Dropping the Ball

This should have been a world-class mismatch: a brew-fueled basketball brouhaha versus a global scourge with a death toll that makes 9/11 look like a sideline skirmish. But a quick Web search, only slightly less accurate than a Ron Artest roundhouse, shows that editorial cartoons on the Nov. 19 NBA brawl outnumbered those on last week’s World AIDS Day about 50 to 1.

Maybe cartoonists are burned out on this deeply depressing story, or perhaps we’re spending all our moral outrage on the war in Iraq, as a colleague suggested to me last week. Surely most of us feel we did our best work on AIDS a decade ago. But World AIDS Day is a news peg to grab on to; and we ignored it as if it were Catalytic Converter Appreciation Week.

Cartoonists get paid to sit on the sidelines and pelt the bad guys. Then one comes along, and we run for the Auburn Hills. Maybe we’ll go toe to toe with AIDS when it affects the NBA. Oh, wait -- how long since Magic retired?