Bill Barr and the ersatz Papal Octopus
Come on now, The New Yorker. Surely one of Conde Nast’s babies famous for their cartoons should be familiar with the other Nast. Thomas Nast was the father of American cartoon and the progenitor of the conspiratorial renditions of the feared papal insurrection. Nast’s nastiest cartoons were a passionate projection of his virulent anti-Catholic beliefs, hardly unusual in the 19th century among Protestants and ethnocentric nativists, until John F. Kennedy’s era ushered in an amnesia. The American River Ganges, Nast’s 1871 caricature of Catholic bishops as reptiles ominously wading and slithering to the New York shoreline, salivating with ravenous appetites to devour the Protestant schoolteacher and children, was published in Harper’s Weekly not once, but twice!
