The print cartoon, in the hands of the skilled artisan, is social commentary at its most succinct. As a showcase for exposing irony, hypocrisy, or the comical foibles of the human condition, it articulates its message with broad pen strokes and a minimum of tedium.
However, in the puerile hands of the reckless hack, its effectiveness is negated. It's like entrusting a Sharpie marker to a toddler and expecting him to remain ink-free and not poke himself in the eye.
Everything I know about Sean Delonas I learned in the past two days. He's the New York Post Page 6 cartoonist who specializes in right wing - themed "humor," cleverly incorporating homosexuals, minorities and Democrats as the butt of his "jokes." Such a fan is he of his own work, he submitted the same cartoon twice, which the Post dutifully published, in April and June of 2008. Post editors, who evidently stopped reading his cartoons before shuttling them off to press, never seemed to notice. Which may partially explain how his latest freeze frame of trash saw the light of day.
The cartoon attempts to capitalize on two concurrent events in the news: a renegade pet chimp who attacked and nearly killed a woman before being shot by police, and the stimulus bill recently signed by President Obama. (President Obama. I'm starting to love the rhythmic pulse my keyboard makes when tapping out those two words. But I digress.)
When I first saw the cartoon, it struck me as having the crass quality of KKK propaganda. This cartoon would fit right in on a White supremacist site. It's disturbing. It depicts a dead chimp on the sidewalk lying in a pool of its own blood, two bullet holes in its chest. Two cops with guns. And for the big punch line, one says to the other: "They're going to have to get someone else to write the next stimulus bill." Get it? Obama is a black monkey who's just been shot to death! Hahahahaha! Oh. . . That's not it? I've misinterpreted?
Here's the Post's version of a mea culpa, which appeared online on Feb. 20:
"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."
They just couldn't resist that third paragraph, could they? It's like the wisecracking jackass who takes a licking on the schoolyard playground and yells one last insult before running back into the classroom.
There are those on the right who point to the Bush-as-a-monkey left-wing "hypocrisy" that took root over the previous eight years. They miss the point. The monkey Bush stuff draws a clear parallel between W.'s stupidity and the mental acuity of a docile primate. This cartoon doesn't even make sense as juxtaposed satire.
Others try to insert the fine print that those offended by the connection are morons because "Obama didn't write the stimulus bill, you morons." (Quote lifted from comment thread in Vanity Fair online article.) Well, Moron, of course Obama didn't WRITE the stimulus bill. But he is the face of the bill, signed the bill, and is holding press conferences dedicated to it. How does the timeliness of a rampaging chimp even remotely tie in to the stimulus bill if not for the blatant racism it suggests?
Part of the Post's explanation (and this seems like the revisionist strategy a defense attorney might take) that the point behind connecting the two events is that the stimulus bill is so retarded that it could have been written by a monkey. Lying in a pool of its own blood. With two bullets in its chest.
My impression, as of Friday, February 20, 2009, 11:51 a.m. Pacific Time, is that this Delonas guy is toast. There's a difference between freedom of speech and dumb free speech. He is not elevating public discourse. He is doing nothing more than perpetuating outdated stereotypes by conveniently linking two completely unrelated incidents with results that cannot be taken any other way except being patently offensive. If the Post wanted to avoid misinterpretation, they should have considered running their "apology" as a postscript at the bottom of the cartoon when they published it.
It's not funny. It's not clever. All it does is to empower those who think that their "reverse racism" claims have legitimacy just because we have a Black president.
What does a chimp lying in a pool of blood have to do with the stimulus bill? A week ago, I would have said, "Nothing." But today, I stand corrected. It represents -- in spite of the significant leaps we've made in social progress -- just how close we are as a country to our past.
