Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the cartoon incorporates a racist caricature, why would it be fair to attribute it to the Democratic Party? Is everything attributable to anybody (arguably) associated with “the left” also attributable to the Democratic Party and, if offensive, also grounds to preemptively condemn the Democratic Party?
My mistake, then. Must just be an Oliphant/racist Democrat zeitgeist. Sorry.
But of course! Therefore, I see no reason not to hold the Republicans accountable for G. Gordon Liddy, in full foam-flecked display here:
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=585368
Asked and answered:
Bricker: This just isn’t GD material, even if the cartoon ***is ***racist. Nothing can come of this other than a downward spiral of cross-accusations about Pubbies not condemning so-and-so for doing such-and-such. Unless, of course, all you want to do is feel good about having found hypocricy somewhere, and in that case, the Pit is your friend.
OK.
I read the linked article.
I do not endorse everything Mr. Liddy is reported to have said.
I’m also a bit skeptical of the article.
Liddy, in his book Will, discusses this anecdote at length. It’s unclear to me from the article if it’s reporting a contemporaneous conversation with Liddy over lunch or if, as the author did with the rat story, re-telling the story from Will.
If the author is encapsulating the story as it was told in Will, he’s made a serious mischaracerization: Liddy never told his children to START fights. His advice was to fight back, rather than walk away and report the violence to a teacher.
Considering that the quote attributed to Liddy in the article is lifted word-for-word from the relevant passage in Will, I think it’s safe to say that the article’s author is re-telling the Will story, and not independently reporting on an anecdote told by Liddy at the lunch. And he’s made a serious error in his reporting.
So - that’s my reaction to the article. I don’t endorse everything Liddy says, but I do endorse some thing he says.
Did you have a specific point you’d like further clarified?
Putting aside this particular Oliphaunt cartoon (and I’m a big enough fan of his past work that I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt), there have been some opinions expressed by editorial writers, cartoonists, and others sympathetic to Democratic positions that would have been (quite rightly) denounced loudly had they been aimed at Democrats. These include Jeff Danziger’s “Ah don’t no nothin’ 'bout aluminum tubes”, Gary Truduea’s “brown sugar”, and (perhaps most egriously) some radio guy’s reference to Ms. Rice as “Aunt Jemima”.
In an ideal world, these would be denounced by both left AND right.
To be honest, i, like dropzone, am somewhat ambivalent about whether Oliphant’s depiction of Rice verges on racist caricature.
I thought i’d try a little experiment. I sent a copy of the cartoon to about 15 friends of mine, asking them to comment on the depiction of Rice. Now, all of these friends are left/liberal academics who are also:
a) very sensitive to problematic representations of race in popular culture
b) strongly opposed to the current administration and its policies.
None of these friends know the reason for my inquiry, nor do they know it has anything to do with these message boards. So far, i’ve had two people reply, and they said:
and
At best, these leftists seem to be ambivalent about the representation. Doesn’t necessarily make them right; i just thought people might be interested in a viewpoint that has no SDMB baggage attached.
As a point of comparison, you might also be interested in looking at how other political cartoonists have represented Rice. Check out this selection and this one from Slate. There are 3-5 cartoons per page, and a whole bunch of pages.
We’ll turn this into a debate yet!
No, you most assuredly did not answer my questions, which were (1) why would it be fair to attribute Oliphant’s cartoon to the Democratic Party, and (2) whether everything attributable to anybody (arguably) associated with “the left” is also attributable to the Democratic Party and, if offensive, also grounds to preemptively condemn the Democratic Party? All your “asked and answered” quote says is that you thought Democrats wouldn’t condemn what you saw as a racist caricature, without saying anything about your connection of the cartoon with the Dems in the first place.
I dunno, mhendo, I figger if you have to look at it twice to pick up on the racism, it may not be there. Smacks of deonstructionism, if you follow my drift.
Lets say you did a cartoon depicting Mike Tyson munching an ear. He does, in fact, have rather large lips, therefore, a caricature of Tyson, with big lips munching an ear, wouldn’t be racist, anymore than depicting Mick “Liver Lips” Jagger as having big lips would be racist. Because he does, doesn’t he?
But if you depict Mike Tyson munching an ear with a bone in his nose, flashing on the cannibal meme, then it would be racist, because it implies that Tyson’s animalistic behavior is somehow an attribute of his race, rather than because he’s a brutal dickhead.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here, as I can to a certain extent see why Blacks would object to the “big lips” meme in charicatures. Blacks only have “big lips” as compared to whites, and so what a lot of whites see as an exagerated feature is, to many Blacks, simply the norm.
For example, Bush gets drawn with big ears because he does have big ears, compared to everyone on the planet. But Blacks are by default compared to Whites in this country, with the implication that even features they have which are typical for those of West African ancestry, are “different” in some respect. The question would be, does Tyson have lips that are abnormal large for the ethnic group to which he belongs? If the answer is “no”, then drawing his characture with exageratedly large lips is indeed a form of racism, even if it is subtle or usbconscious or minor.
