The enduring reputation of the cartoonist Michael Leunig is one thing I’ve been baffled by given that childhood. His cartoons have been caught on my grandmother’s fridge, and I recall hunting at the wobbly drawings of a guy with a duck on his head with confusion and, as I got older, irritation.
— Michael Rowland (@mjrowland68) August 18, 2015Leunig goes there (yet again) on vaccination. @theage pic.twitter.com/3rRJf0LX3M
Why is this man’s inward-seeking sentimentalism so beloved? What does he want? Is he actually exhorting us all to shut ourselves off from society and start off new lives in a magical elf land, the place everybody wears placid smiles and dances close to in humorous hats?
Leunig is copping flak for publishing an additional anti-vaccination cartoon. This time, he compares the Victorian government’s No Jab, No Pay policy to fascism. Leaving aside the reputable debates about regardless of whether punishing anti-vaxxers is the greatest way to get young children inoculated, his use of “fascist” to describe well being policy he disagrees with is utterly in keeping with the type he’s created above the previous forty years.
Leunig’s fans love his trademark “whimsy”. He’s well-known simply because he taps into a vein of exhaustion with facets of the globe: technologies, bureaucracy, the absurdity of politics, “the demands of contemporary existence”.
Although this observation is facile in itself – yes, life is challenging and exhausting – it is his resolution to it that will get me. Each time there’s something unhappy, or evil, or messy out there, Leunig plops the teapot on his head and retreats into his fantasy land. In fact, that’s how he acquired his start in lifestyle. As he told Andrew Denton in 2006:
[I]t was drawing a cartoon about the Vietnam War … I was striving to draw about this quite hard subject and I acquired engrossed and tangled in it and the deadline was ticking away and, anyway, I just then drew a duck. I drew a duck. It appeared. You see, I was stuck. I couldn’t go on. I didn’t know exactly where to go forward. The duck appeared in my thoughts or came off the end of my pen and then I put a fella sitting on the duck and then I drew a teapot on his head. It was an act of defiance. I was currently being absurd, you see, simply because I couldn’t untangle this horrible Vietnam tragedy and I drew this factor …
Overwhelmed by the globe, his stubborn, ignorant sentimentality prospects him to retreat yet again and once again into nostalgic fantasies he is his own weary gentleman seeing profound truths about lifestyle in a cloud from a far-flung hilltop. In April he gave a keynote deal with on spirituality, in which he said:
Our spirituality is innate, idiosyncratic and normal, and it would be futile for me to attempt to examine the matter too closely or elaborately in this constrained discussion. I am not outfitted to do so anyway.
This is pure, uncut Leunig: banal, quasi-spiritual nonsense intended to appeal to our sense of dissatisfaction. There’s a very very good purpose Leunig’s cartoons are typically pinned up in locations the place men and women are desperately unhappy: doctors’ waiting rooms, Centrelink offices, at the RTA.
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This apolitical thread runs by way of all his perform, infusing it with smarmy middle-class ennui that considers the difficult function of engaging with actual philosophy or politics – the ideas and practices that humans build to comprehend and improve the planet – to be also difficult or unpleasant.
Till, that is, some thing punctures his duck-o-sphere, and he can not resist poking his head out of Curly Flat to supply an view on existing affairs. He tries to have it each ways, as Michael Gordon (perhaps inadvertently) noted in 2010:
“Some cartoonists have been extraordinarily successful at taking pot shots at society’s mores even though top a merry dance like a medieval King’s fool. Michael Leunig is a traditional instance of this sort of artist. He claims to be non-political but all of his work is about the inhabitants of the City of Mankind. Even the holy fool occasionally finds himself out of the zone of sanctuary ….”
Leunig’s infantile posture that puts his (and his audience’s) want to be pacified above the needs of other people in the neighborhood, from which he absents himself. His function is like a sponge, soaking up emotional distress instead of examining why it exists or how it could be used as the impetus for constructive modify.
Except when it does not: his occasional forays into explicit political cartooning demonstrate that he does feel a responsibility to comment on issues he considers critical, like vaccination fascism.
His subgenre of anti-vax cartoons tap into a lengthy-standing disdain for contemporary motherhood, which can be observed in his controversial cartoon Ideas of a Little one Lying in a Childcare Centre. In a dig at mums who put their little ones in care, the cartoonist puts phrases in the mouth of an unhappy bub: “Call her a cruel, ignorant, selfish bitch if you like but I will defend her. She is my mother and I think the Planet of her”.
Once more, I’m nearly sympathetic: men and women really really don’t have enough time for household, neighborhood and leisure. But does he determine the forces responsible and get caught into them? Is the mom also a person who struggles and may well need to have the occasional mystical hilltop retreat? Nope, it is her selfishness that is to blame.
Leunig’s anti-vax stance is created on these two tendencies: his perception of the globe (particularly the political planet) as inherently coercive and hostile to an imagined and innate human innocence and his see that the traditional mom-little one bond, which he never bothers to explain, is a divine interface that need to be upheld at all fees. As he wrote in another current anti-vax cartoon:
Some mothers do ‘ave ‘em.
They have maternal instincts
That contradict what science thinks.
They stand up to the state:
A mother’s adore might be as fantastic
As any new vaccine
That man has ever seen
Nuts to the actual mums of the planet, who feel professional-loved ones policies like free childcare, parental depart, fiscal and employer assistance are what they need to have to practice motherhood successfully. Leunig, the guy who has invested many years encouraging individuals to plant themselves in the garden, is aware of far better – and he’ll inform you so (even as he pleads his unworthiness to do so).
From this position we can see why Leunig’s obvious concern for children’s well being stirs him to oppose vaccinations, which have been confirmed time and time once again to be a wonderful way of marketing children’s health. The little one he’s protecting here is not in the first instance an real, living youngster – but his very own mystical inner little one, which he continuously reminds us is of the utmost preciousness.
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To him, the government mandating vaccinations is just yet another intrusion of the dirty, messy, cruel contemporary world he’s spent his daily life keeping away from. In his interview with Andrew Denton in 2006 he demonstrates this view, saying he homeschools his own kids to protect them from obtaining to “submit and be managed … and be baffled out of [their heads] by all these mad issues they teach them”.
To acknowledge that vaccination functions wonders would be to concede that Big Government, Big Pharma, and numerous other Massive Mean Nasties are component of a nuanced globe that is really well worth being a element of.
That’s unlikely to take place any time quickly. Leunig’s cartoons encourage us to go on a long lasting psychological trip. If that is what he requirements to do to get out of bed in the morning, then fine, but if he would like to declare this exemption, he can not count on something more than mockery and derision when he comes down off the lonely mountain to give us a lecture.
I do not want to go on Leunig"s anti-vaccination mental trip | Eleanor Robertson
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