![]() ![]() 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." Maybe Granlund can reach more people by being more artless. But maybe she was being too smart for the room. It's certainly ( wit all doo respeck) more creative. Telnaes' approach is more visceral, more provocative and thus potentially more effective. Note that he doesn't even draw the kids' faces. On the other hand, maybe Dave Granlund has a better approach: Skip the metaphors entirely. 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.Īnd 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.Īs 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. 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. Is it better to assume that they are lying racists or that they are raging incompetents?Įither way, I'm willing to grant that they are perfectly sincere.Īnd if they don't know how the game is played, why expect readers to get it? 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. 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. So we're already on different wavelengths, before we get to the deeper point that her cartoon was mocking the father, not the daughters.īut 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. The response to which is, "He's put his kids in commercials." The response to which is, "Obama has not put his kids in smarmy, smart-ass acting roles." So you have people, in all sincerity, saying, "Can you imagine the uproar if a cartoonist had depicted Obama's kids as monkeys?" 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. I've seen them declare it "racist" for a white cartoonist to depict white kids as monkeys. 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?Īnd 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. ![]()
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