Satirical cartoonist Bendib a madman on a ‘Mission’

Kam Williams

“‘Mission Accomplished’ is about point of view. The cartoons invert the U.S. media reality … by focusing on disputes and debates in human terms. For the typical American, this book’s point of view is a world turned upside down. The modern-day princes and potentates, the wealthy investors and powerful politicians, are stripped of their pretensions and placed in context of their effects on vast numbers of individual human beings.

Bendib’s cartoons scramble a deck that has been stacked by the demagogues and crusaders who feel they must diminish the humanity of others to exalt their own. No wonder he can lay claim to being ‘America’s most censored political cartoonist.’”

— Excerpted from the Foreword (p. vi) by Norman Solomon

Long gone are the days when the nation’s syndicated cartoonists could be relied upon to challenge the status quo in a thought-provoking fashion likely to shake the masses out of the doldrums. There’s a reason for this unfortunate development — by and large, the mainstream press is comprised of conglomerates that share the same interests as the corporations and politicians whose behavior deserve to be monitored and satirized.

Consequently, many cartoonists currently enjoying widespread circulation either approach hot button issues solely from their employer’s perspective or avoid controversial material entirely.

Fortunately, Khalil Bendib is an exception to the rule, a shining throwback whose work stands in sharp contrast to the output of many of his colleagues. This inventive Muslim American artist routinely weighs in with clever, iconoclastic cartoons — collected here in the brilliantly titled “Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America’s Most Wanted Political Cartoonist” — on a broad canvas of controversial subjects, such as war profiteering, the abandonment of New Orleans, contemporary racism, the nation’s health care and criminal justice systems, and of course, the Middle East.

One particularly delicious example of trademark Bendib can be found in his lampooning of the 2004 presidential election, depicting voting in Ohio as “separate but equal” with side-by-side tableaus in which votes are collected in ballot boxes in white precincts, but in trash cans in black neighborhoods.

Bendib returns to this theme frequently to illustrate the country’s 21st century form of segregation — he draws an updated version of a divided hospital whose “Whites Only” sign has been replaced by one reading “Insured Only.”

As a collection of such biting and salient satire, Bendib’s “Mission Accomplished” is just the sort of honest, hard-hitting publication called for in this Orwellian age, where engineered ambiguity, carefully disguised horrors and deliberate disinformation have become the order of the day.