The World Is Run By Assholes

Or Why I Draw Political Cartoons

The men in charge of ancient Pompeii did a fairly good job of destroying the city before a giant cloud of ash swiftly finished the job for them. The city was run by corrupt liars. Most of the population knew this, but were powerless to incite change. How do we know? Because preserved on Pompeii’s walls is political graffiti ruthlessly mocking those in power.

Political cartoonists are some of the only people keeping score in society, and I hope a few of my cartoons will be unearthed from the ruins of our forthcoming apocalypse as proof that we weren’t all on board with the way things were going.

I consider my work from the last few years to cover a period of American decline that hasn’t been fully accounted for yet. We’re halfway through a “lost decade” we worried about when our financial system crashed in 2008. According to indicators used by most economists—the growth of Wall Street, the Dow, employment rates—we’re bouncing back from the recession. But for people who have lost homes, delayed retirement, been locked out of careers, accepted new ones for lower pay, and become mired in a lifetime of student debt, the economy doesn’t quite seem on the upswing.

Americans have lost faith in nearly every institution, beginning with their government. Approval of Congress sits around nine percent, lower than used car salesmen, lice, and Nickleback. Nearly everyone else in a position of power has proven to be just as detestable. The priests are molesters, the homophobes are gay, the athletes are juicers, the memoirists are frauds, your friends from high school post militantly dumb and easily disprovable things on Facebook on a daily basis.

Most of my cartoons are motivated by the urge to call bullshit. Looking back on some of them now, I’d happily put my record on the issues as a lowly political cartoonist up against any highly compensated pundit in Washington. The pundits share something in common with those in power: the total absence of a sense of humor. Which makes bringing them down a notch that much more satisfying.

If you should think I’m a relentlessly negative curmudgeon, I will shake my fist at you and say that I’m not. There are innumerable things in today’s world that I find unobjectionable or even inspiring marks of genuine human progress. But none of them compel me to draw cartoons. My work serves to humor the afflicted and afflict the humorless.

Not that it changes our circumstances. The world is run by assholes. It’s been this way for some time now. Sometimes the only thing you can do is mark up public surfaces and get everyone to laugh at the people running things. It’s a small form of resistance, a minor annoyance at best to those in power. But if they insist on doing us this way, I’m at least going to make them come out every morning and repaint the damn walls.