World-renowned political cartoonist Dwayne Booth, more commonly known as Mr. Fish, has found himself in the crosshairs of the new McCarthyist assault on free expression and higher education. While employed as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Booth became a target of Zionist and pro-Israel critics, and his work became a flashpoint of controversy in the months leading up to his firing in March. Facing charges that certain cartoons contained anti-Semitic tropes, J. Larry Jameson, interim president of the University of Pennsylvania, denounced Booth’s illustrations as “reprehensible.”
In a statement about his firing, Booth writes: “The reality – and something that, unfortunately, is not unique to Penn – is that colleges and universities nationwide have been way too complicit with the largely Republican-led efforts to target students and faculty members engaged in any and all speech rendered in support of trans/black/immigrant, and women’s rights, free speech, the independent press, academic freedom, and medical research – speech that also voices bold criticism of right-wing nationalism, genocide, apartheid, fascism, and specifically the Israeli assault on Palestine.”
In this special edition of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc sits down with Booth in the TRNN studio in Baltimore to discuss the events that led to his firing, the purpose and effects of political art, and how to respond to the repressive crackdown on art and dissent as genocide is unfolding and fascism is rising.
Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us.
A wave of authoritarian oppression has gripped colleges and universities. Life on campus looks in some ways similar but in other ways very intensely different than it did when I was a young man in the 1960s. International students like Mahmoud, Khalil are being abducted on the street and disappeared by ICE agents in broad daylight, and hundreds of student visas have been abruptly revoked. Faculty and graduate students are being fired, expelled, and doxxed online. From Columbia University to Harvard, Northwestern to Cornell, the Trump administration is holding billions of dollars of federal grants and contracts hostage in order to bend universities to Trump’s will and to squash our constitutional protected rights to free speech and free assembly.
Now, while the administration has justified these unprecedented attacks as necessary to root out so-called woke scours like diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and trans athletes playing college sports, the primary justification they’ve cited is combating antisemitism on campuses, which the administration has recategorized to mean virtually any criticism, opposition to Israel, its political ideolog, Zionism, and Israel’s US-backed obliteration of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Now, our guest today is Dwayne Booth, more commonly known as Mr. Fish, has found himself in the crosshairs of this top-down political battle to reshape higher education in our country. Booth is a world-renowned political cartoonist based in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in venues like Harvard’s Magazine, The Nation, The Village Voice, The Atlantic. Until recently, he was a lecturer at the Annenberg School [for] Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. And just days after the Trump administration announced it was freezing $175 million in federal funds depend, Booth was fired.
Booth’s work has become a flashpoint of controversy in the months leading up to his firing, facing charges that certain cartoons he made contained antisemitic tropes. J. Larry Jameson, interim president of the University of Pennsylvania, denounced Booth’s illustrations as reprehensible.
In a statement about his firing posted on his Patreon page on March 20, Booth wrote this: “The reality and something that, unfortunately, is not unique to Penn is that colleges and universities nationwide have been way too complicit with largely Republican-led efforts to target students and faculty members engaged in any and all speech rendered in support of trans, Black, immigrants, and women’s rights, free speech, the independent press, academic freedom, and medical research, speech that also voices bold criticism of right-wing nationalism, genocide, apartheid, fascism, and specifically the Israeli assault on Palestine.
Today we’re going straight to the heart of the matter, and we’re speaking with Mr. Fish himself right here in The Real News Studio. Welcome. Good to have you with us.
Dwayne Booth:
Great to be here.
Marc Steiner:
So I gotta ask you this question first. Just get it out of the way. So where did the fish come from?
Dwayne Booth:
Oh my gosh. Well, that’s a long tale. I attempted to name my mother, had gotten my stepfather a new bird for Father’s Day. And this was right after I dropped out of college and was living in the back of my parents’ house and fulfilling the dream of every parent to have their son return. I’m not getting a job, I’m going to draw cartoons, and my real name is Dwayne Booth, and I wasn’t going to start. I started to draw cartoons just as a side, and I couldn’t sign it “Booth” because George Booth was the main cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, and I couldn’t just write “Dwayne” because it was too Cher or Madonna, I wasn’t going to go for just this straight first name.
So I attempted to name this new bird that came into the house. My mother asked for names and I said, Mr. Fish is the best name for a pet bird, and she rejected it. So I said, I’ll use it. And I signed all my cartoons “Mr. Fish”, and I immediately got published. And one of the editors, in fact, who published me immediately had pretended to follow me for 30 years. Mr. Fish, I can’t believe Mr. Fish finally sent us. Oh, it was locked in. I had to be Mr. Fish.
Marc Steiner:
I love it. I love it. So the work you’ve been doing, first of all, it’s amazing that a person without artistic training creates these incredible, complicated, intricate cartoons. Clearly it’s just innate inside of you.
You have this piece you did, I dunno why this one keeps sticking in my head, but the “Guernica” piece, which takes on the Trump administration and puts their figures in the place of the original work, to talk about that for a minute, how you came to create that, and why you use “Guernica”?
