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Vocabulary > Language > Personifications
Uncle Sam, John Doe, John Bull, Jim Crow, etc.
Uncle Sam Recruiting Poster
This version of Uncle Sam
was first published in a popular magazine in
1916
and was adopted as a military recruiting
poster
when the United States entered World War I.
"The Uncle Sam Wants You" motif
has been used subsequently to promote every
conceivable cause.
During the Vietnam War it became an anti-war
poster.
James
Montgomery Flagg.
New York: Leslie-Judge Co., 191.
Color Lithograph.
Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress (77)
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/images/77vc.jpg
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/britintr.html
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/tr11c.html#wwii
Chicago:
S. Brainard's Sons,
[1898].
Sheet music cover.
Music division, Library of Congress (75A)
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/images/75avc.jpg
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/britintr.html
Cameron (Cam) Cardow
Canada
Cagle
21 January 2009
Uncle Sam
The Old Lady
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/oct/05/juventus-palermo-napoli-serie-a
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/cartoon/2008/dec/07/recession-bank-of-england
Uncle Tom
USA
Uncle Sam
USA
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/britintr.html
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm015.html
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm202.html
"Jim Crow"
USA
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/jim-crow-on-west-broadway/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-slavery-reparations_x.htm
http://www.vahistorical.org/civilrights/jimcrow.htm
http://www.pbs.org/jazz/time/time_jim_crow.htm
in the Jim Crow South
USA
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/03/us/AP-US-Slavery-to-Freedom.html
Britannia
Columbia
John Tenniel. Punch, May 6, 1865,
p. 183.
General Collections (71)
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/images/vc71.jpg
This drawing, expressing the widespread
sympathy in Britain
for the grief felt in the United States after Lincoln's
assassination,
appeared in the popular British magazine, Punch.
The artist was John Tenniel (1820-1914), the famous illustrator of
Alice in Wonderland.
The Guardian G2
3.8.2005
No laughing matter
One of the strengths of the British character, we have always told ourselves, is
our sense of humour.
But stand-up comedians and sitcoms are getting increasingly dark, satirical -
and, arguably, unfunny.
As the Edinburgh fringe, the showcase for the cream of the nation's comedy,
kicks off, Stuart Jeffries asks:
are the British forgetting how to laugh?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1541488,00.html
John Darkow
The Columbia Daily Tribune
Missouri
Cagle
18 December 2008
Wom Move Suffragettes #1 Of 2
[ Female suffrage, male suffering,
Fun, June 12, 1875 ]
Life Images
http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=d081fa705bc4e4f3
John Bull
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/britintr.html
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/
John Doe
USA
http://www.answers.com/topic/john-doe
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/a-name-only-a-lawyer-could-love/?hpw
The Joneses
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/national/class/CONSUMPTION-FINAL.html
Murphy's law
colonel Blimp
Deep Throat
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1496592,00.html
Mr Lovely
Mr Clean
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/11/usa
Mr Right
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/opinion/17wooldridge.html
Mr Wrong
Mr Quiet Man
Mr Thing
Mr Nice
Mr Nice Guy / Mr nice guy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/business/media/05mickey.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/comedy/story/0,,2273165,00.html
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,1302369,00.html
Mr No
Mr Nasty
Mr Angry
Mr Cool
http://sport.guardian.co.uk/wimbledon2007/story/0,,2122014,00.html
Mr Big
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,1509333,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,1143054,00.html
Mr Lover Man
Mr Ordinary
Mr and Mrs Average
Mr Whip Ass
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_
objectid=13787939_method=full_siteid=50143_headline=
-BRITNEY%2DS%2DEX%2DIS%2DMR%2DWHIP%2DASS-name_page.html
Mr. Fix-It
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13bob.html
Mr. Inside
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/business/11hohlt.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/sports/ncaafootball/21blanchard.html
The Essex man
Everyman
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2041842,00.html
Walter Mitty
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/james_thurber/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/01/uk-property-fraud-kallakis
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/13/ukcrime.ukguns
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1012918,00.html
Johnny-come-lately
Captain Mainwaring
Joe Public
Joe Blog
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040621-650732,00.html
Johnny Collaborator
Big Boss
Dr Death
Dr Doom
Old Man Winter
White Knight
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/nyregion/11fall.html?hp
Big Oil
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-17-dems-energy_x.htm
Joe Sixpacks
USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/us/politics/19palin.html?hp
American mythic pantheon > John Henry
USA
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/johnhenry/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/books/review/Downes-t.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/18/books/18grim.html?ref=review
17.3.2005
The Guardian p. 22
6.9.2004
Now It’s Iraq on the Agenda for Mr. Fix-It
of the G.O.P.
