Your Own Blog Site Devoted to Political Cartoons
Political cartoons expose the hypocrisy of politicians. They remind us every day that we are being led by people with truly bad judgment. They amuse us because we know they are accurate. They use exaggeration to drill through to reality. They are altogether positive.
They are also useful for teaching the modern history of the United States. I am working on a course for the Ron Paul Curriculum on U.S. history. What if I could include lots of cartoons? The students would benefit.
Because of the World Wide Web, and because of search engines, it is now possible to find more information about more things than ever before in history of man. Nobody could have foreseen this in 1993. Fundamentally, we are in the midst of an educational revolution that will change the way people learn. Given the fact that translation software is going to get better, we are soon going to be able to access information published almost anywhere in the world, and read this information in our own languages. Again, nothing like this has been possible in the past. There is no way that this is not going to change the legal and political structures of every society. The ability of the gatekeepers to keep out information is in the process of disintegration.
Yet in one area we have made almost no progress whatsoever: accessing old political cartoons. There is more condensed information in a political cartoon than in almost any other form of communication that is available to the general public.
First, there is an artistic aspect to it that is possessed by very few people. Second, there is the ability to make connections between visual images and contemporary events. Again, almost nobody possesses this ability. The number of political cartoonists who have any real effect on the thinking of literate Americans is minimal. I suspect that this is probably under a dozen people over the last three decades. (How many can you name?)
Unlike our memories of words, phrases, dates, names, and so forth, we cannot use search tools to find a specific political cartoon. There are cartoons that I would love to be able to locate. I can't. Who wants to put them on the Web? Even if somebody did, how would I search for a cartoon? In any case, I have forgotten most of them.
Political cartoons are very short-run tools of persuasion. They hit a particular issue, and the issue may be dead in a month. The number of cartoons devoted to this issue may be dozens. Because of the World Wide Web, all of these cartoons are available today. It is not like it was two decades ago, when local newspapers would buy cartoons from one or two political cartoonists, and then publish the cartoons on the editorial page.
Problem: we can't track one down. We forget.
Old editorials are really dead. People do not reread old editorials. The only way that somebody's old editorial is going to survive is if it was written by a national columnist, who then packages a few dozen of them, and gets a book publisher to release the book.
What is true of editorials is even more true of political cartoons. With the exception of a handful of cartoonists who have a national audience, a cartoon that is run in a local newspaper is dead within a week. Nobody remembers it. Probably, nobody should remember it. Issues come and go. But, occasionally, some major issue is dealt with by a political cartoonist in such a powerful fashion, that the cartoon has staying power. But when I say this, I mean staying power only in people's memories. People have not collected scrapbooks of political cartoons. I have known a lot of conservatives in my life, and I have never seen one of them collect political cartoons.
If I were a political cartoonist, I would go to considerable lengths to create a website of my cartoons. I would create a system of search and retrieve that is verbally based, so that people doing a search on a particular event could find the cartoon. I would post one cartoon per page, and I would write down search terms for the cartoon. This way, people doing searches on a particular topic would be able to find my cartoon. Maybe the person would link to it.
It would be far easier to teach a course in American history if there were thousands of cartoons available, and if there were search terms associated with the cartoons. I have never seen this, but this is what is needed. The cartoons would reflect the ideological commitment of the person writing the textbook or monograph. The cartoons, even if not printed in a book, could reinforce the message in a powerful way.
The whole point of political cartoons is to condense an issue down to a visual image. The image gets across the idea in less than five seconds. It is like a headline. But a political cartoon, if well-designed, is a stand-alone tool of persuasion. I write a headline to persuade you to read the first paragraph of the story. A political cartoon does not ask you to read anything. It only asks you to see the implications of a particular event, and then remember these implications.
The power of the political cartoon is that it contains very few words. It is this lack of words that is central to the political cartoon. It is persuasion in the most powerfully condensed form that we have. This never occurred to me before. I should have recognized this half a century ago. In a loose sense, I always knew it. But, because of the Web, and because of short videos, I was reminded of the fact that a good political cartoon is better than any video. That is because a good political cartoon sticks in the mind, and this may take a total of only about 10 seconds.
I can imagine somebody with a particular ideological slant creating a website devoted to political cartoons. It could be based on a history timeline. It could be based on certain key issues.
Do not use archives. Archives do not convey useful information. What is needed is a website categorized by topics, and then broken down, year-by-year.
There are lots of websites where you can get political cartoons. If a person collected three cartoons a day, posted each cartoon on a separate page, and included on that page searchable terms related to the cartoon, over a period of years, this would be a very important website. It would not take a great deal of time to do this each day -- maybe an hour. It would not take the ability to write. It would take only the ability to go out and glean from several websites filled with political cartoons, and then to come to a decision about which political cartoon is likely to have staying power. This takes judgment, but it is a special kind of judgment. It does not take writing ability.
A lot of conservatives would like to do something of value, but they don't like to write. This way, they don't have to write. All they have to do is to spend an hour a day looking at political cartoons. Most of these are forgettable. Most of everything is forgettable. But some things deserve to be remembered, and this includes political cartoons. Of all forms of political information, I can think of none that has comparable levels of information transfer, but lower levels of institutional memory.
Somebody could set up a free website on WordPress.com, and buy an inexpensive design page for $75 or less, which would enable the person to categorize topics down the left-hand side of the page. Then, deeper into the site, it would be categorized by year. You do a site search on "Federal Reserve," "2006," and pull up a dozen pages with one cartoon per page.
What would be the value of this site? For anybody doing a history of a single topic, the value would be tremendous. The work involved in assembling the site would pay off permanently. It could still be paying off in a century.
For people who want to do research on late 19th century New York City, the cartoons of Thomas Nast are invaluable. They had enormous impact at the time. His most famous cartoons were about Boss Tweed. Tweed fully understood how devastating they were. He offered a bribe to Nast to stop publishing them. He was quite forthright about why. He said that the people who voted for him did not read much, but they could see, as he said, "them damn pictures." Eventually, he was sent to prison. It was the cartoons that did him in.
If you are a political junkie, put together a site like this. You can have links to the cartoons, and you can have links to articles about the topic. But the cartoons are far more important than the editorials and articles on the topic. If the topic is important, it will eventually wind up on Wikipedia as a separate entry. But there will be no cartoons.
Save the cartoons, in case the links go down. Use Snagit or some similar tool to post them. But include the link to each cartoon, preferably to the cartoonist's site. Cartoonists want to be remembered. This way, they can be remembered. Their work does not need to die in a month or a decade.
To avoid copyright problems, set the posting date a month later. By then, a cartoon is dead. It has no value to the sites that pay for a cartoonist's output.