Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-Going through the latest edition of the UK’s The Economist I met this picture of Britain’s former Prime Minister Gordon Brown in all his Edenic glory (obviously photoshoped by a newsroom guy) and laughed lungs out.
However at the nether end of my comic relief a thought came up.
What if that picture was in some local daily and the figure of art was our own President Mugabe.
Someone would have dearly paid.
But for what, one wonders over the hypothesis?
Did Brown lose his standing, his respect or his prestige when he was thus parodied?
Local media publications have mainly kept themselves to mere cartoons of leaders, a feat which annuls any germane connections between the real person and the comic imitation of his being.
At the end the cartoon of the President is very much him whilst at the same time a mere creation so distant from his being that he doesn’t care what pose he is given.
The sarcastic and even acidic parodying of leaders in frames as one above is part of the Western media culture and the question one has, in a bid to explore the limits of the practice, is have those countries lost something we have gained through the practice?
In our comatose-stiff need to maintain respect for leaders and refrained (been refrained actually) from such types of parodying have we gained much?
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