Sherry Chandler

linked to this Frank Rich broadcast, “Our Politics, Our Theater,” on February 6.

I’m a little slow, but count me 10,001

Thanks to a heads-up from a correspondent I can direct you to cartoon commentary from the Lexington Herald-Leader’s own Pulitzer-Prize winning political cartoonist, Joel Pett. I heard Joel read this on the local NPR station (WUKY of the Writer’s Almanac controversy) on Tuesday, I think. My memory of what he read is slightly different from this text, but not substantially so:

As a cartoonist, I completely understand and share the impulse to mock religion. In fact, I think mockery is my religion. I sure have lots of faith in its power, as demonstrated by this uproar.

Over the years here in Lexington, my main religious targets (besides radical Muslims) have been the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Christians. I go after Catholics mostly over the Vatican’s policies on birth control and the fact that they apparently prefer pedophile priests to women priests. I regularly lampoon Christian fundamentalists over abortion rights, and both groups get ripped over gay rights.

I’ve depicted God and Jesus a few times, and nobody has burned down the paper. Mostly they do the Christian thing: forgive me and pray for my hell-bound lost soul.

…

The current conflagration in the Muslim world is not without its ironies. The State Department issued a statement warning against inciting religious hatred as if Muslim rage springs solely from some rotten cartoons in Denmark and not from U.S.-Israeli policy, our decades-old chumminess with the Saudi royals, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo or the little matter of the occupation of Iraq.

I recommend that you read the rest.

Joel Pett’s cartoon archives can be found here, including “So Jesus, Mohammad, and Buddha go into a bar…”.

except the black ink used to draw cartoons on white paper. Read Juan Cole here (he quotes that other troubled Dane, Prince Hamlet) and here .

from Verlyn Klinkenborg:

The last telegram ever delivered appears to have been sent by Western Union — whose very name seems to say “telegram” — on Jan. 27. It’s easy to understand why the practice of sending telegrams lapsed. They simply could not compete with telephones, express delivery services, e-mail and text-messaging — which, in its compression, bears some curious analogy to the telegram. But knowing that the last telegram has now been delivered is somehow a little like knowing that the last martini has been drunk or the last dinner jacket worn. I would like to believe that there will always be a world where telegrams come directly to the door, throwing a note of suspense into the air.

How many movies turn on that moment! The doorbell rings. A uniformed boy says, “Telegram!” or, “Western Union!” He hands over an envelope in return for a tip, and the plot rounds the corner. Only the telephone has rivaled the telegram as a plot point. It’s hard to imagine that e-mail will ever play as large a role in Hollywood.