So Ben Garrison Apparently Kind of Wants to Sue Me

Benny boy did say I could point out how racist and shitty his cartoons are so I am using that permission to point out that his work is both racist and shitty.

At the risk of being sycophantic, I happen to be of the mindset that the folks who comment regularly on this website are great: funny, smart and engaged, with fascinating histories and points of view who add tremendously to this site every goddamn day, even when I’m not publishing anything new. 

Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place commenters are many things, most of them wonderful. One thing they are not, however, are passionate cultists and defenders of soon to be ex-President Donald Trump. So you can only imagine my surprise and muted delight when I discovered that political cartoonist and notorious Trump propagandist Ben Garrison had started commenting on this site. 

Garrison did not have thoughts on my Batman Beyond write-ups. Nor was Garrison weighing in on whether Nicolas Cage or John Travolta is ultimately the greater actor and movie star. He didn’t have a movie for me to watch and write about for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 either.

If his outraged comments are to be believed, the only articles on this website that Ben Garrison seems to care about are the ones about him. The legendary lover of Trump and labels first showed up to angrily insist that his reputation for being racist and anti-Semitic was wrong because, well, he said it was, and also when he showed a shadowy Jewish powerbroker sinisterly pulling the strings of prominent American generals he labeled that figure “Soros” instead of “Jew.” 

See? Shitty but also racist.

Needless to say, this was not an argument that my readers and commenters found terribly convincing. To say that he failed to convince them with his arguments and powers of persuasion would be a huge understatement, to the point that I believe at some point he went and deleted a bunch of his comments here because they made him look substantially worse, rather than better. Considering the sorry state of Garrison’s reputation, that’s really saying something. 

Garrison somehow couldn’t stay away. So when I published a piece about hilarious parodies of Garrison’s cartoons in which online smart-asses edited/re-mixed Benny Boy’s cartoons to replace a hunky, absurdly, obscenely ripped Donald Trump with a similarly dashing, muscular Karl Marx he accused me of libel and copyright infringement in addition to being a “chucklehead writer” pushing “his moronic communism” and engaging in “knuckle-dragging trolling.”

Bear in mind that in the article he was referring to but appears not to have read, I EXPLICITLY state that the parody cartoons I’m writing about are OBVIOUSLY the work of other people and that they derive their humor and satirical bite precisely from the obvious contrast between Garrison’s reputation as the hardest of hard-core Trump worshipers and the muscular brand of Marxist-Leninism being espoused in the parody cartoons. 

There are malicious folks who edit Garrison’s cartoons to make them more anti-Semitic and racist, inserting Nazi-era caricatures into his already histrionic tableaus. I would never do that. It’s wrong morally and ethically and there is a chance that someone might come across them online and think they were real Garrison strips.

That obviously is not the case with the Commie remixes of his work, particularly when, AGAIN, I explicitly state in the article that the parodies that proliferate online are the work of parodists, not Garrison himself. 

racist, shitty.

As a political cartoonist, Garrison makes his living mocking public figures by exaggerating what he sees as their negative qualities and characteristics. So it’s fascinating to me that he is apparently of the opinion that mocking public figures like himself by exaggerating negative characteristics like a predilection for propagandistic hero worship somehow constitutes libel and copyright violation. 

The first amendment protects parody as free speech. As the world’s preeminent “Weird Al” Yankovic historian, I should know. Those Marxist parodies are consequently protected speech and I can’t be guilty of libeling Garrison by portraying him as a Marxist if I explicitly state that the humor in those parodies comes from Garrison being the antithesis of a Communist true believer. 

I kind of wish Garrison would follow in his hero’s footsteps and file an ego-based nuisance lawsuit against me. He’d be laughed out of court and it would be the biggest, best publicity this site has ever received. Alternately, I’d feel weirdly flattered if I ended up in one of Benny’s strips, furiously and maliciously writing what is helpfully and clearly labeled “libel”, “copyright infringement”, “moronic Communism” and “knuckle-dragging trolling” on my trusty laptop.

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here