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Yesterday I Started Drawing Obama From Scratch

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Ted Rall

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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Ted Rall

Print Magazine interview with Ted Rall about censorship. http://www.printmag.com/uncategorized/ted-rall-censored/

ToMoed!

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Ted Rall

I can die a happy man! Fuck the Pulitzer. I’ve been ToMoed!!!

Interview with The Progressive About Daily Kos Censorship

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Ted Rall

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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Ted Rall

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?

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How to Deal with a Media Pile-On

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Ted Rall

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Tips for Targets of Online Hatefests

Over the holiday weekend I found myself in a uncomfortable yet not entirely unfamiliar place. I was the target of the online equivalent of the Two Minute Hate in Orwell’s “1984.”

The subject: the way I draw President Obama. Which I’ve been doing since 2009. But this column is not about that. It’s about a few things I’ve learned about how online witch hunts and mob mentality have evolved in recent years.

Like other cartoonists I’ve taken heat before, notably over my “terror widows” and Pat Tillman cartoons from 2002 and 2004, respectively. During the grim years following 9/11, bloggers on the far right of America’s political fringe repeatedly issued furious rants calling for me to censored, imprisoned, tortured, raped and/or assassinated. Well, hey, it’s nice to be noticed.

Ten years later, the anatomy of the Internet pile-on has changed, and it reveals some interesting changes in American political culture. The knee-jerk nationalism of the Bush years has given way to a form of political correctness on steroids under Obama, with identity politics running amok. Influenced by social networks, the comments sections of political discussion websites have adopted like/dislike ratings systems that amplify groupthink. In contrast to the 2000s, when right-wing haters threatened lefties’ lives more than their livelihoods, conservative Obama Democrats are more likely to censor you than to threaten to kill your family.

To be sure, the basic characteristics of TwoMinuteHate.com remain the same. Internet mob rule still relies on the power of suggestion; when people follow a link that urges Click Here to See a Terrible Horrible Witch, they’re more likely than not to see, well, a horrible witch.

I call this the Comedy Club Effect. 99.99% of stand-up comics aren’t funny. Yet most people laugh at most of their (bad) jokes. People who spend $30 plus a two-drink minimum are preconditioned to have a good time. Having a good time at a comedy club requires laughing. So the audience laughs.

The mandatory drinks help.

After I was introduced as “America’s funniest cartoonist” at a talk in Chicago I apologized — in a straight-ahead, not even trying to joke way, for being late, explaining that I’d gotten stuck in traffic from O’Hare. Everyone laughed.

The corollary of the Comedy Club Effect is that when people are preconditioned to hate, they tend to hate well and often. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen experienced this when his “what if I were a bigot” musings (“people with conventional views must repress a gag reflex“) about New York Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio’s biracial family drew calls for his firing and unsubstantiated assertions that these were really Cohen’s thoughts. It was the exact 180-degree opposite of fair: If anything, white conservatives “with conventional views,” rather than progressives, should have been angry at Cohen for attributing bigotry that the conventional types hadn’t expressed.

Like other targets of media pile-ons, I find it hard to accept that angry people who are yelling at you are open to nothing you have to say. Explanations don’t help. Apologies don’t stop them. They just want to yell at you. Anything you say can and will be used, distorted and twisted against you in the court of Twitter.

If you’re smart, you’ll duck and cover, leaving your allies and fellow travelers to run interference for you and defend your cyberhonor. But your defenders won’t get far. Dissenting voices get shouted down too. Anything they say will be similarly twisted and they’ll be accused of being your toadies and shills. In the end, they’ll get ground down by endless demands to repeat themselves until they finally fade away, leaving the field to your attackers’ hundreds of comments, all of which will remain forever Google-able to your future might-have-been employers.

There’s no way you can win. All you can do is conserve your energy until the mob moves on to burn down someone else’s house.

As always, commenters have strong opinions about, for example, cartoons they haven’t actually seen.

My latest imbroglio brought me into contact with such relatively recent additions to the PC canon as “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining.” According to the Urban Dictionary, whitespaining is “the paternalistic lecture given by whites toward a person of color defining what should and shouldn’t be considered racist, while obliviously exhibiting their own racism” and mansplaining is “the tendency of some men to mistakenly believe that they automatically know more about any given topic than does a woman and who, consequently, proceed to explain to her — correctly or not — things that she already knows.”

A more lucid definition is for the suffix “‘splaining,” which Geek Feminism calls “a form of condescension in which a member of a privileged group explains something to a member of a marginalized group — most particularly, explains about their marginalization — as if the privileged person knows more about it.”

As a white male, in other words, I can imagine how irritating it would be to hear a white guy like me tell someone who isn’t white or male about their experience as a disadvantaged minority. But I can’t know how they feel.

Obviously, this is true. The trouble is that, on sites like Daily Kos, where the majority views are pro-Obama and pro-Democratic Party no matter what they do, the cries of “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining” are used to stifle not condescension, but disagreement.

Speaking about the controversy over the way I draw Obama, the founder of Daily Kos refused to weigh in with his opinion over whether or not I am racist. “Don’t be that white guy telling African-Americans what is and isn’t racist,” sayeth Markos Moulitsas. 1300 comments or so later, someone finally asked: “If white guys have no right to voice an opinion about racism, I’m curious if minorities expect white guys to say anything at all about racism (except for racist statement, of course)? After all, if your opinions simply aren’t welcome, can you really expect people to engage in a debate?”

