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Pity the Fool: The Decline and Fall of Disgraced Cartoonist Bill Day

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Ted Rall

As his colleagues shifted in their seats in awkward disgust, disgraced former Memphis Commercial Appeal editorial cartoonist Bill Day delivered a smarmy, tacky 15-minute filibuster masquerading as a defense of plagiarism.

The arena-like setting was a conference room at this year’s Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention, held in Salt Lake City. Earlier this year, Day, a 60-year-old artist whose career spans three decades at several papers, including the Detroit News, was accused of one count of plagiarism – scraping an illustrator’s rendition of an automatic weapon from the Internet, removing his signature and copyright information, adding words and additional artwork, and presenting it as his own without the customary attribution or permission from the original artist. (He claimed that he pulled the cartoon after being made aware that there was a problem, and that no newspapers ran it. In fact, it went out to hundreds of papers.) Even more serious in the jaundiced eyes of cartoonists attending the convention this year, a Tumblr blog collected at least 160 discrete sets of repurposed cartoons drawn by Day himself, totaling nearly 1000 pieces. In these recycled, or “self-plagiarized” cases, Day created a “new” cartoon by altering a few details of a previous work and issuing it as new.

Barely behind the scenes in all this was Daryl Cagle, formerly a cartoonist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and now sort of an Arianna Huffington of comics aggregation and syndication. Cagle distributes Day’s work. When the scandal broke, rather than fire Day – something that I had to do to two of my colleagues when I was a syndicate executive – Cagle vigorously defended his actions, bragging that he was “amused” and did the same thing himself, and encouraged other cartoonists to follow their example as a way to cut corners and meet deadlines. Said encouragement took the form of posts to Cagle’s influential blog, keeping Day on board the syndicate, dissembling on his behalf, doing even more outrageous things himself, and organizing an Indiegogo fundraising campaign on Day’s behalf – the only such campaign conducted on behalf of any editorial cartoonist on Cagle’s roster – that raised $42,000 from fans and sympathetic readers who believed Cagle’s videotaped plea that one of America’s best editorial cartoonists was in danger of becoming homeless. (I was one of them. I contributed $100.)

Despite Cagle’s best efforts to muddy the waters and rally his own cartoonists, many cartoonists disapproved of what Day had done, and more so of his brazen, unrepentant attitude. Two days before the convention, in fact, he sent out yet another cartoon – an obit cartoon of the not-dead-yet Nelson Mandela – that appears to have been repurposed.

Plagiarism, conflict of interest, cartoon repurposing and other ethical violations have been a long-standing problem in the field. When I was president of the Association between 2008 and 2009, I managed to push through the first ethics-related bylaw in the 50-year history of the Association: a proviso that permits the Board of Directors to expel a member it determines to have committed plagiarism. This didn’t go far enough: it didn’t cover nonmembers like Day, for example. But it was a start.

Many cartoonists seemed to believe that calling out fellow artists for ethical lapses would turn us into a sort of “cartoon police,” ultimately resulting in internecine conflict that would terror us apart. Some of us, mainly me and my friend Matt Bors, replied that bad behavior by a few members of a profession is a bigger threat, since it tarnishes the entire field by association, especially when the main professional Association of that field remain silent, and thus guilty of tacit consent.

This year’s convention organizers decided to address the issue by holding a town hall forum on plagiarism, recycling, etc. with the centerpiece being a proposed AAEC Code of Ethics drafted by myself and Bors. Our proposal spans a full range of lapses, from brazen plagiarism – tracing and Photoshopping other people’s work, through the kind of thing that Bill Day does, all the way to stealing other people’s ideas and jokes.

A few weeks before the convention, Bill Day expressed an interest in attending in order to defend himself. He believed himself completely guiltless and thought that most of us would come around to his way of thinking if we heard from him in person. It should be noted that he had already published at least two blog entries in which he accused the Association of being composed of a pit of snakes – he literally drew this – and attributed his actions to a busy schedule holding down multiple jobs while trying to support his family. Oh, and not to be forgotten: he also blamed the death of his brother and even his – I swear this is true – his cat. He didn’t make a direct link saying that he had plagiarized and recycled due to these events, or even because he was simply too busy to do good original work, but the line of argument was clear to all.

I didn’t think it was a good idea for him to come to the convention. And I will also confess to being more than a little frightened. He lives in Tennessee, a state with liberal gun laws. And I was by far his most strident critic.

In the event, he requested time to speak on the first day of the convention, Thursday. But when the scheduled time rolled around, he was nowhere to be found. He told the incoming president that the crowd wasn’t big enough. However, everyone was there. What did he want us to do, get people off the street? He rescheduled for Friday. It was supposed to take place over breakfast, but instead of Day pleading his case, there he was, chowing down on our food – food he didn’t even pay for, since he wasn’t registered for the convention and isn’t a member anymore. Again, he wimped out.

Annoyed, I hit the social networks, letting the world know that this manipulative plagiarist had wussed out not once, but twice, distracting us from important business and wasting everyone’s time. I heard from several colleagues, urging me to take down my posts lest the supposedly emotionally unstable Day finally be pushed over the edge and commit suicide. Apparently, the night before at a local bar, he had been talking about offing himself. I replied that, since it is evident that he doesn’t usually do what he says, there was nothing to worry about.

