Notes
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It’s not in the tradition of the cartoonist to post a simultaneous retraction, or apologetic deconstruction with the cartoon they drew. In fact, even worse, on a grander scale, for the artist to grate against the tradition of The Artist, and go so far as to explain something they expressed through a medium that should be considered unexplained and unexplainable, preferably discrete. Oh, the shame… crassly explaining by means of another medium, text, which only usually ‘appens in a court of law after the expression (as IT‘s history may attest to) if the work was culturally damned, or contrapuntally, if the artist is egotistical enough, that when the press come calling with promises of money and sex, ugly class hungry, succumbs.
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I emphasize this, as wisdom doth intimate, Art Better Be As Mysterious As That Which Inspired It.
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Nevertheless, the Muse hath demanded it:
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As a comic artist, cartoonist, whatever… I’ve always avoided direct political satire. It feels like a default setting for journalistic entrapment – psychologically – that many a Fleet Street flunky, well-intentioned or otherwise, hath fallen prey to. Fowl of.
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I’ve researched the subject, and found that there is an history of politicians, dating back to at least Gladstone and D’Israeli, positively enjoying that a cartoonist hath represented them, nay, glorified them, even if the message were one regurgitating utter bile. So, and honest guv’nor, it isn’t an excuse for my lack of development in the area of caricature why I’ve always avoided… uh… caricature. Y’know, yer ‘onner, I dunnit so as not to feed the ego of yet another psychotic politician who coldly declares war, or signs the document that consecrates such horror. The arms business and its gallery of vicious smiling salesmen.
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Fame, at any price, including the violent dismemberment of the beauty of people’s lives, arouses them.
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I wish not, to procure.
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Then there is the problem of pigs. As an embarrassed human being, I am disgusted at our treatment of pigs, alongside our treatment of other humans, and, well, every other fucking species that we, the humans, have managed to do atrocious things to.
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I admire bacteria. For bacteria has probably been the most successful creature in waging war on a species that has the arrogance to assume it is dominant, in its lack of a real sense of Soul and broad divinity. Universal Community remains an ideal at this point. Still. Even here. In the Silence.
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Yet here I am, degrading pigs, by assigning them to being a symbolic representation of all that is egregious about humans who have power over other humans’ lives. Pigs actually don’t deserve that.
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Yet this. This… is the International Times. A magazine that found its feet, and guts, and heart, at a time when the socio-military temporal soldiers, that enacted and enforced the edicts of an intellectual Draconian Mediaeval Feudalist systematic complacency, were described in the midstream parlance, as “Pigs”.
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Actually, those who had the eyes of a Soul that is Free, and dared to question such edicts, who dared to confront those soldiers, by flaunting their blatant lack of belief in a calcified social construct, would never have been so uncool as to reinforce the stereotype. Yet it found fame in the so-called underground, the weed-exchange of an already dead revolution, a shadow of an echo of a movement that seemed all the more ridiculous the more trendy it became, before its implosion. (And reanimation as a guy in bellbottoms saying “Yeahhh!” at some bird’s tits, doing Kung Fu, and spraying pig hormones into his armpits before he jumped into a Ford Capri in an advert.)
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They are clever like that and always turn Truth into adverts.
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So. Again. Whilst I do not retract the meaning behind my cartoon, I apologize for its clichéd symbolism.
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And I apologize to pigs.
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Here’s to Nye Bevan.
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Luke Temple Walsh