Mr. Fish - Go Fish: How to Win Contempt and Influence People

This collection contains cartoons previously unpublished anywhere outside of Mr. Fishs ever-blackening soul. Those previously published first appeared in Truthdig, Harpers Magazine, the LA Weekly, and the Village Voice. (For a complete list of publications that have printed the authors work, please refer to his FBI file.)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Published by Akashic Books

2011 Dwayne Booth

ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-014-4
eISBN: 978-1-61775-068-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010939103

First printing

Printed in China

Akashic Books

PO Box 1456

New York, NY 10009

info@akashicbooks.com

www.akashicbooks.com

For Jeff,

who, in my earliest memory, is running ahead of me in the blinding sunlight through the

tall, yellow grass in New Jersey, laughing his head off, not wanting to get caught and not

wanting to get away, making me a path to feel fast in

And special thanks to Robert Scheer and Zuade Kaufman of Truthdig

for providing the horn for my bull

TABLE OF CONTENTS

E lisabeth Kbler-Ross wrote a book in 1969 called On Death and Dying. In it she described how there are five stages of grief that one might expect to experience when facing the end of life. When it became a national best seller, she expanded the concept to include anybody experiencing a catastrophic personal loss, like a drug addict hitting rock bottom or anybody who suddenly finds himself or herself incarcerated or destitute or limbless or celibate or pregnant. Then the concept was expanded further still, to include anybody who has ever been passed over for a promotion at work or anybody whose pet has ever run away or anybody who has ever woken up with beard burns on her uterus and the sound of the First Battalion, Twenty-Third Marine Regiment singing Thank Heaven for Little Girls from the shower. Anybody, really, who has been blessed by a normal life and who has easy access to the K shelf in the death-and-dying section of a bookstore.

The five stages of grief, according to Kbler-Ross, are, from first to last: 1) denial, 2) anger, 3) bargaining, 4) depression, and 5) acceptance. Of course, those stages are now as endemic to how we perceive ourselves as the way we brush our teeth and elect our presidents and seek out validation in self-help books for any emotion that we find we cannot repress effortlessly.

Now, assuming that these are, in fact, legitimate emotional phases that everyone experiences when clobbered by some unforeseen disaster (and not simply just another academic concoction designed to sell books and further promote the bullshit illusion that the inner workings of a human being can be sorted and labeled and cataloged and understood as easily as the innards of a cuckoo clock), I have to figure that these must also be the same stages that a person who attempts to preemptively clobber disaster before being clobbered by it must experience, only in reverse. Somebody who can look up and recognize impending disaster everywhere, as if each potential disaster were a big stinky bison, part of a dispersed herd both polka-dotting the horizon and standing close enough to fog the sheen off our patent leather shoes while munching at the flowers that we planted in celebration of our eternal optimism.

Thusly, just such a person would begin by 1) accepting the fact that he lives in the world and has a certain measure of responsibility to help maintain both his own and the worlds longevity and well being. Perhaps his motivations are selfish, purely predicated on something as ignoble as self-preservation. No matter, he accepts that he would rather survive in the world than succumb to its hostilities, knowing full well that there are forces and menacing realities that exist contrary to his mission, maybe even in active contempt of it. He accepts that his egotism may not keep him safe, but that it might confuse him sufficiently with just enough narcissism to propel him forward with some self-edifying sense of purpose into a lifetime unlikely to corroborate his self-regard.

Almost immediately 2) depressed by his inability to profoundly improve upon the indifferent mediocrity of human existence or to inspire a global collaboration between enlightened men and women capable of challenging the thuggish inhospitality of the world and to ultimately mellow it, he will wonder if his innate desire to help maintain both his own and the worlds longevity and well being is a waste of time. Maybe it is even worse than that; specifically, a terminal form of spiritual self-destruction. Perhaps it is a death wish. Like a prisoner confined to a tiny cell, he will question the usefulness of his dreams of freedom, believing that because they are unreal beyond the confines of his sleep and have never known physical expression, they must be nightmares. How else to explain the impossibility of their realization? He is a stone preoccupied with the insane notion that weightlessness is a matter of will and not physics.

He will then find himself 3) bargaining with the dismissive universe, as if it has ears, telling it that in exchange for him not attempting to alter it that it should attempt to reward his goodwill by going out of its way to not alter him. Upon realizing that his request for mutual respect is directed at a reality vast enough to make him puny by comparison and insignificant beyond measure, his voice so microscopic as to not even rise to the level of a whisper, he will turn his back on realityfuck it! He will then bargain with himself. He will promise not to expect any tangible reward for his perseverance in exchange for the energy to continue failing miserably without succumbing to the madness that comes with continuing to fail miserably.

He will then find himself overcome with 4) anger when he realizes that the atoms conspiring to create the indifferent, booby-trapped universe are precisely the same atoms that conspire to make him, and that asking for preferential treatment for himself is as ludicrous as his asking the moon to not only have the power to sustain his sanity through unrelenting turmoil but also to make him special in the process.

He will then rely on 5) denial to help him forget that he ever wanted toor even tried tosave himself or the world using such harebrained argumentation, for without such improvised deniability hed never be able to look himself in the mirror, let alone fall asleep at night and then get up in the morning feeling sufficiently refreshed to begin the process of moving through the stages all over again, his self-aggrandizement restored, the world in flames and exploding like the most promising New Years Eve ever.