At this writing, he is still alive and still spending his $42,000.

Finally, on Saturday morning, Bill decided to grace the microphone with his presence. Following an engaging presentation on the history of editorial cartoon plagiarism in the United States by Joe Wos – did you know that the famous Paul Revere cartoon of the Boston massacre was brazenly plagiarized, and that he was called out and pretty much threatened with a duel over it? – and an overview of the proposed code of ethics, Bill took the stage. Incoming president Mark Fiore warned him that he would be limited to a strict 15 minutes, as we were getting started late and we had not planned for him to speak at this time. Everyone was quiet and respectful. No rolling eyes. We just sat and watched.

It was an epic act of self-immolation.

For 13 minutes, Bill Day revisited how he first got into cartooning. About his childhood in the segregated Deep South, how a friend was murdered in a racial bias incident. Then he seemed to get obsessed over accusations that his plagiarism stemmed from laziness. “They call me the lazy cartoonist,” he kept saying. He talked about how he waited until the age of 34 to land his first staff cartooning job, apparently something he still feels bitter about. (I turn 50 this year, and have never gotten one.) He held up a photograph of a box-sorting facility where he had worked in Memphis, for FedEx, and bitterly complained about here he was, at age 60, sorting boxes rather than drawing cartoons. (Many of the cartoonists in the room have performed manual labor, including yours truly.) He pointed out that he volunteers, reading to children in underprivileged areas, and held up a photograph of himself with African-American children. You could almost hear an audible gasp of disgust from the audience at this I-have-black-friends gambit. Not to mention, if he’s too busy to draw original work, why does he have time to volunteer anywhere? He didn’t say it, but the implication was clear – struggling to make ends meet after getting laid off by the Commercial Appeal prompted him to cut corners as a cartoonist. But if that was the case, why not just apologize and promise not to do it again? Especially now that he has a cool $42,000 to live off of for at least the next year?

As I watched Day ramble, I kept thinking that I could have gotten him off the hook in three minutes flat. All he needed to say was that other cartoonists, like John Sherffius, have used copyrighted and trademarked material as important components of their cartoons, and that he didn’t know it was wrong to do so. That he only did it once. That he wouldn’t do it again. And that if any royalties came in, if the cartoon ran anywhere, he would send them to the original copyright holder. As for the repurposed cartoons, he could have said – quite credibly – that he wasn’t the only guy who did this sort of thing. (Mike Ramirez comes to mind.) That it’s his work to recopy, he owns the copyrights. That you can’t punish someone retroactively. If the association decides to enact a rule against this sort of behavior going forward, he would abide by it, but until then, he was guilty of nothing more than cutting corners. Frankly, that would have done the job. But he couldn’t. Like the telltale heart in the Edgar Allen Poe story, his guilty conscience wouldn’t let him. He knew he was corrupt. So he had to make lame excuses.

He brought up his dead brother. And his dead cat. Again.

By the way, it turns out that it wasn’t a dead brother at all. I found out that afternoon that it was really a cousin. I bet he didn’t have a cat either.

Finally, at Minute 13, he began to address the issue of the plagiarized cartoon. But he talked so slowly that, even though Mark Fiore let him run on an extra five minutes, he didn’t get anywhere. The issue remained as opaque, and undefended, as ever. It was hard to watch: sad, infuriating, and ultimately the very definition of pathetic.

Bill left the room so that we could consider the code of ethics.

Mostly, cartoonists expressed the usual doubts. In particular, they were concerned about the strong enforcement provisions that I had included, directing the Association, when it becomes aware of ethical misbehavior, to issue public statements about them and to notify employers. Paul Fell said that we were in danger of fighting while we were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and in the end there might only be three of us left. Patrick Henry-like, I exclaimed, “Better three with integrity than 300 without!”

Some anti-Code cartoonists pointed out that there’s a gray area when it comes to defining plagiarism. Bors countered this by saying that that shouldn’t be an excuse to throw up our hands and not take any action at all.

Steve Kelley, until recently the cartoonist for the New Orleans Times Picayune and now the co-creator of “Dustin,” conceded that ethics has become a serious issue yet characteristically called for a free market solution: with the Internet, he said, you can always count on a blogger to reveal these things, and then the cartoonist in question is shamed and loses his job. I think that this is when the vibe in the room started to shift. “Look at Bill Day!” I said. “He’s a plagiarist. His employer enables him. In fact, thanks to his employer, who also recycles cartoons without letting editors know, he got a $42,000 raise – the biggest raise in American editorial cartooning! No one else in this room got a raise like that. Hell, many people in this room don’t even make that much.”

One of the big problems has been that cartoonists guilty of plagiarism have worked for years for newspapers and syndicates that remained unaware of their actions. So In extreme cases, I think it’s important for the Association to inform them. We can’t fire anyone, nor should we want to, but if an employer wants to keep a plagiarist on board – like Daryl Cagle is currently doing – they should make that decision with their eyes open. I drew an analogy with the American Medical Association, that if the AMA became aware that one of their members, or any doctor, is a quack, his patients and employers have the right to know. Otherwise, we would be complicit. This is not without precedent. Past presidents of the Association have notified cartoonists’ employers.

