Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

xchrom

(108,903 posts)
Sat Jun 14, 2014, 05:58 AM Jun 2014

Amity Shlaes's anti-new deal graphic novel

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/amity-shlaes-anti-new-deal-graphic-novel.html



Amity Shlaes, the popular conservative author who has set out to debunk the New Deal, has issued a clarion call to cartoonists—or, rather, to her fellow conservatives, to hire themselves some cartoonists. Shlaes has just repackaged “The Forgotten Man,” her 2007 chronicle of “the people whom the New Deal forgot and hurt,” as a graphic novel. Which means that you—and your children—can now see those people being forgotten and hurt in stark, black-and-white (occasionally sepia) pen and ink.

Shlaes says that she intends “The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition” as a demonstration of the power of this medium, and it’s a claim worth evaluating. In “A Cartoon Manifesto,” written for the National Review, Shlaes looks to introduce her conservative audience to what she calls “the oddly named genre of the ‘graphic novel.’ ” She expects skepticism. “Counterintuitive as it may sound, these graphic novels not only feature nonfiction but also lend themselves enviably to difficult nonfiction topics.” She quotes “an artist” who describes graphic novels as “a gateway drug to content” (an opiate, one might say, for the masses).

Conservatives, Shlaes notes, are a “high-minded” bunch, and “prefer to read print books, and prefer that their grandchildren do, too.” Still, it is time, Shlaes declares, for conservatives to stop “turning up their collective nose at graphic books” and ceding the medium to—no points for seeing this coming—the Reds. Shlaes is particularly distressed by an illustrated edition of Marx’s “Das Kapital” (currently No. 117,507 in Amazon’s rankings, but it could be having an off week). A cartoon version of Howard Zinn’s polemical “A People’s History of American Empire” is also a concern; Joe Sacco’s “Palestine“ “is yet worse.” So Shlaes, for one, has had enough. “Graphic Edition” in hand, she is leading the charge into “education ground” now held by the left.

The “Graphic Edition,” illustrated by a Canadian cartoonist named Paul Rivoche, is a faithful translation of Shlaes’s original. The original, unfortunately, was sententious, misleading, and, for a work of history, all too neatly aligned with the agenda of the twenty-first century Republican Party. (I have a different take on the New Deal in my own book, “Supreme Power.”)
Latest Discussions»General Discussion»Amity Shlaes's anti-new d...