Democratic Transparency

Democratic Transparency - James Gillray

The content of political rhetoric is fluff, spin, and image mongering.  More so today than ever before?  Perhaps.  For those who are interested, the truth is not hard to find behind the colored pictures of the magic lantern show of television.

Every once in a while, I come across an article or a letter in the NYTimes that nails it right on the head.  Simply, and without complications.  Here is my latest entry:

To the Editor:

John McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate is reminiscent of President George H. W. Bush’s choice of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court.

Faced with public sentiment for an African-American to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall, Mr. Bush said, in effect: “You want an African-American? Here’s one who will consistently work against most African-American interests.”

Mr. McCain, thinking that he can seduce supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton, says: “You want a woman on the ticket? Here’s a solidly anti-choice woman who’ll work against women’s interests.”

Interestingly, both choices play the same game of identity politics that Republicans claim to abhor.

Their cynicism is shameless.

Joseph Russo

Bristol, R.I., Aug. 29, 2008

Thanks, Mr. Russo.

Foxy Lady

This is a late 18th century print by Rowlandson called “Reynard put to his shifts.”  It is from my personal collection, and is one of my favorites because of the dense knot of allusions, mythological, sexual, political, and satirical that it contains.  Just what is it about?

“Reynard” is the French word for fox, and it is sometimes used in English fables (in the land of fox hunting) as the name as an animal character.  The Fox referred to here is Charles James Fox , Whig opponent of the Tories.  James Gillray lampooned him often and viciously, partly because he was, for a while, in the pay of the Tory party.  (Though he didn’t spare James Pitt, the Tory leader, either.)  Here is a detail of a Gillray satire of Mr. Fox  that shows him assassinating British liberty in the costume of a French sans culotte revolutionary.  (He was, for a time, a supporter of that revolution, and Gillray pilloried him as an unpatriotic sympathiser with Napoleon long after the Revolution had devoured its children.)  In my print, Mr. Fox is, of course, shown as a fox chased by some vicious hounds that bark out the names of legislative bills he supported.  A fashionably dressed woman  calls out to him, “My dear fox, get into cover,”  inviting him to run and hide beneath her skirts.  The sexual innuendo is indirect, but clear.  What is going on?

In 1784, the year this print was made, two unusual things happened in British politics:  Mr. Fox had to actually compete for his seat in parliament – usually a seat once gained, was totally safe; and Mrs. Georgiana Cavendish, an educated, brilliant, cultured, and tremendously wealthy noblewoman (shown here in a portrait by Gainsborough – she was famously attached to gambling) who was a distant cousin, friend and supporter of Fox, went out on the hustings to drum up support for him.  (He won in the end.)  Never mind the Age of Enlightenment, this was not women’s work, and she was ridiculed and lampooned for it.

Rowlandson himself, did several satires of her political canvassing, including these two, which show Mrs. Cavendish suckling foxes at her breast, and buying votes by selling kisses.  Other less subtle prints show her groping tradesmen, not just kissing, or playing with voters on a see-saw balanced on a penis fulcrum.

 

There is an additional association:  the theme of “Reynard put to his shifts,” i.e., the hunted fox at his wits end was a common theme in popular culture of the day.  Here is an image by Carrington Bowles (1779) that shows one representation of the story with some commentary:

Reynard’s Last Shift may be read satirically as a comment on the upper-class hunters’ callous indifference to the disruption their sport brings down upon a peasant family. But we know as well that the image takes place within a narrative that here begins to yield other possibilities, among them the lascivious joke of the huntsman grabbing tail, highlighted by his reach between the legs of the alarmed woman. There is also the problem of the two genteel bystanders, woman and man, whose amused nonchalance is so striking. Is this cruel indifference or is it just possible that the young man’s gesture and her gaze indicate that they share our lascivious joke, setting up a complicity with the viewer? And indeed who are we as the imagined viewer? Possibly our 18th Century counterparts—the purchasers for a print like this—would be more of the “middling sort” who would see themselves as neither gentry or peasant, but there were always openings for alignment one way or the other. It could be that part of what made “jokes” like this so resilient in the period was a fluidity of the social structure in which the boundaries were unstable, even while readily recognizable within the visual delineation the prints suggested through such markers as dress.
from Clark University

This sort of close and entertaining analysis of satirical prints from this period of English history is found in abundance in Vic Gatrell’s fabulous book, City of Laughter:  Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London.