Dwayne Booth:
Well, it’s called “Eternal Damn Nation”. And one of the things that we should be responsible and how we communicate our dismay to other people. Now, what we attempt to do as artists is figure out the quickest path to make your point. So we tend to utilize various iconic images or things from history that will get the viewer to a certain emotional state and then piggyback the modern version on top of it, and also challenge the whole notion that these kinds of injustices have been happening over and over and over again. Because the Picasso piece is about fascism. Guess what? Guess what’s happening now? So you want to use those things to say that this might refer to a historical truism from the past, but it has application now, and it speaks to people, as you said, it resonated. Why did it resonate? Because it seems like a blunt version of truth that we have to contend with.
Marc Steiner:
So when you draw your pieces, before we go to Israel Palestine, I want to talk about Trump for a moment. Trump has been a target of your cartoons from the beginning. And the way he’s portrayed eating feces — Can I say the other word? Eating shit and just having shit all over him, a big fat slob and a beast of a fascist. Talk about your own image of this man, why you portray him this way. What do you think he represents here at this moment?
Dwayne Booth:
Well, it’s interesting because, in many ways, what I try to do with the images, the cartoons that you’re referring to, is, yes, I try to make it as obscene as I possibly can because the reality is also obscene. So I always want to challenge somebody who might look at something like that and say, oh my gosh, I don’t want to look at it. It’s important to look at these things.
The reality is, yes, I create these metaphors, eating shit and being a very lethal buffoon and clown. Those, to me, are the metaphors for something that is actually more dangerous. He’s being enabled by a power structure and being legitimized by these power brokers that surround him to enact real misery in America and the rest of the world, so you don’t want to treat somebody respectfully who is doing that. You want to say, this is shit. This is bullshit. This is an obscenity that we have to not shy away from and face it.
And if it is that ugly, if the metaphor is that ugly, again, challenge me to say that I should be respecting this person in a different way, should be pulling my punches. No, no. We should be going full-throated dissent against this kind of person and this kind of movement because it is an obscenity and we have to do something about it.
Marc Steiner:
The way you portray what’s happening in this country at this moment in many of your cartoons, in many of your works, Trump next door with Hitler, Trump as a figure with his middle finger to the air, all of that, when you do these things. How do you think about transient that into political action?
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s one of the tricks with satire, and I think that satire, I don’t think people know how to read satire anymore. What stands —
Marc Steiner:
It’s a lost art.
Dwayne Booth:
It’s a lost art. People think that Saturday Night Live is satire, and it’s not. It’s comedy, it’s burlesque is what it is.
Marc Steiner:
It’s burlesque.
Dwayne Booth:
It’s burlesque, it’s parody —
Marc Steiner:
It’s burlesque.
Dwayne Booth:
And what it does is it allows people to address politics in a way that ends with laughter and ridicule, which is the physiological reaction. And when you laugh at something, you’re telling your body, in a way, that it’s going to be okay. We can now congregate around our disdain and minimize the monstrosity by turning Trump into a clown or a buffoon. Only then we can say we’ve done our work. Look at how ridiculous he is. Now we can rely on other people, then, to do something about it.
Satire is supposed to, from my understanding through history, is supposed to have some humor in it. A lot of the humor is just speaking the blatant truth about something, and it’s supposed to reveal social injustices and political villainy in such a way that when you’re finished with it, you’re still upset and you do want to do something about it. Again, if we have to start worrying about how we are communicating our disdain about something that is deserving of disdain, Lenny Bruce quote, something that always has moved me and is the reason I do what I do. When he said, “Take away the right to say fuck, and you take away the right to say fuck the government.”
Marc Steiner:
Yes, I saw that in one of your pieces.
Dwayne Booth:
We need that tool. So when I am addressing something that I find upsetting, I lead with my heart because it is a visceral reaction. It’s very, very upsetting. I pour that into the artwork that I’m rendering, and then I share with other people because people are suffering. I know what suffering feels like. So the emotional component is really, really important to me.
And if you notice, looking at the cartooning that I do about Trump, is those are very involved, most often, fine art pieces. They’re not the whimsy of a cartoon because it’s more serious than that. I want to communicate through the craft that I bring to the piece that I’m willing to spend. Some of those things take me days to complete.
Marc Steiner:
I’m sure.
Dwayne Booth:
This is so important to me, and you’re going to see my dedication to, A, giving a shit and wanting to do something about it. If I can keep you in front of that piece of art longer than if it was just a zippy cartoon, it might seep into your understanding, your soul, and your enthusiasm to also join some sort of movement to change things.
Marc Steiner:
What popped in my head when I first started looking into the piece was the use of humor and satire in attacking fascism, attacking the growth of fascism. Maybe think of Charlie Chaplin.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah, The Great Dictator
Marc Steiner:
That was so effective. But the buffoonery that he characterized Hitler with is the same with Trump. It is frightening and close.
Dwayne Booth:
It is. And I would say, again, one thing I just want to be clear about is that there can be elements of parody and burlesque in there, because what that does is that that invites the viewer into the conversation. It says that this is not so dangerous that you should cower. This person is a fool — A fool who is capable of great catastrophic actions, but he’s an idiot. He’s an idiot. You’re allowed to be smarter than an idiot, and you’re allowed to lose patience with an idiot.
So the second question. So, OK, if you can inspire somebody to be upset and recognize that they are somewhere in this strategy coming from an authoritarian of I will devour you at some point, and maybe this is where… I don’t know if you want to get into the college experience necessarily right now, but that was one of the things that’s interesting about being a professor for. I taught there for 11 years, and it’s always been in my mind. I love teaching, but I was hired as a professional because I was a professional cartoonist. I’m actually a college dropout, and so I bring the practice of what I do into the classroom.
One of the things that was very interesting is, as the world blows up, colleges and universities are institutions of privilege. There’s no way around it. There’s students, yes, that might be there with a great deal of financial aid or some part of a program that gets them in, but by and large, these are communities of privilege. So it was very interesting to see when the society was falling apart, when there was an obvious threat before it was exactly demonstrated about academic freedom and so forth, the strategy from many colleagues that I spoke to was, all right, if we hold our breaths and maybe get to the midterms, we’ll be okay. If we can hold our breaths and just keep our heads down for four years, maybe things will be better. And my reaction was just, do you realize that that’s a privileged position? There’s people who are really suffering. If that is what your strategy is moving forward, then we are doomed because there’s no reason to be brave and stick your neck out.
Marc Steiner:
A number of the things running through my head as you were just describing this, before we go back to your cartoons, which I want to get right back to, which is I was part of the student movement into the 1960s. We took over places, we fought police, we got arrested and expelled from schools. I was thrown out of University of Maryland after three semesters and got drafted. Don’t have to go into that story now, but that happened. So I’m saying there’ve always been places of radical disruption and anger and fighting for justice.
How do you see that different now? I mean, look, in terms of the work you do and what happened to you at Annenberg, tossing you out.
Dwayne Booth:
Well, that’s a two-part question, and we can get to the second part of that in a second. But when it comes to that question of what has happened to college campuses, essentially, is look around. The commodification of everything has reduced the call for speaking your mind, for free speech. Because if you’re going to be indoctrinated into thinking that the commodification of everything is what’s calling you to a successful life, then colleges and universities become indoctrination centers for job placement, way more than even… When I was in college, it was different. You were there to explore, to figure out who you were, what you wanted to do, literally, with the rest of your life. It wasn’t about like, OK, this is how you play the game and keep your mouth shut if you want to succeed. That is the new paradigm that is now framing the kinds of conversations and the pressures inside the classroom to “succeed”.
But my thing with my classes, I would always tell my class a version of the very first day is, what you’re going to learn in this class is not going to help you get a job [Steiner laughs]. What it’s going to do, if I’m successful, and I hope I will be, is it will allow you the potentiality to keep a white-knuckled grip on your soul. Because the stuff we’re looking at is how did the arts community communicate what the humanitarian approach to life should be? That’s not a moneymaking scenario. In fact, there’s examples all through history where you’re penalized for that kind of thinking.
But what is revealed to students is that this is a glimpse into what makes a meaningful life. It’s not surrendering to bureaucracy and hierarchy. It’s about pushing back against that.
Marc Steiner:
Right. And the most important thing in an institution can do — And I don’t want to dive too deep into this now — But is make you question and make you probe and uncover. If you’re not doing that, then you’re not teaching, and you’re not learning.
Dwayne Booth:
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And that’s where we are now. Just even asking the question has become a huge problem. Even when everything started to happen with Gaza and with Israel, we had some conversations in class, without even getting, I wasn’t even trying to start conversations about which side are you going to be on? This is why you should be on this side and abhor the other side. It wasn’t even questions like that. The conversations we ended up having was the terror on the campus to even broach the subject.
My classes where we spoke very frankly about, I can’t even say the word “Israel”, I can’t say it. And it was also among the faculty. And I don’t know if you’ve spoken to other faculty members at other universities, and this shouldn’t be shocking, but at some point, a year ago, we were told, and we all agreed unanimously, not to use school email. They’re listening. We were going to communicate with WhatsApp or try to have personal conversations off campus because we do not trust the administration not to surrender all of our personal correspondence with these congressional committees attempting to blow up universities.
And they did that with me. There was some communication about Congress wants all of your communication with colleagues and students.
Marc Steiner:
That literally happened.
Dwayne Booth:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
They wanted all your communication?
Dwayne Booth:
Yes. And I wasn’t alone. This is what’s going on on college campuses. So A, it’s a really interesting thing to ask because I don’t own the correspondence I have on the servers at school. I don’t. So it’s not even up to me. I can say no, but they’re still going to do it. So that kind of question, what that does is say, you are under our boot. We want to make sure that you understand that you are under our boot and that you’re going to cooperate.
So what was my answer to that? My answer was, fuck you. Because this is coming after a semester where a couple of times I had to teach remotely because not only there were death threats on me, but being the professor in front of this class, there were death threats on my students. So knowing that and really being angry at the main administration and the interim president Jameson for surrendering to this kind of McCarthyism. Again, that’s an easy equation to make, but it’s accurate. It’s a hundred percent accurate.
Marc Steiner:
I’m really curious. Let’s stay with this for a moment before we leap into some other areas here, that when did you become first aware that they were coming after you? And B, how did they do it? What did they literally do to push you out?
Dwayne Booth:
Me being pushed out, it’s an interesting question to ask because Annenberg actually protected me. Jameson wanted me out when The Washington Free Beacon article came out in February of last year.
Marc Steiner:
The one that accused you of being an antisemite?
