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A long time ago, I wondered how our visual culture would handle the arrival of Barack Hussein Obama. It seems that the answer is: by the ears.
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The Edge of the American West 
27 comments
November 6, 2008 at 12:10 am
teofilo
Long s on “self” but not “these.” Odd.
November 6, 2008 at 12:28 am
Vance
That’s how it is in the original (third line). I’m not sure what the rule was, or whether there was simply free alternation. “happinefs”.
The ears are a nice choice.
November 6, 2008 at 12:32 am
Vance
happineſs
November 6, 2008 at 12:54 am
bitchphd
The long s is at the beginning of words; I forget what the rule is for using it within words, but it’s something like a simple rule of which was easier to write, or to read next to certain letters. A handwriting convention that carried over to print for a few years before being abandoned.
November 6, 2008 at 4:40 am
kid bitzer
oddly, enough, it was when i saw this cartoon–linked from sully’s blog–that i first started getting teary-eyed about the election.
and by the way–that jefferson intended “all men” to include blacks is amply proven by what he wrote in the first draft.
in the lincoln-douglas debates, douglas argued that “all men” meant only “free voters of english descent”, i.e. the colonists who wanted political powers equal to those of their analogues back in the u.k., and the english voters to whom they were appealing.
i was very surprised to see that garry wills accepts this interpretation, i.e. that jefferson’s “men” meant only “homo politicus”, and therefore excluded slaves.
no one who sees the deleted paragraph about slavery–deleted by south carolina, i understand–can find that plausible. in the bill of indictments against king george, tj writes:
” he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
look at the holograph:
where the word “MEN”, used of the slaves, is twice as large as any other word on the page.
every doctrine of construction tells us that if an author uses “men” with such emphasis to include black slaves in one passage, then he should be assumed to use it in the same sense on the previous page of the same document.
jefferson–that twisted fuck–would agree with toles’ interpretation, with at least half of his deeply conflicted mind, i.e. the half that wrote the declaration, not the half that kept slaves.
it truly is a great time, a great day, a great change.
and it is truly typical of history that the right side wins partly on the merits, and partly because the wrong side, in addition to being wrong, is tactically incompetent, selects an aging war-hero who should have been put out to pasture, a dingbat running-mate, a second-rate karl rove as campaign manager, etc. etc.
the clash of ideas never quite happens purely, idea to idea. it’s a million irrelevant particulars, instead, and the ideas secondarily, or hardly at all. it’s the big ears, in this case, and mccain’s penguin-laugh, and palin’s shopping sprees.
but i can view all that with equanimity, because in this case the right idea won anyhow.
November 6, 2008 at 6:54 am
politicalfootball
kid, I would respectfully submit that there was no candidate available to the Republicans better than McCain. I’m not sure why this is so – perhaps McCain was the best that the arc of history could cough up at this moment – but I feel quite confident that it is so. You think Mitt would have run better? Huck? Thompson?!?
November 6, 2008 at 7:00 am
politicalfootball
Also: Leaving aside for the moment his inability to draw, is there a better newspaper editorial cartoonist out there than Toles?
November 6, 2008 at 7:47 am
dana
I’m not sure why this is so
Winner take-all-primaries, mostly, and a split in the party. I think the moneybags had wanted Romney, the churches wanted Huckabee, but Romney didn’t win because he is a Cylon, and Huckabee couldn’t get the moneybags to support him. McCain ended up being the compromise candidate that no one was really thrilled with.
November 6, 2008 at 7:48 am
Ben Alpers
Ligatures. We need more ligatures.
Restore traditional typography!
November 6, 2008 at 7:55 am
Ben Alpers
politicalfootball, I actually think Huckabee would have been a stronger candidate. I don’t think he would have won, but he would not have had to worry about shoring up the base, so he could have afforded to go with a VP pick that signaled (however falsely) a move to the center. The optics would be great: he’s a total Washington outsider. And, as today’s Republicans go, he has excellent populist credentials, which would have served him well following the financial meltdown. But most importantly, he is just about the only person in the country who the crazy GOP base loves but who would go over well with the general public, as he is scary likable (though his political views are just plain scary).
But I do think McCain was a stronger candidate than the rest of the GOP hopefuls. And he certainly could have run a more effective campaign.
