Final Intervention

"Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?",
a Children's book

 

A graph depicting government spending

No matter how long it’s been since we’ve last heard them, childhood nursery rhymes remain repetitive enough that they’re incredibly difficult to forget. For my project, I wanted to create a satirical piece using the silly nature of nursery rhymes. Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar remains, for some annoyingly repetitive reason, one nursery rhyme I remember quite well. Using the concept of someone, or something, stealing from others, I had the idea of using federal spending to create something that stands relevant in recent conversations about defunding the police.

The topic I chose is government funding, on local and federal levels. When you look at how much money is spent on police forces in local communities, and how much the government spends on military weapons and vehicles, and then, comparatively; how much is spent on our schools, and health care systems, and public housing, and environmental protection acts, the picture painted is rather depressing. From John Berger, Ways of Seeing: "Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal..." One thinks about how, in terms of whether the government will fund this or that, the option that helps our communities directly are often forgotten. 

The Guerilla Girls have a "particular combination of subversive theatrics and outrages flaunting of convention finds a ready audience", as quoted from their book, that particularly leans into performance art through a witty means. While this idea is not performance art, the reuse of a child's nursery rhyme plays into the theatrics of protest.

First, I wanted to create characters fitting a child’s book that would be able to represent the public affair categories I wanted to mention. When I realized one such image already existed to represent the police (and by that extensions, the defense and military aspect of the federal budget as well), I decided to create other animal characters to contrast the police pig. The animals chosen were relatively random, mostly chosen to look cute enough to fit the style I was going for.

While I wasn’t able to create and produce a fully illustrated satirical children’s book, I was able to produce a hand made concept zine exploring my idea. The animals are depicted responding to the nursery rhyme and continuing the song until they get to the guilty culprit of who stole all the cookies from the jar of general funding— the pig.

The metaphor is relatively obvious to the viewer, with cookies representing federal funding.

Ideally, the project would be illustrated and printed like a normal book. While I didn’t have the time or resources to do that, instead I used a 14 by 17 piece of sketchbook paper to cut and fold into a mini-zine. I penciled everything in before adding pastel coloring to everything through light watercolors. After that, I used a black marker to add the text and draw the accompanying doodles. Then, paint markers were used to highlight some parts and make it look more colorful.

The zine is as shown below.
(Sesame Street audio was used from here)

Sources for further and/or background reading:

How much do US cities spend on policing?

Police funding in local governments

Discretionary spending