Washington Post Jan 25 2025: A15.
She's dead ... wrapped in plastic!
Edith Pritchett's so-called editorial cartoon "January Sales: A chart" would be a waste of precious opinion space on any day. The decision to publish it on Jan. 20 — a confluence of Inauguration Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day — was an utter insult to your readers and to the day's significance.
Ronnie Jill Kweller, Washington
As a young reader of The Post and fan of Edith Pritchett's "non-funny, non-political, non-satirical, non-mocking, non-anything scribbling," as Norman Michael Harman described it in the Dec. 14 Free for All, I feel the need to justify why her pieces give me something to look forward to each Saturday. Her cultural observations on the mundanity of modern human existence never fail to make me chuckle after reading 14 to 20 pages of news about the woes abounding in America and the rest of the world. Last I checked, the op-ed pages are labeled "Opinion," not "Political Opinion," and I applaud The Post for sticking with her cartoons, as they resonate with and attract young readers like me. The Post is not just for octogenarians.
Roxanne Rogers, Springfield
Fix your hearts or die
The Jan. 8 "Garfield" featured a large dog on a heavy chain excited about an upcoming walk, to which Garfield cynically replies, "Dogs are so easily entertained."
I can't help but compare it with the heartbreaking storyline two years ago in Patrick McDonnell's "Mutts," in which Guard Dog was abandoned on his chain, only to be rescued by kind humans. Told with compassion and empathy, the story had millions eager to see the happy conclusion of Guard Dog being adopted and taken off the chain forever. It helped teach the nation about the evils of dog chaining and abandonment, from the perspective of the dog himself.
It seems Jim Davis didn't get the message. He seems to think that dogs on chains are "entertained" by going on walks, and actually sneers at them for it.
David Bernazani, Ashburn
Through the darkness of future's past, the magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds ...
Let me get this out of the way: No, I am not proud of the fact that I almost never can "spot six differences" between the two cartoon panels within the "Slylock Fox" block in the Sunday Comics. The puzzles are geared toward little kids, an age group I left in the 1960s. I can handle not being the equal of "Erin, age 8" in the Your Drawing feature, because art has never been my strong suit. But I am a 66-year-old college graduate, so my regular inability to identify the six differences is disheartening. It would be downright humiliating if not for the fact that The Post runs this feature in such a small size that I often can't tell the differences between the panels even after I've peeked at the answers. I respectfully ask you to enlarge these panels so I can definitively evaluate whether I'm losing it. (In the meantime, I find that yes, I can indeed draw a hungry bear in three steps by following Slylock Fox's illustrated instructions.)
Eric Ries, Kensington
... fire walk with me
In her Jan. 15 editorial cartoon, "Recipe for disaster," Lisa Benson identified budget cuts, water policy, the Santa Ana winds, firebugs, politics, the insurance crisis and dry brush as "ingredients" in the catastrophic California wildfires. But she left out a basic ingredient: greenhouse gas emissions. Those emissions create changes in climate, such as periods of heavy rainfall followed by excessive heat and drought. The rainfall enhances growth in vegetation that is then dried by the heat and drought, making conditions ripe for fire.
The chef in the cartoon appears to be a Democratic donkey. But climate change is nonpartisan. It has devastating effects on red states as well as blue ones. Think of hurricane disasters in Texas and Florida.
We cannot ignore the link between climate change and natural disasters. To protect ourselves, we must all be "climate chefs." That requires working together to drastically reduce the greenhouse gases we use in our "recipes."
Michael N. Wilcove, Rockville
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