Recently on an overnight transatlantic flight, I had the misfortune of sitting behind a loud, opinionated, and kinda paranoid American teenager (with an extremely nasally accent!). For whatever reason, the middle-aged man sitting next to him - who happened to be en route to India - kept engaging him in conversation. The only solace I found was to draw these wobbly sketches of the loud mouth and to jot down some of his more inane comments.
"If the federal government allows the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists to guard our borders, they are just asking for hate crimes. The federal government CANNOT allow our borders to be guarded by WHITE SUPREMACISTS! Don't you agree?"
"Illegal immigrants are a big problem in this country. I mean, if you go to a town like Paterson, you'll see Latinos standing around all over just waiting for big trucks to pick them up for work. What do you do about immigrants in India?"
"They take all the the basic need jobs that most people don't want. But still, there are some hard working people that want those jobs. It's impossible to grant amnesty to an illegal. WHAT IF THEY HAVE A CRIMINAL RECORD? One thing I heard is that if they keep the Mexican border open, then they're just letting in the drug traffickers and the TERRORISTS! I don't know about the terrorists but definitely the drug traffickers. They're bad."
"What's your opinion of President Musharraf? At least he's helping us out with the terrorists. Osama Bin Laden? People say he's dead, but I'm not buying it. He's alive. He's alive and hiding in the mountains. I just hope we don't go to war with Iran."
"Question: did you ever see that movie "Blood Diamonds?" [pause] But you heard about it? It's based on a true story. A lot of these diamonds go through India, and you don't know if they're real diamonds or from Sierra Leone."
Artwork by Tiki Chris © 2007