In this image, Georgiana is given a sort of [mock] heroic aspect, standing tall and firm, while fox cowers beneath her skirts.  The dangers to Fox’s political personna are apparent – Karl Rove is not an original thinker.  My sense also is that Rowlandson here is alluding ironically to the myth of Actaeon, with which he was certainly familiar, as would any man of his class who was educated on the classics.  That unfortunate man loved nothing so much as hunting stags with his hounds, but one day he accidentally happened on the goddess Diana naked at her bath.  She splashed and cursed him, he metamorphosed into a stag, and his own beloved hunting dogs pursued himand tore him to pieces.  He couldn’t even form words to call to them to stop.  Here, the goddess is is protector, simultaneously saving him, and by implication, emasculating him, I think.

The Masses are Revolting

“Sire, come quickly! The peasants are revolting!!” You know that old joke.

Carlyle, my constant companion these days, writes of the black, sulphorous mass beneath all society, slowly rising up, for good or ill. The masses, with their red Phrygian caps of liberty, planting liberty trees everywhere, staging revolutionary spectacles on the Champs de Mars that mix royal pomp, medieval papistry, and carnival.

Gillray pilloried James Fox, yet again, by showing him as a scruffy, farting, bloodied sans cullote (in fact without [knee] breeches, not without pants, but Gillray can’t let such a chance go) shouting Ca Ira!, [It will go well!] loosely translated here:

We’ll string up the aristocrats!
Despotism will die,
Liberty will triumph
“We will win, we will win, we will win,”

And we will no longer have nobles or priests
“We will win, we will win, we will win,”"
Equality will reign throughout the land

And the Austrian slave will follow it.
“We will win, we will win, we will win,”

And here is Gillray showing the zenith of the glorious revolution, speaking of stringing up people on the Lanterne as Carlyle refers to the lampost cum lynching post.

Was this the true birth of mass society? The rule of the mass-mob-demos-and consumer? Carlyle devotes a chapter to journalism of the day – it was everywhere:

One Sansculottic bough that cannot fail to flourish is Journalism. The voice of the People being the voice of God, shall not such divine voice make itself heard? To the ends of France… Constant, illuminative, as the nightly lamplighter, issues the useful Moniteur, for it is now become diurnal: with facts and few commentaries; official, safe in the middle…

A daily newspaper! The Moniteur. Faithfully reporting the news so that I, centuries later, sunk in my collegiate ennui, deep down in the third sub-basement of the library, can happen upon its collected numbers, bound, gilt-edged, in tattered leather covers, and turn hopefully to the news of January 21, 1793, and read of the execution by guillotine of Louis Capet. (Where did I put that photocopy?)

And news for all!

Nor esteem it small what those Bill-stickers had to do in Paris: above Three Score of them: all with their crosspoles, haversacks, pastepots; nay with leaden badges, for the Municipality licenses them. A Sacred College, properly of World-rulers’ Heralds, though not respected as such, in an Era still incipient and raw. Such is Journalism, hawked, pasted, spoken. How changed…since the first Venetian News-sheet was sold for a gazza, or farthing, and named Gazette! We live in a fertile world.

Mass journalism, for anyone with half a penny. Posters, placards, propaganda on parade. The satirical prints of the day were more scatalogical than Gillray’s by far! The revolution sought to manage information, to create its record consciously.

And what of Ortega y Gasset, author of The Revolt of the Masses? He despised the mass-man, but like Flaubert, did not identify him with an economic strata, but as a type. (Flaubert: I despise the bourgeois in a worker’s smock as well as the one in a top hat!) Could it be that Ortega is writing about the genesis of kitschman?

He felt that history was moved by aristocrats, the Nietzchean supermen, the special ones, but why did he feel that? Because the movement of history was marked by the “progress” in things he valued. What about movement for its own sake? What if history just moves, never progresses? No theory, no subject class, just one darn thing after another. And the mass-men, the sans cullottes, Carlyle’s hero-men, they all play their part.

