The Greatest Cartoon Ever

By Matt Groening-1983

click on the cartoon to see larger version.

I remember cutting this cartoon out of a magazine and pasting it on the inner flap of one of my school notebooks in 1983. I was 19. My life as a dissident actually started long before that...probably at age 9 or so. I used to read the Native American literature that my Dad had around....like "Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties" by Vine DeLoria, Jr., and "The Way, an Anthology of American Indian Literature".
By contrasting the history I learned from that and other literature with what was being taught as truth in school...I never really was permeable to the usual indoctrination. I was resistant to conventional wisdom since my first years as a reader and thinker. My run as a philosopher and freethinker was compromised for many years after discovering how to dull the sting of living in a world I never made with intoxicants. Of course that did not work in the long term. Now I have become a nightmare of sorts to some....a sober, educated Indian that understands theology and political science.