Though I unfortunately missed Kal’s presentation, I did make it to the two AAEC panels that took place on Saturday afternoon (Day 3).

The panel “Cartoonists’ Rights and the Free Speech Situation Facing the World” was moderated by Terry Anderson (again, acting director of Cartoonists’ Rights International) and included Ritu Gairola Khanduri (board member of CRNI), Ann Telnaes, Zunar, Pedro Molina, and Charles Brownstein (of the Comic Books Legal Defense Fund).

Ritu described the United Sketches Women Cartoonists International Award, and justification behind it– 5% of political cartoonists across the globe are women or nonbinary.  (I submitted cartoons for this award. The deadline was September 15, and the judges are currently deliberating.)

Pedro told of the desperate state of political protest in Nicaragua, with newspaper offices and TV stations being raided and shut down. Pedro is a tireless advocate for independent journalism, even at great risk to himself, and that risk was evident in his talk. You can read more about him in this interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas or on his own site.

Malaysian cartoonist Zunar told stories of his repeated arrests in that country that were both horrific and hilarious, such as how once the police chief ordered his arrest by tweet, and Zunar’s cartoons for the next year or so all featured some tiny depiction of the police chief tweeting on his phone. Zunar is known for photos of him smiling in handcuffs during these arrests, though the risk has been significant considering that in 2015 he faced up to 43 years in prison for criticizing the Malaysian government. You can read more about Zunar at his site, where you can also find his new book recounting his experiences, Fight Through Cartoons.

Ann described the fallout in 2015 when she published a cartoon mocking Ted Cruz for using his daughters to promote his presidential campaign. You can see the cartoon here, as well as read the AAEC and CRNI reactions to the Washington Post’s decision to pull the cartoon after receiving complaints about it. Telnaes depicted Cruz’s daughters as performing monkeys, which (it seems painfully obvious to me) was not actually an attack on his daughters, but on Cruz for using them as props– something politicians do all of the time, and is off-putting every time and completely deserving of criticism.  The title of the cartoon was literally “Ted Cruz uses his kids as political props.”

But after Cruz himself complained, and Marco Rubio joined him, the Post took the cartoon down and replaced it with an editor’s note (visible at the above link). That didn’t end things for Ann, however– she received a torrent of messages via email and social media that were abusive and sexist. To convey the nature of these messages, she played a video of similar harassment received by sports reporters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro.  It is of course a good thing that the Washington Post didn’t react to complaints about a political cartoon in the same way that the New York Times would do four years later, but their capitulation in taking the cartoon down almost certainly enabled the harassment against Ann. That of course didn’t remove the ability of people to see the cartoon– all it did was tacitly agree, apparently without any consultation at all with Ann herself, that her cartoon was inappropriate.

Charles Brownstein described the power of social media influences in regulating content related to social justice issues. Charles is executive director of the Comic Books Legal Defense Fund.

The next panel was titled “The Legacy of Trump,” discussing the impact of Trump’s presidency on political cartooning during his tenure and anticipated effects in the future. The moderator for this panel was Mike “Comic Strip of the Day” Peterson, and the panelists were Patrick Chappatte, Nick Anderson, and Nancy Ohanion.

This was more of a free-flowing discussion than the previous panel. If you read part I of this post or my previous post “On the death, dearth, and demographics of political cartoons,” then you know who Patrick Chappatte is. You may also recall that Nick Anderson is the founder of Counterpoint.  He attended this meeting with his wife Angel, who I got to meet at the Billy Ireland museum and talk about life in Texas, how the two of them came to settle in Houston, and much bodices cost at the Texas Renaissance Festival, the largest (to my knowledge) ren faire in the country that takes place yearly in November just outside of Houston. (Answer: Yes, bodices cost a lot, but they’re kind of a ren faire staple and well worth the investment if you’re a ren faire junkie like I used to be.)

