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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Editors, Not Terrorists, Killed American Political Cartooning

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Ted Rall
Terrorism doesn’t scare political cartoonists nearly as much as editors — and the corporate bean-counters who tell them what to do.

The Charlie Hebdo massacre couldn’t have happened here in the United States. But it’s not because American newspapers have better security.

Gunmen could never kill four political cartoonists in an American newspaper office because no paper in the U.S. employs two, much less four, staff political cartoonists — the number who died Wednesday in Paris. There is no equivalent of Charlie Hebdo, which puts political cartoons front and center, in the States. (The Onion never published political cartoons — and it ceased print publication last year. MAD, for which I draw, focuses on popular culture.)

When I began drawing political cartoons professionally in the early 1990s, hundreds of my colleagues worked on staff at newspapers, with full salaries and benefits. That was already down from journalism’s mid-century glory days, when there were thousands. Many papers employed two. Shortly after World War II, The New York Times, which today has none, employed four cartoonists on staff. Today there are fewer than 30.

Most American states have zero full-time staff political cartoonists.

Many big states — California, New York, Texas, Illinois — have one.

No American political magazine, on the left, center or right, has one.

No American political website (Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, Slate, Salon, etc.) employs a political cartoonist. Although its launch video was done in cartoons, eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s new $250 million left-wing start-up First Look Media refuses to hire political cartoonists — or pay tiny fees to reprint syndicated ones.

These outfits have tons of staff writers.

During the last few days, many journalists and editors have spread the “Je Suis Charlie” meme through social media in order to express “solidarity” with the victims of Charlie Hebdo, political cartoonists (who routinely receive death threats, whether they live in France or the United States) and freedom of expression. That’s nice.

No it’s not.

It’s annoying.

As far as political cartoonists are concerned, editorials pledging “solidarity” with the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists is an empty gesture — corporate slacktivism. Less than 24 hours after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel fired its long-time, award-winning political cartoonist, Chan Lowe.

Political cartoonists: editors love us when we’re dead. While we’re still breathing, they’re laying us off, slashing our rates, stealing our copyrights and disappearing us from where we used to appear — killing our art form.

American editors and publishers have never been as willing to publish satire, whether in pictures or in words, as their European counterparts. But things have gone from bad to apocalyptic in the last 30 years.

Humor columnists like the late Art Buchwald earned millions syndicating their jokes about politicians and current events to American newspapers through the 1970s and 1980s. Miami Herald humor writer Dave Barry was a rock star through the 1990s, routinely cranking out bestselling books. Then came 9/11.

When I began working as an executive talent scout for the United Media syndicate in 2006, my sales staff informed me that, if Barry had started out then, they wouldn’t have been able to sell him to a single newspaper, magazine or website — not even if they gave his work to them for free. Barry was still funny, but there was no market for satire anywhere in American media.

That’s even truer today.

The youngest working political cartoonist in the United States, Matt Bors, is 31. When people ask me who the next up-and-comer is, I tell them there isn’t one — and there won’t be one any time soon.

Americans are funny. Americans like funny. They especially like wicked funny. We’re so desperate for funny that we think Jon Stewart is hilarious. (But…Richard Pryor. He really was.) But editors and producers won’t give them funny, much less mean-funny.

Why not?

Like any other disaster, media censorship of satire — especially graphic satire — in the U.S. is caused by several contributing factors.

Most media outlets are owned by corporations, not private owners. Publicly-traded companies are risk-averse. Executives prefer to publish boring/safe content that won’t generate complaints from advertisers or shareholders, much less force them to hire extra security guards.

Half a century ago, many editors had working-class backgrounds and rose through the ranks from the bottom. Now they’re graduates of pricey graduate university journalism programs that don’t offer scholarships — and don’t teach a single class about comics, cartoons, humor or graphic art. It takes an unusually curious editor to make the effort to educate himself or herself about political cartoons.