Daily Kos is one of many sites that have adopted Facebook-style like/dislike rating systems. Viewers may click “recommend (+)” or “hide (-)” on blog entries as well as individual comments. Items with more thumbs up add to a poster’s digital “mojo” on the site. Items with more thumbs down get hidden from view and subtract from mojo. Run out of mojo and you can’t post anymore. You are unpersoned, like in “1984.”

The link aggregator Reddit demonstrates the problem with this system. Post cute kittens and your ratings soar. Post anything controversial — say, something about Edward Snowden — and the hates will more than cancel out the likes. Reddit is a place where anything less than totally insipid goes to die. I assume they like it that way.

At Kos they call this “community moderation.” It sounds democratic. In practice, the Rec/Hide system is toxic, stifling and distracting, prompting long threads of comments by people complaining about one another’s hides and recs, and threatening to get even for them. (What were we talking about again?) There are secret Facebook pages for various gangs of Kossacks, who swoop into certain posts to rec or hide them into glory or oblivion, as the case may be.

It sounds silly. It’s what happens when people have too much time on their hands.

But this manipulation of online political discussion has a real-world effect: it crushes anything that disagrees with the hive mind — a collective mentality that becomes more lockstep because of it — and it kills anything new or interesting. Worst of all, casual browsers could be forgiven that nothing new or interesting or taking issue with this mainstream/generic view (in the case of Kos, unquestioning support for Obama and the DNC) exists.

I posted a blog defending myself and explaining why I draw Obama the way I do to Kos. It received many recommendations and attracted hundreds of comments. Unfortunately, you can’t find it anymore. It was “hide rated” by pro-Obama Kossacks.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Internet was supposed to turn out like this.

(Ted Rall’s website is rall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

Ruben Bolling weighs in on Daily Kos censorship

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Ted Rall

My friend and fellow cartoonist Ruben Bolling (“Tom the Dancing Bug”), whose work appears at Daily Kos, has issued a statement about the site administrator’s decision to censor my work.

I believe that any site or publication has the right to refuse to publish any cartoonist or writer that they don’t want in thier pages. But to refuse publication specifically on these unwarranted grounds at the very least requires my vocal objection. I’m standing up to say that I believe that Ted’s depiction of Barack Obama is no way racist.

More here.

I have been censored by Daily Kos

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Ted Rall

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Daily Kos is a major liberal/Democratic Party blog. About a year ago, the blog began running cartoons. To their credit, they paid a modest fee for them. Many alternative political cartoonists were invited; I was not.

At the time, the owner of the blog mentioned as an aside that I would be welcome, like anyone else, to post to Daily Kos. A few weeks ago, I decided to take him up on that.

Why did I post there for free? To access readers, many of whom would enjoy my work if they saw it. It was an experiment.

The experiment ended yesterday. When I went to log on, I received the above message. I clicked the acknowledgement.

Which marks the end of my experiment posting to Daily Kos. I might consider altering the way I draw a political figure for a paying client. A very high-paying client. Someone who employed me full-time.

I’m sure not going to alter my drawing style for $0.00 money.

Obviously, this is no biggie. Nothing gained, nothing lost. Given the reflexive pro-Obama/pro-DNC politics of the blog and its owner, it was probably inevitable that they’d do this. It was crafty of them to choose the Thanksgiving holiday weekend to ban me. Fewer people will be around to notice or care.

This act of censorship is notable for several reasons, however:

1. This “liberal” blog has slammed me with the most severe act of censorship of my career. Since I began syndication in 1991, I have had individual cartoons killed. I have been fired, sometimes unjustly (like in 2004, when Men’s Health discontinued my apolitical cartoons about sex and relationships because I opposed Bush and his wars in my political work, which they did not run). I have been kept out of publications where my work obviously belonged.

But this tops them all.

They weren’t paying for my work. To the contrary, I drove traffic to them. My cartoons were routinely among their list of High Impact Posts that elicit a lot of discussion. If you read them, you’ll see that a cadre of militant Obama defenders was determined to drive me away, and they succeeded.

This is what the Democratic Party has come to: so unable to face criticism, whether from left or right, that they stifle opposing voices.

2. Despite the politics of the pro-Obama forces, there remain many liberals and progressives who remain Democrats. I encountered hundreds of them on Daily Kos. They enjoy(ed) my work. I will miss interacting with them. Fortunately, the Internet allows them to find my work in many other places, including here.

3. The grounds for censoring my cartoons from the site — my drawing style — are beneath contempt. Anyone familiar with me and my work knows I’m not racist. My criticisms of the president are unrelated to his race, and to say otherwise in the absence of evidence is disgusting. Here’s the cartoon in question. It should be noted that my editors at a variety of American newspapers, magazines and websites, almost all of whom are left of center politically, some of whom are black and many of whom voted for Obama, have never expressed the slightest concern about the way I draw the president.

Here is the discussion at Daily Kos, which includes a deluge of comments accusing me of drawing Obama in a racist way. You be the judge:

If You Like Our Troops, You Can Keep Them

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