It would be no small stretch to say that Matt Bors and I were the only two people in the room arguing in favor of putting the Code of Ethics on a ballot for consideration by the membership. And yet we carried the argument. Although it felt lonely at the time, I have to say that there is no better place to be than in a group of friends and colleagues who respect you enough to change their minds if you are able to make a strong argument against their previously long-held convictions. I am grateful for their open-mindedness and willingness to listen.

As we prepared for this vote, Daryl Cagle moved that all discussion cease. That we never discuss the topic of ethics at all. That we not vote on whether or not to have such a code. That we not vote on whether or not to put a code on the ballot for the membership to consider. That we just simply stop talking about it. “This will destroy the Association. All this backstabbing,” he said, visibly furious. If English has any meaning, of course, this is the very opposite of backstabbing. This is all out in the open. Outgoing president Matt Wuerker, presiding over the business meeting, asked if there was a second to Daryl’s motion. There wasn’t. Crickets. Not even his syndicate cartoonists were willing to contribute to such a brazenly anti-democratic attempt to squash the discussion. And so, the ballot goes out to the nation’s editorial cartoonists later this year. They will get to decide whether plagiarism, recycling, conflicts of interest and the like should be something that the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists take a public stance against.

Every other journalistic organization does.

A New Domain

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Ted Rall

So I’m going to start doing regular work for A New Domain. Check it out, let me know what you think. The first two are slightly modified versions of my column. I may be doing original stuff for them in the future, and/or my regular column.

Guest Article: “Pacifism and the Coma of Occupy” by Lorenzo Raymond

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Ted Rall

Lorenzo Raymond has graciously given me permission to post the following essay. I hope it will inspire thoughtful commentary here. —Ted

 

“Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’”

– Emerson, “Heroism”

Watching the heart wrenching scenes of resistance, repression, and mass rebellion in both Turkey and Brazil this month is a bittersweet, and in some ways shameful, experience. For an American, it can only bring to mind the Occupy moment of two years ago – the moment that was torn away from us, and that we failed to muster any similar courage to defend.

In Turkey, a comfortable and industrialized country like our own, the protesters’ winning efforts have ranged from sit-ins, to street fighting, to blissfully daring tactics like commandeering mechanical diggers to overpower police vehicles.1 This is the epitome of a diversity of tactics that goes beyond dogmatic nonviolence.

Diversity of tactics was a founding principle of Occupy Wall Street, which was one of the things that set the movement apart from the established political party/NGO left. 2 To be sure, the principle was controversial around the camp, but that was because many occupiers were confused about the history of the anti-authoritarian wave that was sweeping the globe in 2011. A host of pundits had told them that the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships were accomplished without substantial civilian violence: “…Hosni Mubarak took such great pains to use armed thugs to try to provoke the Egyptian demonstrators into using violence…” wrote Erica Chenoweth in a typical New York Times op-ed. “Mr. Mubarak failed.” (Adbuster’s originally promoted OWS as America’s “Tahrir moment”)

Mubarak’s real failure, of course, was underestimating how ferocious the masses could be. On January 25, the first day of the revolution, the Guardian reported “thousands [in] running battles with armed police…” Street fighting was kicked off by gangs of soccer fans, known as “Ultras” (similar groups play a crucial role in the Turkish rebellion today). 3 It soon spread throughout much of the population: “There were a great number of women that were on the front line hurling stones at the police and pro-Mubarak thugs,” Egyptian feminist Sama El Tarzi told Al Jazeera. 4

Little by little, more and more occupiers became aware of this history of resistance, and they also noticed that it was the most militant encampments that were advancing the movement. Occupy Oakland embraced diversity of tactics the most ardently, and simultaneously it re-introduced the weapon of the general strike (familiar in other countries, but anathema to the timid American left) for the first time in decades.

As the concept gained ground across the country, due both to education and activists’ own experiences with the limits of nonviolence (some encampments like Occupy Albany were cozy with the police, but the cops still ended up pepper-spraying them out of their park like all the rest), pacifying left media figures vilified the militants and re-instituted a culture of doctrinaire nonviolence – although one now haunted by a bad conscience. Some of these left celebrities were well-intentioned people whose passion for change had been perverted by cowardice and privilege; others were authoritarian socialists – or in the case of Derrick Jensen, authoritarian environmentalists – who would rather see working people run circles in helplessness than break free without the leadership of a bureaucratic vanguard.

The most notorious of these neo-pacifists, of course, is Chris Hedges, with his “Cancer in Occupy” libels. David Graeber, in his new book The Democracy Project, makes short work of Hedges so I won’t even bother with him. 5 Instead I’d like to examine a few arguments from established left figures who retain greater vestiges of credibility, and whose influence is therefore more insidious.

The tendency I’m dubbing “neo-pacifist” here is marked by token statements that force is appropriate…at some place and time far, far from the here and now (similar to a liberal’s attitude towards socialism, really). One of the more lengthy neo-pacifist arguments last year came from Michael Albert, co-founder of Znet and Z Magazine. “Sometimes self defense is essential,” Albert wrote, “Sometimes even aggression is desirable. But for the most part, and certainly in the large, violence is the turf of the status quo, not of change, and certainly not of a new world.” Albert then claimed some unspecified critical mass of people would have to be achieved before a movement deviated from strict Gandhism – ignoring the fact that Occupy had already drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets (as we will see below, the civil rights movement was no larger when it made use of violence). Needless to say, tactics endlessly deferred are tactics endlessly denied; and the strange migration of self-defense from “essential” to “certainly not of a new world” in Albert’s statement reveals his position as self-negating sophistry.

