The New Yorker
Jul. 14th, 2008 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lollardfishI 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?
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?
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 01:21 pm (UTC)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.