April 29
GUEST: Michael Mark Cohen, Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly," and the creator of a website about cartooning capitalism, talks about the role of political cartoons in exposing our kleptocracy.
Cartooning Capitalism
Michael Mark Cohen
There is an honesty in historical cartoons that is perhaps missing today. There was a time when Uncle Sam was characterized as a bloodthirsty killer or a vile seducer of Lady Liberty. The capitalist barons were hugely fat gluttons sitting at a table overflowing with food while hungry children looked on. Maybe our current media has no stomach for this type of blatant class warfare.
And get how else to portray Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, who spends his time trying to cheat his hourly workers out of their pay and benefits? Bezos has escaped from a Dickinson novel to plague the twenty first century. He is the personification of gluttony and avarice; why can't our media portray him this way?
So the in-your-face cartoons of the Gilded Age have an appeal in our current era of class blindness. We don't demonize the filthy rich, no matter how many children are hungry as a result of their plundering of the working people. Our government officials are often proverbial pigs at the trough, grunting and pushing for those corporate dollars. Why no cartoons showing their detestable appetite for plundering the poor?
Perhaps we are blind to this tyranny of the wealthy, much the same way as we are blind to racism while living in a society drowning in it. We have billionaires who play at sending rockets to the moon while over fifty percent of Americans have no savings at all. Who are one paycheck away from disaster. Why no rage?
