'I'm afraid you have humans'
The irony of this old New Yorker cartoon by Eric Lewis is so precise I haven't been able to get it out of my head for two years. The speaker is the planet Saturn, clad in doctor's garb -- a stethoscope circling his forehead -- giving the bad news to a sick and miserable-looking Earth:
"I'm afraid you have humans."
What more can you say? But of course the dystopian irony is intensified by the fact that the artist is human, the reader (me) is human, and the drawing itself portrays Planet Earth when he was a special assistant to LBJ. Moyers recounted his words at a climate conference earlier this year:
