The “no fun to draw” era

I remember being saddened the first time I learned people don’t actually wear top hats anymore. It’s the kind of depressing fact you’re always learning as a child; one of those gradual revelations that the real world is far less colourful, vibrant, and visually interesting the than the world of comics and cartoons which you’ve grown so accustomed.

I felt a similar sort of childlike disappointment as I read this funny-’cause-it’s-true article by cartoonist Tom Pappalardo the other day, in which he glumly observes how many of our most beloved household appliances, and their conventional depictions in comics, are slowly being rendered obsolete by advances in technological design. Just as no one wears top hats anymore, our present age is one where almost no one speaks into a telephone with a handset, listens to music with earmuff-style headphones, or, increasingly, reads words off a slice of dead tree. The era of drawing boxy TVs, antennaed cell phones, and tabletop radios is coming to a close.

In response, Scott Kurtz, the frequently-ornery web cartoonist behind PvP, has penned a rebuttal saying (as he often says) “get over it.”

“I’’m sorry that Television sets are now flatter and harder to represent,” he writes. “But your JOB as a cartoonist is to represent and reflect the times in which you as an artist live. That’s the basic tenant of the art form.”

This might stem from the fact that I specialize in caricature, but part of what I’ve always enjoyed about cartooning is the exaggeration of reality, the idea that an effective cartoon draws much of its power from an ability to overstate the truth in a rubbery or absurdist manner. It’s one of the reasons why I think almost all cartoonists enjoy drawing animals. Their distinctive characteristics, be it enormous antlers, bug-eyes, floppy ears, or extend-o tongues are just so ripe for creative re-imagining. Take an animal like a Chameleon, for instance. It’s almost an embarrassment of riches. Where to begin?

The same was true, until quite recently, with mankind’s various contraptions. Phones, TVs, radios, and computers were all a mess of wires, buttons, knobs, and heavy metal casings. These ostentatiously mechanical quirks, in turn, inspired much of our now-standard cliched cartoon images of robots, mad-scientist contraptions, or loopy inventor workshops. There was no shortage of visual clues that indicated what it was to be a machine, and cartoonists had a lot of fun calling attention to them.

When technology becomes as it is now, however, all smooth and polished and pocket-sized and razor-thin and button-free, cartoonists lose that ability to overstate reality for comical or stylized effect, because there’s suddenly very little physicality to work with. That’s my main problem with Scott Kurtz’ piece, he summarizes cartooning as “representing ideas and objects as simply as possible,” which ignores the fact that cartoonists engage in this simplistic representation as much through repeating iconic or exaggerated cliches, tropes, and symbols as they do with trying to limit the amount of lines on the page.

A lot of cartoons are visually anachronistic even in their own time (few people had rabbit ear TVs when The Simpsons debuted, for instance, and hell, how many centuries has it been since anvils were common?) but I worry this new push towards ever-more-minimalist technology is making that gap larger than ever. It’s hard to think of a comparable era when so many classical depictions of household objects became simultaneously outdated so quickly, and the aesthetic of daily life so bereft of the sort of visual complexity, detail, and whimsy that traditionally provide such ample fodder for cartoonists.

So while it’s true, as Kurtz says, that a good cartoonist has to overcome the challenges of his time and insightfully reflect reality as it is, rather than some nostalgic ideal of how it should be, I still hold that we’re losing something major right now, in the same way that we lost something when people stopped dressing for their jobs, when globalization made differences between cultures less sharp, when children’s toys became exclusively pop culture souvenirs, when food became mass produced and pre-packaged, and yes, when big important men stopped wearing top hats.

Perhaps I’m just a slave to my own, idiosyncratic tastes, and unreasonably biased towards the sorts of things I’d prefer to be drawing. But in a visual art form, how can you not be?

Can gays be manly?

A review of Androphilia (2007) by Jack Donovan

I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a certain skirt-chasing friend of mine. The topic was my homosexuality, and whether or not it had any connection to my general lack of female friends.

“Obviously,” said my buddy, “you’re only gay because you hate women.”

“Maybe,” I responded, only half in jest, “but I’d argue homosexuality is the highest form of misogyny.”

And now here is Androphilia, a self-described “manifesto” that takes a similar premise in a much more serious intellectual direction. Written by Jack Donovan (or, as he calls himself for the purposes of this book, Jack “Malebranche”), a swaggering, tattooed, unapologetically macho right-winger — who just happens to like guys instead of girls — the book offers up a brashly male-centric theory of conservative gay identity that is worlds away from the polite, libertarian tolerance of GOProud and Andrew Sullivan.

