I subscribed to The New Yorker, recently. I’d let my subscription slide some years ago and when I saw a good subscription deal, I took it. I received my new copy, and thumbed through the pages looking at cartoons.
To my surprise, all the cartoons in this edition were, as Trump himself is, all about Donald Trump. The New Yorker cartoons, as I recalled, were usually random, going from one social, religious, and political issue to another. Trump had clearly trumped all the cartoon selections appearing in April’s edition of The New Yorker.
I counted no less than seventeen cartoons making oblique or direct references to many of Trump’s signature features. Among them included Trump’s vanity, his buffoonery, and his grandiosity. One cartoon sketched facial grimaces in which he appears to be having excruciating gas pains and another in which he looks petulant like a child whose mother just told him no, he couldn’t. Another targeted his folksy verbiage, “really terrific,” another his divisive rhetoric; still another his bizarre selection of advisors, and his naïveté around world issues. While not everybody’s Renaissance man, he is every cartoonist’s bonanza. He remains, as with most narcissists, blissfully self-confident. For some, this is an attractive attribute. For citizens scared witless for their country and feeling powerless to do anything to make it safer, a presidential candidate with an aura of confidence, even bluster will give heart to some.
Comedians and cartoonists love prickly personalities. They are the mother’s milk of satire. Years ago Jon Stewart on the Daily Show aimed almost all of his spoofs at George W. Bush’s malapropisms and his administration that included the hawkish figures of Cheney and Rumsfeld. He’d also given President Obama a rough ride at times.
Trump presents as the archetypal adolescent. He loves shattering boundaries, demanding the center of attention, talking tough and name-calling. Some Americans confuse his provocative demeanor with credible political vision.
It turns out that his persona is similar to the “Ugly American,” a term that first appeared in the 1958 novel of that name by authors Lederer and Burdick. The book highlighted the political and diplomatic types during the cold war. It revealed how isolated, arrogant, loud and insensitive American diplomats and politicians – Americans in general – were in contrast to those of the Soviet Bloc. Soviet diplomatic teams were careful and sensitive in dealing with the subtleties of the people they wished to influence. The Soviets were superior diplomats. The book was a critique of American attitudes of superiority and entitlement that undermined our diplomatic and political activity.
Today’s climate is like the one in 1958 when the book ‘The Ugly American” was written. Then the cold war was in full force. Nuclear arms race was underway, and Vietnam had been brewing on the horizon. The Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, casting doubts on America’s technological proficiency. Today, terrorism, gun violence, racism, bullying, immigration, economic inequity and unrest are our hot button issues.
Trump is so unapologetically self-referential, I wonder whether he could actually do the work required to meet the needs of others, and be able to engage in the give and take essential to the democratic system. Whatever happens, it seems for Trump, is all about him.
I don’t think Trump is the issue, however. He represents the shadow side of the American psyche that many find glamorous. He’s the straight man for one of America’s claims to entitlement, usually phrased, ‘we’re the greatest and most powerful country in the world.’ Our cowboy mentality is alive and well.
After 9/11 America joined the rest of the world as one nation among others as vulnerable as the rest of the world had been for centuries. It was humbling, but it led to a more thoughtful way of understanding just what our greatness is about. It’s not that we are the best, the most powerful, but that we have been singularly blessed. A need to be first, often breeds exceptional and entitled attitudes. Those who understand how much they are blessed, act gratefully and with a measure of humility.
Compared to Trump, political figures like Secretary of State John Kerry who actually serve our country have far lower visibility in the media. Grandstanding is not going to create a better world. If there are still inspiring images out there that can define what’s best about America, and many Americans, I’d vote for the one I saw on TV recently. Secretary John Kerry was signing the climate agreement he helped broker at the U.N. While signing the treaty, he is holding his granddaughter in his arm. It’s a powerful statement, a hopeful one about responsible world leadership and of serious and dignified diplomacy. I see in the image of Kerry one profile of those who work selflessly to insure a safe world for our children and grandchildren.
The picture may have included Kerry but was not all about him. It was about the world that he, among others, cares about and works with quiet dignity to heal.
That trumps all.
William Knight says
This is really top-notch thought and writing.
William Knight says
I wonder how you can moderate it!!!!
Laurence L. Driggs III says
Thank you…
While I certainly subscribe to the concept, “brevity is the soul of wit”, I also recall the ‘editor’s dictum’ [forgotten, or indeed unknown by today’s crop of ‘news-people’; I cannot bring myself to write “journalists’], “Get it first, but first get it right”.
