because of jessica wildfire, I found martin rowson

JESSICA WILDFIRE IS BECOMING one of my fa­vorite jour­nal­ists. She de­scribes her­self as an “un­flu­encer,” which I as­sume is a play on those odd crea­tures of so­cial media known as “in­flu­encers.” She is also a top writer in gov­ern­ment, health, pol­i­tics, cul­ture, and life on Medium. And be­cause of her, if rather in­di­rectly, I dis­cov­ered the art­work of Martin Rowson.

I fin­ished reading Wild­fire’s latest ar­ticle “Things Anti-Vaxxers Told Me This Week,” which opens with these lines: “The anti-vaxxers are angry at us. They say we’ve been judg­mental. We don’t listen to them. We don’t re­spect their views. So I started listening.”

The rightwinger’s motto: “All in­for­ma­tion is sub­jec­tive and no­body can prove anything.”

Here is what the anti-covid-vaxxers (who I as­sume are also the anti-maskers) had to say:

•  “Rules don’t work, so we shouldn’t have them.”
•  “Everyone’s re­spon­sible for their own health.”
•  “No­body can prove anything.”
•  “If it’s not hap­pening to you, it doesn’t matter.”
•  “All in­for­ma­tion is subjective.”
•  “Everyone has a right to a bad opinion.”

Those six lines are the sub-headings for the ar­ticle. Wild­fire gives the reader much more in­for­ma­tion about the con­vo­luted “rea­soning” of the anti-mask/anti-covid-vaccination crowd (of which there seems a never-ending supply).

I was in­spired by her ar­ticle to post a pair of ques­tions on Face­book. I opened the posting with a semi-serious chal­lenge: “Anyone wanna take a crack at an­swering a couple of soon-to-be-current news-related questions?”

These were the two questions:

1. What’s gonna happen when anti-mask/anti-covid-vaccination par­ents send their chil­dren to a school that does not man­date vac­cines and masks and those chil­dren come home with Covid? ¹

2. Who are those par­ents gonna blame? ²

Martin Rowson’s covid cartoons

To catch readers’ at­ten­tion, I wanted a dra­matic image so went off to Google and typed in “covid virus car­toon.” This led me to the fan­tastic image at the top of this page. I traced this car­toon to Martin Rowson, a reg­ular con­trib­utor to the British news­paper The Guardian. Need­less to say, the image above wasn’t the only piece by Rowson that WOW!-ed me.

Rowson con­tributes his art­work pri­marily to The Guardian along with the Daily Mirror, the Tri­bune, the Index on Cen­sor­ship, and the Morning Star. He is chair of the British Car­toon­ists’ As­so­ci­a­tion and has pub­lished thir­teen books of fic­tion and artwork.

So, I wanted to share my “dis­covery” of Rowson and so se­lected five of his pieces that ad­dressed the global Covid-19 pan­demic. Each image in­cludes a blurb from The Guardian ad­dressing the topic of the ar­ticle for which Rowson did the car­toon. Right-click on any image to en­large it.