Anyway, Counterpoint! The condensed version of the origin of Counterpoint is that Nick Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was himself subject to the ongoing purge of political cartoonists, having been let go at the Houston Chronicle after eleven years of cartooning in 2017. Nick saw Rob Rogers undergo the same experience in 2018, recognized and was alarmed by the trend, and wrote up a statement for the AAEC board. Pat Bagley (Salt Lake Tribune, also at the AAEC meeting this time but unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to meet him), was president at the time and apparently brought the piece to the attention of Jake Tapper (occasional cartoonist himself) and therefore CNN, who published the piece on their Opinion page.

There it was read by Vivek Garipalli, venture capitalist and co-founder of Clover Health, who orchestrated a meeting of minds with Nick that resulted in the creation of a cartoon email newsletter with a theme of dialogue between cartoons and cartoonists with opposing viewpoints known as Counterpoint. Currently I believe subscribership is at something like 130,000, and the plan is to become self-sustaining with advertiser support in the future. Newsletters are emailed free to subscribers twice a week.

I’d gotten the chance to speak with Nancy Ohanion when we were tabling on the vendor floor, and learned that while she’d been doing political cartoons for decades (since before I was born) and is syndicated, she’d been doing all of it, including a full-time career in advertising, on her own until recently.  Since I’d never so much as spoken to another cartoonist prior to this meeting, it was amazing and gratifying to talk to her about the community aspect of AAEC, and what it could become in the future.

In this panel, she noted that Donald Trump is not some kind of singular force in modern American politics– that he’s more like a symptom of a disease that leads people to seriously bring up the word “sedition” when talking about political dissent, that makes calling someone a “member of the media” a near-slur, and generally speaking makes the country a more dangerous place for the kind of critique and mockery that are essential, indispensable even, to editorial cartooning. And, as Nancy hastened to add, even when (please don’t say “if”) Trump goes away, this national attitude will not. So we need to decide how to respond to it. Post haste.

Because we should never forget, in the discussion about how oppressive offended people can be, that offense is not itself oppressive. Offense is simply the feeling of being bothered by something that seems to insult you, or someone you care about, or a principle that you hold dear. I’ve seen artists of many kinds– comedians, musicians, cartoonists, and others– react to criticism in really ugly ways.  And it’s not entirely their fault, because we do live in a country, in a world, where offending the wrong people can be career-ending. Sometimes life-ending. But that isn’t the fault of the offended, generally. You cannot simultaneously say that cartoonists should be free to push boundaries (which I forever will maintain that they should), and also raise a fuss when people react to seeing those boundaries pushed. Nobody gets to be infallible. Everybody screws up sometimes.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Elbert Hubbard: “To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” I do not, however, interpret this quote to mean that we should resent criticism, avoid it, or ignore it. Rather, we should distinguish it from harassment, attacks, abuse, trolling, etc. which are not criticism, and once we have identified it as authentic and made in good faith, we should wrestle with it. Sit with it. Consider it. That’s how we become better artists, and better people.

And there is of course a corresponding obligation for critics, to make their critiques in good faith, exercise charity, and recognize that even legitimately offensive speech is not necessarily an occasion to go beyond criticism into advocacy for more punitive measures (or, in case it needs to be said, harassment and death threats).

Since I already blathered on at length about this subject in the previous post, I will cease blathering here and show you this shelf at the metropolitan library next to the vendor floor.  See that book on the lowest shelf on the left, Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels? I must have that book. But no, in case you’re wondering, I did not grab it and run from the library. I have more self-restraint than that.

That Saturday evening of Day 3 was the final evening for many of us. We converged on Hotel LeVeque for a reception and the AAEC awards, much of which I covered in Part I.  In addition to the CNRI awards, however, there were some other highly important honors. Before the awards began, I briefly got to meet Liza Donnelly, cartoonist for the New Yorker (okay, actually meet again because I’d met her earlier in the day along with talented David G. Brown and not realized it), and enthuse over a piece she’d written in 2017 for Medium entitled Editorial Cartooning, Then and Now, which was excellent and really should’ve been part of the “Legacy of Trump” discussion earlier in the day.

The Rex Babin Award for local cartooning was presented by Jack Ohman to Kal Kallaugher, with Nate Beeler as finalist. Nate was a previous winner of the Locher Award, which you may recall was this year given to Chelsea Saunders.

The Ink Bottle Award for outstanding service to the AAEC and to the profession generally, was given to the very deserving Ann Telnaes. Ann’s acceptance of the award was predicated on her being able to share it with Signe Wilkinson, who also contributed immensely to this year’s meeting organization. I love Signe’s work and very much regretted not being able to meet her this year– circumstances prevented her from being there to accept the award along with Ann.

As a new member I hung back for most of this ceremony, delighted and touched by the camaraderie but reluctant to insert myself. I gravitated to fellow new member the immensely talented Tamara Knoss, with whom I’d had dinner the previous evening, along with NC cartoonist Ross Gosse and “Mr. Fish” Dwayne Booth, who had unfortunately been compelled to head back to New York by this time.

The evening was not nearly over with the reception, however– from there we proceeded to the Columbus College of Art and Design’s Canzani Auditorium for the Save the Nib event!

I don’t know that any of us truly knew what we were in for with this event. Seated next to Cullum Rogers, with Ann Telnaes and J.P. “Jape” Trostle behind me, AAEC members and college students throughout the audience, we witnessed what turned out to be a sort of live-action play/testimonial/Powerpoint presentation/tribute/fundraiser/stand-up act/Q&A performed by Nib editor Matt Bors, deputy editor Eleri Harris, associate editor Matt Lubchansky, contributor Chelsea Saunders, contributor Jen Sorenson, contributor Rob Rogers, and contributor Dan “Tom Tomorrow” Perkins.

Matt Bors, Matt Lubchansky, and Eleri Harris first told us the history of The Nib, its rocky excursion as a publication, gaining and then losing funding, repeatedly, until the most recent upheaval when First Look Media bailed and The Nib became Matt Bors’s reader-funded project earlier this year.  They talked about story arcs in their comics, their venture into animation, and the emergence of themes such as “Gotcha Guy” and depictions of Trump as a quasi-“Immortan Joe” character in their imagined apocalyptic wasteland scenario in both comics and animated cartoons.

If anything became clear in the course of this presentation it’s that The Nib has been WORK. Blood, sweat, tears, and long periods without health insurance for everyone involved. This was, and is, a labor of love– that much is more than obvious.

They were dedicated to keeping the mood of the presentation light, in spite of the dire stakes that came through in the retelling, but things authentically lightened up even more when we proceeded into Chelsea Saunders, Rob Rogers, Jen Sorensen, and Dan Perkins each in turn describing their personal histories in cartooning and literally narrating selections of their comics. Rob Rogers read and commented on the entire comic he did on being fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for criticizing Trump for The Nib, which I’m sure was exponentially more fun to rehash as a result of his cartoon artistry than it was to go through as an experience.

That’s what cartooning can do– frame an experience as a story, told by a storyteller, for an audience viewing and listening to the story as much as for the teller him or herself. That’s something that all cartoons have in common, fiction or non-fiction, “political” or otherwise.

Although I didn’t actually interact with any cartoonists on the first day– and that was my fault. Since I had to be at the airport at about 3:30am for my 5:50am flight to Columbus from Wichita on the 26th, I’d opted to stay up the entire night beforehand, and so was basically running on fumes by the time of arrival at the Holiday Inn in downtown Columbus. As it happens, the designated locale for the first events that evening was also about a 30 minute walk away, and I had (to my knowledge) no other way to get there, so I sent regrets, did a little exploring of the area, and then went to bed.

(For a recap of what happened on Day 1 while I was wandering downtown Columbus in a daze/passed out, please see Mike “Comic Strip of the Day” Peterson’s take at this link.)

