14 DAY TRIAL // A poster showing President Barack Obama with his face painted white, with heavy black eyeliner around the eyes, red lipstick and huge scars on his cheeks, just like The Joker in the Batman movies, has started popping up all over the place in Los Angeles and on the Internet. The reactions to it have been mixed, not few being those to cry racism or even some sort of political upheaval, as SkyNews reports.
No one seems to know who designed the poster or for what purpose, which only means interpretations for it vary considerably from one media outlet to another. The fact that the caption underneath the photo reads “Socialism,” for instance, has prompted many to believe that it could be a response to Obama’s recent announcements on the health issue. Others, on the other hand, believe that whoever chose to make the President white like The Joker may have done so for racial reasons.
What is certain, though, is that the poster has managed to cause quite a stir in the media. “It has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism. The only thing missing is a noose.” politics reporter Steven Mikulan of LA Weekly says, as quoted by SkyNews. Tommy Christopher of Mediaite adds Mikulan is probably “overstating” the issue, but agrees the image of Obama as The Joker “is immediately and strongly evocative of blackface minstrel shows.”
Thomas Lifson of the conservative American Thinker blog is trying to put things into perspective, saying that this poster is just the first from a long series. According to him, “Obama’s cool image is so 2008,” so it’s only understandable that more materials along the same lines be released in the following weeks. However, until then, reports in the media have it that the website to first run the poster crashed shortly after following intense traffic. As of now, it is not known whether the site went back up again.
What with all the controversy, some cannot but stop and think that perhaps this is the very purpose of the poster: get people talking and not much more. Jack Napier, for instance, is of the same opinion, as he writes on the LA Times blog that, “The Joker would have a field day turning both sides on the other while they eat themselves, that’s the whole point of the Joker. And maybe that’s the whole point of the joke; create a controversy, upset the apple cart, and watch people go!”