National Review Online, August 18, 2009

If the right to vote (or not vote) for our leaders is a sign of a healthy democracy, so is the right not just to criticize, but also to insult them. Jeering, heckling, and rude, impious laughter are no less a part of the democratic process than the force-fed ecstasy of a party convention, the cheers of the shining-eyed faithful, or the complacent applause at rubber-chicken dinners. A statement of the obvious? You’d think so, but judging by some of the more overwrought reactions to a new and notably unflattering portrait of President Obama, some of his supporters need to relearn how to live with an American way of debate that is vigorous, rarely sedate, and often distinctly rough about the edges. That is not to say that this depiction of the president does not raise some troubling issues of its own — part of its force, unfortunately, if probably inadvertently, derives from the fact that it does — but those issues are, on balance, rather less disturbing than the near-hysterical response of a number of those who claim to be offended by it, reactions that suggest that too many of Obama’s disciples still believe their god-king should be allowed to float, untroubled and undisturbed, above the hurly-burly that the rest of us call politics.

The offending image, as most Americans know by now, is a photograph of Obama manipulated into an approximation of Heath Ledger’s Joker character in The Dark Knight. Its origins remain somewhat obscure, but it appears to have been based on an earlier photoshopped Obama-as-Joker created by a Chicago student. That image was not apparently a reflection of its creator’s political views (and was subsequently removed from his Flickr page). The same cannot be said of the new version. Joker-Obama has been given a blue background and a red frame. These colors combine with a chalk-white face and red slash of mouth to conjure up a harsh, scornful retort to the serene red, white, and blue of the legendary “Hope” by Shepard Fairey that did so much to shape and enhance Obama’s electoral magic.

When comparing these two clashing portrayals, we notice that in Fairey’s poster Obama’s mouth is set, serious, determined, while Joker-Obama’s is transformed into a hideous, thoroughly unconvincing smile, a smile made even more disconcerting by the subject’s staring panda eyes. His face, like that of the movie character on which it is based, is that of a madman. Fairey’s Obama by contrast is a saint, a visionary, a leader, his eyes peering out at the radiant future into which, no doubt, he intends to take us, a future summed up in only two words (first “hope” and later “change,” or was it the other way round?) that can be both noun and commanding verb, but are as empty of real meaning as the “socialism” with which the anonymous artist behind Joker-Obama captioned his creation.

Posters of Joker-Obama first appeared a month or so ago, before going viral and becoming the first anti-Obama artifact to attract a mass following in a country still littered with adoring Obamabilia. In a sense, therefore, this brutal little portrait has already done its work. The icon is chipped. A sharp, disrespectful cackle has interrupted the self-satisfied chorus of agreement with which Obama’s skillfully teleprompted sermons are usually received, a cackle made even more dangerous to the administration by the fact that mounting public skepticism over some of the Democrats’ initiatives has, for the first time since the election, created an opening that even the stumblebum GOP might manage to exploit. It is this (as much as any sense of lèse-majesté, although there is that too) that helps explain some of the outrage that this one image has generated, a tantrum rendered grimly amusing by still-fresh memories of the silence, or even approval, with which so many Democrats greeted the cruel renderings (including, naturally, one as the Joker from, naturally, Vanity Fair) of George W. Bush that scarred the political landscape throughout his term in office.

To be fair, some of those who object to Joker-Obama have attempted to clothe their complaints in something more substantive than “You can’t do that to our guy.” The word “socialism” is inaccurate, they grumble, and to the extent that the Democrats do not appear intent on reviving the spirit of Upton Sinclair they are quite right. On the other hand, we live in 2009, and the bundle of resentments, superstitions, and aspirations once dubbed socialism have evolved into a protean collection of ideas that don’t fit comfortably with traditional notions of what that antique ideological label should mean. Who needs common ownership of the means of production? With growing government intervention in the economy (even excluding the current emergency arrangements), in your pocketbook, and in the more general ordering of society, there are worse ways to describe the direction in which this country is sliding. “Socialism” may not be the most precise, the most carefully calibrated, professorially approved term to use, but as shorthand for the understandable fear that a remodeled leftist leviathan is stirring, it will do.

