The New Yorker Imbroglio

Last week’s New Yorker cover brought on apoplectic rage from various segments of the media and blogosphere. The sketch depicted Barack Obama in the Oval Office clad in traditional Muslim garb, exchanging a “terrorist fist jab” with Michelle Obama, who bears an assault rife and a bandolier of bullets. In the background, Osama bin Laden looks on approvingly from a portrait while an American flag burns beneath him in the fireplace.

Anybody who has a modicum of familiarity with American politics in general or the New Yorker in particular understood immediately what the image was: a work of satire. Indeed, the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes. From Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Chris Rock’s “Niggas vs. Black People,” the greatest works of satire in history have taken what some people are predisposed to believe, albeit plainly false, and mocked it into reversal or extinction. Satire takes the vices and follies of human nature and ridicules and derides them, usually with the intent of bringing about positive change and educating some along the way.

What the New Yorker cover says is very clear: the attacks on Obama – those labeling him unpatriotic, or a radical Muslim, or a terrorist – are outlandish and absurd, and to laugh at them in a way that mocks the cosmic stupidity of human nature is to provide a service, not a disservice, for us all. To accuse the New Yorker cover of racism, or to accuse David Remnick of launching a campaign to spread falsities about Obama, is tantamount to accusing Jonathan Swift of believing that Irish children should actually be sold as food. One does not have to be a member of the “liberal cognoscenti” to see the context of the cover – that the smears about Obama are self-evidently preposterous.

To be sure, there are perhaps some Americans out there who are so brain-dead that they are incapable of understanding the fundamental difference between mocking something and laundering it, so ignorant that they can’t distinguish between satire and smear, between tongue-in-cheek condemnation of racism and actual racism, between mocking lies and adopting them. There are also some Americans out there who still declare that Obama is a Muslim, who imagine that they were abducted by aliens, and who posit that Christopher Columbus sailed to the new world sometime after 1750.

Those who are concerned about the unparalleled idiocy of these narrow souls should worry less about covers of the New Yorker – the most prestigious magazine of its kind in the nation – and more about fixing the various other media outlets, public agencies, and support structures that may help lift our countrymen out of baffling idiocy.

 

Update:

Vanity Fair just came out with a hilarious fake New Yorker Cover. Now we have a mockery of a satire. Brilliant.