Cowboy and misanthrope: a critical (discourse) analysis of Bush and bin Laden cartoons

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Cowboy and misanthrope: a critical (discourse) analysis of Bush and bin Laden cartoons Bahaa-Eddin M. Mazid DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATION 2008 2: 433 DOI: 10.1177/1750481308095939 The online version of this article can be found at: http://dcm.sagepub.com/content/2/4/433

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Mazid: Cowboy and misanthrope 433

Cowboy and misanthrope: a critical (discourse) analysis of Bush and bin Laden cartoons

BAHAA-EDDIN M. MAZID

Discourse & Communication Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications. (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com Vol 2(4): 433–457 10.1177/1750481308095939

U A E U N I V E R S I T Y , U N I T E D A R A B E M I R AT E S

A B S T R A C T The article investigates the political cartoon construction of two major ‘players’ on the contemporary political stage, and the semio-linguistic and visual rhetorical tools used to achieve this construction, through an analysis of semiotic-discursive aspects of a small corpus of political cartoons in English and Arabic, all about the two ‘players’ – George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden – in the aftermath of 9/11 and within the ongoing ‘war on terror’, followed by a more detailed analysis of two political cartoon texts from the corpus – one in Arabic about Bush and the other in English about bin Laden. A rationale for the combination of semiotics and critical discourse analysis and a discussion of the nature and functions of political cartoon are provided. These are followed by a review of the relevant literature with a focus on political cartoons. The analysis, drawing upon the ‘dispositive’ model and the incongruity theory of humor, addresses the verbal and visual aspects of the cartoons, instances of blending, incongruity and visual metaphors therein. Some major notions in CDA, for example Van Dijk’s ideological square and Chilton’s (de)legitimation and proximization, are also utilized in examining the sample cartoons. The detailed analysis of the two cartoons elaborates on the salient features and generic aspects of the sample, specifically on incongruity, blending and visual metaphor, toward an understanding of the messages of the cartoons, the tools used to convey these messages and how they contribute to the ongoing war of ideological misrepresentation. KEY WORDS:

bin Laden, Bush, dispositive, incongruity and blending, intertextuality, political cartoon

Introduction One significant outcome of the development of semiotics, based on the pioneering work of de Saussure, is the rethinking of the traditional notion of text. Semiotics deals with signs. A sign is anything that signifies, or has meaning(s) within a certain code and a given context. Thus, all modern and contemporary media texts


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(e.g. films, clips, ads, TV and radio programs, magazine and newspaper articles, cartoons and comic strips, posters, classifieds, and so on) are legitimate data for semiotic analysis, which can subsume discourse analysis. Traditional discourse analysis itself has taken a more critical stance and developed into critical discourse analysis (CDA). This is a long story that needs not be told here, but two definitional quotations from three major advocates of the approach may cut the story short enough for this article: Critical discourse analysis is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. (Van Dijk, 2007: 108, emphasis added) CDA of a communicative interaction sets out to show that the semiotic and linguistic features of the interaction are systematically connected with what is going on socially, and what is going on socially is indeed going on partly or wholly semiotically or linguistically. (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 113)

‘Language speaks us’ (Matheson, 2005: 7) – whether by ‘language’ we mean verbal or nonverbal signifiers. ‘Speaking’ here means so many things – representing, transforming, resisting, (de)legitimating, among other things (see Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2003). ‘Us’ is no less rich. It includes our identities, attitudes and ideologies, socio-historical backgrounds, the ‘interpretive packages’ (see below) we carry, the contexts and schemas we use discourse within. Within the broad strand of CDA, a semiotic sub-strand has developed, out of an integrationist motive (Van Leeuwen, 2006), paying attention to the visual/ non-verbal dimensions in discourse, as obvious in the work of Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996, 2001, 2002). The discursive-semiotic sub-strand is gaining more and more importance and receiving more and more research attention, developing into a multimodal perception of discourse; in fact, of semiosis (Fairclough, 2006), rather than discourse. A leaflet from a furniture store and a notice on a stand in a bank (Fairclough, 2006), television footage of 9/11 (Chouliaraki, 2004), Cosmopolitan magazine (Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2003), visual aids in textbooks and elsewhere (Lemke, 1998; Van Dijk, 1998), news images (Wodak, 2006), cartoons (e.g. Gamson and Stuart, 1992; Mazid, 2000a, 2000b), to give only a partial list, have proven to be legitimate objects of CDA. A discursive-semiotic, multimodal version of CDA seems to be necessary in handling many modern and contemporary media texts, including political cartoons. The media, Gamson and Stuart (1992) argue, ‘provide a series of arenas in which symbolic contests are carried out among competing sponsors of meaning’ (p. 55, emphases added). Only a critical perspective can capture those contests and whether and how they are resolved. Political cartoon is a subgenre within a broader arena of humor in the media – where verbal jokes, animations, comic strips and non-political cartoons also belong. A political cartoon is an ideal place where communication, semiotics and CDA can meet. Because it is most often critical, a CDA perspective is an ideal way of handling it. Satire and distortion of truth, hyperbole and ad hominem attacks are



at the heart of (political) cartoon. It can be racist and sexist and it can contribute to the promotion of stereotypes (Templin, 1999). It also involves a great deal of representation and misrepresentation, beautification and demonization. The interaction between semio-linguistic features, verbal and non-verbal, and the social issues raised in a cartoon text (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999) makes CDA quite plausible in the examination of cartoon, especially when it is political. A cartoon is a hybridization of a variety of codes – language, picture, color and sometimes movement. Thus, a traditional ‘linguistic’ – that is, wordcentered – analysis fails to capture the non-verbal meanings in a cartoon text and the interactions of the verbal with the non-verbal therein. A semio-linguistic version of CDA can do this and much more.

Cartooning politics/politicizing cartoon A political cartoon is ‘a satirical comment, usually humorous . . . about a political person, event, institution or idea, and reflecting the cartoonist’s own values or opinions on that issue’ (School Programs Section, National Museum of Australia, 2002: 4). It should be noted that ‘cartoon’ is used here in the sense of visual, humorous text that may or may not include a verbal part (see Mazid, 2000a, 2000b) and that ‘political’ is used in a very narrow sense, because most social issues, for example, abortion, have political repercussions and most political issues, for example, 9/11, have social and cultural implications. There is already a wealth of research on humor at large and more specifically on (political) cartoons. For a history of political cartoon on the two sides of the Atlantic, see Cuff (1945) and Lee and Goguen (2003). Some studies address the relationship between (political) cartoons and reality; for example, Streicher (1967) argues that they are grounded in reality. They are somewhere between what something or someone is and what it is not (Belton, 2000). For Mulkay (1988), humor in general derives from patterns of serious political discourse. It is an inversion of the serious world – a response to the difficulties occurring in the course of ‘socially coordinated production of the serious domain’ (p. 197). A political cartoon can be a distortion of reality. Templin (1999) explores the images of Hillary Clinton in cartoons, arguing that it is the norm for cartoonists to employ satire and to distort the truth. Cartoons can very well be sexist, as in the case of Hillary Clinton. The cartoon images of Hillary Clinton suggest ‘a backlash against the professional woman’ (p. 20). Hillary Clinton seems to have become a favorite target of all types of humor – for a study on jokes involving her, see Thomas (1997). Wherever they might be on the true–untrue continuum, political cartoons can only be produced and perceived in a socio-historical background. Raskin (1985) takes prior knowledge to be part of a social scenario selected by the cartoonist and reorganized to form the script which is essential to the realization of the humorous effect of a piece of humor. More about Raskin’s script theory of humor is said below. No matter how seriously they are taken, cartoons continue to reflect cultural attitudes and values, and record and perpetuate many commonly held beliefs. They rely on current personalities