Corporate journalism executives view cartoons as frivolous, less serious than “real” commentary like columns or editorials. Unfortunately, some editorial cartoonists make this problem worse by drawing silly gags about current events (as opposed to trenchant attacks on the powers that be) because they’ve seen their blandest work win Pulitzers and coveted spots in the major weekend cartoon “round-ups.” When asked to cut their budget, editors often look at their cartoonist first.

There is still powerful political cartooning online. Ironically, the Internet contributes to the death of satire in America by sating the demand for hard-hitting political art. Before the Web, if a paper canceled my cartoons they would receive angry letters from my fans. Now my readers find me online — but the Internet pays pennies on the print dollar. I’m stubbornly hanging on, but many talented cartoonists, especially the young, won’t work for free.

It’s not that media organizations are broke. Far from it. Many are profitable. American newspapers and magazines employ tens of thousands of writers — they just don’t want anyone writing or drawing anything that questions the status quo, especially not in a form as powerful as political cartooning.

The next time you hear editors pretending to stand up for freedom of expression, ask them if they employ a cartoonist.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

Special to The Los Angeles Times: Political Cartooning is Almost Worth Dying For

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Ted Rall

CharlieHebdoShooting

 

 

Originally published by The Los Angeles Times:

An event like yesterday’s slaughter of at least 10 staff members, including four political cartoonists, and two policemen, at the office of Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris, elicits so many responses that it’s hard to sort them out.

If you have a personal connection, that comes first.

I do.

I met a group of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, including one of the victims, a few years ago at the annual cartoon Festival in Angoulême, France, the biggest gathering of cartoonists and their fans in the world. They had sought me out, partly as fans of my work – for whatever reason, my stuff seems to travel well overseas – and because I was an American cartoonist who speaks French. We did what cartoonists do: we got drunk, complained about our editors, exchanged trade secrets including pay rates.

If I lived in France, that’s where I’d want to work.

My French counterparts struck me as more self-confident and cockier than the average cartoonist. Unlike at the older, venerable Le Canard Enchainée, cartoons are the centerpiece of Charlie Hebdo, not prose. The paper has suffered financial troubles over the years, yet somehow the French continued to keep it afloat because they love comics.

Here’s how much France values graphic satire:

  • More full-time staff political cartoonists were killed in Paris yesterday than are employed at newspapers in the states of California, Texas and New York combined.
  • More full-time staff cartoonists were killed in Paris yesterday than work at all American magazines and websites combined.

            The Charlie Hebdo artists knew they were working at a place that not only allows them to push the envelope, but encourages it. Hell, they didn’t even tone things down after their office got bombed.

They weren’t paid much, but they were having fun. The last time that I met print journalists as punk rock as those guys, they were at the old Spy magazine.

They would definitely want that attitude to outlive them.

Next comes the “there but for the grace of God” reaction.

Every political cartoonist receives threats. After 9/11 especially, people promised to blow me up with a bomb, slit the throats of every member of my family, rape me, and deprive me of a livelihood by organizing sketchy boycott campaigns. (That last one almost worked.)

The most chilling came from a New York police officer, a sergeant, who was so careless and/or unconcerned about getting in trouble that his caller ID popped up.

Who was I going to call to complain? The cops?

As far as I know, no editorial cartoonist has been murdered in response to the content of his or her work in the United States, but there’s a first time for everything. Political cartoonists have been killed and brutally beaten in other countries. Here in the United States, the murder of an outspoken radio talkshow host reminds us that political murder isn’t something that only takes place somewhere else.

Every political cartoonist takes a risk to exercise freedom expression.

We know that our work, strident and opinionated, makes a lot of people very angry, and that we live in a country where a lot of people have a lot of guns. Whether you work in a newspaper office guarded by a minimum wage security guard or, as is increasingly the norm, in your own home, you are always one pull of a trigger away from death when you hit “send” to fire off your cartoon to your syndicate, blog or publication.

Which brings me to my big-picture reaction to yesterday’s horror:

Cartoons are incredibly powerful.

