the Obama Joker poster.

[Pure]

have a look what the american right have come up with.


comments? any semioticians out there? i find it really scary.

http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2...er-surfaces-sparking-confusion-and-criticism/

http://www.hpbcreations.com/pics/obama_joker_11x17_300dpi.jpg

http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/election/obama-joker-poster-it-does-exi/

 

[slyc_willie]

I find it both clever and tasteless. No doubt, though, we'll see it surface around here sooner or later as someone's AV.

 

[sr71plt]

I've already seen it as an avatar. That wasn't here?

 

[slyc_willie]

I've already seen it as an avatar. That wasn't here?

LOL. I'm not surprised. But if it's been here on Lit, the poster wasn't in one of my usual haunts.

 

[Austin8]

I've already seen it as an avatar. That wasn't here?

yep it was, other presidents have been portrayed as the joker, but this one is especially poignant.

 

[DesertPirate]

Same thing was done to Bush last year, turnabout is fair play!

Here are 3 of the ones with Bush to go with the 1 of Obama:

http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/2009/08/07/Politics/poster-outrage??test=faces

Seems the Left is having trouble with the 1st Amendment? So terribly thin skinned.

With the way they are reacting to questions I wonder what will happen if there is a tenth of the comments and crudity about Obama that there was about Bush? Martial law?

 

[Pure]

bush joker

i find the bush joker almost benign by comparison.

http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/2009/08/07/Politics/poster-outrage?slide=2

 

[DesertPirate]

i find the bush joker almost benign by comparison.

http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/2009/08/07/Politics/poster-outrage?slide=2

No comment on the demon or vampire?
Bush was flat out demonized for 8 years, the current crop of crybabies couldn't handle the same treatment. This is so mild by comparison with what was done to Bush that complaining makes Obama look even more of a wimp.

 

[slyc_willie]

No comment on the demon or vampire?
Bush was flat out demonized for 8 years, the current crop of crybabies couldn't handle the same treatment. This is so mild by comparisonwith what was done to Bush that complaining makes Obama look even more of a wimp.

I found those tasteless, too. I didn't particularly like Bush, I admit that, and I like Obama a little more. There's just something about me that dislikes mocking any sitting president in effigy.

 

[Liar]

I see you fellas haven't been hanging out on the newsgeek and madness sites, like Fark and Digg. It's been an ongoing meme ever since the iconic promo pics from The Dark Knight came out, to grab Photoshop and paint everyone and their mother up as the most creepy Joker possible.

First one I saw was of Sean Hannity, then Hilary, then Bush. Lately, it has been Obama, Michael Jackson, Ahmadinejad, Limbaugh and that crazy lawyer chick who floated the forged Kenyan birth cert.

 

[TE999]

I found those tasteless, too. I didn't particularly like Bush, I admit that, and I like Obama a little more. There's just something about me that dislikes mocking any sitting president in effigy.

Every president since LBJ has been held up to mock and ridicule, not to mention outright hate and vilification. Johnson was a warmonger, Nixon a crook, Ford a stumblebum, Carter a non-entity, Reagan a befuddled old coot, Clinton a horn-dog and the Bush pere and fils alternatively dopes and evil masterminds.

Welcome to real life Barack.

 

[sr71plt]

Every president since LBJ has been held up to mock and ridicule, not to mention outright hate and vilification. Johnson was a warmonger, Nixon a crook, Ford a stumblebum, Carter a non-entity, Reagan a befuddled old coot, Clinton a horn-dog and the Bush pere and fils alternatively dopes and evil masterminds.

Welcome to real life Barack.

Back further than that. It just skipped Eisenhower because he was the war general hero of his time. Truman was portrayed as a henpecked country hick and JFK as the pope's lackey.

The one that really scared me was Nixon. The official portrait we had to hang in federal government offices was just too close to the 5 o'clock shadow sly fox face used in cartoons.

 

[Liar]

Mockery comes with the job. The thing about the Obama attacks that annoy me is not that they are aplenty. That's natural. It's that I think they are somewhat different from much we've seen earlier.

I didn't pay attention to US politics pre Bill Clinton. But the main attacks on him and Bush were quite harmless character assasination. Clinton was a horn dig. Bush was a doofus. At least that was the majority of the discourse going on. Not even the "evil" tag on Cheney seemd to be all that serious. It was more cartoonish than anything.

The kind of attacks we see now on Obama are not made to ridicule him. They're made to scare people of him. With nonsensical trigger words like "socialism", "marxism" and lately, "racism", it's not character assasination, it's person assasination. With very un-specific and unsubstantiated strokes, painting Obama personally as a direct and sinister threat to the life, liberty and security of "real" Americans. That's not the tone of discourse I remember from the last decade.

 

[sr71plt]

The kind of attacks we see now on Obama are not made to ridicule him. They're made to scare people of him. With nonsensical trigger words like "socialism", "marxism" and lately, "racism", it's not character assasination, it's person assasination. With very un-specific and unsubstantiated strokes, painting Obama personally as a direct and sinister threat to the life, liberty and security of "real" Americans. That's not the tone of discourse I remember from the last decade.

I agree and I believe that's what the Nixon cartoons attempted to do too--pretty successfully.

 

[Verdad]

After all the misapplied talks of hate speech, I'm loath to use the word, but I will say that the poster made my blood go cold. I found it much more disturbing than others, judging from the responses thus far.

The image is supposed to be a superimposition of Joker's make up on Obama's face, which is supposed to say that Obama, like Joker, wreaks chaos.

If that were all, I'd say it's a silly message, but I'd accept it as an attempt to criticize Obama's policies by those who vehemently disagree with them. Or I'd say that if it weren't for another, much more sinister meaning, jumping out at me on a much more visceral level.

To grasp that level, one needn't have heard of Joker at all. Joker is a tenuous and artificial metaphor here, anyhow. Rather than conveying much by itself, Joker strikes me more as a smokescreen, supplying plausible deniability to the real message, the one that hits the viewer in the guts.

Blackface, and not Joker, is what the make up truly references. Behind the thinnest pretense, provided by the red herring of the word "socialism", the true message has nothing to do with policies and everything to do with racism.

And it seems to me to get worse even than that. The poster doesn't stop at calling the President "blackface." It goes on to suggest violence. The mouth looks like a wound. It looks as though it had been slashed by a razor, suggesting a throat slashed by a razor, which becomes a gaping "mouth" of its own.

It's in my opinion as close to a threat and as close to an invitation to racial violence as one could possibly get without saying the words. This semiotician, at least, is pretty chilled by it.

 

[Verdad]

i find the bush joker almost benign by comparison.

http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/2009/08/07/Politics/poster-outrage?slide=2

I think it is benign by comparison. To begin with, it's based on a different, funnier Joker, and of course, the interplay of meanings found in Obama's poster is absent here.

 

[DesertPirate]

After all the misapplied talks of hate speech, I'm loath to use the word, but I will say that the poster made my blood go cold. I found it much more disturbing than others, judging from the responses thus far.

The image is supposed to be a superimposition of Joker's make up on Obama's face, which is supposed to say that Obama, like Joker, wreaks chaos.

If that were all, I'd say it's a silly message, but I'd accept it as an attempt to criticize Obama's policies by those who vehemently disagree with them. Or I'd say that if it weren't for another, much more sinister meaning, jumping out at me on a much more visceral level.

To grasp that level, one needn't have heard of Joker at all. Joker is a tenuous and artificial metaphor here, anyhow. Rather than conveying much by itself, Joker strikes me more as a smokescreen, supplying plausible deniability to the real message, the one that hits the viewer in the guts.

Blackface, and not Joker, is what the make up truly references. Behind the thinnest pretense, provided by the red herring of the word "socialism", the true message has nothing to do with policies and everything to do with racism.

And it seems to me to get worse even than that. The poster doesn't stop at calling the President "blackface." It goes on to suggest violence. The mouth looks like a wound. It looks as though it had been slashed by a razor, suggesting a throat slashed by a razor, which becomes a gaping "mouth" of its own.

It's in my opinion as close to a threat and as close to an invitation to racial violence as one could possibly get without saying the words. This semiotician, at least, is pretty chilled by it.

I think you are over reacting badly!
Everyone of his apologists tries to make anything race based and it's pure bullshit! Obama's main henchmen in this overt power grab are white (Pelosi and Reid). It's the policies, not the color.
As for the poser it is a pretty faithful rendition of the mouth they put on Heath Ledger in the movie.

 

[Liar]

I agree and I believe that's what the Nixon cartoons attempted to do too--pretty successfully.

Possibly. I wasn't around back then so I wouldn't know. Could be a re-hashed playbook from those years.