Dwayne Booth:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Dwayne Booth:
So again, what do we do with that? We clean house. We don’t look at the truth of the matter. We don’t look at the specifics. We don’t push back, we surrender. That’s the stance of the administration. So he wanted me fired, but the Dean of Annenberg was just like, no. So they protected me. It’s the School for Communication. It has a history of…
Marc Steiner:
It’s a school where you’re trained journalists and other people to tell the truth and tell the stories and dig deep and put it out there.
Dwayne Booth:
And to say no when you need to say no.
Marc Steiner:
Yes.
Dwayne Booth:
Right. So that happened. So they protected me. I was there because Annenburg protected me. It didn’t stop the administration, as you said at the beginning of the segment, Jameson then makes a public statement that basically says I’m an antisemite and that I’m reprehensible.
So that went on for all of last year, not so much the beginning of this semester because everybody was very focused on what the election was going to reveal.
So I was given the opportunity to develop a new class for this coming fall. So I took off the semester, was paid to develop this new course for, actually, about the alternative press and the underground comics movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
Marc Steiner:
I remember it well [laughs].
Dwayne Booth:
Very good. And so that’s considered the golden age for opinion journalism, which is lacking now. So I’m like, this is a great opportunity to, again, expose what our responsibility is as a free and open society. Let’s really talk about it. I even was going to start a newspaper as part of the class that students were going to contribute to. It was going to be a very big to-do.
Trump won. The newspaper was the first thing to be canceled. We don’t want to invite too much attention from this new regime on the campus. Again, it’s this cowardice that has real ramifications, as you were saying. These funds, as soon as there’s money involved, the strategy for moving forward becomes an economic decision and not one that has to do with people and their lives.
So me being let go, I was part of a number of adjuncts and lecturers who were also let go. So it’s not an easy connection to say that I was specifically targeted as somebody who should be fired. But that said, you could feel some relief. And as a matter of fact, being let go and then being, again, the attacks from the right-wing press increased, and all of a sudden we’re like, finally UPenn has gotten rid of the antisemite. And then we’re back in this old ridiculous argument.
And luckily, I’m not alone. I’m not so much in the spotlight because many people are stepping forward and, again, trying to promote the right kind of conversation about this.
Marc Steiner:
One of the things, a bunch of things that went through my head as you were talking, I was thinking about the course you wanted to teach on alternative press. I you ever get to teach that course again, I have tons of files for you to have, to go through.
Dwayne Booth:
[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was writing the textbook.
Marc Steiner:
Textbook. Oh, were you? OK.
Dwayne Booth:
I’m going to France, actually, and I’m going to interview Robert Crumb. I’m staying over his house. Oh, that’s great.
Marc Steiner:
Oh, that’s great. He must be really old now.
Dwayne Booth:
Yes. I’m really looking forward to it.
Marc Steiner:
[Laughs] I was there at the very [beginning]. I helped found Liberation News Service.
Dwayne Booth:
Oh, see.
Marc Steiner:
And I was at Washington Free Press back in the ’60s.
Dwayne Booth:
See? So you know. I curated an exhibit on the alternative press for the University of Connecticut a couple years ago. Hugely popular. They have an archive that is dizzying. It might be the biggest in the country. And so when I was curating and putting together that exhibit, I would go in and I would be, all day, I wouldn’t even eat, and I would pore through these newspapers and magazines at the time. And I would leave, and I would actually have this real sense of woe because looking at what that kind of journalism was attempting and accomplishing made me feel like we have lost.
Marc Steiner:
Every city and community had an underground paper across the country, and Liberation newspapers were there to service all those papers and bring them together. The power of the media in that era was very different and very strong.
Dwayne Booth:
Well, the work that I do as a cartoonist and somebody who uses visuals to communicate this stuff, that was all through these newspapers, all through this movement. The idea being is the arts community is there — Well, let’s do it this way. The job of journalism, one could say, is that it provides us with the first draft of history, which we’ve heard.
Marc Steiner:
Exactly.
Dwayne Booth:
So the idea as a journalist, what you’re supposed to be asking yourself is what is the real story here? And I’m going to approach it and try to be objective about it, but what is the real story here? The job of an artist in the arts community is to ask the very same question. What is this story really about? What does this feel like? But rather than searching for the objective version of that, it’s about looking for the subjective. This is how I feel about it. And that invites people in to share their own stories. Because really we’re just stories. We’re really just stories.
Marc Steiner:
Storytellers.
Dwayne Booth:
Exactly. So if you can have a form of journalism that not only draws on straight journalism but also can bring in Allen Ginsburg to write a poem that will then explore what does it mean to be a human being? Why are we vulnerable and why do we deserve protection? Until you have that inside of a conversation, why argue in favor of protecting, say, the people of Gaza?
Marc Steiner:
Let’s talk a bit about that. Now, look, this is what got you fired [laughs].
Dwayne Booth:
Well, I don’t… Well, again.
Marc Steiner:
It’s part of what got you fired.
Dwayne Booth:
It created a lot of heat for me last year, we can say.
Marc Steiner:
It is a very difficult question on many levels, being accused of being an antisemite or a self-hating Jew. If you criticize Israel, whether you use the word genocide or slaughter, whatever word you use has infected the entire country at this moment. Campuses, newspapers, everywhere, magazines. And in itself, it seems to me, also creates antisemitism. It makes it bubble up. Because it’s always there, it’s just below the surface. It doesn’t take much to unleash it. So I think we’re in this very dangerous moment.
Dwayne Booth:
We are. But I would say that, with that broad description, if people only approach the question with that broad of an approach, I think we’re in trouble.
Marc Steiner:
What do you mean by that?
Dwayne Booth:
I think the question of attempting to criticize Israel and then being called an antisemite is conflating politics with religion, nationalism with religion. Because really, again, look at it. Just look at all of the conversations that people have been having. To criticize the state of Israel is criticizing the state of Israel. It has really nothing to do with criticizing Judaism at all. Now, if somebody is Jewish and supporting Israel, OK, they’ve made that connection for themselves. So therefore, you can’t have an argument that says, you’re hurting my Jewishness, my Jewish identity by attacking a nation state, because they’re two different things. And if you’re protecting the virtue of a nation state, that is nationalism.
Marc Steiner:
It is. I don’t want to digress on this too deeply, but I think that when you are part of a minority that has been persecuted — My grandfather fought the czars, people in the streets of Warsaw, in the pogroms. My dad fought the Nazis. When you know that they just hate you because of who you are, which is the excuse they used to create Israel out of Palestine, which makes it a very complex matter. It was FDR who would not let Jews here and said, you have to go. You want to get out of those camps? You’re going there.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah. There is that. Yep.
Marc Steiner:
So what I’m saying to all that, I’m saying it’s a very complicated matter.
Dwayne Booth:
And so the argument, though, and I totally agree with you. So what is important for that, the fact that it is a complicated matter, then you need to create space for the conversation to happen, and you have to create the space to be large enough to accommodate all of the emotion, the emotional component that is part of this, because that’s also very, very real. And then the less emotional stuff, like what is the intellectual argument piece of this? So yes, it is all completely knotted up, but the solution is to recognize how complicated it is and then create the space for people then to untangle it.
Because again, that’s why I said about the broad approach. The broad approach is not going to help us. The broad approach is going to actually disenfranchise people from wanting to enter into the conversation. Because you don’t want to say, and as you can see it happening over and over again, anybody who says, I’m against Israel, what Israel is doing, immediately they’re called, they’re shut down by people who don’t want to have that conversation, as being antisemitic. And nobody wants to feel like they could be called an antisemitic, especially if they are not one. Remember, people who are antisemitic, they tend to be proud of the fact that they are antisemitic.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, I know. But there are a lot of antisemites out there, a lot of racists who don’t admit that they’re antisemitic or racist.
Dwayne Booth:
Again, and the question, they don’t admit it. So again, so that’s where you need that kind of conversation to turn the light on in that darkness and give them the opportunity to either defend their antisemitism, have their antisemitism revealed so that they can then self-assess who they are. Because a lot of prejudices people have, they don’t know that they have them, and they have not been challenged.
So much of what we think and feel is reflexive thinking and feeling. You can’t burn that flag. I’m an American, it’s hurting my heart. Let’s look at the issue. What is trying to be communicated by the burning of the flag? It’s not shitting on your grandfather for fighting in the Second World War. But again, if somebody is going to have all that knotted up into this emotional cluster, it’s up to us as sane human beings who are seeking understanding and also empathy with each other to be able to enter in those things assuming, until it’s disproven, that we actually have the potential for empathy and understanding among each other. But you need to create the space and the conversation for that to happen.
Marc Steiner:
What was the specific work that had them attack you as an antisemite at Annenberg? What did they pull out?
Dwayne Booth:
They pulled out some cartoons that I had. It was interesting because they pulled out mostly illustrations that I had done for Chris Hedges. I’ve been Chris Hedges’s illustrator for a very long time.
Marc Steiner:
He used to work out of this building [laughs].
Dwayne Booth:
Yes, exactly. And so what they did was they pulled out these illustrations completely out of context from the article that I was illustrating, had them as standalone pieces, which again, if you’re doing cartoons or you’re doing any illustrations, what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to be provocative and communicate with a very short form. If it’s something as fiery as this issue, then you need, potentially, more information to know what my intent is as an artist. Those were connected to Chris Hedges’s articles that had them make absolute sense. So those were shown without the context of Chris Hedges’s articles.
They showed a couple cartoons that also were just standalone cartoons that had been published and posted for four months without anything except great adulation from readers, because I also work for Scheer Post, which is Robert Scheer’s publication. And I’ve known Bob for decades. And if you don’t know who Bob is, you should know who Bob is. He was the editor of Ramparts and has a very long history of attempting independent journalism.
Marc Steiner:
I can’t believe he’s still rolling.
Dwayne Booth:
He is. He’s 89.
Marc Steiner:
I know [laughs].
Dwayne Booth:
It’s amazing. And so he was running my cartoons. He lost more than half of his family in the Holocaust. He knows what antisemitism looks like. And so these cartoons that were pulled, again, I had nothing but people understanding what I was trying to say. But taken, again, out of context, shown to an audience that is looking for any excuse to call somebody an antisemite, which is the Washington Free Beacon, who has called everybody an antisemite: Obama, Bernie Sanders, just everybody. And framing the parameters of that slander, presenting it to their audience who blew up, again, then started writing me: I want to rape your wife and murder your children. I know where you live. All of those sorts of things all of a sudden come out. So that happened.