My hope is that I accomplished my intent to enlighten the discourse with what I certainly hope was an idea, well thought out. And, while Mr. Merrill [whose offerings I respect and admire] is publishing his opinions, I hope that I also, may be permitted the same privilege. I’m unsure of what you imply by “moderate” in your reply.
After a pleasant but somewhat sheltered childhood in Talbot County, I attended a premier (then) boy’s school in Rhode Island followed by 4 years @ the Univ. of Pennsylvania from which I departed with an AB, Journalism and a USAF commission as a 2nd Lt. The thought of actually writing for a living exposed the real coward within, so after 6.5 years of flying jet fighters (F-100), I opted for 31 years as a pilot with TWA (RIP).
While serving in USAF, I was stationed 3 years @ Wheelus AB, Tripoli, Libya -[Muammar Gadaffi & I were both lieutenants @ the time] where I met & married with the daughter of an oil company executive. My exposure to the oil community as well as friendships in the ‘foreign’ expat communities permitted me some insight to o’seas life not available to many in the armed services. My attitudes toward US foreign policy and practices of the D.o.S. were launched from those Mediterranean Shores from 1962-1965. My thoughts on the subject gestated through the years I flew for the major (at the time) U. S. international airline. In the main, our ‘foreign service’ is not highly thought of in circles of honest, hard-working Americans trying to carry U.S. trade & commerce to foreign shores.
If my remarks suggest an “intemperate” view of things… as they say, “Sorry ’bout that.” But as the late Mr. Cronkite used to say, “And that’s the way it is.” Cheers
Laurence L. Driggs III says
While Mr. Merrill makes a point about the inept and boorish Americans who ‘give us a bad name’, he appears to make the common error of applying the term “Ugly American” to these expat miscreants. Ever since the publication of the novel bearing that descriptive name in its title, common usage has misconstrued to whom the title applies. The ugly American is not a fat, flower shirted, cigar-chomping, insensitive, narcissistic tourist or exported Southern California used car salesman, or indeed an unstable touring American collegian whose cognitive powers have been addled by pot and alcohol.
“The Ugly American of the title is not one of these bunglers, but the book’s hero, a millionaire engineer named Homer Atkins, whose calloused and grease-blackened hands “always reminded him that he was an ugly man.” Homer is the very model of the enlightened ambassador (lowercase) the authors thought America should send into the world. He and his wife become a proto-Peace Corps couple, homesteading in an earthen-floored hut and collaborating with villagers on inventions like a bicycle-powered irrigation pump. Homer’s voice sounds surprisingly contemporary, as if he’s channeling “Dead Aid,” Dambisa Moyo’s recent polemic against current global development practices. “Whenever you give a man something for nothing,” Homer warns, “the first person he comes to dislike is you.” — [ from Michael Meyer, NYT Sunday Book Review, 10 July 2009]
“In the annals of misunderstood titles, a special place belongs to William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s novel “The Ugly American.” Today, the phrase is shorthand for our compatriots who wear tube tops to the Vatican or shout for Big Macs in Beijing. But as summer vacation season begins (at least for those who can still afford it), it’s worth recalling that the impolitic travelers in “The Ugly American” aren’t drunken backpackers or seniors sporting black socks, but the so-called educated elite of the diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language and customs prompts observations like this:
“The simple fact is, Mr. Ambassador, that average Americans, in their natural state, if you will excuse the phrase, are the best ambassadors a country can have,” a Filipino minister tells an American official. “They are not suspicious, they are eager to share their skills, they are generous. But something happens to most Americans when they go abroad. Many of them are not average . . . they are second-raters.” – Ibid
The ‘villains’ of the book are the inept, feckless, politically appointed, ‘cookie-pushing’, “effete snobs” we foist on the world out of Foggy Bottom. I would submit that our present Sec. State is a pure example of the genre.
The true ‘heroes’ of our international intercourse are the millions of anonymous business people and corporate employees [e.g., ‘Homer Atkins’] deployed around the world from enterprises created in and run from the United States throughout the past century. They may be blunt, brash, and egocentric, but they ‘get the job done’! They have ‘savoir faire’ – they know ‘how to do it’.
Say, though certainly not ‘anonymous’, perhaps Mr. Trump just might be one of that group.
John W Thompson Jr says
I spent the late 1990’s, early 2000’s in the former Soviet Bloc, mostly in Moscow. Russia is no longer the Communist or Socialist threat of the Cold War. The USSR lost and they know it. They are now totally ruled by unregulated and corrupt Capitalism run amok. In International Business, we called those Capitalists and Free-Enterprisers the required “roof”…or the so-called Russian Mafia. It runs all the way to the top of their current government.