Well, I’m happy to report that the heavy lifting has already been done by the industrious worker bees of the Library Patrons of Texas Inc., a non-profit agency dedicated to keeping their fellow citizens apprised of what’s on the library shelves of Montgomery County, Texas.

The results of the LPT’s research on my book can be found online here.

Alright, that might be going overboard. I myself opted for an understated fig leaf in my own rendition of the very same panel, seen below as it appears in a special revised edition of SRB that I’ve whipped up expressly for residents of Montgomery County.

Below: A second excerpt from Stuck Rubber Baby: The Montgomery County Edition, available soon at Christian bookstores everywhere.

I’m sure that local gay people, sexually comfortable heterosexuals, and fans of literature that questions the received wisdom of majority culture were among those polled by the LPT to determine exactly what the community standards and values being applied might be.

And the powerful Fig-Leaf Lobby must surely have been consulted as well.

—New York Times, April 24, 2008
Michael R. Gordon reporting

Quick thinking, George. Struggletime Presidents don’t get to shred the Constitution, ignore the balance of powers, and make hash of civil liberties the way that Wartime Presidents do.

Now here we are on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. If ever there was a day for considered reflections on the state of things, this is it. But no. Cartooning deadlines call.

I hope soon to resume more regular posts, but for now let me offer a reprise of my essay called "Two Years, Two Wars, and One Dog Ago." I posted it on my web site on August 9, 2003, as that year’s 9-11 anniversary approached. Sad to say, everything that was ominous about the George W. Bush presidency then has only grown more frightening since — and yet the country gave him four additional years to wreck the nation’s Constitution by re-electing him in 2004.

Maybe. Depending on what really happened with those Ohio voting machines.

In the wake of 9/11, I was numbed by a mixture of grief for the victims and outrage at the whole human race for not having evolved beyond such savagery, I wrote back then. And I was anxious at the thought of what hay our politicians might be poised to make from the tragedy while a jolted citizenry was preoccupied with private fears. What a golden opportunity to use public anger for unsavory ends!

I would be proud of my prescience if a lot of other people had not figured out Bush’s agenda with alarm just as urgent as mine by the time the Decider’s administration was two years along. But America, ever vulnerable to swift-boating manipulation, let the steamroller roll on.

My 2003 essay is too long for a blog post, but if you’d like to see what I wrote in its entirety, just click on this link.

It has taken a compliant and largely conscienceless Republican-led Congress to allow things to go as far as they have already. Will America be any smarter at the polls this November than it was in 2004?

Time will tell.

Unfortunately, Ashcroft’s successor is no better, just slicker, and the Bush Administration is scarier than ever.

He is a man of astonishing shallowness who has banished nuance from all public discussions within his control and who is incapable of admitting any error of consequence.

He is in the thrall of a coterie of power-hungry liars whose instinct if not conscious goal is apparently to establish a de facto dictatorship in America while preaching about democracy elsewhere. They are serenely content to spill the blood of innocents around the world while throwing gasoline on the fires of dangerous hatreds.

Our President has, in the process of establishing his "my way or the highway" foreign policy, run roughshod over hard-won treaties forged by statesman with a greater degree of wisdom in their toenails that he is capable of imagining in his most vaulting moments.

Meanwhile, he is in the process of obliterating every humane and forward-looking program here at home and is shameless in his dedication to the unquenchable greed of his friends in the corporate ruling class.

He claims to worship God but kneels more convincingly before an unthinking ideology of tax-cutting that invites all of us to throw future solvency overboard so that his rich friends won’t be asked to sacrifice any of their perks.

He and his Republican predecessors have packed the Supreme Court with judges who show little indication to protect the public from Executive Branch excesses, and both remaining branches of government are controlled by either wealth-obsessed amoralists or ineffective wusses who long ago lost whatever skills one would wish them to have that might enable them to rise to the occasion and effectively fight back.

The President has three more years in office. The voting machines destined to inform us whether we are pleased with the present crop of rulers are trusted by no one who has been paying attention.

God knows what ways the "opposition party" will find to make itself useless in dislodging the current ruling party from its position of reckless control, but it has proven itself to be endlessly inventive in accomplishing that task in the past.

Not to sound bleak or anything, but a fellow can’t help wondering exactly what the American citizenry is supposed to do about this situation.

When I was a kid harboring dreams of someday creating a nationally syndicated newspaper strip of my own, I was forewarned by the Famous Artists Cartooning Course (a 24-lesson correspondence course I took while in high school) about the liberties individual newspapers would feel entitled to take with my future comic strip, no matter how well I were to write or draw it.

I was instructed to make certain panels — and even whole tiers of panels — expendable in the case of Sunday strips because editors would want the freedom to chop them up, rearrange the panels, and omit whole sections of the strip to save space. Succinct humor would be impossible; there had to be extraneous padding so that the jokes would still make sense after editorial amputations were completed.

I was told to make sure nothing important to a gag or storyline was placed in the bottom quarter-inch of a daily strip, since that section was routinely shaved off by editors who wanted to squeeze more features onto a page even if it cramped the effectiveness of each individual strip.

Then came the demand from editors for wholesale shrinkage of all syndicated comic strips all the time. No more Mr. Nice Editor. Page space was money.

Expertly drawn strips like Apartment 3G and Li’l Abner had to begin skimping on dynamic action and/or physical comedy. Atmospheric vistas of Manhattan and Dogpatch had to give way to endless close-ups of characters hunching awkwardly downward in their frames so that their expressive eyebrows would remain in view underneath word balloons that hogged more and more pictorial real estate (since you can’t shrink text too much or it will become illegible).

The whole mass diminutivization requirement was grossly insulting to a creatively transcendent art form that in its heyday had spawned timeless classics like Krazy Kat and Little Nemo in Slumberland — strips whose beautifully crafted imagery invited rapt contemplation whether they the pictures were spare or elaborate.

And the disrespect was made even more humiliating by the industry’s requirement that cartoonists cooperate in making the children of their imaginations ever more chop-uppable, rearrangeable, and ready to be mashed tightly into whichever jammed corners of their newspapers could be spared for such frivolous fare

Now of course, everything has been made easier by the digital revolution. Charles M. Schulz needn’t be involved at all in the mutilation of his honored offspring. All that’s required is some art department underling who knows how to mash a masterwork flat with Photoshop.

But maybe this kind of thing doesn’t happen in your local newspaper, just mine.

This time the questions are coming from Ed Mathews, who was invited to talk to me while hanging out at Comicon.com’s throbbing Pulse news division. (Normally Popimage, where "My Hypnotist" has been unfolding all week, is Ed’s turf, but Jennifer Contino offered him some of her Pulse space so he could spead the word about my comic strip to the Pulse constituency. Thanks, Jenn. You’re da bomb!

While I’m citing comics journalists who’ve given me Internet "air time" lately, let me also remind you about Katherine Keller’s interview that was posted back in December at Sequential Tart. I don’t get this much press attention often, folks (must be that subliminal post-hypnotic suggestion I enbedded in all of my advance plugs for "Hypnotist"), so lap it up while it’s available!

Meanwhile, back in the land of the mundane, Eddie and I spent hours this weekend trying to get a head start on tax preparation. We’ll be getting professional help this year because of the state we live in (speaking both geographically and matrimonially).

It’s like this: Eddie and I have to check the "single" box on our federal forms even as we check the "married" box on our Massachusetts forms. Such is the sad, conflicted state of America’s current marriage laws.

Eddie and I had contemplated using TurboTax to do our taxes as I’ve sometimes done individually in the past. But the software designers at Intuit, TurboTax’s parent company, seem not to have figured out that there’s a whole set of couples who will never again fit Uncle Sam’s template unless times change radically.

The reality is simple: in Massachusetts Eddie and I are neither domestic partners nor civilly united nor the recipient of blessings under some unofficial "ceremony of commitment." We are legally married. Period. We’d be as married as George and Laura Bush if George and the Federal Government (and lovable Laura, for all the help she’s offering) weren’t quivering in fear behind the built-in bigotry of 1996’s so-called Defense of Marriage Act, hoping desperately thatall of the gay marriages will just go away before their precious institution is ruined—but not before they can be exploited to win a few more elections for Republicans.

But that’s for them to sort out. Here in Tax Season 2006, Eddie and I find ourselves both legally married and involuntarily unmarried at the same time.

Before spending money on TurboTax I called Intuit’s techie-help line to ask whether they’ve programmed their software to deal with couples like us. Those of you who have used TurboTax know that if the data you enter in your federal form doesn’t match the data you enter in your state form, the software will insist on flinging alert messages at you until you agree to pick one version of reality or the other.

When I explained my concern, the phone techie on the other end of the line (who happened to be a lesbian herself) exclaimed. "Yeah, come to think of it, that sucks!" (Or words to that effect; maybe she wasn’t quite that blunt while on the job.)

I suggested that she relay word through her supervisor to Intuit’s programmers that they should get on the stick about this problem if they don’t want TurboTax to keep losing customers year after year. There are a lot of us married gay folks here in Massachusetts, after all, and this problem is going to keep coming up again and again.

"The couples claim state health regulations defining marriage as being only between a man and a woman violate the state Constitution’s equal protection, privacy and due-process provisions," Johnson elaborates.

"In October, Peter Schiff, senior counsel with the state Attorney General’s office, argued before the appellate court that the plaintiffs wanted the courts to rewrite the definition of marriage. He said that job is best handled by the legislative branch of government.

"The court agreed.

"In our opinion, the Legislature is where the changes to marriage" should be addressed, Justice John Lahtinen wrote in the 5-0 decision."

MY COMMENT: And what are the targets of discrimination supposed to do when Legislatures themselves are the guardians of injustice?

Alabama natives like me remember when our state legislators were delighted to deny just treatment to the African-American in Bull Conner Country. Bible-based arguments abounded for why God wanted racial inequality to prevail in perpetuity, and the majority of church-going Southerners could be counted upon to support lawmakers who stuck to their guns on this point.

It took unelected judges who were insulated from voter reprisals to face squarely the fact that longstanding Southern traditions were a gross affront to America’s constitutional promise that all its citizens would be treated equally under the law. For me such "judicial activism" was inspiring during my youth. It gave the Bill of Rights real force; they were not a mere collection of platitudes on parchment.

As the right-wing packing of present-day courts proceeds apace and the ability of incensed majorities to elbow aside the aspirations of minorities resumes its standing as the norm, opportunities to be inspired by America’s promises are few and far between.

Maybe it takes personal memories of watching elected legislators running amok in the thrall of bigotry-based "traditions" for Joe Public to grasp the full chilliness of news like today’s.