During any political campaign, especially one for the Presidency of the United States, there will inevitably be the need to reduce candidates to their bare essentials, that is to caricatures of their personalities with particular focus upon their weaknesses. The number of such drawings for each candidate at this time for the next elections is staggering, and I continue to be fascinated by each artist’s renderings in depictions that are distilled down to non-verbal likenesses of those in competition for the highest office in the land. I’ve been collecting such caricatures and will share my favorite ten here, in alphabetical order. I included two for Donald Trump, because I couldn’t decide which of the top two was my favorite. The reader may draw his or her own conclusions about which ones work best. JB (That’s John Bolinger, not Jeb Bush)
Jeb Bush
Ben Carson
Chris Christie
Hillary Clinton
Ted Cruz
Rand Paul
Marco Rubio
Bernie Sanders
Donald Trump 1
Donald Trump 2 (Dairy Queen Donald)
There you have them, folks…the candidates for President of our country. Caricatures are made generally for the most prominent people in the news, people of huge importance for one reason or another. No one here was favored, just exposed through the humor and occasional pathos of visual art. JB
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
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