The Power Of Images
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In the course of the conversation, it became clear that Perot thought Obama was a Muslim. When I informed him that Obama was actually a Christian, Perot was relieved. He didn’t hate Obama; he just had an instinct to believe whatever he happened to see online over what he read in reputable newspapers. ~Jonathan Alter
All of this might also have something to do with the small problem that Perot has the reputation of being not quite right in the head, but that’s not entirely fair. One must also ask what sources these people are using. It isn’t as if “online” sources are uniformly awash in nonsense and gossip. There are certain kinds of online media and certain sites that excel in misinformation, but there are just as many that don’t. However, if a reasonably well-informed, albeit eccentric, billionaire can buy into such idiocy, there’s no telling who might be susceptible to it among all those voters who still have no idea what either candidate believes at this late stage in the election. The notion that only die-hard rejectionists would entertain bizarre ideas about Obama gets things backwards in a lot of cases–some people become die-hard rejectionists because they come to believe bizarre things about him. If many general election voters have only just started paying attention or won’t pay attention until the autumn, it doesn’t help when you have an image circulating since mid-July depicting the most terrible distortions about a candidate. The Wright controversy exploded the way it did because there was a visual record, and people could watch Wright say what he said, which obviously gave the controversy more staying power and made Wright’s remarks more memorable than they might have otherwise been had they just been published in a transcript.
It’s not surprising to see someone at the official Obama Newsletter Newsweek taking the view that I and many others have taken that the image is very damaging, but Alter is right to emphasise the power of images to override whatever arguments are set up against them. Visual associations are powerful and readily remembered. Propagandists and campaign communications directors (more or less the same thing in different guises) know this, which is why they spend so much time concerning themselves with presentation, atmospherics, backdrops and the like. To take a less extreme example, the principal reason why McCain’s “green background” speech was regarded as a failure was its visual effect, and for the most part no one remembers what he said–only that he said it against a hideous green background and looked absurd. Virtually everyone knows that how candidates appear at presidential debates have an influence on how they are perceived by their audience, and can even affect how the viewers decide whether one candidate or another prevailed. People will remember this image long after many of them have forgotten the purpose of the artist in making it.
Update: One of the responses I keep seeing is something like what the L.A. Times wrote in its editorial:
Obama’s campaign is deeply worried about the legions of morons who they apparently believe make up the heart of this great nation.
There is an idea that people who think the image will do real damage to Obama politically must be assuming that there are “legions of morons” or that there are some people too “unsophisticated” to grasp the obvious satire. Here’s the problem: satire relies on an audience possessing sufficient knowledge to understand the references well enough to recognise that they are being used ironically. It isn’t really a question of sophistication or lack thereof, and it isn’t even a question of intelligence. What matters is how much voters already know about Obama and his wife. To think everyone will “get” the joke as a joke, you have to assume that everyone has been following the election campaign as obsessively as political junkies and professional bloggers. Of course, there has been a string of columns and articles discussing how relatively unknown Obama still is to much of the country, and yet to hear the defenses of the cover image you’d think that everyone has followed all the twists and turns of the campaign from Springfield till now.
In fact, this is the high-information argument that takes for granted that everyone in the country already knows the maximal amount about every phony Obama controversy and also knows enough about Obama himself to know that the controversies are phony. “Oh, yes, the burning flag in the image is rather like the one William Ayers once stepped on in protest of the government! And we all know who William Ayers is, don’t we? Very clever!” This assumption is absolutely wrong, as any focus group with undecided and “swing” voters could tell you. Given the characteristics of many undecided voters, you could not have come up with an image that was more likely to provoke undecided voters in all the wrong ways if the goal was to deprive the false charges of their power and influence in the election.
In a new effort to “help” Obama yet again, the cartoonist for the Seattle P-I has done this mock-up of a cover for the McCains. As everyone can see, a rather crucial difference between what the cartoonist did here and what the New Yorker cover did is that the things being used to mock McCain (rather than refute charges against him) have some significant basis in truth:
The two images aren’t really comparable, but they’re being treated here as if they are, which is actually to reduce the New Yorker image to its most plain, “literal” meaning as an exaggeration of real traits. The first is a roundabout satire of false charges being made against the two figures, and the second is simply a caricature exaggerating certain truths about McCain (e.g., his age, support for the security state, his enthusiasm for killing Iranians, his wife’s former drug problem). If you wanted to make an argument that the New Yorker image reflects some exaggerated form of ”dangerous” truth about the Obamas, you would put it side by side with this McCain caricature as this presumably pro-Obama cartoonist has done. Nice work. Those of us who don’t support Obama should just get out of the way of his fans and let them drag him down.
