(CNN) — If you could pick just one image to sum up how the other half lives … would it be this?
Dead parrot. Folding chair. Torso. Net.
It’s a screenshot of the Independent’s latest cartoon , a theme developed in tandem with women and children whose suffering was the subject of a series of cartoon strip installments last year . The animated re-creation — produced in collaboration with the artist Panorama and BAFTA-winning writer Mary Wakefield — takes an earnest look at the illogical world that does us such reputational damage.
This article was originally published by The Independent, a division of the Johnston Press, and is reproduced here with permission.
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In the grim, dystopian future that appears in the cartoon strip, one unfortunate boffin is unceremoniously despoiled when his brains fall into a net and flop across the floor.
A few looks later, he’s stabbed with a dagger.
And this horrendous design is perfectly at home in the liberal, progressive — even ‘human rights’-leaning — world of the Independent.
It fits right in alongside Dear Leader Donald Trump’s ‘Fake News Awards,’ but appears so much further away from the real world.
It’s anti-establishment chic, too, perhaps a way of celebrating the distance we’ve moved since the tired old ideologies of Robert Mugabe and John Garang .