Caricature in End Times, or the Future of Caricature
Standing in the Rose Garden in June of 2017, President Trump made a solemn announcement: the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The global plan had been drafted and signed just over a year earlier in accordance with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was, and is, an international peace treaty of sorts, with the primary mission of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to sustain life as we know it. In the Rose Garden speech, President Trump proclaimed his undying commitment to put America First. He also lamented the risks of worldwide terror that continued to loom over the United States and its globalized economy. “It’s a stupid and reckless decision,” wrote environmental activist Bill McKibben soon after the president’s announcement. “But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science.” McKibben goes on to call President Trump’s withdrawal “our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq.”1 It was, in other words, an indication of the wrongheadedness in a logic to Make America Great Again, and the apparent comic futility of the notion that we might Make Peace, Not War.
The president’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was something of a forerunner for things to come with regard to global commitments and public health pacts. For months before the United States became the epicenter of a coronavirus pandemic, President Trump ignored dire warnings from federal agencies as well as the World Health Organization (WHO). He disregarded reports presented to him in classified briefings. He discounted the counsel provided by intelligence officials who, a year earlier, lamented to Time that President Trump made policy decisions like he made political decisions: with information that supported positions he already held and thus required a grasp of nuance that went no further than “willful ignorance.”2 Hence, in large part, his administration’s response to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has been almost unanimously deemed a failure, if not an idiotic and preventable one. As one reporter for the Irish Times put it, powerlessness “in the face of a natural disaster” is one thing, but it is “quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time—willfully, malevolently, vindictively.”3 The president, in this reporter’s estimation, is a monstrous imbrication of the Pleasure Principle and the Death Drive, showing forth “all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious.” His barefaced pride is abject. His brazen egotism is the culmination of a charmed life, and a creeping form of Republican Party politics that has evolved over decades into “a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the ‘deep state’ and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks).”4 President Trump is in his wrongful place.
As the saying goes, no one is an island. This, however, is precisely what President Trump pretends to be. Even further, he tends to comport himself as if he is the ruler of an island that is itself set apart from the world. There is a compelling definition of caricature, laid out in terms of individuals and populations, measures and weightings, norms and their exaggerations. It comes from David Perkins. Caricature, says Perkins, is an expression of an individual, population, or even idea that is patently out of whack relative to some scale or magnitude, symbolic or otherwise.5 That is, caricature is by definition a portrayal of something out of humor, recognizable but distorted, unreal (even surreal) yet nonetheless realistic or true. Cartoonist David Rowe is once again helpful here, particularly with a caricature from July 2017 that features King Trump standing atop an iceberg in the shape of the United States. The United States is a frozen island surrounded by water that reflects like glass, with the Eiffel Tower appearing brightly in the backdrop. Trump is naked except for an imperial robe, a ridiculous crown, golden high heels, and a long red tie draped over his grotesque abdomen and covering his genitals. But he is not alone. Next to him, facing Paris, is a polar bear. “Excusez-moi,” he says. One hand is clutching the knot of his tie where it meets his robe. The other hand is shoving the polar bear into the glassy water.
Rowe’s caricature brings Perkins’s definition to rhetorical life. It makes the president into an absurd image of the US national character, individuated and scaled down to the level of a misguided Gargantua. It shows him for his distortion of international norms. It reveals the vileness in his vanity. Inasmuch as caricature entails a complexity of rhetorical relationships that rely upon humorous resemblances to alter how we see ourselves (even, or especially, if in recognition of how we see others), it illustrates a comic abstraction of “the realities of the human condition.”6 Rowe’s caricature—and there are many more where this one came from—goads us to reexamine our sense of collective selfhood not in national or other terms of unity and division but rather in terms of what Joseph Meeker once dubbed “the comedy of survival,” which “depends upon our ability to change ourselves rather than our environment.”7 This makes it all the more crucial that “ugly caricatures” are seen for their capacity to disindividuate characteristics, to derive humor from shared defects, and to push the boundaries of any one individual’s ethical failings so as to magnify the follies of an “individual culture.”8 What might be called the caricature of survival makes it all the more crucial that attention is paid to caricatures that are anything but garden variety. It makes crucial, too, a resituation of the “comic way,” or a renewal of human welfare in the face of a dehumanization so endemic to warfare. And it lays bare that other, all too essential aspect of monstrosity in caricature, from which the humor of the human condition emerges.
