The Passing of Paul Conrad

Encomiums have poured in from around the world today for the celebrated former Los Angeles Times  cartoonist Paul Conrad.  The three time Pulitzer Prize winner, who died on Saturday at the age of 86, won renown as a political satirist, whose liberalism was worn as a badge of honor and who never shied away from confronting men and women in power.

But I can’t count myself as one of his admirers. While  Conrad, more than almost any other political cartoonist of modern times, gave the concept of the ” editorial cartoon” a certain elan, freeing it from its image as a misplaced comic, he also did considerable damage to the image of the journalist as  the objective reporter of truth.

The editorial cartoonist possesses great power.   Among us few remaining newspaper readers, with our  increasingly strained attention spans, there is a respect for the editorial cartoonist that stretches beyond his real powers of persuasion.  We readers might  scan images  such as photographs and photo-sketches to obtain our opinions on any given subject.   With one glance we believe we  can absorb the full import of an editorial position, which may well have some bearing in forming our own ideas.

But in this way, complex issues are often reduced to fairly simplistic statements, stripping the issue of a certain gravitas and balance that is achieved in good editorial writing.

The political cartoonist, who does not have many words with which to convey an opinion and is often consigned to a single panel of images,  must therefore be careful that his or her positions do not cross the line from commentary  into propaganda – a tempting option in such a  format.

Conrad rarely exercised this kind of restraint.   Inflamed by his liberal sense of injustice he railed at the big and mighty often simply because they were big and mighty.

No more was that the case when it came to the Arab- Israeli conflict.   He was unable to appreciate or understand Israel’s need for self defense and repeatedly made provocative comparisons between the IDF and Nazis.  After a particularly meaningful use of the Star of David in a cartoon depicting Soviet prisoners of conscience as the equivalent of Jewish prisoners of concentration camps ( September 24, 1972) , he rarely ever employed it again except as a symbol of hate, repression and violence.    His cartoon in the Los Angeles Times following the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982 ( where he arranged the Palestinian corpses in the shape of Star of David) was beyond the bounds of decency, considering that it was not the Israelis who had perpetrated the killings but the Christian Phalange.  As his comment on the Palestinian intifada of the late 80s , he drew a Star of David made of barbed wire and billy clubs.  He was a particularly vitriolic enemy of West Bank settlers, whom he often depicted as deranged gun-toting Messianists, bent on killing Palestinians and uprooting olive groves – an accusation which has absolutely no basis in reality.    He gave very little time to exploring the violence inherent in Arab society and the emergence of the suicide bomber as the Palestinian weapon of choice.

Years ago I heard a prominent journalist bemoan the fact the journalists no longer seem as concerned with reporting objective truth as with seeing their own idiosyncratic form of justice achieved.  This agenda  Conrad embraced with gusto. “Don’t ever accuse me,” he once said, “of being objective.”

Given this position it is hard for me to agree that Paul Conrad was one of the giants of Western journalism in the last half of the 2oth Century.  His brand of “personal journalism” actually did far more damage to the practice of his craft than good.   His greatest legacy is not a fearless approach to confronting men and women in power, as much as it is a profound cynicism which now pervades his profession and has brought  it increasingly into disrepute.

Tony Blair Has Mashalled the West’s Tough Journey

Tony Blair’s recent published autobiography ” A Journey” is remarkable in a number of ways.

The first is that it is penned solely by the former prime minister without the benefit of a ghost writer;   The second is that it is a insouciantly honest  portrait of a Western leader that doesn’t seek to hide deep  insecurities or avoid blame for major errors of judgment.

As to the first, well, maybe he should have used a little help.  The book is riddled with cliches and unwieldy syntax. It is poorly organized and gives us little of Blair’s political or personal philosophy.   As to the second, the bare- it-all candidness can get a bit much, particularly when Blair intimates his penchant for spending time alone on the loo.

But a third  reason – and an  important one to laud this new memoir – is Blair’s insistence on the centrality of the Trans-Atlantic Alliance to the future of Western civilization.  Blair has understood, much like all his post- War predecessors and every American president since Franklin Roosevelt, that the very concept of  “the West”  as a civilization, would only survive if  the two nations which enshrined its values would continue to cooperate as partners in the greatest of human enterprises – the preservation of freedom and the willingness to fight to defend it.

The personal relationships between the leaders of the two countries – Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and  John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – shepherded the West through the grave crises represented by Nazism and Communism.  The Blair- Bush relationship was just as important in its ultimate recognition of and confrontation to the third great challenge to the West in our lifetime -  the scourge of terrorism and the rise of fundamentalist Islam.  The Trans-Atlantic alliance was undeniably strengthened during the first decade of this century by the development of a warm cooperation between these two men.

More than any European  leader in this century, Blair understood the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 as an assault on the West itself and that an immediate and forceful response would be needed.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as controversial as they now seem, will one day be viewed by history as the West’s defiant statement that it would be neither cowed, nor intimidated by tin pot dictators or highly financed terrorist leaders.

His cooperation with Bush in toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein was exactly the kind of cooperation missing in 1956 when  Egypt’s  president Abdul Gamal Nasser bestrode the Middle East as a puffed up Arab potentate, vowing to deliver a humiliating blow to ” the Western imperialists”.  When he nationalized the Suez Canal in August, 1956,  threatening world trade, the United States and the United Kingdom would have been in their rights to launch an international force to dislodge him.  That did not happen.  Anthony Eden’s government, sensing American reticence and indifference, colluded with France and Israel to seize the canal.  The action took the Eisenhower Administration by complete surprise and in an act of pique,  it threatened to condemn the actions in the U.N.  Security Council, resulting in a humiliating retreat by all three powers.  The damage to the West was incalcuable  and led to Eden’s immediate resignation, the eventual collapse of France’s Fourth Republic and the empowerment of Nasser, who eleven years later would launch the Six Day War and continue as a the bane of the West for another 14 years.

The absence of a personal relationship between the British prime minister and the American president was telling in those circumstances.  And so may it be today.  Neither David Cameron nor Barack Obama have evinced much interest in the Trans-Atlantic Alliance and the idea that the two nations must band together to defend the West and its values, is given short shrift.   Neither seems to be display a keen awareness of the threats posed by the multicultural revolution sweeping through the West; Neither has drawn at all upon the memory of Munich, as nearly every American and British  post – War leader has done, as a policy guide for confronting challenges to freedom and liberty.

Reports have indicated that Tony Blair, in conducting his book tour, must travel in an armed guard for fear of being assaulted.  He is seen in Britain today as largely a failure.   The reviews by his contemporaries of his book have been scathing, painting the former prime minister as a stooge in thrall to American imperialism.

History will inevitably be much kinder to Tony Blair, just as it will be to Bush.  It may sadly reveal that these two pragmatic men were the last of their line of great leaders who took hard, unpopular decisions they felt necessary to protect their populations.  That they understood this and acted in unison, may  be the last gasp of  recognition, among our political leaders at least, of the joint destiny of the English speaking peoples.