: “You better speak up now if you want your piece/You better speak up now/It won’t mean a thing later/Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper…” “Fish n Chip Paper” by Elvis Costello

Sexual harassment is no laughing matter. Whether it be unwelcome sexual advances or requests for sexual favors, it’s a serious offense. And, again, not something one should laugh at. Well, okay, not usually. Some of you might have seen this clip before. It’s a mock(?) PSA about preventing sexual harassment in the workplace. Someone sent it to me the other day and it sorta cracked me up–especially some of the reaction shots of the “victims” once it really gets going…I think it’s funny cause it crosses some gender and race lines that speak much louder than one expects…Check it out:

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As for this New York Post cartoon that’s making waves all over the place: Um, a chimp, a direct reference to the stimulus package, a smoking gun, a newly-elected black president? Wrong on so many levels that I don’t even know how to respond. Part of me is used to these ridiculously racist and homophobic cartoons the Post tries to pawn off as social commentary. But, even if I wanted to try to analyze it enough to think that maybe the cartoonist was just making a mockery of all the idiots in DC, just riffing on those old  ”chimp-with-a-typewriter” jokes as a way of making our government leaders look stupid, another part of me remembers that the artist Sean Delonas has never shied away from doing a lot of the racist, sexist, homophobic work that even some Post writers refuse to indulge in (or only signify). Two white cops shoot a chimp dead–and, at this point in our nation’s twisted history, the ONLY joke he could think to make was about the most important issue Barack Obama is dealing with at the moment? Did he chuckle as he was writing the dialogue bubble? Was he thinking, “I’ll fix that monkey sitting in the White House”? We’ll never know. What I know is that–even though we wanna talk about “post-racial” this, “new-day” that–as I once heard a friend’s mother say, “white folks never cease to amaze me.” My question is this: How do we get to “Post-racial” when we can’t even get past The Post?

Gawker.com provides a gallery of Delonas’ greatest cartoon “hits” (with his favorite targets: gays, women, blacks, just about anyone different than him.) Click here to see some of them, if you like.