Like a lot of illustrations I do for education sociologist Mark Garrison, this one draws on my political cartooning skills, as much as my caricature and illustration skills. The focus of Mark’s article, Infaming the Public, Part IV: Public Self-Consciousness and Assessment for Democratic Renewal is much broader than this cartoon would imply, but draws upon his discussion of the public – parents, teachers, students – fighting back against top-down imposition of the Common Core Standards. Michelle Rhee has become the poster child of the school reform movement; as such she has made herself an excellent target for satire. That broom she wields was prominent on her TIME magazine cover.

Here is a caricature of Emile Durkheim for the Cranky Sociologists blog. You can see more of these at the gallery of the Cranky Sociologists blog, with commentary by SocProf. Durkheim is one of the Big Three of sociology, along with Max Weber and Karl Marx. He did a great deal in defining the unique subject of the discipline – the social – and in developing rigorous standards of study, proof and argumentation to establish sociology as a real science.

This illustration shows Durkheim railing against two social forces, individualism and anomie that he felt were destroying traditional social fabric and undermining modern attempts at social cohesion. So naturally Thing One and Thing Two sprung to mind.

Arizona and Tennessee seem to be in competition for who can impose the cruelest and dumbest laws on its citizens. In Tennessee, the legislature is moving forward with a bill to deduct 30% of TANF benefits to families whose children do not perform well in school. In Arizona we see yet another bathroom policing law, attempting to prevent people who identify with a gender different from what they were born with from using the bathroom they prefer. To get as far as trying to regulate this sort of thing, it must be keeping some folks up at night. I don’t know why. Maybe real social problems are too complex for their little minds.

Drawn in Paper by 53.

UPDATE: Some readers seem confused by the word “prevert.” I assure it is not an unintentional misspelling on my part, but actually a deliberate use of a mispronunciation of “pervert.” You can find it in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and in other satirical treatments of moralistic people in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Another option would be “poivoit” – that derives more from a downstate NY regional dialect. Anyway, there ya go.

Newly added to the Learning Curve page, a cartoon about “Won’t Back Down” and the parent trigger option it propagandizes. The real challenge of this cartoon was rendering Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis in a cartoony fashion, less caricature, more cartoon character (subtle difference, I know.) I think the top panel is successful, Maggie reads well in the second, but Viola slowly falls apart. Not her fault, she is a great and lovely actress, despite her appearance in this POS film; but I subjected her to the narrative demands for cartoony facial expressions.

Did I see the movie I criticize here? Nooo. I watched several trailers, read several reviews and the comments by people who said YOU MUST SEE THIS MOVIE IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE on its Facebook page. The dramatic merits aside (pretty well excoriated by film critics universally), the movie’s argument for the parent trigger — reenforced by its promotional website and the school reform advocates who exhort you to see it — rests upon a lot of wishful thinking combined with bashing of teacher unions and public schools. Conveniently left out of the discussion: the failure of the two California test cases to get past the litigation phase; said phase brought on by buyer’s remorse among parents who signed the trigger petition when they saw what kind of schools they were getting; the heavy financing of trigger efforts by unaccountable school boards full of ties to education materials companies; the lack of interest by charter schools to serve special needs and the TAG designated student populations; and the uniform curricula imposed on teachers who thought they were getting more freedom to teach.

But, hey, this kinda crap gets bipartisan support, so expect it to proceed without much hinderance.

I came up with this one prior to Obama’s somnambulant performance during the first debate, when Romney was imploding so bad that it distracted from some of Obama’s own problems. But after the first debate, I decided to wait until after the second, when I knew he would be more aggressive and thus earn a blue ribbon from a narrative-obsessed news media. Honestly, I have no confidence that Obama will win, but I have a harder time believing that Romney won’t shoot himself in the foot (after placing it in his mouth) and give Obama the election.

The third debate is about foreign policy. How much attention will be paid to the issue of predator drones? So far they are killing more innocent people than presumably legitimate targets — a ratio of 49:1 according to a recent Stanford-NYU study (that’s 98% collateral damage; that’s war crimes territory) — and I have yet to see much about it. The two candidates allowed to debate (and not, say, chained to a metal chair for eight hours for trying to attend) are in agreement on the assassination by remote control policy, so I don’t have any hope anyone will bother to ask.

For more caricatures, see the gallery.

I don’t know what it is that prevents me from posting a link to the new Wanderlost page here every week, but I am on an every other week habit, so I guess that will do.

Page four of “Loose Ends” appeared last week and it takes a slight detour into Star Wars fantasy.

But this week we self-correct with a trip on a penny-farthing.

Like so:

My son was watching The Adventures of TinTin, an early 90s animated adaptation of Hergé’s classic comic books, and it inspired the above entry in my sketchbook. The series is faithful to the look and style of the comics, the character design, the stories and, more unsettling, Hergé’s unapologetic racism and imperialist condescension. If anything, putting his stereotypes into motion and giving them buffoonish voices only makes them worse. Seriously, it’s mind-boggling. To it’s only credit in this respect, the producers wisely omitted TinTin’s notorious adventures in the Belgian Congo.

For those who don’t know, the late Edward Said was a Palestinian-American intellectual best known for Orientalism, a ground-breaking study of how Western literature, art and other art forms treats Middle Eastern peoples and religions as monoliths, as a threat or as exotic, as animals or as mystics, or simply in the way of resources the West wants. I thought TinTin would have a horrible epiphany should he ever come across the book.

Here be the latest pages of Wanderlost story “Loose Ends.”

Page 2 is like a “Where are they now?” for secondary characters, using a newspaper as a dialog prompt.



Page 3 adds more romantic intrigue and domestic drama.

Posted this on Wednesday, but forgot (again) to tell this blog. Social media has got me so scattered. Anyway, here is an image link to the new page that starts a new story line for Wanderlost. And, I should note this, the FINAL story line for Wanderlost. After this, I will move on to new things. Stay tuned.

Mitt Romney’s kneejerk response to the protests and the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya, which led to the deaths of four Americans, revealed a lot about his character. All politicians have a talent for opportunism, but so few are driven by it as Romney is. It was naked ambition that overrode any respect for the facts, the mission of U.S. diplomats and for the dead. He’s a real disgusting human being.