Debilitating the Editorial Cartoon

I suppose the most disconcerting thing about the selection of the "Top 10 Editorial Cartoons" made by Time ("in partnership with CNN," as the banner on the Web page says) is how lame the collection is. In a year when there were so many pain points that ridicule was the only viable alternative to outrage, not one of the Time selections packed the sort of ridicule that would go straight to the jugular of our national consciousness. Consider, for example, that George W. Bush does not appear in any of the cartoons on the Time list, neither in his familiar "Curious George" alter ego or through any other avatar. (Dick Cheney, on the other hand, appears twice, making one wonder if this is yet another maneuver by the White House Press Office to distance the President from the Vice President.) It is not as if ridicule has gone out with T. S. Eliot's whimper. Those of us who read Truthdig have enjoyed a year's worth of cartoons with wit as sharp as the pen needed to draw the finest of their lines, but none of those cartoons made it to the Time list. The lesson is that Time has now become the perfect example of soma-induced journalism whose only task is to convince the rest of us that, as Aldous Huxley put it in Brave New World, "Everybody's happy nowadays." If that does, indeed, reflect the thoughts of most of the mainstream media, then, as my mother used to say, "They have another think coming!"