I can’t reply directly to Boxcar for some reason, but thanks for the belly laughs. “Fish is an artist. His work, once it’s posted online, is art. It no longer belongs to him. It belongs to the public discourse.
So, in a sense, he is much like Manning leaking information that previously was held private.”
That is shear genius. Your understated, devastating mockery of that awful cartoon is far, far more effective than anything I could have said. I’m a huge fan of earnest trolling, and honestly I’ve never seen it executed better. Well done, Boxcar. I salute you.
Thanks…Yea..I have been having issues threading comments. I tried replying below and couldn’t. But not until after writing away and submitting only to see, dammit, the NSA is censoring my comments!
Sorry, it wasn’t meant to be withering or to otherwise put you down. I am just amused by your replies.
On the topic at hand, I do not disagree with your opinion of Fish’s “comic” today, in fact I find it pretty lame and lacking in empathy. I just don’t see what all this typing on the internet is going to do about it.
“I just don’t see what all this typing on the internet is going to do about it.”
And your above-it-all pointing and laughing at silly people who think condemning Manning is important, what is that intended to do, apart from demonstrating your superiority?
Fire Tom Friedman and Tarzie fail to appreciate – and apparently experience – the complex storm of emotions that descended upon many of us upon hearing of our hero’s concession of guilt to the most vile and preying governing authority humanity has ever endured.
Their hyper-emotional, instantly personal and artless responses to our artist’s pained and disappointed comment – which must be expressed – come from somewhere valid, but are incomplete.
Bradley Manning has done all one person can do to sweep cobwebs from the eyes of the public, but Moloch will continue to eat children, whether or not Manning chooses to become more of a martyr than he now is. Manning is only a prophet of many greater than him yet to come if justice is ever to reign.
Manning, if he ever leaves prison will not become another Mandela, a president cherished by people of justice, the latter being conspicuously absent in this culture.
I believe Manning’s extreme actions were only in support of his modest desire to live and let live.
If Manning intended to die as a consequence of his statements he could have become a suicide attacker, as did Nidal Hasan, rather than actively encourage his antagonists to kill him now in a kangaroo court.
Bradley Manning has now become a broken broom, but we not-yet-broken witnesses to his breaking should continue to be critical of the system that broke him and less so of the broken, who, after all still remains a martyr for justice.
May all the splinters of the broken broom, Manning, become whole new brooms in greater numbers, bound together by the truths for which he has paid so dearly, so as to become, one day, unbreakable.
So one thing I would like to know is what it feels like to be kept warm and be able to have your ‘toon’ seen in, the light of the fire that Manning lit, stoked and is now being burnt in? Far enough
Away to never get a singed hair…. Or I could just ask any parasite … It does not have to be you, Fish. Because you are as special as a bedbug.
One more thing. When you castigate Manning for not living up to your fantasies of an anti-authoritarian superhero, you set the bar higher for — and disincentivize — dissent. In that way, this comic very much reminds me of those who dismiss Snowden because he fled rather than “face the music.”
I’m not really familiar with your other work, Fish, but many people I admire speak highly of you. So here’s hoping you’ll apologize for this one. The “balls” comment is the fuckin’ worst.
Great cartoon on so many levels,
I’m with you and Bradley Manning…..
Assange and Snowden,
Greenwald and Poitras….
Free the Man –
Award him the Nobel Peace prize.
A hard call to make, Dwayne – I read the cartoon not as a criticism of Manning, who has been tortured for a significant amount of the time he’s been incarcerated by the US military – if he now attempts, certainly at the suggestion of his lawyers, to reduce the decades of further military incarceration he is facing, he has already performed a service which ensures him his place in history – but rather as a hope that future whistleblowers will be able to escape the clutches of the US military and (in)security apparatus and thus be in a position to refrain from apologising for the service they have rendered humanity. Galileo Galilei was forced to recant by the Inquisition, but his service endures. «E pur si muove !»…
I’m glad you explained yourself on Facebook, because you wouldn’t believe the intellectual knots people were twisting themselves in to square what this cartoon unambiguously says with their admiration for your other work.
This is a miss for you. Not only are you way out of line to judge someone whose contribution to the fight against empire is of historic proportions but that you do it with macho talk of ‘having balls’ takes it into the realm of the truly repellant, and that’s even putting aside the issue of Manning’s gender.
