This modern world

Abstract

This Modern World's earliest incarnation was a satire on technology and consumerism gone awry set in a visual clip‐art world of fifties futurism; it first appeared in the San Francisco—based magazine Processed World. PW is a sort of journal for radical and disenfranchised office workers and other proletariat of the information age. It often features brutally honest critiques of the angst, despair, and drudgery of the office routine and then examines small ways in which people trapped in those routines fight back and try to maintain their sanity. This Modern World's transition from its focus on consumer society to its current incarnation as a strip of media criticism and political satire was a gradual one. However, there was one event that in retrospect marked the transformation into my current, somewhat uneasy identity as a “political cartoonist.” It was the first Saturday after the start of that six‐week spasm of mindless patriotic fever known as the Gulf War. After spending the day doing my bit for participatory democracy, expressing my opinion in the streets of San Francisco with 100,000 or so of my fellow citizens, I went home and turned on the TV—because, of course, nothing is real in This Modern World until it's been viewed through the eyes of a TV anchorperson. The anchorperson I tuned in to reported on the protesters for a minute or two and then quickly cut away to a segment of equal or greater length on the antics of a dozen or so pro‐war protesters in some conservative bedroom community outside the city. And that was the end of the report. I was outraged at this effective trivialization of the opinions of some 100,000 Americans. My first reaction was to phone the station and lambast a recording machine, which turned out to be less than satisfying. Then it occurred to me that I had a public forum. I went into my studio and wrote the cartoon (on media coverage of Gulf War demonstrations) that follows, and for better or worse set foot on a slippery slope’ from which I have yet to recover.