Second Update: The LAT editorial has another claim:
It may be that there are some spectacularly literal-minded Americans who will see the New Yorker’s over-the-top portrayal of Obama as a confirmation of their worst fears. But then, they weren’t going to vote for him anyway.
Of course, there’s no way for them to know that. They assume that there are no potential Obama voters who could be swayed by misinformation and provocative images to vote for someone else, which is to project their own stereotype of the kinds of people who are likely to vote for Obama in the general election (i.e., people just like them).
Filed under: politics
What seems not to be understood in the media is the degree to which Obama’s candidacy represents a purification of the subconscious and unconsciousness of the elctorate. This cuts many ways, for and against Obama. Black men are the “shadow” of our nation’s mind, and Obama’s candidacy has been a series of reactions to him from all kinds of quarters. This cartoon is no different. THis is going to continue all through the election, and all through his Presidency, until the subconscious is either cleaned up or forms a reactionary stance. Obama seems mature enough to endure the purifcatory process. Not sure about the country, however.
conradg,
“Obama’s candidacy represents a purification of the subconscious and unconsciousness of the elctorate.”
When people talk about purifying my unconsciousness, I reach for my gun. (Kidding)
I think we can add your comments to the long and growing list of statements and actions by Obama supporters that are less then helpful to his campaign.
I think images are why the humiliating but largely non-deadly abuses of Abu Ghraib have obtained such media prominence compared to the outright killings of Hamdania and the brutal indifference to civilian life in Haditha. I wrote about it below.
http://mansizedtarget.wordpress.com/2006/05/26/haditha-the-power-of-photos/
Don’t forget sighing. If you sigh in response to lies said in a fake Texas accent, then that demonstrates your unfitness for president. This is in contrast to lying with a Texas accent, which is folksy and cute.
And I don’t even want to think about brown earth tones.
I’m sorry, but this is a tempest in a teapot. Some guy draws a political cartoon that sends news commentators into a tizzy over whether the cartoon helps or hurts Obama for some entirely hypothetical “average voter” about whom anything can be said because he or she is an imaginary character.
This magazine cover hurts Obama among the class of people who (a) haven’t come to an opinion about Obama yet, (b) give a damn what The New Yorker has to say, (c) are too ignorant to realize the cover’s a joke, and (d) won’t be swayed by some other piece of completely unpredictable silliness between now and November. While that set may not be zero, it’s certainly too small to deserve this much attention.
“I’m sorry, but this is a tempest in a teapot. Some guy draws a political cartoon that sends news commentators into a tizzy over whether the cartoon helps or hurts Obama for some entirely hypothetical “average voter†about whom anything can be said because he or she is an imaginary character.”
I would agree; the same high-information voters who see this cartoon have already made up their minds one way or the other. The crucial difference will come after the conventions, after a large number of low-information voters start tuning in, and have a look at all of these controversies, real and imagined, for the very first time. The magazine cover will be forgotten by this time next week; but the issues that led to it will get kicked into high gear right after labor day.
Adam,
You make the common mistake of assuming that everything anyone says about Obama is aimed at either helping or hurting him. I try to say things that are true, rather than aimed at spinning the truth. Daniel makes this same mistake, in assuming that the New Yorker cartoonist has somehow screwed up in being guided by his sense of humor rather than some machiavellian desire to manipulate public opinion. These kinds of comments tell us more about the commentators than about Obama and his supporters. As I said earlier, my first reaction to the cartoons was to laugh. You and Daniel’s first reaction seems to be to analyze and try to predict how others will react – a very strange response, if you ask me. Why can’t you guys just be honest in your own responses, and be guided by something other than over-analysis as a first response?
