It's a classic rock kinda day on the Op-Ed page. Wesley Bedrosian's drawing recalls the '70s work of Roland Topor or Brad Holland, what with the surrealistic clouds, the figure's weirdly sculpted hair, and crosshatching out the ying-yang. But where Topor might have been content to just evoke the conflict at the heart of the editorial, today's drawing mirrors Wright's argument in graphic storytelling that is parable-clear. The man with his head and shoulders in the clouds represents Bush (but doesn't resemble him—no caricatures, please, we're the Times). He strides right, holding a small rightward arrow like a torch in his beefy fist. Meanwhile, below the clouds a thicket of bigger arrows points left. The man is unable to see the leftward arrows through the cloud cover; this is clear from the mottled, carefully crosshatched shadows the clouds cast on them, a nice touch. It's an almost-too-perfect picturing of Wright's thesis: that Bush's noisy fervor to crush despots militarily has blinded him to ways that the rest of the world is fighting tyranny: through good ol' capitalism. Not bad, though I doubt Topor would have deigned to employ anything so efficiently symbolic as an arrow.
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