“I wrote this book for men who love men but are sick to death of the gay community,” Donovan declares early on, in one of his many blunt attacks on the American gay establishment, or, as he might put it, a self-serving racket of limp-wristed queens and haute couture nancy-boys that are robbing homosexual men of what should be their most prized possession — masculinity.

If you think about it, he says, there should be nothing more inherently manly than a man who loves other men. Unburdened by the taming influences of women, who demand their mates soften their rough corners as part of the elaborate dance of courtship, men who opt-out of heterosexual life are free to revel in their uncensored masculinity and celebrate the same in others. They can be however crude, tough, or chauvinistic as they want, and no one will call them on it. They can participate in all their manly hobbies and no one will ever get bored. It should be a perpetual frat party! Only with more consensual sex!

Yet homosexuality rarely seems to work this way in practice. Far from being paragons of machismo, gay men are frequently the precise opposite: effeminate, campy, priggish, and passive, with interests, tastes, and politics that are often in far closer sync with “womyn power” feminists than anything resembling mainstream male America. There’s lots of promiscuity, but little honor. Ample fashion, but scant dignity.

Donovan’s thesis is that this is an almost grotesquely unnatural state of affairs, and bizarrely counter-intuitive for an all-male subculture. So how did it happen? Read the rest of this entry »

The post-partisan province

A letter about British Columbia

Dear Eastern Canadians,

How are you? If I could get you guys to put down your iPads and commemorative CN Tower snow-globes for just one second, I want to explain British Columbian politics to you.

I know you guys have an unfortunate tendency to get trapped in this idea, most recently espoused by Globe and Mail columnist Gary Mason, that BC politics are too “zany” and “unstable” to even understand — let alone take seriously — but it’s really not that complicated. We have a couple different political parties, and sometimes one gets elected and the other ones lose. And sometimes there are scandals, and sometimes the premier resigns. Sounds almost… familiar, right?

That being said, I can certainly sympathize if you’re having a hard time following all the drama surrounding our recently-concluded HST referendum, in which we voted by a significant margin (55%) to throw out a combined federal-and-provincial sales tax regime many other provinces have embraced without a peep. Read the rest of this entry »

Why the parliamentary system can’t save America

The self-righteousness gripping Canada in the wake of America’s recent credit downgrade has not been limited to a mere defence of our supposedly superior fiscal policies. Those are certainly great, we all agree, but many commentators are now going one step further, arguing that the US’ lengthy legislative impasse over its debt ceiling has highlighted the fundamental bankruptcy of the entire American political system, too, casting a glowing light upon the contrasting supremacy of Canadian parliamentary governance.

Checks and balances? Ha! The American system is so deadlocked “they currently have no ‘balance’ and can’t even cover the ‘cheques’ they write,” wrote a letter-writer in the National Post the other day. John Pepall, a man who has made a career out of defending our parliamentary status-quo, went even further, dismissing the US system as “a multi-sided game of chicken in which everyone is trying to avoid responsibility,” and predictably wind up achieving very little in the way of results.

Though not a Canadian himself, CNN’s omnipresent super-pundit Fareed Zakaria has now jumped on this particular bandwagon, as I believe Americans are often wont to do in times of crisis. The grass is always greener, of course, and considering how widespread liberal displeasure is with President Obama at the moment, it’s understandable that many progressive-minded Americans would be inclined to turn against the American system itself as they seek to justify their once universally-favoured candidate’s dreary decline. Read the rest of this entry »

The Obama Strategy: victory without trying

The ongoing debt ceiling debate in the US, and all the squabbling and horse-trading enveloping it, has highlighted an interesting new dichotomy in American politics. It’s a division of ideology, of course, but not the traditional right-versus-left split of popular lore. No, it seems the new dynamic of the two-party system is simply that one party (the GOP) has an ideology, while the other does not.

This is obviously very much the opposite of what the Republicans themselves believe. Watch your average GOP politician at a press conference, or a right-wing talking head on FOX, and they’ll unflinchingly describe their opponents as hardline leftists of the worst sort, unyielding in their defense of high taxes, big spending, and unsustainable, cradle-to-grave hand-outs.

The problem is, it’s not really true. If it was, one imagines that the liberal chorus of support for the Democrats’ debt ceiling bargaining position would be every bit as loud and passionate as that of their counterparts on the right, who, with very few exceptions, have been steadfast in support of “cut, cap, and balance.” Instead, from the left we’re getting this:

“Obama’s continuing insistence on compromising, his continuing faith in bipartisanship despite two and a half years of evidence that [Republicans] don’t do compromise and will never make a deal, is looking obsessive and compulsive. It’s deeply frustrating.” — Paul Krugman

“Obama will have to explain how it is that the Republicans got 98% of what they wanted.” — Glenn Greenwald

“[Democrats are] giving the one-finger salute to their most die hard supporters and their values.” — Rachel Maddow

“He’s not really a Democratic president.” — Maureen Dowd

Read the rest of this entry »

Is speaking French useful?