On Day 2 I was pleased to discover that the AAEC business meeting was being held close to my hotel, at the Columbus Metropolitan Library. I arrived at the meeting room on the second floor to find a gathering of cartoonists seated around a large U-shaped table, as if planning an international invasion, determining the fate of a captured prisoner, or discussing the fate of an organization dedicated to ensuring the future of political dissent in visual satire form. As it happens, only the latter turned out to be true.

Throughout the meeting, roughly 50% of my brain was devoted to thoughts along these lines: “Holy SHIT! Is that…..?” And yes, dear reader, it was. Here are some of the cartoonists I identified during that meeting:

• Ann Telnaes – Pulitzer Prize winner and also one of the organizers of this conference. Co-curator of the “Front Lines” exhibit on freedom of speech and editorial cartooning in America at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. She authored the mission statement we’d been handed at the beginning of the meeting.
• Matt Wuerker – Pulitzer Prize winner (am I going to get tired of typing those words? Probably) and editor of the Front Lines book based on the exhibit.
• Patrick Chappatte – Former cartoonist for the The International New York Times. He was fired when that institution decided to cancel syndicated cartoons in the aftermath of the uproar over an antisemitic cartoon drawn by another cartoonist altogether.
• Rob Rogers – Cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette until he was fired for criticizing Trump.
• Jen Sorensen – Nationally syndicated cartoonist (I usually see her work on The Nib or Daily Kos).
• Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher – Pulitzer Prize winner and cartoonist for The Economist and Baltimore Sun. Co-founder of Counterpoint.
• Ed Hall – Nationally syndicated cartoonist who happened to be sitting right next to me.
• Jack Ohman – Pulitzer Prize winner and cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee.
• Ted Rall – Nationally syndicated cartoonist who is currently doing a series of cartoons about his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.

I’ll try to be circumspect since I’m not entirely sure how much of what was discussed should be considered private business, but I think it’s fair and permissible to say that the AAEC is going through a bit of an identity crisis. Because really, editorial cartooning itself is going through an identity crisis. In 2019 cartooning in general is proliferating, and not just because of the nostalgia angle (most of us adults today being former children who grew up both delightedly reading comics on the “funny pages” of the newspaper at the kitchen table, and then moving to the couch to watch animated cartoons on TV). Traditionally, however, editorial cartoons are associated with the editorial section of the newspaper, and print media generally is suffering. All too frequently it appears that the first, easiest place to cut financial corners is to can the editorial cartoonist.

This, at least, appears to have been the thought process behind New York Times editorial page editor James Bennett deciding to cancel syndicated political cartoons from the international edition of the paper, after receiving considerable criticism for publishing a cartoon deemed antisemitic (which you can view here). Cartoonist Patrick Chappatte, who is a member of the AAEC and attended this meeting, was dismissed in this process despite his total lack of association with the cartoon in question. Chappatte gave numerous interviews and presentations about this incident, including a TED talk entitled “A Free World Needs Satire” which you can view here.

I won’t go through the litany of political cartoonists in America who have been fired, laid off, or had syndications cancelled over the last few years, but rest assured, it is lengthy and significant. And yet, as was repeatedly acknowledged at the AAEC meeting, cartoonists in other places have it much worse. Read the stories of Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart, Nicaraguan cartoonist Pedro X. Molina, and Malaysian cartoonist Zunar for examples.

I’m getting ahead of myself here, but near the end of this trip I had the chance to speak with Terry Anderson, acting executive director of Cartoonists Rights Network International— an organization affiliated with AAEC for the last twenty years (and many other cartoonist organizations around the globe) that works to defend political cartoonists against retaliation by the governments of the countries where they live, and whom they criticize.

