Ted Rall’s “Censored” Obama Cartoon and Other Controversies
Print Magazine
by Michael Dooley
December 4, 2013
Ted Rall’s “Censored” Obama Cartoon and Other Controversies
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LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Another Year
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I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week:
Angelenos try not to think about the shifting plates beneath their feet and their wheels, but everyone knows the Big One is coming — and a bad enough one is coming sooner than that.
Short of moving somewhere where tectonics aren’t quite as disconcerting (i.e., where it snows) there isn’t much we can do about earthquakes. But we can prepare for the worst by mitigating the damage.
Toward that end, Los Angeles city building officials are creating a list of “soft story” wood-frame buildings that were built before 1978. “Soft-story structures often are built over carports and held up with slender columns, leaving the upper floors to crash into ground-floor apartments during shaking,” Rosanna Xia and Rong-Gong Lin II report in the Times.
There are probably about 6,000 of these buildings. The city says it will take at least a year to complete a list. After that, a retrofitting program will be put in place.
But what if an earthquake happens between now and then? It’s not like Mother (or, not to be sexist, Father) Nature waits for bureaucracy to work its magic.
Yeah, I’m a negative cuss.
So anyway, I began thinking about what, if anything, could be done to stave off the inevitable for at least a year — because the idea that this can wait another year is both horrible and amusing at the same time. How do these people think? Walk softly? Pray?
I know. They’re just civil servants trying to do their jobs with shrinking budgets and limited resources. But if, God or fire demon forbid, something bad happens before that retrofit project is finished, everyone is going look back and wonder why we didn’t throw money at it to get it done faster.
Yesterday I Started Drawing Obama From Scratch
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When you’ve been drawing the same character for years, you go on autopilot. After Daily Kos censored my work (on the pretext that my Obama looked simian(!!!), which they didn’t notice for years), I say down to draw him from scratch, as though he were new and unfamiliar.
When I put him through my usual style — which applies the same to members of all ethnic groups — the results were, well, not good.
If anything, he’d turn out more objectionable.
The president is older. He’s lost weight. His hair is cut even shorter. Whatever ape-like demeanor a cartoon of him had in 2009 would look worse in 2013.
Of course, all humans are apes. We share 99.4% of our DNA with chimpanzees. Which is why I look like an ape and Brad Pitt looks like an ape and Dick Cheney looks like an ape. To not draw Obama the same way I draw everyone else, to make him look less ape-like than everyone else, seems fucked up.
So right now, looks like the smiley face. If the Militant Demobamabot Assholes want to censor me, let them end up with something no one can call “racist”: a depiction of the soulless inspidity of our drone murderer, bankster enabler, pro-torture, warmonger of a lying sack president.
Print Magazine Interview
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Print Magazine interview with Ted Rall about censorship. http://www.printmag.com/uncategorized/ted-rall-censored/
Interview with The Progressive About Daily Kos Censorship
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The Progressive’s Ian Murphy has an interview with me about Daily Kos’ disgusting attempt to stifle criticism of the President here:
As Ruben Bolling, creator of “Tom the Dancing Bug,” notes: anyone familiar with Rall’s work knows that crude, “ape-like” depictions of all races is basically his shtick. We’re primates, after all. And while a lot of the irrational anger directed at Obama is undoubtedly rooted in the irrational fear of melanin, it’s a bit tragic when the left cannibalizes one of its own.
Why Doesn’t the Atlantic Fire Noah Berlatsky?
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Affecting his usual oh-so-reasonable tone, comics critic Noah Berlasky is out with a hatchet job about the Daily Kos cartoon censorship story this morning. Among the highlights:
There’s not much question here of Rall’s intent. Rall says he didn’t mean a racial slur, and Daily Kos goes out of its way to say that they are not claiming he was purposefully linking Obama to animalistic stereotypes of black people. Moreover, as anyone who has ever seen Rall’s cartoons is aware, his drawing skill is rudimentary at best. There is every reason to believe Rall did not intend the cartoon to look the way it looks.
Not to look a rhetorical gift horse in the mouth or to be a contrarian for contrarianism’s sake, but what the fuck does Berlasky know about my intent? Nothing — because he didn’t bother to attempt to contact me for comment.
As a regular reader of The Atlantic, isn’t this a firing offense? Isn’t trying to get feedback from the subject of your hit piece kind of, you know, Journalism 101? (Note to Art Spiegelman fans: I repeatedly tried to get the Master of Pretension to talk to me for my 1999 Village Voice piece.)
Then there’s the matter of Berlasky’s personal biases. He has a habit of crawling out of the woodwork to comment about my most controversial work, inevitably in the most negative terms he can conjure. That’s fine; he’s entitled to his opinions, one of which is that my work sucks. But readers, I think, deserve to know your biases.
Berlasky reminds me of a music critic I used to work with at the old New York Observer. He hated rap and metal. So every time he reviewed a record that belonged to one of those two genres, he gave it a bad review. The thing is, the readers didn’t know he hated rap and metal. They thought he hated those specific records. Which was unfair because, in some of those cases, the records were pretty good rap or metal.
Berlasky doesn’t care for editorial cartoons. He obviously doesn’t know much about them. (Choice quote: “That’s why Thomas Nast, who could communicate without words, is one of the masters of the genre.” Actually, Nast was quite wordy.) And he definitely dislikes everything I do.
Shouldn’t he have told his editors at The Atlantic about his biases before pitching them this story?
