"The sculptures were meant to be provocative: 'Miss Mao' shows Mao as a topless woman with distorted, babyish features..."

"... while 'the execution of Christ' depicted a firing squad of life-size Mao statues aiming rifles at Jesus. But Gao denies they were defamatory.... Gao is accused of breaking a law that wasn’t even enacted until nearly a decade after these artworks were first exhibited. In 2018, China criminalized acts that 'distort, smear, desecrate' or otherwise 'damage the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs.'... Gao, who is a Christian, maintains that his artwork was not intended to defame Mao but rather to explore, through cartoonish depictions of a symbolic figure, the concepts of original sin and repentance.... For [his wife] Zhao, who was not married to Gao when he made the statues, it makes no sense for authorities to claim her leaving with her child would 'endanger state security,' as officials claimed...."

From "Seven-year-old New Yorker stuck in China over father’s political art/Gao Jia, the American-born son of a well-known Chinese dissident artist, has missed first grade because his parents have been stopped from leaving China" (WaPo).

"When the going got rough, I tried to imagine that I was one of those big inflatable toys of the cartoon figures Baby Huey or Casper the Friendly Ghost."

"You could knock them down and they always bounced right back up."

Wrote Bill Clinton, quoted in "In ‘Citizen,’ Bill Clinton gives his side of the story/The former president’s memoir aims to set the record straight, with varying results" (WaPo). 

I was inspired to work on an illustration (with Grok):

Rasmussen's insane "production error." Just... "incorrect."

Reader Note: The image used for Twitter today on this story below is incorrect & a production error. The correct image for this poll is on our website, copy & link below.

Now its time, once again it seems, to block some invective spewing Twitter trolls.https://t.co/XA2V8ReiEX https://t.co/YEqsP9pIWW pic.twitter.com/Dm7ghG47gh

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) September 2, 2020

Wow. Let me screen-shot it for preservation:

Kathy Griffin dabbles in fat shaming, and one of her followers serves up an impressively well-drawn poster of "The White Couple From St. Louis."

Omg Kathy! I found your Halloween costume!! Would love ❤️ To see your impression of her!! Hahah pic.twitter.com/rXP6l7q4na

— TuckLuck (@LuckTuck) August 20, 2020

UPDATE: I can't believe I omitted the "men in shorts" tag. Fixed.

"It's our humour... just fun... It's our parade, our humour, people can do whatever they want. It's a weekend of freedom of speech."

Said Peter Van den Bossche, the mayor of Aalst, Belgium, quoted in "Belgian city of Aalst says anti-Semitic parade 'just fun'/A Belgian city has defended as 'just fun' a carnival featuring caricatures of Orthodox Jews wearing huge fur hats, long fake noses and ant costumes" (BBC).

Other floats mocked UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Brexit, climate activist Greta Thunberg, and Jesus Christ on the cross. There were also people parading in Nazi SS uniform...

[S]ome caricature Jews posed with a mock-up of the Western Wall - often called Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, a holy site for Jews. It was labelled "the wailing ant", in Dutch "de klaugmier". The Dutch for "wailing wall" is "klaagmuur".

"This doesn't encourage anti-Semitism; the reaction last year was over the top," Mr Van den Bossche said. "Two hundred percent it's not anti-Semitic."

"DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS CARICATURE? And no, we are not kidding..."

"On Thursday, December 5, 2019, the victim was working as a caricature artist at the Festival of Lights event in downtown Riverside. Around 11:50 p.m., the suspect approached the victim and asked for a portrait of himself. The victim agreed and created the attached caricature of the suspect. Once the victim was finished, the suspect grabbed a money bag that belonged to the victim, which contained about $500 in cash. The suspect fled on foot leaving his portrait behind. This caricature is of the suspect, but of course, has exaggerated characteristics and features. The suspect was described as a Black make adult in his early 20’s, about 5’1” tall with an average build, black hair and mustache, and last seen wearing a blue and red jacket, white undershirt, black pants, and red hat."

A message on Facebook from the Riverside Police Department. (You'll have to look at the picture there.)

It's not your classic facial composite by a police artist — not this sort of thing:



That's D.B. Cooper. Seen him around?

