The Joint Chiefs of Staff have an interesting way of interpreting taste in art. This week they fired off a letter to the Washington Post criticizing a cartoon that puts the human costs of the war in Iraq under a microscope.
On Sunday, the Washington Post ran a political cartoon by Tom Toles depicting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld writing a prescription for a heavily bandaged soldier without arms or legs.
The cartoon got the goat of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who responded with a letter to the editor condemning the cartoon. Writing for the Joint Chiefs, General Pace complained that Toles’ cartoon was “beyond tasteless” and “reprehensible.” Unfortunately, the Joint Chief's comments are unsubstantiated and knee-jerk. The cartoon is not picking on U.S. soldiers wounded in combat, it takes to task the political interests who put these men and women there.
It is hard to imagine how the Joint Chiefs could have missed the signification of this cartoon. In art, as in life, there is always a certain tolerance of ambiguity in making sense of anything, but Toles’ message is crystalline.
Toles’ role as a political cartoonist is to draw attention to abuses of power and social injustices. Toles’ message brings into focus the very human and very high price Americans are paying for this war.
Toles is not responsible for the more than 16, 500 wounded U.S. troops in this war. Toles did not send 2,449 coalition forces to their deaths in Iraq. That honor must be firmly placed on the shoulders of Mr. Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration.
Toles’ drawing uses metaphor, symbolism, overstatement and exaggeration to make an important point -- one that tosses the government’s flippant “battle-hardened” rhetoric back in its face. The immediacy of political cartoons, with their simple lines, often triumph over words. I would challenge any opinion writer to articulate Toles' message as concisely and clearly.