It is hard to imagine a more fitting time to face our own survival, and perhaps most fittingly with good humor and restorative comicality, than a time of pandemic disease. This is especially true when the imperious activities of humans and the imperial arrogance of world leaders not only facilitates but also foments damage to the natural world, never mind the cultural problematics that ail us. Numerous commentators have portrayed the coronavirus as a monster made of bad world leadership and runaway neoliberalism. The pandemic has become a freak show of sorts, with President Trump on center stage as a political aberration that nonetheless represents a longstanding “spectacle of racism, ultranationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that has dominated the national zeitgeist.”9 In this spectacle is the comic plague of a cultural politics that “celebrates capital over human needs, greed over compassion, exploitation over justice and fear over shared responsibilities.”10 Rowe’s caricatures are once again instructive—and monstrous! One from March 2020 pictures President Trump with his arms crossed across his chest, a stern look on his face, and an American flag for a bib covering his suit jacket. He is sitting at a table with the president of China, Xi Jinping. They are surrounded by other world leaders, all with worried looks on their faces. There is a globe in the center of the table. It is pocked with red marks to signify the spread of coronavirus. “The plum pudding has COVID-19,” the caption reads. A handful of small plates with medical facemasks are situated in front of President Xi. A single small plate with a model airplane is set before President Trump, no doubt making fun of his trade wars with the Chinese government, his fetish for both tariffs and travel bans, and—in hindsight—his refusal to wear a mask. The entire cartoon is a remake of Gillray’s famous etching from 1805, entitled “The Plumb-Pudding in Danger,” which features Napoleon Bonaparte sitting with William Pitt carving out pieces of the world for France and England, respectively. In Rowe’s rendition, the “state epicures” are as much emblems of economic and other forms of warfare as they are icons of failed states.
This theme of governmental folly is replete in Rowe’s caricatures. Later in March, just before Easter, he depicted President Trump as a towering and demonic Easter Bunny standing in the charred, black rubble of the United States. The president has a gargantuan girth. He is holding a golden putter cane. A Twitter bird is his only article of clothing. It is wearing a medical facemask and covers his genitals. Most protuberant in the scene is the big basket in President Trump’s hands. It is a basket of COVID-19. The eggs inside are viruses. That same month, journalist and news editor Susan B. Glasser characterized the president’s conduct at the daily White House press briefings regarding the federal government’s coronavirus response as a cipher for his leadership. With unapologetic whimsy and caprice reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s cultural glossology, Glasser referred to his daily dish-ups as “Trump O’Clock Follies,” his moronic comportment and witless remarks as “monumental flimflammery,” and his persona as “a cartoon caricature of a wartime President.”11 Glasser’s characterizations came in response to President Trump’s sense that reopening the United States on Easter, despite the spread of a deadly disease, would be a testament to good timing—not for public safety, but rather for his own showmanship in being something of a savior figure on a “beautiful” holiday. The United States did not reopen on Easter, and Trump blamed everyone from state governors to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the Chinese.
One more caricature by Rowe is worth mentioning in this coda. It is from April 2020, and it was published after President Trump planned to halt funding to WHO as part of a broader push to place blame everywhere other than on his own administration. In this instance, his intent was to insulate himself by pitting leading global health experts against the administration’s Coronavirus Task Force. The president appears as a comic image of grotesque kingliness. His milieu is a domestic space reeking of utter opulence, with gold-tasseled American flags for draperies. White silhouettes of the coronavirus appear where some stars should be on Old Glory, and President Trump looks more like a meretricious wannabe than a meritorious king. His body is familiarly gargantuan. He is wearing a recognizable crown with a caged Twitter bird in the globus cruciger and a dollar sign atop the orb where a cross should be. An imperial robe is draped over his shoulders, tied to his neck with a golden “T” medallion. He has tiny high heels on his feet, a putter for a cane, and a tattoo with the opening text from the Constitution (rendered in its original typography but not its original wording) on his bulging belly. “Me, the People.” There is another amendment, “and Governors. . . .” On the day Rowe’s cartoon was published, President Trump asserted his total authority to decide when individual states could reopen. All governors could hope for was his authorization. Such authority is specious at best, and it betrays the trappings, pomp, and circumstance of President Trump’s faux kingship. Alongside him in Rowe’s cartoon is a globe. The letters “WHO” are stamped on its surface, stretching from the United States to China. On one hand, this seems an outlandish piece of décor for someone so keen on putting America First. On the other, it makes all the sense in the world: it epitomizes President Trump’s self-centeredness, and his notion that he is the only Who’s Who that matters. He is One President who shuns not only the very idea of We, the People, but also the very concept of One World.
