Dr. Toon: War and Pieces
Pity the poor Coyote, who never had an exit strategy either. Through 43 cartoons and 44 years of futility, humiliation, and injury, the Coyote never did consider that Acme might be a food vendor as well as an arms supplier, or that the Road Runner somehow commanded forces that the Coyote could not overwhelm conventionally. Jones described his scrawny protagonist by quoting Georges Santanyana: “A fanatic is someone who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” Such sentiments find echo in the infamous communiqué following the destruction of the Vietnamese hamlet Ben Tre: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”. War breeds fanaticism. During the Vietnam era, the tiny nation to the North absorbed more firepower than was expended during all of WWII. Chemical defoliants erased, in total, an area the size of Massachusetts. The Coyote and American military strategists both pursued a policy of escalation even after the futility of such a course was clear.
Yet, due to indecisive Presidential policies and a determined opponent, the United States did not achieve its aims. As in the case of the Coyote, those aims may have been impossible to begin with. The goals of the United States in Iraq are not entirely clear even to some of the war’s supporters, but one of them appears to be the instillation of democracy in a country that has never known one, in the teeth of fundamentalist radicals who will not stop at suicide. If this is not possible, the eventual exit strategy may entail considerable bloodshed for Iraqis and humiliation for the world’s foremost superpower. The Coyote’s only exit strategy in every cartoon he shared with the Road Runner was, of course, total defeat and mortification. The Soviets shared his experiences in Afghanistan.
Chuck Jones died in February of 2002. Thirteen months later coalition forces led by the United States thundered into Iraq. Military victory was swift but nation building continues to come at a bloody cost. As this column neared completion, hundreds of Iraqis died in a four-day bombing spree coordinated by insurgent forces and the American death toll topped 1,900. Chuck Jones was no politician, nor are there many remarks or interviews on record that clearly indicate his political views. Jones did direct the 1944 short Hell Bent for Election in support of Franklin Roosevelt, and the few snippets obtainable from histories and autobiographies suggest a somewhat liberal, pro-union stance.
This hardly suggests that Chuck Jones was any sort of political commentator, but it could be that he did have uncanny prescience. Or perhaps Chuck Jones was subconsciously absorbing and expressing the Cold War milieu. It could also be true that the resemblance between Road Runner cartoons and situations in Vietnam, Soviet Afghanistan, and Iraq are sheer coincidences. However there is, at least for this writer, the nagging sense that animation once again served as an oft-neglected mirror for the culture and the times that produced it.
Martin “Dr. Toon” Goodman is a longtime student and fan of animation. He lives in Anderson, Indiana.
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