I went to my country road mailbox a couple of days ago, opened it, and beneath nonsensical mail, there was the New Yorker. I held it in my hands and stared at the Barry Blitt cover of the many faces, personalities and histories of Hillary Clinton. And I came to a thought: There’s nothing more to say. It’s all here.
Mouth agape, I’m still staring at it. You? Blitt is incredible, a truly remarkable artist.
Barry Blitt, the New Yorker, Mar 30, 2015
I’m feeling a bit depressed coming into the final weeks of the election — then I saw Barry Blitt’s incredible New Yorker cover in the October 29 & November 5, 2012 issue and I went over the edge. I’m feeling as if a dark, ominous cloud is over my head, a weighty thing. Something heavy is in my soul.
In Blitt’s cartoon we see an overwhelming Romney, eyes shut, complascent, sitting erect. His left arm is being tattooed. All his major issues are being crossed over: Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts, Immigration, Stem Cells, 47%, Romney Care, Outsourcing.
Barry Blitt, The New Yorker, 10/29 & 11/5, 2012
Framing this rather ironic scene are a clipper ship, Caymen or Bust!; a top hat fat with dollar bills; a SEVERLY CONSERVATIVE GOP elephant; a heart: ANN, but of course; hands shaking on the $10,000 BET; CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE; BINDERS OF BABES; the infamous 5 -POINT PLAN to nowhere; and, of course, with his head cut off at the upper right-hand corner, DADDY, SIR! — an anxiety, much as W had for HIS DADDY.
The cover depressed me because it signifies a recipe for a dangerous freefall into old fashioned oligarchy and tyranny manufactured by the Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Ayn Rand myth-making machinery hell-bent on destroying how this country came about through gradual growth and social protective legislation, once understanding that we are all bound together in this democratic — and humane — experiment. This is what we mean by community and moderation. Growth is moderate.
Blitt portrays a slithery Romney — immoral, elitist, self-righteous, and willing to sacrifice anyone, particularly the young, the poor and the old and the infirmed, the white workers who follow him though Romney’s career shows he’s always taken their work away in order to promote himself. Romney has profitted from others’ suffering. This history is crystal clear. Let’s be hard on China while he’s made over 13 million dollars by selling US jobs to the Chinese. To the victor belongs the spoils — and they’re in the Cayman Islands. That’s what we want? A carpetbagger? 
What does Romney stand for, asks Blitt? How do we perceive him? What’s he done?
The best answer came in another Blitt cartoon, this one in The New Yorker’s October 1, 2012 issue. An elegant and indifferent Romney, sitting on a great white stallion, is driven, by his stately groomsman, to the edges of Washington, D.C. — the disconnected elites, that 1%, are encroaching without a care in the world. They will continue on their journey — million dollar dressage horses and an aloofness spray painted by a lack of empathy for anyone that’s not like them. This is why Tagg Romney wanted to punch President Obama after the final Presidential debate. These people respect no one.
Barry Blitt, The New Yorker, Oct 1, 2012
Where are we? What kind of a country do we have?
I’ve come to see that we are in an age of transition where old forms of thinking and living are slowly and reluctantly giving way to more humane ways. This movement is happening everywhere around the world. But what is most depressing — and quite obvious — is that in the US, a reluctance to accept this change means hostility and anger and what is quickly emerging is the legacy of Slavery — Romney – Ryan as plantation owners.
The Plantation Economic Model lives on. First, as I said above, there’s Tagg’s incredibly disrespectful desire to punch the president; second, there’s Donald Trump’s calling for Obama’s college record; and, third, there’s the most flagrant comment made by John Sununu on CNN: “When you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or whether he’s got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama.” Isn’t that racial profiling? Sununu doesn’t leave it there: “I think when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him.”
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, “My party if full of racists.” The GOP, with Romney-Ryan-Rand at the helm, is completely racist. The evidence is overwhelming. Powell and Wilkerson are soldiers, having taken an oath to fall on their swords, as Powell did for Bush – Cheney when, before the UN, said that we had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, clearly and, even by then, when he made that statement, we knew that this was not true. Powell is loyal. He fell on his sword. These guys tell it like it is.
Many around Obama, particularly those that are close to him, don’t want to go here and deflect the race question. But isn’t that the point, the central issue of the election if we follow Tag’s disrespect, Trump’s clear rascism, wanting to have more evidence of his president’s authenticity, and Sununu: the most powerful office in the world is held by a man of mixed race?
It’s as if Obama had suddenly risen to be the first mixed race owner of an NFL franchise — this one called America. It’s unacceptable. Field hands, even those earning 40 Million Dollars, stay on the field.
Obama, I’d argue, to his detriment, has not done well in addressing Race in America. He’s paying the price now, especially in Florida where the Republican lead legislature has cut early voting days, which benefitted Obama in the last election, from 14 days to 8 days. Similar legislation — and obfuscation — abounds in other states. It’s an all out attempt to make it difficult for African-Americans, Latinos and the disenfranchised to vote.
Where does this come from, if not from ye olde grand days of southern plantation owner supremacy?
Now, to fully get depressed, place on top of the race problem the continued Romney support of Tea Party-backed Republican Richard Murdock who declared that he was against abortion even in the event of rape because it’s a “gift from God”; Joe Walsh, another Tea Party – backed Republican Representative of Illinois, who opposed abortion even in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, saying, “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which a woman would not survive without abortion, though doctors and researchers have agressively come out against this statement; and, all this in the wake of Representative Todd Aikin, Senate hopeful of Missouri, who said that pregnancy as a result of “legitimate rape” is rare because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down”: what do you have?
We have one racist, anti inalienable rights, hostile to self-reliance and social justice — and social mobility — GOP.
I’m totally depressed because many Americans are choosing to vote for a slick carpetbagger, an opportunist on the grandest scale, forgetting that US History tells us that our progress and work towards Democracy is slow, arduous, full of potholes, which is why we need social protective legislation that helps us, together, help each other. That’s Obama’s Forward, looking back to a poignant history — and not Romney’s future, an America ruled by oligarchs.
Illustrator Barry Blitt has done it again. He has created yet another great New Yorker cover that parallels the one he did of Obama back in July of 2008. Only now, in the February 23 issue, we find a muscular Alex Rodgriguez signing autographs for steroid pumped children.
Blitt New Yorker -- Rodriguez
The illustration captures the conflicting drama of sports in America today: while we’ve been taught that sports–and particularly baseball–are about community, fair play, honor and courage, the notion that a player works as hard as she and he can for the benefit of the team, we find instead another reality–selfishness and hubris, egotism, deceit, cheating and scandal. And all of it the design of a production system that suggests that winning at any cost is what matters most.
The fundamental American principles of self-reliance, experience and pragmatism are nowhere evident. It’s no wonder we’re all confused.
Baseball was about redemption. It is a forgiving sport for players and viewers; it is also a contemplative sport. The point of baseball is to “come home”–round the bases home. It’s a space game. There’s plenty of time in baseball. But none of this is true anymore. Baseball is as harsh a sport as any other. Home is where the gold is. Possibilities are gone, as is the imagination. Like football, our current national pastime, baseball is now a finite game, about end results. And the end result is not winning, but rather, profit and loss.
In 2008, the 33 year old Rodriguez had a .302 average (.306 lifetime) and earned $28 million dollars. Coming into the 2008 season, the Yankees were valued somewhere between $200 million, to $1.2 billion; their revenue was $302 million (with $28 million in losses); and player costs, the largest expense, was approximately $200 million a year.
“The Yankees—read Steinbrenner—also own more than a third of the YES network, which broadcasts Yankees games to 8.7 million subscribers. The network’s revenues top a quarter billion and its profit margin is 60 percent. Though a completely separate business from the Yankees, YES’s value is directly tied to how much interest people have in the team, making a $200 million payroll a very easy decision.”**
The system corrupts. The profits for many owners, staggering. And players like Rodriguez are used to ensure that a franchise’s tentacles are many and reaching far and wide. It’s not surprising, then, that “A top baseball prospect from the Dominican Republic who received a $1.4 million signing bonus from the Washington Nationals lied about his age and name in what team president Stan Kasten called ‘an elaborate scheme.'”*** The Nationals signed a 16-year-old shortstop named Esmailyn “Smiley” Gonzalez. He was compared to U.S. Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith. “But while the Nationals have been listing his date of birth as Sept. 21, 1989 — which would make him 19 now — Kasten said on Wednesday that a Major League Baseball investigation determined Gonzalez was actually Carlos David Alvarez Lugo, born in November 1985 — meaning he was really 23.” ****
Money corrupts and the prospects of a lot of money earned early and fast corrupts even more. That’s the game now. That’s been American life for quite some time. This is why we can’t see ourselves coming out of this black hole for quite some time.
