Wednesday, August 6, 2025

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Art, Commerce, and Vision

 


Art



Art isn’t free to produce. Especially the kind of art Sabin makes.

 · 9 min read
Art, Commerce, and Vision

I’m a novelist and my husband Sabin Howard is a classical figurative sculptor. Currently he’s the sculptor for the National World War I Memorial, which will be a 56 foot long bronze relief set in Pershing Park, Washington D.C.

Before Sabin forayed into public art, he sculpted from life models. Over the course of designing soldiers in combat and nurses tending the wounded for the WWI Memorial, he has evolved into an expressive humanist. But for decades he put clay over a steel armature while looking at a flesh-and-bones body in space, hiring models the way Canova or Rodin did. The model in Sabin’s studio was a vehicle both for an individual figure with psychological expression, and for an allegorical one that embodies a higher ideal.

Sabin has always been of the view that art elevates us. His body of work includes heroic scale sculptures, including the Aphrodite. Eight women posed for her: a flamenco dancer for the legs, a yoga teacher for the core. I can relate funny anecdotes about the responses from Craig’s List to his ad for a boob model. Sabin worked on Aphrodite for about a year. His work is slow art. Clay is painstakingly accreted to the high points of muscles spiraling over bone. One day he phoned from his studio. He said, “I have a chainsaw. Her gesture is wrong. I’m cutting off her left arm.”

It was months of work. Amputated.

When I tell this story, people smile and nod. This is the tale of an artist with an uncompromising vision of his art. It’s an archetype. They understand. But there’s another implication that they tend to miss. That is, Sabin had paid a dancer to stand and bear her arms aloft while he sculpted. When Sabin lopped off the goddess’s arm, we took a financial hit.

Art isn’t free to produce. Especially the kind of art Sabin makes. He buys steel and foam to make an armature; he lays out cash for clay and sculpting tools; he employs models, a photographer for reference images, a mold-maker, a foundry to pour bronze, and a finisher to weld the cast pieces together. He writes a check every month for his studio.

This is a business. A business driven by passion, but a business nevertheless. For nearly two decades, I’ve helped my husband run it. He moved away from the gallery system because galleries take a hefty 50 percent commission. My various literary agents take 15 percent for U.S. sales and 20 percent for international, so half the price for a sculpture strikes me as gouging the artist.

Few artists complain about the percentage; most spend so much time and energy learning their craft that they pay little attention to the business of art. They also cherish the notion that the real value of art isn’t measured in dollars but in its ability to influence culture and move its audience. Of the multitude of artists I’ve met over the years, most seem to want the gallery to hand them an allowance, so that all they have to do is keep making art. They don’t want to roll up their sleeves and climb into the muddy trenches of the marketplace.

But Sabin has an entrepreneurial spirit and he’s good at client cultivation. He decided to forgo the gallery’s percentage and create his own business. As his wife, I’ve been a full partner in all aspects: sales, promotion, marketing, webinar creation and support, web design, writing, and outreach to museums, clients, collectors, and media organizations.

We have better months and worse months. There’s a level of chaos we tolerate because every month sees a different income, and like everyone else, we have fixed costs: our apartment, our health insurance, our daughter’s education. We have to buy tomatoes and lamb chops and shampoo and school uniforms. It can be scary. But, despite the pressure, we’ve come to appreciate the dynamic opportunities afforded by the capitalist model.

That’s why I’m taken aback when someone turns to me and says, “You’re artists. You’re supposed to be left-wing.” By which they mean Socialist. They don’t mean socioeconomically, philosophically, and racially inclusive, or any of the qualities of independent thought and respect for the sovereignty of the individual generally understood as classical liberalism. They mean that we as artists ought to believe in a state-run collectivism that will provide us with an allowance—presumably so we don’t have to exercise our own ingenuity and take responsibility for our financial well-being.

Sabin Howard at work on the Memorial (pic courtesy of the author)

As mentioned, most artists work within the gallery system. The gallery cuts them a check when there’s a sale. Many artists teach, and universities run on a similar model, doling out a pittance with which an associate professor is supposed to make ends meet. It’s a well-greased, time-honored system with a clear hierarchy and a defined path forward. It’s structured. It feels safe.