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and events and some common understanding of issues for their humorous and critical effect (Berger, 1993). Other studies explore the relationship between the level of satire in political cartoons, on the one hand, and the political realities surrounding them, on the other. Press (1981) believes that cartooning depends on the political system. In a totalitarian regime, it must praise the system and denounce its enemies. In an authoritarian regime, there is some dispraise, and when the regime becomes brittle, cartooning exposes ‘their rigid foolishness’ (p. 53). In a Western democracy during peacetime, cartoonists are ‘watchdogs’, keeping power-holders ‘honest’ and ‘accountable’ (pp. 56–7). Morris (1989) argues that cartoons in Canada, the UK and the US focus on the leaders of the party in power. Other government and business figures are in the minority. Morris further proposes a different conclusion from that of Press. Low satire prevails when newspapers are ‘numerous’ and in servitude of their owner’s party affiliation. As newspapers become ‘monopolistic’, cartoonists become ‘professionals’, focusing on ‘the current power-holders’. Morris also concludes that Canadian cartoonists contrasted the posturing, destructive wastage of politics with the purposive, constructive efficiency of business. Politicians devoted their energies to keying – Goffman’s term: ‘scoring debating points, cultivating their public images, building bureaucracies, holding inquiries, making cosmetic changes’, and so on. Cartooning, Morris adds, misrepresented politics and business as well-balanced rivals. Morris (1992) continues to examine the status of political cartoons as low, medium or high satire. He tests two competing high and medium satire hypotheses by studying cartoons of civil servants and the British royal family, arguing that if they too are portrayed mainly in comic terms, cartooning has become high satire, critiquing politics as an institution. One conclusion Morris arrives at is that royalty occupy an intermediate position as targets of cartoon. They are often portrayed as the victims and servants of politicians. The study supports the medium satire hypothesis: most political cartooning targets the democratic and public segments of decision-making processes in the contemporary state. A third trend of research on political cartoons focuses on the mechanisms used therein for the production of the satirical and critical effect. Buell and Maus (1988) argue that ‘exaggeration and distortion’ are the cartoonist’s ‘stock-in-trade’. They conclude their analysis of the cartoons about the 1988 elections in the USA with the observation that most cartoons in the sample depict ‘frontrunners and oddities, and most of these were unflattering to the candidates’ (p. 856). In addition to exaggeration, political humor at large derives from some incongruity, for example, between ‘the gruesome and the innocuous’ (Kuipers, 2002: 456), the serious and the unserious, which can result in ‘outrage and amusement’: when depicting conflicting parties, political cartoons involve ‘degrading’ enemies, for example, bin Laden and Afghan women, while upgrading personal and national values and images, for example, US national symbols (e.g. Kuipers, 2005). This is an extreme form of the representation of Self and misrepresentation of Other in Van Dijk’s (1998, 2005) ideological square. There is a great deal of untruth in the misrepresentation, it goes without saying. In such



mediated disasters as 9/11, ‘the boundaries between news, popular culture, and fiction become blurred’ (Kuipers, 2005: 82). Giarelli (2006) notices that cartoons develop ‘a subtle semiotic structure to generate a particular meaning that is humorous’. The subtle semiotic structure Giarelli talks about is referred to later in this study in the analysis of incongruity, condensation and blending in the sample cartoons. Based on a study of cloning cartoons, Giarelli concludes that cloning is used in editorial cartoons ‘as a vehicle to make comments about perceived negative social behaviors or events as a way to show guilt by association. For example, a cartoon that depicts clones of Osama bin Laden is as much a condemnation of terrorists as of cloning’ (pp. 71–2). Other studies of (political) cartoons focus on what they can do. Cartoons are capable of communicating ‘subtle, complex, multilayered messages about people and events in the details of how they are drawn – messages that would be difficult or impossible to express verbally’. A political cartoon, moreover, allows the cartoonist to express views that would be too ‘extreme, mean-spirited’, or ‘politically incorrect’ to express in an essay column (Gilmartin and Brunn, 1998: 536). The views expressed may identify with certain ideologies, clarify issues, contrast self with other, and/or reinforce certain positions and attitudes (Meyer, 2000). The effect of a political cartoon is therefore not simply and not always laughter. A (political) cartoon can be cathartic, resulting in an Aristotelian purgation or recognition, or in relief, or adjustive, resulting in behavioral or material change (Lively, 1942). Relief can happen upon beholding a negative object or entity being ridiculed, or dysphemized, so to speak. This much has been done on cartoons, but they have not received the academic research attention they deserve, given their influence and popularity. Carrier (2000) insists on the traditional divide between high and low art forms and does not allow ‘comics’ to be part of art history. The divide is increasingly diminishing with more and more academic work on caricature and cartoon, as borne out by, among other things, the references of this study, the publications devoted to humor and cartoon and the expansion of disciplines and approaches such as CDA and semiotics to include semio-linguistic work on cartoon texts. These texts can cause not only amusement, purgation and enlightenment but also conflict and harm. We have seen them causing cultural clashes and economic boycotts in the case of the Danish cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten depicting the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in ways deemed inappropriate by the majority of Muslims, as borne out in the rallies and demonstrations in many Arab and Muslim countries, diplomatic problems between Arab countries and Denmark, in addition to a general boycott on Danish products in Arab-Islamic societies (e.g. Rustomji, 2007).

Concepts and models DISPOSITIVE TRIANGLE

A dispositive analysis embraces everything surrounding and inside a discourse fragment – discursive practices, non-discursive practices and materializations (Jager, 2002). The discursive practices in the cartoon text are the uses of verbal


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as well as non-verbal signals to create meaning and effect. The non-discursive practices represented by and surrounding the cartoons start with the mega event of 9/11 and extend to the war on Iraq, part of what is now known as the war on terror. Materializations related to this war include weapons used, as well as weapons ‘talked about’ (WMD), and lives ended. A number of satellite channels, for example, Al-Jazeera, have materialized as an outcome of some 25 years of war in the Arabian Gulf region. ( DE ) LEGITIMATION Legitimation and delegitimation, as conceptualized in Chilton (2004) and Van Leeuwen (2007), and the ideological square that contributes to achieving both through the positive representation of self and the negative representation of other, as conceptualized by Van Dijk (e.g. 1998), and the proximization (Cap, 2008; Chilton, 2004) and distancing that accompany them, are essential to understanding and analyzing any piece of political discourse. Elaborating on Chilton (2004), Cap (2008) defines legitimation as ‘the linguistic enactment of the speaker’s right to be obeyed . . . the claim to rightness’ (p. 22); the inhabiting of a position of authority by the speaker and proximization as ‘a heavily legitimizationoriented strategy to picture the occurring events and their actors as directly affecting the addressee’ (p. 29). Strategies used to establish the claim to rightness, a necessary step toward legitimation, include ‘the awareness and/or assertion of the addressee’s wants and needs, reinforcement of global and indisputable ideological principles, charismatic leadership projection, boasting about one’s performance, positive self-presentation’ (p. 22). Van Dijk’s ideological square, another important tool in doing CDA, has proven to be extremely effective in handling various discourse genres and fragments, especially political, immigration and racist discourse: with the many subtle structures of meanings, form, and action, racist discourse generally emphasizes Our good things and Their bad things, and deemphasizes (mitigates, hides) Our bad things and Their good things. This general ideological square not only applies to racist domination but in general to in-group/out-group polarization in social practices, discourse, and thought. (Van Dijk, 1998, 2007: 130)