Something like this might hit me less wrong if it came from Barrett Brown or someone else who was looking the full force of punitive state power straight in the fangs, but you’re a fucking cartoonist. What makes your daily acquiescence to state power — that is, lawfully creating satirical cartoons for a small audience made up of people who mostly agree with you — less cringing than Manning’s effort to possibly secure for himself a few years of freedom? Why don’t you do something really brave? Something that might get you arrested? Or don’t you have the balls?
I don’t see a worthy political statement here. I see narcissism, victim-blaming and a lack of empathy. It’s very fucked up and I’m not sure I’ll ever read you the same way again.
Thanks for getting it right.
I bet if you wrote Manning’s apology on a piece of paper, and held it up to a mirror, you would see the above un-apology.
Anyway, I agree. But I also remember Lenny Bruce’s act about authority figures coming after his butt with a funnel and a bucket of hot lead — he said he’d tell them anything they wanted to hear, just keep that funnel away.
So, one more time, I say great job Mr. Fish.
And thank you – @david lange – for the reminder of Lenny Bruce. It’s hard to be furious and – well, humble?74tn – at the same time, to see what we ourselves might resort to under a similar test….
This is what true courage looks like, calling out someone who gave his life to stop war crimes and slow empire. I just wish you and your giant balls were doing time instead of Manning so you could show him how it’s done.
It isn’t up to me to say what difference my work makes or has made. I do, however, know that joining the armed forces of a spooky empire and agreeing to keep secrets for it and then being shocked by the crimes it commits and breaching my promise and then being tortured and imprisoned for speaking truthfully was never going to be my path to relevance. In fact, none of the artists who have moved me towards resistance and criticism of the U.S. government have been required to follow an arc of political awareness similar to Manning’s. I wasn’t aware that was the litmus test. I deeply appreciate Bradley’s leaking – I’m just disturbed and saddened by the victory of the state who was able to coerce him into admitting that his noble act of whistleblowing was a personal failure instead of a public service.
Bullshit, you self-absorbed piece of dung. No one is asking about your “arc of political awareness.” They are calling you out for being unbelievably shitty. And your comic doesn’t speak to you being disturbed or saddened by the victory of the state – it calls out Manning for lacking courage, and most strikingly, “balls.”
The only one who is imposing “litmus tests” is you, insisting that Manning and future whistleblowers not only do way more — and pay for it way more — than anyone else, but to do it a way that conforms with your macho fantasies.
We get it. You and the artists that inspired you were never as backward as Manning when he began his march toward complete moral and physical destruction by the state. So put aside anything privilege might have to do with that, or any inclination to admire someone for coming so far in their thinking, and judge away.
That you think the influence of your work vs. Manning’s is an open question says all we need to know about where you’re coming from.
Fuck you, you preening, self-important creep.
boxcar
Have to admit to being confused. Fish is an artist. His work, once it’s posted online, is art. It no longer belongs to him. It belongs to the public discourse. So, in a sense, he is much like Manning leaking information that previously was held private. It is now public and becomes part of the public discourse. Fish’s cartoons derive such vitriol because they challenge the status quo and sheeple like quality of the average american. Much like the exposure of any wrong doing by people or institutions we dearly need to believe in as just and righteous…when they are not.
To attack Fish for his opinions, beliefs and work is just silly. Such misplaced rage and energy. I am scared for the folks who didn’t like Cambell’s Tomato Soup all because Warhol had the balls to expose it for what it is! It’s those railing against Fish, i challenge you to find the source of your rage and then take it out on the actual culprits. But that would take courage, intelligence, passion, and the willingness to expose one’s own convictions, opening themselves to ridicule. And THAT takes balls. The kind of balls so few artists (and people of all walks) are truly lacking. And these kind of balls, frankly, are not being displayed here by the “get a haircut” comebacks being hurled at Fish.
Tis true Fish is mighty opinionated, Yet he, much like the great artists through history who have had the courage to challenge authority, has the courage to put out through his art, the convictions of his beliefs. Now, would Fish still do what he does in Stalin’s Russia (or Putin’s Russia by that matter) knowing a cartoon would indeed get him imprisoned, tortured, killed? Only Fish can answer that. But i do feel confident that part of the reason artists such as Fish rail the way they do is because they can! And they want to preserve that freedom. Fish owes no-one an apology or an explanation. To those who feel they have a right to put down the messenger for the message, have at it. I know Fish can take it. In fact, it will make him stronger. There are many works of his i do not like. But that’s what make great artists special. They are held to the standard of their own conscious, not to the milquetoast tastes of a made for tv populace . Viewers can react however they choose to. That’s the beauty of art…creating discussion. And the folks here who are shouting Fish down, to shut up, and go back in his box and draw lovely little cartoons about how everything is unicorns and lollipops in the land of the free, it is they who are being more repressive, intolerant and, dare i say, “un-American”. In every battle like this there are only two sides: Edward Murrow or Joe McCarthy. Which side are you on?
