Word: feiffer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jules Feiffer's America: From Reagan to Eisenhower, the cartoonist's belated 25th anniversary album, is valuable not only for Feiffer's witty, ironic insights but also for its telling social history. By mixing Bernard and Huey--and a host of other unnamed husbands, wives, lovers, and children--with Ike, Jack, Lyndon, Dick, Jerry, Jimmy, and Ronald, Feiffer's collection uniquely bridges the gap between the timeless New Yorker genre of cartoon and the dated, sharply topical political humor of a Herblock or an Oliphant. The combination effectively gives Feiffer's particular perspective on how one segment of the country...
RATHER THAN just providing a pleasant hodgepodge of drawings, like most such collections, Feiffer introduces each section with a snappy summary of his motivating psychology. "During the 'Ike Age,'" he writes, "the economy prospered, the middle class grew, the attention span died." People had simple political worries--The Bomb. Accordingly, the cartoons centered on muddled fears of nuclear war and confrontation with communists. Bernard and Huey's associates are obsessed with nonconformism and the nations' apathy...
Kennedy was the "Sundance Kid," who "blew into our lives like a blast of cold air." Leading into the Kennedy batch of drawings, Feiffer acknowledges the excitement the young leader provided, but he also sees in him a certain liberal aristocrafic falseness. "Style engulfed substance," he writes. Kennedy's views on foreign affairs "were shaped by James Bond." The cartoon characters begin to evince a certain liberal hypocrisy. One concludes that "civil rights used to be so much more tolerable before Negroes got into...
...section on Johnson--"Here Lies Lyndon"--follows Feiffer's crowd through an America disillusioned and betrayed. Feiffer's wit perhaps peaks here, mirroring his personal fury at Johnson--the dealer who made significant progress in civil rights and poverty eradication programs, then let Americans down by escalating the Vietnam War. "Mine is rage of a lover betrayed," Feiffer writes in retrospect. "I don't often trust in public figures; Johnson seduced me." The division and incomprehension among liberals comes through clearly in the section...
...FEIFFER TREATS in "Vietnixon" saw the development of a dilemma that eventually hurt his cartoons, pushing him more towards politics and away from the people-and-politics intimate type of commentary that showed his distinctive touch. As Feiffer explains it, the increasing radicalism of his old crowd and of the left in general made him feel wishy-washy. But Nixon resolved the problem--he provided a simple political enemy that could unite all of the left. "He brought the revolution to its knees," Feiffer writes, "and released me into a world that I once more understood...