On the beaten path

Besides, we had Mark Wilson, from Lake Placid — the husband of an old friend of ours, Mary
Thill (she used to patrol the Tri-Lakes for us out of our Lake Placid Bureau and is now editor of Adirondack Life magazine). He’s as good as any of the national cartoonists, and he’s local.

That’s a hard combination to marshal — a local person with the talent to draw good cartoons that make a biting political point. Wilson does it well, and we’re lucky to have him.

See, here’s the thing that most casual readers misunderstand about political cartoons: They make their own points, not our points. The Press-Republican isn’t generally trying to present political cartoons that reflect our viewpoint, if we even have one on a given topic.

We are not liberal or conservative, and very often, the cartoonists aren’t, either. They are just trying to be funny, or poignant, or reflective ... or something ... on the topic they are drawing about at the time.

Our goal, as a newspaper, is to try to present different viewpoints — certainly not the same one all the time. Most cartoons skewer President Bush, if they skewer anybody, but that’s understandable: He’s the guy in charge, the guy making most of the decisions. When Bill Clinton was president, he was the one on the cartoonists’ hot seat. The same was probably true of Abraham Lincoln in his day.

My point here is that the newspaper doesn’t have a point in running political cartoons except to present as wide a variety of points of view as possible, with the hope of amusing as well as enlightening.

The cartoons we run are a tiny part of the large tapestry that constitutes a newspaper.

Don’t read too much into them as a reflection of the paper’s political bent.