This is Vanity Fair's current "cover", an overt parody of the now ubiquitously discussed New Yorker cartoon.The editors write:
We here at Vanity Fair maintain a kind of affectionate rivalry with our downstairs neighbors at The New Yorker. We play softball every year, compete for some of the same stories, and share an elevator bank. (You can tell the ones who are headed to the 20th floor by their Brooklyn pallor and dog-eared paperbacks.)
And heaven knows we’ve published our share of scandalous images, on the cover and otherwise. So we’ve been watching the kerfuffle over last week’s New Yorker cover with a mixture of empathy and better-you-than-us relief.
One thing that's interesting about this, although nobody with any stroke at all outside of Ralph Nader would ever mention such a thing, is the idea of collusion between media outlets. Nay, did Harrogate say collusion? Better to say, when a small handful owns the whole shabang, you're gonna get the same tripe rolled out in slightly different packaging. When was the last time we were able to say the major television and print media did a legitimate service for the nation?
But those days are over. Once they got rid of who was by far the most liberal President in the post WWII Era, Richard Nixon (that's right, Tricky Dick), for being more overt about his criminality than other Presidents, that was pretty much it. From there on out it's been water-carrier city. Hello ditto-heads, and a carnivalesque homage about what a great servant ye were, when ye die. Etc.
But stay! lo and forsooth, enough of such things that Readers don't care about, and to the Cover itself.
Jeralyn at TalkLeft writes of the cover:
I think the VF cartoon is much gentler and less offensive than the New Yorker cartoon.
Also, the McCain cartoon has more truths: John McCain is old, Cindy McCain did have a love affair with pills (even though in the cartoon the pills she is holding are for her husband) and McCain does admire George Bush.
What would you have added to the McCain cartoon to clearly represent the "politics of fear"?
Well. Harrogate is going to, as someone said in Office Space, "GO AHEAD and disagree" with her premise. After all, there really isn't that much you can make up about McCain that is harsher than the truth of what he represents.
But soft! What's that? Jeralyn's deeper premise is right, though? Does Vanity Fair really have the gall to treat the burning Constitution as a caricature, after all we've already seen?
Okay, to Jeralyn's last question, Harrogate will answer. In truth they should have depicted, on a War Room type screen, an image of a huge crowd about to be landed upon by a nuclear warhead. Or, to make the same point, simply a picture next to the one of Bush, except this one depicting McCain having lunch and laughing it up with William Kristol.
But then, how far off would those images have really been?
2 comments:
Thanks for the plug to my Nixon post. However, if you read the actual text of the post, I think you'll find that I am not calling Nixon a liberal.
In fact, the point I'm making is that an icon of conservativism now appears liberal by comparison to today's politicians. This is not indicative of a change in the positions of liberal and conservative.
It is instead an indication that we as a nation have shifted so far to the right that we can't even see the center anymore. Those who are significantly far right of center, but still not extremely so, are now considered liberal.
But, they're not.
Clinton and Obama, for example, are both solidly right of center as can be seen on the political compass site. Those we consider right, such as McBush, are up against the right wall and getting out the jackhammer to try to get through it.
Anyway, my point was not to make Nixon out to be a liberal. My point was to show that even today's "liberals" are really quite conservative. Today's conservatives are not. They are neocon right wing nut jobs.
Dear misanthropic,
Excellent blog ye have going there, and it's great to have you here! And, Harrogate not only got your point that Nixon was no liberal objectively speaking, but decided herein to take it to what (he, anyway) deems its logical conclusion.
Which is, if we are to ascribe legitimacy to the political landscape that we have in the United States. Which most everyone seems to do.
Then, we are absurdly forced to conclude that the Democrats as currently configured are liberals. And that therefore Nixon was, indeed, a liberal. We are thereby, as the great Rhetorician Aristotle might have said, launched into an infinite regress.
As you pointed out in your original post and emphasize here again, certainly any comparison of Nixon to the Clintons or to the Dems' current standard barrier dramatically reveals the rightward shift our nation has taken.
Harrogate hoped that his own link to Nader and corporate media consolidation would hint at the core of his argument.
But anywho... hopefully ye will continue to contribute to our humble blog!
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