The ideological square parallels the shield and weapon uses of language, especially through euphemism and dysphemism (Allan and Burridge, 1991, 2006; Mazid, 2004), and the classical Arabic concept of beautifying the ugly and uglifying the beautiful (Van Gelder, 2003). The square is part of a more comprehensive model Van Dijk proposes for analyzing ideology in discourse. SCRIPTS AND METAPHORS

The Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) is based on an argument for Script/Schema Opposition (SO) in humorous discourse. For the theory itself, also known as the incongruity, or script incompatibility, theory of humor, see Attardo (2001) and Raskin (1985); for explanations and illustrations thereof, see, for example, Deckers and Buttram (1990), Mazid (2000a, 2000b), Brock (2004) and Smuts (2006). A script, according to Raskin (1985), is ‘a large chunk of



semantic information surrounding the word or evoked by it’ (p. 81). A schema is more or less the same as a script – ‘a cognitive structure for representing generic knowledge in memory’. It represents ‘stereotypical concepts of objects, situations, and behavior sequences’. ‘Dinner at a restaurant is an example of a schema’ (Deckers and Buttram, 1990: 53–4). Incongruity can occur within a schema (when an event does not fit into the schema) or between schemata (when two schemata are ‘opposite or incompatible’ (p. 54). Resolution of the incongruity or incompatibility normally results in a perception of humor in a joke or a cartoon. Incongruity as a source of humor can be traced back to the work of Freud and his theory of condensation and displacement. Verbal and non-verbal techniques such as condensation and displacement disguise the aggression involved in a joke or a cartoon enough to allow a pleasurable response of laughter rather than disgust or guilt. ‘Joke-work’ involves ‘the mechanisms of condensation and displacement, and both find expression in classical rhetoric in the ideas of metaphor (condensation) and metonymy (displacement)’ (Lowe, 1986: 443). Another important insight from Freud, already suggested above, is that jokes ‘succeed in liberating suppressed’ or ‘censored’ thoughts through humor, ‘thereby releasing energy and creating joy’ (p. 442). A visual metaphor involves ‘a visual fusion of elements from two separate areas into one spatially bounded entity’ (Carroll, 1996: 810, emphasis added). Carroll refers to the fusion as homospatiality, which is condensation in Freud‘s theory – two different, sometimes conflicting, entities or objects blended and confined within the same space. An example is the body of a human with the head of an animal in a single visual text. For Forceville (1994), a visual metaphor involves a replacement of an expected visual element by an unexpected one. There should be no ‘pre-existent or conventional connection’ between the two elements (Forceville, 1994: 2). The term used to refer to this condition is non-compossibility (Carroll, 1994). An example of this is the replacement of a tie with a shoe in an advertisement. Fusion and replacement, however, do not account for all visual metaphors. Moreover, the condition that the elements in the cartoon should be unrelated in reality does not seem necessary in many visual metaphors. Visual metaphors, El-Refaie (2003) argues, can be based on ‘implicit forms’. Some underlying metaphors, for example immigration-is-invasion, may be activated by the humorous text. Verbo-pictorial metaphor in advertising arises when either the source or the target part of the metaphor is rendered pictorially and the other verbally. An advertising example is a billboard promoting the Amsterdam zoo featuring a photo of a smiling orangutan, with the text ‘Mona Lisa’ superimposed on it (Forceville, 1996: 158). A Lakoffian conceptual perspective on visual metaphors seems necessary, at least when fusion and replacement fail to account for them. Such a perspective is more or less about the blending of two spaces, for example human and animal, into a third, for example ‘talking snake’, which has its own emergent structure. The blending involves selective deletion and compression. In looking at a blend, it is important to identify the connection or connections between the original spaces (e.g. Lakoff and Turner, 1989; Turner, 1996, 2000, 2003, 2006).


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Blending, fusion, or condensation is a common feature of almost all cartoons; therefore, it is an instance of intertextuality. Intertextuality, another long story that cannot be told here, is the relation of one text to other texts. The relation can take many forms – parody, borrowing, plagiarism, generic and/or thematic similarity and so on. Another intertextual feature of many cartoons is that they play on the connotation of a verbal or non-verbal signifier, that is, word or image. While the denotation of a word or image is its objective, definitional, literal, or direct meaning, its connotation includes all (subjective) cultural, emotional, or ideological overtones and undertones and associations that the word or image may have.

Data and methodology The small-size cartoon corpus consists of 16 cartoons where Bush is the main signifier, 14 cartoons where the main signifier is bin Laden and six cartoons which combine the two. The two cartoons singled out for detailed analysis are: 1) Bush: by Egyptian cartoonist Moustafa Hussein, Al-Akhbar (Egyptian Official) Newspaper, 16 August 2007 (see Appendix). The newspaper takes an apparent pro-government stance. There is, however, a lot of space for criticism as long as it does not collide with the country’s authorities. There is space for the criticism of, for example, the US administration and Israeli policies and practices; 2) Osama bin Laden: Professional Cartoonists Index: Where is Osama? by the US American cartoonist Mike Lane, 11 January 2007. The cartoon can be found at [http:// www.cagle.com/news/WheresOsama/main.asp]. The other cartoon texts come from a variety of print and electronic sources that are listed at the end of the study. The selection of these texts is not completely subjective; they represent tens of similar cartoons which convey more or less the same messages. All cartoons examined in this study come from the same, never-ending political story – the so-called war on terror, Bush being the leading ‘warrior’ and bin Laden being the number one ‘terrorist’. The story began with the 9/11 attacks (2001) and it has not come to a closure yet. The second chapter came as a response to the attacks. It was a war on Afghanistan – the stronghold of Al-Qaeda and its leader bin Laden and its supporting regime Taliban (7 October 2001 – ongoing). The third chapter was Liberation Iraqi Freedom, or Second Gulf War, a war on Iraq (20 March 2003 – ongoing), where another target of the US-led war on terror, Saddam Hussein, used to rule. The analysis of the corpus focuses on the thematic patterns – the cartoon constructions of the two personae – and salient stylistic and generic features – the tools for realizing those constructions – in each cartoon. Then, the article zooms in on two political cartoons. The analysis of the two cartoons examines their textual and visual dimensions and their semio-linguistic features, taking a great deal of functional grammar and CDA for granted. Then, the entire cartoon sample is located in its discourse strand and the instances of incongruity and blending are examined, followed by a discussion of the major intertextual aspects of the cartoons and a wrap up of the messages of the texts; that is, how they con-struct the two political personae.