There’s also a cultural notion that artists are supposed to be too high-minded to make money. The vapid romanticism of the starving artist has been promoted at least since Victorian times. During the Renaissance, a workshop and apprenticeship system, as well as an embedded ideal about the beautification of cities and the ennoblement of public and private spaces, provided a path to livelihood for talented artists. And “starving artist” hearkens to a mistaken idea about filthy lucre—that somehow hard cash and noble ideals are incompatible.

We recently worked with a business partner who was affronted when we explained that our venture together had to culminate in earnings or we couldn’t afford to do it. She felt that what mattered were the ideals behind our platform. Ensconced in her wealth, she couldn’t understand that our ideals are important, but that they will not be realized if we can’t earn a living.

The implications of the left-wing model go deeper than finances. They devolve into a vision of art as a collectivist endeavor: Art by committee. Art by groupthink. The state pays the artist, so the state gets to tell the artist what to make. But the collectivist framework is diametrically opposed to real art.

Real art is the product of the personal, human vision of the artist. However, it is not simply self-expression. Self-expression is worthy and sometimes well-executed, and a small percentage of it is art. Real art, on the other hand, balances the artist’s individual perception with something that is universal in understanding and meaning. People—everyday people without PhDs—feel it in their bones. They may not be able to articulate it but, like pornography, they know it when they see it. And, in fact, there are objective standards for evaluating art. Beauty, excellence, and the artist’s skill matter.

This understanding is incompatible with the fashionably progressive, postmodern credo that only the group matters and, anyway, everything is meaningless. God is dead and so are reason, meaning, and order. All that remains to understand how things are is a sterile process of deduction and, since every person is his or her own Sherlock Holmes, there’s no hierarchy of taste or quality. All is relative. Except that, as always happens, some animals are more equal than others, and the animal that dictates taste is the collective or the state.

The Left behaves in the manner of the totalitarian state they say they fear. They dictate taste and expression. They extinguish an artist’s distinct, personal and human vision if that vision runs contrary to the collectivist agenda. Thus is creative ability squelched. As Ayn Rand declared in The Fountainhead:

…The whole secret of their (the creator’s) power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He had lived for himself. And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

The inevitable outcome of a collectivist belief system is the ethic and aesthetic of the lowest common denominator. Ayn Rand managed to understand this without God (although, personally, I think she missed the mark on spirituality).

In distinguishing artists from leftists, I respectfully disagree with Jordan Peterson, whom I greatly admire. In a YouTube lecture, he discusses a spectrum with creative artists/non-hierarchical/unstructured liberals on one end and hierarchical/structured/non-artist conservatives on the other end. I believe this spectrum offers too easy a dichotomy. Watching Sabin, and meeting other successful artists, including world-class musicians, painters, and writers, I’ve found that successful creative people have a profound talent for hierarchy and structure. This is just an observation gleaned from personal experience. It’s not the result of a double-blind scientific study.

As the wife of a famous artist, I’ve lived the truth that art transcends social caste and class. Sabin and I have broken bread with billionaires and food stamp recipients, iconic musicians and stunt actors, broke underwear models and rich technocrats, lawyers and bankers and store clerks and ladies who lunch and everyone in between. This is really fun. People’s stories are a novelist’s raw materials, and I get to meet a breathtaking array of humankind.

My experience contradicts Dr. Peterson’s pedagogy. Truly successful artists have a masterful understanding of hierarchy. They see as a whole cloth how small parts fit into a larger whole; they see what is lesser and must be subsumed into what is greater. They’re also experts at structure and the discipline of their craft. Simultaneously, very successful non-artists foist a formidable creativity. They may wear a suit and tie instead of the t-shirt and jeans my husband favors, but their way with hedge funds or legal statutes or sound waves bespeaks an unlimited and inventive playfulness with the fundamentals of their field: creativity.

Art Is Not Therapy
Something is flattened when our understanding of art is asked to serve the logic of a medical diagnosis, which sees the messiness of the human condition as a malady to be cured.

