Red, Blue, but no red-white-and-blue

---by Micheal

America, the land of red white and blue, seems to be breaking into two separate nations, one red, one blue. I discovered yet another symptom of this change while doing some photo research for a project. I needed some images of chimpanzee faces. Among the expected wildlife shots, were many caricatures of president Bush made to look like a chimp.

The vast majority of these caricatures were simple homemade hack jobs, like copying and pasting chimp's ears onto an image of Bush, or clipping Bush's face and pasting it over a chimp's face. I'm sure each "artist" imagined he had created something unique and clever.

All those chimp-faced caricatures reminded me of some propaganda pictures from World Wars One and Two. During WWI, allied propagandists created images of German soldiers as apes, or the Kaiser as a fat chimp. In WWII, American poster artists created images of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, etc. as chimps. There were posters of Tojo or other Japanese military officials as chimps.

The goal of those propaganda posters was to vilify an enemy, to liken him to a "lower form of life." With such images, we comforted ourselves about our intrinsic superiority over our enemies. It was okay to be insulting. They were enemies.

What does that say about America when our president is vilified as if he were a foreign enemy? Does it indicate that the Blue nationals don't regard Bush as their nation's president, but the leader of an enemy nation?

As much as I felt Bill Clinton's morals and ethics were deplorable, I cringed inside to hear Reds vilifying him as if he were the leader of a foreign nation, not the duly elected president of America. Does the office hold no respect anymore?

So there you have the symptom. We don't seem to have one president over one nation. We have, instead, the notion of a Red Nation and a Blue Nation. The leader of one, is seen as the evil occupier of the other. How long can that go on?

United we stand, divided we...