New York Post should have known better

By PAUL HAIST

article created on: 2009-03-15T00:00:00

A political cartoon by Sean Delonas published in the Feb. 18 New York Post and reproduced on this page has been criticized by some as racist because—they say—it implicitly likened President Obama to a chimpanzee and thereby evoked racist imagery of blacks—and worse, it raised the specter of assassination.

Apes and monkeys frequently show up in political cartoons or illustrations.

In addition to the currently problematic Delonas drawing, two other ape/monkey cartoons are shown on this page along with the infamous cover of the July 21, 2008, New Yorker depicting Barak and Michele Obama in the Oval Office.

One of the ape-toons is the cover illustration of Portlander Cassandra Sagan’s 2004 book, “No Chimp Left Behind,” a satirical romp through a garden of muddled pronouncements by former President George W. Bush. The book's cover proclaims its literary device: “President Really Hairless Chimp Switched at Birth.”

The other, like the Delonas drawing, is a single-panel political cartoon in which American-Algerian caricaturist Bendib depicts the Jewish people or Israel as a great ape astride the world. This drawing was used in an interview with Joel Kotek published on the Web site of The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ Institute for Global Jewish Affairs (jcpa.org). Kotek used the image to illustrate one of several anti-Semitic motifs in Arab cartoons—in this case, Jews as masters of the world.

When the Delonas cartoon appeared, The Post was deluged in complaints; demonstrators paraded outside their office. The paper was accused of racial stereotyping and suggesting assassination.

Post Editor-in-Chief Col Adams said in defense, “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the (Feb. 16) shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.”

When the public and media watchers called The New Yorker on the carpet for its Barak and Michelle cover last summer, Editor David Remnick said the magazine meant only to mock “the politics of fear” surrounding Obama’s candidacy.

I think the public eventually let The New Yorker off the hook. They are, after all, a foremost bastion of liberal hip chic punditry.

By contrast, Rupert Murdoch’s perennially money-losing New York Post is at best a bastion only of tawdry, exploitive and sensational journalism the bottom line of which is the bottom line—if only they could dig deep enough to find one.

To give The Post the benefit of the doubt and suggest that Adams was telling the truth about their motive in publishing the cartoon is to suggest that he and his staff are not just culturally tone deaf but downright stupid.

Even if their motive was mockery, they should have been aware of the racial implications of the drawing and realized that shooting a crazed chimpanzee as a stand-in for the author of the stimulus bill (Obama) is about as sensitive as it would be today for Sagan to produce a new satire suggesting that our new president is really a hairless chimpanzee switched at birth.

No matter whether one agrees with Sagan’s political views, and the many humiliations she pinned to Bush notwithstanding, her sharp satire is in the best tradition of American political satire and did not cross boundaries that in our society touch a nerve that might best be buried deep beneath cultural scar tissue as we try to move on from a dark and very long chapter of our past.

But touch that nerve is exactly what The Post cartoon did. It succeeds—if that’s the right word—because it plays on racist stereotypes about African Americans as less than human, prone to violent outbursts and best watched over by white authorities—and shot down stone cold dead if necessary. No uppity chimpanzee of blessed memory in Connecticut will alter the fact that most people will react to the Delonas cartoon that way, even when they don’t realize it or articulate it to themselves in that way.

The Delonas cartoon is more akin to the Bendib cartoon on this page than to the other two illustrations in that it rests on a foundation of hateful ideas and paints an entire race with a brush loaded with those hateful ideas.

The Bendib is hardly the worst anti-Semitic cartoon anyone has ever seen, but it is in a tradition that most Jews should recognize, as they also should in this particular Delonas cartoon.