Terror and Sadness (and Sad, Terrifying Boredom)

By the Comics Curmudgeon
So obviously, living in America today is one long roller-coaster ride of joy and despair and rage, because of the Depression and the Politics. And so our political cartoons reflect this our discordant reality. Why should we expect sanity and levelheadedness in newsprint when we cannot find it life? Join us on an ink-stained journey into the heart of darkness, as the cross-hatched drawings scrawled out furiously in some dank, half-empty newsroom reveal the terrifying secrets that lie within America’s heart.

Clicking the little cartoon makes both it and your terror grow 5x bigger. Try this, now!

Look! It’s our athletic young president. At first, he appears to be happily playing basketball, the game he loves so well, the one keeps him in touch with America’s youth. But upon closer examination, he’s not engaging in healthy competition with his peers, but is rather buffeted by a trio of demonic horse-headed subhumans. The beast-men’s almost-human arms flail about as they engage in a macabre dance around Obama, whose face sags as he realized that this is no dream, no nightmare, but some kind of hellish, baffling reality. He looks into those monstrous, soulless eyes, sees their inhuman ears turning towards him, hears the braying, and wonders: where did I go wrong?

Flash forward to the Obama that survives this experience: shorter, fatter, more Eddie Munster-like. Heavily armed, his long-lost idealism replaced by a desire to dish out savage violence to whoever wrongs him. Looming ahead of him is a pooching gut, spilling over the belt that tries to contain it. There’s no head, no arms, just this disembodied torso. Maybe it represents Somali piracy. You can tell yourself that, Mr. President. Maybe it represents your looming mortality. Maybe it doesn’t represent anything at all. Maybe you just need to shoot hot lead into a soft belly.

Eventually, the nightmare world comes full circle, and now it’s Obama who’s the animal: a hopping, grinning rabbit. But that’s not a smile of pure joy, but rather of mindless mania, as he leaps with unstoppable energy across the landscape, unwilling or unable to stop. Most rabbits, of course, are not equipped with a cloaca, and yet the helpless Obama rabbit leaves behind eggs, or feces, or feces-coated eggs, all sliding out of the same slot as he continues his desperate bouncing across the face of the country he once governed, leaving a trail of terrified and disgusted children in his wake.

And how can we expect such children to reach adulthood with any kind of sense of selfhood intact? How can we expect them to grapple with a world of constant threats if they’re raised to be numb to terror? These two young men are enjoying a night out at the casino, and are being accosted by a member of the Florida legislature (which is to say, a pervert.) “How much more would you young adults blow?” he asks them. Really. This is a question asked in a political cartoon. The two young men are giving it serious thought. How much more would they blow? Weigh your options carefully, boys, and don’t promise what you can’t deliver.

And in this devalued world, what becomes of real human emotions? Is there no sadness, no joy? For the most part, there is not. When we die, we will not be mourned by our fellow humans, who will be numbed from all the video games and the fellatio; rather, the only tears that will be shed will drip from the eyes of the robots we built to serve us. Their glass and metal lenses, which have observed us for so long, will weep like a child upon the death of a parent. They are a better breed than us, and will inherit the earth and its pleasures while our biological descendants decline into evolutionary irrelevance.

In other news, the two most boring things in the world are Twitter and John Kerry; this has been proven, with science. This cartoon combines both of them!