Anthony Weiner and the Charles Woods Dilemma Part One

  

What did Charles Woods get for Christmas?

  A pair of glasses and a staple gun.

  That is probably the first political joke I ever heard. Not so much a political joke, really, as a joke about a political figure. There were lots of jokes about Charles Woods on my elementary school playground while I was going to school in Alabama in the '60s. I don't recall hearing any jokes around that time about Wallace who was then governor and leading the state and the region down a truly monstrous path.

  Charles Woods did not lead anyone down a monstrous path. He was simply a monster. In the crude, simplistic, purely physical way that monsters exist to sheltered children.

  Woods had been shot down in World War II and as a result suffered extreme burns on his face and hands. With virtually no real facial features at all, he resembled Dr. Phibes from the Vincent Price movies. Amazingly, he decided to enter Alabama politics and had some success at it.

  I was a political cartoonist for the Birmingham Post-Herald for twenty years and during that time I would occasionally consider the Woods dilemma.

  An editorial cartoonist uses caricature to exaggerate the features of political figures and others into representations of their true selves, at least as seen by the cartoonist. It's an easy tool to abuse. This is, of course, highly unfair. .But politics itself is unfair.

  Still, there is a line

  It's one thing to render, through caricature, a fat senator into a bloated hog or over-emphasize the unattractive features of a homely governor. (I took particular pleasure in drawing the loathesome one-time Attorney General Charlie Graddick, who, over the years devolved in my cartoons into a doughy fish-lipped Mr. Potato head). It 's quite another to apply these same techniques to the deformed features of a burn victim!

  Even though Woods remained in the political arena through my years at the paper, I somehow never found myself in the position of having to actually caricature him so I don't know what I would have done. There were, however, some pretty butt- ugly characters who did land in my sights and I did not hold back from exploiting their physical deficiencies in the least.

  So, what, other than degree, is the difference between exploiting the natural everyday ugliness of a politician and doing the same with a Charles Woods?

  I'll attempt an answer in the next post. An answer that, I think, bears on the media reaction to the Anthony Weiner affair.