The press in 2004 vs. The press in 1876
Still searching for an honest reporter, 128 years later.
Thomas Nast was a brilliant political cartoonist. I just read a bunch of his cartoons. They were filled with amazing detail in the woodcuts. The parallels in his cartoons to today's world is astounding. The cartoons cover:
-- Corrupt politicians
-- Voting shenanigans
-- The influence of religion in the schools and on politics.
-- The press' focus on gossip and trivial things.
Here are the names of the papers in the cartoons:
o The Daily Slanderer, The Daily Busybody
o The Tribulation: The (Mis)leading Paper in America
o The New York Hoax, Daily Canard
o The Chicago Daily Pernicious Gossip Times
o The Innuendo, The NY Moon Shine
o The Washington Hatchet, The Rumor and
o The Honest World Doomsday
I know there is nothing new under the sun, but maybe Nast's cartoons seem so current because George W. Bush keeps looking backward, to old energy solutions, old foreign policy, old views of human rights, and old views of the economy.
Thomas Nast was a brilliant political cartoonist. I just read a bunch of his cartoons. They were filled with amazing detail in the woodcuts. The parallels in his cartoons to today's world is astounding. The cartoons cover:
-- Corrupt politicians
-- Voting shenanigans
-- The influence of religion in the schools and on politics.
-- The press' focus on gossip and trivial things.
Here are the names of the papers in the cartoons:
o The Daily Slanderer, The Daily Busybody
o The Tribulation: The (Mis)leading Paper in America
o The New York Hoax, Daily Canard
o The Chicago Daily Pernicious Gossip Times
o The Innuendo, The NY Moon Shine
o The Washington Hatchet, The Rumor and
o The Honest World Doomsday
I know there is nothing new under the sun, but maybe Nast's cartoons seem so current because George W. Bush keeps looking backward, to old energy solutions, old foreign policy, old views of human rights, and old views of the economy.
3 Comments:
My son, fresh from American History classes, says this is the new Gilded Age. The parallels are frightening. Thank god for the net and the speed of empowering information we have now, perhaps this 'age' will only last one term.
Wow! I was going to make that statement about the New Guilded Age in my post, but I didn't know if anyone knew what it meant. Here is what Bush's Harvard Econ professor had to say about Bush and his drive backwards toward a new-guilded age. (I think the reason I don't like to use guilded is that it doesn't conger up how bad it was in most people's minds.)
T: What he has been doing, not only in economics but externally everything else, what he’s trying to do, he’s trying to bring back the, what we call the gilded age of 1900 to 1920s when we didn’t have any votes even for women, segregation was a way of life (certainly in the south and Texas). Lynching was going on. He’d like to bring one of those few things, and what he is doing is suddenly he’s carrying out the radical revolution. It’s not (unintelligible) way of doing it, he is committed to really just revolutionizing the United States that the eh, to bring back the United States of 1900 to just before the Great Depression. The same thing that produced the Great Depression. For example, his economic policy could be characterized as the Reverse Robbing Hood Philosophy.
S: The Reverse Robbing Hood Philosophy?
T: Yes. Robbing the poor and the working people to benefit the rich and powerful corporations. He believes in that because in my class he said he was opposed to the Securities Exchange Commission.
S: He said this when he was in your class room?
T: Oh yeah. He said that the Securities Exchange Commission was the enemy of capitalism and that greed is beautiful and all those stuff. And to him Franklin Roosevelt was a socialist, the New Deal was socialism. So now what he’s doing is trying to push the United States back to pre-Great Depression era.
Somewhere I remember Newt Gingrich saying that the Victorian era was one we would want to return to. Dear God.
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