Political cartoon sample BUSH CARTOONS

One cartoon collage in English features Bush talking to God, revealing that he is only following heavenly commands in invading Iraq and in thinking of invading Iran and Syria. The direct speech mode in the balloon reinforces the sense of Bush being in direct touch with God, and the body language of supporting the right ear with the right hand and leaning and focusing the right ear in the direction where the voice seems to come from signals attention – ‘What’s that, God, you want me to invade Iran and Syria, too? OK. Another staged terror attack on the homeland? Of course, I will, Lord.’ Bush is an obedient servant to God, a near-prophet, a chosen president, which establishes an essential incongruity between religion and invasion, between mission and exploitation. Blended, the two worlds of religion and political ambitions result in a new space where the former is in service of the latter. Either Bush is lying or he is serving a ‘merciless God’. The qualification of the ‘terror attack’ as ‘staged’ reveals an exaggeration, a falsification and a dramatization of the attack to produce the desired fear effects. Looking at reports entitled ‘No WMDs’ (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and ‘Iraq war threat was exaggerated’ in another cartoon text, Bush, in his White House office, has nothing to apologize for – ‘It was God who prompted me to go to war, and He has my full confidence.’ It was not the WMDs that motivated the war; the war on Iraq was a response to a divine call, so to speak. It was a war authorized by God, Bush suggests. Bush is the doer in the embedded ‘go to war’ phrase, but there is a prompt in the main clause where he is the experiencer/target of the mental/verbal process of prompting by God. Bush is not to blame; as a believer in God, he is pre-destined to go to war. The cartoon text, thus, reinforces the impression of a direct connection between God and Bush and the prophetic status of the latter, as well as the missionary nature of the whole enterprise in Iraq. Putting the theological motivation aside, Bush’s statement may be read as a last resort to religion, a manipulation of the deistic appeal, when other excuses for the war were found to be false and/or ‘exaggerated’. On the front page of the Arabic version of Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2007, Bush is caricatured as a magician, a master of deception, and his political behavior is described as a Scheherazade’s strategy of inventing stories and fables to capture the attention of the audience and to produce desired political effects. The description is an allusion to the famous heroine of the Arabian Nights who manages to keep the bloody King in suspense waiting for the rest of a tale. As soon as one tale finishes, a new one begins but never ends the same night, giving the King no chance for executing the clever narrator. So the narration goes on for a 1001 nights, and so Bush’s stories have been going on from 9/11 to Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan, then to Saddam and Iraq and so on. The cartoon text thus contains a complex incongruity of Bush as president of the US and as a magician and as a clever storyteller. Another cartoon in English, also heavily intertextual, features Bush reading a book entitled the Lessons of Vietnam and reading news about students averaging 50 percent on a national history test. He is amazed: ‘Wow! That high!’


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The incongruity between ‘50%’ and ‘high’ reveals something about Bush oftcartooned stupidity, which is borne out in reading the experience of Vietnam and still repeating it in Iraq and elsewhere. Bush’s exclamations can result in a scalar implicature where 20 percent, for example, is tolerable and 70 percent is unimaginably outstanding. In another cartoon in English, a dictionary entry and a graphic illustration of the entry are combined: the entry is on ‘insanity’ and the illustration is Bush himself reading the book Iraq. The blend of a dictionary entry with the illustration tells the whole story: doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is insane. In a cartoon text in Arabic, Bush and Blair are obviously overjoyed upon discovering WMDs. They are right under their noses; in fact, they are their noses. Their noses are caricatured as rockets or missiles, one each, which results in a visual fusion of the human body space with that of weapons – a nose-as-rocket metaphor. The noses are the weapons. Bush and Blair seem to be following their noses, as it were, in their war on terror and to continue in the same direction notwithstanding the losses and lessons. That Bush is determined and relentless is also revealed in the cartoon in English where he ‘rides’ a war-plane, in cowboyand-soldier attire, holding a sword in his right hand and the plane’s ‘curb’ in his left hand, pledging ‘to infinity and beyond’, thus underscoring cowboy rash and impulsiveness and war hunger. The blend of a plane with a horse results in a new space where modern warfare rests on a primitive desire of a war-lord to control and dominate and win. Winning the war on terror has not proven to be an easy task, especially with the cowboy – Bush himself – riding a collapsing elephant and shouting ‘onward to victory’ in another cartoon in English. He does not seem to be able, some say willing, to capture bin Laden, either. A cartoon in English features Bush holding a truncheon waiting for bin Laden to get out of his hide – in a Tom-and-Jerry fashion. Year in, year out, a cobweb forms around Bush’s head, hands and legs and bin Laden never gets out. The impulse to dominate is an opposite of justice, a violation of the motto Justitia semper Librans – ‘Justice always means balance’. The scales representing this balance are destroyed by Bush in another cartoon in English and the Lady of Justice no longer carries her sword. The sword is now a saw in Bush’s hand used to cut off one side of the scales, which renders ‘Justice be done’ semantically empty and gives rise to the more realistic ‘Justice be hanged’ – which Bush declares in the cartoon. Two worlds are fused in the cartoon: the abstract symbolic world of justice and the real world of warfare and injustice. The fusion is an instance of doublespeak where what a speaker says is only a camouflanguage, so to speak. Hanging occurs in one cartoon in Arabic where the White Master with a star-spangled hat symbolizing both Bush and the US, fused into a new space of gladiator and victim, is interviewing a poor, hanged Arab-Muslim and asking him ‘Why do you hate us?’. The caption on the cartoon is ‘A Dialogue with America’. Killing and hanging are never dialogic and the question will never be answered by a dead interlocutor. The cartoon ridicules a question that Bush actually asked in an important speech in the aftermath of 9/11 – ‘Why do they hate us?’ referring to Arabs and Muslims and presupposing that they really do – but his answer to



the question has always been shallow and narrow, for example, ‘they hate our freedoms’ (e.g. Corn, 2003: 135; Mazid, 2007). Other themes show up in the cartoon sample. For example, Bush’s perception of himself and his country as leading the entire world, as the center of the globalized universe, is ridiculed in a cartoon in Arabic where the president, dressed formally and presidentially, as it were, is in a bureau of vital statistics and civil registration, requesting an ID card. He asks the person in charge to write Owner and General Manager of the World and the Earth and Everything Therein in the profession slot. That Bush’s motives are not as religious as he seems to pretend, at least in two cartoons already examined in this section, is indicated in a cartoon in Arabic with the caption ‘Uncle Sam ready for Iran and all’. The caption plays on the Arabic word for Sam which means ‘poisonous’ when the /m/ sound is geminated. This verbal fusion of a human with an attribute of snakes is even more obvious in the visual blending of a typical Uncle Sam with a snake – the lower part of the body and the tongue belong to a snake; the rest is Sam’s. A snake remains a symbol of evil designs, of flexibility and deceptive softness and of Satan himself. Bush seems to be very good at (waging) war, but very weak at domestic issues. This is visually realized in a caricature where Bush the body-builder has very strong well-developed left biceps, labeled ‘War’, and very weak, barely visible right biceps, labeled ‘Domestic Issues’. In another cartoon, on the third birthday of the war on Iraq, Bush blows three candles – labeled Sunni, Shiite and Kurd – in the war tart. The birthday becomes a death-day, and the party becomes partisan warfare in a ‘liberated’ Iraq. In a cartoon in Arabic, Bush is dressed in an American uniform of stars and stripes, yet carrying a famous Nazi symbol – the Iron Cross – and mustached in much the same way as Hitler used to be, pointing toward the Islamic World as if commanding an army to move. BIN LADEN CARTOONS

