A crude and highly dangerous poster which entirely misrepresents Barack Obama and uses a crass, fallacious slogan to describe his political vision has been circulating across America – and now, digitally, across the globe.
You can find it in
this link.
Thankfully, the Obama-Joker-Socialism poster pictured above, which began appearing across Los Angeles and other parts of the US in July, is infinitely less disingenuous, less evacuated of all meaning and less entirely risible than Shepard Fairey's "iconic" propaganda sop.
Moreover, it is
genuinely inspiring.
And what the image inspires, regardless of its true origin (the sole focus of all mainstream comment until 20-year-old student Firas Alkhateeb came forward last week), is a rare frame of criticism through which to reflect on the policies of the US regime’s latest frontman – and those of his cheerleaders.
Public satirisation, however rudimentary, of Obama's political creed has been almost entirely absent since his "historic" accession: that astonishingly a-critical fanfare most notable for its “intensification of feeling and degradation of significance”, to use Walter Lippman’s classic phrase.
And with good reason. Accepted unquestioningly as the benevolent face of an America renewed in moral purpose and direction, Obama’s messianic status has long been
naturalised within mainstream commentary.
Accordingly, the initial media reaction to the Palestinian-American student’s admirable and entirely democratic subversion stands as a remarkable illustration of how restricted the parameters of mainstream debate remain over all things Barack.
The immediate response of the liberal press – a
most accommodating vehicle for the US leader’s blandishments – was defensive, terse and one-dimensional.
“Obama as the Joker: just what is it supposed to mean?” asked the Guardian in a
pithy news stub:
“A bizarre poster depicting the US president as Batman's arch-nemisis [sic] has everyone scratching their heads. There are many levels on which it doesn't quite work…”A more sustained piece of “analysis” was
subsequently provided by the Guardian’s Ben Walters, under the title “Why the Obama as Joker poster leaves a bad taste in the mouth”.
In this painfully narrow assessment of the poster’s possible implications, Walters griped that “this attempt to paint the US president as a supervillain” is “just wrongheaded. Plus, it's not even funny”.
The poster was dismissed as “the American right's first successful use of street art”.
This analysis largely represented the standard rebuttal of the poster across the liberal media spectrum, which was to scorn the “cohesion” of what was evidently an amateurishly misguided barb by the US right: pairing Obama with the “horror” of socialism, and lampooning him as evil incarnate.
In fact, this reading was a quite shocking "straw man" – in which the very
idea that the poster might have originated from the
left (mocking the risible myth of Obama’s global beneficence, for example) was wholly absent.
As commentator
Kurt Nimmo wrote with devastating clarity:
“The basic problem with the Obama as Joker poster is that its message is lost on those who believe the government is basically good and all it takes to turn things around (things accomplished by that monster Bush) is that we elect the right man to the office of president. It is intellectual laziness that prevents most people from reading the true message.”I
n this circumscribed scenario, the idea that Obama could be reproached for his reprehensible failings as a liberal – or, more simply, denounced as the fraudulent mask of a murderous rogue state –
is an impossibility.
It simply does not exist.
Neither does critical discernment. The addition of the word "Socialism" (allegedly appended to Alkhateeb's image by an anonymous other) actually dilutes the message, observed Nimmo, who went on explain the primary reason for the “laziness” described above:
“It is of course incomprehensible for most liberals to believe Obama represents the most violent and sadistic force in the world – the United States government long ago taken over by [a] bankster cartel or mafia. Three million dead Vietnamese, one million plus dead Iraqis, an undetermined number of Afghans and assorted others either directly slaughtered by the US war machine or its numerous proxies should be evidence enough. “So should the penchant for torture and economic warfare, the latter waged against literally billions of people… Obama is the current and transitional face of this high-tech murder and economic violence machine.”
This reading of our perilous geopolitical moment is simply unacceptable within the confines of mainstream debate.
As Harold Pinter noted in his
Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 2005:
"Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified."But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now."Pinter's summation is as biting now as then:
"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
The media – and especially in the US – also entertained the notion that the Obama as Joker poster contained racist connotations. This was, as ever, another lamentable abstraction designed to obfuscate any meaningful criticism of Obama’s contemptible record.
Nimmo wrote:
“Liberals far and wide are like Chatty Cathy dolls when it comes to either criticising or parodying Obama – they uniformly assert racism is at work. Of course, one of the reasons our rulers selected Obama is because they want to disarm all criticism by playing the race card. In our politically correct and brainwashed society, any allusion to racism immediately destroys an argument – no matter how reasoned or logical.“The white face – and clowns usually hide their faces under white makeup (it is called “clown white”) – has nothing to do with an attempt to portray Obama as a white person. It’s about Obama as the Joker, and not necessarily the Joker played by the late Heath Ledger.“Bob Kane’s original comic book Joker is a master criminal and a bizarre psychopath. Obama is not necessarily a psychopath – that is to say a ruthless hands-on serial killer – but by the standard of his office he is a master criminal, or rather a front man for a cartel of master criminals.“In 2009, the office of the president is nothing if not a wholly owned subsidiary of the international bankers. In fact the whole of Congress is owned by the banksters and their corporate minions, a fact the liberals consistently miss or are incapable of understanding mostly because many of them are beholden to foundations established by the same bankster elite.”So too a corporate media in thrall to pro-business governments – left, right, any-which-way.
All too quickly, of course, arrived the “revelation” that the author of this “wrongheaded” right-wing smear was in fact no angry conservative, but a student from Obama’s hometown who actually favoured “an even more liberal presidential candidate”.
A humble and bemused Alkhateeb explained his simple reasoning:
“After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ,” he told the
Los Angeles Times. “From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him.”
