lollardfish | The New Yorker

I love the New Yorker. My father buys me a subscription every year for Xmas and has for about 10 years now. I read almost all of almost every issue, skipping the articles that bore me (local New York theater/opera/music/dance), devouring the film reviews and the politics, and regularly learning an immense about. The magazine is often ahead of the curve - it ran its first long piece on Obama before he was asked to do the keynote address at the Dem convention. It ran a piece on evolution in the PA courts/school system before the decision was handed down (after the decision it was in all the papers). Seymour Hersh writes for them (I hope you read his recent piece on Iran. Among other conclusions, the Bush admin. has been giving money to Baluchis in Iran. Kalid Sheikh Mohammad and Romsi Yousef were both Iranian Baluchis, to give you an idea of the issues here.

Anyway.

Next week this cover will be running, but since it's already online, the shit is hitting the fan as we speak. Here's what the editor of the New Yorker has to say about it - it's satire.

It may be satire. I'm embarrassed to have it showing up in my mailbox. I'm considering canceling my subscription.

What's going on here? Am I victim of my own double standard? I was happy enough having Bush the cowboy or idiot showing up on the covers. I think I'd be just as offended if the New Yorker ran a cover showing Clinton as a dominatrix or with a penis (or with Bill's penis) or something else as crude. The cover /is/ expressive of the current lies being perpetrated by the right against Obama (the piece is called "The Politics of Fear"), so I guess it's a great job by the artist.

But I'm embarrassed to have it showing up in my mailbox.

What do you all think?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I agree: it's way stupid. Because if the satire is supposed to point out that the Right is insane for what they're saying about the Obamas, the cover should have shown them, not the Obamas. Even enclosing the current picture in a dream bubble coming out of the head of some fearful or gleeful wingnut would have been better. Right now, the cover offends us and validates the stupid whisper campaigns slurring the Obamas as anti-American terrorists. It's just plain stupid, a real miscalculation.

As Atrios says, the presidential campaigns this year are going to be awesome! <- snark

Hmmmmm.

On the one hand, if it gets the article read, that might be good. BUT, it's well known that people tend to "let in" ideas that mesh with the ones they already have and ignore the ones that don't, so my fear would be that people would see the cover and *not* read the article, and just say, "Yeah, that Obama, he's a rag-head."

I think it's unfortunate. A better cover might have been to show Uncle Sam (us) tied down and being force-fed lies about Obama?

There's not even an article, it's just the cover. The New Yorker lets covers speak for themselves, one way or another.

My mistake; you are correct.

In that case, I do nearly think that the cover is deeply, deeply misdirected and inept, if it was not really intended to be malicious.

Most unfortunate.

I think it is a great cover. The only thing missing is Michelle's hijab. Lighten up!

It's hard to be a Black Panther and wear a hijab.

On the other hand, wingnuts seem to be able to be offended by Obama's Christianity and that he's a Muslim at the same time, so ...

Would you be deeply embarrassed to have it show up in your mailbox if it had been George and Laura Bush pictured *the same way*? Disregard for a moment the cognitive confusion that illustration would likely engender.

If you'd be equally embarrassed, then I don't think you're a victim of anyone's double standard. If your discomfort is based on whether or not the people depicted are ones you support and/or respect, well, then, yes, you might want to look at that.

I can't say. I think my imagination is too weak. The best analogy I could come up with would be images of Clinton.

What I thought of was a cartoon of George and Laura in a car, George doing a line of coke off Laura's arm while she swigs whiskey from a bottle and drives the car through a stop sign, killing a bunch of teenagers. I think that would offend me but I don't actually think it's as bad as the New Yorker cover, because you can't tell such pervasive evil lies about white people. The background isn't there.

P.

Yeah, I think that would offend me too, and yet somehow that stuff never became a target of the left wing (at least not effectively) or the MSM during '00 or '04.

But those aren't lies...

Just saying.

I think Kevin Drum nailed it:

So: gutless. And whatever else you can say about it, good satire is never gutless.

Right.

It's simply bad satire if it has to be explained. This has the tinge of opportunism to it in that it will sell copies without having to justify its existence.

I don't think it's worth canceling, but it could be worth writing the magazine about.

Buddy Hackett's worst joke was: "So there's these two fags fucking a dead alligator on the back of a bus." He never, ever finished the joke, and at the end of his show he'd sing a sweet song to his daughter.

Somehow I find this relevant to the current conversation, but its been a long day and I can't quite pinpoint why.

Hope it went well today.

It's simply bad satire if it has to be explained.

And therein lies the problem: it lacks context and an actual reference to those making the assumptions about the Obamas. If it is criticizing *them*, there needed to be some way of representing that. As someone on my AP listserv said, even Swift managed to satirize the proposer himself in the contents of "A Modest Proposal," and a savvy reader can find that satire in his writing. I like to think of myself as relatively savvy, but in perusing that cover I can't find anything that criticizes the rumour-mongers themselves. So the natural assumption is to assign the satire to the pictured subjects.

Actually, I think it is hilarious.

However if I were editor of the New Yorker I probably wouldn't have published it because there are going to be some people that don't get that it's satire and will go, "Yeah! That's EXACTLY why I wouldn't vote for that guy!"

On the other hand, are there really that many readers of the New Yorker that would have to have this explained to them? Clearly there are some number of readers (at least 5 by my count) who find it offensive rather than funny, but I'm pretty sure it's not influencing any of you against Obama.

there are going to be some people that don't get that it's satire and will go, "Yeah! That's EXACTLY why I wouldn't vote for that guy!"

Here's one from my AP Listserv this morning -- these are educated, politically engaged teachers of AP English, and this one I respect for his erudition, if not his political views:

"I do not think it is that far from the truth, and thus am not amused by it. I take it to be an accurate representation of their true inner life. I think they do work as a team (fist bump at capturing the White House) and I do think that at their root they are out to replace traditional American values of love of freedom and protection of individuality (flag in the fire place), with a radical socialist collectivist program which will make the populace even more dependant on government than they are now.

With McCain we get what we see. With the Obamas we don't know who they really are, so conservatives project their fears and liberals project their hopes. I'd love to see a cover showing how liberals see the Obamas. Perhaps as The Messiah and Mary at the moment of the rapture. How funny is THAT?"

If that's how a well-read rigorous thinker sees when he looks at this image, I can't imagine what the bigger idiots in your country will think. The New Yorker editors HAD to know they wouldn't be able to fly this one under the radar. Whether New Yorker readers are discerning enough or not becomes beside the point when something like this becomes the centre of a media firestorm.

If the image was out of context before, just think about the lack of context now as it's splashed all over Fox News and 30-second sound clips on local TV news reports. It may not influence any stalwart Obama supporters against him, but you can bet any number of "undecideds" will take a step back for a moment... and some won't come back.

The alligator joke is really, really funny.

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