BY HARRY PINCUS | I was snoozing in front of the television over the weekend, when I was awakened by what appeared to be some sort of a nightmare. Some might call it a divine intervention, and the New York Post ran a photo of a flag twisted into the shape of an angel, but I think it was a bloody nightmare.
I’m old enough to have met John F. Kennedy, when I was 8 years old and he was headed to a campaign appearance along Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. The next president of the United States was enormous, and golden, as he reached out to me like Michelangelo’s G-d from the heavens. My hero appeared on television to tell us that racism is wrong, and we followed our young president through the treacherous Cuban Missile Crisis, when we thought the world might end, and he won the respect of old Khrushchev. In June of 1963, President Kennedy went to American University and spoke of how we are all mortals, as he reached out to the leader of the Soviet Union in an appeal for peace. When J.F.K. made it clear that he wasn’t going along with more wars, they killed him.
F.D.R. was paralyzed, but no one seemed to care about that when he spoke in powerful, ringing tones of hope. This president fell on his face at the Democratic Convention of 1940, but he picked himself up from the beer-stained ramp and told Americans that they have a “rendezvous with destiny.” Indeed, we did. People displayed pictures of F.D.R. and J.F.K. in their homes.
I even recall learning to read the name “Eisenhower” from a newspaper headline next to the blurry gray eminence, who had merely led the D-Day invasion as our supreme commander and built the national highway system.
As a newspaper illustrator, I was privy to the vast trove of morgue photos that weren’t fit to print at The New York Times. I’ll never forget one in particular, which depicted a little peanut farmer from Georgia as he was being shown the nuclear war apparatus aboard the plane he would be occupying in the case of a third world war. Jimmy Carter seemed to lose his famous smile beside the towering generals who were escorting him onto that plane, and perhaps the press does embellish the truth, because I chose to draw him with his famous grin — and the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, though Carter proved to be the greater man in defeat. When the Daily News asked me to do a drawing of a “Revolving Door Presidency,” I went down to the old telephone building on the Avenue of the Americas, where they have a splendid bronze revolving door. As I held up my Polaroid camera, a working man with a copy of the Daily News under his arm emerged from the doors and asked why I was taking his picture.
“I see you read the Daily News,” I said, proudly. “And if you get the Sunday News, there’ll be a drawing of Jimmy Carter emerging from these very doors, and you’ll be Jimmy Carter!”
“I am Jimmy Carter!” exclaimed the worker, who pulled out his wallet and his ID card to prove it.
I was drawing the faces of the American electorate for The New York Times Week In Review, when the Daily News called and asked me to draw their 1984 election front page. I raced across 42nd Street and told the art director at the News, “Give me all your Reagans and all your Mondales.” The art director merely shook his head and said, “It’s going to be Reagan Bush.” I was outraged, but they were going to have sandwiches and drinks in the newsroom on election night and I was invited, once I had finished drawing Reagan and Bush.
The Daily News did publish my moronic drawing of Reagan and Bush under the headline “Ronaway!” and placed a blow-up of my front page in the bronze windows of their famous Art Deco lobby. Mayor John Lindsay, who had jokingly called me his “deputy mayor” when I volunteered to work for him as a 16-year-old at Coney Island, came to a Daily News party and I showed him my cover. The former mayor shook his head at the sight of a jubilant Reagan. “What a schmuck!” he said.
I remember my presidents rather fondly, and even the worst of them have become family members that I wouldn’t mind seeing again. After all, the story of our lives is mirrored in our presidents, and we have to experience at least some pleasure in recalling the presidents of our youth. I don’t know if the young people of today, though, will feel the same way about the aged countenances of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and one has to wonder if there is something divine going on here — or merely a bloody nightmare.
Is Donald Trump really larger than life, or is it just we that have become smaller? If Trump can distort the truth into his own reality, if he can defy bullets and furnish our highest courts with stay-out-of-jail turnstiles, what is left to us? How will we relate to each other in a future that is unfettered by truth or decency?
Some measure of credit must be given to Mr. Trump, the new Comeback Kid, who literally dodged a bullet and appears to have accomplished the coup d’état that he failed to complete on January 6. He now controls the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court, the latter which has ruled that he is immune from prosecution and thus above the law. Just yesterday a federal judge that Trump appointed threw out the most threatening case against him, and he is now free to store top secret documents next to his toilet bowl, and distribute them to foreign operatives, if he so chooses. Trump is ahead of Joe Biden in every poll and he is the most beloved convicted felon in living memory.
I don’t know if I would have raised a fist and shouted “Fight!” had I just been shot, but I thought that Trump was shouting a different “F” word. It’s not yet clear how the failed assassination attempt changed history, but it certainly resulted in an iconic “raising the flag at Iwo Jima” photo-op for Trump. As usual, someone else took the bullet for the Teflon Don, and a fireman who tragically sacrificed his life to shield his family is the real hero.
Perhaps Trump will be magically transformed by his brush with death. Meanwhile, those of us who intend to resist a fascist dictatorship in alliance with Putin and Hungary’s Orban had better figure out what to do — and fast.
The train is leaving the station and we had better insist that our man step down, or back him wholeheartedly. I myself wrote a sad poem about “Poor Old Joe” the other day, but now I just don’t know, because Joe Biden is the last of the old family members that I can still recognize as my president. Two monkeys with the world in their hands always run for president, and at the end of the day the American people get what we deserve. With Biden and Trump, we have two old heavyweight champs slugging it out until one drops.
I may be wrong about Donald Trump. But if he really is the fated one, I have to wonder what fate holds in store for our troubled and divided nation.
Pincus is an award-winning artist and longtime Soho resident.
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