For two years in the 1870s, the English writer Lewis Carroll laboured over a lengthy poem, “The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)”. The work was in the nonsensical spirit of an earlier poem, “Jabberwocky” from his 1871 children’s novel, Through the Looking Glass.
The poem begins with a crew of ten sailing off to find a peculiar and highly elusive creature called the Snark. The stakes are high; what they’re after may be a highly dangerous “Boojum.” At one point, one of the crew calls out to the others that he has found the creature, and vanishes.
They hunted till darkness came on, but they found / Not a button, or feather, or mark, / By which they could tell that they stood on the ground / Where the Baker had met with the Snark. / In the midst of the word he was trying to say, / In the midst of his laughter and glee, / He had softly and suddenly vanished away— / For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
The present-day term “snark” doesn’t appear to trace back to “Snark,” but there is no lexical certainty on this. Urban Dictionary insists “snark” is simply a mashup of “snide” and “remark.” According to Merriam Webster, “it comes from taking the longer word snarky and subtracting the -y. Snarky began being used around the meeting of the 19th and 20th centuries, initially with the meaning of “snappish, crotchety,” and then later taking on the sense of “sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner.”
Regardless, “snark” is now an all-purpose adjective and noun, perfectly descriptive of today’s culture of high irony, low comedy, and social media flaming.
As a political cartoonist, I traffic in snark myself. For decades I was a contributor to the biweekly paper The Vancouver Courier, among other publications. A succession of editors allowed me to extend my humourous targets from the city limits to the national stage and the world at large. I had greater freedom as both cartoonist and columnist to speak my mind than most contributors for bigger papers. What I traded off in pay I gained in autonomy.
But all things must pass. There’s no need to explain how the web, Craigslist and social media stole eyeballs and revenue from the print media. Suffice it to say that eventually one employee after another was let go at my paper. I was spared close to last, but I could feel the axe coming with my work appearing less and less frequently. Eventually I was let go entirely, “to make room for other voices,” in the words of a senior editor. In short order the paper abandoned its print edition for a ghostly online presence, before vanishing altogether. And no other news organizations, local or national, were particularly interested in my work.
You may be saying, “Olson, you’ve buried the lede! Your industry collapsed, and Trump had nothing to do with it!” True enough, but toward the end I felt what I did for a living was becoming a bit more redundant. Primarily, but not exclusively, because our neighbours to the south had managed the impossible. They had elected an actual cartoon president.
The 45th president was like some cartoonist’s most savage caricature come to life. Satire critically depend on some recognizable distance between the object of satire and the satire itself, but in word, deed and appearance the Tweeter-in-Chief collapsed that distance to nothing, like a black hole swallowing an orbiting white dwarf.
A 2019 New Yorker cartoon sums up the difficulty for people in my line of work: a woman leans into the doorway of her partner’s office as he’s scribbling away at a drafting table. “Stop - that Trump cartoon you came up this morning just happened,” reads the caption. (This would be an example satire retreating in desperation to meta-satire.)
Early on a few people had said to me, “You must love it that Trump got elected.” They looked a bit disappointed when I told them no, for the reasons above. But I still welcomed the challenge!
A Trip in a Clown Car
For much of the 20th century, one of the very few places you could find publicly expressed snark - in the form of comedic but critical takes on power - was the opinion section of newspapers big and small. Political cartoonists were allowed to tell uncomfortable truths about self-important, sometimes deluded or dangerous leaders, in a concise visual manner. The political cartoon was the “anchor” of the editorial section.
Beginning mid-fifties, this satirical sensibility threaded its way into the softly subversive lampoons of Mad magazine, Harvey Kurtzman’s influential but long forgotten Help, and into the comedy routines of Paul Krassner and Lenny Bruce. By the time the Yippies nominated a 145-pound domestic pig, Pigasus, as president just before the opening of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Illinois, it seemed the Mad magazine ethos had helped turn some its young readers into soldiers of snark.
By the early seventies, the political brand of snark went newsstand mainstream with the politically acidic National Lampoon. 1975 saw the launch of Saturday Night Live, a live late-night bacchanal that deconstructed the comforting conventions of Cronkite, Severaid and Brokaw, in form if not in content. Producer Lorne Michaels and his cast kept things just tame enough for NBC’s Standards and Practices to nix blowback from sponsors and other powerful interests.
Today SNL limps along with its tired Alec Baldwin Trump routines. Despite some moments of genuine hilarity (Jim Carrey’s Biden stands out), the sharpness isn’t there. The knife isn’t just dull, it’s a rubber prop that can’t penetrate the target. How can it? In the early aughts, the culture of snark had expanded beyond the precincts of late night television into sitcoms and reality television, with its incubator for the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, “The Apprentice.”
Trump’s win of the Republican nomination and the presidency is the ultimate triumph of snark. The man himself is its apotheosis and Mount Olympus. In the 2015-2016 Republican debates, he caught his fellow nominees flat-footed with his antics, calling Jeb Bush “low Energy Jeb” and flinging water from a bottle in comic reference to Marco Rubio’s supposed nervous sweats.
Once elected as President, Trump’s disastrous clown car accelerated past parody. The bilious, bloated Steve Bannon leaping in and out; the slick Anthony Scaramucci (“the Mooch”) crawling aboard and falling off; sleazy hanger-on Roger Stone doing handsprings off the roof; a big judicial hook pulling “Mad Dog” Flynn out through a side window; White House adviser and bottle blonde Skeletor Kellyanne Conway denying she’s wearing greasepaint and size 42 shoes; Trump’s own smug, clownish offspring looking out from the back seat; the whole circus seemed tailor-made for hilarious dissection.
