Mauldin on the Attack
Mauldin’s first cover, Dorfman remembers, was one of Daley “in a Keystone Kops getup seated like a little kid cutting paper dolls out of the ‘Chicago Press,’ except that the cutouts spelled ‘We Love Mayor Daley.’ We used that cartoon again in June of 1971, surrounded by the editorial-page masts of all four dailies–with the heads of the editorials endorsing Daley for a fifth term.”
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In March 1970 CJR looked back at the ludicrous Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, which had just ended with five convictions (all later reversed). “Here we have the classic blindfolded Justice, with sword and scales,” Dorfman recalled, “except that she’s badly disheveled, very pregnant, and staggering away from an encounter with [Judge] Julius Hoffman, who’s shown peering around the corner, rubbing his hands.”
“It takes a mighty thin skin to be that effective a voice,” says Mauldin’s son David, an artist who lives in Santa Fe. “He always needed to be somebody, which is why he hated it so much when some officer walked all over him. He was aggressive and thin-skinned and smart–a cartoonist’s recipe.”
Mauldin was buried this week in Arlington National Cemetery–“which at some point he decided he wanted,” says David. “The last I’d heard, he wanted to crash his airplane into a swimming pool.”
On the worksheet these categories are listed collectively as “miscellaneous,” and only one of them can be checked. The worksheet is divided into two columns, and “miscellaneous” is in the bottom right-hand corner, at the end of the column labeled “Other Factors.” Here are the rest of those factors: Four points for having a parent who went to Michigan–perhaps it troubles President Bush that at Michigan it’s five times as helpful to be poor or black as it is to be a legacy. Up to three points for the admissions essay, up to five points for “personal achievement,” another five for “leadership & service,” ten for being a Michigan resident, and six for hailing from an “underrepresented Michigan county.”
Michigan’s in trouble, says a high school counselor I know, because its 150-point scale feigns an objectivity no admissions officer believes in for a second. Given a pool of applicants a university believes can do the work, nothing’s more subjective than choosing among them to create a class that’s good for the students in it and for the school. One reason universities try to admit a diverse student body, the counselor told me, is that students want one. “Urban kids absolutely crave it,” she says. “They want something that feels like a city.” A senior who comes home from a college visit and announces, “Everyone sure looked white,” is rarely paying a compliment.
