Besides making the occasional video, I will soon be expressing myself in the art of editorial cartoons which is my true passion. I’ve featured some great ones on this blog: David Horsey, Tom Toles, and Matt Wuerker. Editorial cartoons are interesting to me because they can give an entire synopsis in one shot, and if done effectively, they will stick in your mind and make you think about the issue. There’s a reason why despotic governments don’t like articulate cartoonists. Without a doubt, the best editorial cartoonists are some of the most informed people. You have to be knowledgable about world events and issues in order to produce art that will convey meaningful social commentary. So this is something I want to start doing since I do have the artistic skills. Let’s see if I can pull it off.

Agriculture and Climate Change is a blog that I just started following. Last night while on the net I was looking at her collection of editorial cartoons and saw one that pretty much sums up the state of modern industrial civilization’s relationship with the Earth. It’s done by Turkish cartoonist Kürşat Zaman whose work I’ve never seen.

It reminds me a little of an M. Wuerker cartoon from several years ago concerning the resource-sucking war machine of the American Empire:

Has anyone checked their wallet recently? For most, that Ponzi-scheming, resource-plundering American war machine, aka Military Industrial Complex, has relieved you of some major coinage over the years. For others, it has exterminated their country, if not their life.

Back to the Turkish cartoonist Zaman, here is another of his that struck me:

I interpret this one on several different levels. The first message that came to me was America’s prison industrial complex and the fact that America is number one in locking people up:

The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?

…According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports…

I also thought about the fact that America is basically an open-air prison with this country having become a pervasive Security and Surveillance State and all branches of its government usurped by elite monied interests. As the corrupt Boss Tweed said in the movie ‘The Gangs of New York’, “The appearance of law must be upheld, especially when it’s being broken.”

And of course on a third level, those people trapped in Miss Liberty’s head are the humans spirited away in American’s rendition program and its secret prisons. Or the arbitrary confinement in the black hole Guantánamo.

And of course this one. But it’s a slow burn: