Bill Berkowitz: 'Is Ted Rall the most dangerous cartoonist in America?'
Posted on Saturday, July 24 @ 09:28:23 EDT
This article has been read 1433 times.
By Bill Berkowitz, Working
For Change
The outrageous and strident political cartoon has an illustrious history in the
U.S., dating back to Benjamin Franklin and the Revolutionary War. Political
cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall works within that tradition, providing an
antidote to the conglomerate-controlled world of editorial cartooning, where
dumbing-down has often been the ticket to moving up the syndication food chain.
To those that can't stand him, Rall is a cranky loudmouth, an anti-patriotic no-goodnik
whose work habitually violates good taste and the boundaries of reasonable
political discourse. For others, he's a commentator willing to take risks who,
in the words of late sports reporter Howard Cosell, "tells it like it
is." A recent collection of his work, Generalissimo el Busho: Essays and
Cartoons On The Bush Years (Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing, 2004)
contains columns, cartoons, and non-archived essays from the period shortly
before Election 2000 through January of this year.
Rall rattles sensibilities. A few months back he caught holy hell for penning a
controversial cartoon questioning both the sacrifice and intelligence of Pat
Tillman, the professional football player who gave up a multi-million dollar
contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join his brother Kevin in the military
after 9/11. In late April, Tillman was killed in a firefight in Afghanistan (it
was later discovered that he was a victim of "friendly fire").
While politicians and pundits rushed to publicly celebrate Tillman's sacrifice
and heroism, Rall used the incident to take a look at the bigger picture --
Bush's misdirected permanent war against terrorism. His strip asserted that
Tillman had been led to "falsely believe Bush's wars against Iraq and
Afghanistan had something to do with 9/11" and was thus a "cog in a
low-rent occupation army that shot more innocent civilians than terrorists to
prop up puppet rulers and exploit gas and oil resources." The strip ends
with three media types struggling to come up with a one-word descriptor for
Tillman: "Idiot," says one. "Sap," suggests another.
"Hero!" shouts the editor.
Rall's controversial cartoon was pulled from a number of media outlets that
normally carry his work, and earned him death threats and a visit with Fox News
Channel's Bill O'Reilly. At the end of the interview, O'Reilly broke with his
custom of giving the "last word" to his guest. Instead, O'Reilly took
the "last word" for himself, saying that Rall should "be
ashamed" of what he "did to Tillman." The following night
O'Reilly said that Rall "makes [Doonesbury's Gary] Trudeau looks like Rush
Limbaugh."
Making enemies
In a period when Bush-bashing has become an art form and the right routinely
dismisses dissenters and critics as Bush-haters, Rall was way ahead of the
curve. The Wall Street Journal singled him out as "the most bitterly
anti-American commentator in America." The National Review called him
"a big fat zero, an ignorant, talentless hack with a flair for recycling
leftist pieties into snarky cartoons that inspired breakfast-table chuckles
among the leftist literati and the granola-munching types."
Sometimes, Rall lays it on pretty thick. While the media was in a paroxysm of
grief over the death of President Ronald Reagan, Rall punctured the sanctity:
"His clown-like dyed hair and rouged cheeks disgusted us. We hated him
during the dark days he made so hideous, and, with all due respect, we hate him
still." He later acidly observed that the late president was "turning
crispy brown right about now." Rall defended his comments saying: "I
think most people view the president as a fair target. Reagan was a public
figure, and he was an idiot. And if he were around and lucid, he would probably
say that it comes with the territory."
Rall posits that effective critics must "enjoy some special insight into
their targets." The Washington Post's long-time editorial cartoonist
Herblock "understood Richard Nixon's underlying personality and depicted
his sleazy essence with a dozen scowling lines surrounding a grim lattice of
five o'clock shadow," he writes. Similarly, the Seattle Times' David Horsey
"channeled to the core of Bill Clinton's sexual dualism, his simultaneous
admiration for and exploitation of women, using fulsome young lasses pursued by
the Arkansas Apollo."
Cartooning presidents since the Reagan Administration, Rall believes that while
he's produced "some decent pieces," he hadn't captured "unique
insight into their personalities." When Team Bush sent "hired young
goons to beat up and intimidate Miami-Dade County election workers," after
November 7, 2000, Rall recognized Bush as "a bully." He launched a
cartoon crusade against the man he calls the "(p)resident,"
referencing his appointment to the office by the United States Supreme Court.
Not long after Bush took office Rall christened him "Generalissimo el Busho,"
a not-so-subtle reference to what Rall calls "tin-pot Third World
autocrats."
"The first image that popped into my mind upon watching Bush's simian
countenance 'accept' Gore's concession was that of former dictator Augusto
Pinochet," Rall writes. "I discovered an old Time containing a state
portrait of the Chilean general [who in 1973 overthrew the legitimately elected
government of Salvador Allende in Chile and subsequently was responsible for the
execution and disappearance of thousands of dissidents]; I was struck first by
the contrast between the grandeur of his costume and the dimness of his
eyes."
Generalissimo el Busho, like Pinochet, "would soon assume all the trappings
of high office -- Air Force One, honor guards, the right to interrupt prime-time
sit-coms -- but they wouldn't change his essential inferiority and
incompetence."
Unlike the chattering classes -- television's talking heads, right-wing radio
talk show hosts and mainstream columnists -- who prefer to put Election 2000
behind them, Rall vowed not to "move on," not to recognize the
illegitimate (p)resident, and "never [to] utter the phrase 'President
George W. Bush.'"
As fellow political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow states in the introduction to
Generalissimo, criticizing the president in today's climate is easy; Anti-Bush
books populate the bestseller lists, rock groups put out Bush-bashing CDs and
Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, was the top-grossing movie in America
in its first week on the screen and has become the top-grossing documentary of
all time. "Saying it when the entire country seems to be lined up against
you -- well, that's when it matters," Tomorrow writes. And that's what Rall,
a Pulitzer Prize finalist and two-time winner of the Robert F. Kennedy
Journalism Award, was doing even before Election Day 2000.
Rall knows he can't be effective as a lone voice. In two earlier anthologies
entitled Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists and Attitude 2: The
New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists, Rall champions the work of a new breed
of lesser known, and sometimes unknown "subversive cartoonists" --
many of whom ply their trade in alternative weeklies and underground comics. In
these volumes, Rall interviews and samples the work of more than forty political
cartoonists who "revel in anger about issues that matter to ordinary
people." These "subversive" political cartoonists stand tall and
take risks in contrast to "their colleagues on the editorial pages on the
nation's chain-owned daily newspapers who produce empty jokes about the
news."
Do Rall's cartoons and commentary occasionally stray from civil political
discourse? You bet. Can he be insensitive and mean-spirited? On occasion.
However, in an age where prisoners are mistreated at home and tortured abroad,
where civilians are killed indiscriminately in the name of a permanent war
against terrorism, and where administration utterances make used car salesmen
look like principled truth-tellers, the boundaries of what passes
"civilized" political debate must be challenged. And that's what Rall
does.
Let's give him the "last word": "Cartooning won't change the
world," he writes, "but that's no reason not to try."
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His
WorkingForChange column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players,
institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.
© 2004 Working Assets.
Reprinted from Working For Change:
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17340
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