Good times, bad times for cartoons

E P UNNY

WHEN times aren’t bad enough, cartoonists complain. ‘‘We’re suffering from good times. What’s good for the republic is bad for cartooning.’’ Pat Oliphant bemoaned in 1998 after 35 years of cartooning American politics through Vietnam, Watergate and three Pulitzer Prizes. In an end-of-the century appraisal, the younger Doug Marlette went even further. He pronounced his tribe of editorial cartoonists an endangered species.

Having had a grandmother bayoneted by a national guardsman in a mill strike in the ’30s, a father in Vietnam and a mother going to pieces at home in the ’60s, he saw the act of cartooning as a sacrament and found the approaching century professionally uninspiring. No McCarthy, No Nixon, No napalm bomb. Only petty offenders of the Clinton kind. Nothing to kindle the fire in the belly.

The American cartoonist is too touchy. His Indian counterpart has seen the worst of good times. We had all of 19 months from June 1975 when the country’s newspapers carried nothing but good news. Trains ran on time, people worked more and talked less and the incarcerated opposition even less.

Two of our finest satirical minds, Rajinder Puri and O V Vijayan, opted out. Those who endured sat chewing more pencils or smoking more cigarettes than was good for them, as the censor bent over their sketches looking for encrypted treason.

Indian cartooning survived thanks largely to unlettered voters who never read the good news anyway. TV was still a rarity. To be fair, our leaders haven’t since given us such good times. Worse, they are giving us indifferent times driven by utterly cynical politics pixelized into sub-faiths, sub-sub castes and micro-McCarthys.

Day after day, we nuance our way through loads of political correctness. Last Tuesday came the big relief from this low intensive pettiness. The twin towers of global politics and economics came crashing down. And with them any immediate prospect of bearable times. Oliphant and Marlette couldn’t ask for more.

But there is a catch. No way anyone anywhere can appropriate the mess. To start with, it is too big and too instant to provide any local advantage. TV in its own way is a great leveller. The images of the towering infernos reached the Delhi evening and the New York morning the same time. If anything, the cartoonist working for the morning paper could have got into print sooner.

Cartoonists the world over converged as never before. We in Chennai or Mumbai looked out of our windows and saw the Statue of Liberty as starkly as the New York-based cartoonist. Also Planet Earth with its galactic paraphernalia rolls as easily into our drawing sheets as theirs. This is one sign that Nostradamus missed.

The globe is a battle-scarred cartoon cliche that has endured two world wars and the lesser deadlier ones that followed. When it reappears persistently, be warned. Our shakers and movers from politicians to priests and generals to economists are losing control.

And presence. Now you see them constantly performing before the TV camera. Hopefully, they will soon fight their way back into the cartoon, which is where they belong. Till then, the little planet will drift in 2 and 3 column wide newsprint to remind us that our survival isn’t exactly a cosmic priority.