The cartoons where bin Laden is the main signifier are no less dysphemistic. A cartoon in English contains his ID card that says everything about his hobbies – bombing, beheading, among other things – and proudest moments – 9/11. He is not merely evil (adj.); he is evil (n.), as the label of an over-arching, dangerous, Satanic bin Laden carries in another cartoon in English indicates. In this strip cartoon text, there is a visual parallelism between the high waves, heralding a typhoon, in each part of the text. The second part contains two additional elements: the icon for the globe and a caricature of bin Laden, represented as overwhelming the globe with evil. The caption on the first part reads ‘unpredictable’; on the second, ‘predictable’. Nature can be evil at some moments – we do not know when this can happen; bin Laden is always evil. Being evil, he is comfortable with terror and blood. Bin Laden is at home with bombs and other weapons, a typical wolf in another cartoon in English, a homeless bomber crippling New York subway, and happily singing thereafter, and many other things. Celebrating a birthday, bin Laden, long-bearded and armed as usual with his berretta, has in front of him a tart,


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but no candles; five missiles replace the candles thus blending a moment of happiness and celebration with a moment of war. The blend indicates a natural tendency to celebrate war. Bin Laden seems to have found in terror a favorite vocation – ‘Beheadings, suicide bombs, torture – Ok! Back to work!!’. Echoing some actual statements made by Bush, one cartoon in English situates bin Laden in the company of Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Stalin. It is dangerous to dance with bin Laden. A cartoon in English juxtaposes a verbal acceptance of a truce by bin Laden with his hand extended, albeit stained with blood. The acceptance of a truce is thus a form of deception. Evil and good continue to overlap in other cartoons about bin Laden. Dressed in a stolen Canadian Security uniform in a Canadian airport in a cartoon in English, he shouts ‘God is Great’ (allaahu akbar) – an expression of victory in Arabic. For him, it seems, stealing security uniforms from infidels, as well as being able to sneak into one of their airports, is a victory. Reading news coming from Iraq – ‘US body count now over 1000’ – in another cartoon in English, he is overjoyed and decides to ‘get cracking’ as Bush seems to be ‘catching up to’ him. The ambivalence and paradox in bin Laden’s attitude to religion and war, in fact the hypocrisy many attach to the entire Jihadist endeavor, is ridiculed in a cartoon in English where a typical Osama with a bomb in his turban comments on the Danish cartoon affair ironically arguing, ‘Cartoonists must not draw Muhammad with a bomb in his turban!’. The incongruity between what he is saying and what he is doing, visually realized in the fusion of a turban with a bomb, is easy to pin down. The same incongruity exists in a wordless cartoon about bin Laden where his beard is so long that it reaches a detonator nearby and is tied to it. Religion, symbolized by the beard, is a tool and a weapon. Bombing has come to be part of a ‘holy war’ and of ‘sacred terror’ (e.g. Benjamin and Simon, 2003). The bin Laden cartoons seem to suggest that, in addition to the aforementioned characterizations, the leader of Al-Qaeda is cunning and dubious and ubiquitous, capable of taming a fierce, iron animal that symbolizes the US and its war funding, over-seeing a pinned-down Bush who is drowned in his own war rhetoric, unable to ‘Git ’em’, and becoming a nightmare for his hunter: a cartoon in Arabic depicts Bush, tired of training on capturing bin Laden, in bed with his wife. Startled, the wife shouts, ‘I almost died. You were stifling me’. ‘Sorry honey, I thought I caught bin Laden’, Bush apologizes. Another cartoon in English lists comic characters and the ‘crafty animals that elude them’: ‘Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner; Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. President Bush and Osama bin Laden.’ Bin Laden is obviously more degraded than Bush in the cartoons. The cartoons also seem to suggest a kind of secret deal between bin Laden and Bush; for example, bin Laden plays the role of a US sergeant calling upon Bush, ‘I want you to invade Iraq’. He is ecstatic at hearing that Bush has won and is staying in the White House for another four years – ‘Looks like I might be safe for another four years’, which renders Bush’s talk of hunting down bin Laden simply empty and pretentious.


Mazid: Cowboy and misanthrope 445 BUSH AGAINST / AND BIN LADEN CARTOONS

The plotlines, the over-simplistic black-or-white polarities, that Bush and bin Laden seem to have established since 9/11, each in his own ways and available channels and each for his own purposes – Jihad versus Infidels in bin Laden’s lexicon; freedom versus evil in Bush’s – do not seem to be convincing any longer (e.g. Corn, 2003). Bush and bin Laden seem to have more similarities and more mutual interests than their Doublespeak and Hatespeak (Fox, 2000, see below) superficially suggest. A heavily verbal cartoon in English lists an impressive number of things that the two have in common – both are ‘chosen’; both like ‘to blow things up’; each knows God is on his side; neither ‘reads the newspaper’, to mention only a few things in common. The apparent, ram-like head-butting between Bush and bin Laden in the visual part of the text should not be exaggerated. All the cartoons where Bush and bin Laden appear together follow the same kind of parallelism or equivalence that characterizes the head-butting cartoon referred to above, and they are all in English, incidentally. A wordless cartoon depicts Bush and bin Laden turning a spinning wheel in two opposite directions. The bleeding center of the wheel is the globe itself. The fusion of an iconic representation of the globe with a bleeding human indicates the kind of misery and suffering the world has to undergo because of the two seemingly opposed leaders. Another fusion occurs in another cartoon between the bodies of two kettles and the heads of Bush and bin Laden. Bush calls bin Laden ‘fascist’ and bin Laden responds, ‘Takes one to know one’ – a mutual misrepresentation of the other and a war of ‘bad names’. The kettles may suggest that it all boils down to two evils at war, or that both are at their best when they are on fire. The profound similarity between the two is cleverly captured in a cartoon where each occupies half the text space and a balloon joins them. Together, they declare that they are ‘just doing the work of the Almighty’. Backgrounded is a world on fire, dead bodies and horror. Again, the two are either lying, double-speaking, or referring to a merciless Almighty. Regardless of their ‘staged’ rivalry and bin Laden’s nightmarish presence – bin Laden: ‘Is this on? Ahem . . . I am the ghost of past, present and future’ – and their tragic encounter and determination to get rid of each other – ‘to Bin or not to Bin; to Bush or not to Bush, that’s the question’ – they remain united by a host of ‘big, bold and brazen lies’ (Kellner, 2007: 639); at least, this is what the cartoon sample indicates.

