![]() The Bush bailouts, followed by the Obama bailouts, infuriated him. ![]() “You’ve got to be mean to be a cartoonist.”īut in the wake of the Great Recession, Garrison discovered that he didn’t need to be very funny or even necessarily mean to succeed. “You’re a nice guy,” a staff cartoonist added. “You’re not funny,” the paper’s art director told him. ![]() Years before, he had tried editorial cartooning while working on a local Texas newspaper, but his friends discouraged his efforts. He was a libertarian, broadly speaking, but politics weren’t a huge part of his life. At that time, he had recently moved from Seattle to Montana and was working as a freelance commercial artist, specializing in infographics. No one, least of all Garrison, would have predicted any of this a decade ago. Now he is the pissed-off oracle through which the MAGA movement’s fear and rage translates into gut-punch images. In the past year, as fallout from the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election consumed the political right, Garrison has ascended to new heights. And when Donald Trump burst into the political arena, Garrison reinvented himself as one of the foremost fire-breathing America First cheerleaders. “It would be the acme of embarrassment,” Garrison said.Īfter all, Garrison’s success depends on his notoriety, which the self-styled “rogue cartoonist” has maintained since he began drawing during Barack Obama’s presidency. A Pulitzer is a career-ender in his world. Even if the board were to approach him, he would refuse the honor. And Garrison, who recently turned 64, laughed when I posed the question. The Pulitzer Prize Board won’t say, of course. Did anyone else, in a year marked by medical and political hysteria, produce more Pulitzer-worthy work than Ben Garrison? And to the honest observer, he was the only serious contender. The real reason it didn’t choose a winner, these sniggerers smirked, was not that no one deserved the prize, but that the board couldn’t bear to recognize the one man who did. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, of which Bolling and another finalist, Lalo Alcaraz, are members, decried the whole institution of the Pulitzers as “narrow-minded” and blinded by “hubris.”īut elsewhere, there were whispers-well, sniggers, really-that the board hadn’t goofed. Ruben Bolling, one of the three people recommended to the board, called the snub “frustrating, baffling, and wrongheaded.” Many of his colleagues agreed. The decision seemingly made no sense, especially since so many cartoonists thought they produced great work throughout a hectic year. When the Pulitzer Prize Board announced in June that no one would receive its annual award for excellence in editorial cartooning, many political artists were outraged.
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