Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?

Updated 3/30/05

Artist's Statement

Credit for this one is due to my two collegues Tom Hart and Jen Sorensen, with whom I've been touring all week. (All blame, however, is mine alone.) We've been driving up and down the East Coast, from New York to Providence to Boston to New Haven and Back to New York, talking politics all the way, and somehow this cartoon emerged from all our discussion. The ghoulish and obscene Terri Schiavo case grinds on and on, serving as a calculated diversion while the Republicans sneak through legislation on bankruptcy and class action lawsuits, quietly removing the legal tools for individuals to protect themselves against corporate power. None of us can quite reconcile the creepy dissonance between conservatives' deep concern for fetuses and the comatose and their apparent indifference to the poor, or civilian casualties in Iraq. Well, actually, I'm affecting naiivete for rhetorical purposes here; I think I understand the disconnect very well. Embryos and the brain-dead are abstract and blank, passive objects on which to project their vague sentimental notions of innocence and lavish their tacky, simple-minded, misplaced love, sort of like pets (hence the bunnies). Actual human beings, by annoying contrast, are complex and flawed and dirty, full of wrong opinions and bad behavior. Fundamentalist Christians just aren't up to the daunting challenge of loving real people--in other words, they aren't grownups. Hence the profund, weepy love they profess for their invisible friend Jesus, a guy they never met who died two thousand years ago.