November 26, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 — Everyone in Washington
knows that President Bush has a lot riding on the Iraq Study Group, the
bipartisan panel searching for a fresh strategy in Iraq. But so has the man
whose name has become synonymous with the group: its Republican co-chairman,
James A. Baker III.
The last time he dominated the news was in 2000, in Florida, when Mr. Baker — a
former secretary of state who has been a friend and a tennis partner of the
first President Bush since the current president was 13 years old — led the
legal team that delivered the White House to its current occupant. That was Mr.
Baker in partisan mode, cementing his reputation as Bush family confidant and
Republican fix-it man.
Now, at 76, Mr. Baker is in high diplomat mode, on a mission, friends and
supporters say, to aid his country and his president — and, while he is at it,
seal his legacy in the realm of statesmen, a sphere he cares about far more than
politics.
“I think he’d like to be remembered as a 21st-century Disraeli,” said Leon
Panetta, a Democratic member of the group, referring to the 19th-century British
statesman and prime minister. “I think deep down he is someone who believes that
his diplomatic career, in many ways, helped change the world.”
On Monday, the 10 members of the Iraq Study Group — five Republicans and five
Democrats — will convene in Washington for two days of deliberations, to try to
produce a report by mid-December. The panel, formed at the urging of a
bipartisan group in Congress, has a broad mandate to conduct an analysis of the
situation in Iraq, including military, economic and political issues.
The group has conducted hundreds of interviews, but some question whether even
the most thorough report can have any effect on the ground in Iraq, where
sectarian violence is escalating.
The panel remains deeply divided over several critical issues, most notably
whether to accede to calls by Democrats for a phased withdrawal of troops. Mr.
Baker, who would not be interviewed for this article, has said he wants
bipartisan consensus, but the panel’s Democratic co-chairman, Lee H. Hamilton,
acknowledges it will be difficult.
“It’s not a guaranteed result,” Mr. Hamilton said. “There is a lot of focus on
our work, and a lot of attention to it, and high expectation from it. I think
Jim and I both feel that pressure.”
Mr. Baker is no stranger to world affairs; he presided over the end of the cold
war, the 1991 invasion of Iraq (arguing famously against ousting Saddam Hussein)
and was an aggressive dealmaker in the Middle East. He has always been “the
quintessential pragmatist,” in Mr. Panetta’s words, a master at intertwining
politics with diplomacy, at consulting everyone in the beginning so no one feels
left out in the end.
That has been his modus operandi at the commission, where he has functioned
almost as a shadow secretary of state, using his vast personal Rolodex to reach
out to international figures the Bush administration has shunned — while testing
the political waters at home.
He has made ample use of his Bush connections, dropping in on the president for
private Oval Office tête-à-têtes. He led the study group on a mission to
Baghdad, where they donned helmets and flak jackets to meet leaders of every
political stripe. (“A lot of them knew him,” Mr. Panetta said.)
He has included Mr. Hamilton on every decision, going so far as to reject a
photo shoot at Newsweek unless it included Mr. Hamilton, colleagues said. He
insisted the report be released after the November election. He has let
information slip out when it has suited him — like news of his quiet rendezvous
with officials from Syria and Iran, rogue nations in the White House’s view —
but has demanded absolute secrecy about the substance of the panel’s work.
“We’ve all been issued cyanide pills,” said Edward P. Djerejian, who is helping
Mr. Baker write the draft and is director of the James A. Baker III Institute
for Public Policy at Rice University, a university Mr. Baker’s grandfather
helped found.
As a two-time former cabinet secretary (at Treasury under President Ronald
Reagan and the State Department under the first President Bush) and a two-time
former White House chief of staff (Reagan and the first President Bush), Mr.
Baker has been around Washington long enough to know how to play the
expectations game. Right now, he is playing it to the hilt, putting out the word
that Iraq 2006 is hardly Florida 2000.