It's a bit strange to see a street-artist caricature as the depiction of a suspect, with those "exaggerated characteristics and features." Some people might even feel offended to see a black person's features exaggerated like that. But how awful to extract that work out of an artist and then not pay, not care enough to want the portrait you sat for. Maybe the man was hurt to see how he was caricatured, and if he didn't want the drawing, he didn't want to pay for it, and if he didn't pay for it, he was already stealing, so perhaps he thought, might as well take all his money, and he deserves this, for drawing me like that. Art is dangerous. It's a miracle people want caricatures of themselves, but they do. That's why the artist had $500. And now the thief is humiliated by having his caricature displayed to the world. Chances are, he will be caught. That's quite a distinguishing feature, being only 5'1".

"Reporters labor under the terrible requirement that what they report must be true. Opinion writers need to endure the less stringent demand..."

"... that what they opine be at least plausible. Nobody ever expects what cartoonists do to be either true or even plausible. That’s why we’re all as happy as larks."

Said Robert Grossman, who lied implausibly about Nixon, Bush, etc. etc. and tied the airplane in a knot in the "Airplane!" movie poster, quoted in his NYT obituary. He was 76.

Asked whether there was something undignified about his caricatures, he said: "Undignified?... Virtually anything has more dignity than lying and blundering before the whole stupefied world, which seems to be the politician’s eternal role."

"This is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked. Monstrous!"

This is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked. Monstrous! pic.twitter.com/MeYLTy1pqb

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 17, 2018

Via AP ("Jim Carrey is being criticized on social media for a portrait he painted that is believed to be White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders").

Weird ad for Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Rebecca Dallet that just popped up in the sidebar on Meade's browser.

Does anyone know the source of that ad? It can't be the candidate's campaign, I don't think, because it has no identification. The font seems... off, and the image is just so amateurish and needlessly extreme that I'm questioning the 3d word of my post title ("for").

(It's so bad and chaos-y that I was thinking the Russians did it.)

UPDATE: Meade saw the ad again and clicked on it and went to this page at a website that identifies itself as the NDRC — the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. It says: "Paid for by the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Not authorized by any candidate, candidate’s agent or committee." Seems like those words should be on the ad, not something you have to click to see.

On Tuesday, April 3, Wisconsin voters have the chance to elect Rebecca Dallet to the State Supreme Court. Dallet has served her community for the past two decades – first as a prosecutor, then as a judge. She is committed to fighting for Wisconsin values. Putting the right state candidates in office is instrumental to the success of restoring fairness to the redistricting process. Now’s not the time to sit out....

That ties Dallet to a specific issue, redistricting. It still doesn't make sense of that image, which seems to represent Trump's judicial appointments. You can redistrict all you want and it won't change the Senate, which confirms the appointments.

What is the NDRC? From the website:

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by the 82nd Attorney General of the United States Eric H. Holder, Jr., is the first-ever strategic hub for a comprehensive redistricting strategy. With the support of former President Barack Obama, as well as key leaders around the country, the NDRC is attacking this problem from every angle to ensure the next round of redistricting is fair and that maps reflect the will of the voters.

Why drag your reputation down with such an abominably amateurish ad that I thought it was the Russians! At least kern!

Is caricature a lost art?

This is the best The Washington Post can do?!



Note that the name of the new podcast is "Can He Do That?" It will be interesting to see how much the failure to ask that question with respect to things Obama did will affect the answer to the question now that they are roused to ask it.

ADDED: Interesting to use the word "can" — so famous in the Obama catchphrase "Yes We Can."

That could be an answer to WaPo's question about Trump. "Can he do that?" Yes we can.

Or does parallelism require Yes he can? If so, I need to ask where Obama got the "we."

And, of course, Trump himself likes to say "we." Many people pointed out that Trump's inaugural address had very little use of the word "I" and a lot of "we."

I'm just asking for consistency from the press if it wants to be seen as professional. It's so far gone that it hardly matters, but it's my self-appointed job to notice these things.

Speaking of what goes on in the locker room, remember this New Yorker cover from May 2015?

I originally wrote about it here. The cover shows lots of male candidates getting ready in a locker room and Hillary Clinton looking in from the other side of the door. Donald Trump is not in the picture at all, but it would be Donald Trump who, weeks before the election, would get in trouble for something he and his supporters would try to pass off as "locker room talk."

"For most of the last year, we have seen endless hand-wringing in the news media about how crude Donald Trump is..."

"But it seems obvious to me that it is Trump’s enemies, far more than Trump, who have gone into the gutter and, to a degree that may be unprecedented, coarsened our political life," writes John Hinderaker at Power Line, on the occasion of that naked Donald Trump statues that stood in 5 American cities yesterday. "When it comes to crude, beyond the pale attacks, Donald Trump is far more often the victim than the aggressor," Hinderaker concludes.

