CSotD: Fluency at the drawingboard
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One of the old, hoary standbys of learning about political cartoons in high school is the list of symbols to be memorized: The bear is Russia, the bulldog is Great Britain, Uncle Sam is America, plus the list of landmarks like Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal.
We teach political cartoons the way we teach foreign languages: We tell kids how to translate them instead of immersing them so they can gain fluency.
And cartoons built with those stock symbols are generally as clumsy as the halting, uncertain presentations made by American kids in foreign language class.
Howsoever, once in a great while, the stars align, and today Ed Stein noticed and grasped the moment.
He's certainly not the first person to tie classic ruins into Greece's economic crisis. For the past several weeks, cartoonists have been drawing ruined temples with labels indicating that they are Greece's economy. It's not that that's bad usage — or, at least, it wasn't the first few times — but it doesn't bring anything to the table. Yeah, Greece has some ruins and their economy is in trouble. And?
The idea of the EU straining to prop up those ruins is something I hadn't seen before, and, not only does it make the point that Greece hasn't quite been destroyed yet, thank you, but it both emphasizes the stress of the attempt on the other EU nations, and hints at its futility.
And then Ed takes brilliant advantage of that old standard symbol of Italy and the serendipitous timing of Italy's financial crisis to suggest the outcome, or at least to outline the situation and comment upon it.
He got it all — this would work even if the Tower of Pisa were not, by its nature, leaning.
That is, if it were France's economy suddenly on the skids, he could have shown the EU propping up Greece with a tilting Eiffel Tower about to collapse on top of things. It would work, but in that utilitarian "The bear is Russia, the bulldog is Great Britain" formal way that sucks the fun out of political cartoons.
The Leaning Tower, however, not only is a formal symbol of Italy, but one which unintentionally, serendipitously captures not only the immediate economic situation, but Italy's overall track record of political stability as well as the always-entertaining-but-not-so-reassuring soap opera that was the Berlusconi government.
And you can say that it all came together, but it didn't. Ed Stein saw it and put it together. There's a huge difference.
And I suspect, knowing how these creative moments generally happen, that he drew it and then looked at it and said, "Wow. I did that?"
Because that's how fluency works, and how it differs from translation.
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I don't often hand out "honorable mentions," but, speaking of putting two things together with some impact, Jeff Danziger deserves a free drink for this devastating bit of cheap humor. And I say "cheap humor" with the greatest respect, because it's not often a cartoonist can crack you up and still make a coherent point.
Oh dear.
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