Fresh, Fierce ICE Cartoons – Brutal Abuses, Beatings & Rampant Hypocrisy!
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Republicans and Alito
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Cartoonists and Cockroaches
A column in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times starts off like this:
“POPE JOHN XXIII, or ‘Good Pope John,’ remains one of the most beloved figures in recent Catholic history. Among treasured memories of this kindly, roly-poly pope, perhaps none looms larger than the evening of Oct. 11, 1962, when he told a vast crowd on a moonlit night in St. Peter’s Square, ‘Go home tonight and give your children a kiss, and tell them that this kiss comes from the pope.’ When German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s stern doctrinal enforcer, was elected as Benedict XVI in April, an editorial cartoon in an Italian paper showed him looking at a similar crowd and saying, ‘Go home tonight and give your children a spanking, and tell them that this spanking comes from the pope.’
“In a nutshell, the cartoon captured many people’s expectations of Benedict XVI: a hard-line taskmaster who would bring liberals and dissenters in Roman Catholicism to heel.”
Speakers and columnists, like this one, often quote cartoons but seldom mention the name of the cartoonist. With this writer, one fourth of his column came from an uncredited cartoonist. (I think it is fitting that one fourth of my own column starts off with a quote from a writer whom I have chosen not to name.) Writers are almost always named when they are quoted, but cartoons seem to be mere anecdotes that deserve no attribution beyond, “I saw this cartoon …”
An unnamed op-ed page editor at the Los Angeles Times told me that he doesn’t like political cartoons because they tend to “overpower the words that surround them.” He went on to tell me that his two favorite cartoonists are Tom Toles and Ted Rall, two cartoonists with rudimentary drawing styles who put lots of words into their cartoons; this editor liked these cartoonists because they were “more like writers than artists.”
There seems to be a natural friction between the “picture people” and the “word people” who are troubled by those powerful pictures. A famously unnamed editor at The New York Times is quoted as saying, “We would never hire an editorial cartoonist at the Times, because we would never give so much power to one man.” Another unnamed New York Times editor is quoted as saying, “We don’t like editorial cartoons at the Times because you can’t edit a cartoon like you can edit words.”
Editors see cartoonists as “bomb throwers,” because cartoonists enjoy a different set of journalist ethics than writers. Cartoonists can put any words into the mouth of a public figure, whether those words were actual quotes or not. Cartoons make readers angry. A strong political cartoon generates much more mail from readers than the strongest words. Most editors are timid and want to avoid controversy; they choose to run syndicated cartoons that are unobjectionable gags about current topics. Cartoonists call this “Newsweekification” after the inoffensive, bland and opinionless – but funny – political cartoons that Newsweek magazine chooses to reprint each week, further trivializing political cartoons.
The power and effectiveness of political cartoons cause more and more newspapers to avoid cartoons. There are half as many editorial cartoonist jobs as there were 75 years ago. Of the biggest newspapers in America – The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune – none have political cartoonists on staff.
The newspaper industry often complains about a dwindling and aging readership as younger readers prefer to get their news through other media. The old-line “word people” lament that youngsters nowadays get their news from Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” In fact, most young people get their news from political cartoons. Every state in the United States has middle and high school students interpret an editorial cartoon as part of state-mandated testing. Teachers who must “teach to the test” include political cartoons in their classes. Students learn their current events through political cartoons and, ironically, most of the students see newspaper political cartoons on the Internet rather than on paper (visit www.cagle.com). The “word people” who run newspapers have “Newspapers In Education” programs to try to develop a younger readership, but when a stack of newspapers is dropped on a teacher’s doorstep once a week, there is usually only one political cartoon on the editorial page – not very useful to a teacher who only needs the newspaper to teach about editorial cartoons.
Perhaps in the future we’ll see this turn around, and see more columns like this one, where cartoonists’ names are mentioned and writers’ names are not; when that happens, I expect traditional newspapers will have long gone extinct. Just as the cockroach will continue to roam the Earth long after mankind has disappeared, political cartoonists will still be crawling out from dark corners long after the “word people” have killed off newspapers.
Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. He is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005 Edition,” are available in bookstores now.
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Miers Squished
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Bennett Reprehensible
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Dropping Billions
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Take Responsibility
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FEMA Snail
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The President Leaps Into Action
Worldwide Cartoonists Take Pleasure in America’s Pain
The easiest way to see what world opinion looks like is to look through the mirror of political cartoons. The devastation of Hurricane Katrina has done nothing to elicit sympathy from the world according to cartoonists around the globe who are finding pleasure in America’s pain.
In Europe, anger at President Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto treaty to stop global warming is the focus of “I told you so” cartoons. The Europeans see global warming as the obvious cause of Hurricane Katrina and seize the opportunity to blame the president for causing the calamity.
German cartoonist Heiko Sakurai depicts President Bush swept up in a tornado along with a sign that reads, “Welcome to New Orleans.” The president says, “Global warming? What a ridiculous idea! But we got very serious information from our intelligence services that there might be a connection to Al Qaeda …”
Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune (owned by the New York Times) draws a scene of flooded New Orleans ruins, with a billboard that quotes the president, “’Climate change remains to be proven’ –George W. Bush.”
Cartoonist Olle Johansson from Sweden shows the president taking his “global warming dog” for a walk; the dog has escaped from his collar and turned into a raging storm outside the frame, as the president says, “The hurricanes just love to play with him.”