The US president (and, more broadly, US presidentialism) is a necessary stooge in all of this, specifically when it comes to portraying situations normal all screwed up. Consider that Telnaes has pictured Trump using a flattened world as toilet paper while announcing his plan to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. Crudely, the president is seen making a mockery of the urge to be decisive in the idiomatic suggestion to shit or get off the pot. An animated cartoon published by the Real News Network in January 2018 goes further with a depiction of King Trump commanding something akin to the Great Wave to back off while he sits on a throne gripping a golden T-topped scepter. In the wave are words and phrases like “Climate Chaos,” “Monster Storms,” “Floods,” and more. There are editorial cartoons of Trump holding the world hostage with a handgun. Of the president eating the world as if it was the innards of a hamburger. Of Trump literally doing battle with a globe armed with a rifle in a reimagining of cartoonist David Low’s infamous World War II–era cartoon, “Very well, alone.” “Arm yourself,” said Winston Churchill in late spring of 1940, “and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict, for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation.”12 Taken today, these are words that could be applied to the pervasive sense of a world continuing to compete for resources, a changing climate, migrant populations, refugees, class divisions, race divides, gender inequities, and a generalized aura of war as populations scramble to save themselves. Of course, they could also be applied to an image of global cooperation that pushes back against the descent into some olden war of all against all.
There are some eerie resonances here of Perkins’s view that humor is a dubious bedfellow of caricature precisely because of the ways it can provoke new, potentially vexing images of Otherness in comic imagery of the Self. Lurking in this mix of monstrosities and magnitudes is a medicalized sensibility about culture and character that has come along with the coronavirus pandemic and will undoubtedly persist long after the world goes back to “normal.” These resonances relate to the very art of caricature as it was established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was a specific term for that relation. It was figura caricata, or “charged figure,” and it connoted the monstrosities of particular bodies as they typify the monstrosities that are actually in and of an entire body politic. It was a term meant to capture what it means to imagine the right and wrong ways of being together relative to caricature as a potential harbinger of critical judgments—or, better, critical admonitions—about the human condition.13 Caricature, in other words, was seen as a rhetorical appurtenance for proper, or improper, ways of seeing and being. Similarly, monsters and monstrosities are more than reflections of malformations. They are more than distorted images of ourselves revealed in a comic looking glass. The word “monster” comes from the Old French monstre, but it also comes from the Latin monere, which means “warning.” Caricatures are comic portrayals of monstrous characters and characteristics. They are, at times, monsterful unto themselves. But they are also very often warnings that are meant to make us see what might come of, say, human cruelties or deformed cultural principles. Caricature comes from monstrosities. It reminds us of people like the White Kings in Carroll’s looking-glass world who find it difficult to see people as people. It is the rhetorical thing that, like Alice, brings the plum cake before the Lion and the Unicorn. Caricature is most surely of a kind with Alice, a “fabulous monster,” carrying the weight of the comic (and not-so-comic) worlds we make as if they were looking-glass cakes. The mirror, or the medium of comic anamorphosis, is not the thing distorted; what is in the mirror—that is what is twisted, mangled, bent. A caricature of world leaders failing in their responses to a pandemic is not only a caricature of people. It is a caricature of the plum pudding, too.
It would not be inappropriate to proclaim at this point, “Hand ’round the caricatures, Monster!” After all, the future of caricature has a stake in showing forth the miscreations and the aide-mémoires in the Human Comedy. Its rhetorical ecology is such that, at the end of the day, the human condition is the fundamental site of its comic abstractions—of kings and subjects, of citizens and soldiers, of Selves and Others, of Us and Them. Its wartime sense of humor, as has been captured throughout this book, makes it possible to grapple with what are undoubtedly the grotesqueries of peace as they square off with the vainglories of war. Caricature reminds us that no one is an island, and that no rhetorical force of nature can face off with the natural world. It laughs at the idea that a comic looking glass might be rose-colored, and the common sense that anyone can safely have a cake and eat it, too. What is more, caricature parlays the so-called comic way into a comic way of seeing and being that resembles a caricature of survival such that we can look upon the world for what matters in our charge to live together, differently. It would be folly, then, to look for caricature in the normal course of things.