We learn from the historian Richard O. Davies, in Sports in American Life, A History, that “to be a sporting man in the mid-nineteenth century was to be someone who flouted rules of social acceptability by gravitating toward activities deemed inappropriate for a proper gentleman.” By mid-century this changed and sportsmen had good social standing and created outlets such as boating, swimming, horse racing, baseball, and so on. And by the end of the century, spontaneity is gone from sports and we find “formalized structures, written rules and bureaucratic organizations,” Davies tells us. Professionalism in sports is in–and it comes in with industrialization. Money–read profits–becomes central to the American experience.
Now in 2009, we have incredibly lavish sports venues, extraordinary media contracts and more highly paid stars than ever before. The stakes are high. So so much so that sports venues are sometimes created at the expense of communities nearby–the old Yankee Stadium and the South Bronx is a case in point.
The athlete as role model, in this system, is supplanted by the owner as king. The owner as plantation owner in a vituperative economic model dating back to slavery (see: William C. Rhodan, sports columnist for The New York Times, in Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete /a star like David Beckham, at the time of this writing, is about to be traded–not loaned–to AC Milan). Money is privileged above all else. The premium placed on performance is extensive because the faster, bigger, and more powerful athlete has to hold the viewer’s attention. Salaries and on and off the field mayhem (Phelps’s pot smoking theatrical) are all part of the mediated experience of sports in America. Without it we don’t know what to make of our sports. We need the disjointed narrative to make sense of our oppressive lives that, with every day, appear to hang by a thread.
Phelps + Bong
Professional sports mirror American life and the reflection is bleak and dark. The American athlete is central to our collective experience. The professional athlete is a metaphor for our sense of self, our desires–but also our foibles, our darkest selves. It’s not surprising, then, that during these the darkest of times Mixed Marshall Arts, which used to be called caged fighting, extreme fighting, and no holds barred fighting, is one of the fastest growing spectator sports. Anything goes.
Bernie Madoff and R. Allen Stanford believed this–anything and everything was for their taking. Not unlike Rodriguez and “Smiley”-Lugo, Madoff and Stanford, who lived in an elite system, a bubble, sensed that they were somehow immune to the morals of our society and our socioeconomic systems. Rodriguez’s ready-made narrative is that he was young and naive, a stupid kid. Unknowingly he took steroids. In the case of “Smiley”-Lugo, MLB, agents and owners are all passing the buck, no one really taking responsibility, though there is a history of age irregularities in the league.
Why a 70 year old Madoff, so respected by Wall Street, would create a Ponzi Scheme, your guess is as good as mine. And why would Stanford involve himself in fraud is yet another mystery. But most distressing is the information we’re getting that some of the Madoff money comes from organized crime, while some of the money in the Stanford case comes from a Mexican drug cartel. Madoff and Stanford have allegedly been involved in money laundering. Anything goes, including the taking of people’s lives.
Madoff and Stanford, and Rodriguez and “Smiley”-Lugo are one and the same, born in a time where hubris reigns supreme; where what children see and experience is irrelevant–some will suffer, others will pull themselves up by their bootstraps and survive, and yet others, like those kids in the Blitt New Yorker cartoon will imitate Madoff and Stanford, Rodriguez and “Smiley”-Lugo. This is the most corrupting tragedy of all. Everyone is expendable. And when everyone is expendable, everyone is also a commodity.
Steroids, graft and corruption, these are the symptoms of a lost humanity.
In “Money for Idiots,” David Brooks tells us that, “Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.”
This is the ideal, not the reality. We find ourselves in a moment of real moral oscillation. We don’t know which end is up. We can only look at ourselves, though, and determine who and what we value,what’s closest to the human heart, what’s important. It may mean that in order to balance ourselves out, we have to also balance out idiots–but not criminals–as Brooks contends in his editorial piece.
In the meantime, in the South Bronx, within view of Yankee Stadium, a little girl, Pineapple is her name, Jonathan Kozol tells us in The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, looks out towards Manhattan and describes us as “other people.” She fully understands that we live differently than she does–and she’s only in elementary school. What she sees–the Rodriguez’s and the Madoff’s and the Stanford’s–are what she calls “other people,” and they live different lives, touted as successful, luxuriant, wonderful. Just to get to school, Pineapple and friends have to walk through all sorts of dangers. As she looks outward past Yankee Stadium, how will she learn how to choose? Who will she be given who we are?
