Great Australian cartoonist, Michael Leunig, recently did a cartoon floating the idea. It was censored. You don’t really have to know anything much about Australian politics to get the joke; you only need to know that Howard, Downer and Ruddock occupy senior government … er … positions. On top of the pile so to speak. Here is the offending cartoon:
Not really pushing the limits of humour here in Canada,m more like standard fare for the Royal Canadian Air Farce.
I don’t think any kind of torture will make a politician tell the truth, personally anyone wanting to be a politician seems to be genetically modified speicies, that obfuscates, fudges, redirects, spins, talks out of the side of their mouth, can blink while lying and absolutely forge what they said ten minutes ago.
But a naked human pyramid of politicias now that would be hilarious.
I don’t believe in torturing another being, whether an animal or that other featherless biped that we are so obsessed with. Torture, just like terrorism, isn’t morally right. When I read about the “acceptable” variants of interrogation that are currently being used by so-called civilized countries, it sounds a lot like torture to me. The though of being locked in a cell and being subjected to sudden loud noises is more than I would be able to bear, I believe.
No, I don’t believe that politicians should be tortured to make them tell the truth. It is torture enough for us listeners to have to listen to them speak.
I don’t think Michael Leunig was being serious. Well, he was being serious, but not in proposing torture. There is probably no more humane person on this planet. Here’s the email he wrote to Media Watch, the (Australian) ABC programme that broke the story.
Michael Leunig comments to Media Watch:
The role of the cartoonist, as well as making us laugh at our shared predicament, is to discover and express what is repressed, and to say out loud what people everywhere are whispering.
The cartoonist is a voice of the permanent opposition and uses metaphor and surreptitious, ambiguous images or words to challenge society’s values, to test freedom of speech to the limit, to subvert the pomposity of authority or popular opinion and to make absurdity and hypocrisy visible.
This voice is not an expert or corporate voice - it is quite distinctly and necessarily the original, unique and peculiar voice of the individual human, or the lone soul, and it speaks to the heart as well as the head.
Cartoons do not necessarily sum up a situation nor are they always intended to be balanced; often they are made as extreme provocations or catalysts to help breach repressive taboos or break the stifling silence of conservatism and respectability.
Sometimes they need to be in bad taste.
The cartoonist is not interested in showing that the enemy is in league with the devil but rather the extent to which a bit of the devil is in all of us.
This sometimes seems traitorous. However, a cartoonist who supports government policy and current, conventional wisdom is nothing more than a propagandist.
The true cartoonist is a moral philosopher who compulsively and dutifully challenges and resists the powerful, the victorious, the dominant, the fashionable, the well heeled, the well established and the well armed; and in so doing, upholds the importance of the powerless, the vulnerable, the voiceless outsiders, of nature and many improbable or neglected ideas.
A good healthy cartoon is drawn from conscience and must be strong, spicy and controversial; it will often hurt, offend, disgust and cause trouble because it may touch upon negative matters such as human darkness or the neurotic defences, psychological wounds and sore points and emotional sicknesses in society.
It holds up a mirror to us which is sometimes funny , sometimes painful and often quite perplexing but the hope is that ultimately it is therapeutic.
How would you determine if a politician was lying? Politicians are policy makers, so enacting a law to torture themselves isn’t feasible. The torture of jokes and cartoons is probably most effective to get them to straighten up. Just think of what would happen if people took the law into their own hands…politicians would pass laws to torture the people who torture. They try to pass laws to keep the torture on themselves down as it is. Since they don’t love freedom of the press, does that mean politicians don’t love freedom?
Or course I realized that Michael Leunig was not being serious with his query as to whether politicians should be tortured to tell the truth. I saw this as satire. However, sometimes it is interesting to pretend to buy into the ploy of the satirist.
Michael Leunig’s comments to Media Watch are impressive. It demonstrates how complicated and subtle writing and drawing a good cartoon can be, and how easy for them to be misunderstood.
This cartoon pokes fun at two issues; 1) That politicians, like Bush and Howard, are able to get away with lying, and it seems like we’re helpless to do anything about it. 2) That these same politicians have a double standard regarding torture. I think it’s good satire.
I think it’s a funny, sardonic cartoon. It’s on the edge, to be sure, and I can understand the squeamishness about it, but it’s in the tradition of the kind of political satire that should make one squirm a bit.
There’s at least one small thing we can do to torture politicians: don’t re-elect them. Ever.
Wombat, have you ever read The Onion? This looks pretty much like typical Onion fare, including the presentation. ( www.theonion.com , click on “what do you think” somewhere on the left.)
