So I made a funny picture of the Keebler elf we put in charge of the Attorney General’s Office of the United States. This is my homage to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the elf who invented the best-selling cookie in the South, the Keebler Kluxie Cookie. But, of course, if I call the man a racist, angry Trumpkins are going to immediately tell me that I am the real racist. I admit it, though, I am prejudiced against people who hate others based on skin color, religion, or other factors that allow them to feel they are inherently better than the group that they hate. And I don’t apologize for making fun of the people I am prejudiced against. I have, after all, a good reason for making fun. I am a cartoonist at heart, if not a professional. And making fun of the things that I hate and fear makes me fear them less. I feel it is a much better response than to build more bombs and give the police more freedom to murder those I hate and fear. Laughing at the darkness is, I think, better than filling my own heart with the darkness and allowing it to snuff out my light.
For example, here is a vicious real-life Boris Badenov who really scares me. He is a very angry man who wants to punish people for being immigrants. He also hates Jewish people and is on record blaming them for the world’s troubles in a way that sounds frustratingly retro-Nazi-fascist in tone.
This is, of course, the same kind of fun-making that Jay Ward unleashed on the Russian threat that had American school children learning how to “duck and cover” in response to fears of imminent nuclear first-strikes back in the 60’s when I was a small boy. Rocky and Bullwinkle made us laugh and made it better. In this picture I have stolen you see Steve Bannon using a cane to threaten the All-American Moose. And you know that however dastardly the plan, there is every reason to believe the Moose will magically survive and we will get a good laugh at the bad guy’s expense.
And making fun of these cartoon villains (there is no member of Trump’s basket of villains who is not a human cartoon character) is not a matter of actually hating the people. I don’t personally hate any of these individuals. I make fun of them because it makes me feel better. It may also make some of you who I share these things with feel better too. I do hate many of the things they have said and done. And I feel I have a right to make fun of these things and thus make fun of the cartoon villains who said and did them.
I identify as a liberal for these reasons, and do not apologize for it, so make cartoons of me too if you feel the need.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Centaur
The centaur… Kentaur, Κένταυρος, Centaurus, Sagittary… human from the waist up,horse body from the waist down… I hate to break it to you, but the damned things are only imaginary. There are no real ones anywhere. Not even in Thessaly. The half-horse children of Ixion and Nephele are totally made up by goofy story-tellers in the distant past.
And yet, what they actually represent in poems, plays, stories, and myths is a very real part of what it means to be human and what it means to be alive.
There are many centaurs in literature, going all the way back to the Greeks. But my favorite depictions of the man-horses of literature occur in what are basically children’s books. In the Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis portrays centaurs as wise and noble, gifted at star-gazing, prophecy, healing,and warfare. Aslan the Lion, the Christ-figure of the tales, relies on their steadfast faithfulness in his battles against evil and the White Witch. In the Harry Potter books of J.K. Rowling, the centaurs live in the Forbidden Forest just outside of the Hogwarts grounds, always in hiding from the human world and shy, at least until Firenze comes Chiron-like to join the faculty, aid in the teaching of magic, and help in the struggle against the evil of Voldemort. In the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, Chiron himself of Greek myth teaches the young heroes, though the rest of the centaurs you meet in the stories are very Dionysian and basically a bunch of drunken party boys… err… party horses… err… horseboys.
So essentially the centaur has a dual nature. On the one hand they are cultured and learned and wise. On the other hand, they are directly connected to the earth and the natural world, liking the sensual half of the human experience. And it might be important to note… centaurs never wear pants… in fact, could never wear pants.
In Greek mythology, the Centauromachy, or war between the centaurs and the Lapiths, represents a central struggle in the human psyche. The centaurs are pictured as being as wild as untamed horses. They are sensual and willful and try to disrupt the wedding of Hippodamia to Pirithous, King of Lapithae by kidnapping Hippodamia and all the other Lapith women and girls. It turns out badly for the centaurs because they represent unbridled sensuality without rules while the Lapiths (who are directly related to the centaurs as cousins) represent rules and rationality. We all know how that is expected to play out in human society… so of course that is what happens in the myth. The rational always rules in the end.
So I identify strongly with the idea of the centaur. The rational man-part guiding the sensual horse-part. The whole teacher-y Chiron thing… and getting to walk around naked… on four legs. The centaur is a thing to draw and a thing to tell stories with and a thing to invade your dreams. Part man, part horse, and totally unreal.
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