Pro-Capitalist Propaganda, circa 1948

This is absolutely fantastic. Very much worth your 9 minutes. I love Cold War propaganda. There's an excellent set of Soviet animated propaganda on DVD. It's out there in part because people see it as so quaint today that there's a market for it. This is just as bizarre. Really there's little difference except that the artistic merit of the capitalist propaganda is less than the communist stuff.

Via Sociological Images

I'm totally rooting for Harvard this year in the Yale-Harvard football game

Here's why.

It seems the venerable Yale University Press has made an editorial decision to censor the Danish cartoon depictions of Mohamed that caused the big brouhaha in 2006 in a forthcoming book. Bad, yes. What's worse? The book, by Jytte Klausen, is about those same cartoons. The book is entitled The Cartoons that Shook the World. Except you don't actually get to see the cartoons-- taking it a step further, not only did Yale UP ban the inflammatory cartoons from 2006, but all depictions of Mohamed in the entire book. I hadn't realized that sharia law was in effect in New Haven.

Fear was the only reason, it seems. A Yale UP official is quoted in the linked article saying that "when it came between that [printing the cartoons] and blood on my hands, there was no question”. Thus, one of the world's great academic presses has been bullied by a bunch of unabashed idiots who hurt people and destroy things over mean-spirited drawings of their magical being. Giving into fears of extremist reprisal makes for really bad policy. Remember, say, most of this decade? Still, the argument went as such: the cartoons are available on the 'Tubes and can be described in words, thus including them would be an unnecessary affront (or, "gratuitous"). This seems fairly shallow to me; after all, the author of the book, an expert on the controversy, wanted them included. Putting them on the cover might have been gratuitous; omitting them completely is cowardice of the worst kind. I would wager that one would be hard pressed to find a single academic book about political cartoons that didn't reprint cartoons.

Go Harvard*! Boo Yale!

* pending my becoming aware of some objectionable act of cowardice and supplication of stupid people on the part of Harvard

Awards are weird

I'm not a huge TV/film person-- I only ponied up for cable last November for the first time in my adult life-- but I do watch an ample amount of TV, especially during the school year while I grade stacks of papers. This is something of a disclaimer, because I am about to tread into waters in which I'm not completely comfortable swimming.

The Emmy nominations came out, and I was surprised to read that Family Guy has been nominated in the Best Comedy category. This would not have been terribly surprising, except that it is the first animated series to be nominated for Best Comedy since The Flintstones in 1961.

This I don't get. The show is based on the simplest, most elementary kind of post-modern juxtapositional shock jockery. The plot lines are completely stock, a feature I'm not entirely convinced the writers intend ironically, and the endless stream of referential pop culture non-sequitors seems over-played to me. Not to mention the show goes to the "take-a-moderately-funny-moment-and-make-it-funnier-by-stretching-it-out-so-it-isn't-funny-but-then-keep-going-so-it's-funny-again" well too much for my taste. For this kind of compulsive pop-nostalgia, I'll take Robot Chicken any day, in no small part because 11 minutes of this kind of schtick is enough.

I wouldn't care so much, save the fact that The Simpsons was never nominated, even in its greatest stretch of seasons in the early 90's. Or South Park, which is often incisively topical, completely fearless, and spot-on (the South Park where Butters is sent to a Christian camp to rid boys of homosexuality is a work of art).

I suppose if the Emmy's track to public sentiment, the nomination makes sense, since Family Guy seems to be airing on some channel for at least 4 hours a night. For my money, though, I'd rather watch South Park or classic Simpsons.

More on That Cartoon

I'm cross-posting here a piece that I put up at the Newsarama blog (comics website, for the uninitiated). I blog over there daily, and invite you all to come play, but this one seemed relevant to the AD audience, so I'm posting it here as well:

To build off Caleb's post below, as well as something I've written about before, today, Here and Now on NPR featured cartoonists talking about Obama and race.

Wednesday’s New York Post cartoon has sparked a national conversation about the role of race in cartooning. On Monday - two days before the Post cartoon came out - three editorial cartoonists shared their views on race in cartoons in a forum at the JKF Museum. We hear a piece of their conversation and then check in with one of the cartoonists, Joel Pett, to see if his opinion has changed in the light of the Post cartoon.

The audio is available on the site, and the segment on the cartoons comes in at 29:25. Pett notes that part of the reason to interpret the cartoon in a negative light is, frankly, the reputation of Delonas, the cartoonist.

"The guy was either so insensitive as to not be able to anticipate this reaction or he anticipated it and just didn't care. Either way it's a terrible cartoon."

"There's a difference between free speech--you can draw a stupid racist cartoon and walk around the streets showing it to people. But that doesn't mean that you necessarily get a place in the profession and get paid for it. If you do that, you gotta expect to be held to some kind of standard of decency."

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post said on MSNBC (at about 3:55 of the video) that the problem might've been caught if there was better diversity in the workplace. For example, I'd be willing to bet that many of the people who defended the cartoon on Caleb's post were white. I'm not trying to beat up on anyone for being white--I'm white. But the thing is, being white, we simply don't deal with racism the same way. This is what diversity does: it provides multiple viewpoints, multiple frames of reference for the same subject. This doesn't mean controversial subjects should be avoided at all costs, but that fraught images like this one can be examined from different perspectives, and that perhaps a better critique of the stimulus package could've been produced.

Not to be too much of an academic wanker, but Judith Butler, one of my favorite theorists, wrote that “The speaker who utters the racial slur is thus citing the slur, making linguistic community with a history of speakers,” (The Judith Butler Reader, p 221). Her point is that insults draw on a vast history in order to have their power. Perhaps Sean Delonas really wasn't aware that there is a long history in this country of comparing African-Americans to apes. But the people protesting in the street with Al Sharpton (whatever you may think of Sharpton) certainly were.

The New York Post is hardly a newspaper of record, and I'm not suggesting censorship. One of the best things about free speech is it tells us a lot about the speaker, and in this case, those giving him a platform. I've defended the free speech rights of offensive political cartoonists in the past in this very blog. But you cannot cry "free speech!" and then complain that people speak out against you. As Colleen Doran noted in a panel at NYCC, it's not censorship to choose what you will and will not support.