The page in the New York Post before this cartoon featured a photograph of President Obama signing [writing] the Stimulus Bill. Putting aside the offensive connotation, does the cartoon work on any level? Is there a joke in linking the Chimpanzee gone native in Connecticut to the Stimulus Bill? What is it?
Is the cartoonist drawing on a third association, to the big laugh line from Die Hard, when an helicopter full of FBI guys, snotty agents who didn’t want the assistance of our hero, explodes, and an LAPD regular says: “I guess they’ll have to get some more FBI guys.”
What is it? The Stimulus Bill was written by a monkey? It was argued and reshaped by a dueling phalanx of legislators. It may have become disfigured, but was it by any stretch engineered by a monkey?
Certainly the moneyed class, which Murdoch represents, objects to giving any of the treasury to middle America. It can go to banks, or CEOs, or in the form of tax cuts to the multi-billionaires, but craft an economic solution that puts jobs or financial relief in the hands of ordinary people and the corporate press is not interested. So the bill author would be a bleeding-heart, or a sentimentalist, or Rainman for that matter. But where does the analogy work as a monkey?
A chimp-faced lampoon worked for Bush, because of the resemblance, and the mental acuity, and verbal skills. The Stimulus Bill can be plenty of wrong things, was it dumb?
II.
Here’s the apology the NYPost offered for their cartoon. What they said, or left unsaid, certainly didn’t match their bad taste to argue their cartoon wasn’t about Obama, but naming the piece THAT CARTOON.
Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.
It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.
It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.
Period.
But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.
This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.
III.
This note came in from Rita Ague:
What’s wrong with this picture?
Of course there’s racism out there, but be careful not to fall victom to spin. Rupert M. is one of the giants in the neo-con coup d’etat. The loss of a free press to military/industrial/corporate interests, and resulting news being turned into spin and hate mongering, is but one of many reasons I’ve put back on my old legal and journalist hats.
We are in such a hell of a mess, and we’re passing that mess onto and into the rest of the world. I’m not sure we can dig ourselves out. We may not see relief, and the kind of change we of good hearts and good minds so long for, come about in our lifetime.
Let’s pray constantly that some Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch induced bigot, or a neo-con agent posing as same, does not shoot or do away with Obama. The cause of the killing will, of course, be blamed on racism. But the real reason will be the fear the neo-cons have that our new president is going to take away their power and control, and quash their currently-being-exposed incredible greed.
My fear is that Murdoch, by and through his New York Post newspaper, FOX spin and hate channel, and all the other mass media he and his Neocon cohorts own and/or control, is spinning us to believe that some forthcoming assassination, when it occurs, was inevitable and based on a rise on racism and hatred, when it was truly based on more evil, Karl Rove-like Machiavellian (the end justifies any means) manipulation.
God help and protect us all, particularly Barack Obama.
Rita followed it up with this plea to MoveOn.org:
I need your help, Marc, in getting out the warning through Move-On’s far reaching Internet connections:
BEWARE! THE GIANT (military/industrial/corporate) NEO-CON SPIN MACHINE (formerly known as the “liberal mass media”) IS CRANKING UP
OBAMA, BAR THE DOOR!!!
I’m scared, Marc. It wasn’t accidental that the Post ran the dead ape cartoon with it’s deadly caption. Nor is it an accident that we are suddenly hearing more and more about all the racism and all the ‘racist’ assassination attempts being planned and made on Obama.
My intuition/precognition will be supported if and when we hear more of this racism and hate against “The Man” jive. As the old advertising saying goes: ‘When you think they’re tired of hearing about it, that’s when they’re just beginning to catch onto what you’re trying to tell/sell.”
I could be wrong about this “IT WAS A RACIST THING THAT DID HIM IN” campaign, but just in case I’m right, shouldn’t we be safe rather than sorry, and get a Move-On Campaign and heavy duty word of mouth going through the net, that we’re onto what’s being spun in the mass media, and why it’s being spun.
For sometime now, my slogan has been UNDO THE (military/industrial/corporate) COUP! Now I think we’d better come up with a new slogan, and start spreading it, as far and as wide as we can. It could be something like:
KEEP OBAMA ALIVE AND WELL – TELL THE PRESS TO GO TO HELL!
Even the nuanced critiques of the CHARLIE HEBDO COMEUPPANCE in Paris begin by disclaiming “of course the cartoonists didn’t deserve to die.” But I wonder, have none among us yet earned our adversaries’ judgment? We western imperialists are quick to decide which of our opponents deserve to die, even as mere collateral in our preemptive justice-dealing. How uncharitable of our exceptionalism to think that only we can direct extrajudicial assassinations. Paris is a front line like any other noncombatant zone marauded by US drones. Our intelligence agencies aren’t bothered to explain who they target and why. Contrast our existential rationalizations with the concrete evidence, much of it rubble, with which anti-imperial defenders can condemn us. 
Might a satirist consider exercising SOME discretion in one’s pursuit of Freedom of Speech? AS IF that is Charlie Hebdo’s lofty ideal. Heralded as 
When the satiric cartoon Li’l Abner was made a musical on Broadway, robber baron General Bullmoose sang Bring back the good old days, lamenting the regulation of capitalism, pondering:
with a remote control bomb, Iran accused the west and its clandestine operatives, a consortium Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the 
I wonder if a similar preponderance of the populations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia feel confident they will not be collateral to some drone attack or nighttime raid. Likewise, is anyone at all living in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt or Sudan safe from kidnap by the intelligence services of Israel?
It may be that the translation of triangle failed Ahmadinejad. To me he’s describing a trinity: the father, son and holy ghost. They serve each other, one of them invisibly, except for the evidence of its deeds.
Two German newspaper have joined a leading French newspaper in reprinting the controversial Danish caricatures of Islam’s prophet Mohammed. They are acting in solidarity with the Danish paper whose actions provoked an international boycott of Danish products. This is how collective action is supposed to work. Speak out, and if you’re threatened, be joined by another voice and then another, until there would be too many voices to silence.