Bubbly Economics

If you have read my recent post on Ayn Rand, or if you keep tabs on right wing pseudo-intellectualism in general, you might be interested in Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times today. Writing about the ongoing mortgage debacle, he derides Alan Greenspan and others for their inaction regarding the real estate lending bubble that is now deflating rapidly and with great consequences for the economy as a whole. He regards it as a triumph of extreme ideology, and he specifically singles out for mention Alan Greenspan and his lifelong devotion to the ideas of Ayn Rand. I quote:

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

Sound familiar? How can anyone believe such rot? Then or now? Of course, the Nobelist Milton Friedman was similarly hypnotized by the “power of the market.” So interesting, then, to read Adam Smith, the granddad of modern economics and to see his views on the merchant class. I quote once again his remarks on the merchant class, from The Wealth of Nations:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

Of course, I can’t resist putting in another Gillray link, this time on the theme of uncorking…

Metamorphosis

In Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak Memory, there is a chapter in which he takes a break from his sometimes tedious nostalgia about the comings and goings of his aristocratic family and describes the origins of his “mania” for butterflies. Of course, he was a serious collector and respected lepidopterist all of his life.

The image of men with butterfly nets has often been used in movies and TV for comic effect, but apparently his experience was that it was regarded as simply bizarre. Here he describes the impact of his boyish hunts on the startled Russian country people:

“I would see in my wake the villagers frozen in the various attitudes my passage had caught them in, as if I were Sodom and they Lot’s wife.”

Marvelous simile there, a movable city of sin, the burning metropolis of Sodom, plowing through the countryside leaving a trail of salt/stone figures, transfixed by its passing. And here he addresses the frightening aspects of transformation as he comes across a caterpillar on the path:

“…a strange creature…in a frantic search for a place to pupate (the awful pressure of metamorphosis, the aura of a disgraceful fit in a public place).”

I think it was Joyce Carrol Oates who identified the “gothic” element in Dante’s Inferno, as those passages in which characters experience in helpless terror the changing of their bodies into something else. (The “disgraceful fit” reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s descriptions of his epileptic attacks, always ecstatic in the end). Transformations and horror, as with Actaeon, werewolves, American and otherwise, Jekyll-Hyde, vampires male and female, and even the Incredible Hulk.

(The image at the top is by James Gillray, and shows a celebrated naturalist Joseph Banks.)

Richard Sala Comics

How nice to talk about an artist who hasn’t been dead for two centuries. Well, I see no reason to apologize for my taste, and if you read my recent post “On Paper,” you know that Richard Sala is my favorite comics artist now. This black and white piece from “The Grave Robber’s Daughter” illustrates other aspects of his work that I love: comic gore galore; black humor; great sound “effects” (does he practice stabbing people to get it right?); sexy, tough, profane female characters; and femme fatales, dead and alive.

The heroine above is Judy Drood, a dark alter-ego of Nancy Drew. She slugs and swears like a sailor. The image below is his fetching heroine, Peculia, to be found in his series Evil Eye, and elsewhere. You don’t want to mess with her either. How does he make them so sexy with such simple elements? Too bad Peculia isn’t real…she wouldn’t like me anyway…I’m reading these things too much!

I was not always a comics fan. As a boy, I read a bit of Superman and Batman. After college, I enjoyed reading Zap and Anarchy comics briefly. I always liked Edgar Allen Poe, however, and clearly, so does Sala! It was James Gillray, of course, that reawakened my joy in the pure entertainment of graphic images. The sheer delight I get from Gillray’s wild and vicious satires is matched by the giddy pleasure of Sala’s hilarious, dark, absurd, noir-world. It’s pure entertainment of a very special kind. See for yourself —-> Richard Sala’s Page.

Odd Maps

Maps are part of my business – I make them with computers using geographic information system (GIS) applications. On occasion, I cannot resist buying some old scraps of paper with interesting maps on them. I have a particular fondness for maps that don’t show much of anything. The one on the left here (click on the thumbnails to enlarge them) is a genuine United States Geological Survey (USGS) quadrangle that has nothing but water! I like to say that it’s the most accurate map in the world because it conveys virtually no information. If you wish to avoid error, say nothing.

