Never seen satire before?

My GOD!

First, let it be known that homophobia, racism, and all the rest of it infuriates me. I am a run-of-the-mill gay-friendly vegetarian Jewish liberal, and I in no way support "insensitivity to gay people."

Cartoons aren't always meant to be funny; political cartoons run in many newspapers with the intention of being ironic, not comedic. Lynda Barry has a syndicated cartoon, "Ernie Pook's Comeek", which appears in the Tucson Weekly. The "Comeek" is rarely funny.

In fact, one of Barry's cartoons, which appears in her collection "My Perfect Life" (get the title's irony???), features Maybonne, the adolescent protagonist, being called a "lesbo" because she was caught holding hands with a classmate.

So she finds herself a sleazy male classmate to take her out to the woods and prove the tormentors wrong. The scene is raw, lonely, painful.

I hardly think Barry wants her readers to infer that it's acceptable to hurl epithets. I'm not going to presume to know Jeremy Olson's intentions. I doubt he has Lynda Barry's endless sympathy for the underdog, but I also feel pretty sure that he isn't aiming to spread homophobia. It seems, rather, that Olson would want us to shake our heads at the idiot with the gun.

There are many ways to make a point. Maybe the Wildcat should print Swift's "A Modest Proposal."

Julie Newman

Creative writing graduate student