Maybe I’m alone, but I’ve never thought Bush’s ears were abnormally large. The cartoonist has a fine line to walk. He needs to anthropomorphize the parrot to resemble Condi, yet use features unique to her and not to her racial background. Pretty tough to do. I’m inclined to give the cartoonist the benefit of the doubt and assume that the lips were just an attempt to inject her sex into it and not her race. If he really wanted to call attention to race, he might have the bird say “Yowsah, massah” or some other obvious racial slur. But he didn’t so I say give the guy a break.
It seems Oliphant did more than just draw Condi’s head on a parrot’s body. There are two striking features of Rice, one is her hair, the other is the gap in her teeth. Both are quite comical and are pretty much trademark caricature characteristics, if you will. It seems that in order to pull off the cartoon with the political intent of the artist, simply plopping her head on bird’s body is lame.
I did some creative paper cutting and tried just that. The typical Condi caricature seemed lacking. I think by morphing the beak into a mouth, it actually helps to emphasize the squawking in a more visual, albeit, exaggerated way.
Well, i know that you stalwarts of the Old Left have very little time for postmodernism, deconstruction, etc., so i’m probably not going to change your mind on this issue. 
I’m no deconstructionist myself, but i think that the ideas of post-linguistic turn period have offered some useful correctives to what were often rather simplistic analyses of cultural forms and relationships. Different things portray different messages to different people, and i believe it’s profoundly reductionist to assume that everyone reads a cultural “text” the same way.
Here i tend to agree with you. And this is a common problem faced by those whose stock-in-trade is the caricature—how to portray a caricature of a specific individual without giving the impression that your portrayal is somehow representative of larger social, cultural, racial or ethnic groups. The thing is, the very nature of this problem means that there’s always going to be some slippage in interpretation, especially in cases this this one.
I’m not saying that those slippages or arguments mean that the cartoonist is racist, or that the cartoonist intended to make a racist argument. In fact, if there’s a single truth to be conveyed about this whole episode, it’s that while an artist has considerable control over how his or her work will be presented, he or she has virtually no control over how it will be received. And, to tell you the truth, i think that’s a good thing. Art would be pretty dull if we all saw it the same way.
(1) why would it be fair to attribute Oliphant’s cartoon to the Democratic Party
Oliphant self-identifies as a Democrat, and his cartoons generally attack Republicans. While he holds no official position as a Democrat, he certainly is a public figure that calls himself a Democrat and offers up images that a neutral observer would conclude attempt to aid the cause of the Democrats.
*(2) whether everything attributable to anybody (arguably) associated with “the left” is also attributable to the Democratic Party and, if offensive, also grounds to preemptively condemn the Democratic Party? *
Objection, compound question and assuming facts not in evidence 
If my question preemptively condemned the Democratic party, I apologize. However, it’s been my anecdotal experience that attacks made by the left’s public figures against the right’s public figure have included tactics that, were the direction of the attack reversed, would have elicited cries of racism. Because this cartoon seemed a perfect example of that flaw, I led with a strong hint that I felt the cartoon was disgusting, and an invitation to Democrats to either embrace or condemn it. In my view, that does not “preemptively condemn” the Democrats - it was merely an invitation for self-identified Democrats to live up to the tolerance and diversity that their party wishes to be known for and speak out against a racist attack… even when the attack in question is levelled against a Republican.
I agree, and I don’t think the lips in this cartoon are particularly exagerated. I was talking about 'luci’s hypthetical involving Mike Tyson, and the automatic assumption that Tyson has “big lips” as being racist., since his lip size is only big in comparsion to what is usual for Whites. Now, if someone drew a charicature of Angelina Jolie with exageratedly big lips, then that wouldn’t be racist.
BTW, I never really noticed Buhs’ ears until the cartoonists started drawing him that way. Maybe it’s just that they stick out a bit more than usual, but there is something odd about them.
Thank you for those answers, Bricker. Two points, though. First, do you have a cite on Pat Oliphant self-identifying as a Democrat? Just so we’re on a firm foundation with that one, since my experience with his work has been that, like most political cartoonists, he lampoons both sides with particular emphais on whoever’s in power. He’s certainly taken his share of shots at Democrats, e.g., here and here.
Second, even assuming Pat Oliphant self-identifies as a Democrat . . . so what? What’s the point of starting a thread to demand that the Democratic Party either condemn or embrace whatever it is he’s said or drawn, when the guy has no position of influence or authority within the party and neither seeks nor holds any public office? Surely, you wouldn’t want an anti-Republican pissing contest started every time some self-described Republican says something offensive, even if he holds no position of authority within the party, etc.
I can’t find an online bio, but I have a collection of his called “Fashions For The New World Order.” The book’s about fifteen years old, and the forward has a brief commentary section from him in which he say’s he’s a Democrat.
Because, as I said, I have anecdotal experience that attacks made by the left’s public figures against the right’s public figure have included tactics that, were the direction of the attack reversed, would have elicited cries of racism. My experience has been that attacks like that are sanctioned by the left, in general.
Am I the only one who looked at Oliphant’s cartoons before this thread? He’s been drawing Condi as a parrot for a loooooong time. He also draws Dubya as a mini-cowboy, I suppose this is an affront to midgets.
Or are the Pubbies insisting we call them the vertically challenged? :rolleyes: