Thursday Links
By Draining the swamp isn’t easy- but @POTUS never gives up! The bigger the monsters are….#BenGarrison #cartoons https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/y64bGOFzC8
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) June 22, 2017
- This is a few months old, but I think it’s still incredibly relevant. Julie Beck of The Atlantic talks about why we’re living in a post-fact world.
- Donald Trump’s choice to be envoy to address women’s issues is this gal: When Flake, a vocal Trump critic, announced his retirement by saying “there may not be a place for a Republican like me in the current Republican climate,” Nance tweeted that he “sounded like a middle school girl.”
- Karen Heller of WaPo throws a bit of shade Rod Dreher. “The man burps copy.” is my favorite quote.
- This is a weird, interesting story about Ben Garrison and his journey from crank to troll-victim to super-crank, but mostly I just like it because of its descriptions of Ben Garrison cartoons.
To take in a whole Ben Garrison cartoon is crushing, because of how saturated and strange his particular artistic terrain is — it’s as overstuffed as the busiest Brueghel, and the taxonomic depiction of every disposable perversity and ugliness is clearly something like the soul of the work. Bit by bit, it is legible: Garrison’s towering and increasingly muscular depictions of Trump are ridiculous relative to the chowder-bodied real thing, but also so goofily gormless that they provide perspective on the particular hero worship at work. His sweeping, boiling swampscapes offer a queasy glimpse at the world as the artist sees it. Nothing is concealed or even really coded, but that doesn’t make it any easier to comprehend. Everything is labeled, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense.