TIME Person of the Year

My wife just bought me a copy of TIME magazine's annual "Person of the Year" issue. This year's recipient is Barack Obama--no surprise there. (I think "World Waits with Baited Breath to Learn Identity of TIME Person of the Year" would have been a funny headline on The Onion about a month ago.)


I haven't seen semiobama do anything with this so far (maybe I missed it?)*, but the striking thing about the cover is that it is a direct take-off of the famous poster series by an artist named Shepard Fairey that circulated in the weeks leading up to the election. Here's one of Fairey's posters from the series:

And here's the TIME magazine cover:

The point to be made here is not that TIME is imitating Fairey: that's beyond obvious. Nor is it exactly a "tribute," to Fairey or Obama, either one. Republicans might argue that TIME is here revealing its biases by casting the new president in a light that his supporters clearly approve. But it seems even more likely that whoever selected this cover for the "Person of the Year" issue is up to something a little more subtle.

The TIME cover uses several visual gestures (colors, the rather stylized yet realistic artistic style) to acknowledge the Fairey posters, but superimpose onto it several words and images that aren't immediately clear. If you look closely, you can see a windmill, part of an American flag, a snippet of a headline ("Breaking News: Barack Obama...") on Obama's forehead, and (more proimenently than anything else) a dollar sign, just below the president-elect's left ear. None of these images seems exactly to be a clear "message"; together, they form something that might be described as more like a "texture." They resemble the various symbolic and anti-counterfeiting design features on a dollar bill.

What message does this send? That Obama will one day be one of the honored presidents on American money? Somewhat less favorably (or more ambiguously), that the economy is the biggest issue he will face as a new president?

At any rate, it's an interesting example of a publication taking control of a candidate-sponsored image (sort of; Fairey's posters weren't "official" campaign documents, but prints were available for sale on Obama's campaign website) and using it to its own ends. Rather than saying "we're willing to present you in the way you and your supporters want you represented, Barack Obama," TIME seems to be saying "Now that you're elected, you might think you control the message, but in reality, you belong to us."

UPDATE: I didn't look closely enough; the TIME cover doesn't imitate a poster by Shepard Fairey; it is by Shepard Fairey. Almost as if Obama has, by some weird consensus, taken on a (semi-)"official" poster artist, with a distinctive style that will (presumably) be associated with the new president for some time. Hard to think of a precedent where a public figure (even beyond just politics) has been so closely associated with a particular artist or form of imagery. Semiobama doesn't seem to talk about the recent TIME cover, but they do discuss the original Fairey poster in some detail, and astutely, here.

*ANOTHER UPDATE: semiobama has now had its say on the TIME cover (and even provided a link to this blog--thanks, guys!), bringing several additional insights into the mix.

Election Day 2008

Everyone knew that Tuesday, Nov. 4 would be a memorable day in history. The unanswered question is how it will be remembered. Lots and lots of images--some will stick, some won't. Which ones will be iconic?

I'd nominate the tv feed of Jesse Jackson weeping at Grant Park in Chicago while waiting for President-elect Obama to give his acceptance speech. Cynics wondered, predictably, if Jackson's tears were of frustration rather than joy: after all, Jackson was the only other African American to come anywhere close to being nominated for president (not that he came all that close), and he notoriously (and profanely) criticized Obama last summer when he wrongly thought he was off-camera. But for most, I suspect, the image was a moving one, even if Jackson's attitude toward Obama is, in all probability, complex. The media's narrative tends to allow for little nuance in the relationships between black leaders--either Obama is the culmination of all that Jackson has worked for, or else Jackson and Obama are rivals.

On the other hand, I think few of the political cartoons in the days following the election will stick. Much has been made about humorists' supposed difficulties in finding a comedic edge when it comes to Barack Obama. (See here and here for interesting discussions.) Whatever the cause, the main problem seems to be a lack of originality. Lots of references to Obama's famous "fist-bump":



...and to Abraham Lincoln passing the mantle to Obama:



...and to Abraham Lincoln fist-bumping Obama:



...and to Martin Luther King, Jr. fist-bumping Obama:


A good part of these cartoon's drives is wishful thinking: the implied (or explicit, sometimes) claim that, now that an African American president has been elected, America's legacy of racism is over. George F. Will was upfront about this: "We are free at last from the inexpressible tedium of the preoccupation with skin pigmentation." Stephen Colbert was equally upfront (if less sincere), asking interviewee Charles Ogletree: "Is, then, racism over?"

Fear of a Black President

This topic (the last in my three-part series of golden oldies) is both timely and obsolete now that Barack Obama is maintaining a tidy lead in the presidential election with just over two weeks to go. When I wrote this paper, Obama was a state senator with no national name recognition, and if there was going to be an African American president anytime soon, most people assumed it would be a Republican, Colin Powell. (Also, the paper was written before the TV show 24, which initially featured the African American actor Dennis Haysbert as the president, or the Chris Rock movie Head of State, had debuted.)

