In the spirit of the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens, someone else's work who's been dead for over one hundred years but is still pissing off people: the consummate cartoonist Thomas Nast.
This time it's over his nomination to the vaunted New Jersey Hall of Fame, which has aroused the ire of a 14th century relic, The Ancient Order of Hibernians. They, along with enlisted political hacks, are protesting the inclusion of Nast based on the content of a few of his panels which depict Irish Catholics in derogatory fashion. President of the New Jersey Order, Sean Pender, says “I find it is outrageous that the New Jersey Hall of Fame is even considering such a bigot in these times for consideration” - a sentiment parroted by Assemblyman Wayne P. DeAngelo (D-Mercer): “We should not be honoring any individual who contributed to the popularization of bigotry and prejudice in our country." While this by definition might preclude an awful lot of shenanigans relating to the Church, in the meantime this politician better make sure he isn’t ever caught using the donkey symbol for the Democratic Party, or the elephant either for his Republican counterpart, Assemblyman David Rible: "As a state Assemblyman and an Irish Catholic I am appalled at the idea that New Jersey would seek to honor a man who openly conveyed prejudice and intolerance through his so-called art." And none of the protesting parties better use anything depicting Santa Claus or Uncle Sam either for that matter, lest they accidentally further contribute to honoring said individual’s media popularizations.
So
much easier to attack the shadow puppet instead of the
real thing, or try and grapple with the societal circumstances behind
historical events - much less what's going on right now - as
cartoonists, and all other forms of the media, reflect the bigotry and
prejudice of their times. To isolate them from their context results in
censored stupidity such as, for example, the
new, anesthetized edition
of Huckleberry Finn. And the supreme irony is how Nast, much like
Hitchens, focused his ire
upon the leading sources of bigotry and intolerance at the time, ie
religion in lockstep with its political simulacra. Not much has
changed, and as any casual perusal
of current editorial cartoons will reveal, there are many, many more
artists that will be joining Nast in Hell, or at least never get in to
the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Speaking of which: voting is open to all...
Like his art, Nast's thirty-year residence in New Jersey encompassed the good, bad and the ugly, and his body of work
left an indelible mark upon American culture, despite the efforts of
politically-correct censors who would do their best to erase the past.
Which, in light of the continuing blemish upon the Church in Ireland, will take far more than the self-righteous indignation of apologists to overcome. The systemic, institutionalized abuse extends beyond any one country,
even soiling the shores of Alaska, having reached remote Native villages and
resulting in the bankrupting of the Catholic Diocese of Fairbanks with
payments last year of 9.8 million dollars to the victims of abuse. *For more on this, watch the Frontline program "The Silence" here.
Posted above is "The American River Ganges,"
one of the notorious panels by Nast that is attracting all of the attention: it recasts bishops as
...menacing innocent children. Hmmm. One of the hallmarks of a great
editorial cartoon is how timeless it is, and this particular
one should be rerun in conjunction with any press about this newest
Nast-y controversy just to point out the hypocrisy of cherry-picking a
few bad
apples, since everybody knows that not all Irish
Catholic priests are pedophiles, right? Because it's simply just not
fair to draw upon such negative stereotypes on the basis of a few, isolated instances.
One would think that such
an organization would not cast stones, especially in a (literally)
stained-glass house: regrettably, being portrayed as drunks, reptiles or apes is
probably the
more benign caricatures that Irish Catholics will now be remembered as. They
certainly seem to have adopted the convoluted right-wing logic of spinning any criticism into where not tolerating bigotry is somehow re-branded as being intolerant and bigoted itself.
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