Q&A: Patrick Oliphant
Who knew Patrick Oliphant’s slyness could translate so smoothly from world-class political cartooning to a wit-crackling interview? The 72-year-old Australian-turned-Santa Fean, now one of the most widely syndicated political cartoonists in the world, has spiked satire against eight presidents and picked up a Pulitzer along the way. He’s the cartoonist’s cartoonist—and his signature character Punk, seen in the corner of most drawings offering his two bits’ worth, is the penguin’s penguin.
Where were you on Monday the 18th of February, 2008? Is that atypical?
I deny I was anywhere on Monday, February 18, 2008. Or I do not recall. That is not atypical.
OK, so this is going to be more difficult than I thought. Let me ask it another way: What’s the deadline cycle like for you?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be difficult. After doing this for 53 years, I can take deadlines pretty well in stride. I just need to be left alone to do the work. I’m normally up around five, watch TV news to see what’s happened overnight, read the papers, drink too much coffee, and get my mind moving. I usually can get something on paper in rough form by ten o’clock, which leaves a couple hours to do the finish.
When did you first fall in love with Santa Fe?
Certainly it was the first time I visited here in the fall of 1969. I was living in Denver at the time, working as the cartoonist for the then-fabled Denver Post. (Few newspapers are fabled anymore, including The New Mexican.) From the moment I arrived in the U.S. in 1964 from Australia, Santa Fe was touted to me as a sort of Shangri-la, a place like no other. Which proved to be true.
How do working in Santa Fe and working in Washington, D.C., differ for you?
Washington is a strange and special kind of hell where lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and the members of a narcissistic media all meld together into a stew of treacherous backbiters who labor under the terrible delusion that Washington is the center of the earth. However, there should be—there always must be—a Washington, D.C., where we can keep those people all in one place properly fenced. I must admit D.C. has the redeeming social value of its great museums.
But I prefer to be in Santa Fe. Most people here have nothing to prove—they have done it and moved on to other points of interest. That doesn’t mean they are retired—one can go to Phoenix for that. Wear funny pants and follow a little white ball around all day. Retire is not a word in my
lexicon. I don’t understand it.
So ... where do you keep all your awards? Is the Pulitzer right there in the middle?
Awards have even fewer redeeming features than golf. The newspaper business has, since its inception, been notoriously and ingloriously cheap. Pulitzer, a fine example of the avoidance of paying ink-stained wretches a living wage, lived by the dictum, “Don’t give ’em money, give ’em medals!” I once adorned a dim hallway in D.C. with a plethora of framed awards. Then I moved, and all of that went into storage. I have no idea where it is now. I subscribe to the belief that public attention is measured in millimeters and in this field of endeavor you are only as good as you were yesterday.
Is now as great a time to be a political cartoonist as I imagine it must be?
This present campaign time is a wondrous embarrassment of riches. But I’ve been saying that of Bush and his gang of criminals for eight years. So rewarding have the Bush years been, I have seriously worried about losing that cast. I worried needlessly, it turns out. Whoever is elected next year, as a cartoonist I can’t lose. We must remember: What’s good for a political cartoonist is not necessarily good for the Republic, and vice versa.
Cartoons tend to create a surprising amount of controversy (e.g. the Danish drawings of Mohammed). Are there any you regret?
When he was running for president in 1996, I often depicted Bob Dole as Dracula. This I regret. He was painted as a Prince of Darkness when his real main attribute was a wicked sense of humor delivered with a wonderful sense of timing. But he was a conservative and had no business exhibiting a sense of humor, so it all evens out in the end.
You are also a fine artist. What does Punk the Penguin think about your art?
He keeps his opinions to himself.
On May 1, Oliphant and Landfall Press released the color etching Three Candidates ($800, 505-982-6625). In D.C., see Leadership, a retrospective at the Stanford in Washington Gallery (202-332-6235).