I think the word I'm looking for is belittling. Bush was belittled by his dissent mob as stupid cowboy wannabe with daddy issues. Clinton was belittled by his mob as a walking penis. Reagan, as pointed out, was belittled as first the Hollywood president, and later as the geriatric old coot. Bush the elder was belittled as a charachterless grey suit and paper pusher.

Obama is not being belittled, he's being inflated. The importance of the things he do and what the opposition thinks he might do, is grossly exaggerated. He's Satan, Stalin, and the Illuminati puppet master all rolled up in one. And he's going to kill your grandmother and enslave your children.

 

[DesertPirate]

I think he's more the puppet than the puppet master.

 

[sr71plt]

I think he's more the puppet than the puppet master.

I think Liar has it right. I don't think anyone with any sense of politics in the last year could see Obama as anyone's puppet.

 

[Liar]

I think he's more the puppet than the puppet master.

You may think so. But that's not the image that is being pumped out and cemented by the very vocal opposition, from Tea Parties to talk radio. Obama is not a guy to simply Dislike. He's a guy to Fear.

 

[SeaCat]

Personally I think it's a load of bullshit. Look at who's screaming and who they are whipping up in their screaming.

These are the same people who did the same things to other Presidents, and they thought it was cute. They do it on a daily basis to their oponents and find nothing wrong with it.

But when it is done to "their" president or icon their minds are blown. Immediatly it is racist, (Reverse Black Face) It's Evil and it's even immature. (I can agree with the immature part but that's politics.)

Then again I have this odd philosophy. Wake the fuck up nd get a life. Irregardless of who you voted for he's now the president so get behind him and try to help him.

Then again I have a problem with most of the public groupings and titles. I believe in judging a person on their actions.

Cat

 

[Verdad]

I think you are over reacting badly!
Everyone of his apologists tries to make anything race based and it's pure bullshit! Obama's main henchmen in this overt power grab are white (Pelosi and Reid). It's the policies, not the color.
As for the poser it is a pretty faithful rendition of the mouth they put on Heath Ledger in the movie.

Possibly. But if not the main message, it's a double entendre that's almost inescapable to read into the image. The meaning of threat is certainly present, as Liar noted; that it can flip between "Obama is a threat to you" and "threaten Obama" makes it just another notch more disturbing.

Personally I think it's a load of bullshit. Look at who's screaming and who they are whipping up in their screaming.

These are the same people who did the same things to other Presidents, and they thought it was cute. They do it on a daily basis to their oponents and find nothing wrong with it.

But when it is done to "their" president or icon their minds are blown. Immediatly it is racist, (Reverse Black Face) It's Evil and it's even immature. (I can agree with the immature part but that's politics.)

Then again I have this odd philosophy. Wake the fuck up nd get a life. Irregardless of who you voted for he's now the president so get behind him and try to help him.

Then again I have a problem with most of the public groupings and titles. I believe in judging a person on their actions.

Cat

Wouldn't it be cool if people made fewer assumptions? Or at least took time to discern between different posters. Half of the board apparently loathes me because I'm not sufficiently devoted to their ideas, but it doesn't stop the other half from thinking I'm fanatical about those same ideas. You can't have it both ways, guys.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

have a look what the american right have come up with.


comments? any semioticians out there? i find it really scary.

http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2...er-surfaces-sparking-confusion-and-criticism/

http://www.hpbcreations.com/pics/obama_joker_11x17_300dpi.jpg

http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/election/obama-joker-poster-it-does-exi/

And where was your outrage when Bush was depicted in the same manner, as the joker?

I guess it's okay for the left to do things like that but, so help god if someone that leans a little right does it, it's scary.

What a bunch of bullshit.

 

[sr71plt]

Well, I do think that DP was right that you (Verdad) overanalyzed/demonized (with a view of seeing every nuance as intentionally evil) the Obama Joker poster and that SeaCat is right that every president gets just about as much demonization in cartoons as the previous ones. The difference here does seem to be that Obama is black, so there should be different rules applied (some think). But to me, the equalizing reality sets in when no special quarter is claimed/given on the basis of race--and I think that's how Obama plays it.

Bush the Lesser was cartoonized as a monkey, which, to me, is on par with making Obama the Joker. And as I noted before, I don't think any president has been more demonized in cartoon than Nixon was.

On the offensive scale, the avatar a certain poster has been using here that makes Obama into a painted-up tribal cannibal type is more offensive to me than the Joker one is--and I'm sure the poster was trying for offensive when he used it. But a national-level politician signs on for this. And the Americans are just working in a tradition that was acidly set by the British centuries ago.