Bill Gallo, Daily News cartoonist, has been at the paper since 1941, been cartooning since 1960, which, in the vernacular of newspaper people, makes him the “dean” of something or other. We don’t care if he’s the dean of the fucking universe, he is not funny. Cartoonists are supposed to be funny or thought-provoking or at least amusing. Gallo’s not any of these.
Today’s cartoon--a pathetic analogy between Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripkin Jr’s election to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Bush’s decision to send 21,500 more troops to their possible graves in Iraq--is two panels. On the left panel are white Ripken (who, in pursuit of the consecutive game record, destroyed his team) and black Gwynn. In the right panel are a black soldier and a white soldier. A dumb, stupid, shockingly simplistic analogy. Not only does Gallo lack an iota of creative spark, but his faux-crusty WW II patriotism doesn’t fit the slaughter in Iraq (not sure it fit WWII, either). He might as well make an analogy between race horse Barbaro’s broken leg and Basrah babies’ missing heads.
Worse, today’s cartoon epitomizes America’s utter indifference to suffering, as well as its addiction to remote-controlled wars--wars fought by poor rural boys and indigenous militias, by high-tech aircraft and Tomahawk missiles, and watched by channel-surfing, affluents who regard convenience the most sacred of constitutional rights. How does Gallo’s cartoon epitomize this? Because it lacks outrage. Because it equates applause for two fat ex-major leaguers with applause for two youngsters marching to their deaths. He should’ve drawn two mothers--like the famous photo of the anonymous man stopping the tanks on their way to Tienamann Square--standing in front of the soldiers, preventing their deaths and the deaths of innocent Iraqis.