Recently, Sabin went abroad to make a 1:6 scale maquette for the WWI Memorial. Ultimately, the finished Memorial will be a 56 foot long, 10 foot high relief with 38 figures. All the figures fit into a unified narrative, all the small parts are ordered coherently into a greater whole to tell a story. It’s the hero’s journey from home through the hell of war and PTSD to a triumphal, and transformed, return home. It’s mesmerizing.

Fabricating the maquette, however, was an ordeal. The fabrication factory fancied itself as a “socialist collective of creativity.” But Sabin quickly discerned the truly capable workers. As Dr. Peterson correctly notes, when many people do something, some people do it better than others. The fabrication factory specialized in film props and collectibles. Collectibles are great fun, but they are not art. They are dolls. Sabin parried an argument every time he said, “Make the right leg longer than the left. It’s not a literal translation from life. The figure is perspectival.”

He eventually booted the doll-makers off the maquette. He sculpted alone out of his personal, unique vision, persisting until he accomplished a maquette of power, beauty, and dignity. World War I veterans have all passed, but they will be honored by “A Soldier’s Journey.” The beauty and dignity of Sabin’s National Memorial imbue it with value—which leads to some criticism of the capitalist system. All too often, mercenary collectors expect an artwork to stand somewhere and get more expensive. The dollar value is the “value” of the art. They miss the intangible qualities that make art valuable qua art.

The capitalist system also tends to corruption in the market-museum system. The separation between market and museum should be clean and distinct. Increasingly, it’s not. It’s expensive for a museum to mount an exhibit; a cunning gallery will underwrite that exhibition in order to promote their artists and to shore up the asking price for the artists’ work. This pleases collectors who have already bought works by the exhibited artist. Their investment is safe. However, new artists, or artists whose work is on the next wave of art history, are ignored by galleries and museums. Art is reduced to a commodity.

Reductive and heartless, the capitalist system can go too far. It often does. But the alternative is worse: state-sponsored art that confines the artist to a collective agenda. I see that happening now in Hollywood, where so many movies are vehicles for preaching propaganda, not for telling a story. It gets boring.

History is replete with examples of artists who stayed the course despite the slings and arrows of groupthink. Michelangelo, for example, my husband’s great reference, stuck with his vision despite potentially fatal disagreements with a murderous Pope. To the benefit of humanity, he resisted Papal input and adhered to his unique, personal vision. The Sistine Chapel resulted.

Great art is not collectivist. And artists aren’t necessarily left-wing.






Political Cartooning—And Why

 


Art

The Death of Political Cartooning—And Why It Matters

Many nominally democratic political regimes practice de facto censorship in regard to material criticizing their populist rulers.

 · 12 min read
The Death of Political Cartooning—And Why It Matters
James Gillray’s 1791 work, “The Hopes of the Party Prior to July 14th,” depicting the execution of George III.

Six years ago, on January 7th, 2015, two brothers armed with Kalashnikov rifles assaulted a building on Rue Nicolas-Appert in Paris, where they killed a maintenance man named Frédéric Boisseau and forced their way into the second-floor offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. They asked for four cartoonists, by name, and executed each of them. They also killed four other journalists, a bodyguard assigned to protect one of the cartoonists in the event of just such an attack, police officer Ahmed Merabet, and a friend of one of the cartoonists. Following a nihilistic two-day crime spree, the brothers were killed in a hail of police bullets outside a printworks north-east of Paris.

The ghastly murders at Charlie Hebdo shocked the world. Yet while the scale and violence of the incident were unprecedented, such attacks against cartoonists are hardly unknown. Throughout history, cartoonists have been jailed, kidnapped, tortured, exiled, and murdered. Ostensibly, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were killed for drawing pictures of the prophet Muhammad. (Two days after the murders, an al-Qaeda cell in Yemen claimed to have engineered the attack. And a surviving journalist named Sigolène Vinson reported that one of the killers instructed her to convert to Islam, and shouted Allahu Akbar!) It’s a pattern similar to other historical incidents in which cartoonists have been targeted: The victims made a joke at the expense of those who couldn’t take one.