November 6, 2008 at 8:00 am
raspberryaunt
On rules for long s versus short s, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
and
http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html
November 6, 2008 at 8:03 am
Ben Alpers
Winner take-all-primaries…
Although these were McCain’s path to the nomination, they were also his Achilles heel. He was able to win the nomination without really convincing a majority of his own party to support him. For example, he garnered 100% of Florida’s delegates with thirty-some-odd percent of the vote in that state’s primary.
But this meant that McCain never really sold his own party’s base on his candidacy, even as he was winning the nomination. McCain was thus unable to move to the center with his VP pick, cause he still had to seal the deal with the GOP. If you’re still shoring up your base at the convention, you’re already running a step behind your opponent (see, also, Jimmy Carter in 1980).
This story was completely underreported because the active and prolonged Democratic primary battle played into the media’s bias in favor of exciting contests. And the (not as close as it seemed) Obama-Clinton fight birthed the (always factually challenged) PUMA narrative, which the media continued to stoke well into the summer. In fact, McCain’s need to pacify his party’s base proved much more consequential than Obama’s need to get Clinton supporters on board, which proved fairly easy once Clinton backed Obama.
November 6, 2008 at 8:05 am
dana
I think the long primary season also helped just in terms of ensuring that people in the later primary states (PA, in particular) registered to vote.
November 6, 2008 at 8:10 am
ari
I think the long primary season also helped just in terms of ensuring that people in the later primary states (PA, in particular) registered to vote.
Agreed. I’m now persuaded that the primary fight was good for Obama, though I don’t think that Clinton was doing him any favors (at least at that point).
November 6, 2008 at 8:31 am
zunguzungu
Rob McDougall wrote a great piece over at Cliopatria that seems worth quoting from, vis a vis the Jefferson/ratification line:
It almost doesn’t matter what Jefferson “really meant” by “all men.” No, that’s not it. It matters when great and noble promises are broken. But here’s an idea Greil Marcus put in my head: the promises made in the Declaration and the Constitution are so great that their betrayal is an inevitable part of the promise. And that’s what makes them work. Marcus (who wrote a surprisingly pessimistic piece on Obama just before the election–Phil Nugent dismantled it thoroughly) calls that betrayal “the engine of American history.” The “more perfect union” is a limit approaching infinity. As each generation discovers–inevitably!–that the promises made to them were false, they battle to make them a little more true.
It’s interesting, too, to think through how that “limit approaching infinity” line rhymes with MLK’s “arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” which O alluded to the other night.
November 6, 2008 at 9:17 am
ben
That friggin’ s-t ligature pisses me off to no end.
November 6, 2008 at 9:21 am
ari
Like, when you’re doing research? Or just because?
November 6, 2008 at 9:29 am
ben
I’m not sure why it does it, but it does it when I have to read it.
November 6, 2008 at 10:18 am
Vance
I think you mean it pisses you off no end (though of course it’s also to no end).
November 6, 2008 at 11:21 am
Martin G.
S-T ligatures are typographical show-off. but man do they look cool.
November 6, 2008 at 12:04 pm
fafnir
Hooray, racism is over now apparently!
November 6, 2008 at 12:07 pm
ari
Right after they called Ohio for Obama, fafnir, racism ended. Just like that. Or didn’t you get the memo?
November 6, 2008 at 12:10 pm
ari
And to be clear, I posted the cartoon not because I think that Obama’s victory signals the end of racism, but because Toles comes as close as there is to occupying the position of Caricaturist in Chief. His version of Obama, then, is interesting. And it’s pretty clear that he’s decided, here at least, to avoid the issue of race by focusing instead on ears.
November 6, 2008 at 12:10 pm
ari
Caricaturist in Chief should be Cartoonist in Chief. Nap time.
November 6, 2008 at 12:18 pm
eric
So black people have small ears? Racist.
November 6, 2008 at 12:21 pm
ari
It took you eight minutes? Your reaction time is disappointing, I have to say.
November 6, 2008 at 1:15 pm
andrew
I’ve seen the long s in handwritten letters from the 1860s and 1870s. I’d have to dig out my photocopies from whatever box they’re stored in to check, but I think Leland Stanford used it.