New Zealand Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson shows President Bush addressing the nation, “The American people can rest assured that we plan to invade New Orleans as soon as possible.”
Bill Leak of The Australian newspaper in Sydney shows President Bush dressed as a cowboy, holding out a tin cup begging for help as Australian President John Howard looks the other way, telling an aide to tell Bush that he gave “at the office.”
Cartoonists in developing countries, the Middle East and Latin America display their disgust for America and President Bush at every opportunity. Americans are portrayed as greedy, obese, stupid and arrogant. Hamburgers are a worldwide symbol for America and we often see ugly depictions of hamburgers; it seems strange to us, but defiled burgers are instantly recognizable around the world as insults directed against America. In Middle Eastern countries where there is no Christian lore that would give rise to a devil character, Dracula is substituted for Satan, and President Bush or Uncle Sam are often depicted as vampires.
Another common symbol for America is the comic book superhero, sometimes Batman or Spiderman, but usually Superman is the worldwide substitute for Uncle Sam, and in most cartoons Superman suffers an indignity that brings joy to an America hating audience. In his most recent cartoon, Emad Hajjaj of the Al-Ghad newspaper in Amman, Jordan draws President Bush in his Superman suit, with Hurricane Katrina as his up-blown skirt, exposing his skinny, naked, black legs trudging through the mud, labeled, “Third World.”
Many of the world’s cartoonists work in countries that allow no press freedom, but the cartoonists describe themselves as being “free.” A Cuban cartoonist once told me, “I’m free to draw whatever I want … as long as it is about the United States.”
Bashing America is a daily job for the world’s cartoonists, and it will take a lot more than death, devastation and widespread human suffering to jar them from their routine.
Daryl Cagle is the political cartoonist for MSNBC.com. He is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to over eight hundred newspapers, including the paper you are reading. His book, “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005 Edition,” is available in bookstores now.
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Civil War On The Table
Civil War on the Table
As a political cartoonist I sit around all day watching cable news pundits argue with each other. That’s what all of the political cartoonists do. Our cartoons are nothing more than more screaming voices on the editorial page and our cartoons typically amplify the standard opinions we hear on TV, where pundits offer ready-made opinions on every issue. All I have to do is pick from the tasty opinion smorgasbord that is served up to me, 24 hours a day. The problem is that lately, I’m feeling a bit overstuffed, and the opinions I’m being served aren’t tasting very good.
The ready-made opinions on Iraq come in three flavors:
1. Stay the course and fight the good fight for democracy and freedom (this is what the President and the far-right pundits tell me).
2. Iraq is a big mess, but it would be worse if we left because there would be civil war (this is what most of the pundits tell me).
3. We should get out now (this is what Cindy Sheehan and the far-left pundits tell me).
All of these choices leave a bad taste in my mouth. As a cartoonist, I want a bad guy to bash. The only good cartoons are the ones that bash a bad guy. Most of the cartoonists have chosen to bash President Bush as the bad guy for getting us into Iraq and keeping us there. In my own cartoons I’ve chosen to bash the insurgents in Iraq; they seem like the obvious bad guys to me. The Sunnis hate America. The Sunni insurgents don’t have much success blowing up American soldiers, so they spend most of their time blowing up Shiites; they oppress women, they boycott the elections, they refuse to negotiate on a new constitution. They seem like good, all around, bad guys.
The Shiites are bad guys too. They also hate America, they want an oppressive religious theocracy to rule Iraq, they oppress women, they are aligned with Axis of Evil member, Iran; but at least they negotiate, they vote, they don’t blow things up as much as the Sunnis, and they are the majority in Iraq. I’ll call them: “less-bad guys.” (We like the Kurds, so we’ll ignore them.)
The TV pundits tell me that we must stay in Iraq because if we leave there will be a terrible civil war. All of the options seem dark and gloomy. I wonder why none of the pundits ever discuss the bright side of civil war. I see four arguments for civil war in Iraq:
1. There are a lot more Shiites than Sunnis, so the “less-bad guys” would win.
2. With the Shiites fighting the Sunnis, we (and the Kurds) can sit back and watch until it’s over
3. We’ve learned that the American army is the world’s best at destroying things, but we do a lousy job of building things and keeping peace. We should quit trying to do the things we do poorly.
4. There will be a lot of death, destruction and suffering in a civil war, but many pundits argue that our initial war was so clean and efficient in targeting only the military and sparing the civilian population in Iraq, that the Iraqi people never suffered enough to be willing to make the compromises necessary for peace and democracy. Until they suffer enough to cry, “Uncle Sam,” there is no reason to expect the Sunnis to be civil; they lost their man Saddam and lost their control over Iraq. Of course they would be in a surly mood.
Iraq seems to be having a civil war now anyway, but we’re keeping the heat down by constantly stirring the Iraqi pot. It is a natural American tendency to think that if we stir the pot, the stew will be better; but we could turn up the heat, sit back and let the stew simmer until done. That seems to me to be a recipe that would taste as good as any of the others that are being offered to me, and I’d like to have it served up along with the other dishes on my TV pundit smorgasbord.
Daryl Cagle is the political cartoonist for MSNBC.com. He is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to over eight hundred newspapers, including the paper you are reading. His book, “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005 Edition,” is available in bookstores now.
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Sheehan Snooze
