AudioShocker

One of the things about writing a column on Mondays is that if something catches your eye on Tuesday or Wednesday, and you decide to write about it, then you're already a week late by the time that you've gotten your opinion out there. And give the fickle and shallow nature of our national corporate media, most times a story doesn't even get to last a whole week. But I'm not going to let that stop me! I would like to briefly address the infamous-as-of-last week cartoon from the New York Post, which you can see in this randomly selected op-ed piece from The Guardian. So I assume that all of you have seen this cartoon and have already formed some sort of opinion about it.

Obviously, the thing is completely racist. Even if we take the cartoonist at his word (which we don't need to do), it's clear to me that he was drawing on a long history of racist imagery in the United States, even if he didn't consciously decide to do so. In an email conversation with Nick he brought up the fact that he's mostly disappointed because it's not a good cartoon--it's not funny, and it's a shame that it suddenly gets all this attention. I don't regularly read too many political cartoons (I once, at a dinner party, met a real life political cartoonist, and he was about the most annoying, pretentious, self-loving person I've ever tried to talk to about something as light-hearted as cartoons), but it seems to me that expecting them to be funny isn't necessarily the correct way of reading them. Granted, the "best" political cartoons may well be the funniest, but it's also the case that they're often just trying to make some point, or get some message across, or in the case of the New York Post, be a lightning-rod for controversy, as, despite threats of boycotts, controversies tend to increase rather than decrease circulation.

One argument I've heard, in terms of giving this particular cartoon a break, is that Bush was drawn as a monkey all time. That is the case, but it was always a caricature, easily recognizable as Bush, whereas the chimp shot dead in this cartoon is just a chimp. "Aha!" says the cartoon-defender, "Here we can definitely see that it's not racist, 'cause this chimp in the cartoon only points to the actual primate in Connecticut, and has nothing to do with Obama." But this is actually where can definitively identify the racism of the cartoon (and, though he isn't completely in agreement with me on what follows, I owe the noticing of this to the aforementioned conversation with Nick): normally, a political cartoon will assign a particular label to its allegorical characters, with banners or labels on the various people or things that say "Democrats" or "National Greed" or some other similar thing. In this cartoon, the chimp has no label. He know, from the caption that this chimp represents the person who wrote the economic stimulus bill. Since Obama is president, and has spear-headed the move to get a bill passed, the reader takes this the writer of the bill to be Obama. This could have been avoided with the usual labeling, with a sash, or a t-shirt on the dead chimp that said "Democrats" but there's nothing there. So, even if the dude that drew the cartoon wasn't going into it planning to be racist, but not thinking himself that the chimp needed a label, he's drawing on a long history of racist images to assign a label to his image. Any argument that he intended the cartoon to mean "monkeys wrote the economic stimulus bill" is undermined by the fact that he failed to follow the proper protocols of how political cartoons work.

And now for something more timely, since stuff that happens on Sundays is still mostly topical by the time Monday rolls around. I don't actually want to write too much about the Oscars, since I general find the awards to be mis-assigned and the proceedings to be incredibly dull. I was at an Oscar party which included a pool for correctly filling out a ballot, so I do have a record of how accurately I predicted the award winners. I was correct in only 10 out of the 21 categories that were announced on the televised ceremony, which proves, once again, that my taste is better than the people that voted for the awards. So, wow, I'm really blowing the chance at being timely here. Oh well.