“The expectations have gotten well beyond where he wanted them to get,” said one
person close to Mr. Baker, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “You’re talking
about a political equation as much as you are a strategic and diplomatic one.
And one of the things that’s making the situation difficult is this image that
Baker’s coming in, Baker’s riding to the rescue. There are some very smart and
very strong Democrats on this panel, and they’re not going to do what Baker
tells them to do.”
Nor will President Bush; his press secretary, Tony Snow, insisted that the White
House would not “outsource this problem to the Baker commission.” The White
House is already pushing back against the report, even before it is issued. The
Pentagon is doing its own review of Iraq policy, and the White House has
commissioned another. President Bush, meanwhile, is traveling to Jordan this
week to meet Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, where he is expected to
reassure the prime minister that the United States is not pulling out anytime
soon.
Mr. Baker’s relationship with the president is one of the great curiosities of
Washington, and many here are trying to divine how he will use that tie to
advance the Iraq Study Group. The two are not nearly as close as Mr. Baker is
with Mr. Bush’s father; Mr. Baker’s recent autobiography, “Work Hard, Study and
Keep Out of Politics,” suggests tension just under the surface.
Mr. Baker writes that he did not mind being left out of the current
administration: “We had our turn. Now it was his.” Though people in Washington
see a certain irony in his return to manage a new Iraq war gone wrong, he
insists he is not “implicitly criticizing” Mr. Bush for the invasion. Yet Mr.
Baker takes pains to point out, in a one-sentence footnote, that Mr. Bush is “an
alumnus” of the “office boy pool” at Baker Botts, Mr. Baker’s law firm in
Houston. In one scene from the elder Mr. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, he
refers to “the ever-playful presidential son, George W.”
These days Mr. Baker refers to that son as “Mr. President.” The president calls
Mr. Baker, 16 years his senior, “Jimmy.” Aides to both insist Mr. Baker has not
used his private Oval Office meetings to tip the president off to the
commission’s work. But then, Mr. Baker would never be that unsubtle.
“He’s treating the president just like he is everyone else, as somebody to be
co-opted, and brought into the process,” said one outside adviser to the study
group, who was granted anonymity to talk about the process.
Some Democrats consider that a good thing. “Baker has the great good possibility
of success because he’s so close to the president,” said Senator Joseph R. Biden
Jr., the Delaware Democrat and incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. “He’s able to give the president a way out, a way of saying, ‘I
didn’t do what the Democrats said. I listened to Baker, my old buddy, Jim
Baker.’ ”
By all accounts, Mr. Baker relishes his encore as elder statesmen.
“Look, he was certainly a very effective politician, a wise political
strategist,” said Donald L. Evans, a close friend of Mr. Baker’s who served as
commerce secretary in President Bush’s first term. “But that was a means to an
end. He’s playing, I think, the role that he should be playing at this moment in
life — the distinguished statesman that is there for leaders to go to, and
listen to.”
The study group, formed in March, operated below radar for months. But the
assignment just happened to overlap with Mr. Baker’s October book tour. Mr.
Baker left no media outlet unturned, even appearing on “The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart.” (“Don’t think for one minute they don’t sell books,” he later told The
Houston Chronicle.)
Mr. Baker used the appearances artfully, promoting the book and setting the
stage for public acceptance of the Iraq Study Group. He made clear his
differences with the White House, telling the ABC news program “This Week” that
“it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies” and that his panel would search
for a middle ground between “ ‘stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’ ”
The political landscape, though, has changed dramatically since then. If Mr.
Baker can guide his group toward recommendations that are accepted by the White
House and Democrats, and that yield real improvement in Iraq, he will be more
than a Republican fix-it man. Mr. Evans, the former commerce secretary, said he
would be remembered as “America’s fix-it man.”
But foreign policy experts and politicians alike say there is no miracle elixir
for Iraq; if there were, someone would have thought of it already. Ivo Daalder,
a scholar at the Brookings Institution, says the real test for Mr. Baker is to
pull the White House “out of the quicksand” in a way that has lasting political
effects at home and strategic effects in Iraq.
“This is an impossible job,” said Mr. Daalder, adding wryly: “Even God couldn’t
meet those expectations. Perhaps Jim Baker can.”
Now
It’s Iraq on the Agenda for Mr. Fix-It of the G.O.P., NYT, 26.11.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/washington/26baker.html
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