And so again, there I am — And I’ve had hate mail. I’ve had death threats before. I’ve never been part of an institution where the strategy for moving forward is being part of a community was… All right. I was told to just not say anything at first. We’ll see if we can weather this. And then when the Jameson statement came out, I wrote to my dean and I said, I have to say something now. I can’t sit back and just let these people frame the argument because it’s not accurate.
Marc Steiner:
Right, right.
Dwayne Booth:
Then I started to talk to the press, and again, started to say, we need to understand that there is intent and context for all of these things, and I cannot allow the truncation of communication to happen to the degree where people are silenced and then people are encouraged to self-censor.
Marc Steiner:
So I’ll ask you a question. I’ve been wrestling with this question I wanted to ask you about one of your cartoons. It’s the cartoon where Netanyahu [inaudible] are drinking blood.
Dwayne Booth:
It’s not Netanyahu. I know which… Is it with the dove?
Marc Steiner:
Yeah.
Dwayne Booth:
OK. Yeah. Netanyahu is not in there.
Marc Steiner:
That’s right, I’m sorry. So the first thing that popped in my head when I saw that picture was the blood libel against the Jews by the Christians that took place. My father told me stories about when he was a kid how Christian kids across from Patterson, the other side of the park, would chase him. You killed, you drank Jesus’s blood, you killed Jesus, the major fights that they had. So talk a bit about that. That’s not the reaction you want us to have.
Dwayne Booth:
No, no, no, no. Absolutely not. It is interesting because I think that’s probably the leading one that people — And now when all this started up, again, they don’t even show it, they just describe it, and they describe it so inaccurately [Steiner laughs] that it just makes me crazy.
Marc Steiner:
You’re not shocked, are you [both laugh]?
Dwayne Booth:
No, no. But in the cartoon, it’s actually, it’s power brokers. These guys look like they’re power brokers from the 1950s. I like to draw that style of… And if you want to look at these guys, they look completely not Jewish. I pulled them from, like I said, they’re basically clip art from the 1950s. So they’re power brokers at a cocktail party. It’s playing off of the New Yorker style of the cocktail party with the upper class.
So they’re upper crust power brokers. Behind them is a hybrid flag that is half the American flag and half the Israeli flag. And they are drinking blood from glasses that says “Gaza”. And there is a peace dove that is walking into the room and somebody says, who invited that lousy antisemite.
As a cartoonist, understand that when it comes to, as I said earlier, trying to figure out how to make the point as quickly as you can and as eye catching as you can. If you look through the history of the genre, drinking blood is what monsters do. They do it all of the time in their criticism of people who are powerful and who are called monsters. I, frankly, when I was drawing it, I [wasn’t] like, well, this might be misinterpreted as blood libel. I didn’t know what blood libel was.
Marc Steiner:
I’m sure you didn’t.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah. And again, and it was posted for a long time and nobody’s said anything about it. But then when it was called that, it became a very interesting conversation because it was like, oh, OK. So now I can see how that would flood the interpretation of the cartoon. And again, this is what happens in regular conversation. And particularly if you’re communicating as somebody who uses the visuals as your form of communication, there’s a thousand ways to interpret a visual.
Marc Steiner:
There are.
Dwayne Booth:
There are. And as the artist, you have to understand that you’re going to do the best that you can and hope that the majority of people are going to get what you’re trying to do. Which brings us, again, back to that second question or that point that I was making earlier, which is let’s have the conversation afterwards. If you understand that my intent was playing off of not a Jewish trope but a trope of criticizing power — Which, actually, out of curiosity, I went through the internet and I all of a sudden started to assemble, through time, using people are drinking blood constantly who are evil. So it’s used and so forth.
And so the challenge with something like that was to then try to communicate that that was not my intent. I know a communications, a free speech expert, in fact. She and I had a really interesting conversation about it because she is such a radical, she’s been more radical than I am. She wanted me to know that it was blood libel, and she wanted to hear me say, yes, I knew it was blood libel, but I’m going to use that to force the conversation and reclaim what that blood libel was supposed to be as, A, this ridiculous thing that actually is being applied as a truism in this circumstance.
But all of a sudden it became this academic conversation and I was just like, whoa, I don’t need it to be that, because you don’t want to upset everybody and confuse what your communication is, obviously. So I said, it wasn’t that. She goes, you sure [Steiner laughs]? Are you sure you weren’t trying to do that? I’m like, no, I wasn’t trying to do that. So that’s what that one was.
Marc Steiner:
So I’m glad we talked about this because I think that… I’m not going to dwell on this cartoon, but when I first showed this to some of my friends —
Dwayne Booth:
You’re not alone [crosstalk]. I get it. I totally get it.
Marc Steiner:
As I was preparing for our conversation, that was their first reaction as well.
Dwayne Booth:
Right. Right.
Marc Steiner:
Because your cartoons, they’re really powerful, and they get under an issue, and it glares in front of your eyes like a bright light. And they’re very to hard look at sometimes, whether it’s Trump eating shit, literally [both laugh], and the other images you give us. It’s like you can’t allow us to look away. You want us to ingest them.