Now, as for my remarks about the unconscious, that’s my well-after-the-fact analysis of this incident, and others like it. If you don’t think you have an unconscious, your desire to reach for a gun at the mention of it is pretty revealing. Not much analysis needed there. It kind of proves my point that many peoples’ reactions to Obama are more a projection than an insight into Obama – such as Daniel’s continued projection of “condescension” on Obama’s part. Add up these paleocon responses, and it’s not a pretty picture.
In a presidential campaign, it’s not terribly strange to discuss whether a given incident helps or hurts a candidate and to speculate how others will react to it. Clearly, the cover was *intended* to help him insofar as it was trying to ridicule attacks against him. Yes, they probably also thought it was an amusing gag. They were wrong.
My first response to the image was, “This is incredibly stupid.” Then I thought, “It completely fails to achieve what it’s trying to do.” Those responses are the least interesting things to talk about, if you ask me, which is why I tried to, you know, *think* about this as it relates to the election.
For the last time, I’m not “projecting” condescension onto someone when a non-trivial number of observers refer to his arrogance and condescension all the time. If you like the way he talks down to people and lectures them, good for you. Am I condescending to other people? Almost certainly. You can hardly be a blogger without some of that. The difference is that I am not running for office, and I don’t need the votes of people to whom I am condescending. For a politician, a habit that might otherwise be unremarkable or even desirable can be a liability.
And, yes, talk about “purifying” people’s unconscious mind is ridiculous. It doesn’t inspire me to reach for a gun. It does make me want to stop taking his supporters seriously.
For that matter, the Obama campaign’s *first* response was to presume to know how other people would react to the image. That must also be very strange.
conradg,
I was referring to the effects of those words/images, not necessarily the motivations behind them. I have no knowledge of what was going on in the cartoonists head when he drew that cover. My guess would be: “Look at how those witless rubes in flyover country view the Obama’s? Aren’t they a riot?” Or something along those lines. Whether done out of a misguided stab at humor or some mix of other motives I can’t say with any certainty.
“my first reaction to the cartoons was to laugh.”
Well that makes one of us. My baseline definition of satire is that is should be funny, or at least amusing. The cartoon fails on all counts. I’m not sure how that makes my response is less “honest” than yours.
Being obsessive political junkies, you and I can both view that cartoon with a bit of ironic detatchment. But there are large masses of our fellow citizens, that simply do not know all that much about Obama and I’m not sure what is gained by trying to pretend this is not the case.
“If you don’t think you have an unconscious, your desire to reach for a gun at the mention of it is pretty revealing”
I am quite sure I have an unconscious, it’s just that outsourcing the “purification” thereof to someone who is, in my mind, merely a slippery Chicago pol that creeps me out a little bit, and a bit of an indication (an unconscious one, perhaps?) that Obama supporters such as yourself view his candidacy in something very much like religious terms. Would you want Mayor Daley purifying your unconscious? How about Mitt Romney? John McCain? Ron Paul? Do you find it a bit odd that you’re assigning a politician to do this type of work?
“Why can’t you guys just be honest in your own responses, and be guided by something other than over-analysis as a first response?”
If we are going to strive for honesty when describing our reactions to such an image, your (forgive me) third-rate and long distance psychoanalysis of America’s collective unconscious might be due for some calibration on that front. If I’ve engaged in “over analysis” (I don’t think so, my original comment on this thread was a whopping two sentences long), I think it would be fair to say you’ve engaged in under analysis and fallen back on empty tropes as Obama-as-Savior/let’s laugh at the rubes rather than engaging the cartoon on any critical level.
I feel that, if anything, the real significance of this cartoon is in the overblown reaction. All it really shows us is how humor (or attempts at humor) is off limits in regards to Obama. To create a high-concept and easily digestible one panel cartoon, there need to be simplified traits on the subject to exploit for laughs. With McCain you have age, Bush his intelligence, Kerry his snootiness etc. With Obama, love him or hate him, he’s hard to pin down so easily and the humor has to be more complex.
That said, the image is so ridiculous I really don’t feel that anyone can take it seriously; even if they don’t necessarily find the image funny.
I find it interesting that both of you didn’t find the cartoon funny. I certainly did, my 19 and 22 year old sons did, but my wife didn’t. I find it odd that you and Daniel simply assume that the cartoons were failures, because either you didn’t laugh, or it doesn’t seem to advance Obama’s cause. Comedy is not universal. Some people just don’t find some things funny, and others do. I’m guessing neither of you are big fans of Stephen Colbert. I think he’s a genius, and I’ve never minded his running joke about Obama as a secret terrorist, but I’m aware that he has a limited audience. You seem not to understand that the primary motive of the comedian is to be funny, not to be politically successful. Even successful political comedians like Colbert have to go with what is funny, not what helps their political causes. There’s a good reason Dennis Miller stopped being funny when he became a post-9/11 conservative. Previously, he just told jokes to be funny, without much caring whether it was liberal or conservative. Suddenly, he had an agenda, and the humor was secondary. Bad move.
Humor is always a good pathway into the unconscious, because if you have to think about it, it isn’t funny. The laugh response comes from the subconscious and unconscious, even by short-circuiting the conscious, analytical mind. Comedians who try to “design” their comedy to carry a conscious message just aren’t funny. It’s almost the opposite of political campaigning and message-messaging. So the notion you have that this cartoonist failed at his “message” presumed that he had one. He didn’t. He was just mining the unconscious for humor. This is what he came up with. Some people, like me, found it very funny. Others found it offensive – my wife, for example. This is still not a conscious response, but it reflects the unconscious.
If you’re going to analyze people’s responses to cartoons, you can’t do so without talking about psychology. That is in fact what both of you are doing when you pretend to make some kind of political analysis of the “effect” of this cartoon. You are both psychoanlayzing the audience, and then projecting onto me “offense” that I’m psychoanalyzing you. Now THAT’S funny! People are touchy, thin-skinned, and easily offended, or easy to make laugh. It depends. A lot of black people don’t find the cartoons funny. No surprise there. A lot of people don’t like being lectured to, but a lot of those people are the same people who like to lecture to others. Not just Daniel, but Jackson himself, who got his “cred” back in the 70’s and 80’s preaching responsibility to black audiences all over the country. That he now finds Obama “talking down” to black people is funny, in my view, in that he did the same thing for years and years, and thought it was virtuous. Daniel says he’s not running for President, as if that excuses a vice, if it is one. The fact is, Presidents do use “the bully pulpit” now and then in a good cause, and there’s nothing wrong with Obama’s cause. Nor does the actual audience seem to be objecting – the audience of young men who aren’t taking responsibility for fatherhood. No, it’s people like Jackson, who has more than a few things to feel guilty about, and Daniel, who I presume is not a young black man who has abandoned his kids, or might, who feel offended, or presume there’s a problem here. In which case we have to look to other factors to explain this obsession.
Does Obama condescend when he speaks? This is like asking if the New Yorker cartoon is intrinsically funny? It’s an entirely subjective question, in that people give different answers depending on their own personal psychology, and then pretend it’s an objective matter they have observed, when it’s really their own reaction they are talking about. You and Daniel both like to pretend that the cartoon is simply not funny, because you didn’t laugh. This is simply inexperience talking, not having a wide enough understanding of human nature beyond one’s own unconscious presumptions. But the cartoon clearly is funny – to some people, like me and my sons. The lesson is that there’s no such thing as something being intrinsically funny, or intrinsically offensive. Comedy is intensely subjective, as is “offensiveness”. There are plenty of very popular comedians I may not find funny, but someone does.
The same goes for politics. Daniel presumes that people who support Obama are objectively deranged in some way, otherwise they would respond to Obama just like he does. The problem here is that Daniel is operating under the assumption that he’s an objective observer, rather than a highly eccentric individual with strange ideas about things, and strange emotional responses. Of course, they are not strange to him, they seem perfectly natural to him. I use the word “strange” as a kind of provocation, because it doesn’t mean anything in itself. What is strange to one person is familiar to another. Daniel’s responses are very familar to him, and thus seem rational, while Obama supporters must belong to some oddball cult of brainwashed cultists who aren’t guided by rational thinking. And this from a Ron Paul devotee! My God, what are you thinking, Daniel? Have you no distance from yourself at all?
And that’s the problem. People like us tend to analyze the electorate from a distance, but the real problem isn’t in “the electorate”, it’s in each one of us personally and individually. Do we have any real distance from our own emotions, our own unconscious reactions to things that we simply take naturally? Not so easy.