January 14th edition of Charlie Hebdo

In the aftermath, there was a huge outpouring of support for Charlie Hebdo. The slogan “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) appeared everywhere. Millions marched in the streets, and heads of state locked arms and strode defiantly down the Boulevard Voltaire in support of free speech. The “blasphemous” cartoons that had displeased al-Qaeda were reprinted in other Western countries, and Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff sold eight million copies of a follow-up edition depicting Muhammad crying over the slain. Seen in isolation, it seemed as if Western politicians and journalists were united in defense of liberty and free expression, even in the salty, provocative form favored by cartoonists.

But in truth, political cartooning is in decline—and not simply because of the dramatic (and very real) threats posed by religious fanatics. Many nominally democratic political regimes practice de facto censorship in regard to material criticizing their populist rulers. Then there’s the collapse of print media, the rise of new codes of political correctness, social-media mobs, and the greater competition for audience presented by Netflix and other online media. My craft has a glorious history, and has shaped the fates of empires. Yet many young people won’t be mourning the slow death of editorial cartooning because they are no longer aware that the medium even exists.

“The Birth and Origin of the Pope,” by Lucas Cranach

Some trace the birth of cartooning back to Christian reformer Martin Luther, whose blockbuster successes on the newly invented printing press helped pioneer the distribution of woodcut sketches lampooning the Catholic Church. Luther knew that many people who looked at his works were barely literate, so he recruited artists to complement them with pictures that spoke for themselves. In one (still) shocking 1545 image, The Birth and Origin of the Pope, German Renaissance painter and printmaker Lucas Cranach depicted the devil defecating out Pope Leo X. In the centuries to come, many such satirists would pay with their lives (though not Cranach, who had powerful political allies, and lived till the ripe age of 81).

Goya’s “No Hubo Remedio”

In Spain, the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition kept up operations till the early 19th century. Its demise was sped along by Spanish master Francisco Goya, whose famous Los Caprichos etchings assailed the spirit of madness and social panic wrought by the Inquisition. Meanwhile, in the political sphere, cartoonists on all sides of the French Revolution (and its Napoleonic aftermath) became powerful cultural combatants. On one hand, Parisian cartoonists hastened the demise of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by depicting them as indulgent and sexually licentious. Yet Napoleon fared little better, at least among foreign artists such as English caricaturist James Gillray, who gleefully portrayed the emperor as a lunatic. Gillray, Napoleon lamented late in life, “did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down.” (Ironically, Gillray died in June, 1815, just days before Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo.)

“Manic Ravings, or Little Boney in a Strong Fit,” by James Gillray

Following Napoleon’s fall, the subsequent Bourbon Restoration, and the July Revolution of 1830, Europe’s caricature artists were still at it—including caricaturist and publisher Charles Philipon, whose depiction of King Louis Philippe I as a pear (La Poire) stands as one of the most famous political cartooning images in the craft’s history. An enraged Louis orchestrated a massive crackdown against the press, including against Philipon himself, who defended himself during his trial by drawing the king’s face, and then three additional sketches displaying how the king’s likeness slowly morphs into that of a pear. “Can I help it if His Majesty’s face is like a pear?” he asked his prosecutors. Philipon was convicted of “contempt of the king’s person” and was briefly imprisoned. But the pear would endure as a symbol of revolution.

The first influential cartoon published in an American newspaper has traditionally been credited to Benjamin Franklin, who drew his famous serpent divided into eight parts with the legend Join, or Die—the message being that fellow colonists must band together to repel the enemy forces then threatening their territory. Long after Franklin’s death, the image would be dusted off for reuse by supporters of American unity.

Thomas Nast, whom many consider to be the greatest editorial cartoonist of all time, rose to prominence during the Civil War. Still in his early 20s, the young German immigrant began producing such arresting pro-Union material that Abraham Lincoln—flipping Napoleon’s rueful commentary about James Gillray on its head—referred to Nast as “our best recruiting agent.”

During the national election of 1864, conducted amidst the Civil War, the Democrats pushed a platform of reconciliation with the slaving south. In response, Nast created his famous Compromise with the South cartoon, depicting an injured union soldier, bowing his head and lifelessly shaking hands with a victorious confederate who stands atop the grave of a fallen Yankee, with Lady Liberty weeping in the foreground. The epitaph on a tombstone reads “In memory of the Union heroes who died in a useless war.” Nast’s lurid but masterful image created a sensation, and showed how politically powerful the cartooning medium could be in an age of mass newspaper readership. Two months later, Abraham Lincoln defeated the Democrat candidate, George McClellan, to secure a second term.

