Rowson On the Dumb Son of a Bitch

Martin Rowson, "Drawn to Dubya"

In 2004 the re-election of George Bush filled almost every atom of my being with dismay, despair, fear, loathing and disgust, at what this implied about the future of America and the world. I say almost every atom, because deep down in my reptile brain, the cartoonist in me knew that four years of Dubya could never be enough.

This highlights several of the fundamental contradictions contained within satirists. Obviously, if our satire worked and all those creeps we lampoon just stopped, the world would be a perfect place, we'd have nothing left to satirise and I'd be painting kittens in teacups, probably on velvet. But worse than that, quite often cartoonists get caught in a kind of satirical Stockholm syndrome, where we come to love the things we seek to destroy. In other words, Bush was just a joy to draw.

Infuriatingly, Steve Bell established the Bush-as-chimp shtick before any of the rest of us, and it's considered bad form to nick other cartoonist's tricks. Even so, Bush still offered more than any caricaturist could dream possible: there's the eyebrows writhing round his crinkled forehead like demented chinchillas, and beneath them eyes so close together they seem in constant danger of fusing into cyclopism; then there's the mouth, offering either a dumb, Mad magazine shit-eating grin or elongating into a truly simian pant hoot as he tried to articulate human speech. Add to that his pointy ears and flattened, beaky nose, and even if he'd been a Nobel Peace laureate of impeccable liberal credentials, we'd still have loved drawing and stretching every single feature.