Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Tom Tomorrow is sometimes accused of satirising only the right and never the left. But I seem to recall one This Modern World strip in which someone accidentally drops a lit match and then quickly steps on it to extinguish it – while the punditocracy immediately goes into overdrive, speculating on how, if the match hadn’t been snuffed out, it might have caused forest fires that would devastate whole cities; they conclude: “I think this shows the need for more regulation.” Anyone know of a link to that?

In other news, I’m off to FEE again tomorrow for an Austro-Virginian bash.

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7 Responses to Tomorrow and Tomorrow

  1. Joel Schlosberg September 17, 2008 at 11:26 am #

    There’s some good discussion of Tomorrow in this Boing Boing post (which compares him to Reason’s Peter Bagge), including his lampooning of liberal targets like Clinton, “GoreBot”, and “granola guy”:
    http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/18/peter-bagges-liberta.html

    Although he loses some points for this lame attempt at satirizing libertarian think tanks (as Kevin Carson put it when I posted it and a bunch of other cartoons on LL1 way back in 2006, “But the other two didn’t even have the saving virtue of being funny. They were just asinine. The Tom Tomorrow cartoon was just the rehashed goo-gooism that Ann Landers used to spout in her annual April 15 column: ‘Sob! But *however* would we pay for our streets and schools?'”):
    http://www.thismodernworld.org/arc/TAP/01-libertarian.jpg

  2. Jesse Walker September 17, 2008 at 1:42 pm #

    I don’t know whether that cartoon is online, Roderick, but you didn’t imagine it. Liberty reprinted it in the early ’90s.

  3. Anon73 September 19, 2008 at 12:27 pm #

    Hey Roderick,

    in the past you’ve stopped short of condemning efforts of libertarian-minded people to get into the public sector to “change the system from within”. For example you said if the Death Star was hovering above the planet then infiltrating the Death Star to help destroy it would be ok. On the other hand, if the results of infiltrating the Death Star are to accomplish nothing at all, it’s hard to see how there is any moral case for doing it. What do you think of this man’s story?

    http://mises.org/story/3106

    He claims that since his 32-year salary is less than the 4 billion dollars he ultimately saved the taxpayers that therefore he was successful in slowing the growth of government boondoggles. Do you agree, and would you encourage others to emulate his example?

  4. Bob Hodges September 19, 2008 at 2:03 pm #

    Speaking of political comics, did anyone know that Anarky appears in the December issue of Robin? It looks pretty bad.

    Cheers,
    Bob

  5. Rad Geek September 27, 2008 at 1:25 pm #

    Found it! The comic you seek is “Dan Rather” (1992).

    While I was looking through the archives, I also found this strip from 1990.

  6. Administrator September 27, 2008 at 6:23 pm #

    Thanks, Charles!

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-09-27 – The Archives of Tomorrow - September 27, 2008

    […] A few days ago, Roderick mentioned one of the sillier complaints that’s usually directed against Tom Tomorrow and his cartoon This Modern World: that he allegedly only satirizes the Right and never the Left. (By Left, the person making this criticism usually means corporate liberalism, or, really, just Democrats.) There’s plenty of blind spots or confusions that you could criticize Tom Tomorow for, but this one I don’t get. I don’t know exactly why a political cartoonist with very decided views is expected to adhere to the Fairness Doctrine in the topics that he chooses, but anyway, the complaint is just empirically false, and nobody who actually read more than two or three installments of the comic would think that it’s true. Just recently, there’s comics like Obama phenomena, but it’s especially clear if you spent any time reading the comic back during its glory days in the 1990s — since there was a Democratic president at the time, not surprisingly, Tomorrow spent more time writing about Democrats than he does now (and also, at times, the real Left — see, for example, Mumia or Chomsky). Roderick mentioned a particular comic: […]

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