Letter to the editor, Valley News, White River Junction, Vermont, June 16, 1996:

The comic strip Garfield is neither humorous nor insightful. Never has been, never will be.

But unfortunately it's more than just not funny. The cat is blended from all the Biblical faults—sloth, greed, envy and meanness, and the strip depends on the distortions of caricature for its effects. But there is one device above all others that places the strip beyond the pale: It repeatedly uses lethal violence as a source of humor. The violence is assumed to be natural and justified because the victims are a special class. They are a special class because they look different.

Garfield celebrates the killing of spiders for no reason other than they are spiders. I have tried to teach my children to kill only for food, defense or compassion, and to try to maintain a high degree of awareness of the lives we take as a means of understanding our part in the circle of life of the Earth. We hold that it's not all right to kill, curse or deny an education or a job because of differences of appearance. That's prejudice. I resent being exposed to an unregenerate proponent of prejudice in my daily paper.

Please put the cat out, for good. Use the money saved to support a new strip.

†