Wanderlost "Tongue-tied" Page 12

In this latest installment, Dr. Knott continues to probe the inner recesses of Sheldon's mind.

Part of this page was drawn with actual crayon. It was fun to go outside the digital box. And into the Crayola box.

On to other things: In a NY Times Book Review of Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy, Shibley Telhami describes the focus by the authors on political cartoons that have appeared following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001:

The cartoons show violent, oversexed males, oppressed females, deceptive foreigners. The cartoonists, the authors argue, frequently conflate terrorist groups or the Taliban with Muslims or Arabs in general. One example shows the Taliban in Arab headdresses. “The underlying presumption is that Pashtun Muslims dress as all Muslims dress — as the stereotyped Arab.” (They don’t.) Another cartoon, they say, suggests that “Islamic beliefs inflamed Arab hatred of the United States.”
Still, it’s hard to tell how representative these examples are, since we can’t compare them with other cartoons that may have been more balanced. It’s also hard to measure their impact on public opinion.

As someone drawing political cartoons since before 9/11, I have been observing the work of my peers in the mainstream and alternative presses as well. The latter crowd have been pretty careful in their representations of Muslims, recognizing that there are geographical, historical ethnic and sectarian divisions within a religion comprising over a billion people throughout the world. Personally speaking, I took pains to examine news photos of the specific people whose countries we were bombing or threatening to bomb, noted common modes of dress, ethnic characteristics and gender signifiers. I wanted to get the details right, because I was attempting to portray people I have little personal contact with yet who suffer at the weapons of my government. I'm not tooting some sanctimonious horn here; it's what a responsible artist does.

The mainstream folks are more spotty; some cartoonists are more conscious than others, and some are just total hacks. Prior to 9/11 newspaper editorial cartoonists, with few exceptions and regardless of political leanings, portrayed Arabs mostly as fat sheiks with "OPEC" branded on their bellies or headdresses; only the Palestinians warranted different costumes, mostly militant and violent. It should be noted here that "Muslim" and "Arab" and "Palestinian" were frequently conflated concepts. Whether or not such cartoons had direct "impact on public opinion" they were symptomatic of a larger cultural ignorance that, once attacked by the more extreme elements from a part of the world hitherto ignored, kicked into paranoiac and viciously racist overdrive.

I think it's appropriate to use political cartoons in the mainstream press as indicators of a society's tropes of fear, ignorance and anger, especially in a critique of American cultural responses to unprecedented terrorist attacks on American soil. Editors choose and pay for political cartoons because they concisely express a viewpoint reflecting popular discourse on a topic. This discourse is framed by various interests, of course, not least of which is the publisher's, an increasingly faceless entity as newspapers are consumed within the larger matrices of corporate properties. One instance of an Islamophobic cartoon - or even a handful of such - is a likely aberration; but we're talking about a frequently occurring set of negative stereotypes that are widespread and run deep historically. Indeed what troubles me is that these stereotypes are so ingrained they can be produced effortlessly with no conscious malice on the part of the offending cartoonist. After 9/11 and into the present day the tactics of our warmongering political class have exploited these stereotypes to keep the fear, anger and ignorance alive, overwhelming rational dissenting criticism of policies that threaten to establish a police state at home and a perpetual war abroad. Cartoonists should never allow themselves to be so used.