Laughter Louder Than Bombs? Apocalyptic Graphic Satire in Cold War Cartooning, 1946–1959
American Quarterly, Volume 70, Number 2, June 2018, pp. 235-266
In
the postwar American media landscape, “the bomb” symbolized both
security and insecurity. Two of the nation’s leading syndicated
cartoonists—the Washington Post’s Herbert Block and the Village Voice’s
Jules Feiffer—played on this paradox by parodying the arms race, civil
defense, nuclear testing and deterrence. But the schisms within
progressive politics in this period distinguished Block and Feiffer as
social critics. At the height of anticommunist hysteria, Block’s
single-panel editorial cartoons often featured the anthropomorphized Mr.
Atom, who became a spectral figure within the Cold War imaginary. In
the post-McCarthy era, Feiffer’s narrative-driven strips spoofed
military Keynesianism by critiquing the role capitalism played in
fueling the nuclear crisis. While Block and Feiffer both recognized the
existential threat posed by nuclear weapons, they were representative of
a left-liberal divide at a point when humor was undergoing
transformations in the wider culture and a political struggle over the
bomb’s future was being fiercely waged. By foregrounding these
cleavages, this essay argues that satirizing the full slate of
contradictions of the nuclear era meant questioning the basic
assumptions of the Cold War rivalry and breaking from the consensus
framework altogether. Only by critiquing the ideology of the American
Cold War commitment could the absurdities of the arms race be laid bare.
No comments:
Post a Comment