I agree that there is more crudeness in the attacks on Trump than coming from Trump himself. However:

1. Parallelism seems to demand that we compare what Trump himself says to what the another candidate says. If we want to look at what people other than candidates are saying about Trump, we should compare it not just to what Trump says, but to what his supporters say and to what everyone who hates Hillary says — including speech in the form of sculpture and drawings and paintings. There's some pretty crude stuff out there.

2. And shouldn't there be crude attacks on political candidates, in words and in graphic depictions? This is a grand tradition! I celebrate it. I'm thinking of Daumier's Gargantua...



Daumier went to prison for that. And I'm thinking of David Levine's Henry Kissinger.

3. The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on "Crossfire" in 1986:



"[Brutality] is already in politics. I think if you use the so-called strong words, you get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words?" (And note that Donald Trump just yesterday was defending his style of speech as a way to save time: The important thing is to get to the truth and being too careful and polite "takes far too much time.")

I love the new New Yorker cover.

It's "Suiting Up" by Mark Ulriksen.



Great style and substance. We looked at this one and talked about it for 15 minutes.

Here's Amy Davidson's article about the cover and about all the old covers depicting Hillary Clinton. (You see her way in the back in the window to the door of the men's locker room in the new one.)

UPDATE: October 12, 2016 — notice who's not there at all: Donald Trump — who would proceed to win the GOP nomination and to get in trouble for "locker room" talk.

"I want to see queer and trans people of color with radical social and political analyses dominate independent media by creating and growing our own platforms, so we can centralize and control our own narratives."

Just one example from the responses WaPo got asking "leading feminists" what they are hoping to accomplish in 2015.

Something so garbled and dispiriting about it all.

Nice caricatures though.

"Wow! That's quite the racist caricature at the link!"

"Can you imagine what the equivalent caricature of a black person would look like?"

Unsent email... to the reader who sent me a link to "We Don’t Need Nice, We Need Justice: Racism and the Moral Blindness of White America."

Another Barry Blitt New Yorker cover about Obama.

"When I heard that the troubled Obamacare Web site was built by a Canadian company, of course I felt personally responsible," says Blitt (because he's from Canada). "I’ll be happy when the glitches are all worked out and everything’s running smoothly, so I can put this all behind me."

Nice drawing. The sentiment is rather stickily sweet for the circumstances, but it's The New Yorker, shoring up support for the once-beloved President.

Denis McDonough won't answer those "if" questions.

Today, on all the talking heads shows, Denis McDonough was everywhere, making Obama's case for Syria, and got pushed over with the question what if Congress votes no...

... as captured by the great Crack Skull Bob/Walt Taylor. (Lots more of this morning's heads at that link.)

The Anthony Weiner New Yorker cover.

Perfect!

What's wrong with the argument that Bloomberg Businessweek cover isn't racist because the artist is from Peru.

Here's the cover, in yesterday's post, where some commenters were saying something like what I'm seeing at the Columbia Journalism Review:

Sounds to me like it might have been [the artist Andres] Guzman’s decision to make the family members minorities — not Businessweek’s. And I have a hard time believing that a man from Latin America deliberately intended to portray minorities, including Latinos, in a negative light.

Ridiculous. It doesn't matter what Guzman intended or how Guzman feels about things. Bloomberg Businessweek chose to run the illustration on the cover. They are responsible for that decision which had to include judgment about how it would be perceived by potential readers. The point of a magazine cover is to reach out to readers — not to passively convey an illustration that an artist was asked to provide. If what comes in from the artist is going to strike readers as weirdly racial, the editors shouldn't run it. Does the Columbia Journalism Review seriously think otherwise?

Now, it is interesting that we perceive a cartoonish image with 4 black and/or Hispanic caricatures to be saying something about minorities. Maybe we should have evolved to the point where our natural reading of such a cartoon would be generic, but Bloomberg Businessweek's choice of cover illustration took place in the real world that currently exists.

"Shushing the Baby Boomers."

I linked to this January 2007 NYT piece in the previous post, and I've linked to it before — here and here. Is Obama a Baby Boomer or not? If Obama the solution to the Baby Boomer problem or part of the problem? Obama's ambiguous generationality. Much to say there.

But I've just got to make a separate post to call attention to the historical artifact that is Robert Grossman's illustration depicting Barack Obama leaping over 6 little figures who represent the Baby Boomers: