Existing comment:
There are so many old men in Oliphant's drawings! Generals, politicians, businessmen, heads-of-state, college administrators, all deciding the future of the world in offices, boardrooms, and other places where old men meet. Nixon was just one sweaty instance among many, and Oliphant was skeptical of them all. This drew my attention to the less frequent appearance of young people and families, satires in which he encouraged us to think beyond the next election cycle.
Oliphant's satire of a football behemoth, dating back to 1969, gains power from an inescapable visual equivalence with nuclear missiles, then haunting Oliphant's comics and the public imagination. College athletic directors were no different than military profiteers, Oliphant suggests, exploiting future generations for their own benefit.
In a satirical masterpiece, Lt. General Hershey toys with the deferment requests of potential draftees. The "Hershey Directive" declared that when young men destroyed their draft cards they were immediately eligible for service, prompting protests across American college campuses.
On three separate occasions, Oliphant depicted an American family sitting outside their cave. In this variant, the children openly rebel against Nixon's housing plan. How seriously are we meant to take satires such as this? How genuine is the fear that we might be bombed or legislated back into the dark ages?
American exceptionalism is no comfort: even families on the "good side" of the world face "unemployment, inflation, and high food prices," while those on the other side face outright famine. This is surely one of the darkest imaginings of American life to ever appear in the daily papers. |