In-depth analysis of two political cartoons TEXT ( VERBAL ) The cartoon text about Bush may translate into English as ‘Bush: God knows I want to ‘‘liberate’’ humankind in this world from their sins, ‘‘reform/remove’’ the darkness in their souls and the stupidity of their ‘‘beliefs’’ and to save them/free them from the whims and quirks of their minds, ‘‘eternally’’, once and for all’


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(original emphases). The second cartoon is about bin Laden: ‘Osama (reading news about the tsunami refugees): ‘‘All that death, destruction and misery’’, ‘‘What a happy new year!’’’. The headline in the newspaper bin Laden reads – ‘Tsunami: Refugees’ – triggers his delight and locates the cartoon in a sociohistorical context of a huge disaster that afflicted many countries in Asia in ” in the first cartoon, an example of 2004. The deistic gambit ‘God knows’ “ authorization in Van Leeuwen’s (2007) framework, is used to render the locutions to follow credible and authoritative. Other deistic words in the text, making up a deistic semantic isotope, so to speak, are ‘sins’ “‫” ﺧﻄﺎلﺎﻳرﺎﻫﻢ‬, ‘reform’ “ ‫” ﺻﻠﺢ‬, ‘beliefs’ “ ‫ ”ﻣﻌﺘﻘﺪاﺗﻬﻢ‬and ‘eternally’ “ ‫”اﺣﺔ ﺑﺪلﺎﻳرﺔ‬. The clause in the deistic gambit is mental, in systemic functional grammar parlance. Another mental process, ‘I want’ “‫” لﺎﻳرﺪ‬, introduces a list of clauses where Bush is the Doer – ‘liberate’, ‘reform/remove’ and ‘free/save’. Human beings “‫ ”اﻟﺒﺸﺮ‬are the patient of all of these material processes. The verbs/processes are all positive, yet both of them are ideological polysemies and glittering generalities. What is liberation from one point of view might be murder or invasion from another. A division is established through the Doer–Patient polarity between Bush himself as liberator, savior and reformer and the rest of humankind as sinful, whimsical, dogmatic and stupid. However, all the processes are hypothetical and in the irrealis mode. They do not indicate things that are happening or being done by Bush; rather, they refer to things he believes he wants to do. However, they are grounded on a major presupposition that humankind have sins; their beliefs are stupid and dogmatic; they have whims and quirks, and their souls are dark, and that Bush can fix all of these problems. Osama’s two clauses do not contain any processes. The first part is predominantly nominal – ‘death’, ‘destruction’ and ‘misery’ – referring to real rather than hypothetical conditions and inflictions. At least death, destruction and misery are presupposed. A process may be retrieved – for example, ‘All that death, destruction and misery are inflicting humankind/are happening in the world/ are there in the world’ – but the retrieval is not necessary. The three nominals refer to negative conditions and events and form an isotope of darkness and suffering that contrast drastically with the light and happiness of a new year in the second part of the cartoon. The second part is an exclamation, where bin Laden is the Senser and the Phenomenon is ‘happy new year’. The underlying process may be understood as relational – ‘I am happy’. He is not a Doer or Agent of any material process. Bin Laden is detached from the scene, not suffering any of the inflictions, not even feeling sympathetic, as borne out by the deictic ‘that’ in the first part of the cartoon. TEXT ( VISUAL )

The central visual signifier – the visual theme, so to speak – in the first cartoon text is George Bush in cowboy attire. The cowboy, an animal herder basically, is a symbol of American individualism. The elements of the cowboy that appear in the text are knee-high boots, jeans, a large revolver holstered on each hip, a third in his right hand pointing downwards to a pile of dead bodies (the ground whereupon Bush stands), a cowboy hat with a wide brim and a bandanna



(a large neckerchief). Stereotypically, a cowboy stands, in the minds of many, especially non-Americans, for violence, impulsiveness, rashhi ammourhi and hot-headedness. The cowboy’s (Bush’s) left-hand index finger points upward – as if making a ‘point’ or referring to heaven as his witness – and so is his face. The entire left side of the cowboy belongs to a preacher, or a public speaker deriving inspiration and seeking support from above, while the right side belongs to a killer. The central visual signifier in the second (strip) cartoon text is Osama bin Laden, as seen on TV, in most caricatures and in ‘alleged’ as well as real videotapes. We see bin Laden in two poses – first looking at a newspaper, where news about the tsunami is reported, and second facing camera, so to speak. There is a mini-‘mute narrative’, Sonesson’s (1997) term, in the cartoon. Bin Laden is in his traditional, non-military attire – a turban and a simple jilbaab, also known as kandoura and dishdasha (traditional Arab-male dress) – sitting on a prayercarpet, keeping his exceptionally long, flowing beard, yet still carrying his berretta on his left shoulder. There is also a traditional pot of water nearby. In the first part of the cartoon, bin Laden looks somewhat amazed; in the second, he is obviously delighted. Something happens in the middle – he reads a headline about the tsunami refugees. Reacting to the news story, his right and left thumbs make a victorious signal – ‘thumb up’ also means ‘OK’, ‘That‘s great’ and ‘Good luck’. The signal in the cartoon is obviously emphatic, intensified by repetition – two thumbs, not just one. In cartoon (1), there is an essential contradiction between the firearm and the dead bodies, an outcome of war, on the one hand, and the heavily religious discourse in the balloon, on the other – between what Bush says and what he actually does. The contradiction is highlighted by the cartoonist through the use of inverted commas around religious vocabulary. The highlighting serves as a metalinguistic intervention which draws readers’ and viewers’ attention to the ‘doublespeak’ in the balloon. In (2), there is a contradiction between the two parts of the verbal text – ‘death, destruction and misery’ and ‘What a happy new year!’. Death, destruction and misery should occasion sympathy and unhappiness in a normal human being. In bin Laden, they occasion delight, a sense of triumph and hopes of more death, destruction and misery to come. At least in the case of the first cartoon, incongruity is perceived largely through a central visual metaphor. There is at least one obvious fusion in each of the two cartoon texts. The fusion can be described as two spaces – a source and a target space – combining together and a new blended space is formed (Coulson and Oakley, 2000; Lakoff and Turner, 1989; Turner, 1996, 2000, 2003, 2006). In the blended space in the first cartoon, the Bush and the Cowboy nodes are fused, condensed in Freud’s terminology, to a single Cowboy-Bush space, with the cowboy attire and tools functioning metonymically. A new meaning emerges in the new space, a meaning which is not to be found in either of the two input spaces. Only in the blended space can the incongruity between the image of the US President and that of the Cowboy be seen. Cowboys are generally thought of as dangerous; so, the blending


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is obviously dysphemistic. Another fusion occurs in the bin Laden cartoon – bin Laden the devoted Muslim on his prayer carpet and bin Laden the terrorist with his berretta, a metonymy of a warrior, rather than a worshipper. The fusion is reinforced by a disruption of the bad news versus good news script in the verbal part of the cartoon – bad news about some of the outcomes of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster is followed by an expression of delight; in fact, a complex expression, where words combine with a big smile and two thumbs up. DISCOURSE STRAND AND SCRIPT