A larger problem with neo-pacifist arguments is that they distort history in ways that are genuinely Orwellian. For instance, Albert presented the World Trade Organization shutdown of 1999 as an example of nonviolent victory undermined (almost!) by rabble militancy: “The anti-corporate globalization uprising that took place in Seattle, Washington, in the U.S. – which is just one among a great many similar cases – had, before any trashing occurred, already hamstrung the WTO.” 6

But the reality is the black bloc-ers got up just as early as the blockaders did on the day the WTO was crippled. At 8:45am, “About 20 protesters dressed in black throw eight metal newspaper boxes into 5th Avenue, but are chased away by other protesters,” – so reads the University of Washington’s WTO History Project Timeline for November 30, 1999 7 (The Seattle City Council’s timeline puts “Crowd breaking Niketown windows” even earlier, at 8:04am). By late morning, protesters had not only shattered windows at Bank of America and a dozen other commercial locations, they had thrown “cans, bottles, and barricades at the police.” Then and only then did the WTO cancel its opening ceremony at noon, and the Secret Service sequester Secretary of State Albright in her hotel.

The left media largely relies on David Solnit of the Direct Action Network for their understanding of Seattle. Solnit too is fond of denigrating the smashy kids, 8 but in unguarded moments he’s admitted that DAN had no confidence that nonviolence alone – even nonviolence involving thousands of people – would shut down the meeting:

“I think we were all surprised when we completely disrupted them and shut them down to the point where they couldn’t even have their opening ceremonies, and when that happened all day, most of us thought that we would disrupt them in the morning and the police would start regaining control in the late morning…” [“David Solnit interviewed by Jeremy Simer, March 23, 2000” WTO History Project, University of Washington] 9

The reason why the police couldn’t regain control until the morning of the next day – and the reason a state of emergency was declared which made the WTO protests a prime-time story – was precisely because of the chaotic rebellion that Solnit and Albert are so eager to demonize.

A secondary complaint of both men is that the rioting distracted from the real issues. There are at least two peer-reviewed studies – Deluca and Peeples 2002, 10 and Owens and Palmer 2003 11 – that say the complete opposite. The former concluded that, “In Seattle…symbolic violence and uncivil disobedience in concert produced compelling images that functioned as the dramatic leads for substantive discussions of the issues provoking the protests…On NBC, for example, dramatic images of violence yielded to a female protester declaring, ‘We’re just normal people who are tired of the exploitation of the multi-national corporations throughout the world.’” And Albert’s contention that the spectacular coverage “replaced substance about globalization with an endless litany of noise” is really bizarre; Z Magazine expended thousands of words at the time documenting the lack of substantial mainstream commentary about globalization until the riot.

While Seattle benefitted from a de facto diversity of tactics, Occupy in its earliest days benefitted from having them de jure. The founding guidelines of the Direct Action Working Group of Occupy Wall Street stated “We respect a diversity of tactics, but consider how our actions may affect the entire group.” As Nathan Schneider noted in The Nation, this flexibility led directly to spontaneous confrontations that brought OWS global attention. “The two incidents of police excess that catapulted the movement into the mainstream—the pepper-spraying of young women and the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge—both happened after protesters moved from the sidewalk to the road during marches, improvising…The NYPD, caught unprepared, overreacted in front of cameras, and public sympathy flooded to the protesters”

There was a lot of improvising – and a fair amount of aggression – in those heady September days before Big Labor and the left celebs started piggybacking in the wake of the headlines. In the minutes leading up to the great pepper-spray massacre, I recall seeing 19-year old Brandon Watts scuffling with the cops. Brandon was later famously bloodied by the police the week of the Zuccotti Park eviction. He was charged with assault – throwing batteries at them to be exact. 12 Watts was generally agreed to be a loose cannon by occupiers, but then again, he’s also generally agreed to be the first kid to “face the cops down” and assert his right to put up a tent. “After that, tents started popping up everywhere,” one occupier told the New York Daily News. “That kid was a fighter.” 13 Some considered him crazy, some considered him a hero, but either way, we needed people like that. If there were a few more fighters, the movement might be, well, moving – instead it’s in traction. Projects like Occupy Sandy are admirable, but they look an awful lot like America before the rupture of 2011. Eight years ago, the Common Ground Collective of New Orleans fostered an impressive amount mutual aid as well – but it wasn’t the beginning of an insurrection, just the beginning of a non-profit corporation (albeit one better than average). And let’s not mince words: insurrection is what this rotten country desperately, desperately needs.

