CSotD: Beyond the weeping statue
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Editorial cartoonists love to take a familiar symbol and adapt it to express an opinion. Weeping Statues of Liberty have become a snide inside joke about lazy, sentimental dreck, after the scores of them drawn in the wake of 9/11. Justice peeking under blindfold is another graphic cliche, while some other cartoonists don't seem entirely clear on the distinction between the two statues.
So it was a pleasure to see Rob Rogers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette create this appropriate and striking use of Justice to comment on the Jordan Miles case. This is a local story in Pittsburgh, about a high-honors student from a local high school who, according to his story, was going from his mother's house to his grandmother's one night in January when he was approached by three plain-clothes policemen whom he mistook for robbers. The police version is that he was seen sneaking around houses in the dark and they believed he was carrying a gun under his coat.
Miles fled from the three men, who caught him and beat him severely, then arrested him for aggravated assault, loitering and prowling at nighttime, escape and resisting arrest. All of these charges were subsequently dropped, but Miles had been so badly beaten, his face swollen and large patches of bald, torn scalp where his dreadlocks had been ripped from his head during the beating, that the photos his mother took became a focus of outrage in the community.
The case has now provoked further anger, as the police officers involved have been reinstated and the Justice Department has declined to bring charges against them. A scan of Pittsburgh media suggests that Rogers is taking the mainstream opinion in this case, but what makes the cartoon work is how well he uses the imagery.
By substituting the swollen, bruised face of Jordan Miles for the normally bland, blindfolded face of Justice, Rogers blends two familiar images appropriately with his caption, also a familiar phrase. These three elements work well together, with none being stretched out of its normal frame and no need to gin things up with a maudlin overlay of emotion.
It's rare that all the elements of a cartoon come into place so readily, rarer still when a cartoonist recognizes the possibilities before it's too late. This is solid craftsmanship by an experienced master of the form.
It's also a very strong example of why local newspapers should employ their own cartoonists. I'd be surprised if anything else in the Pittsburgh media has the resonance of this single panel.
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