I have been a political cartoonist my whole adult life, and I believe what I do is important. Satirical cartoons weave together humour and weird kinds of sympathetic magic to damage, and thereby try to curb the excesses of, powerful people through caricature and mockery, by means of metaphor and symbols: things signifying things other than themselves; allegories and allusions; tropes, if you like. They also require a lot of deniable ambiguity, because they undermine power by laughing at it, and power has a huge armoury of weapons with which to answer back.
Nonetheless, instead of the rather pompous definition of satire as “puncturing pomposity”, I’ve always preferred the punchline of the great joke where a son comes home from work complaining to his mother about his new boss. She replies, with the wisdom of mothers: “If he’s so special, how come he shits and he’s going to die?”
In other words, it’s my job to remind the powerful of their metabolising mortality, which they share with the rest of us. But all those layers of ambiguity and diverse interpretation mean cartoons can be hazardous and potentially deadly, at both ends. So, because satire should only ever punch upwards and never kick downwards, years ago I drew up this simple set of rules for myself.
I should never attack anyone less powerful than me.
I should never attack people for what they are – their ethnicity, gender or sexuality – only for what they think and do.
And should I ever offend anyone I hadn’t targeted, I would always apologise.
At the end of April, I drew a cartoon, part of which included a depiction of the former BBC chairman Richard Sharp as a typical employee after being sacked, carrying out their possessions in a cardboard box. After the cartoon was published on the Guardian’s website, another wholly plausible description was posted on Twitter by Dr Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, describing it as brimming with vicious antisemitic tropes
You can read my account of what I thought I’d drawn on my website, written within hours of Rich’s initial tweet. In the same piece I apologised unconditionally and took full responsibility for the enormous hurt and upset I had unintentionally caused. But how could both things be true? I had drawn an antisemitic cartoon, yet I had not been aware I was doing so.
Having unwittingly broken my first two rules, I had quickly acted on my third. But soon this no longer mattered. Intentionality became irrelevant. I could now only see what Rich and thousands of others saw, and saw it for what it was. I was now consumed with deep, devouring shame. That coming Friday, I was due to draw a cartoon covering the coronation, but by this stage I had long since lost all sense of moral authority or even agency to draw anything or judge anyone, and two days after the Sharp cartoon was published I asked for time off.
All of this matters so much because this mistake – though “car crash” comes closest in my mind to describe the jagged intermeshing of accident, chaos, loss of control, damage and huge hurt to blameless bystanders – happened within a context I’m very conscious of.
Since that Saturday, I keep remembering my late colleague Simon Hoggart’s story about travelling out of London with Alan Coren to record an episode of the News Quiz; how when they boarded the train Coren, who was Jewish, went into a kind of psychic shock. He’d been triggered, somewhere in his subconscious, by the role trains played in transporting millions of European Jews to their murder.
I also keep remembering one of the most chilling scenes in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, where a historian displays the receipts for block-booking excursion tickets for the Nazis’ victims’ journeys to the death camps. I also keep thinking of the suitcase packed and ready by the front door in preparation for immediate flight.
This is the banality of evil continuing to terrorise: the everyday things where evil lurks in train timetables and tickets; disguised, who knows, in your neighbours; in a stupid drawing laden with otherwise unperceived meanings steeped in death in a cartoon in your morning newspaper, God forgive me.
It gets worse than that. Bite the air in Britain and you can taste the racism, the homophobia, the sexism and all the prejudices that constitute the real cancel culture that pervades our society. It’s the thousand tiny cancellations people suffer daily not because of what they think or do, but because of what they are; cancelling their right to go where they choose and feel safe, do what they want and feel at ease, read what they like and not be triggered by a blunder blithely evoking genocide.
It’s even worse than that. I’d like to think that I’m not even remotely antisemitic, but what do I know? As a visual artist operating in a genre dependent on exaggeration and mockery, I also swim in a swamp being constantly fed with poisonous slurry from two millennia of European Christian art portraying Jews as ugly, avaricious monsters.
Worse, 50 years ago, with the Holocaust rawly fresh in everyone’s minds, at my Anglican school the chaplain dismissed the suffering of the Jews as punishment for Christ’s crucifixion. And 25 years ago, a senior figure at a major UK charity, thinking I was Jewish because he’d mistakenly assumed “Rowson” is an anglicisation of “Rosen”, instantly told me an antisemitic joke on discovering I wasn’t. Far, far worse manifestations of antisemitism continue unabated. This is the air we breathe; the miasma many of us choke on.
These facts should not be ambiguous, though what I do as a cartoonist depends on ambiguity. But while all of it is about power and its control through mockery, within this context, individuals have multiple identities and multiple roles as these matrices constantly shift.
Take Sharp, a friend of Boris Johnson, whom I believed I had drawn in a particular, fairly unkind way, reflecting what he does and thinks. But at the very instant that depiction was seen – as it was, whatever my intention, by many deeply shocked and frightened people – as a cruel depiction of what he is, a Jewish man in his 60s, caricatured grotesquely (though in hideously familiar ways), the power dynamic completely collapsed. The public, satirisable appearance of Sharp dissolved to reveal the real, breathing, victimised human being beneath. Worst of all, victimised and bullied by me, in ways wholly anathema to me both personally and professionally. Carelessly and terrifyingly easily, I had utterly and comprehensively failed. It was and is inexcusable on every level.
What I do in my work is a twisted and dreadful magic, and it needs to be practised with extreme care. Over the past few weeks, clambering through the wreckage resulting from my last cartoon, I have been talking to lots of people, prominent and otherwise, from across the Jewish community both to atone and to help me understand how I could have done this terrible thing.
I thank all of them enormously for their generosity, their time and, let’s be frank, their forgiveness. And they’ve helped me learn, bit by bit and ahead of my return to these pages in September, to remember what I already knew. The business of satire has never been to give indiscriminate offence, and nor is it my job. Its price therefore must always be eternal vigilance.
Martin Rowson is a cartoonist and author
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