If one studies the history of American social movements with open eyes, it becomes clear that it’s always been this way. In 1962, the civil rights movement was at a low-ebb; Martin Luther King’s star in particular was fading, 14 so the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to go into Birmingham in 1963 looking for confrontation as well as nonviolent witness. King’s chief of staff, Wyatt Tee Walker developed a strategy that relied on the rowdiness of black “onlookers” to their demonstrations – that is, angry people who hadn’t been trained in, nor agreed to, nonviolence. 15 Even as the iconic pictures of crowds bombarded with fire hoses were being taken, Life magazine photographer Charles Moore was injured by a brick thrown by a protester, intended for a fireman.16 “A duel of rocks and fire hoses escalated” through the second week of May until Birmingham’s elite agreed to negotiations with King. 17 The Ku Klux Klan then bombed the movement’s local headquarters, and in retaliation 2,500 blacks rioted and burned a nine-block area of the city. 18 White House tapes show this to be the direct impetus for Kennedy’s belated backing of civil rights legislation. 19 “President Kennedy feared that black Southerners might become ‘uncontrollable’ if reforms were not negotiated,” writes award-winning historian Timothy Tyson. “It was one of the enduring ironies of the civil rights movement that the threat of violence was so critical to the success of nonviolence.” 20

“Predominantly nonviolent” is a phrase that appears over and over again in the movement case studies put forward by pacifist theorist Gene Sharp (including his whitewashed history of the Black Freedom Movement). 21 It’s clear on inspection, however, that “predominantly nonviolent” is just another way of saying “partly violent” – a part that’s usually indispensable. From Birmingham, to Seattle, to Turkey, to Brazil, any autonomous movement that hopes to seize and hold public space – and seize and hold the public imagination – must manifest a diversity of tactics.

Sources: 1. Jacob Resneck, “Demonstrations rock Istanbul” Occupy.com, June 3, 2013 – http://www.occupy.com/article/demonstrations-rock-istanbul
2. Nathan Schneider, The Nation, April 20, 2012 — http://www.thenation.com/article/166820/paint-other-cheek#ixzz2VUrdG1ex 3. Sherif Tarek, Ahram Online, April 13, 2011 – http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/9591/Egypt/Politics-/Egypts-ultras-go-from-football-to-politics.aspx
4. Fatma Naib, “Women of the Revolution” Al Jazeera, Feb 19, 2011 – http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/02/2011217134411934738.html
5. David Graeber, “Ask me anything chat” Reddit.com, Jan 28, 2013 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/17fi6l/i_am_david_graeber_an_anthropologist_activist/
6. Michael Albert, “Violence Begets Defeat or Too Much Pacifism?” Znet, Feb 10, 2012 — http://www.zcommunications.org/violence-begets-defeat-or-too-much-pacifism-by-michael-albert
7. “Day 2- November 30, 1999” WTO History Project, University of Washington – http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/day2.htm
8. David Solnit, “Seattle WTO Shutdown to Occupy” The Indypendent, December 5, 2011 –http://www.indypendent.org/2011/12/05/seattle-wto-shutdown-%E2%80%9999-occupy-organizing-win-12-years-later
9. “David Solnit interviewed by Jeremy Simer, March 23, 2000” WTO History Project, University of Washington – http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/interviews/Solnit.pdf 10. Kevin Michael Deluca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen” Critical Studies in Media Communication Volume 19, Number 2, June 2002, pp. 125-151 -http://comphacker.org/comp/engl335fosen/files/2012/08/pubspheretopubscreen-seattle-csmc.pdf
11. Lynn Owens and L. Kendall Palmer, “Making the News: Anarchists Counter-Public Relations on the World Wide Web” Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 20, No. 4, December 2003 pp. 335 – 361 — http://www.csun.edu/~vcspc00g/454/anarchy%26webpr-csmc.pdf
12. Jillian Dunham, “A Protester’s Uneasy Presence at Occupy Wall Street” New York Times, City Room blog, December 2, 2011 — http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/a-protesters-uneasy-presence-at-occupy-wall-street/?_r=0
13. Joe Kemp, et al, “Protester Brandon Watts, who was first to pitch a tent at Zuccotti Park, is now the bloody face of ‘Day of Action’” New York Daily News, November 18, 2011 — http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/protester-brandon-watts-pitch-tent-zuccotti-park-bloody-face-day-action-article-1.979573
14. “The Limits of Nonviolence”, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Era 1954-1985 website –http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/06_albany.html
16. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Harper Collins, 2004), p239 — http://books.google.com/books?id=HecWJnClV3wC&q=239#v=snippet&q=large%20knife&f=false
17. Foster Hailey, “Dogs and Hoses Repulse Negroes at Birmingham” New York Times, May 4, 1963 http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/race/050463race-ra.html 18. Branch, Parting the Waters, p760 — http://books.google.com/books?id=U8ExdUHjzkMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=parting+the+waters&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bMDDUeb1CoWw4AO13YD4Cg&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=rocks&f=false
19. Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Struggles in the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p301 –http://books.google.com/books?id=FFfSnM5sLSwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=but+for+birmingham&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xsbDUbCGB6vb4APp9YCICA&ved=0CDgQuwUwAA#v=onepage&q=2500&f=false
20. Jonathan Rosenberg, ed., Kennedy, Johnson and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), p97-99 —http://books.google.com/books?id=ZbK8U_w9lN0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Kennedy,+Johnson+and+the+Quest+for+Justice:+The+Civil+Rights+Tapes&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wcfDUaPQFM7j4AP3loHACw&ved=0CDcQuwUwAA#v=onepage&q=black%20muslims&f=false
21. Timothy B. Tyson, “Civil Rights Movement” in The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature, eds. William L. Andrews, et al (Oxford University Press, 1996), p149 — http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/birmingham.htm 22. Glenn T. Eskew, “Filling the Jail in Birmingham” Nonviolent Sanctions Vol. 5, nos. 2 & 3, Fall 1993/Winter 1994 . Note that in this account of the Birmingham campaign, published in Gene Sharp’s newsletter, all mention of rioting is suppressed, even though it’s written by a historian who had considered the rioting significant in his other scholarship on the campaign. (compare with note 19) http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsb41d.html

