The Beat Goes On — Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) Recounts Another Week In Coronaverse With The Usual Cast Of Characters

In his e-mail, along with today's toon, Tom/Dan wrote:

Another week of isolation, another cartoon. I hope everyone is hanging in there, and best wishes to anyone directly affected by the virus.

One quick note on this cartoon: "President of what?" is Snake Plissken's reply in "Escape From New York," when he's told that the President is trapped in the maximum security prison of the movie's version of 1997 New York. I wanted some actual line from the movie, and that was the best I could figure out.

I posted a thing on my blog, which (between us) is a slight revision of the foreword to my next book -- which, at latest word, may not be delayed too long after all. Fingers crossed on that. Dropping a new book in the middle of a pandemic is not ideal, but I fear that the longer it gets delayed, the more likely it is never to be published at all. Anyway, this is what I wrote:

Friends, it has been a really strange three years.

Three years ago in November Donald Trump was elected president of these United States, and we all woke up the next morning staring at one another in disbelief, if we even managed to sleep that night at all (I, personally, did not). We felt like we had somehow veered suddenly into the wrong alternate universe. We had all become unwilling residents of the Stupidverse.

Two years ago in November, a similar seismic shock hit my personal life, as I found out that my marriage of nearly twenty years was over, suddenly, brutally, without warning. I didn’t sleep much that night, either. And for a long time after that, nothing in the world made sense, outside of my life or in it.

Somehow through all of this, I kept writing cartoons. The one constant in my life was the weekly deadline — a relentless burden in some ways, but comforting in its familiarity and routine.

Over these past few years, cartoonists and comedians have grown used to hearing the same comment over and over again: you must have so much *material*! Unfortunately that’s not really how it works. Satire is the art of taking something to an absurd extreme in order to highlight the problems of the current moment. The thing is, we are living in the absurd extreme. I try my best, but it’s impossible to come up with something so ludicrous that Trump won’t actually end up doing it in reality, often before anyone even reads the cartoon.

Satire in the age of Trump is exhausting.

Under previous presidents, there were interesting things to say. There was an important niche to be filled critiquing a popular president like Obama. It felt like it mattered to stand up against the wave of jingoism and war fervor of the Bush years in the aftermath of 9/11. Now the challenge is to avoid stating the obvious, over and over again. Trump is an idiot and his acolytes are cultists — everybody knows this! That’s been the professional challenge over the past few years, made more complicated by the fact that I was simultaneously trying to re-invent my personal life from scratch and survive the profound trauma of divorce. Trauma which has been re-awakened as this global crisis throws the precarity of my current life, as compared to the old one, into stark relief.

All that is solid melts into air. I literally have no idea what the world will look like a month from now. You’d think, after the past few years, that I would have embraced the fundamental uncertainty of existence as a constant. You’d think after all these years of working at home, I’d be used to life under lockdown. My apartment is moderately spacious, by New York City standards, which is to say I’m not crammed into a single-room studio. But it is still … small. It feels a bit like being on a reasonably comfortable spaceship, but instead of the void of space, I look out onto blossoming trees and sunny weather and I miss the life I had, the lives we all had, a few short weeks ago, when we could gather with friends and do all those things humans enjoy doing together.

Stay well, my friends

Dan/Tom

And on that somber note, we begin another week isolation (aka :Shelter-In-Place) which has gotten old almost immediately. The news is still grim with the death-count climbing. The :solutions" are not solving anything. In search of something... anything that might relieve these feelings of helplessness and dread, this blogger re-read the novelist William Faulkner's acceptance speech after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. The gist is that the human spirit will not just endure, it will prevail. If this is a (fair & balanced) wish for the future, so be it.

[x TMW]
More Life In The Coronaverse
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

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