The quad is similar to another map, more whimsical, that is shown at the wonderful blog, Strange Maps, where you can find all things weird, funny, and cartographic. The map I have in mind is from Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. Go take a look around – you’ll never look at maps the same way again.

The middle map I have here is an 18th century chart of part of Mongolia, and, of course, there’s not too much on it either. Makes you wonder what use is was to anyone. The image to its right shows the area of the map superimposed (dark polygon) on a modern map of Asia. Quite a big area to wonder through with only that as your guide! Such was life before MapQuest and Google Earth.

Finally, once again, we have James Gillray. This is not the only image he did that involves massive deployment of turds, animal or human. And it is not the only anthropomorphic map he did either, but it is one of the best of both. Believe it or not, it is not the most unflattering portrait of George III he did. After all, here George is heroically defending the British against an invasion by Boney, and the joke is mostly on the French. Was this where Monty Python got their line (for the French) “I fart in your general direction!”

On Paper…

Pencil, pen, crayon, charcoal, on paper…create a world of meaning – where? In our minds.

In the book/film, Black Robe, the story of French Jesuit missionaries in Canada in the early 17th century, there is a passage in which one of the priests demonstrates the power of writing to the Algonquins. They have no equivalent tool in their culture. He takes aside one tribe member and asks him to whisper his name into his ear. He writes the name on a piece of paper and then hands it to another missionary who is standing some distance away. The second man speaks the name of the Algonquin and all the tribesmen are amazed. How did the name travel across space? There was no sound, no hand signs. Somehow, the name was captured in the scratches of black on the piece of paper!

Works on paper take the ideas and images of the creator and capture them for us to see, so that we can digest them in our minds. I have always thought about this a lot, this is what art is (and not just on paper) but lately I’ve been thinking about it on paper because of my preoccupation with James Gillray and comics. If you doubt that last connection, click on this thumbnail and examine this work from 1800 by Gillray: “Democracy: or a Sketch of the Life of [Napoleon] Buonaparte.”

Could not this have been produced, just this year, by Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury fame? (Many versions of the image were hand colored.)

For a superb social history of the English satirical print in the time of Gillray, I recommend the immensely enjoyable and beautifully produced book, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in 18th Century London by Vic Gatrell. You will even get a history of laughter!

The history of comics, and its relationship to art and ideas is wonderfully presented by Scott McCloud in his book, Understanding Comics.

Of course, the title is a nod to Marshall McCluhan’s Understanding Media, which is the inspiration for his text, although I think McCloud is better at explaining his more clear and sensible ideas than was McCluhan. Perhaps too, McCloud is a fan of the book that I never tire of promoting,

Prints and Visual Communication, by William Ivins. This book delves into the fundamental philosophical issues of just what reproduced images, i.e., prints, are, and what they do to us and for us. It tells us how they became ubiquitous – the movement towards mass reproduction of photographs in periodicals is the epic challenge motivating the ‘plot’ of the book – and lets us imagine what the world would have been like before this earthshaking change.

Meanwhile, these panels are from the comic tale, “One of the Wonders of the World,” by Richard Sala. This is, perhaps, my all-time favorite. I hope to post more on comics, with more examples, later.

A Peep…

Foul things lurk in the dark, damp caves of seditious politics! If my ignorance of Latin doesn’t hobble me too much, it says on the right, “Truth is great, and will prevail.”  (The thumbnail gives a larger and more clear uncolored image of this wonderful print by James Gillray.)

This print is from the Anti-Jacobin review, a journal dedicated to combating liberal and revolutionary sympathies in England in the last decade of the 18th century. All sorts of good people were pilloried in its articles. James Gillray was, for part of his career, in the pay of the Tory party, not an unusual arrangement for a satirist in those days.