By the Way

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Ted Rall

If Edward Snowden really took his NSA contractor job in order to find details of the Obama administration’s illegal and unconstitutional espionage against the American people, then he is to be commended even more than if he had discovered the programs and then gotten disgusted by them. That would show that in the first place, he was intelligent enough not to willfully be part of the intelligence apparatus. Secondly, he would be behaving in the finest tradition of investigative journalism, going under cover to expose wrongdoing.

What Does This Mean?

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Ted Rall

I get the above message whenever I sign on to my email using Mozilla Thunderbird, from my home account. Does this mean the NSA is up in my business?

 

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Editorial Cartooning, R.I.P.

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Ted Rall

photo copy

 

A Powerful Form of Journalistic Commentary Falls Victim to the Digital Dark Ages

This week I’m heading to Salt Lake City for an annual ritual that may soon come to an end: the annual convention of the nation’s top political cartoonists. This is bad news for my summers. It’s terrible for America, which is about to lose one of its most interesting art forms.

The AAEC convention is always a blast. Hundreds of intelligent, quick-witted and hilarious guys — sadly, it’s almost all men — talking politics, the media and culture, one-upping each other with one witticism after another, even during serious panel discussions and the you’d-think-it’d-be-deadly-dull business meeting. Partisan divisions fall away as drinks flow, gossip unfurls and jokes fly; one of my dearest friends is a conservative cartoonist.

Turns out, even the dumb editorial cartoonists are smart. The same men who crank out Uncle Sams and avenging eagles blasting feckless Talibs, cartoons choked with outdated labels and metaphors no one understands, turn out to be hilarious, funnier and a shitload smarter than the stand-up comics (hi, Louis C.K., hi Jon Stewart) we’re supposed to be worship these days. (Why the dumb cartoons? They say that’s what their editors want.)

Alas, editorial cartooning is dying in the United States. After decades of decline (punctuated by countless warnings), there are so few political cartoonists left that it’s hard to see how the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists can survive much longer. If the current trend continues, political cartoons — which are thriving in pretty much every other country on earth, helping to effect radical change in places like Syria, Iran and Spain — will disappear from the United States, which perfected the art form, at the peak of its golden age.

A hundred years ago, political cartoonists ruled the earth. Like dinosaurs. There were thousands of newspapers and thousands of cartoonists working at them. Bill Mauldin, Paul Conrad, Jeff MacNelly and Pat Oliphant were stars, boldface names. As newspapers declined, cartooning jobs vanished. In 1990 there were about 280 professional political cartoonists left. By 2000, roughly 80. Now less than 30. Many states don’t have one.

The layoffs continue. The Bergen Record just laid off Jimmy Margulies. He won’t be coming to Salt Lake City.

It’s the same story with syndication. It costs a paper about $15 or $20 a week for three to five cartoons by an award-winning cartoonist, but even that’s too much for cash-strapped newspapers. They’ve slashed their syndication lists. (They say they’ll use the savings to hire local cartoonists — but never do.) Many papers are doing without cartoons entirely.

In a field where bad news is the new normal, the New York Times’ 2012 request to cartoonists to produce hundreds of pieces a week for free stood out. Enough, we said. We refused. So the Times told us to take a walk. No other change at the Times has prompted as many reader complaints — but editors don’t care.

We joke — what else would we do? — that we should, like World War I veterans, go in on a bottle of champagne to be opened by the last man standing. Demographically and actuarially, that will be Matt Bors. At age 29, Bors is the youngest professional political cartoonist in the U.S. Despite the long hours he puts in supplementing his syndication income as an editor, blogger and freelance illustrator, he earns $30,000 in a good year. “I feel honored to be the youngest band member on the Titanic,” Bors says.

No wonder no one else wants to get into the field.

One of this year’s convention speakers is Victor Navasky, the author of a new book about political cartooning. Its subtitle references the “enduring power” of political cartoons. Yet Navasky mostly ignores developments since the 1980s, when Jules Feiffer and Matt Groening (“Life in Hell”) sparked the “alternative editorial cartooning” movement that includes artists like Bors, Ruben Bolling, Tom Tomorrow, Jen Sorensen, Keith Knight, Stephanie McMillan and yours truly.

American editorial cartoons have never been this smart, funny or relevant. Yet the best and brightest cartoonists of our generation are being pushed out of work because they can no longer earn even a meager income. In recent years talented cartoonists including Lloyd Dangle (“Troubletown“), David Rees (“Get Your War On”), Mikhaela Reid (“The Boiling Point“) and Tim Krieder (“The Pain—When Will It End?“) have called it quits because they couldn’t pay their bills.

The causes:

No jobs. No newspaper or magazine has hired a cartoonist from the new generation in more than 20 years.