In the decades following the war, Nast would continue to elevate the medium to high art. In 1871, he began an ongoing series for Harper’s Weekly attacking the corruption of Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that controlled New York politics. Nast so mercilessly lampooned William M. “Boss” Tweed as the machine’s ringleader, that Tweed was heard to rage, “Stop them damn pictures! I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing them damn pictures!”

Eventually, Tweed was convicted of money laundering. (He attempted to escape justice by absconding to Spain, but was soon apprehended by Spanish officials, who reportedly recognized him with assistance from Nast’s cartoons.) As for Nast himself, he’d go on to conceive of the elephant as a symbol for the Republican party, popularize the use of the donkey for the Democrats, and help create the modern image of Santa Claus that Americans have come to love.

In the 20th century, radio and television would replace print as the public’s preferred source for news. And so the grand and intricate style of cartooning employed by newspapers and magazines during the 19th century was no longer sustainable. These were replaced by smaller and simpler cartoons, which allowed for more advertising space and faster turnaround times. But even within these constraints, brilliant cartoonists continued to emerge as influential provocateurs. In the lead-up to WWI, American artist Art Young was tried twice under the country’s Espionage Act for “conspiracy to obstruct enlistment.” One of his images portrayed the war as devilish chaos, cheered on by ignorant and cynical politicians, capitalists, religious officials, and journalists.

Anti-war cartoons by Art Young (left) and Louis Raemaekers (right)

During the same era, Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers was charged with the crime of endangering Dutch neutrality with his cartoons depicting German militarism. In one of his most famous pieces, a woman representing imperial Germany is shown being drawn into an intimate dance with Death himself.

Tyrants and demagogues of whatever stripe, generally being both cruel and bombastic, have always made easy targets for cartoonists. This of course includes the worst of the lot, Adolf Hitler, who was mocked by (among many) English cartoonist David Low. Indeed, the Nazis were so infuriated by Low that he made it into the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. (better known in English as the “Black Book”)—the list of prominent British figures slated to be arrested if the Germans ever managed to invade and occupy Great Britain.

Communist tyrants were the subject of caricature as well. And so, too, were notorious anti-communists, such as US Senator Joseph McCarthy. Indeed, long-time Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block is credited with coining the term “McCarthyism” in one of his 1950 cartoons. And his later work skewering Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal earned him a Pulitzer Prize, alongside the more famous Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Herblock (as he often was known) died in 2001, and so wasn’t alive to witness the continued decline of his trade in the 21st century. Yes, editorial cartoons still exist (including at the Washington Post, which runs a cartooning syndication service featuring eight artists). But their influence is nowhere near what it once was. And one of the few times when they still enter the public consciousness is when they attract the ire of fanatics or tyrants—which still happens in repressive countries such as Syria, Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, China, and Russia; or in free countries such as France that are attacked by terrorists.

Art, Commerce, and Vision
Art isn’t free to produce. Especially the kind of art Sabin makes.

In his 2013 book The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, author Victor S. Navasky explained that the visual stimulus of a cartoon hits our brains in the thalamus, “which in turn passes the information to the region of the brain called the amygdala, the brain’s ‘fear center.’” The effect is to provoke a more rapid emotional response than would be possible through text. By amplifying this effect through caricature, exaggeration, and mockery, cartoonists—like propagandists (and sometimes the line between the two can be blurry)—can supercharge these mental phenomena. In fact, Navasky describes research to the effect that our brains “react more quickly to caricatures than photos of real faces,” which some neuroscientists call a form of superstimuli.

For a 19th-century newspaper reader, this might have been the only superstimuli the media could provide them. But we are now living in an era of mass overstimulation, especially through video, a medium with which old-school cartoonists never had to compete. A well-liked cartoon on the cover of a newspaper might have once been a source of discussion for days. But that effect is impossible to duplicate in the current age of social media. Sharing even the best cartoon on social media is akin to throwing a chicken into an alligator pit: It will be instantly consumed, digested, and forgotten.

