New Yorker wishes Trump a landslide loss in the elections for his own good.
AB Wire
Vishavjit Singh, 45, a Washington-born Sikh crusader and political cartoonist who now lives in New York, and occasionally transforms himself into ‘Sikh Captain America’, a costumed soldier with a traditional head wrap who fights bigotry and champions cultural understanding through public appearances and talks, wants the GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump to lose the elections by a landslide margin for his own good.
According to Singh, the brash businessman Trump who has created a series of controversies with his bigotry and abrasive mannerisms and talk, is making America hate again, not great again as his elections campaign promises.
“Donald Trump has certainly been a candidate whose words have been alarming for someone like me, who happens to be at the front lines of bigotry in post-9/11 America,” said Singh in an interview to The Washington Post
Singh draws a stark contrast between Trump and Cap’s alter ego, Steve Rogers — two iconic New York characters born in the ’40s, to coincide with the release of the film ‘Captain America: Civil War’.
“Captain America as a character would stand in complete opposition to Donald Trump and his candidacy,” said Singh. “Today, besides ISIS, the festering of extreme right-wing and supremacist forces at home will be targets for Captain America’s wrath.”
Singh also creates cartoon campaigns, such as the Send Sikh Note To Trump postcard campaign, in which he and some of his fans send Trump a postcard every day “with a message focused on processing our anger inspired by his jingoistic madness into small kernels of humor and compassion. He might be full of himself, overstuffed with his achievements with a towering skyscraper of an ego, but even deep inside him resides seeds of benevolence.”
“I wish him well; I wish him compassion; I wish him to realize the violence of his words; I wish him a landslide loss in the elections for his own good,” Singh told the Post.
Captain America was born in New York during World War II, from the minds of Jewish creators and future comic-book legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who introduced their super-soldier by having him deliver a haymaker to the jaw of a reeling Hitler.
Sikh Captain America was also born in the Big Apple for sociopolitical reasons, as Singh was planning to attend his first New York Comic-Con as an exhibitor in the fall of 2011, said the Post report.
“Some of my art is informed by my own experience on the streets of America and being targeted as an outsider — at times as a threat just based on my looks,” Singh said. “So I had this vision of an American superhero fighting hate and intolerance.”
Singh, who grew up in Maryland, and attended school at a young age in New Delhi, explained that in 1984, after Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by her two Sikh bodyguards, mobs carried out an anti-Sikh massacre.
“I grew up in a family that looked Sikh with turbans, beards, long unshorn hair, but we were not a religious practicing family,” he said. One time a potentially murderous crowd hovered outside his home in Punjab before moving on, his family safe but scarred.
Singh had learned about the Sikh faith through illustrated books. “Some of the most amazing real-life superheroes from the young, 500-year-old faith were men and women who gave their lives in pursuit of their beliefs, defending others’ right to practice their faith, community service,” said Singh, who did not become truly politicized until after he started his pre-engineering studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Today, Singh gets frequent requests to dress as Sikh Captain America. He’ll appear at, say, the University of Kansas one week and L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum the next. This summer, he’ll also be part of Marvel Comics’ gallery of 75 Captain America cosplayers from across the nation, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Captain America’s creation, said the Post report.
The New York Daily News reported Trump may not appreciate the pointed messages in postcards being sent to his Fifth Avenue headquarters by Vishavjit Singh. Like the one from a San Francisco critic who wanted “to send you a Trump Turban to help you keep cool in the intense heat you feel in this world.”
“What makes America great is not going back,” Singh said to the Mail. “It’s going forward, all of us collectively.”
On a cross-country plane trip to teach cartoon workshops on the West Coast, he got the idea of using the four postcard designs he made for New York Comic Con to send messages to Trump. Unveiling the hashtag #SendSikhNotetoTrump, he issued the call last month.
He received them. He’s sent 21 finished postcards to the Trump office, as of end of last month. About 60 percent of the messages are his own; 40 percent, he estimates, have come from others responding to his campaign. He’s waged it on his web site, Sikhtoons.com, and on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, where he’s @sikhtoons.
On another mailing, an elementary school student reportedly says, to Trump, “My dad likes you. Mom does not like you. I am confused. You talk like some kids at my school.”
Singh works with those submitting comments to fine-tune them, making them punchier, said the Mail. That’s exactly what happened with a correspondent who recently stayed at a Trump hotel in Florida. Her proposed postcard remarks emphasized how impressed she was with the service she encountered.
She wrote Trump about how great everything at the hotel was, but she noted an irony, Singh says. The message: “Your enterprise is being managed and taken care of by immigrants you are criticizing on a daily basis.”