Gillray, however, even as he took one side in his work, was not likely to let the other side off easily. In the print below, he shows Price, a well known liberal divine, surprised in his study as he pens subversive, “revolutionist” texts. And who, or what!, is finding him out? Edmund Burke, the famous conservative, here represented primarily by his nose. (Compare to the contemporary portrait detail shown below.) As the Gillray collector and scholar, Draper Hill, remarked,

“with typical ambiguity, the content of the engraving is critical of Price but the form ridicules Burke.”

For a wealth of images and background on Gillray, visit this excellent online gallery: New York Public Library – Gillray

Here are the notes on the image above:

Although originally a Whig and a supporter of the American Revolution, statesman and celebrated orator Edmund Burke warned that the French Revolution would lead to the collapse of order and an outbreak of regicide and atheism. Reduced here to a pair of peering spectacles, a prying nose, and a pair of tiny hands wielding a crown and a crucifix, Burke split with the Whigs and by 1792 had allied himself with the Tory leader, William Pitt. The “rat” upon whom Burke spies is the Dissenting, radical clergyman Dr. Richard Price. Gillray imagines Price at work on an imaginary essay “On the Benefits of Anarchy Regicide Atheism,” with a picture of the execution of Charles I hanging over his desk. Price’s actual sermon before the reformist Revolution Society, which praised the French Revolution and its ideals of liberty, and championed an elective monarchy, provoked Burke to write Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). While Burke’s essay was probably instrumental in changing Gillray’s attitude toward the French Revolution, the artist chose to portray Burke as a crazed fanatic. As Draper Hill has commented, “with typical ambiguity, the content of the engraving is critical of Price but the form ridicules Burke.”

Gillray – George Bush

(click to enlarge the image)

Scientific Researches?

It can get pretty grim today, examining the rampant run of pseudo-science. There are a lot of intellectuals out there, and a lot of pseudo-intellectuals (that’s SWAY-do, if you’re not in the know) and even more pseudo-scientists. The image by Gillray lifts my spirits a bit, with its hilarious shafting of savants, intent on the investigation of the pneumatic power of farts.

Yes, there’s cold fusion – when will the cold water thrown on it finally wash it away? – and there’s Intelligent Design – a “theory” without content – and there are the worthy epigones of that Victorian blockhead, John Galton, the contemporary running-dog-lackeys of vulgar empiricism. Right now, I’m thinking of Charles Murray, Adam Bellow, and the latecomer to the club, John Gartner. Not household names? – read on!

When I think of pseudo-science, I think of Murray, who made his splash with The Bell Curve, a statistical mishmash that manages to avoid the important question of just what he purports to be measuring. Race, intelligence? Does anyone have a clear definition of what these are? No? Then it’s off to the races, no pun intended – develop your own theory of anything. Murray hit the stores with another book in which assessed human “achievement” of civilizations with a quantitative method. Surprise, the west is on top! You pays your money, make your assumptions, and…

(Those who want a more intelligent assessment of why some cultures have won out while others disappeared should check out Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. His critics often tar him as a simple “environmental determinist”, but his arguments are quite rational, and far more subtle and profound than his critics appreciate.)

Murray’s first book was published by Adam Bellow, who has since weighed in with his cogent analysis of nepotism, a deliciously self-serving tome by someone who’s principal claim to fame – no fault of his own – seems to be his (recently deceased) father. Yes, it’s all genetic, ants do it, fish do it, nepotism is natural. Even Edward Wilson, the father of sociobiology, who stumbles badly when he tries to advance his ideas to the human cultural realm (He is a big-time subscriber to the naturalistic fallacy, i.e., that you can get an ought from an is.), might cavil. The crude socio-biologists always warp the same way: animals have evolved behavior A; humans have behavior B; A and B appear to be similar types of behavior; therefore, human behavior B is nothing but animal behavior A, and it is the same in all respects, origins, and purposes. Quite a few leaps there, and nature doesn’t make big jumps, does she? Back on the purely human level, Bellow said in a NYTimes Opinion piece,

“a name, nepotism can serve to get your foot in the door, but after that, you’re on your own”.

Of course, legions of struggling actors, artists, and other professional aspirants well tell you deadpan, straight off, getting your foot in the door is THE crucial step! They’re all smart! So, pseudo-science serves, once again, to dress up some propositions that are most gratifying to one’s self-esteem.

