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Writer's pictureMichael Jacoby

Like Herrings and Onions #4 - "Four" Talkback

Updated: Jan 16, 2021

Original Release Date: April 4, 2018

Poor, oppress-ed Helen.

This issue was my second attempt at over-the-top offensive humor, after “Nice Corpse.” I drew this on a larger file size, the first one ever on the whole site. I saved it as a PNG and uploaded it to the site. Whether the older one or the newer one, the quality of the image is spectacular.

The inception of this issue was the frequent far-right takes I keep on finding social media throughout this whole decade. My Facebook friends would often share images, mainly pro-Second Amendment images, from right-leaning pages. Foolishly, I crept into such pages and found articles from other right-wing sites and images such as these:


Because of my tendency to view such pages online to defy logic and be angry, I realized that my generation and younger would be a group of smug, far-right, Boomer mindset, victim-playing grifters. As the years passed, I saw more and more absurd far-right takes, like anyone who dares sympathize with progressive or left-wing ideals is a tyrannical fascist or anyone who doesn't slavishly obey the far-right is akshually a drone-like NPC incapable of original thoughts (in fact, if I had released this issue a few months later, I would have Helen made her presentation with a photo of the March on Washington with the people's faces replaced with the NPC face). For a while, I had thought that only the far-right are evil and had been trying to make the left look bad to make people ignore them, and were seemingly successful.

But as the months passed after making this issue, I learned more.

As far as I can understand, people are naturally reactionary and are often afraid of mysterious, scary change and often hold onto old, antiquated stereotypes, like all transgendered people actually just want to rape your daughters in the bathroom, LGBT rights will lead to religion being illegal, feminists are really misandrous loonies, civil rights for ethnic minorities means less rights for whites, etc., etc., leading to the thoughts about liberals being the real fascists mentioned in the previous paragraph, because liberals would most likely bring the scary change.

Usually, people who are protesting harmful, negative things like bigotry or police brutality or economic inequality have a good point and try to make themselves look good so that people would follow their cause. Unfortunately, people on their side usually shoot themselves in the foot and often try to create change by means of violence/force/riots, or try to release the public information of a teen for the heinous crime of wearing a hat and smirking smugly, or try to prevent a book based upon the trials of Chinese people or supposedly mocking African-Americans, or think white males are the most vile beasts on the planet, or make the protest sites uninhabitable, or general all-around snobbery, solely wanting attention and not giving a damn about any issues—basically proving the far-right's paranoia correct, giving them good reason to act angry, disgusted, and snobbish towards the left, and making progress of any kind impossible. Additionally, I think if none of the bad seeds existed and it was just the civil, decent people working their hardest to try to bring progress, the public would still act reactionary anyway because the represent the eeeeeevil scary change.

Also, closing on an apolitical note, this issue is called “Four” for many reasons. It's the fourth issue of LHAO, it was released in April, and the Wix webpage titles at the time only allowed around 40 characters total, leaving small and weird titles.

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