Others have tut-tutted that using the Joker in this fashion makes no sense because (a) the Joker isn’t a socialist and (b) President Obama is not a raving homicidal maniac — criticisms that may suggest that the literalists are now running the asylum. We are after all talking about a caricature. We can, I think, agree that — despite persistent rumors of his earlier involvement in the Biden campaign — the Joker is not even a Democrat, let alone a socialist (he is more of a nihilist, I suppose). Equally, I hope that even the most rabid of those of us on the right can admit that Obama — while not so preternaturally calm as frequently asserted — is very far from being a raving homicidal maniac. We ought also to be able to agree that using the Joker to deface (in two senses of the word) a picture of Obama was, sit down please, a joke — a pointed joke, sure, a nasty joke, maybe, but a joke nonetheless. There’s nothing much to parse here, folks, just move along.

And yet that grotesque image has made more of an impact than might have been expected. Perhaps it’s just because it represents a chance at last — after months of generally worshipful media coverage — to protest and, better, to make fun of our sainted president. And maybe it does come with a certain crude logic. You can at least make a case that the Joker is an agent of chaos, and that Joker-Obama thus taps into fears that chaos (hyperinflation, say) will soon be with us if the Democrats’ policies continue in their present direction. Maybe. But the best bet is that the real power of Joker-Obama is as a mask, a device that plays to the anxiety of many Americans (an anxiety so strong in some cases that it has given birth to the Birthers) that they do not know who Obama is, an anxiety that is the not altogether surprising consequence of his rapid rise, guarded personality, deceptive governing style, and — it’s a shame that this should be perceived as relevant, but it apparently is — an upbringing and ethnic background that differ sharply from what was once considered the American norm.

That last aspect brings us to the regrettably inevitable question as to whether the poster is any way racist. Of course, the manner in which elements in the Obama claque attempt to shut down debate by blaming (it sometimes seems) almost any criticism of the president on racism has become a cliché of contemporary American politics. And in that respect, the reaction to Joker-Obama has not disappointed. Blogging for LA Weekly, Steven Mikulan claimed “the only thing missing” from the poster “is a noose.” Over at the Washington Post, culture critic Philip Kennicott tied himself up in knots as he tried to demonstrate that applying the “urban” make-up of Heath Ledger’s Joker to Obama (rather than that of Jack Nicholson’s supposedly more “urbane” take) was a “subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument,” an attempt to assert that “Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time.”

Ridiculous, yup, but just because most such allegations of racism are ludicrous, that does not mean that all are. There is something — the whiteface — about Joker-Obama that means this poster is not a banner under which the opposition to the president should rally. To be sure, “clown white” (to use the technical term) makeup is an essential element in the appearance of Batman’s archenemy: it’s impossible to transform anybody — whether George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama — into the Joker without it. Nevertheless, even if (as I would guess) the Joker-Obama poster was created without any racist intent, it can still be read in a way that resonates very uncomfortably indeed. However much we might want to, we can wish away neither the uglier parts of history nor their continuing echoes. As a result, therefore, and regardless of the intention behind it, giving Obama the Joker’s stark white skin tone takes what would (in the case of Bush and Clinton) be simple caricature dangerously close to the badlands of minstrelsy.

Of course, most (though not all) minstrel shows featured whites in blackface rather than the other way round, but a key theme that lurked within almost all of them was the use of, to adopt a clumsy phrase, racial cross-dressing to mock and belittle black people. It’s the memory, however vague, however buried, of this, I suspect, that has contributed to both the poster’s offensiveness (to some) and, sadly, its appeal (to others). Yes, About.com (owned by the New York Times!) is, at the time of writing, running a picture of RNC chairman Michael Steele made up to look like a clown, but when I look at it all I see is a depiction of a man (who happens to be African-American) portrayed as a clown. The far more disturbing Joker-Obama is something else. Unlike Steele’s sleek clown, we are shown an unhinged, sinister trickster, with make-up that is not so much costume as (rather poorly executed) camouflage, a disguise that can at least conceivably be interpreted as a suggestion that Obama could not have been elected if he had revealed, so to speak, his true colors, a suggestion that in its most literal sense is deeply demeaning to African-Americans.

Stretching too hard, perhaps, overly “sensitive,” possibly, but both America’s troubled racial history and the current febrile state of our politics call for caution in this area — and so does clear-eyed political calculation of what it will take to beat Obama in 2012. Playing the Joker just isn’t the way to go.