The uniting painting.

• Author: Lurie, Ranan R.
• Position: Viewpoint essay

On 26 May 2011, I celebrated my seventy-ninth birthday, and it seemed to me as if only two weeks had passed since I had turned sixteen years old.

But time has indeed flown by, measured by the more than eleven thousand political cartoons that I produced on a daily basis during those "two weeks."

I believe that the least important thing in a political cartoon is the drawing, the humour, and the paraphernalia around it. The real and only worthwhile factor of each cartoon is the message that it delivers to the three hundred million bosses that I have accumulated throughout the years--my regular readers. I send them my day-by-day graphic conclusions of the political, economic, and military interpretations of at times exciting, at times mundane, international events.

These "two weeks" were a period of strenuous and rich in-depth studies for me. I felt like a hunter on a daily mission to identify, then chase, my moving political target, cornering it, and carrying it on my back to my studios, where I would carve it up carefully. I would choose its better parts, spray some artisan olive oil salt it with humour, and pepper the final result with some piquant graphics--after jotting under my sketch a few words intended to channel my readers' concentration to my specific conclusion. Then I'd test the pencil sketch on four of my fellow editors--the News, Editorial, and Features Editors had to fall in love with my newly-created cartoon; the fourth one, the Sports Editor, had to fail to understand it. By doing that, I would be fulfilling the instructions of my ideal recipe for preparing a tasty and brain-nourishing cartoon. Only then would I put it into the microwave for about two to four hours of pen-brush strokes, and finally put the meal on my readers' plates. Going through such a process so many times taught me how to find my way through the paths of contemporary history, and it led me to two bottom lines.

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The first was that good wins, that democracy is the victor, that harmony is where good life flourishes, and that justice is a way of life guaranteeing longevity, both physically and politically. Evil, tyranny, dictatorship, and concentration camps only lead to hell.

The second, somewhat to my surprise, was that I couldn't wrap up in one cartoon all that was expressed in my first bottom line. Generally speaking, I can react fairly efficiently to any single or dual message in one political cartoon. I discovered that the beautiful...