Fewer opportunities. Fewer papers or magazines are running work by freelancers. Just last week, Time magazine quietly announced that it would no longer run cartoons. They’d been buying reprints for $20 each — a big change from 2001, when they were paying $800 to four artists, including me, for original content — but it was still too much.

Shrinking rates. The Village Voice, which gave Feiffer and Groening their starts, was famed for its cartoons. Groening got the Voice to pay $500 a cartoon in the 1980s. By the time I came on board in 1999, it was $100. Five years later, they slashed it to $50, take it or leave it. Now they don’t run comics at all. If I had a dime for every email I get from editors that start out “I’m a big fan of your work but I don’t have a budget for cartoons,” I’d be rich. Yet there’s always a budget for writers.

Censorship. It’s often what you don’t see that has the biggest effect. The cultural and political establishment has ruthlessly suppressed the new generation of cartoonists (I’d say young, but it’s been going on so long that some of these “new” cartoonists are over 50). You’d have to ask the gatekeepers why, but I suspect that our style (snottier, influenced by punk rock), politics (further left) and demographics (Gen X and Gen Y) are hard to relate to when you’re a Baby Boomer editor, producer, museum curator or book publisher. They don’t hate us; they don’t get us. So they don’t give us any play. (For example: Navasky’s book.) Which translates to less visibility and fewer dollars in our pockets.

There are bright spots. The liberal blog Daily Kos reposts edittoons. Nsfwcorp, a subscription-only print periodical, commissions original work, exclusive to them. But those are not nearly enough to sustain the medium.

Anyone who reads cartoons understands that they’re unique. Mixing words and pictures delivers commentary in a compelling, memorable way that prose — I say this a writer — can’t match. As editorial cartooning disappears, reformers lose an arrow in their quiver. Corrupt politicians and greedy CEOs get away with more.

The bloodbath in journalism in general and cartooning in particular is usually blamed on the Internet. Professional cartoonists work for newspapers and magazines; they’re forced to cut back as print display ad dollars are replaced by digital pennies. What revenues cartoonists can earn by selling directly to their readers — books, original drawings, merchandise — is getting sliced ever more thinly by online competitors: online meme generators, amateur webcartoonists, YouTube videos.

But that’s not the whole story.

At newspapers, cartoonists are the first fired, the last hired. When media gatekeepers — including those on prize committees — reach out to a cartoonist, they gravitate toward old-fashioned cartoonists who use hoary tropes like donkeys, elephants, labels and lots and lots of random crosshatching. Fetishizing the past is counterproductive because it discourages innovators. Also, it doesn’t work. Readers don’t respond. But editors blame cartooning as a medium when their real problem is their lousy taste in cartoons.

The New York Times Book Review is rightly skeptical about Navasky’s optimism about the future of editorial cartooning online: “An increase in distribution channels is not the same thing as a creative renaissance, and so far major online news sites have resisted the chance to hire their own political cartoonists.”

As a writer and cartoonist, I’m constantly looking for jobs. Sites like The Daily Beast, Salon, Slate and Huffington Post always post listings for writers. Lots of them. But they never hire cartoonists. From U.S. newspaper websites to the new Al Jazeera America, there’s lots of work for writers (albeit, for the most part, poorly paid). No one wants to hire cartoonists.

Why not? I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. It’s probably just groupthink coupled with a general lack of understanding of the “enduring power” of the medium. Newspapers first hired cartoonists because they were popular with readers. They still are. Portable electronic devices and the Web are quintessentially visual — duh — and cartoons — especially political cartoons — are massive clickbait with awesome viral potential. Someone at some point is going to re-figure out that people like comics. Then there’ll be a scramble to find edgy graphic content — comix journalism, editorial cartoons, animated cartoon videos — followed by the unwelcome discovery that due to years of censorship and impoverishment, there aren’t many cartoonists left creating professional work.

In the meantime, the Internet will continue to be something few people would have predicted: a sea of text as bland as the op/ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in March 2014 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

Not Safe for Cartoon Fans with Taste or Brains

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Ted Rall

It’s that time again.

Two stories are prompting a deluge of shitty — make that incredibly shitty — editorial cartoons. (Shitty is the norm, at least when it comes to those in USA Today, and other mainstream newspapers and websites.) First is Edward Snowden’s flight from Hong Kong to Russia and then to — maybe Ecuador. Acting like 1991 never happened — like the Cold War never ended — hack cartoonists are reliving the glory days of an ideological clash between socialism and capitalism that, well, just isn’t happening anymore. And boy oh boy, do they look stupid!

Then there’s the death of James Gandolfini. I hate to break the news to my fellow cartoonists, but “The Sopranos” was a TV show. He wasn’t really a mobster. He’s pretending.

OK, off to the races:

133262 600 Civil Liberties cartoons

Poor Gary Varvel. Hardly the most politically astute pundit to begin with, this one has gotta hurt. Because China really did look out for Snowden, protecting him in a special police-run district and then permitting him to leave despite America’s Big Brother move — talk about creepy — of annulling his passport.

 

133335 600 Whistle Blower cartoons

If I were the parents here, I’d be proud. But somehow I doubt that that’s what Koterba has in mind. And, um, time to consult a colorist.

