The extremely cultured Tunku Varadarajan (I love spelling his name) has a run-in with a pompous would-be cartoonist -- who didn't want to make drawings for political opinions he didn't agree with -- and gets a spectacular short column out of it:
One must, as a rule, be as calm as a geisha when dealing with strangers over the telephone; but I had an exchange with a man the other day, a pompous little artichoke, that led me to breach the aforesaid convention....
He'd have to first read the op-ed piece he was going to illustrate--to see if he was in accord with it politically--before he could agree to go ahead.
"Hang on a minute!" I said, "I can't let myself be mugged at deadline by an illustrator who says, Sorry, but I don't like that author's views on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, so I won't draw."
There followed an Arctic sort of silence, after which he asked me (with the same amour-propre of a moment earlier): "Is the concept of an artist having political views alien to you, sir?" Convinced, now, that the man had no future on our page, I was prepared to burn my bridges. "Is the concept of a daily newspaper," I replied, "alien to you, sir?"
(Via alicublog)