In sum, I looked at the various representations of an African American president in the news media, film, and literature, and concluded that there have been two main strains:

1. the "liberal version," which focuses on the attainment of the presidency by an African American man (always a man, as far as I've seen), and scrupulously avoids talking about policy or any overty "racial" issues: once an African American assumes the office of the presidency, this myth assumes, the American history of racial conflict will immediately become a closed book.


2. the "Afrocentric version," which assumes that blackness is "an ideological rather than a purely visual or symbolic entity," and that the race of the president is a separate (although clearly related) issue from that of race relations in America.

Lots of examples to look at (again, remember that this is pre-Barack Obama, pre-24 and Head of State):

• Toni Morrison famously wrote, during the Clinton impeachment scandal of 1998, that Clinton was "our first black president." However seriously she meant her remarks to be taken, Morrison clearly saw blackness as something other than a matter of skin color--as a cultural rather than a biological phenomenon. In the animosity Clinton faced from the right, she saw a glimpse of what African Americans in positions of power consistently face in our culture; thus, her view can roughly be categorized as part of the "Afrocentric" perspective.


• The 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed touches on the rumor that President Warren Harding had black ancestry. Wrote Reed, "When Republicans approached Harding with these rumors and asked him to deny them he said, 'How should I know. One of my ancestors might have jumped the fence.' What kind of answer was that?" Clearly, Reed was not charmed by Harding's unwillingness to acknowledge (or, for that matter, even to bother to repudiate) a possible black heritage.
• The 1964 novel The Man by Irving Wallace tells the story of Douglass Dillman, a black senator who (through a series of coincidences) ends up as president. Although Wallace is taking a stand against racism, he also betrays his implicitly racist attitude in a couple of key passages. His character, President Dillman, thinks to himself, "an original piece of paper is white, but the carbon is black, and often the carbon copy, no matter how weak, is almost as useful." Almost as useful? A racist Secret Service officer resents Dillman's ascension to office; however, (anticipating the motif of the "noble racist" later seen in Matt Dillon's character in Crash) he nobly risks his life to save Dillman's and is rewarded by a promotion that allows him to move into a segregated neighborhood. (I'd feel better if I felt that Wallace was conscious of the irony here, but I'm not convinced he was.)
  

  Inevitably, Dillman is impeached (one of the points I suspect Morrison was trying to make was that the first African American president will surely, like Clinton, be impeached--we'll see). He is charged on four counts, but he knows very well that the real reason he's being impeached, what he thinks of as the "fifth article," is being black. Eventually, he's acquitted and his lawyer informs him that he was acquited of "all five" charges--that is, he's acquitted of being black!

• Although I have not seen it, I read a very interesting article about the film version of The Man (starting James Earl Jones), written by Samuel B. Garren and published in CLA Journal. It explains that the original screenwriter, an African American novelist named William Attaway, attempted to push the story in the direction of a more distinctly anti-racist message (for example, showing that racism was present throughout the nation, not exclusively in the Deep South, and--in contrast to the novel--including scenes in which African Americans speak out against racism without being regarded as whiners or schemers). Garren, who read the various rejected drafts of the screenplay by Attaway, shows that he was flouted at every turn by Wallace and the film's producers. (The film was eventually made using a screenplay by Rod Serling.)
  
• Then there's Deep Impact, the 1998 movie in which Morgan Freeman plays a president who must contend with an asteroid that threatens to destroy the world. The movie follows the "liberal" model of African-American-president mythology. The producers cast a black actor to play the president, true, but only in the absence of the slightest whiff of political topicality in the movie. We're all anti-life-destroying-astroids, and so it must have seemed safe to cast the president as a black man (knowing, presumably, that this was unusual, and maybe even benefitting from the appeal of newness). Movies about actual issues upon which Americans can disagree, in contrast, cast white actors as the president.

I'd be interested in how people think recent developments alter the thinking outline above. Clearly, Obama's candidacy has (to the minimal extent it has touched directly on race at all) traded exclusively in the "liberal" version of the myth in its rhetorical and symbolic gestures. On the other hand, assuming Obama is elected (as polls suggest he will), it will be interesting to see how his racial identity--Obama is, of course, the son of a black man and a white woman--influences the discourses that surround him.

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: The first black president is neither black nor a president. Discuss.

Handshake

After the second Obama-McCain debate, the TV cameras showed John McCain giving Barack Obama a pat on the pack; Obama then offered a handshake to John McCain. McCain deflected the offer by pointing Obama's attention to his (McCain's) wife, Cindy, whose hand Obama then shook. Here it is:



Viewing the debate coverage, I noticed it, briefly registered it as odd, but didn't think anything more of it. Maybe it means nothing (although it has provoked some debate). However, at least one writer managed to connect it to larger discourses and codes concerning masculinity, and the result is some nice cultural commentary. Here it is: http://www.theroot.com/id/48400.