And my take: The cartoon is NOT about manning at all. The message, as in much of Fish’s work, is that it is ALL of our job’s to call out injustice and horrific deeds done in our name. Having to create cult hero’s out of everyday 20 somethings is what the establishment wants. To create individuals standing up to power are easier to swat away and discredit than if large swaths of people stand together. And no better way than to kill a movement than to prevent it from ever starting.
If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox — if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the … confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought. -ER Murrow
Funny you should mention Warhol, boxcar, because your lengthy, bourgie and sophomoric disquisition on art and free speech made me think of his famous line to Valerie Solanas.
‘Did you type this all yourself?’
Condemnation is not censorship. Fish has an opinion on Manning. I have an opinion on Fish. You have an opinion on me. See how that works?
Is this the fuck you to the court manning is not in a position to give (as a sane person on trial) or is this focusing on manning’s inability to hold his own under mere court proceedings?
I can’t reply directly to Boxcar for some reason, but thanks for the belly laughs. “Fish is an artist. His work, once it’s posted online, is art. It no longer belongs to him. It belongs to the public discourse.
So, in a sense, he is much like Manning leaking information that previously was held private.”
That is shear genius. Your understated, devastating mockery of that awful cartoon is far, far more effective than anything I could have said. I’m a huge fan of earnest trolling, and honestly I’ve never seen it executed better. Well done, Boxcar. I salute you.
Thanks…Yea..I have been having issues threading comments. I tried replying below and couldn’t. But not until after writing away and submitting only to see, dammit, the NSA is censoring my comments!
Boxcar, you were being mocked just now.
Really? No….say it isn’t so! Well, you know us craven ball-less artists are gluttons for any kind of attention. Even from you, Tarzie, my sweet!
‘ballless’? I don’t say shit like that, at least not earnestly. That’s your artist friend.
bunch of dudes in the comments section calling a guy out for self-righteousness. this is soooo delicious.
Actually, no, that’s not what he’s being called out for. So even within the extremely lame realm of hypocrisy-spotting discourse, you fail.
Grow some balls. Also a brain. Also be more interesting. <– this is art. Which makes me a leaker of sorts.
lulz. if you say so, dude.
Don’t you mean, ‘cool story, bro?’
Woulda been withering.
Sorry, it wasn’t meant to be withering or to otherwise put you down. I am just amused by your replies.
On the topic at hand, I do not disagree with your opinion of Fish’s “comic” today, in fact I find it pretty lame and lacking in empathy. I just don’t see what all this typing on the internet is going to do about it.
Anyways, as you were.
“I just don’t see what all this typing on the internet is going to do about it.”
And your above-it-all pointing and laughing at silly people who think condemning Manning is important, what is that intended to do, apart from demonstrating your superiority?
Fire Tom Friedman and Tarzie fail to appreciate – and apparently experience – the complex storm of emotions that descended upon many of us upon hearing of our hero’s concession of guilt to the most vile and preying governing authority humanity has ever endured.
Their hyper-emotional, instantly personal and artless responses to our artist’s pained and disappointed comment – which must be expressed – come from somewhere valid, but are incomplete.
Thank You.
‘come from somewhere valid, but are incomplete.’
oh god fuck off, Doctor Thera-crunch. Like I need your fucking sign-off, you arrogant, self-satisfied dolt.
There are better ways of expressing anguish than admonishing people with far greater courage than you to grow bigger balls.
Really, you condescending dipshit. Just fuck off.
Nevermind, guys. They just have tiny dicks.
‘they just have tiny dicks’
More ‘complex emotions’ in the Fishian ‘Grow Balls, Manning’ vein.
I guess I will never grasp the depths of your anguish.
At least you’ve dispensed with the condescending voice of self satisfied bourgie knowingness.
My “I am not Bradley Manning Fantasia” allegory.