I’d been following CRNI passively previously, but was truly walloped by the impact of their mission on Saturday evening when, at the AAEC reception, it was announced that founder of CRNI Dr. Robert “Bro” Russell would be retiring, and their annual award for courage in cartooning renamed to the Robert Russell Courage in Cartooning Award. You can read more about that at CRNI’s site here, and/or watch the video for yourself:

The first recipient of the newly-named Robert Russell Courage in Cartooning Award was announced on October 2– Chinese cartoonist and dissident Badiucao. Here’s Terry Anderson’s comment:

Badiucao is an exemplary cartoonist of courage. He was specifically targeted by a censorious regime — in person, online and, most disturbingly of all, via pressure applied to family members — but has persevered and removed the leverage his adversaries thought they could exploit by actively dismantling the anonymity they assumed he cherished most.

Thankfully Badiucao is an Australian resident and so cannot be abused as readily as some other cartoonists seized by China in recent years, most notably Jiang Yefei and Zhang Dongning, both of whom have been arrested, criminalised and essentially disappeared. However he is not immune and believes he has been followed, hacked and even had his home invaded by agents of the state. As China celebrates the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic it’s worth contemplating how far they have come in terms of economic development and international relations, weighed against the minimal progress made on fundamental and individual freedoms.

Reporters Sans Frontieres places China 177th of 180 nations on its Press Freedom Index. Committee to Protect Journalists places it 5th in its Top 10 Most Censored Countries. It is ironic that so many modern Chinese citizens enjoy the trappings of middle-class life — abundant consumer goods, lavish weddings, pampered pets and much foreign travel — while they are denied the simple act of expressing dissatisfaction with their government. China is mighty. It has nothing to lose and everything to gain by loosening its grip on discourse.

Badiucao has seen his cartoons removed from Instagram for supposedly violating community guidelines, and tweeted on the irony of this happening while death threats against him, also made on Instagram, had not been removed in spite of his reporting them.

So now it’s time to talk about freedom of expression and social media. You’ve got time for a little tangent on this, don’t you? Of course you do.

Social media companies– Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and so on– are privately owned. They are not, despite the complaints of conservatives in America who have found themselves banned from such platforms, public utilities. And yes, in America it’s generally the conservatives (Alex Jones, Milo Yiannoppulos, etc.) we hear trying to make this argument, not in the slightest dissuaded by the clarity of First Amendment case law.

I would strongly recommend Ken “Popehat” White’s episode of his Make No Law podcast “Deplatformed: Social Media Censorship and the First Amendment” for an informative, authoritative discussion of this subject.  I’ll give you a quick spoiler: moderation of content on social media by the companies who own those platforms is not a violation of anyone’s First Amendment rights.

HOWEVER (you knew a “however” was coming)…the subject is not that cut and dry, for several reasons.

Governments, such as the government of Pakistan recently, have been known to try pressuring private platforms to remove content that isn’t protected under the laws of their respective countries. Cartoonist Clay Jones experienced this when Pakistan demanded that WordPress remove one of his cartoons judged to be “blasphemous,” and leader of the South Asian Free Media Association Imtiaz Alam was threatened for tweeting a cartoon by Afghani artist Atiq Shahid mocking Saudi Arabia’s prince Muhammad bin Salman. Shahid also reported that he’d been suspended from Facebook (more information available on this at the above link).

While their right to moderate content is not in dispute (at least, not by me), social media sites tend to do so much in the way of your 4th grade teacher when a fight breaks out– they don’t care who started it or who is right and who is wrong; all they want to do is make things settle down. They operate by a heckler’s veto standard– whatever and whomever get the most complaints (or, in some cases, complaints from the most powerful and influential people) will be removed, regardless of the reasoning behind those complaints.

Sloppy algorithms also result in content intended to criticize hatred and bigotry getting removed along with actual hatred and bigotry, because the algorithm can’t distinguish between them. As you might expect, this is a particular problem for cartoonists because we rely on symbols as visual shorthand, and it’s often necessary to depict those symbols in order to say something about them. Obviously not all depictions of a thing are endorsement of that thing, but if your algorithm says “Person in a pointy white hood means racism, and racism is bad, so any depiction of a person in a pointy white hood is bad,” then say goodbye to any cartoons attacking racism by showing a guy in a pointy white hood.

