[/caption]Carol Forsloff with Samantha Torrance - Cartooning Obama may seem funny for some folks, but for the conscience of the serious liberal and conservative, and for the media, it is a wakeup call. For the value of the media is not just to hold power to account but the public truth as well.
“There are some pretty ugly things written about Obama. Why don’t the newspapers write anything about those awful caricatures and cartoons?” she inquired, while admitting liberal bias. This neighbor woman paddling in the swimming pool of a condominium complex in Oregon talked of grief from politics and how the media has underlined the worst about it most of the time. She said, “I read the stuff because I want to know the other side. But still it makes me sad.”
But the conscience of a conservative might ask the same question as well, just as one who calls herself liberal has done, about the type of politics that goes beyond the humorous to ugliness instead.
A young woman who calls herself conservative responded to the hate mail the press receives about Obama this morning with the same visceral reaction, that it fosters ugliness. Much of that hate mail is of the nature that reaches average citizens, the forwarded type that takes the format of jokes and stretches those beyond credulity and reason to downright mean instead. “It isn’t funny, but abuse. Let’s call it what it is,” the conscience critic says. “And let’s say something good for once. It’s time, now don’t you think?”
The conservative who believes in the value of traditions, in preserving what is right and good in government, looks to reasoned debate to give full-throated voice to those traditions. The voice of that conservative when multiplied by millions can remind us of our history, of the foundations that were laid by brave and faithful folk who sacrificed for freedoms long ago.
The liberal looks to equality in life, to changes that refine. Open-hearted, open arms, the liberal’s call to truth just comes in different ways to build a future path.
Both voices of our nation’s conscience, right and left, are threatened now, undone, by prattle that’s extreme, that comes in missives couched in fun, where ugliness remains.
While missives mock Obama many go beyond all that that, to lies and to aggressive words and pictures meant to elicit hate and anger, in the comic style of Batman jesters not the humor they protest.
A recent one portrays Michelle Obama as a monkey, complete with image, in a narrative about Tarzan and the Apes, received from Louisiana, as Deep South as one can get. Another sent just days before spoke of the President’s plane crashing and his death in cartooned script. Again the missive sent proclaims Louisiana roots again.
And Louisiana’s shame again, from a history blotched with monkey faces prominent in flyers aimed at keeping white folks scared or laughing at the caricatures of black folks they kept working in their fields. A civil war returned again in most uncivil ways that increase the racial slur database with stereotypes that continue to be used.
While some in Southern regions make a mockery from the past, the others ridicule from places in the heartland, still the same.
The fashion face of meanness that now pervades debate, the media, the social discourse, the politics, of course, have taken down the flag and then put Christ back on the cross. They come from hypocrites that want Christ in their Christmas still.
But some of us will write of things that still need done, where politicians fail. We write of things they have achieved, for they are part of us.
And we refuse that foolishness that comes in guise of jokes just meant to hurt and potentially destroy the very essence of the truth we are to serve.