Not to denigrate writing (especially since I do a lot of it myself), but cartoons elicit far more response from readers, both positive and negative, than prose. Websites that run cartoons, especially political cartoons, are consistently amazed at how much more traffic they generate than words. I have twice been fired by newspapers because my cartoons were too widely read — editors worried that they were overshadowing their other content.

Scholars and analysts of the form have tried to articulate exactly what it is about comics that make them so effective at drawing an emotional response, but I think it’s the fact that such a deceptively simple art form can pack such a wallop. Particularly in the political cartoon format, nothing more than workaday artistic chops and a few snide sentences can be enough to cause a reader to question his long-held political beliefs, national loyalties, even his faith in God.

That drives some people nuts.

Think of the rage behind the gunmen who invaded Charlie Hebdo’s office yesterday, and that of the men who ordered them to do so. It’s too early to say for sure, but it’s a fair guess that they were radical Islamists. I’d like to ask them: how weak is your faith, how lame a Muslim must you be, to allow yourself to be reduced to the murder of innocents, over ink on paper colorized in Photoshop? In a sense, they were victims of cartoon derangement syndrome, the same affliction that led to the burning of embassies over the Danish Mohammed cartoons, the repeated outrage over The New Yorker’s insipid yet controversial covers, and that NYPD sergeant in Brooklyn who called me after he read my cartoon criticizing the invasion of Iraq.

Political cartooning in the United States gets no respect. I was thinking about that this morning when I heard NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley call Charlie Hebdo “gross” and “in poor taste.” (I should certainly hope so! If it’s in good taste, it ain’t funny.) It was a hell of a thing to say, not to mention not true, while the bodies of dead journalists were still warm. But these were cartoonists, and therefore unworthy of the same level of decorum that a similar event at, say, The Onion – which mainly runs words – would merit.

But no matter. Political cartooning may not pay well, or often at all, and media elites can ignore it all they want. (Hey book critics: graphic novels exist!) But it matters.

Almost enough to die for.

How To Avoid a Hangover

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Ted Rall

Originally published at Breaking Modern:

 The future is so bright you may want to wear shades — and, if the latest economic data is any indication, you may be able to afford some swagaroo designer ones as what might just be a real recovery heats up in the coming year.

All that crazy optimism, however, might leave you with one hell of a hangover the morning after celebrating New Year’s Eve 2015. That’s no way to start out a promising year! Which is why, as a veteran of more all-nighters than I care to (or can) remember, I’m sharing my hangover avoidance and mitigation tips. Even if you absorb just one of these tips on how to avoid a hangover, you’ll be a happier post-partier…or a slightly less miserable one, anyway.

What IS a hangover, exactly?

 Let’s turn to the friendly folks at Medical News Today for a solid definition of that crap I’ll-never-drink-again feeling when you wake up:

 A hangover is a collection of signs and symptoms linked to a recent bout of heavy drinking. The sufferer typically has a headache, feels sick, dizzy, sleepy, confused and thirsty. Hangovers can occur at any time of day, but are usually more common the morning after a night of heavy drinking. As well as physical symptoms, the person may also experience elevated levels of anxiety, regret, shame, embarrassment, as well as depression.

The severity of a hangover is closely linked to how much alcohol was consumed, and whether the sufferer had enough sleep. The less sleep the worse the hangover. It is impossible really to say how much alcohol can be safely consumed to avoid a hangover – it depends on the individual, his/her circumstances that day, how tired they were before their drinking started, whether they were already dehydrated before the drinking began, whether they drank plenty of water during their drinking session, how much sleep they got afterwards, etc.

How to avoid a hangover

The only surefire way to avoid a hangover is, to echo Nancy Reagan, Just Say No, i.e., don’t drink alcohol. For certain people — alcoholics in or not yet in recovery, obviously, drug abusers, people who are allergic to booze — that should be their daily reality. If you’ve read this far, however, you’ve probably already decided that abstinence is not for you.

If you know in advance that you’re going to drink a lot, plan ahead. That starts with what you eat, beginning with breakfast the day of the big event. Pickles, hummus, asparagus, eggs and milk are among the foods that mitigate the negative effects of alcohol consumption — but only if downed beforehand. Others suggest mashed potatoes. From personal experience, I vote for carbohydrates. A generous serving of pasta in your stomach at least two hours before your first glass will probably take the edge off.

Even if they’re the same weight as you, if you’re female and/or of East Asian descent, don’t try keeping up with your drinking mates. Women have less body fat by weight than men do; Asians have low levels of the enzyme acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, which breaks down acetaldehyde. Women and East Asians get drunk faster and suffer more the next day.

Avoid carbonated drinks — the CO2 speeds the absorption of alcohol into your system. “A study at the University of Surrey in 2001 found volunteers given two glasses of fizzy champagne had an average of 0.54 milligrams of alcohol per milliliter of blood after five minutes, while those given the same amount of flat champagne had 0.39 milligrams,” reports The Daily Mail of the UK, where they know something about drinking.

Conventional wisdom dictates that a principal cause of hangovers is dehydration, but that has become controversial in recent years.

Adam Rogers, author of Proof: The Science of Booze, told NPR.

“Everyone will tell you, “Oh, it’s because alcohol dehydrates you and that’s what’s causing the hangover.”… [So you’re told to] alternate [between water and alcohol], or have a big glass of water before you go to bed, and some of that comes from the fact that you do get dehydrated. But, in fact, the dehydration does not seem to be what’s causing the hangover. You can fix the dehydration — and you’re still hung over.”

Anthony Giglio, a NYC wine expert and author of Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide, disagrees: “I drink at least eight ounces [of water] with no ice to make sure I pace myself and don’t overindulge.”

I side with Giglio.

If you drink one full glass of water (no ice, unless you make it two glasses) for every alcoholic beverage, you’ll won’t feel like dying when the hangover hits — and you might stave it off entirely. Whether this is due to the hydration factor or the fact that during the time you’re drinking water you could be drinking booze instead — not to mention the tendency to get thirsty in a hot bar — is for scientists to debate. All I know is, alternating between drinks and drinks of water works.

Light makes right. Lighter-colored alcohol like vodka has fewer congeners — chemicals that determine the color, smell and taste of the drink — than darker drinks like bourbon. Studies have found that lighter beverages with fewer congeners leave you feeling better after drinking.

Go to the top shelf. It’s not just labeling: more expensive bottles have fewer congeners. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be happy you sprung for Bulleit over Night Train. Your credit card bill, on the other hand, may not agree.

Hangover Mitigation

Now you’ve done it. How can you take the edge off the hangover you already have?

Traditional remedies include drinking lots of water, greasy food and even sex, but the truth is, there’s no scientific proof any of those will actually speed the alleviation of your headache or other symptoms. Still, your body will likely crave the water and certainly the food, so go with it.

Aspirin works. So does sleeping it off, so you might want to call in sick.

Alcoholism experts disapprove of people talking about this, but it turns out that the “hair of the dog” remedy — having a Bloody Mary or other alcoholic beverage over breakfast ­— actually reduces the effects of a hangover.

Here’s Rogers again:

“The idea [is] that a hangover is caused by methanol toxicity. So, methanol is another the kind of alcohol right, alcohols as a class or a class of molecules in organic chemistry, ethanol is the one that we drink to feel like we’ve been drinking. But in any preparation of fermenting and especially distilling you’ll get a little bit of methanol too. And if there’s too much, that’s that, it’s the stuff that makes you go blind in bad moonshine right? But there’s a notion that in small amounts it might be what’s causing symptoms of a hangover too. And when you’re treating methanol toxicity in a hospital – you show up in an ER with methanol toxicity. They’ll give you a big dose of ethanol because it displaces the methanol off that enzyme. It keeps the enzyme from breaking it down into toxic stuff. So the idea is, well maybe the hair of the dog is like that. Maybe the hair of the dog is you’re giving yourself ethanol and that’s displacing the methanol and so you feel better.”

Seriously, though, at some point — at least by the afternoon after the morning after the night before — it’s time to start detoxing.

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