Random Thoughts Department

No, this isn’t a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed, but a cartoon of the boys’ dean of my high school that I drew for our school’s newspaper thirty-one years ago for Valentine’s Day.
When I was very young – four or five – I used to imagine God as some wise, old, platinum gentleman, the color of one of those aluminum Air Stream mobile homes, who looked vaguely like Robert Young on “Father Knows Best.”

I was dying of curiosity to know what God looked like (at that point in time I still believed that Mary and Joseph were in their eighties, retired and living in a suburb outside of Miami, mourning the death of their only son, Jesus). I used to wonder why there were never any photographs of God in our Sunday School circulars. One Sunday, I asked the teacher, some wise-acre, gum-snapping 15-year-old girl, when we were going to get to see some pictures of God. “Stupid, nobody knows what God looks like,” she replied. Thus began the steady chipping away of my faith.

As for the Muslims rioting throughout the world over a cartoon that appeared in a Danish newspaper of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, get over it. Tell us what the prophet Mohammed means to you instead of burning down embassies, and why the hell aren’t you swarming the streets in protest every time one of your brothers or sisters – in most cases deluded teenagers – shows up on a bus during rush hour with bombs strapped to their waists, or when a car bomb goes off at a street market while your mothers and grandmothers are shopping for fresh tomatoes. I don’t think we should denigrate someone else’s culture, but in most Western societies where there is free speech and where women aren’t forced to wear blankets over their heads in public, this is what it racks up to – the pearls and garbage of democracy. Like it or not, we have the right to be offensive. And if Muslims think that cartoon was bad, they ought to come to America and watch daytime television, where topics ranging from hemorrhoids to impotence are discussed freely on sleazy talk shows.

Frankly, between Christians, Jews and Muslims, I think these religions are all responsible for ruining our planet.

But back to the Valentine’s Day cartoon that appeared in my high school newspaper in 1975. I can’t believe that I actually got away with drawing the boys’ dean wearing a diaper. This was considered pretty subversive back then. Most of the stories and papers that we put together were created under the influence of pot. Our editorial staff of freaks was constantly being hauled into the assistant principal’s office for writing and publishing offensive material – to parents, that is, not the students. Everything was done manually, stories were typed on rickety typewriters with sticking keys, and drunken typesetters laid out the paper for us one led letter at a time as a favor to our school by the publisher of our local newspaper. Our man on the street columns, where students were asked questions like, “What do you think of Nixon,” or “What did you do over the holidays,” eluded to sex with hookers and buying six-packs of beer or Cold Duck with fake IDs at the local liquor store. A typical issue included reviews of Led Zepplin concerts, bizarre bodies drawn on giant heads of teachers, violent sports imagery (our school mascot was a Native American), acid poetry, crazy photo collages and as little school news as possible. With all the concerns today about the dangers of Cyberspace and our hyper-sensitive, politically correct, fundamentalist Christian culture, I don’t think kids can get away with the shit we published in our school newspaper back in the 1970s (which incidentally, was named the top high school paper in the Midwest region for that year by Quill & Scroll). There was no way that our school administration could control us, and I can only imagine how much more dangerous and subversive our paper could have been, had we had Quark, Adobe or digital photography, instead of me sitting in my basement drawing cartoons of our faculty with India ink.

Vice President Dick Cheney proved that he is once again above the law, hunting without a license and blasting one of his hunting party in Texas over the weekend. The fact that the White House tried to keep the story of our nation’s vice president shooting somebody quiet for 24 hours, makes me wonder how many other guys the draft dodger has shot.

Yesterday driving home from a gig, I was listening to a caller on a radio talk show, who said he taught a course in hunting safety. He said that Cheney violated a number of safety rules – not sticking to his own pre-agreed field of fire, not ceasing fire when one of the party stepped out of the line, and shooting behind himself which is a big hunting safety, Bozo no-no. But if you’re some old white guy who thinks the universe revolves around his shriveled up ball sack, you’re free to do whatever the fuck you want.

When I worked for an internationally known, product safety testing company, we published a safety standard for cable boxes that were required to withstand a hail of bullets. Our engineers literally called it, "the drunk hunters' test," when hunters became bored in the field and would shoot up cable boxes when they couldn't find any innocent birds to shoot.

The whole Cheney-friendly fire incident illustrates just how out of control this administration is, as if we all didn’t know that already. Bush and Cheney are their own “weapons of mass destruction.”