Editorial cartoons are wonderful, aren’t they?
There are those cartoons that make me laugh out loud. There are those that are more serious, but still make excellent points in clever ways. Some cartoons are wickedly satirical. Others are somber.
And, as I have become increasingly aware lately, they all have the potential to evoke strong reactions.
I have caught some heat for a couple of cartoons that ran on these pages recently.
The first was done by well-known syndicated cartoonist Gary McCoy.
It was an unfl attering depiction - to say the least - of President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.
We heard numerous complaints about that one.
How did it come to be published? I had been looking for a conservative cartoon for that day’s paper and settled on that one, just because it stood out to me as a blatantly right-wing piece. I rushed through the selection process and didn’t take enough time to really evaluate it.
In retrospect, I realized the cartoon was needlessly disrespectful and, above all, dumb. I regret running it.
Moving on: Two days later, we ran a cartoon - this one by Rick McKee of the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle - showing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. The soldierhad his gun drawn and was looking at himself in a mirror. The caption read, “Confronting our worst enemy in Afghanistan.”
One reader was infuriated enough to write a letter to the editor, which was published Wednesday. She said the cartoon “denigrates each and every one of our courageous military members” and insisted that the newspaper should apologize for it.
At least one person called us to say she agreed with the letter writer.
The cartoon was in reaction to a recent wave of troubling and disturbing incidents in Afghanistan perpetrated by NATO or our military: the video of U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of dead insurgents; the incineration of some copies of the Quran; and worst of all, the late-night massacre of 16 Afghan civilians, allegedly perpetrated by U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.
The cartoon, though not exceptionally clever, illustrated what I suspect many Americans arethinking - that a few bad apples in the military are harming our cause more than the Taliban ever could.
That sentiment shouldn’t be equated with a lack of respect for what our courageous men and women are doing overseas.
Sensible folks understand the vast majority of our troops are performing their duties with integrity and honor. Keep in mind they are operating under great stress in an obviously hostile environment, with the threat of death following them whereverthey go.
Some deeper thought on the cartoon and the subject of Afghanistan leads us to some important questions: What are we still doing there? Why has our mission there dragged on for more than a decade? How much will we have spent on our mission, and how many lives will have been lost, when it’s finally over? What will it cost to treat all those U.S. soldiers who return with physical and/or mental problems? What do we expect Afghanistan to look like in the future?
These are the questions that should preoccupy our presidential candidates.
Instead, all we hear about is who’s to blame for the price of gasoline increasing by a few dimes per gallon.
On these pages, we periodically run notices of the latest deaths of U.S.
soldiers. This is one way to remind our readers of the sacrifices being made in distant lands. We don’t hear enough about those sacrifi ces.
The Afghanistan mirror cartoon might have seemed harsh, but it also begs usto pay attention to this military effort we all are paying for in one way or another. If it started a conversation at the dinner table, I’d say that cartoon served its purpose.
In the meantime, I’m wondering whether I should save myself a lot of grief and stop publishing editorial cartoons - maybe just pictures of puppies and kittens instead.
Just kidding.
DAVE PEROZEK IS EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR OF NORTHWEST ARKANSAS NEWSPAPERS.
Opinion, Pages 13 on 03/25/2012