CSotD: How the Other Half Lives Matters
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In today's Medium Large, Francesco Marciuliano speaks for many, I'm sure, though he has the advantage of a strip that is extremely meta, such that commenting on commenting is within his mission.
Other cartoonists are in a position similar to 9/11, because they are required to say something at a moment when it's hard to do more than draw tears.
Sometimes that works:
When James Garfield finally died, Nast chose the simple depiction of a weeping Columbia, with a poem reflecting upon that long vigil.
I used to explain to students that, while "weepers" are a cheap way out when someone famous dies, this is a good piece, because Nast had long-established Columbia as a warrior-goddess, stern and strong, with armor and sword, protecting America.
Depicting her as a helpless, grief-stricken woman was jarring and spoke to the feelings of a nation that had stood by for nearly three months while the medicine of the time tried to treat the President.
I also show them Mauldin's classic weeping Lincoln, and point out that a weeping Uncle Sam or a weeping Statue of Liberty, while they are symbols of the nation, would have been cheap bathos.
Lincoln, too, died at the hands of an assassin, but, had Mauldin simply depicted a sad Abe Lincoln standing in a cemetery, that would have seemed cheap.
But using the Lincoln statue melded that national symbol with the personal response, turning what could have been a forgettable so-what into a classic that even Herblock, the other great cartoonist of the era, couldn't match.
This time around, Clay Bennett may have done as well as anyone else by expressing the sense of "when will it ever end?" with this simple motif.
These moments feed into Bennett's understated style; on 9/11, while it seemed every other cartoonist was drawing a weeping Statue of Libery, Bennett's response stood out by invoking, rather than depicting, the horror.
There has been a lot of chatter on Facebook, suggesting a parallel between the present trauma and 1968, the year that saw the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, together with the chaos of the Democratic National Convention.
I don't feel the comparison holds up.
Having been a college student then, the only true parallel I see is that, at each of those moments, there was a sense of "Is this the one that will wake people up?"
But I also remember that those who condemned the system, the Weathermen and other hardliners, were a small group that coalesced after the Democratic Convention. Most Americans still thought things could be fixed.
The Convention was a turning point of sorts, but not in creating despair and radicalism. Rather, the chants of "The Whole World Is Watching" were accurate: It wasn't entirely unfiltered, but the live television coverage was unplanned and watching a police riot while hearing Mayor Daley's denials and explanations knocked a lot of people off the fence.
As Mauldin depicted it, this was the moment that the media, and through them, Mom, Dad, Bud and Sis, saw how "law and order" really unfolded on street level.
I addressed that moment — and the cartoons that commented upon it — this past March and I stand by what I said then about what Middle America saw behind the curtain.
They were appalled and Humphrey lost the election, though the popular vote was considerably closer than the electoral college margin.
This ushered in the Nixon era, but George Wallace had already awakened rightwingers and so neither the riots in the streets nor the manipulations of the Nixon White House deserve full credit or blame for the divisions that ensued.
Still, even when Kent State happened two years after the Convention, the shocked response was not that the entire system was broken, but that it had been hijacked and needed to be rescued, not overthrown.
And, about the time that began to feel impossible, Nixon provided the gift of Watergate, in an era not simply when newsrooms had the staff, the budget and the cojones to ferret out uncomfortable facts, but when the Senate had members of sufficient intestinal fortitude to conduct a hearing that was sincere and complete in its intentions.
I guess you had to be there.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Ndula provides a hint of how we are viewed from Africa, while Stantis expresses the destruction of "one nation indivisible," into clicques and factions and conflicting definitions of who constitutes "us"and who can be dismissed as "them."
And perhaps distance provides perspective: Ndula's piece from Kenya might also have been juxtaposed with this Michael de Adder panel from Nova Scotia, because this is how race relations look from that distance.
It's also how they look from this distance, but we've said that so many times with so little impact that you have to wonder what goes on in this country's collective head when, once more, we are forced to confront another mass shooting.
Perhaps Quebecer Terry (Aislin) Mosher has the best answer to that last question.
And if we didn't pair that panel with Ndula's, maybe it would go better with Adam Zyglis's cartoon anyway.
Because I'm not sure what we can leave to our children anyway, if we can't qualify for the traditional opening "being of sound mind …"
LONG ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance. – Jacob Riis, 1890
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