The only exceptions occur when cartoonists get negative publicity—as in 2018, when Australian cartoonist Mark Knight received blowback for his cartoon depicting tennis great Serena Williams having a mid-match meltdown at the US Open. Cries of racism and sexism rained down from watchdog groups, athletes, and celebrities. The furor even forced an investigation by the Australian Press Council (which eventually exonerated the cartoonist and his publisher, though by that time, of course, everyone had moved on). “The cartoon about Serena is about her poor behavior on the day, not about race. The world has just gone crazy,” Knight said afterwards.

In April 2019, the international edition of the New York Times published a political cartoon by Portuguese artist António Moreira Antunes that was seized upon by critics as anti-Semitic. The cartoon portrayed a recently re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu as a seeing-eye dog, leading a blind President Trump, as an obvious metaphor for the relationship between the two leaders.

In response to the outcry, the Times immediately discontinued all editorial cartoons in their international edition (they hadn’t run cartoons in their domestic edition since 1958) and dismissed their two in-house cartoonists, Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song, neither of whom had anything to do with the offending piece. (“Hey this is new. Did we just invent preventive self-censorship?” Chappatte asked in his excellent TED Talk on the subject.) For his part, António (as he is known professionally) denied he had worked with any racist intent, and that people should not accept the idea that “any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism.”

More recently, we’ve witnessed the self-cancellation of Susan Miller Warden and Jeanne Miller Wood, co-owners of the Washington Missourian newspaper, who resigned after their 90-year-old father, Bill Miller, the paper’s editor and publisher, published a cartoon by Tom Stiglich attacking the idea of defunding the police.

Cartoon by Tom Stiglich

“We believe it was racist and in no circumstance should’ve been published” the sisters wrote. Their father also apologized for his “poor judgment,” and called the cartoon “racially insensitive.” The paper promised readers they would “discontinue using cartoons by this particular cartoonist.” (Stiglich, no stranger to controversy, once remarked about his work, “Any time that I include a minority, some readers will automatically scream ‘that’s racist.’ That does tend to get old.”)

And lest we imagine that humorless outrage is limited to the left side of the political spectrum, consider veteran Canadian cartoonist Michael de Adder from Brunswick News Inc., and Rob Rogers from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, both of whom created pointed anti-Trump cartoons that did not sit well with their publishers. De Adder lost his job in 2019 after creating the cartoon that appears below. Rogers also was fired, despite the fact that he’d been with the Post-Gazette for 25 years.

It’s estimated that at the start of the 19th-century, there were about 2,000 editorial cartoonists plying their trade in print across the United States. As far as I can tell, that number now hovers around 30. The few cartoons that do remain in circulation are usually picked up on the cheap from syndicates (such as the above-referenced Washington Post). These syndicates act as sales agents for cartoonists, and are eager to sell the same pieces to as many publications as possible. And the more broad and generic the cartoon, the better the sales. This keeps the art form focused on the national or international scene, endlessly sending up the same stale left-vs-right dynamic, with little commentary on local issues. The majority are facile and forgettable—a perfect fit for the corporate owners of the last newspapers standing.

Considering that cartoons and cartoonists are often the first to go when fascists gain power, it is sad that we here in the West—where we remain free to publish what we want—seem determined to watch them go extinct through a combination of cancel culture, indifference, and economic factors. But the fanatics are far from indifferent: When French middle school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in October, it was allegedly because he’d had the temerity to display the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his students as a visual aid in a discussion of freedom of expression. He had warned his Muslim students about the images in advance, offering them the chance to opt out of the session if they preferred. The lesson caused an uproar anyways, and in the end his precautions made no difference to those who feel murder is a justifiable response to drawings.

“Against the assault of laughter,” wrote Mark Twain, “nothing can stand.” This insight remains as true today as ever, and helps explain why the right to ridicule is one of the first rights that freedom’s enemies seek to extinguish. The job of the cartoonist is to hold up a mirror and allow society to get a good look at itself, perchance to laugh in a spirit of self-recognition. I fear for any society that decides it cannot be roused to do so.