Picture Book Politics

[Richard]

Picture-Book Politics
Bruce Handy, NYT

While we wait, here’s an excerpt from the intro to Garen Thomas’s readable if not particularly inspired chapter book, “Yes We Can: A Biography of Barack Obama”:

“There has emerged a new leader who seems to be granting Americans a renewed license to dream. . . . People believe he under*stands them, because by some measure he is them. . . . He manages, through what appears to be genuine concern, to uplift those who have fallen and bring hope anew to both the cynic and the idealist.”

Let’s perform a brief thought experiment. Let’s imagine the same saucer-eyed prose being written about Michael Dukakis, John Kerry or Al Gore — or for that matter, either George Bush. Nope. Doesn’t quite translate.

I think it’s fair to say that no modern American politician, not even Ronald Reagan, has entered the arena with as much symbolic, even messianic, baggage as Obama has. Some is the byproduct of his historic role, some the product of his own oratorical manufacture, and some has been projected on him, vaporous and inchoate, as if he were a big-eared, smartly dressed healing crystal. When you distill all that into something suitable for children, well, the results can be judged by their covers. “Barack,” a picture book written by Jonah Winter and illustrated by AG Ford, depicts Obama looking off into the distance — at the future? The promised land? Another town hall meeting in Scranton? — against a backdrop of blue sky and a suggestion of heavenly clouds. “Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope,” another picture book, written by Nikki Grimes and illustrated by Bryan Collier, features a ghostly adult version of the candidate looming behind his boyhood self, the elder Obama’s hands raised in a preacher’s gesture, light beams emanating from the horizon to suggest we’re at a more churchly incarnation of a Hollywood premiere. Upping the ante, “Yes We Can,” the chapter book, backdrops our hero with a suggestion of both heavenly clouds and light beams — the full Botticelli.

Parson Weems might gag.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/bo...w/Handy-t.html

Compare those lines with the following:

Primer for the Württemberg Public Schools

This page contains translations and illustrations from an elementary school reading textbook, published in 1941. The propaganda content, even for young children, is strong.

http://bytwerk.com/gpa/ib33-15.htm

The Battle for Germany:
A Textbook for the German Youth
Philipp Bouhler

This book owes its origins to the Führer.

During a walk in the forest at the Obersalzberg in Fall 1936, the Führer said how much German schools needed a brief book that would give the German youth a picture of the battle of the movement.

In the following pages, I attempt to meet this need. May the book urge German boys and girls to do their duty, to increase their fanatic faith in their people, their nation and the Führer, whose heirs they will be.

They are the ones who will determine Germany's future.

Rußdorf am Inn, Spring 1938

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/bouhler.htm

Richard