Cartoon Sparks Heated Protest By Firefighters
Lorraine Bacon’s husband has been a firefighter for 25 years.
Doug Bacon works at Fire Station No. 3, the busiest station in Spokane.
Last year, Station 3 crews made 2,300 runs. Day and nights. Weekends and holidays.
Doug and Lorraine are part of the brotherhood of firefighters. Sisterhood, too. And wifehood.
I have a soft spot for firefighters. The men and women who pull on 60 pounds of gear to rush out and combat flames have withstood, for the most part, the critical winds that have battered many other institutions.
Firefighters remain heroes and heroines in the eyes of the public, and in their own eyes, too.
It is not conceit. It is simply a result of believing in what they do and knowing that the public values it.
This abiding belief in the honor of firefighting led Lorraine Bacon to her phone. As a wife of a fireman, she called me to say she was angry at the image of a firefighter portrayed by editorial cartoonist Steve Benson of The Arizona Republic in Phoenix.
Benson drew a cartoon to express his opposition to the death penalty. The Spokesman-Review printed his cartoon last week.
To make his point, Benson sketched an image of a firefighter holding a baby in his arms.
The baby says, “Please, no more killing.”
The firefighter, wearing the label Death Penalty Fanatics, says, “Oh, stop your whining!”
Lorraine Bacon said Benson stepped way out of line. “That cartoon was tacky and was an insult to firefighters,” she said.
She called Benson and told him as much. And she didn’t stop there. Lorraine and another Spokane firefighter’s wife, Claudia Lobb, took their protest nationwide. Last week their protest had spread across the country to the pages of USA Today and NBC’s “Today” show.
Benson said he didn’t intend for the image of his cartoon to be viewed literally as all firemen telling a dying baby to stop whining.
“In this particular case I was trying to point out the ultimate irony of sentencing McVeigh to death,” he said. “If they want to take it literally, they have completely missed the intent of the cartoon and they don’t understand cartooning.”
It’s clear Benson doesn’t understand firefighters, either.
The cartoonist was thinking about an image to make us think about capital punishment.
Lorraine and Doug Bacon were thinking about Chris Fields. Fields is the firefighter who carried a dying 1-year-old from the bombed federal building in Oklahoma City.
“I talked to Chris and he was upset,” Doug Bacon said of the cartoon.”Chris is a wonderful guy and he is still dealing with this. As firefighters, we don’t view that picture as some image, like the Statue of Liberty, for cartoonists to use. This is still too fresh.”
Perhaps so. But in this high-speed world of instant communications, the image of the fireman and the baby already has entered the American memory archives.
Close your eyes and you can picture the baby’s arm. The fireman’s eyes looking down. The red blood on the little body pressed against the yellow firefighter’s coat. The number five on Chris Fields’ helmet. That picture has become a backdrop, like the Tetons, for telling and selling.
Benson, one of the best cartoonists in the country, understandably would be attracted to that image because he knew all of us would know it, too. He knew he could use the image to make a point. And that’s a cartoonist’s job.
Lorraine Bacon said Benson was a little thin-skinned about the cartoon when she called him.
This is because cartoonists share elements of a brotherhood enjoyed by firefighters.
Cartoonists believe in what they do. They jump to defend their work at the mere hint of a disparaging word.
Of course, there are differences. Cartoonists start more fires than they put out.
Still, I have a soft spot in my heart for cartoonists as well as firefighters.
Our society needs both.
We need cartoonists to push the envelope and make us think.
We need people like the Bacons to step forward when they think cartoonists, or other exercisers of the First Amendment, have gone too far.
We can handle this.
In America, we allow people to have an opinion and allow others to stand up and challenge it without going to jail or having your house burned down.
It works, as long as we keep our honor along with our sense of humor.
Doug Bacon never lost either.
“If Steve Benson’s house were on fire or if he were having a heart attack, we firefighters would do our best to save his life and property,” Bacon said.
Then he laughed. “Only maybe we’d visit him later in the hospital and say we thought he was a jerk for drawing that cartoon.”
, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday on Perspective.