A Veritable Sketch?

One of the more pragmatic reasons for ending the Viet Nam War, it was argued during the late 1960s, was the annual saving of $20 billion that presumably could be redirected toward the nation's citizens and cities. That "peace dividend" fantasy, which never stood up under close scrutiny, was laid to rest forever by President Nixon's 1974 budget. It allocates to the Pentagon as much money in peace as it ever spent in war, while paring funds for some Great Society programs.

Bemoaning that seeming postwar anomaly, Cartoonist Bill Mauldin of the Chicago Sun-Times recently sketched a bloated Pentagon general guzzling a baby bottle while a black child cries with hunger in his crib. In retaliation, the Republican National Committee commissioned its own artist to draw a "corrected real life" version of Mauldin's cartoon for its monthly publication, First Monday. His drawing: an obese black man in diapers guzzling a bottle while an impoverished, diminutive Pentagon general goes hungry.

Although human-resource allocations now take up a larger percentage of the Federal budget than defense spending (the opposite was true as recently as 1970), it hardly seems accurate to depict the Pentagon as undernourished. It also seems a questionable jest to show the nation's poor as Pampered and bloated. Said Mauldin upon seeing his "corrected" piece of satire: "I'm delighted they've done it. In a funny way, they make my point more fully. All cartoonists deal in hyperbole, but to turn it around as they did goes beyond hyperbole."

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