Benjamin Chambers writes:
I was astonished by the raw politics on display in this Donald Reilly cartoon when I ran across it in the December 30, 1967 issue of The New Yorker last night:

It refers to the October 1967 riots at the University of Wisconsin, when students who objected to the presence of recruiters from Dow Chemicals on campus because of the company’s role in making napalm were involved in a bloody melee with police. Apparently, David Maraniss wrote a very good book about the event, titled They Marched into Sunlight.
At first, I was surprised because I couldn’t remember another cartoon in the magazine that so explicitly named/attacked a single company. (Can Emdashes readers suggest any?) But I’m no longer certain the cartoon is as much of an indictment of Dow as I first thought.
The cartoon seems to speak from a position of comfortable distance, where the absurdity of doing spin for a company that manufactures a horrific weapon of war at the same time that it makes Saran Wrap is as much a part of the cartoon’s humor as the certainty that the Dow recruiter will be greeted with student antagonism of an entirely different order of magnitude.
In other words, what counts in the joke is the mismatch between the two men’s expectations and what the recruiter is about to encounter. One could imagine a parallel cartoon in which two Christians, about to face lions in a Roman arena, marshal their rhetoric.
What do you think?