Bradley Manning has done all one person can do to sweep cobwebs from the eyes of the public, but Moloch will continue to eat children, whether or not Manning chooses to become more of a martyr than he now is. Manning is only a prophet of many greater than him yet to come if justice is ever to reign.
Manning, if he ever leaves prison will not become another Mandela, a president cherished by people of justice, the latter being conspicuously absent in this culture.
I believe Manning’s extreme actions were only in support of his modest desire to live and let live.
If Manning intended to die as a consequence of his statements he could have become a suicide attacker, as did Nidal Hasan, rather than actively encourage his antagonists to kill him now in a kangaroo court.
Bradley Manning has now become a broken broom, but we not-yet-broken witnesses to his breaking should continue to be critical of the system that broke him and less so of the broken, who, after all still remains a martyr for justice.
May all the splinters of the broken broom, Manning, become whole new brooms in greater numbers, bound together by the truths for which he has paid so dearly, so as to become, one day, unbreakable.
So one thing I would like to know is what it feels like to be kept warm and be able to have your ‘toon’ seen in, the light of the fire that Manning lit, stoked and is now being burnt in? Far enough
Away to never get a singed hair…. Or I could just ask any parasite … It does not have to be you, Fish. Because you are as special as a bedbug.
One more thing. When you castigate Manning for not living up to your fantasies of an anti-authoritarian superhero, you set the bar higher for — and disincentivize — dissent. In that way, this comic very much reminds me of those who dismiss Snowden because he fled rather than “face the music.”
I’m not really familiar with your other work, Fish, but many people I admire speak highly of you. So here’s hoping you’ll apologize for this one. The “balls” comment is the fuckin’ worst.
Great cartoon on so many levels,
I’m with you and Bradley Manning…..
Assange and Snowden,
Greenwald and Poitras….
Free the Man –
Award him the Nobel Peace prize.
A hard call to make, Dwayne – I read the cartoon not as a criticism of Manning, who has been tortured for a significant amount of the time he’s been incarcerated by the US military – if he now attempts, certainly at the suggestion of his lawyers, to reduce the decades of further military incarceration he is facing, he has already performed a service which ensures him his place in history – but rather as a hope that future whistleblowers will be able to escape the clutches of the US military and (in)security apparatus and thus be in a position to refrain from apologising for the service they have rendered humanity. Galileo Galilei was forced to recant by the Inquisition, but his service endures. «E pur si muove !»…
Henri
Henri –
Thanks for reminding us of Galileo.
I’m glad you explained yourself on Facebook, because you wouldn’t believe the intellectual knots people were twisting themselves in to square what this cartoon unambiguously says with their admiration for your other work.
This is a miss for you. Not only are you way out of line to judge someone whose contribution to the fight against empire is of historic proportions but that you do it with macho talk of ‘having balls’ takes it into the realm of the truly repellant, and that’s even putting aside the issue of Manning’s gender.
Something like this might hit me less wrong if it came from Barrett Brown or someone else who was looking the full force of punitive state power straight in the fangs, but you’re a fucking cartoonist. What makes your daily acquiescence to state power — that is, lawfully creating satirical cartoons for a small audience made up of people who mostly agree with you — less cringing than Manning’s effort to possibly secure for himself a few years of freedom? Why don’t you do something really brave? Something that might get you arrested? Or don’t you have the balls?
I don’t see a worthy political statement here. I see narcissism, victim-blaming and a lack of empathy. It’s very fucked up and I’m not sure I’ll ever read you the same way again.
Thanks for getting it right.
I bet if you wrote Manning’s apology on a piece of paper, and held it up to a mirror, you would see the above un-apology.
Anyway, I agree. But I also remember Lenny Bruce’s act about authority figures coming after his butt with a funnel and a bucket of hot lead — he said he’d tell them anything they wanted to hear, just keep that funnel away.
So, one more time, I say great job Mr. Fish.
And thank you – @david lange – for the reminder of Lenny Bruce. It’s hard to be furious and – well, humble?74tn – at the same time, to see what we ourselves might resort to under a similar test….
This is what true courage looks like, calling out someone who gave his life to stop war crimes and slow empire. I just wish you and your giant balls were doing time instead of Manning so you could show him how it’s done.
Fight the power, toony.
Agreed. What the fuck have you done to actually make an iota of difference- the kind of difference that gets you tortured, killed, or imprisoned?