Bush, bin Laden, the war on terror, Al-Qaeda, WMD and other things most closely related, have come to be prevailing schemata in today’s world. They are recurrent topics in media and politics and also in everyday conversations and scholarly discussions around the globe. More general schemata activated by those listed above include religion and war. With religion comes an array of ideals such as justice, tolerance, love and peace and cooperation. An opposing set of practices, emotions and behaviors comes with war – hatred, murder, misanthropy, destruction, misery and suffering. The cartoons above, the sample as well as the two cartoons analyzed in more detail, belong to a huge discourse strand – a ‘thematically uniform discourse process’ in Jager’s (2002: 47) words – on terrorism and resistance thereof, a discourse that stretches vertically from time immemorial, from Hitler to bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and horizontally across languages and countries at present. The discourse strand on terrorism, and the war thereon, is often entangled with a discourse of religious salvation, so to speak. In the bin Laden cartoons, religion is suggested by the prayer carpet and the attire and appearance associated with Osama and his followers. Interestingly, he borrows many Western expressions – ‘happy new year’; ‘Takes one to know one’ – and fits them into his own discourse fragments. In the entire cartoon sample, religion is evoked through direct references to God. The entanglement of terrorism discourse with religion is an important feature the cartoons (and the two main personae therein) have in common. INTERTEXTUALITY

The cartoon texts in the entire sample fit in the discourse strand of the war on terror, the war on the war on terror and the ideological polarities causing the two wars and resulting from them as well. The first cartoon analyzed in detail is not the first time Bush has been depicted as a cowboy. For example, Time magazine had a cover article referring to George W. Bush’s foreign policy as ‘Cowboy Diplomacy’, and Bush has been described in European newspapers as a ‘cowboy’ (Wikipedia; for another reference to Bush as Cowboy, see Diamond, 2002). In fact, he has become a target of humor and critique in contemporary media East and West. The image that results from those (mis)representations is that of a president who is widely seen as ‘a cartoon character’, a ‘B-grade cowboy’ and many other things (O’Connor, 2005: 163). The narratives emerging from the Bush biographies are of a former president’s son, a born-again Christian and a Texan (O’Connor, 2005; Schweizer and Schweizer, 2004).



Falah et al. (2006) identify the following themes in a sample of Arab cartoons on the war on terror: imperialist intent; the arrogance of power; realist power politics; double standards toward the UN and international law; and support of Israel as immoral. One of the cartoons examined reaffirms the language of power. The Bahraini daily Al-Ayam (21 November 2002) attached a sketch of President Bush to a report on Afghanistan. The picture shows him as a cowboy, in typical cowboy attire, with a powerfully muscled upper body and flexed biceps. The image is a cross between a wild-west movie cowboy and a modern-day body builder, not that fearful by itself but effective in catalyzing political resistance when we think that this person is the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth. In other words, the cartoon argues that the hegemonic power’s authority rests on violence. (p. 156)

‘Fundamentally,’ Lively (1942: 101) argues, ‘any symbol, for the detached observer, is in itself without tendency’. The cowboy image, as already indicated above, can mean many things for many people. Its connotations can range from positive masculinity and control to negative impulsiveness and rash and irrationality. The visual context of the cowboy in the Bush cartoon, in addition to the verbal subtext, motivates a negative perception of the cowboy symbol. In the same vein, the caricature of bin Laden is typical and somewhat predictable. His turban, long, flowing beard, traditional Arab-Muslim male dress, long nose and fingers have become popular enough since 9/11. Furthermore, the verbal characterizations which identify bin Laden as a hideously ugly, menacing terrorist, evil thug, bloody mastermind and elusive fugitive, martial adversary and sadistic criminal, primitive savage and outlaw are quite common in Western media. They also show up in the sample cartoons broadly examined above. Religion has always been there – an important weapon in the armory of both sides of the ongoing conflict, the clash of fundamentalisms (Ali, 2002), a firearm for demonizing the enemy and a shield for glorifying self (see Allan and Burridge, 1991, on the use of euphemism and dysphemism as a weapon and a shield). Bin Laden has always talked of fighting ‘infidels’ and ‘unbelievers’ and of his entire endeavor as ‘jihad’. Bush has always represented the conflict after 9/11 as one between good and evil (Kellner, 2005), used the ‘Wild West’ metaphor, and described the campaign as a ‘crusade’. In his speech to the Congress on 20 September 2001, Bush described the conflict as a war between freedom and fear, between barbarism and civilization (e.g. Mazid, 2007). He continues to use the notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘civilization’ to describe both what ‘the civilized West’ is fighting for and what the terrorists are opposing (Kellner, 2005: 17). The post-9/11 discourse of Bush and his administration at large is predominantly moralizing, divisive and absolutist – absolutely good fighting absolutely evil; what is absolutely evil must be destroyed (e.g. Höijer et al., 2004; Kellner, 2005; Mazid, 2007). Analysis of and commentary on the Bush administration’s discourse after 9/11 (e.g. Chomsky, 2001; Graham et al., 2004; Höijer et al., 2004; Kellner, 2005, 2007; Ottosen, 2004; Woodward, 2002) have identified certain patterns and major statements: it is a war between good and evil; the US has a mission to accomplish in defending civilization and freedom and justice; the


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enemy of the US, and thus of humanity and democracy and peace, is Islamic terrorism, led and incarnated by Osama bin Laden (Erjavec and Volcic, 2007). Bin Laden’s borrowing of a typically Western Christmas expression may reveal a deep-rooted ambivalence in Arab-Islamic culture today, as far as the relationship with the West is concerned. Bin Laden himself used to be an ally of the US when he fought against the former USSR in Afghanistan and he is now using a weapon that must have been manufactured somewhere in the West. An interesting instance of intertextuality, already referred to above, is the text-within-text in bin Laden’s focal cartoon – the newspaper headline about ‘Tsunami refugees’. In addition to contextualizing the utterances in the cartoon, the headline contributes to the incongruity and abnormality therein. While the headline is in harmony with bin Laden’s description of what is going on (‘death, destruction’ and the resulting ‘misery’), it is an unpredictable trigger of anyone’s delight, unless this is bin Laden as represented in a lot of Western media. CONSTRUCTIONS

According to Meyer (2000), differentiation is a major function of humor. Communicators use differentiation to contrast ‘themselves with their opponents, their views with an opponent’s views, their own social group with others, and so on’, to make ‘both alliances and distinctions’. ‘Comic ridicule’ can maintain ‘identification’ and unity among members of one group while stressing ‘contradictions’ and ‘differences’ from other groups (pp. 321–2). The author of the cartoon about Bush examined in detail is an Egyptian, an Arab-Muslim; of the cartoon about bin Laden, a US American. The target of the first is George Bush; the target of the second is Osama bin Laden. The stage is set for an ‘ideological square’ (Van Dijk, 1998, 2005). The first cartoon is a negative representation of Bush, the second is of bin Laden. The misrepresentation derives from an essential contradiction, or incongruity, in each cartoon. ‘To be most effective, a cartoon must have three characteristics: sparkling wit, a basic element of fact, and a didactic or editorial purpose’ (Cuff, 1945: 87). It is difficult to measure how ‘sparkling’ the wit is in the cartoons examined here, but the fun is there, both in the caricatures and in the incongruities. There is also a great deal of truth in each of them. At least, the caricatures refer to two people we know. The message of the two focal cartoons is simple enough, and it is conveyed in the rest of the cartoon texts: 1) Bush is (represented as) a hypocritical warmonger, an insane cowboy and body-builder who uses religion to legitimize and justify his crimes against humanity; 2) bin Laden is (represented as) a dubious, nightmarish misanthrope who finds joy in the suffering and misery of humankind.

