Responsible cartooning in a time of crisis

At a time when all the editorial cartoons are starting to look alike, Dwane Powell wins for "copying" on purpose.

For non-comic-historians and youngsters under 60 generally, here's the classic Ron Cobb cartoon he's riffing on.

It first ran in the LA Free Press in 1966, but I saw it in a book of Phil Ochs sheet music, which is a damn good recommendation, too.

However, I've often thought, in looking at it, that it needed an update because the technology is long gone.

I wouldn't exactly swap Powell's for Cobb's, because the original depicts a shattered True Believer. As noted yesterday, we're still waiting for the Deplorables to wake the hell up, and, as Cobb suggested then, they never really do.

Powell picks up on Cobb's notion of someone who never quite got it and still doesn't understand what the hell happened, and applies it, instead, to Dear Leader.

And as much as we may have denigrated LBJ, the president in 1966, there was a line between him and the True Believers who followed him into Vietnam.

I was just reading something about how Harry Truman insured that the president was the only one who could approve a nuclear attack, because he didn't trust trigger-happy generals with the horrible power.

Though he did trust the American people not to put an uninformed, irresponsible screwball into the Oval Office. Sigh.

Read the Constitution more closely, Harry: The beauty of a good system is that it accounts for stupidity, greed and foolish behavior at all levels.

You didn't.  

 

Which brings us to David Rowe's cartoon, because how could I possibly choose among all the "They're both crazy!" cartoons depicting Trump and Kim Jong Un as a pair of crazy people. 

Yes, they're nuts, they're babies, they fret over the length of their penises. 

If you're a cartoonist, not simply an illustrator, tell us something we don't know. 

Rowe goes beyond the cliche pairing to demonstrate their difference in scale, turning an obvious and tired concept into something with some meaning and putting the onus on Trump to behave rationally and proportionately and like a goddam grownup.

If Trump could find North Korea or Iraq or Iran on a map, he might also know that blowhard bombast is part of political rhetoric in some societies and that it is neither necessary nor wise to respond to it.

After all, Saddam Hussein boasted of the "Mother of All Battles" and his troops folded like a card table while Baghdad Bob reported their glorious victories.

But there's another approach to this, which is that, if you want to go to war, you pretend to take the hot air literally, and gin it up with purposeful lies and distortions.

That's when you need a rational, intelligent executive in the White House.

We may have been stampeded into the first war with Iraq by chickenhawk bullshit, but, whether Bush One believed it or not, he had the sense to stop short of a full invasion and overthrow, which forced the hawks to try again later, with a more compliant chief executive, and we've seen the results.

Now we see a purposeful misunderstanding of Iran's divided government, and ignoring of the strong reformist movement in favor of emphasizing the verbal bombast of the hardliners and highlighting the actions of their Revolutionary Guards, who periodically seize boats that stray into their national waters and then, once the actual government has intervened, release them unharmed.

Similarly, there is, in the current confrontation, an issue for editorial cartoonists:

Showing Kim and Trump as equals is not only tired but incorrect, while depicting Kim alone as a dangerous lunatic is playing into the hands of the chickenhawks.

You have to cover it, but, given the stakes, you have a moral obligation to get it right.

Rowe got it right: Kim is a knucklehead and Trump is responding foolishly.

We need to have grownups in the Pentagon, and a spine transplant for Congress.

Again, jury selection is November 6, 2018.

 

On a related note

Scott Stantis has been quiet of late, doing mostly local cartoons for his editorial gig at the Chicago Tribune and offering reruns at Prickly City, but now he's back in the saddle, with, at the latter, this accurate but depressing reflection on where we stand.

 

And on an unrelated but related note

I wouldn't normally feature a regional topic, but Bill Day's criticism of Florida Governor Rick Scott's approach to the opioid crisis applies beyond that one state and governor and legislature.

As a resident of the president's favorite drug-infested den, I'm proud of our state's decision to sue the makers of Oxycontin for its marketing practices.

I've run into people who still think the whole crisis is about people shooting heroin for kicks and have no idea of the role Big Pharma has played in provoking and abetting the crisis.

Last year, I was using opioids, but, fortunately, in a highly controlled situation, which is good because, man, they sure do feel nice, and going beyond the needs of my post-surgical pain was inviting.

A lot of people have my experience: A sense of "God, I must never touch this stuff again" and the ability, thanks in large part to ethical prescribers, to stick to it. Not everyone prescribed an opioid ends up a junkie.

But once you've floated on that cloud, you will understand why some folks can't get off it.

And, if you are a decent person with some social consciousness, it will increase your disgust for politicians who wring their hands for the cameras, but decline to actually support effective programs, and to oppose greedy pharmaceutical companies that feed the problem.

 

Finally, this:

Jen Sorensen derides the myth of patriotic bumpkins.

I'm in touch with a lot of my very rural high school's alumni, and we're as divided as anyone over current politics.

Pretty united over how we feel about being stereotyped as hillbillies.

 

So here's your moment of local milk people zen:

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Comments

[D.D.Degg]

I gotta thank you for showing me that Rowe cartoon! I love (♥) it. It is the best presentation of the Trump - Kim relationship I have ever seen. The idea, the art, the execution (that background of yellow, orange, and red - colors associated with a nuclear blast). As you say, a simple concept turned into something so meaningful. It's a wonderful, and thoughtful, piece.
I haven't seen it elsewhere so I have you to thank for bringing it to my attention.
D.D.Degg

[Hank G.]

I understand that people have different experiences with opioids, but I was on a morphine pump about 25 years ago after back surgery, and while I appreciated the pain relief, I did not like the sensation at all. I only got the morphine for a few days, so there were no physical effects from stopping it.

Maybe I underestimate the dangers, but since I have some current pain issues, I kind of wish I could get access to some. I don’t know what doctors those addicted people are seeing, but mine are not like that at all.

[Mike Peterson]

Things may well have changed in a quarter century, or it just may be that you didn't like the sensation. My father used to decline Novacaine at the dentist because it was less pleasant than the drilling. *shrug*

However, there are doctors who either overprescribe in general or who will write scrips that give patients too many pills at a time -- a month's supply instead of a week. And then there are actual pill factories; unethical doctors who will prescribe whatever you want in whatever quantities you want. The former are being educated, the latter are being investigated, but that's where the funding comes in.

Al Jazeera America had a good documentary on places in Florida that just sold opioids wholesale, while it also came up in Bernie Sanders' post-election town hall in Ohio, and I believe Ohio has a lawsuit against some pill factories.

[Mike Peterson]

And, yeah, D.D., isn't that something.

Now it's tomorrow and he and Powell each have to come up with another. Phew.

[Kip W]

I had minor surgery once, and was all helpless and pathetic about that. I was in a room with someone who moaned softly in pain much of the time. They had a morphine dispenser you could push a button on and either get more feen (these are the jokes, folks) or at least think you would.

They didn't seem to press the button much, which impressed me. I believed then that if I'd had as much pain as the unseen sufferer, I'd have sounded like the telegraph operator on the Titanic.