Cartoons Without Humor
LONG, MICHAEL
Cartoons Without Humor The underwhelming oeuvre of Herblock, America's worst political cartoonist BY MICHAEL LONG The thing that drives so many creative types batty is not their own lack of...
...Whether he invented the term or not, there is no doubt that he epitomized the type for whom the fight against "McCarthyism" would outlive the senator himself and be transformed into a lifelong anti-anti-Communist passion...
...FOLDING PEACE TABLE...
...Great actors spellbind in regional theater while selling ties at Macy's to pay the rent...
...and in one especially repellent panel he draws a schoolyard of dead and dying children under the view of two smiling lobbyists for the NRA...
...Herblock's cartoons often aren't editorializing, they're just especially nasty name-calling...
...Not for Herblock...
...He equates gun rights advocates with dealers of street drugs...
...Everyone is either friend or foe...
...In his 1998 memoir Herblock: A Cartoonist's Life, Herblock dismisses the Clinton fund-raising coffees as merely "crummy...
...It has never seemed to bother him that this passion led him to judgments that were woefully wrong...
...He worried Horace Greeley— perhaps to death...
...He is a law-and-order man—unless the lawbreakers are his friends...
...Lately, though, he rarely even makes sense...
...And there in the middle of the page was Good Citizen Herblock, grinning from ear to ear—as if Watergate had been years of good clean fun...
...Insert labels yourself...
...A week later, he portrayed the Reagan administration as a bum hanging onto a bottle of OLD JIM CROW...
...If a conservative did this, he would be looking for another line of work faster than the Reverend Jesse Jackson could come up with a new word to rhyme with "bigot...
...Because for Herblock, editorial cartooning is little more than photography by other means...
...This was gentle compared with the panel four years later mocking Bush's signature phrase for American voluntarism...
...But now when I walk into this office I am cool and calm...
...The deal is fairly canny: He singlemindedly cheers on the team, and in return, they pretend he is amusing...
...While he blasted Presidents Reagan and Bush repeatedly over the Iran-Contra affair, and Gingrich for his book deal, Herblock pulled on the kid gloves for Bill Clinton...
...Writing in the introduction to Herblock: A Cartoonist's Life, Washington Post owner Katharine Graham confessed to "generally finding myself laughing uproariously" at Herblock's cartoons...
...Even as Senator Joe McCarthy used his kangaroo committee hearings to damage his own political enemies with the charge of communism, so Herblock used the radioactive charge of McCarthyism to damage his enemies...
...There he is, still stuck on the edge of the battlefield, illustrating away, concentrating earnestly with his tongue hanging out and a pen in his mouth, metaphors whizzing past his ears, just missing their target...
...His liberal politics are mind-numbingly cliched...
...he depicts hunters as careless fools...
...Rarely in his 70-plus years of work has he come upon either a leftist position or pol with which he disagreed...
...Herblock the cartoonist got to me," Nixon famously said...
...There is no middle ground with Herblock, and none of the playfulness found in the work of superior cartoonists...
...Herblock has made a career as an enthusiastic water boy for the powers that be on the left...
...Above a tableau in which dozens of Americans are firing on each other with machine guns, Herblock pens: "A thousand points of light...
...Indeed...
...Throughout the 1980s, he portrayed the Pentagon spending that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union as a ludicrous waste...
...And he defends Clinton's renting of the Lincoln bedroom to donors by—get this— playing down the historical value of the room itself: It is a room Lincoln never slept in but which now contains his bed, along with a framed picture of him and other "Lincolnia...
...Disagree with Herblock, and you disagree with Heaven...
...Sometimes Herblock is even lazier...
...The windows are cut off by the edges of the panel in the same places...
...Continuous mention of this room not only implied that Lincoln had occupied it but practically gave the impression that he was still using it and was being forced to sleep in the hallway...
...His anthropomorphic atom bomb, a recurring trope throughout the Cold War, is a quaint period piece now, a reminder that when it came to the most important political struggle of the age, Herblock never got it right...
...The likeliest explanation for Herblock's durability is that he was always the premier Nixon Hater at the paper whose reputation was secured by Watergate...
...But like a colossal bore who repeats his stories, thinking your failure to respond means you didn't understand the first time, Herblock is not content to leave bad enough alone...
...When he marches without his ideological orders, though, the cartoons can be increasingly hard to parse...
...Regular readers of the Post may wonder: Has he always been this bad...
...THE DEVIL and THE DEEP BLUE SEA...
...he frequently drew Caspar Weinberger necklaced with a commode seat that stood for wasteful spending...
...They are virtually the same cartoon, nearly 14 years apart...
...The father of the art, Thomas Nast, was busting chops as far back as the Civil War...
...Herblock (he's used the compound name since the 1920s) cannot draw caricatures...
...The caption...
...But for real tastelessness, it's hard to beat Herblock on the subject of race relations...
...Perhaps most objectionable, he is never, ever funny...
...He started as an illustrator, filling much the same role for newspapers that photographers do today...
...And in the early 1870s, Nast helped depose Boss Tweed with nothing more than the power of the pen (and the impressive circulation of Harper's Weekly...
...A couple of examples: On January 13, 1982, he portrayed President Reagan directing a black couple to a sign reading OFF LIMITS TO COLOREDS...
...Nast's job was to draw what he saw...
...Herblock is a direct descendant of Nast—Nast the illustrator, that is...
...Michael Long is a director of the White House Writers Group, a strategy and public relations firm in Washington, D.C...
...On October 19, 2000, the Washington Post ran a panel in which he portrayed George W. Bush (labeled BUSH) as Peter Pan, standing on the ledge of a building and set to fly under the power of a bag of FAIRY DUST CAMPAIGN PROMISES...
...Try these: WORLD PEACE for the sun and MIDDLE EAST CRISES for the manhole...
...Like so many leftists, Herblock was driven less by outrage over Nixon's dirty tricks than by unspent rage against Nixon for his success in exposing liberalism's tolerance for communism in the 1940s and 1950s...
...It's an odd obsession that recurs in his work...
...A stroll through the new Library of Congress exhibit "Herblock's History" provides the answer...
...Reagan is always a nitwit...
...Hence his trademark habit of labeling every item in the panel with GREAT BIG CAPITAL LETTERS...
...He'd rather use a knee to the groin than a tickle in the ribs...
...Indeed, Herblock might be just another forgotten hack if Nixon hadn't rescued him in the 1970s by letting it be known that Herblock wounded him...
...In a July 2, 1980, cartoon, for instance, he weighs in in favor of federal funding for abortions...
...The corner of the building in both panels is the same...
...Nixon is always crawling out of a sewer...
...For practically every other cartoonist in America, liberal or conservative, Clinton has been a dream president...
...Two weeks ago, in the midst of Israeli-Palestinian violence in the Middle East, he dashed off a panel of rock-tossers in Bedouin scarves standing around a hinged slab on legs...
...If his method is execrable, his politics are worse...
...The Washington Post ran this quote across a page of Herblock's Nixon panels on August 9, 1974, in newspapers that hit the front porch just hours after his resignation...
...Herblock's metaphor—which is in no way suggested by the drawing—splays out like so: The sun is labeled ECONOMIC INDICATORS and the manhole is labeled TRADE DEFICIT...
...The illustrations are breathtakingly simple and un-witty...
...Enter Washington Post political-cartoonist-for-life Herbert Block...
...Consider a typical Herblock cartoon firom March 3, 1985...
...In an especially shameful cartoon published just five days after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Herblock took his place at the head of the "moral equivalency" crowd, portraying Kennedy and Khrushchev struggling together to keep a nuclear monster in a box—as if the two occupied the same side of that struggle...
...His lone strength is the smear...
...Of course, the history of editorial cartoons is full of rim shots and dirty pool...
...In a panel from October 4, 1988, he ludicrously outfitted then-presidential candidate George Bush with a lapel button reading EXTREME RIGHT-WING POLITICS...
...Partisanship is the lifeblood of political cartooning, but Herblock's has always been of the unpleasantest sort...
...Nast the editorial cartoonist created the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey, and even the modern image of Santa Claus...
...He no doubt thinks he's getting inside the brain of those nasty Republicans, but what he finds there seems more revealing of his mindset than his enemies': black characters with enormous lips, Step 'n' Fetchit caricatures, and welfare queens...
...But the panel is—as usual—so generic, practically any other labels would do...
...EXPENSIVE GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS and FEDERAL DEFICITS...
...On January 25, 1987, Herblock drew Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger as the personification of the proposed Star Wars missile defense, standing on the ledge of a building and set to fly under the power of books labeled MARY POPPINS, DUMBO, SUPERMAN . . . and PETER PAN...
...Most notably, in a panel from December 8, 1982, that would be laudable for its prescience were it not offered as ridicule, Herblock puts these words in the mouth of President Reagan: "If we keep on with the arms race, after a while the Russian economy will collapse...
...He takes the unsubtle view that his political opponents are all basically Klans-men...
...This is the cartoonist's equivalent of Andy Kaufman's Foreign Man: The jokes don't make any sense, and the desperate explanations only make them more obscure...
...But it was when he moved from representation to allegory that he gained notoriety—and, ultimately, wealth and formidable influence...
...His smug apologies for the Clintons make a James Carville rant sound like Tocqueville...
...Unrelieved scorn for enemies, but special pleading like this for friends—hey, it's a living...
...The Herblock cartoon has been an institution for so long, perhaps one should just bow down and admire the longevity of the thing, and not look for truth, or wit, or even a solitary passing insight in it...
...can be taken as a fair selection, then, yes, he has always been this bad...
...Instead of zig-zagging through a war zone with cameras around the neck, illustrators like Nast had to pitch an easel on the edge of the battlefield and dodge cannonballs between ink strokes...
...He became the first editorialist of his kind, inventing elements of the language of cartooning, and setting hypocrisy and lies in high relief...
...Thanks to this device, he sometimes achieves the distinction of insulting the reader's intelligence four or five times in just one cartoon...
...Well, I guess he knew whom he had to please...
...Herblock claims credit, Gore-like, for inventing the term "McCarthyism" (and, later, the epithet "Contract on America...
...The rest of us are laughing at the fact that such a hack managed to get by for so long with so little talent...
...Wanna play Herblock...
...He helped elect Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency...
...An Afirican-American woman—no husband to be seen—and four small children...
...A fellow in a suit sits at one end holding newsprint-sized sheets marked BARAK PEACE PROPOSALS...
...Herblock's cartoons have been a fixture on the Post's editorial page for more than 50 years, despite fairly obvious shortcomings...
...Perhaps it is not fair to judge Herblock this way...
...If the 121 cartoons he has donated to the library (does it ever turn anyone down...
...When he sticks to partisan business, the knee still jerks in all the right directions...
...But Nast didn't arrive on the scene as a cartoonist...
...If blind fealty were a virtue, Herblock would have been measured for his saint's robes back when Clinton was still learning to play post office...
...He labeled the Soviet military threat PENTAGON PROPAGANDA...
...Cartoons Without Humor The underwhelming oeuvre of Herblock, America's worst political cartoonist BY MICHAEL LONG The thing that drives so many creative types batty is not their own lack of success but the caprice of success...
...It's when the laurels go to the nog-for-brains that life seems most unfair...
...A happy-faced man is running down a street toward a manhole...
...Just last week, he heard that Ralph Nader was less than alarmist about the state of abortion rights under the Republicans, and he dashed off a picture of a dark back alley (though he forgot the requisite coathanger...
...For all his sermonizing that Republicans are out to lynch black people in every sense of that word, Herblock's drawings themselves always call to mind particularly unpleasant racial stereotypes...
...lousy actors sign eight-figure deals to say the F-word in front of a movie camera...
...Huh...
...And whom does he draw as the representative supplicant of such largesse...
...The same amount of skyline is visible in the lower left corner...
...And the night sky of both panels is illuminated by identical sliver-crescent moons...
...And when inspiration fails, there is always the National Rifle Association to quicken his pulse and send him racing to the drawing table for a little defamation...
...Consider also Herblock the hypocrite...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 9
