Henceforth, All Art Must Serve the State
In a world fully possessed of its senses, Lanny Davis would have marked himself indelibly as a national laughingstock by now. It worries me that as one, the “artistic community” has wheeled from near-unanimous opposition to the state to near-unanimous opposition to any dissent against it. And now that I mull it some, it may be the very term “artistic community” that scares and confuses me the most:
Consider the recent flurry of debate over the Obama “Joker” posters that have been appearing in Los Angeles. This image represents the only substantial counterpoint to Obama’s current agenda from the art community. What’s been the response?
One writer from the LA Weekly declared of the image, “The only thing missing is a noose.” Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post stated, “So why the anonymity? Perhaps because the poster is ultimately a racially charged image.” Bedlam magazine, the first to comment on the poster back in April, argued, “The Joker white-face imposed on Obama’s visage has a sort of malicious, racist, Jim Crow quality to it.” [….]
To give some perspective, remember that the “noose” comment came from a publication that once presented a cover image of George W. Bush as a bloodthirsty vampire. [Reason, Patrick Courrielche]
It’s time to revisit our usage of the word “liberal” when it becomes associated with ostracizing and suppressing dissenting thought. I can hardly imagine a more pernicious and potentially effective way to intimidate dissenters in our society than to label them as racists for no better reason than the race of the sitting president. By definition, is the coddling infantilization of the President of the United States ever a necessary thing, notwithstanding the fact that he is of African descent? If the mandatory infantilization of our president means that he’s above criticism, then we must suspend this acquired reflex. If we can’t do even this, can we say that his election represents meaningful progress for our society?
The power of art, in combination with the suppression of free speech or a free press, has been used as a tool by authoritarian governments to control their citizens. From Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, art has been used to deify leaders while preserving the position of the ruling class. Most artists would not want to be referred to as tools of the state, but in the case of Obama’s administration, that’s exactly what they’ve been so far.
“Hope” to me is a modest thing — it means having a president with the maturity to be a heart-breaking disappointment to those who worship him as a post-spiritual deity. For the record, I’m hopeful that Obama is fundamentally much more practical and self-interested than ideological, and that he knows that embracing this cult’s basest Trotskyist impulses would cost him reelection.
I dont think that the sitting president is enforcing any type of executive order on art, nor will he ever plan to.
I didn’t say he was. It’s the “artistic community” that’s trying to recreate the Cheka.
While I may agree with the President on health care, I understand that there are those who do not agree. I have seen this picture, and while I disagree with it, I find it in poor taste, and think that it takes an important issue and tries to make a sound byte (picture byte?) out of it, there is no way that this is racial. The Joker wears white makeup, the artist is making a comparison between Joker and President Obama, hence Obama has white makeup. I am sick and tired of some on the left who, whenever someone challenges the President, have a knee-jerk reaction that leads to it somehow being racist.
Now, there are cases where these individuals are taking the “artistic liberties” too far. There have been pictures that show a swastika with a slash through it and “OBAMA” underneath. There are pictures of the president with a Hitler-style mustache, and signs saying “Stop Socialism”, using the SS sign in place of the “S’s”. Comparing the president to a fictional character is one things, but trying to draw a parallel between Obama and Hitler/Nazism/The SS is over the line.
That poster is so stupid. The Joker is an anarchist.
Interesting piece in WSJ about totalitarian art and the eyesore that Kim Jong Il favors:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574336383324209824.html
When Bush was portrayed by the left as a monkey, no one took it seriously.
When Obama is portrayed as The Joker, some on the left are acting like it’s treason.
And they don’t understand what’s wrong with that.
Did the lefties at least give Bush more than 6 months on the job to start portraying him as a bumbling idiot or did he portray himself as one first?
Portraying Obama as a preacher in the pulpit would fit perfectly since he likes to sound like one whenever he speaks.
I propose ostracizing the artist for being a worthless hack who deploys outdated pop-culture imagery in a basically incomprehensible way (hey remember this thing??? Also SOCIALISM)
At least the Obama Antichrist stuff shows some imagination
I found the Pres. Obama image distasteful, but whoever did it seems to have done a good service, because I saw on one conservative site a reprint of it beside a Bush poster as joker that showed remarkable similarities — meaning the artist who did the Obama poster of course knew what the knee-jerk reaction from the left’s activists and media (redundant, yes, I know) would be and did it because he had the Bush example on standby to bash them about the head with —— which is a convincing argument illustrating a serious problem our society has with its media.
