Afghan Notebook #28
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 by Stephanie McMillan
Archive for August, 2010
Cartoon: Street Harassment
Monday, August 30th, 2010 by Barry Deutsch[Crossposted on TADA, where anyone can comment. Comments on this post here on "Alas" are restricted to feminists and pro-feminists only.]
Click on the cartoon to see it larger.
| Script for this cartoon | |
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Transcript:
(Each of the first nine panels shows a black-haired woman walking in a public place at different times and in different outfits. In each outfit, a different stranger on the street is making a comment to her. She looks very unhappy with the comments. Panel 1 starts showing her from fairly far away, but each panel gets closer up on her face until panel 9.) Panel 1 Panel 2 (woman is waiting at bus stop) Panel 3 Panel 4 Panel 5 (Woman is carrying groceries) Panel 6 (Woman is riding bike) Panel 7 (Close up on woman’s almost wincing face). Panel 8 (Closer up on her face, which is turned away from the viewer.) Panel 9 (Very far shot of woman, walking hunched over with her hands in her jacket pockets). Panel 10 (Woman at home, in her bedroom. A cheerful man in the background, wearing pajamas and sitting on a bed, talks to her; she has her back to him and looks miserable.) |
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When I was researching this cartoon, I came across several different women reporting they get harassed more often when they’re on a bicycle. So I decided that in one panel the woman should be riding a bike. But it turned out I was lousy at drawing a bike, so I actually had to use photo reference, and redraw it several times. So I probably worked harder on that one panel than any other in the cartoon.
Then, when I finalized the cartoon’s layout, I ended up cropping 90% of the bike out of that panel. Oh well.
Monday, August 30th, 2010 by Stephanie McMillan
Someone asked me this question:
“Obviously the destruction [of the planet] already occurring hasn’t been enough to bring us to the tipping point [of resistance]. What will it take for the masses to unite behind an effective solution?”
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My reply:
“What will it take?” is something I wonder about all the time. How far does the murder of the planet have to go? Do we really have to be starving and gasping for breath before we break through denial? We’re almost at that point now, and denial is still rampant.
Part of the problem is that most people in this culture don’t have any idea how to live without industrial production — without water from the tap, without food from grocery stores. If the only source of basic necessities is this system, and people don’t know any other way to live, then they will continue to defend the system that provides them.
It’s like the demand for jobs. In the context of this society, most of us can’t live without jobs, though they’re the arena in which our exploitation takes place. So until we understand that the whole system must be done away with, and until we can live some other way, we end up demanding that the system provide more jobs.
I saw a TV program where someone showed common vegetables (eggplant, tomato, etc) to schoolchildren, and none of them could identify them. In the last couple generations, most of us have lost the ability to grow food (even when we can still identify it). More importantly, most people have no access to land.
A lot of people argue that we should form communes, permaculture “eco-villages,” community gardens and so on to serve as examples of how we could live sustainably. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing those things, but they’re not going to be what’s needed to defeat this system.
There were many cultures who used to live sustainably on this continent, and they’ve been systematically all but wiped out. So it’s not enough to withdraw. As soon as the system wants what you have, or demands your participation, they will violently destroy anyone who doesn’t cooperate.
What will it take? The same things it’ll take to make revolution to uproot all forms of exploitation and oppression.
In the first stages:
* Broad realization that this system is killing the planet, and that to save all life, including our own, we need to defeat and dismantle the system.
* A recognition of who the enemy is.
* The sense that it is more dangerous to let things go on as they are than it is to rise up and fight back.
* A vision of a viable future.
These ideas are spreading, and we need to spread them more, to unite as many as possible in a powerful movement to take this system on. We need to connect the struggle for saving the planet with the struggles for social justice — the enemy is the same.
– Stephanie McMillan
Monday, August 30th, 2010 by Matt Bors
A comment about my recent Afghanistan cartoon caught my eye.
Their construction industry isn’t hampered by union thieves and outrageous, unreasonable environmental regulations.
Yes, no corruption in Afghanistan! And let me tell you, staying in buildings that were erected in the last few years, this place could use some building codes. Environmental regulations? Not any that I’m aware of. Shit and piss run in the gutter next to the trash and flies swarming the dead dog carcass. No one is in charge of cleaning it up so no one does. No free market solution seems to have popped up.
Fun With Predator Drones
Monday, August 30th, 2010 by Matt Bors
Obama drastically increased the number of boots on the ground and the use of predator drone attacks. What a liberal.
“Crowd Counts”
Monday, August 30th, 2010 by August J. Pollak
Crowd counts for right-wing events combine two of the right’s favorite passtimes: quickly spreading lies over the internet and then demanding that any evidence they’re lying is liberal bias. Case in point: Glenn Beck holds massive self-promotional event at the Lincoln Memorial. Random internet monkeys claim a million people were there. People who know what they’re talking about say it’s a tenth of that. Wingers throw tantrum.
Oh, right, so I guess it’s three of the right’s favorite passtimes.
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War is Borsing
Sunday, August 29th, 2010 by Matt BorsAlison Hallett of the Portland Mercury has an interview with me.
Are you approaching this journalistically, or more like your editorial cartoons? (ie to what extent are you going for objectivity, insofar as that is possible?)
All I can do is present the situation as honestly as possible. I don’t imagine the cartoons that come from this will have the normal humorous tone of my editorial cartoons, but I’m also not pretending to be an objective journalist. I wouldn’t want that anyway. “Objective journalists” have been reporting from Afghanistan for nine years and they rarely venture out of Kabul or their embed program. Our main goal is to see how Afgans outside of these areas actually live.
Axe in Congo
Sunday, August 29th, 2010 by Matt BorsDavid Axe leaves for the Congo this week to report from one of the most troubled places on Earth. There are plans to do some work together from this trip and Bors Blog wishes him him well from Herat, Afghanistan.
You can follow his reportiong at warisboring.com.
