THE DAILY PIC (#1423): These strange Barack Obama masks are part of a portfolio of photos by an artist named Dan Starling, which I saw a while ago at the Confederation Center for the Arts in Prince Edward Island, Canada. (For obvious reasons, I’ve been saving up this Pic for today.)

Starling bought the masks at stores and online, then used a complicated process of painting and Photoshopping to arrive at the 27 images in his series. (You can read about his process, and the ideas behind his piece, by scrolling down on his Web site.)

I can’t help feeling that much more is at stake in these masks’ distorted Obamas than the fun of caricature. There seems to me to be a voodoo-doll quality to them, as though by pulling apart Obama’s face, in plastic, their owners hope to affect the real man’s flesh.

Of course, I’m a Democrat. (Worse than that: I’m a Canadian, which puts me waaaay to the left of Bernie Sanders, even.) So I take any attack on Obama very much to heart. I remember the Nixon masks that were everywhere in my youth. Did Republicans feel about them the way I do about these plastic Obamas? And does casting a black man as a ghoul or The Joker mean something different than doing the same to a white man?

I think it does.

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