Discussion and conclusion As far as the two focal cartoons are concerned, it should be remembered that this is Bush as seen by an Egyptian cartoonist and that this is bin Laden as seen by an American cartoonist and that both cartoons, much in the same way as



those in the rest of the sample, belong to the category of commentary, which is obviously more personal than that of accounts (Gamson and Stuart, 1992), although accounts are ‘personal’ and ideological in their ways which are not dealt with in this article. ‘The propagandist-cartoonist,’ Lively (1942) argues, ‘does not maintain the divine detachment of the raisonneur. He has a parti pris to further by attempting to influence the trend of thought’ (p. 100). Both cartoonists, depicting ‘enemy images’ (Ottosen, 1995), have ideologies and biases, or ‘interpretive packages’ (Gamson and Stuart, 1992: 59), which inspire the arguments, or the messages, in the two cartoons. Of course, Bush and bin Laden, and their followers, have their counterarguments, which derive from their own, relentlessly competing, ‘interpretive packages’, or ideologies. As borne out by their own speeches and releases, as well as by the cartoons in the rest of the sample, both of them believe they are fighting a holy war – fulfilling a ‘mission’ and answering a ‘call’ in Bush’s words and doing jihad in bin Laden’s. Others might see the two players in the ongoing game differently. In spite of the apparent differences in status and amount of power each has, the two have many things in common. In the texts above, each has his firearm, and each has religion on his side. A merciless killing-to-reform attitude informs both of them in the two central cartoon texts. In the case of bin Laden, the tsunami is perhaps a ‘divine’ punishment so that ‘infidels’ and nonjihadists may repent, or else perish – a very popular interpretation of natural disasters in religious thinking. It can be true, but it should occasion insight and wisdom, not delight in others’ suffering. However, it would be an obvious mistake to interpret the two focal cartoons as manifestations of a clash of civilizations. The very notion of a clash of civilizations is a grand misconceptualization many have been living by. Many of the cartoons ridiculing Bush come from the West; many of those ridiculing bin Laden come from the Middle East. Moreover, the countries that were hardest hit by the tsunami are not Western or ‘non-Muslim’ countries. ‘America’s ‘‘war on terror’’ and Al Qaeda’s ‘‘jihad’’ reflect mirror strategies of imperial politics’ (Agathangelou and Ling, 2004: 517). As indicated by the discourse strand where the cartoons come from – the war on terror discourse – each of the two leaders singles out the other as the main cause of ‘violence and destruction’ in the world and each declares the other must be ‘defeated or killed’. Each represents Self as ‘innocent, victimized, virtuous, moral, and rational; the enemy Other, as demonic, murderous, and radically barbaric’. Responding to violence becomes a ‘moral imperative’ each of them feels justified in making (p. 521). For Bush, killing and murdering are not as ugly as people might think, given the ‘noble’ motives and intentions of liberation, reformation and salvation behind them. For bin Laden, misery, death and destruction are good reasons for celebration as long as the victims are not jihadists, although most of them were helpless, poor Asians, not ‘Westerners’, and as long as the ultimate goal of Islamizing the globe, or else eradicating it, is materializing and taking shape. In the first focal cartoon, there is an obvious case of Doublespeak – ‘language that makes the bad look good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear


452 Discourse & Communication 2(4)

attractive, at least tolerable’ (Lutz, 1989: 1), at least as perceived by the cartoonist. The inverted commas surrounding the Arabic words meaning ‘liberate’, ‘reform’ and ‘eternally/for ever’ are potentially and intentionally ambiguous. They can mean ‘kill’, and by killing, eternal liberation from sins and stupid beliefs inevitably happens. From the cartoonist’s point of view, Bush ‘intentionally tries to change how we view the world’ (Fox, 2000: 47). Instead of seeing the atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are invited to see Bush’s ‘intentions’ to make the world a better place and humankind a reformed species. We are invited to hear not the shootings, but the ‘camouflanguage’ (Quarterly Review of Doublespeak). For those who have seen the facts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush’s Doublespeak becomes an outright contradiction, a big lie. There is a lot of Doublespeak and Hatespeak in the rest of cartoons about Bush as indicated in the remarks on the cartoon sample above. In the second focal cartoon, there is flagrant case of Hatespeak, defined by Fox (2000) as communication that ‘expresses negative and destructive attitudes and behaviors toward certain groups of people on the basis of their race, age, ethnicity, religion’ and other affiliations or backgrounds (p. 165). To feel ecstatic at the death, misery and destruction of others is an abnormal state of hatred. Yet, again, this is how the cartoonist perceives bin Laden. This should not be surprising given the bloody, brutal nature of bin Laden uncovered in the rest of cartoons about him and the image of him that has already developed in Western media and Mediaspeak. The depiction of Bush is not surprising, either, given how many in the Middle East and Muslim world see him. Bin Laden and Bush are not the angels or the holy fighters they think themselves to be; they are not the devils their enemies think they are. What is most authentic about the two cartoons is their contribution to the war of misrepresentation and delegitimation between fundamentalists in the West and in the East, escalated and accelerated by the 9/11 attacks. The cartoons are also true to their genre where incongruity, fusion and blending account for a great deal of the humor therein as well as the critique of their objects, and where the interaction between the visual and the verbal is essential to the encoding and the decoding of the message. The analysis of those and other aspects given above is not meant to be the final word on cartoon in general or on the sample texts in particular. It is only one possible reading of the texts indicating the centrality of incongruity in humor and of misrepresentation in the war on terror and the war on the war on terror discourse. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am very grateful to Professor T.A. van Dijk for an encouraging initial response to my original manuscript where he suggested adding a sample of political cartoons about Bush and bin Laden to the original two cartoon texts analyzed in-depth in this article, and for his support and patience. I would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the valuable comments and suggestions, and Amy Goggins for her assistance and patience. The usual disclaimers of course apply.


Mazid: Cowboy and misanthrope 453 A P P E N D I X : TH E B U S H CA RTO O N

S O U R C E S O F CA RTO O N SA M P L E :

1) Websites [www.caglecartoons.com] [www.cagle.com] [www.Davidwilhite.com] [www.kirktoons.com] [www.lilgeocartoons.com] [www.splendidmarbles.com] [www.cartoonistgroup.com] [www.cartoonstock.com] [www.mahjoob.com] [www.enigmaticparadox.com] [fun.aarabiah.net] [www.omayya.com]

2) Press The Honolulu Star Al-Akhbar (News) Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (Middle East) Detroit Free Press


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BAHAA-EDDIN M. MAZID

is Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Sohag University, Egypt and currently Assistant Professor, Department of Translation Studies, UAE University. His research interests include pragmatics and (critical) discourse analysis, translation studies, linguistic criticism, semiotics and cartoons, media texts, and the teaching of language and translation. His recent publications include a book – Politics of Translation: Power and Ideology, Culture and X-phemism in Translation between Arabic and English (LINCOM, 2007) – and an article – ‘Presuppositions and Strategic Functions in Bush’s 20/9/2001 Speech: A Critical Discourse Analysis’, Journal of Language and Politics 6(3): 351–75. A D D R E S S : Department of Translation Studies, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, UAE University, Al-Ain, PO Box 17771, United Arab Emirates. [email: [email protected]; [email protected]]


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