It happens to the best of us. Pitted in a heated us-versus-them argument at a party, Internet forum, or whatever, someone nominally on “your side” invariably pulls out a demonstrably untrue factoid. The enemy seems fazed by the rhetorical blow; the ignorant statement worked! Quietly satisfied, you stay mum even as the guilt gnaws.

Almost without fail, whenever the legitimacy of Canada’s official French-English bilingualism doctrine is raised, someone on the defensive side will pull out the chestnut that, if nothing else, learning French makes us more competitive and attractive global citizens. In an increasingly globalized world, after all, it’s the multilingual who will inherit the earth. Canadians with French language skills will simply have more opportunities for successful careers in international commerce and business than their unilingual counterparts. Doors will be opened, and all that.

It’s an argument you hear a lot in this country, yet also one that’s quite difficult to quote, since almost no one associated with Canada’s official bilingualism apparatus ever makes it. If you read the writings of federal departments like the Official Languages Commissioner and lobby groups like Canadian Parents For French you’ll actually find suspiciously little mention of the world outside Canada at all. Their rhetoric remains firmly wedded to the ’60s-era justifications that spawned official bilingualism in the first place; namely that it helps foster peace and harmony amongst Canada’s “two founding nations” as we edge ever-closer to the Kumbaya utopia “where linguistic duality forms an integral part of society.” But if people want to learn French ’cause they think it’ll help them get jobs in Europe, that’s fine too.

The Canadian public’s naivete regarding official bilingualism in the year 2011 can be at least partially attributed to our quintessentially adorable tendency to assume the federal government only spends its time promoting useful and productive causes. Sitting as comfortably insulated from Quebec separatism (and terrorism) as we now do, the idea that learning French is in any way useful to protecting national unity seems rather unmoving. So the unauthorized “bilingualism as a path to personal betterment” justification has emerged through the grassroots, generating awkward mixed feelings among bilingualism’s traditional boosters. On the one hand, anything that gets Canadians more interested in speaking French is A-OK. On the other, purely utilitarian arguments can be a very dangerous thing, largely because… well, French is not a terribly utilitarian language. Read the rest of this entry »

Decennial Funfest!

Review of “No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America”

Ann Coulter is a difficult woman to fluster, but the other day, Piers Morgan, CNN’s otherwise uninspired Larry King stand-in did just that.

“If you had a daughter or son who came to you and said they were gay, how would you feel?” he asked.

“How would you react?” Coulter retorted defensively, clearly not liking where this was going.

Repeating his question a second time, Coulter could only choke out “I can’t imagine being married,” at which point the conversation turned to that particular distraction.

Coulter’s obvious unease was revealing, in the sense that it exposed the practical limits of what author David Courtwright describes as “conservative politics in a liberal America,” the subject of his ambitious new book, No Right Turn.

Fifty years ago, a Coulter-like figure wouldn’t have flinched at such a question. And why not? In those days, what to do with homosexuals was obvious: send them to a psychiatrist, if not jail. There are doubtlessly more than a few Americans who believe that to this day. Yet Coulter, for all her right-wing bona fides is a thoroughly modern child of the 1970s. Until his death, for instance, she was close friends with the late Robert Jones, the openly gay former editor of Harper-Collins, whose long-term “partner” she was respectfully prepared to accept as such (watch her use the title unprovoked in this Booknotes interview). Though Jones was a liberal, and Coulter often made much of her efforts to “convert him” to the right, there’s no evidence to suggest his lifestyle ever personally offended her. This makes her recent keynote speech at a gathering of gay Republicans even less cryptic than many liberal pundits feigned it to be at the time.

In any case, the idea that a self-proclaimed conservative woman can diffuse passing judgment on homosexuality with an assertive statement of pride in her voluntarily spinsterhood reveals just how topsy-turvy the state of what we consider “right wing” has become in the 21st century. From Rush Limbaugh’s multiple wives to Sarah Palin’s out-of-wedlock grandson; to a Fox News prime time lineup filled with Catholics, Scientologists, and Mormons; to the huge, red-state success of gross-out movies like Jackass 3-D, the fact that even the most proudly reactionary subculture of modern America is home to an increasingly sliding scale of moral rectitude is hardly a novel observation, yet rarely do we pause to observe just how far the standards have dropped. So-cons today busy themselves trying to outlaw abortion and gay marriage, but few seem to have much of a problem with legalized gambling, no-fault divorce, revealing modern fashion, on-demand pornography, profanity-laced television, and ever-more creative forms of miscegenation. Some may happily partake in all seven before breakfast, though all were bitterly opposed by their intellectual predecessors. Read the rest of this entry »

What kind of constitution do Canadians actually want?