So
wrote the Guardian after this turnaround:
“Firas Alkhateeb, 20, is far from one of the red-faced protesters who have shouted down Democratic politicians at constituent meetings, nor is he a smug young conservative standing against his Obama-enthralled peers.”Yet these were the only positions plausible according to the paper’s initial non-analysis.
Beyond the cloying hagiographies and unwavering pro-Obama support of the liberal media, Alkhateeb’s depiction of the president as lacking in “substance” is easy enough to understand.
The exemplary
Paul Street has written:
“Obama has remained amazingly silent on his campaign promise to advance the critical and overdue labor law reform - the Employee Free Choice Act (the EFCA) - that is required to re-legalize unions and restore strength to the labor movement (aptly described by John Edwards during the primary campaign as ‘the single greatest anti-poverty program in American history’). The EFCA is loathed by key segments of the business class and is therefore not currently on the table of recovery policy."Of Obama's foreign policy pronouncements, Street adds:
"Obama is continuing core Bush policies on Israel and Iran. He refuses to pay honest attention to the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people about whose fate he stayed revealingly mute during the savage U.S.-Israel assault on the people of Gaza last December and January. He made no effort to resist the U.S. Israel lobby's torpedoing of Charles Freeman's nomination as chair of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman, a veteran national security operative, was brusquely dismissed because he dared to suggest that the Israeli apartheid and occupation state might bear some responsibility for violence and hatred in the Middle East.
"Meanwhile, Obama dangerously and revealingly resists pressure to investigate and prosecute the monumental war and human rights crimes of the Bush administration. He quietly commits to the officially concealed trillion dollar annual Pentagon budget, a giant subsidy to high-tech industry that pays for more than 760 bases across more than 130 nations and accounts for nearly half the military spending on earth – all in the name of 'defense.' The leading Wall Street investment firm and bailout recipient Morgan Stanley reported the day after Obama's election victory that Obama 'has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.'"Elsewhere, the rigorous and uncompromising Street (author of what John Pilger has called "perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States",
Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics) skewers the myth of Obama's domestic "Change" epoch:
“Obama refuses to advance the obvious cost-cutting and social democratic health-care solution: single-payer national health insurance (improved Medicare for all). Consistent with his recent description of himself as a New Democrat, Obama's Treasury Department and the secretive, unaccountable Federal Reserve Bank (to whom the new Administration increasingly wishes to pass the buck of the current financial crisis) will dispense untold trillions of dollars in further taxpayer handouts to the giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign and who drove the U.S. and world economy over a cliff.“According to leading liberal economist James K. Galbraith in the Washington Monthly, Obama's plan to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries' toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management in place amounts to a massive effort to ‘keep perpetrators afloat.’ “By left-liberal writer William Greider's account, ‘Obama's approach so far is devoted to restoring Wall Street's famous names and his [supposedly non-ideological] advisors tell him this is the 'responsible' imperative, no matter that it might offend the unwashed public. Obama evidently agrees’ (Washington Post, March 22, 2009). The liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is ‘filled with a sense of despair’ by Obama's ‘bank rescue plan,’ which ‘recycles Bush administration policy – specifically the 'cash for trash' plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury secretary Henry Paulson’ (March 23, 2009).
“The Obama plan rewards reckless and selfish investor class behavior by funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to bankrupt banks. Under the scheme unveiled on March 23, 2009, the public is put on the hook to the tune of $1 trillion. The program amounts to what Krugman calls a coin flip in which investors win if it's heads and taxpayers lose if it's tails. As the Times quickly noted, ‘the Treasury and the Federal Reserve will be offering at least a tablespoon of financial sugar for every teaspoon of risk that investors agree to swallow,’ buying up the toxic mortgage assets that the investor class created in the first place. The government (identical to the people in a functioning democracy) will take more than 90 percent of the risk, but private investors reap at least half the reward.“Meanwhile, the underlying insolvency of the banks continues, a problem the Obama administration hopes we will forget about as we get dazzled by their fancy and obscure plan. Beneath claims of allegiance to ‘free market’ ideals and ‘private enterprise,’ the Administration's ‘bank rescue’ design – described by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich as a continuation of ‘the most expensive tax-supported fiasco in history’ (Salon, March 20, 2009) – boils down to a traditional exercise in Wall Street welfare: socialism for the rich, market discipline and capitalism for the rest of us. It is at heart what Greider calls an effort ‘to restore the old order that failed,’ the dark reality beneath newspaper headlines proclaiming a new age of progressive-style government regulation (‘Bill Moyers' Journal,’ PBS, March 27, 2009)."
Street’s last sentence is most instructive. A critical chasm separates the quality of this analysis from the robotic chorus played out by our daily newspapers.
The simple fact is that a mountain of evidence exists to illustrate how deplorably Obama’s actions – both domestically and abroad – belie the noxious façade so painstakingly sculpted by his administration.
The patently ephemeral nature of this façade was plain as day to a 20-year-old student of Palestinian origin, who was moved to satirise what he and many others rightly see as an epic exercise in truth-reversal.
Not so for our flagship media channels.
For them, the US president is
"America’s hope, and, in no small way, ours too" – a saviour to be buttressed, airbrushed and resolutely defended.
Such are the permitted limits of dissent.
Nick Griffin's appearance on the BBC's worn-out political forum Question Time was a predictably haphazard show-trial that generally worked wonders for its racist guest of honour.
It was the one and only statement from the serpentine Griffin that was not immediately ridiculed or quashed.
Despite their commendable intentions, the irony of 800 justice-seeking humans expressing outrage at a fascist party entering the headquarters of an organisation which implicitly supports aggressive, illegal wars and horrendous repression around the world was acute.