I think the discourse in the media and public on the townhall meetings is more troubling for the society – and on a different tract for the media in particular.
Personally – I don’t care what the topic is – Iraq War II or nationalizing health care – do NOT shout speakers down or work to create conditions in which they cannot be heard. Period.
Shouting outside a venue in the street is fine. But not inside the hall where the forum has been set up. I wish universities had been cracking down on this important problem for years — but of course, Bush was in the White House then…
However, after the initial 24 to 48 hours of news coverage labeling this a “right wing” conservative issue, I’ve gotten around the blogs enough to see that the media isn’t exactly providing the real picture of what has been going on. They have been, as usual, taking their cues from the likes of Nancy Pelosi in labeling the noise makers the “conservative mob” and either directly stating or implying they are Nazis and rabid racists.
I found Pelosi’s talking about them not looking like poor people – of their dressing like the middle class – rather telling.
I’m not much of a doom-sayer — but we have seen some troubling things out of the marriage between the media and the left in recent years. The way they went after Joe the Plumber was disturbing. What they generated the weekend over which Palin was named McCain’s running mate was stunning. They way they are branding the opposition to health care reform/nationalization and government spending racists and Nazis…….is disturbing…
I will be very interested to see how this plays out by the first mid-term elections under Obama’s watch….
I can’t say this for certain, but I’d be willing to wager a little that —- if you compared media coverage of Obama’s cabinet and other picks to those of Bush’s during the same amount of time, you would see a very stark difference.
The media went after Bush’s people just like they went after him. They kept working and working until over time they were able to peel them away one by one. People like Wolfawitz and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld and Rove and Cheney and even Powell – though in a different manner. I can’t think of a single Obama appointment that has gotten a fraction of the negative blasting Bush’s people took — took until eventually most of them stepped down.
It is clear in today’s America, the media has decided it is at war with one of our two main political parties and political/social ideologies…
I understand your frustration with people using the racist label too liberally.
However I don’t think we can assume that the creator of this image did not have racist intentions. I am not saying he did, I am just saying we can’t assume he didn’t.
When I saw the image I immediately thought of blackface. I am not sure if that was the artist’s intention but that’s what I thought.
I think you would agree that because of the history of oppression against African-Americans there are many negative visual images associated with racism against this group. It’s highly unfortunate and something we can hopefully overcome soon.
It isn’t as similar as I remember it, but here is the Bush-as-Joker image from Vanity Fair.
As I understand it, the Obama image came up as a national topic based on it being seen around the LA area. So, it was not at first an image by the media. What does that say about the state of our media?
For 8 years, the media itself put up images to demean Bush in the public’s eye. The media is also very quick to throw around labels or report the Dems throwing around labels like Nazi and brownshirts and jackboots and such — something very distasteful – and something that lows the society’s understanding of the real thing in history.
So, let’s say the people who made the Obama poster had racist intentions for doing it. What does that say about our media and what the media casually accepts from the left aimed at conservatives? Do we have a word in the language that means racists against a political/social orientation???
Newt Gingrich leads the Republicans to retake the House for the first time in 40 years, and the media makes it its mission to destroy him. We get images like this. Pelosi becomes the first female Speaker as the Dems retake the House after less than 10 years, and she is made queen for a couple of months.
I think it is at least worthy of a real conversation about what it means when the people who control the flow of our news have a hatred for one side of the political spectrum that borders on the level of a racists hatred for minorities…
I think it’s a silly argument. The ‘point’ being made by the poster is stupid in my opinion, but equally, it’s obviously not overtly racist. I don’t think any political leader escapes being the subject of, lets say, ‘criticism’ of this general form (graffiti, posters, whatever), and I don’t think they necessarily should.
However if the accusation of ‘racist’ intent is inaccurate, or over-the-top — which it appears to be — should that kind of thing really surprise us? I imagine that there was probably a time in the United States when creating similar anti-Bush ‘artwork’, or songs, or scrawling this-or-that dissenting slogan on a wall, would have led some radicals to accuse those responsible of being supporters of ‘terror’ or some other bullshit.