133131 600 The usPhone cartoons

If I see one more “Obama has big ears” gag related to the NSA PRISM program…

 

133024 600 Snowden cartoons

This one kinda freaks me out. Fitzsimmons’ rep is as a liberal. Oh, well, so much for that. Because according to him, Snowden is a traitor who helped the Taliban. Although I’m not exactly sure what the Taliban — who knew the U.S. listened to every phone call long before the story broke in The Guardian — learned from Snowden.

133185 600 Privacy Blower cartoons

2013 Pulitzer Prize winner. The forced metaphor totally fails: Obama isn’t revving up the destruction of our privacy. That fig leaf is long gone. But do newspaper editors want to see Sam’s shriveled wang, bloodsoaked with the anal fluids of some Afghan detainee?

And finally…

133154 600 Edward Snowden and Lindsay Mills cartoons
WTF?

On to poor James G.:

133566 600 James Gandolfini cartoons

Supporting evidence for my drive to ban certain cartoonists from using Photoshop. Also: he wasn’t actually Tony Soprano.

133494 600 James Gandolfini cartoons

Did any of these guys actually see the show? Tony Soprano wasn’t Tony Montana. Bullets didn’t spray.

Luckovich cartoon: James Gandolfini dies

He. Was. An. Actor.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Get Pissed Off and Break Things

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Ted Rall

File:Keep-calm-and-carry-on-scan.jpg

 

Why Are Americans So Passive?

There’s a reason “Keep Calm and Carry On” is everywhere. When people lose everything — their economic aspirations, their freedom, their privacy — when there’s nothing they can do to restore what they’ve lost — all they have left is dignity.

Remember Saddam? Seconds before he was hanged, disheveled and disrespected, the deposed dictator held his head high, his eyes blazing with contempt as he spat sarcastic insults at his executioners. He “faced death like a lion,” said his supposed body double, Latif Yahia, and no one could argue. He left this life with the one thing he could control intact.

Dignity. That’s what “Keep Calm and Carry On” is all about. That’s what we think of when we think of the Battle of Britain. As German bombs rained down, the English went about their business. Like the iconic photo of the milkman tiptoeing over rubble. Like the bomb-damaged stores whose shopkeepers posted signs that read “We are still open — more open than usual.”

Man, that is so not us.

You’ve seen the T-shirts, with their clean Gill Sans-esque lettering and iconic crown. There are mugs, postcards and posters. Of course. It’s a reproduction of a propaganda poster from World War II, an (unsuccessful, because it wasn’t distributed) attempt by the British government to steel jittery citizens during the Blitz.

“Keep Calm and Carry On” merch dates to 2000 but really took off after 9/11; the popularity of the image, the stoicism of its call to stiffen upper lips everywhere, and numerous parodies (“Stay Alive and Kill Zombies”) has generated millions of dollars of profits, inevitably sparking lawsuits and inspiring a song by John Nolan.

Why is a meme originally prepared for a possible German invasion of the UK (which is why it wasn’t released) popular now? Zizi Papacharissi, communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, points to the crappy economy. “We are undergoing a profound and fairly global economic crisis, so it is natural to revisit the saying: Keep calm and carry on. It reminds us of courage shown back then, and how courage shown helped people pluck through a crisis.”

It’s also a reaction to terrorism — or more accurately a reaction to the initial reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks: hysteria, jingoism, multiple wars of choice, all doomed. More than any other factor, Obama owed his 2008 victory to his (Maureen Dowd called him) Vulcan personality: cool, implacable, possibly non-sentient, the anti-Dubya.

What wouldn’t we give for a 2001 do-over? No invasions, no Patriot Act, no Gitmo, no “extraordinary renditions,” no New York Times op-ed pieces arguing in favor of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Treat 9/11 like a crime, let the FBI go after the perps. Reach out to Muslims, reconsider our carte blanche to Israel, and most of all: go slow. Don’t freak out.

Perspective: 3,000 deaths is awful. 9/11 was shocking. We killed 2 million Vietnamese people, yet they’re going strong. With a minimum of whining.

And yet…

Sometimes you need some perspective to your perspective.

There are times when it’s appropriate to freak out. When, in fact, it’s downright weird and unhealthy and wrong not to flip your lid. For example, when you get diagnosed with a terrible disease. When someone you love dies.

There are also times when big-picture, impersonal stuff, including politics and the economy, ought to make you crazy with rage or grief or…something. Not nothing. Not just keeping calm and carrying on.

Keeping calm and carrying on was an appropriate response to the Blitz.  Short of moving away from the targeted area, there’s nothing you can do about bombs. Living or dying is a matter of happenstance. Keeping calm might help you make smart decisions. Panic is usually more dangerous than self-control.

The same is true of terrorism. Terrorists will kill you, or not — probably not. You can’t fix your fate.

But that is decidedly not true about the economy. Not when what is wrong with the economy is not something no one can control — a giant meteor, bad weather, panic in the markets — but something that most assuredly can and indeed should be, like the systemic transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the rich that has characterized the class divide in Western nations since the 1970s. The appropriate, intelligent and self-preserving response to mass theft is rage, demands for action, and decisive punishment of political and economic leaders who refuse to change things.

As one revelation about the National Security Agency’s spying follows another, the “Keep Calm and Carry On” meme seems less like an appeal to dignity and calm reserve than the much older, classic response of the power elite to their oppressed subjects: Shut the Fuck Up.

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in March 2014 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

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