Provocative lies are easy. Dangerous truths are hard. The two should never be confused. And no, in case you’re wondering, I am not proposing myself as the ultimate arbiter of which is which– just asserting, forcefully, that it is the eternal right of the cartoon-consuming public to make that determination for ourselves. And even if in America political cartoonists enjoy the relative luxury of being able to express themselves without government censure, we experience the same chilling effect as print journalists when the president declares that “the media” is the enemy of the people and suggests that the “liable [sic] laws” should be re-examined for the purpose of more effectively punishing purveyors of “fake news.”

After the business meeting some of the cartoonists filed outside to participate in the “Chalk Slam” event sponsored by AAEC in conjunction with the Columbus Metropolitan Club, with a theme of “freedom of expression” for AAEC members. I found a spot on the sidewalk next to Ann Telnaes, currently absorbed in creating one of her trademark depictions of Trump. Jack Ohman was seated next to her providing entertainment and critical commentary.

In the afternoon we were treated to a screening of the documentary Mr. Fish: Cartooning from the Deep End, which really drove home for me how in spite of the “Intellectual Dark Web” and its fans and hangers-on making money hand over fist by claiming to distribute dangerous truths when they’re really just repeating stale conservative talking points, the actual dangerous truths are still…well, dangerous to tell.  In it, Dwayne Booth (Mr. Fish) expressed frustration at how “sports team” partisanship in politics drives backlash against his work that criticizes corruption, warmongering, and bigotry regardless of the affiliation of the guilty party. His cartoons are frequently graphic because the violence of an authoritarian state is graphic, and he mocks the hypocrisy of the agents of that violence clutching their pearls over artistic depictions of tragic circumstances of their own making.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the result of doing this work has not been a life of unqualified appreciation and financial success for Booth. You cannot derive from this that the only tellers of truly dangerous truths are the ones visibly struggling, but at the very least it should drive some abiding and healthy skepticism of the persecution narratives told by those rolling in dough. The backlash against Booth’s work doesn’t make him right– it does, however, show that saying the right thing or the wrong thing can earn you a backlash, so the determination of right or wrong cannot depend on the reaction, on the number of people outraged or delighted, or the degree of their fervor in either direction. You have to think beyond that.

The other thing that Cartooning from the Deep End reiterated for me is that “cheap offense” is the other side of “cheap laugh” coin. It’s really not difficult to offend people, just as it’s really not difficult to make people laugh. That’s why satirists of all kinds who lazily rely on hackneyed bigoted tropes will always outnumber those who strive to say something revealing and thought-provoking. As author John Scalzi famously noted, the failure mode of “clever” is “asshole.”

After the movie screening we filed over to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, which was hosting an exhibit titled “Front Line: Editorial Cartoonists and the First Amendment” curated by Ann Telnaes and Lucy Shelton Caswell (Professor Emerita and Founding Curator at the Billy Ireland museum). Lucy conducted a tour for the AAEC cartoonists, describing the history of the rocky relationship between editorial cartoonists and the governing bodies that were their job to pillory.

 

I feel the need to emphasize, though, that Mike and Lyta’s cartoon about Steven Pinker was also a political cartoon. Just as Nate Powell’s illustrations of John Lewis throughout the three-book March series were, in a sense, political cartoons. In my previous blog post about the state of modern political cartooning, I quoted Signe Wilkinson’s lovely definition of editorial cartoons as “making funny pictures about the jerks in power.” The “jerks in power” are never just the people occupying the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court.  They’re also Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvey Weinstein, and the Koch brothers, and all of the people who receive funding from those oligarchs for various reasons….such as Steven Pinker. I think that if editorial cartooning is to survive, it’s critical to acknowledge that.