As an outsider, I think it’s a little weird that so many artists so openly support a politician — full stop — let alone one who is (from a European perspective at least) quite moderate, at least when looks past the furore created by the colour of the man’s skin. Having said that, the fact that he does enjoy this support is nothing to get butthurt about either, and I think that some people are.
The Obama poster is pobably part of the campaign against Obama’s health care reforms. This debate has become nasty. I bet these posters are taken down very quickly, especially in LA.
This poster is not really art – it’s a fear-mongering political poster in bad taste. No wonder the artistic community has nothing but disdain for it.
George Bush had very low appoval ratings, so no one objected to him being portrayed as a monkey, Joker, or whatever.
Obama, on the other hand, is popular, charismatic, and black, so many people are still in the honeymoon phase with him.
The problem is – as I’ve been saying – when you have such influential segments of the society acting as an arm of one of the two political parties. When the media and entertainment industry (I think you could safely include academia in here too) shrugs its shoulders at — and even takes part in — demeaning of one of the political parties —— then —- rises in righteous indignation and the strongest of slanders against those who demean the other —- you have a serious problem in the society.
Bush’s approval rating were so low, so it didn’t matter if was visciously attacked and demeaned continuously in the media, entertainment industry, and on campus. —- Gee — one wonders how his approval rating could have gotten so low…
Or — for that matter — how an unknown figure just a few short years ago, with virtually no experience in government to speak of (compared to others who have risen to the presidency) —- gets catapulted onto the national scene and then helped into the White House…
When influential elements of the society become exclusively the domain of people from one side of the political spectrum, it is not good. Not at all. There is more to diversity than skin color and ethnicity….
This poster reeks not of racism, but of stupidity.
I do have to say —- my first comment in this thread on this topic was off base. I wasn’t remembering correctly what the image of Bush as Joker looked like and on having seen it again, I doubt the Obama poster artist had it in mind when making his and thus the first comment is way off base…
Point taken, but a problem arises when hacks like Glenn Beck and people responsible for graphics at Fox News put blackface on Nazi propaganda when comparing Obama to Hitler.
As long as we’re on the arts: for the record, this is one of my favorite posts on your abundant site, and I’m sad you pulled the other KCNA dispatch about Kim Jong Il and his love of opera, since it intersected nicely with Kim’s dependence on the PRC (a dependence which, rather than the ROK hard-line which you recently praised, might also be responsible for North Korea’s recent interest in negotiation).
Adam, I don’t think I’ve pulled any posts recently (I update them all the time, but I don’t pull them; they just fade off into the archives in inverse order of publication). Use the search window; it’s there.
The Obama-Hitler photoshops are wrong, despicable, and beneath contempt, but it’s actually the wacky Lyndon LaRouche cultists — fringe Democrats who advocate a single-payer system — who are pushing that line. Now, I’m not a fan of Beck so I’m not familiar with his material, but I’d concede that comparisons of rationing care to Nazi eugenics is a stretch. I find some aspects of the amorphous, hydra-headed “reform” proposals under discussion to be very disturbing, and Beck, I suppose, is seeking a potent (but irresponsible) way to point out what lies at the bottom of the slipperly slope. In a free society, the audience for silly ideas will be inversely proportional to that audience’s logical reasoning skills, and that’s something the rest of us have to live with if that society is to remain free.
I hope you’re not supporting the lets-kill-the-heretic mentality that would stifle the fairly mild criticism in the poster I cite above. If so, where’s the mob that will drive out such equally objectionable and ill-founded falsehoods that held that George Bush (a) intentionally lied to start a war in Iraq to enrich oil companies, (b) was behind 9/11, or (c) promoted comparisons between Hitler and Bush? The Democratic party largely adopted (a) as a talking point, and Michael Moore was invited to sit next to Jimmy Carter at the 2004 DNC Convention. Dick Durban certainly flirted with (c) when he compared U.S. soldiers to the Gestapo, and Democrats certainly haven’t repudiated (a), (b), or (c) as decisively as the Republicans have repudiated the birther idiots.
Can we agree that all of the above-cited truthers, birthers, LaRouche cultists, and violators of Godwin’s Law are unfounded, irresponsible, and — yes, I’ll say it — unpatriotic? Even so, let’s not extend that into a call for censorship. Let’s just conspire here and now to drive the nuts from the sane and civil part of our national conversation.