Lord Love-a-duck

I wish I could remember exactly what it was: some years ago I was watching a televised debate, from the heart of ABC-land, and at some point, a speaker used Michael Leunig as a reference point for something positive, that everyone could agree on. The next person to speak was a twentysomething young woman, who began by observing parenthetically that she hated Leunig, and so did all of her friends. Even watching at home, you could hear a kind of gasp go round the audience. Hate Leunig!? B-but how could anyone hate Mr. Curly-ducks, whom we all love?

Those people, and the rest like them, are a big part of what's wrong with Michael Leunig. He started off decades ago as an edgy, ratbaggy young cartoonist working for the 'alternative' press at a time when that term still meant something, and some of his cartoons from that period still strike me as clever and funny. It's probably inevitable that with the passage of time, he should have acquired a more reflective outlook, as most of us hopefully do. His problem was that, as his audience aged with him, and assumed their places in the cultural establishment, they immersed him in a hot bath of sycophantic adulation that seems to have completely leached any kind of self-critical faculty out of him.

It's clear from the cartoons themselves that what we might call his thought processes are fairly muddled - his mis-remembering of a key detail of his 'Auschwitz' cartoon (see top), in a recent interview, is significant (he recalled the figure of a Jewish death camp prisoner as a Nazi guard - Prisoners? Guards? Whatever.) But what really sets the seal on this matter are his embarrassing attempts at a written response to his critics (here and here). Without fisking these in detail (it's been done) the main conclusion to draw is that Leunig has obviously never had to argue one of his 'points' to a critical or sceptical interlocutor.

It's not irrelevant to observe here that, on any objective professional standard, Leunig's work has declined markedly in the last few years. Instead of drawing a cartoon from scratch, he has come to rely increasingly on existing photographs, artwork and illustration with minimal or in some cases no intervention. On at least one occasion he has simply submitted an existing news photograph with a 'funny' subtitle. The cartoon he published today in the Age, when eyes are on him in a way they haven't been for a long time, plumbs a new depth of pointlessness: two retro ad illustrations of a man and woman, emitting empty speech- and thought-bubbles. Leunig has arrived at the point where, if he blew his nose on a piece of paper, the Age would publish it, and that can't be good for any artist or cartoonist.

As a critical exercise, I tried to construct a meaning for the 'Auschwitz' cartoon, but eventually had to give up, foundering upon the hopelessly woolly notion of 'war' in the Leuniverse. On the most generous interpretation, i.e., that by 'war' Leunig means the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, one can only ask, what alternative does he offer? That everyone should just go off to their hobby farms and hug a duck? We don't expect editorial cartoonists to solve the world's problems, but it's not too much to ask that their visual shorthands should represent some kind of reasoned, defensible position.

Leunig's tone-deafness to the real world is also painfully apparent in his waffling on about his hobby farm. It's obviously meant to make him look like a humble, modest man, in touch with the things that really matter, when anyone outside the Age-Leunig bubble sees it for what it is: an indulgence available only to a relative few, mostly the kind of people Leunig likes to excoriate - businessmen, executives, professionals, rich people.

Why do people hate Lord Love-a-Duck? Here are a few suggestions:

Hypocrisy
Leunig has an agenda, as you would expect of an editorial cartoonist, but he pretends he doesn't. He claims to be against universal evils called 'war' and 'fascism', but he's never done a cartoon about Ba'ath torture cells or Palestinian suicide bombers or Jihadi head-hackers. On the contrary, he's only too happy to publish nonsensical cartoons excusing Sheik Yassin as a 'poor defenceless old man in a wheelchair'. Compare him to Peter Nicholson or John Spooner, who both have back-catalogues of strong cartoons on these subjects.

Cant
As in 'religious humbug'. Leunig loves to drag God in. He is, for that matter, the only star in the Age stable who would dare do this, and moreover not be mocked for doing so. According to Brother Michael, we were supposed to love and forgive Osama bin Laden. I might take this appeal a little more seriously if it were not apparent that Leunig hates John Howard and George Bush with a venom that clearly goes well beyond the good Christian's righteous anger against wickedness. This gentle, loving man of God can obviously imagine no fiery pit sufficiently deep or sulphurous to receive the souls of Howard and Bush.

Finally, in my longest post ever (may I find a worthier subject next time) a word on Leunig's Pacifism. George Orwell identified two different kinds of pacifists: the honest ones, who realised and acknowledged that pacifism may mean submitting yourself to destruction at the hands of an enemy who does not share your scruples, and the frauds, who preached pacifism, but were always careful to do so within the borders of a country with a strong standing army, and a firm policy of self-preservation. Leunig obviously fits into the second category, but one suspects that, while an honest fraud always knows somewhere deep inside himself that he is a fraud, Leunig has for so long lived such a sheltered, unchallenged life that he genuinely does not make that connection. That most of the people who live quiet lives in peaceful, prosperous countries are able to do so only because somewhere down the line, "rough men stand ready to do violence in their behalf". Why, he wonders, can't the whole world just be like his Peaceable Kingdom, where the ibis lies down with the grasshopper? If he really wants an answer, he might start by asking the people who used to own his paddock.