CSotD: Doves, serpents and a mother’s love
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Cartoon Movement, along with Radio Netherlands Worldwide and Stripdagen Haarlem, a comics festival in Holland, have announced the 10 finalists in their "Cartoon Spring Competition" for young (under 35) cartoonists from the Arab world, drawing on the topic of the Arab Spring.
As of this morning, six of the 10 are posted; this one is by Youcef Bechkit, an Algerian. It's interesting to see the levels of optimism in each piece and then see where they are from: The other really upbeat one so far is from Jordan. Others are a bit more grim or at least enigmatic.
You can see them by going to that main site and then just using the arrows to navigate through them. And you would do well to poke around a little there; the site is surprisingly deep and has quite a bit of varied content.
I find a lot of international cartoons a little strong on metaphor and weak on storytelling for my taste, but preferences vary, and I'm certainly not in a mood to defend the more story-based style of American cartooning at a moment when half-a-dozen or more Yanks have done the same cartoon with Mark Zuckerberg doing a "face plant" over Facebook's IPO and the rest are riffing on the TIME Magazine nursing toddler cover.
Actually, none of the Facebook IPO cartoons have been worth much, given that, as discussed earlier, anyone with any knowledge of the market could see it was overvalued.
I expect cartoonists to be partisan, but I think it's important that they not be ignorant. They should be doing more than watching Leno's monologue for inspiration, and, if they're going to pass along false reports, biased polls, phony projections and suchlike, dammit, they should know that they are lying.
I can tolerate a deliberate, partisan lie more than a case of somebody simply repeating something he's too dumb and lazy to verify.
Granted, it's harder to come up with good commentary — on any platform, not just cartooning — when things are generally going well.
I interviewed Arlo Guthrie back in 1989, and he talked about kids coming to his concerts because they felt they had missed something by not having been young in the Sixties. Good music, good art comes from moments of tension, and, in slack times, well, you get slackers.
But, he noted, there was plenty going on at that moment in East Germany and in China and in Czechoslovakia, and, 20 years hence, young people would look back on their parents' youth with the same feeling of wishing they'd been alive then.
It's a good time to be a young person in the Middle East right now. For all the danger and conflict, they are surrounded by activity and crisis and change, and one day, Inshallah, their kids will look back from a world of quiet and say, "What was it like to be young then?"
And yet we are also living in a world of crisis here in the West, and we're responding like the ostriches of metaphor, hoping that, if we make jokes about Facebook and address national economics with simpleminded comparisons to personal finance, if we ignore the wars that only touch 20 percent of families in terms of personal risk but touch us all in terms of tanking our economy now and for the future, all the economic problems, all the obsessive fear that persuades us to give up our privacy, all the bizarre social insecurity that spurs us to interfere in each other's intimate lives, all the crazed demagoguery that elevates the few above the many, will go away.
We are like wealthy, pampered young Nicholai Rostov in War and Peace, unhorsed in his first battle and watching the French soldiers come towards him: "Who are they? Why are they running? Can they be coming at me? And why? To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?" He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible. "But perhaps they may do it!"
Nicholai escaped the French, smartened up and became a fine soldier. But I suspect many others have been cut down while still frozen in that state of stunned disbelief.
I don't think these cartoonists from the Arab countries have any illusions about being protected, either by their mothers' love or by some great cosmic exceptionalism.
As some fellow from the Middle East once said, when you find yourself among wolves, it is good to be as wise as a serpent, and as guileless as a dove.
We should listen to him.
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