Cartoonists get back to work

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In the immediate aftermath of tragedy, editorial cartoonists, like everyone else, pay their respects. Ever since Bill Mauldin's famous weeping Lincoln Memorial captured the nation's grief at the Kennedy assassination, the stark black-bordered post-horror cartoon has become a genre unto itself. In something of a departure from their usual mixed reactions, newspaper readers LOVE them. They want prints. They want originals. For a day or two, they forgive and forget our past transgressions and hail our collective genius.

But after the sobbing Statues of Liberty, after memorializing New York's firefighters and cops as the Twin Towers of Bravery, after Iwo Jima 2, and the demonizing of terror, then what? Well, then, as the president urged, we, like all Americans, get back to work.

We start asking questions about lax security. We express our feelings, hopes, even doubts about our country's capacity for dealing with such an enormous threat. We ask questions about civil liberties, retaliation, racial and ethnic profiling, corporate bailouts, and all the rest. And, inevitably, we return to employing the various tools of our tirades: irony, humor, ridicule, scorn, skepticism and sarcasm.

Everyone has a personal timetable for the resumption of criticism-as-usual. In my case, I waited exactly four days before jumping on the president's claim that we would "punish any state that harbored or trained terrorists" by asking if that included the state of Florida. I let another two days pass before pointing out that Mr. Bush was now learning the value of international cooperation, and another two days before trotting out another in a long series of Cheney-wears-the-pants pieces, which featured my usual diminutive trouser-tugging W mumbling simplistic slogans about good and evil.

Plenty of readers felt we ignored the central tenet of the maxim that "tragedy plus time equals comedy." From the furious clenched-teeth voicemails, the subscription cancellations, the demands for my resignation and the love-it-or-leave-it ultimatums, you'd think we were flying the al Qaid flag on the building. In a fit of exaggeration only a cartoonist could fathom, one elderly woman spat into the phone that I "should have been in the World Trade Center." Such is the power of the cartoon, when it is unleashed.

Fortunately, I have editors and a publisher who understand that infuriating a few customers is an unavoidable consequence of good editorial cartooning. We've tried to address our readers' concerns, by the diabolically simple tactic of just answering our mail and phone calls. It's work, but preferable to losing subscribers or pulling our punches.

Tragedy energizes all of us with a renewed seriousness of purpose. For cartoonists, that means none of the silly pop-culture wisecracks that have so unfortunately defined the field in recent years. Newsweek published only strong, serious cartoons the weekend of Sept. 15, 2001. So did USA TODAY. It has long been known in cartooning circles that if you want the national ink, stay away from complicated foreign policy subjects or divisive religious issues, and go for the mainstream. Well, for a while at least, complex world issues and divisive religious issues ARE the mainstream. We'll see how long that lasts. Americans aren't much interested in them, and even the editors and publishers who know better lack the will for the fight.

Soon the cartoons will return to gags about celebrity weddings and consumer trends, and we can all relax, secure in the knowledge that life is back to normal, and we are safe from the sharp swords of satire. That's when I'll start to worry again.

Joel Pett has been with the Lexington Herald-Leader since 1984. He is a past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, and the recipient of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize.