Photo by Vinnie Cammarano
Key Points
All the news just repeats itself, like some forgotten dream that we’ve both seen.
John Prine wrote that lyric in 1971, about the time I drew one of my first cartoons on one of the big issues of the day: A gasoline crisis. The drawing was an outline of the United States as a fuel gauge with the needle pointing to empty.
Shortly after that cartoon appeared I attended my first press conference as a reporter in training. A U.S. senator was in town to address that same ongoing energy crisis and led off with a little speech outlining what steps he thought ought to be taken.
They included things like don’t take unnecessary trips, drive slower, carpool and quit driving gas-guzzling oversized cars.
When it came time for questions, I waved my hand like everybody else did, in hopes that I would look like a real reporter, even though I was just a journalism student and didn’t have anything to ask. Of all things, he pointed at me, possibly recognizing that I was the least of all his worries in that room full of people who knew how to ask tough questions.
It wouldn’t look good for me to say, “just kidding…you other guys go ahead.” So I asked the first question that came to mind.
“Senator, what kind of car do you drive and how many people ride to work with you?”
Everybody laughed except the senator himself and the several senator helpers he had brought with him from Washington. I think hethought it was a cheap shot, but it could have been a lot worse.
I could have said: “Senator, you just flew yourself and a staff all the way from Washington to Tennessee to tell people who don’t have enough gasoline that they ought to use less of it. Are you trying to tell us that was a NECESSARY trip?”
It didn’t really matter what was asked because he didn’t have any good answers to any of the questions and certainly no solutions. Maybe because there aren’t any.
I’ve been writing and editing stories and drawing cartoons about energy crises and gas prices for half a century. Whether in headlines or punchlines, the issue won’t go away. The only thing that really changes is the numbers.
I did one cartoon about people with lawn mowers lining up for gas that’s 89.9 cents, a price that was an outlandish exaggeration at the time. Then one about charging by the pint because there were no big 1’s to put on the sign. A later one warns that the gas stations have some big 2’s on order. The last one I did was when it hit 4 and two guys were changing an old-fashioned sign. The boss tells the helper, “don’t throw that 3 away…it’ll be easy to convert to an 8 when the time comes.”
It’s just a cartoon for now, but who knows? It’s getting harder and harder to tell the jokes from the journalism.
(For a look at some gasoline-related cartoons through the years, check out jakevest.substack.com)