Marie Antoinette’s beheading during the French Revolution was prefigured by a campaign against her, which included the dissemination of unflattering rumors and a drawing that showed the queen’s head grafted on to the body of a Harpy. In those days, that was daring political satire. It had grievous consequences.
Now, in the age of Photoshop, every crank with a computer can be his own little Robespierre. Even children, cutting and pasting in the glow of the blue screen, can quickly learn how to lop off the heads of the famous and paste them insultingly on to the bodies of others.
Fortunately for modern-day victims, e-mockery isn’t fatal (as it was under the actual Robespierre, with his guillotines). Still, it must be deeply unpleasant.
There you are, going about your business, when someone comes along and punctures your majesty with a particularly sharp joke or cartoon or tampered photograph.
The latest individual to experience the unpleasantness of public ridicule is, of course, President Obama.
In the first six months of his presidency, Obama’s image has endured various unkind manipulations. He’s been depicted as a pair of goggling eyes. His head has been grafted on to the body of a witch doctor.
And now his face is appearing on posters in the guise of The Joker, the terrifying and depraved character played by Heath Ledger in last summer’s Batman blockbuster.
The Joker’s slashed cheeks and alabaster clown makeup were ghastly when an actor wore them, and they are ghastly again superimposed on the face of our 44th president.
Kudos of a dubious sort surely go to John Caglione Jr, the makeup artist who prepared Heath Ledger for the screen and who, it seems, created this new cultural trope. Naturally, many Obama supporters are livid: Whoever put Obama in this guise must be racist!
I do not recall a similar outrage last summer when George W. Bush appeared in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine dolled up in grisly Joker maquillage. Perhaps sensibilities were dulled from eight years of seeing the American president depicted as a chimpanzee, as a vampire sucking the lifeblood from Lady Liberty (on the front cover of the Village Voice), and, across the world, as a warmongering chimera made up of equal parts Texan and Nazi Fuhrer.
You’d think the ubiquity of such grotesque imagery would dilute its power to shock. Yet a picture of Obama as The Joker or Bush as Dracula still packs a wallop. These images are designed to surprise and offend, and they do.
The odd thing, really, is how consistent this type of mockery is over time and across the political spectrum. The treatment of Marie Antoinette, whispered by her enemies to be a monster of appetite, and displayed in caricature as a clawed Harpy from antiquity, suggests how very old a practice this is.
Whether the effect is achieved through computer rendering or from the tip of a quill pen, the temptation is to present your opponent quite literally as a monster.
If you can’t sufficiently evoke the fellow’s fiendish qualities through force of language or suppleness of argument, well, you can simply graft his face on to a repellent creature that everyone will recognize.
We may smart when our guy gets smeared. We may guiltily exult at the malicious misrepresentation of the other guy. But it’s silly and ahistorical to seethe with outrage or to believe that, as our hearts may urge us, some politicians ought to be sacrosanct. Offensive exaggeration is the language of politics. And ‘t’was ever thus.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