Yet for his base, Trump was not some glad-handing Beltway phony shoveling out market-tested homilies with a shit-eating grin or practiced gravitas. He was the real deal. It didn’t mattered what nonsense or racist sentiment the Lyin’ King mouthed; while other politicians trafficked in market-tested pieties, Trump simply opened up an expressway from id to tongue, and half the Republic loved it.
In the most interesting Möbius Strip manoeuvre of all, a rich man with a jaw-dropping succession of failed business ventures positioned himself as an enemy of the establishment, even though he’s one of its more colourful spawns. It’s just that Trump hails from hypercapitalism’s rentier and mass entertainment divisions rather than the oil sector, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or official Washington.
Trump’s clown car has rolled on for four years, into ditches and against the traffic, toward the edge of cliffs and back, all the while picking up and dispensing clowns like a mobile Pez dispenser. I occasionally tried my hand at a Trump cartoon, but I think I failed to overtake the reality, like most of my colleagues.
In a Snark-like manner, Trump has managed to evade judicial capture by Mueller et al. He was inadvertently helped along by the NYT-WaPost media axis, with their inflated claims of Russian collusion, a tactic that predictably failed to end with impeachment. Not incidentally, the thousands of lawsuits in play before he won the presidency failed to slow him down while in office.
Even while gravely intoning about Trump’s existential threat to the Republic, US media bosses in the liberal axis loved, loved, loved the Orange Thing for what he did and continues to do for revenue. The same applies for the Fox-Sinclair axis, obviously. The biggest mainstream news organizations posted major gains in circulation numbers and ratings beginning with the 2016 election, figures which remained high throughout MAGA the Hutt’s reign of error.
"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," said CEO Leslie Moonves of the 2016 presidential race. He added that the campaign was a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and expressed hope it would continue. The CBS CEO and his country club class were obviously delighted to flog tickets to a long-playing federal road accident to rubbernecking news consumers, while advising them the mess must be cleaned up forthwith for their own safety. It’s all very Lewis Carroll.
“For the Snark's a peculiar creature, that won't / Be caught in a commonplace way. / Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t: / Not a chance must be wasted today!”
A Tough Gig
At the outset of Trump’s reign I was finding the political world increasingly toxic, and not just in Washington. In my province, Christy Clark’s Liberal government government leveraged policies that weren't just socially and fiscally destructive, but would be illegal in other jurisdictions. (“You come across as angry,” a friend once said of my later renderings of her and her cabal. I was.)
I later learned my paper’s owner, Glacier media, was flinging money at the Liberal reelection campaign. That surely didn’t help my continued employment prospects. At least I had lots of nearby targets I found more bemusing than bile-raising, like the developer-friendly Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson, who surely must have tired of the endless reproductions online and off of this particular reader favourite:
Yet with snark invading and consuming everything from television to politics, and shading into existential loathing, the editorial cartoon has shrunk in significance over the years. It still has its place, but now it’s just a note in a bottle tossed into a sea of memes.
Trump grew his base by 11 million voters over his reign, and the anger, alienation and disgust with establishment politicians isn’t going away with Trump’s exit. It may only result in a figure downstream even worse than him. As Paul Street put it in a recent essay in Counterpunch:“Here we might turn Karl Marx on his head and advance the possibility that authoritarian and fascist presidential history might be appearing the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”
As a satirist, I almost welcome a forthcoming reign of the addled Biden, because at this stage a semi-senile leader with launch codes seems more cartoonable if no less dangerous than a fascistic, six-time bankrupted reality TV star. Both Trump and his putative successor are, to me at least, symptoms rather than the disease itself. The makeup of Biden’s administration, all hawks and mouthpieces for the corporate state (many from the Obama administration) makes one thing plain as a pandemic: removing one large colourful wart isn’t the same as eliminating the virus responsible.
The question is now this: is the presidential Snark prepared to peacefully step aside in January? Or is he a Boojum replacing Pentagon staff and cooking up a delayed “October Surprise” to either justify his stay or have Biden inherit a war he started? Time will tell, and soon.
So to sum up, Trump wasn’t the only factor in the decline of my cartooning career - unemployment was numero uno - but Orange Thing’s antics sure helped put a chill in my quill. As the globe spins further into mirror worlds of social media-fed FUD, I feel satire is no longer up to the task of highlighting the abuses of state and corporate power running out of control. But I still think satire is important, and I don’t have many other arrows in my quiver. So for now, I’m back to taking aim.
"It's a Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears, / And seemed almost too good to be true. / Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers: / Then the ominous words "It's a Boo—" / Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air /A weary and wandering sigh / That sounded like "-jum!" but the others declare / It was only a breeze that went by.
I think US writer Chris Hedges has Obama figured out pretty well. Just Google those two names!
Good one, Geoff. I am happy to see you take aim at the Democrats too. Abandoning their base in the rust belt and heart land set them up for eventual failure. And the failure won't end with Biden's election unless he does something for that demographic.
His base is anti-war, which is great. But I don't think most of them are aware of how things were lining up with regards Iran. That was going to take place during his second term.
Obama was a huge disappointment. They pretty much all are. Made men and women for the military industrial complex.