That’s why I consider Obama a big psychological test. One could obviously say the same of any politician, or anyone at all for that matter, but some people who rise to public prominence do so particuarly because of the psychological factors involved. In Obama’s case, he’s more like a rorschach test than most, because he has a particular quality about him of lacking discernable “content”. This is what people are referring to when they say they don’t know him yet, or don’t know what his platform is about. These are just the unconscious reflecting an inability to point to a definable “there” there. McCain can be pinned down easily – old, cranky war hero. But Obama hasn’t been pigeonholed yet, and it’s tough on everyone, comedians included. The Obama cartoon isn’t really about Obama – it’s about the ridiculousness of the extremes people are going to define him. That’s why it’s funny, and that’s why it’s offensive. The reason the cartoonist went that direction isn’t because he was trying to make a point, it’s because he’s forced to go there, because there’s so little that is “funny” about Obama himself. A writer for one of the late night shows mentioned how difficult it was to write jokes about Obama. He said something like “Obama has no obvious flaws”, which isn’t true at all, but it reflects the fact that Obama is more of a mirror than an object which can be seen in a mirror. Even his flaws seem to be reflective in nature. Reagan was teflon, but Obama is the kind of semi-transparent, semi-reflective glass we find in two-way mirrors – we see right through him, superimposed against our own image.
The idea of “Obama as savior” is itself a reflective trope, reflecting both our desires and our projections of desire. Obama himself simply doesn’t comment on these things, which only increases the property. Figures like Obama do serve a purifying function when they arise in our national consciousness. That’s part of their attraction. People want to get these things out in the open. That’s why I think, in a deeper sense, cartoons like these are good. I don’t know if they help Obama politically, but they do help the country psychologically. It depends on if people feel like they want to keep a purifying figure like that around. I think they do. The unconscious factors that go into people deciding who to vote for often hinge on such things as these. I won’t pretend to know the answer to that question, but it’s worth examining. It simply requires a helluva lot of self-examination first, of understanding what we are really reacting to in Obama’s “character” rather than just projecting our own reactions upon him. Same goes for Obama supporters as well.
I happen to love Colbert, and I found Remnick’s comparison of this cartoon to what Colbert does to be entirely unpersuasive. For reasons I just laid out in the next post, I don’t think the cartoon works because I agree that it doesn’t meaningfully exaggerate any of the attacks. It isn’t satirising–it’s repeating. That’s a huge difference. If other people find it funny, that’s fine.
I don’t assume that my reactions are objective or representative, and I have made that caveat explicit I don’t know how many times. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think objectivity exists. It’s a rationalist invention that has no bearing on real human experience. If I did think I was objective and representative, I would often be wondering why more people don’t want to bring back the Byzantine empire, since it is obviously such a great idea. Pun not intended.
My ideas are pretty clearly strange and eccentric, and I take a certain satisfaction from that. That doesn’t mean I can’t judge a cartoon to be politically tone-deaf when it is, and that is what I have been talking about. The pro-Obama folks who are laughing at this cartoon are a bit like Romney supporters who were absolutely positive that anti-Mormonism would have no effect on his candidacy. They were probably laughing at his lame jokes about marriage being “between a man and a woman and a woman and a woman.” They’re not laughing anymore. They were wrong, and I think people who want to laugh this off are also wrong *if* they are more interested in seeing their candidate succeed than in having a chuckle.
I don’t assume Obama supporters are deranged, except in the sense that I think all optimists are a little mentally ill, despite everything they have done over the months to try to prove the contrary. There are Ron Paul personality cultists as well, and I have never been one of them. They were the people who thought he could actually win, and who seemed to believe that he had no flaws. These were the people who created hip-hop odes to the man, and who still think he can win the nomination at the convention. It is especially that refusal to see any flaws in the candidate that is part of the “cultist” mentality I am referring to when I critique Obama’s fans.
Yesterday I watched MSNBC’s daily political show — oh wait, they’re all political shows, except for the ones about prison life — and Smerconish (sp?) and a lady whose name I forget actually argued that the cover was good for Obama, because it gives him a platform to denounce all these misconceptions. (Buchanan, as usual, the only one on the panel of “experts” who really understands the political impact of the thing.)
