Requiem for a cartoonist {Doug Marletter} (CNN)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Mitch Gelman
CNN

Editor's note: The writer of this appreciation of Doug Marlette's contribution to our recent political dialogue worked with Marlette at New York Newsday and was a friend.

(CNN) -- Last week was a very good week for corrupt politicians, dirtbag dictators, pompous preachers, deadbeat dads, corporate suits, bloated bureaucrats and hypocrites from all walks of life.

They got a reprieve when 57-year-old editorial cartoonist and novelist Doug Marlette died when the pickup truck he was a passenger in hydroplaned and struck a tree on a back road in Mississippi.

Thus, the Pulitzer Prize-winner's poignant pen was silenced.

During four decades as a cartoonist appearing in Charlotte, Atlanta, New York, Florida and Oklahoma newspapers, as well as in syndication across the country, Marlette built a career as an equal-opportunity offender. He skewered Bill Clinton as easily as George Bush, Ross Perot as effortlessly as John Edwards; it's not too farfetched to think that Mullah Omar and Jim Bakker might have found common ground in believing Marlette was an evil, vicious, godless rodent of a man.

In his work, Marlette was indiscriminate in trying to give voice to justice and to offer unbending support for the underdog. His spirit, he often said, was forged in the South he grew up in, where he was anti-war and anti-racism in a community grappling to come to terms with both Vietnam and civil rights in the 1960s.
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/07/15/marlette.ap...