On The New Yorker's cover.
This eerie image was slated to be the Mardi Gras week cover until Dick Cheney shot his friend, whereupon it was replaced by the umpteenth unoriginal Brokeback Mountain parody.
At Cartoon Brew, the artist, Bill Joyce, a Louisiana native, is bitter:
Our collective sorrow and tragedy mattered less than a single hunting accident. . . .
Mr. Cheney's friend is thankfully alive. Meanwhile we're still finding bodies in New Orleans.
UPDATE: That image would have been very fitting, and so might have brought just a bit of heart's ease to this week's Mardi Gras revelers, as only finding the right words or images can do. From the Washington Post:
New Orleans Puts On Mask for Mardi Gras
Visible Trappings Can't Hide SadnessNew Orleanians are tired. They are distracted. On the face of it, they seem normal and as lighthearted as ever. But they are not. And so it is with Mardi Gras -- the two-week pre-Lenten celebration that ends Tuesday, "Fat Tuesday." It is exuberant on the outside, strange and different and diminished by loss on the inside. [ . . . ]
New Orleanians said they were going to participate in Mardi Gras, but there is a great sense of absence.
The story says that one of the city's social clubs, the Orpheus Krewe, had planned long before Hurricane Katrina to make its Mardi Gras theme "The Power of Nature." After the storm, they changed it to "Signs and Superstitions."
There's humor in evidence, too, though:
What [some parade floats] lacked in material perfection, they sought to make up in satire. One float was called "Drove My Chevy to the Levee, but the Levee Was Gone," and another was "Rowed Hard and Put Up Wet." [ . . . ]A group of women drinking at a French Quarter bar wore hazmat jumpsuits, gas masks and boots -- as well as the traditional Mardi Gras glitter and brightly colored wigs. Purple labels identified the group as the FEMA Fatales.
I hope Bill Joyce's image is circulating down there.
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