Talking about parliamentary reform in Canada can easily get you branded as a bit of an eccentric kook, or at best, a one-note wonder. Indeed, if you read the mainstream press you don’t tend to come across the topic a whole lot, which just reinforces the idea that our Westminster status quo is basically uncontroversial and quietly appreciated. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” pundits and politicians repeat ad nauseum.

Yet the polls tell a different story. One of the great under-reported phenomena of modern Canada is the massive disparity between the system of government Canadians want, and the system we actually have. A recent Harris-Decima poll commissioned for the Canadian Press put the figures on stark display:

- 72% of Canadians want a directly-elected prime minister, rather than one appointed through parliament

- 60% want the Senate either elected or abolished

- 56% want a different electoral system

Any one of these reforms would represent a substantial transformation to Canada’s style of government. But they’re not even the worst of it. As I noted in a Tumblr post last month, other polls reveal even more contempt for Canada’s present constitutional system:

- 53% of Canadians do not want the governor-general making political decisions regarding coalition governments

- 60% believe the governor general’s office should be either abolished or elected

- 80% of Canadians favor fixed election dates

- Only 21% of Canadians want Canada to remain a monarchy

- Two-thirds of Canadians want the Supreme Court elected

Precisely none of these reforms are ever debated seriously in Canada, save for reform of the Senate, which has taken nearly a century and a half just to get a government nominally in favor of elections. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2011 Election: How wrong I was

I must admit, I felt pretty darn clever when I wrote this post at the beginning of the 2011 election cycle. By carefully averaging reelection rates in past Canadian elections, I thought I had assembled a pretty foolproof model for predicting each party’s solid “base” in the House of Commons — as in, the number of seats they were almost certain to hold, regardless of whatever else happened, simply due to Canadians’ well-documented tendency to reelect the vast majority of incumbent MPs seeking another term.

Alas, the election had other ideas. 2011 actually ended up being one of the worst elections in modern times for incumbents. An amazing 91 incumbent candidates lost their seats in this go-round, including several cabinet ministers and two party leaders. Considering that only 20 ridings out of 308 had no incumbents running for another term, this means 2011′s incumbent rate of reelection was only 68%, the lowest rate since 1993, and, perhaps more interestingly, the lowest rate for any minority parliament election in at least four decades. (Emergency elections held during minority parliaments have historically had significantly higher rates of re-election than elections held under stable majority governments. Riding this trend was a big part of my prediction regime.) This low rate, in turn, was almost single-handedly responsible for the three biggest stories of this election: the decline of the Bloc and Liberals, and the rise of the NDP, none of which my model predicted.

The most obvious explanation for why I was so off is not very intellectually inspiring, but is still as good as any: this was a crazy election. As a fairly unstable country whose most serious existential dilemmas continue to go unaddressed, Canada is prone to wild oscillations in its politics about once a generation. Until now, 1993 was the most recent mash of the “reset” button, and that election also produced bizarre outcomes that defied prediction. As I’ve written elsewhere, a lot of this drama stems entirely from the Quebec vote, whose erratic preferences, as sweeping as they are unpredictable, can cause a lot of turmoil in a delicately balanced multi-party parliamentary system such as ours.

It should be noted that while election ’11 was pretty rough for incumbents, it wasn’t equally rough for everyone. The Bloc Quebecois was obviously hit hardest; out of the 44 incumbents they ran, only three were re-elected, for a truly pitiful success rate of 6.8%. On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, the NDP only lost two of its 34 incumbents, garnering a Stalin-esque success rate of 94%.

Though today’s Internet data makes such numbers very easy to calculate, these party-by-party rates are still basically useless in any long-term sense, no matter how subsequent elections go. If this was truly the election that Changed Everything, then these rates can’t be seen as reflecting anything more than the one-time breakdown of a rotten party system. The NDP obviously can’t always be ascendant, and the Bloc can’t always collapse. Likewise, if this election is an outlier, and subsequent elections go back to our 1993-2008 standards of “normal,” then the crazy ups-and-downs of 2011 will be little more than, well, outliers. In any case, it would take a big stretch to believe that our entire political culture of incumbent preference has been permanently overturned. A more plausible theory would be a “Russian Roulette” analogy, whereby Canadian elections are usually very painless for incumbents, except for that one random time when they’re decidedly not.

The only firm conclusion one can draw from all this is that anything can happen in Canada, and election predictions aren’t worth much. My other blog, The Mace, was off in its seat projections by 40 seats, and was still found to be the most accurate by Canadian Election Watch. That’s the sort of country we’re dealing with.