I came across a middle-aged woman on Ferry Beach in Scarborough, Maine, reading The New Yorker. When I asked her what she thought about the latest cover she pursed her lips and said, “Well.” She shrugged annoyingly. “It’s sarcasm—but do we really need this now?”
Blitt's New Yorker Cover Cartoon
The cover cartoon by Barry Blitt shows the Obamas in the Oval Office. Michelle, sporting a radical chic Afro and an AK-47 over her shoulder—“Nothing gets between me and my AK”—stares intently at her husband, head tilted towards him, her left hand on her hip in an ah ha, you go girl pose. Her right hand reaches out to her husband’s, fist closed. Right on, we did it.
Barack is in Muslim garb. A sly eye gazes at us—a fox, telling us to wait and see what’s next now that the Obamas have arrived. The other eye is presumably on Michelle. He reciprocates Michelle’s clenched fist. Right on.
Two distinct artifacts behind Barack Obama adorn the Oval Office and flirt with our xenophobia and racism. An American flag burns in the fireplace and above the mantel looms half of a portrait of what can only be described as an Islamic fundamentalist, perhaps even Osama Ben Laden.
Do we really need this now? Yes, we do.
Iranian Female Guards with AK-47s
Michelle Obama’s Afro is 1960’s chic radicalism. The AK-47 comes from the Middle East. In Tehran a billboard of a young woman and her AK-47 stares down at the busy streets reminding everyone that even the women of a repressive regime are willing to fight for the cause of Islam.
Michelle’s cartoon figure fuses the strong African American female with the equally strong Middle Eastern woman, suggesting that a third, more dangerous possibility can reside in the White House—the woman that has appropriated our worst fears and is going to have her way.
Cartoons are exaggerated messages. Realistically, Michelle embodies the post civil rights American Dream. She is the daughter of a city water plant employee and a secretary. She attended Princeton and Harvard Law, reaping the rewards of the civil rights struggle. The image is then not about Michele Obama at all.
The cartoon overstresses how our deepest, most profoundly xenophobic fears can be manipulated to create a myth—even if the myth is a condemnation of the truth.
The cunning Obama image confuses us, too. He has not helped himself in this respect, changing positions he once held, having to defend himself on issues ranging from his personal relationship with God and the flag to the wars to political reform. He’s backed by real estate professionals, medical professionals, commercial bankers and hedge fund and private equity managers. Obama’s ambitions are supported the old-fashioned way, money, and lots of it. He’s mainstream politics, with every sound bite moving more to the center.
The cartoon is sarcasm all right, but it derides the viewer. It postulates knowledge, but not of the Obamas. It’s about us and how reliant we are on the media’s fixation with the surface of things. This was evident during the primaries when we wondered about Barack’s odd name, his relationship to Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his not sporting an American flag pin on his lapel. If Obama is not loyal to American iconography, the argument goes, then he must be loyal to something else, and with a name like Barack Obama, well then, it must mean he’s secretly loyal to Islam. He even wants a dialog with Syria and Iran—that says it all. Israelis have picked up on Barack’s middle name, Hussein, and read it as a sign of mistrust and contention.
The New Yorker cartoon is our shortsightedness. It portrays, as Jonathan Ralston Saul has written, an “unconscious civilization,” a “civilization that scorns knowledge itself.” We aggregate the quick and easy, the first idea or, better, the first image until we can’t tell truth from fiction. We don’t know when we are being told something meaningful or when we are being made fun of—and in this case, both are true.
In The New Yorker cover we find the Other we don’t want to face. This Other is not the fear that Islam or any other belief system may find its way into the White House, but rather, it is the sins of America that we have yet to resolve to enable us to move closer to reconciliation since, after all, what is demanded of us today is to find roads to end conflicts and renew friendly relationships with those we have scorned and violated. Our age requires deliberation, cooperation and collaboration, particularly when we find deep differences.
The woman on Ferry Beach finally said to me, “I don’t know what this means, not now.” This is why we need to look at this cartoon. It’s an image not of the Obamas, it tells us nothing about them, but of our challenges and conflicts, of us, the citizenry that has been sleeping away the promises of America.
Yes, we need this now—because we are inalienably free and we’ve yet to realize the promise of this truth.
A letter in response to Barry Blitt’s cover (July 21, 2008)
The Uncanny 