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In seriousness I think Eli drives the libs nuts not just because he satirizes so many liberal heroes, but because he’s someone who isn’t trying to present a perfect sanitized vision of American Jewishness, or America generally. https://twitter.com/elivalley/status/1335310387751903238
Liberals have a tendency to get very uncomfortable with any member of any marginalized group who depicts any hint of the unpolished, uncomfortable, or even grotesque that exists within their community (as in any community). The Other must be sanitized to be accepted
That Valley would depict the grotesquery of Obama is even more painful for liberals because he is the epitome of sanitized Blackness, prim and proper to an almost superheroic extent. Remember how they love to say “eight years without a scandal!”
Liberal acceptance of the marginalized is thin, resting on an idealized premise of the marginalized. This is why they were so desperate to deflect blame for property destruction during anti-police protests as the work of “outside agitators”, those pesky “white antifa punks”
A riot is disorderly, painful, even worst of all: ugly. Even the people on the right side of history, even the oppressed, may not all behave exactly as the liberal would prefer. Those irritatingly *human* people may not present the Obamaesque ideal the liberal wants, so...
...they have to reconcile all those *ugly* actions as the work of outsiders who don’t actually belong to the clean, sanitized, idealized class that the liberal has just so much respect and empathy for.
Think too of how much liberals love to depict conservatives as fat, slovenly, dirty, rubes. Never mind that plenty of people who are fat or poor or boorish are oppressed, are progressives, are decent people. Never mind that many conservatives are tidy and skinny and erudite
The lines have to be rendered properly for them. On the one side you have the Obamas of the world, wearing suits that fit properly, speaking with perfect polish, peddling hope and decency and moral cleanliness. And on the other you have fast-food-wolfing, fat, slovenly Trump
Eli’s work really gets under the liberals’ skin, I think, because he depicts the ugliness in liberals too, even in their most perfect steam-cleaned heroes. Even in people who have an identity other than a cishet white man.
Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all. His work depicting Trump & co works fine for them because the grotesquery matches their neat-freak manichean vision of politics and ethics. The clean and the dirty, the orderly and the chaotic, the tidy and the slovenly
But when he turns his eye to the liberal heroes who embody the proper, priggish, cleanliness that this sort of liberal admires, well, that’s a bridge too far.