Dwayne Booth:
I want you to ingest them and then have an honest reaction. And then, again, it doesn’t have to be in a conversation with me, have a conversation with somebody else. Because that cartoon that you were talking about, it started a bunch of debates.
Marc Steiner:
The Trump one?
Dwayne Booth:
No, no, no.
Marc Steiner:
Oh, the blood libel.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah, yeah — Don’t call it the blood libel one. See what I mean, man [both laugh]? So it started, what I would say is necessary debate to really get to the bottom of issues. Again, that’s really what we should be doing. We should be encouraging more and more difficult conversations. Because we’re not, and look at where we are. People are uncomfortable to even go into the streets. You don’t have to shout. You don’t have to carry a sign. People are being conditioned to be uncomfortable with making a statement in the name of humanity, even though humanity is suffering in real time in front of us. Look at Gaza. For me, there’s no way to frame the argument that can justify that. There’s just no way. There’s too many bodies, there’s too many dead people. There’s too much evidence that the human suffering that is happening over there right now in front of the world needs not to be happening.
Marc Steiner:
It needs not to be happening. [I’ll] tell [you] what just popped through my head as you were saying that, a couple things. One was the Vietnam War where millions of Vietnamese were slaughtered, North, South, all over. And we didn’t call that a genocide. We called that a slaughter. And then I was thinking as you were speaking about… I speak at synagogues sometimes about why we as Jews have to oppose what Israel’s doing to Gaza.
Dwayne Booth:
And I’ve gone to synagogues and seen those talks. That’s also what I’m [crosstalk] —
Marc Steiner:
They’re very difficult talks to have people just…
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah.
Marc Steiner:
Because it’s an emotional issue as much as it’s a —
Dwayne Booth:
Exactly.
Marc Steiner:
— Logical and political issue. And so, when I look at your work, again, it engenders conversation. It makes you think it’s not just his little typical political cartoon. It’s like you sink yourself into your cartoons like an actor sinks himself into a part. That’s what I felt looking at your work.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny because just hearing you say that, it’s true that quite often I forget about my cartoons soon after I do them because I’m already onto the next one. And I’ve done searches for things and found my cartoons that I’ve forgotten. I have no memory of doing them [Steiner laughs]. Some of them I don’t even get, and I literally have to call my older brother and say, what was I trying to say with this? He’s very good at remembering what I was trying to say and can decipher my cartoons for me.
But yeah, it is a form of meditation. If you look at the work that I do, again, if you’re going to stick with a piece of art for hours, you have to be able to sustain your focus on it. So I meditate while I’m doing it and see if it feels true to my emotional reaction to what’s going on, then I post it.
Marc Steiner:
So lemme ask you this question. So think of one of your most recent cartoons, I dunno which one, I’ll let you think of it since I don’t know what your most recent cartoon is, and it’s about Gaza and Israel and this moment. Describe it and what you went through to create it.
Dwayne Booth:
One of the most recent ones that I did was, as the death toll continued to climb, and I think it was right after Trump started to talk about how beautiful he’s going to make Gaza once we take over. The normalizing of that, and even the attempts to make it a sexy strategy, hit me so hard that my approach to that was, OK, well what would that look like? What would the attempt to normalize that amount of human suffering, what would that look like?
Well, it sounds like a travel poster that is going to invite people to the new Gaza. So I decided to do a travel poster riffing off of an old Italian vintage come to Italy poster, just like a Vespa. Let’s get a Vespa in there and a sexy couple. Now, I don’t want to render something that has Gaza completely Trumpified already. We’ve seen what that looks like. Let’s, OK, satire. But let’s talk about, let’s visualize what that would look like right now moving towards that. So I have this young couple on a Vespa coming down a giant mountain of skulls, heading to the beach. And out in the beach there’s some Israeli warships. And it’s rendered, at a glance, to be very gleeful, but then you start to notice the details of it and the attempt to normalize, again, an ocean of skulls, [and] nobody’s recognizing the fact that these are a slaughtered population. So that’s what I thought.
And so, again, sometimes what you want to do is you want to say, alright, this is an ugly truth that’s being promoted as something that is beautiful, I’m going to show you what that looks like as something that’s been beautified. And the reaction, of course, is just like, oh my God, this hits harder than if I showed the gore, in the same way that if you go back to Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”, right? He published that anonymously. And he also, it’s very interesting because it’s about what do we do with the poor, bedraggled Irish people? We make them refuse for the needs of the British. We will cook the children, kill some of the grownups, make belts, make wallets, all of these things to feed the gentry of the British.
What’s very interesting about that is he sustained the irony of that all the way through. You don’t have the sense, he did not turn it into parody or burlesque or wild craziness. He presented it as a solution to the problem. Now, if you look at that, it actually makes business sense. It would actually solve the problem — Minus all the horror of killing babies and killing a bunch of people. It makes good business sense.
Now, if you look at that and you see that as a parallel to what is justified by big business and corporations now, it happens every single day. It’s been completely normalized. Look what’s going on with the environment. Look at the Rust Belt across this country. All of that stuff is rendered in service of profit and economics the same way that “Modest Proposal” was, and people have been conditioned to see it as normal and ignore the human suffering.
Marc Steiner:
I’m curious. The first one is, where’s that latest cartoon published?
Dwayne Booth:
I actually gave it to Hedges for one of his columns, and then I posted it and people wanted prints. I’ve sold prints of it. And it was also in the paper that comes out of Washington that Ralph Nader does… Gosh, what’s it called? The Capitol…
Marc Steiner:
I should know this
Dwayne Booth:
Myself. I should know this too, because I’ve been doing cartoons for them for a few years now.
Marc Steiner:
Capitol Hill Citizen.
Dwayne Booth:
That’s it. See, I missed the word “hill”. Thank God.
Marc Steiner:
Capitol Hill Citizen.
Dwayne Booth:
Which is a great newspaper. And it gives me the opportunity to see my stuff on physical paper again, which looks gorgeous to me. I’d rather —
Marc Steiner:
Now that you’ve described the cartoon, I saw it this morning as I was getting ready for this conversation. I didn’t know whether it was the latest one you’ve done.
Now that you were facing what we face here, both in Gaza and with Trump and these neofascists in charge of the country, your brain must be full of how you portray this. I just want you to talk a bit about, both creatively and substantively, how you approach this moment when we are literally facing down a neofascist power taking over our country and about to destroy our democracy. People think that’s hyperbole, you’re being crazy. But we’re not.
Dwayne Booth:
No, it’s happening.
Marc Steiner:
And if you, as I was, a civil rights worker in the South, you saw what it was like to live under tyranny, under an authoritarian dictatorship if you were not white. I can feel the entire country tumbling in at this moment. So tell me how you think about that and how you approach it with your work.
Dwayne Booth:
It’s an interesting time because, in many ways, my work is quadrupled. Partly because it’s just what I’ve always done, but the other part is I don’t see this profession stepping up to the challenge at all. I don’t see any single-panel cartoonists who are hitting the Israel Gaza issue nearly as hard as I am.
Marc Steiner:
No, they’re not.
Dwayne Booth:
No. And I see a lot also, of the attacks on Trump. And again, it always strikes me as, how would the Democratic Party render a cartoon? That’s what I see out there. And it’s too soft. It is just way too soft. So as I increase my output, I feel the light getting brighter and brighter on me, which makes me feel more and more unsafe inside this society because yes, they’re targeting people who are not citizens, but what’s next? We all know the poem.
But at the same time, I feel like it’s a responsibility that I have, and I’m sure that you probably have this same sense of responsibility. Speaking up, talking out loud, even though it’s on my nervous system, it is grinding me down in a way that is new.
But that said, my numbers of people who are coming to me are increasing. I’m actually starting a substack so I can have my own conversations with people and so forth, because we have got to increase this megaphone. We just have to.
In fact, one thing that was interesting is just this last October I was invited to speak at a cartooning conference in Montreal. And the whole reason to have me up there and to talk about it was was from the perspective of the people, the organizers, I was the only American cartoonist who was cartooning about Gaza.
Marc Steiner:
Really?
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah. And I’d had conversations, remember, that there’s some cartoonists who are doing some things that, again, are just a little bit too polite. Because if we’re looking at this thing and we do think that this is a genocide, you can’t pull your punches. And so, in fact, when this stuff had happened with me initially with the Washington Free Beacon, I reached out.
There’s another colleague I have who’s a cartoonist, whose name is Andy Singer, and he and I have been in communication over the years, and he’s somewhat fearless on this issue. He and I were talking, and we came up with this idea, let’s publish a book that has cartoonists who, over the last many decades, have had a problem criticizing Israel for fear of being called anti-Semitic.
We sent it out to our colleagues and other international cartoonists and so forth. We found two, Matt Wuerker and Ted Rall, who were willing to participate in this project. I had a number of conversations with others who just contacted me privately and said, I can’t do it because I’ll lose my job. I can’t do it because I’ll be targeted and I’m too afraid. I can’t get close to this subject, my editor won’t let me do it, so I can’t do it. International cartoonists, different idea, a whole different approach, sending me stuff. I can tell my story. I’ve been jailed. I’ve been beaten up for this kind of work. And so it became a very interesting thing.
Again, the United States is, by and large, it’s an extremely privileged society. And yet, when it comes to issues like this, it demonstrates the most cowardice because we’ve been made to be way too sensitive about our own discomfort to advance the cause of humanity and justice, love, all of those things because we’ve seen that there is a penalty for doing that, and we do not want to give up certain creature comforts. We don’t want to be called something that we are not, and we need to be uncomfortable. In many ways we have to break soft rules. We have to chain ourself to fences and then make it an inconvenience to be pulled from those fences.
Marc Steiner:
This has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you being here today and for all the work that you do. And I think that we’re at this moment where the reason that many of us who are part of Jewish Voices for Peace and other organizations is to say those voices are critical in saying this is wrong and has to end now. And I appreciate the power of the work you do. It’s just amazing. And we encourage everybody, we’ll be linking to your work so people can see it and consume it. And I hope we have a conversation together in the future.
Dwayne Booth:
Thanks. I agree. Thanks a lot, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
Good to have you sliding through Baltimore.
Dwayne Booth:
Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, let me thank Dwayne Booth, also known as Mr. Fish, for joining us today here for this powerful and honest conversation. We will link to his work when we post this episode. You want to check that out.
And thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, audio editor Alina Nehlich for working on her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing The Marc Steiner Show, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.
So please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.