It isn’t up to me to say what difference my work makes or has made. I do, however, know that joining the armed forces of a spooky empire and agreeing to keep secrets for it and then being shocked by the crimes it commits and breaching my promise and then being tortured and imprisoned for speaking truthfully was never going to be my path to relevance. In fact, none of the artists who have moved me towards resistance and criticism of the U.S. government have been required to follow an arc of political awareness similar to Manning’s. I wasn’t aware that was the litmus test. I deeply appreciate Bradley’s leaking – I’m just disturbed and saddened by the victory of the state who was able to coerce him into admitting that his noble act of whistleblowing was a personal failure instead of a public service.
Bullshit, you self-absorbed piece of dung. No one is asking about your “arc of political awareness.” They are calling you out for being unbelievably shitty. And your comic doesn’t speak to you being disturbed or saddened by the victory of the state – it calls out Manning for lacking courage, and most strikingly, “balls.”
The only one who is imposing “litmus tests” is you, insisting that Manning and future whistleblowers not only do way more — and pay for it way more — than anyone else, but to do it a way that conforms with your macho fantasies.
Keep digging, bub.
We get it. You and the artists that inspired you were never as backward as Manning when he began his march toward complete moral and physical destruction by the state. So put aside anything privilege might have to do with that, or any inclination to admire someone for coming so far in their thinking, and judge away.
That you think the influence of your work vs. Manning’s is an open question says all we need to know about where you’re coming from.
Fuck you, you preening, self-important creep.
Have to admit to being confused. Fish is an artist. His work, once it’s posted online, is art. It no longer belongs to him. It belongs to the public discourse. So, in a sense, he is much like Manning leaking information that previously was held private. It is now public and becomes part of the public discourse. Fish’s cartoons derive such vitriol because they challenge the status quo and sheeple like quality of the average american. Much like the exposure of any wrong doing by people or institutions we dearly need to believe in as just and righteous…when they are not.
To attack Fish for his opinions, beliefs and work is just silly. Such misplaced rage and energy. I am scared for the folks who didn’t like Cambell’s Tomato Soup all because Warhol had the balls to expose it for what it is! It’s those railing against Fish, i challenge you to find the source of your rage and then take it out on the actual culprits. But that would take courage, intelligence, passion, and the willingness to expose one’s own convictions, opening themselves to ridicule. And THAT takes balls. The kind of balls so few artists (and people of all walks) are truly lacking. And these kind of balls, frankly, are not being displayed here by the “get a haircut” comebacks being hurled at Fish.
Tis true Fish is mighty opinionated, Yet he, much like the great artists through history who have had the courage to challenge authority, has the courage to put out through his art, the convictions of his beliefs. Now, would Fish still do what he does in Stalin’s Russia (or Putin’s Russia by that matter) knowing a cartoon would indeed get him imprisoned, tortured, killed? Only Fish can answer that. But i do feel confident that part of the reason artists such as Fish rail the way they do is because they can! And they want to preserve that freedom. Fish owes no-one an apology or an explanation. To those who feel they have a right to put down the messenger for the message, have at it. I know Fish can take it. In fact, it will make him stronger. There are many works of his i do not like. But that’s what make great artists special. They are held to the standard of their own conscious, not to the milquetoast tastes of a made for tv populace . Viewers can react however they choose to. That’s the beauty of art…creating discussion. And the folks here who are shouting Fish down, to shut up, and go back in his box and draw lovely little cartoons about how everything is unicorns and lollipops in the land of the free, it is they who are being more repressive, intolerant and, dare i say, “un-American”. In every battle like this there are only two sides: Edward Murrow or Joe McCarthy. Which side are you on?
And my take: The cartoon is NOT about manning at all. The message, as in much of Fish’s work, is that it is ALL of our job’s to call out injustice and horrific deeds done in our name. Having to create cult hero’s out of everyday 20 somethings is what the establishment wants. To create individuals standing up to power are easier to swat away and discredit than if large swaths of people stand together. And no better way than to kill a movement than to prevent it from ever starting.
If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox — if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the … confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought. -ER Murrow
Funny you should mention Warhol, boxcar, because your lengthy, bourgie and sophomoric disquisition on art and free speech made me think of his famous line to Valerie Solanas.
‘Did you type this all yourself?’
Condemnation is not censorship. Fish has an opinion on Manning. I have an opinion on Fish. You have an opinion on me. See how that works?
Is this the fuck you to the court manning is not in a position to give (as a sane person on trial) or is this focusing on manning’s inability to hold his own under mere court proceedings?