I happen to know that the next member of my anti-pantheon, John Gartner was Bellow’s school chum. Is this a co-inky-dink? Or…is it in the genes!? [And why am I talking about them? Simple: Saul Bellow died this week, and Gartner's book was just reviewed in the NYTimes today. And there are other connections, too dark and nefarious to mention here... ] Now he has written a book which posthumously analyzes several American high achievers and concludes that they were all hypomanic, i.e., just this side of clinically manic. Pity they aren’t around to suggest otherwise. Of course, this just proves that the USA itself is one great big self-selecting gene pool of hypomanics, which is why the USA is so successful, and presumably always will be. This is science? Yes it is, by jingo!

Finally, I must refer to Nicholas Kristoff’s column today, in which he asserts that Nukes are Green. NK doesn’t pretend to be a scientist, but he does claim to be factual and rational. Still he comes out with this statement:

Radioactive wastes are a challenge. But burdening future generations with nuclear wastes in deep shafts is probably more reasonable than burdening them with a warmer world in which Manhattan is submerged under 20 feet of water.

Okay, nuclear plants are pretty safe, I agree. Okay, they don’t contribute to greenhouse gases, but why does he assume that we should be more worried about submerging Manhattan than burying waste? Is he certain that they are equally probable. Nukes do produce waste – Manhattan under 20 feet – that’s a stretch for even the worst warming scenarios. Is it because the French do it? Hey, pass the Freedom Fries! “Probably more reasonable?” Better be sure before you bury!

Environmentalists often state that human civilization is conducting a giant, uncontrolled experiment with the climate, and if it turns out badly, we’re in bad shape. Doesn’t burying tons of intensely radioactive waste and assuming that our progeny will properly take care of it for the next 100,000 years or so amount to a rather daring experiment? A little radioactive waste in the groundwater could be a big problem, not to mention the fact that the USA can’t even seem to find a place to accept burial of even part of its waste. You can’t just dream away political problems such as NIMBY, although if we had a French Revolution here, that would be a solution, We could simply quell parochial resistance by forking over money to those affected the way the French government does. Bravo, bon idee!

Why does Kristoff pose the energy issue as one of “how do we maintain our current level of consumption in our current distribution system?” Green energy options are most feasible when the Grid is gone, replaced by more local sources. Utopian in the short run, perhaps, but the short run is quite malleable in this case by public policy. The long run, in which we are all dead, as Keynes famously remarked, is bad in any case. The facts, and imagination, are both part of science.

Gillray

My latest obsession – the prints of Mr. James Gillray, father of the political cartoon. I recently saw an enormous exposition of his work at the New York Public Library, and I was entranced. I’ve never had the least interest in collecting anything, not since I was a boy collecting metal cars, but the sight of his prints started me on a long-term project. Unfortunately, original impressions of his engravings and etchings are rare and expensive, so I shall be able to purchase only those of lesser quality or later editions from the 1849 Bohn edition. Oh well…The one on the upper left is one of his ’suppressed plates’, i.e., he never printed it, either because of government, publisher, or self-censorship. It is a jab at the king and his mistress, who was unpopular, and who was a rather petite woman compared to His Majesty. Gillray digs the knife in by ostensibly comparing their shoe sizes in this very funny and racy design that even Gary Hart might love. [Speaking of Mr. Hart, candidate manquee, my hat's off to him for skewering David Brooks with his letter to the editors of the NYTimes in which he pointed out that Brooks, the new-age conservative, was ripping off a good idea of George McGovern's, the bete noir of the right.]

Next, we have a print on a bizarre geometic theme, showing a sphere being projected onto a plane – a reference to some rumor of the day – and a conceit dear to my digital-cartographer’s heart. Then, France and Brittania kissing and making up, and finally, one of his many anti-Jacobin prints, decrying the execution of Louis XVI and deploring the Reign of Terror. He is wonderfully witty, tremendously inventive, higbrow and vulgar all at once. Hilarious! Exhilarating!

You can see a large image of the last three by clicking on the thumbnails, and you can find several websites that have a lot of his work on display, for sale or simply for show.