In other words, these people clearly do not understand how the uninitiated and somewhat radicalized voter responds.
Here in semi-rural Kentucky, I know that a mass email, with the cover attached and a message that read “Even the New Yorker thinks he’s a terrorist sympathizer!” would gain a ton of traction. And while it might not sway anyone who was going to vote FOR him to vote against, it sure might sway a good number who would have stayed home to go vote for old white McCain (who, consequently, in both physical and dispositional terms, looks a lot like Kentucky’s elected officials).
And while we’re at it, I’ve heard absolutely NO Obama supporters give any indication that they see him as a “messiah”; rather, that’s a canard I’ve only heard Limbaugh / Hannity / O’Reilly / Barnes / Lowry / Thomas /et al accuse his supporters of thinking.
Thanks for the comment. It’s true that no one who supports him actually claims that he think he’s the Messiah, but that these supporters think Obama-as-Second-Coming is a sort of amusing insider joke that they can tell among themselves. The only problem is, again, that the people who take such jokes as serious claims respond by accusing Obama of being the Antichrist. Score another victory for the forces of consciousness-raising.
I’m glad you loove Colbert – there’s hope for you yet. I can’t really say why I found the cartoon hilarious, I just did. So did quite a few people I know. Therefore, it’s funny, in that it has an audience of some kind. Apparently Orson Bean is funny also, because he has an audience, but I’ve yet to understand why. The notion that the cartoon is politically tone deaf is probably accurate, in that being politically tone deaf is virtually a necessity to even having a chance of being funny. Again, so what? If I have to sacrifice my own odd sense of humor to get Obama elected, it’s just not worth. I’ll throw FISA under the bus in a second, but if I have to give up on humor, forget it.
I think you confuse the notion of laughing at this cartoon with the notion that those who laught think it’s “harmless”. I don’t think the cartoon itself is any big deal, it just very intentionally points out how strong the “Obama as secret terrorist muslim” is. The reason I and others like me laugh is that it has power, otherwise we wouldn’t laugh. What I find funny, others find offensive. In other words, it’s not the cartoon that’s the problem, it just points to a problem Obama has. SImilarly with your obsession about the “bitter” comments. In themselves, I don’t think they made any difference, they just pointed to a problem Obama already had.
I don’t argue with the notion that all optimists are mentally ill. I would just point out that everyone is mentally ill, pessimists also, as well as the dreaded “normal” people, it’s just a question of which forms of mental illness one finds offensive, and which forms attractive. Further, I’d point out that sometimes people are attracted to the things they are offended by, and part of Obama’s appeal is just that. The Obamacon factor, for example, is in part fueled by people who are attracted to Obama precisely because he’s so different from themselves, and plenty of conservatives are really just sick of themselves by now. If you think people aren’t attracted to what repulses them, how do you explain Richard Nixon winning two Presidential elections, one by a landslide? Just pointing out how complex this stuff really is, and how mixed people’s feelings are altogether, not that this is all going to come out rosy for Obama. It’s just that the country is really, really psychotic right now, and doesn’t know what it wants. Obama is actually successful right now for that very reason. People are attracted to him because they don’t know what they want, and because they don’t know what he represents, he somehow feels “right”. It should make for “interesting times”.
conradg,
Glad we’re on the same page with this. I will miss Colbert only if physically removed from the couch. He has kept his show fresh and funny in ways that Stewart hasn’t been able to.
[...] No doubt, there will be a hue and cry about “ageism.” The thing that seems strange to me is that every time someone tries to do a McCain parody of the now-infamous New Yorker cover, they end up denying the intention and context of the satire that they are parodying. There is essentially nothing in this image that is not an exaggeration, or just a representation, of things that are true about John McCain: he is old, his wife once had a problem with prescription drugs, he is closely aligned with George Bush and he does support policies that violate the Constitution. As a caricature, it works quite well. As a parody of an image that is supposed to be mocking absurd claims about the Obamas, it completely fails, because the point of the New Yorker image is supposed to be that everything in it is ludicrous and false and obviously so and, more to the point, it is supposed to be exaggerating the absurd claims to their most extreme form. (The problem with the original image, as I’ve said before, is that it did not exaggerate the claims, but simply repeated them.) [...]