CSotD: Cartooning for the Right Kind of People
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The blowback over Ann Telnaes' cartoon condemning Ted Cruz for exploiting his children continues, and I suppose you could ask, had she gone Rob Rogers' route and depicted the three of them as clowns, would the explosion have happened?
And the cynical response is that Ted would still have risen up all butt-hurt and asking for money, but possibly not as successfully, since stupid people still don't understand the whole "monkey" thing.
I've seen them declare it "racist" for a white cartoonist to depict white kids as monkeys. Seriously.
It's bad enough that they don't understand the difference between featuring your family in a political spot depicting you as a warm, personable candidate who cares about families, and trotting your kids out in over-coached skits making sarcastic statements about your opponents.
So you have people, in all sincerity, saying, "Can you imagine the uproar if a cartoonist had depicted Obama's kids as monkeys?"
The response to which is, "Obama has not put his kids in smarmy, smart-ass acting roles."
The response to which is, "He's put his kids in commercials."
So we're already on different wavelengths, before we get to the deeper point that her cartoon was mocking the father, not the daughters.
But let's grant all those tone-deaf arguments and get to the use of metaphor: A competent cartoonist should understand the tools of the trade, and, just as you might question a carpenter whom you caught pounding nails with a pipe wrench, you should question the competence of a cartoonist who does not recognize the impact of certain metaphors.
Like the syndicated cartoonist this past year who made a watermelon reference about the president and then said he'd picked the flavor at random.
Or the cartoonists who, in 2009, rose to the defense of a tone-deaf compatriot who used a chimpanzee as a metaphor for the president, who all not only claimed not to know that racists have compared black people to apes, but then denied that it was true.
Is it better to assume that they are lying racists or that they are raging incompetents?
Either way, I'm willing to grant that they are perfectly sincere.
And if they don't know how the game is played, why expect readers to get it?
Look: If a Senator refuses to support funding for something, it's perfectly fine to depict him as a pawnbroker, examining your proposal with a skeptical eye.
Unless he's Jewish. Then you have to come up with a different metaphor, if not because you're a decent person, simply to avoid distracting from your actual message.
And because you are not so stupid and incompetent that you, as a professional cartoonist, can simply pick "watermelon" or "pawnbroker" or "monkey" out of your toolbox and not know what it means and what it is used for.
As it happens, there's nothing wrong with referring to little white kids as monkeys — affectionate parents and grandparents do it all the time — but, if Cruz were Italian, Telnaes would not have been able to use the organ-grinder image.
And I'm sure she knows it.
On the other hand, maybe Dave Granlund has a better approach: Skip the metaphors entirely. Note that he doesn't even draw the kids' faces.
Telnaes' approach is more visceral, more provocative and thus potentially more effective. It's certainly (wit all doo respeck) more creative. But maybe she was being too smart for the room. Maybe Granlund can reach more people by being more artless.
Which reminds me of that great Eugene Pallette line from "My Man Godfrey": "All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."
Which reminds me of another movie line: "You're gonna need a bigger room." (or something like that.)
Cast your eyes on the Year's Top Urban Legends from Snopes and consider that the gullible buffoons who honestly thought Mark Zuckerberg was about to give away his fortune are going to help elect our next president.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post column debunking stupid things has closed up shop because they got tired of bailing water with a pitchfork.
Since early 2014, a series of Internet entrepreneurs have realized that not much drives traffic as effectively as stories that vindicate and/or inflame the biases of their readers. Where many once wrote celebrity death hoaxes or “satires,” they now run entire, successful websites that do nothing but troll convenient minorities or exploit gross stereotypes. Paul Horner, the proprietor of Nbc.com.co and a string of other very profitable fake-news sites, once told me he specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives. They share a lot on Facebook, he explained; they’re the ideal audience.
I'm not suggesting that Telnaes throttle back on the brain cells and let the world catch up.
She has been waging a fierce war on gullibility, and those who exploit it, for decades and, while the world shows no sign of catching up, dammit, someone has to keep saying these things.
Futility is no excuse for collaboration.
Nor, I might add, is profit, and I particularly like the multiple flags festooning the lapels of the Media Guy in that 2003 cartoon, because, as soon as anchors began to wear them, someone asked, "So, when do you take them off again?"
Obviously: As soon as you no longer love America.
And ratings.
I've often told the story of the memo my boss, the circulation director, got from corporate HQ a few weeks before the first anniversary of 9/11, asking what plans we had to match the single-copy sales we had on 9/12.
They weren't asking "How will you honor our brave dead?" or "How will you contribute to the respect given the heroes who assisted on that terrible day?"
They wanted to know how we planned to duplicate the rush of people who bought papers to catch up on the details.
I suggested to my boss, "Well, we could rent a couple of planes …" but of course we simply put together a Great Patriotic Flag-Festooned Supplement and did our best to profit on the dead.
Meanwhile, Ann did this cartoon, which certainly captured my take on the sad spectacle, but I emailed her and asked if any papers had actually run it.
She responded that she didn't think so, but that, fortunately, her family income did not require that she only make cartoons people were going to pay her for.
Well, we've sure been paying for this one, haven't we?
(By the way, her year-end wrap-up is here.)
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