New Yorker Cover - Satire or Not?
Posted by Daren Jaques on July 16, 2008
How often have you started a point you were going to make with a line like this, “I read somewhere once that [blah, blah, blah]. ” THIS NY TIMES ARTICLE discusses how tricky our memories are and why we say things like that. Basically, it points out that we can remember information, but frequently we forget where we got the information. For instance, you know what the capital of Texas is, but likely you have forgotten when and where you first learned it. The article goes on to point out that this very trick of memory is what allows the “Obama is a Muslim” rumor to persist. If you keep encountering this information, eventually the pathway is strengthened and you might not even remember that it was false.
How many mouth-breathing Americans are just going to look at the cover of the New Yorker, remember that their cousin Izzy down in rural Arkansas sent him some forward awhile back about Obama being a Muslim? Certainly this fine specimen of a human isn’t going to actually read the New Yorker. No, he or she is far too busy watching Dancing with the Stars or going to Monster Truck Rallies to be bothered with READING words and stuff.
As a CBB writer, I appreciate good satire perhaps more than most — considering the dearth of satirical posts unleashed upon the world at my hand. But the New Yorker cover may do considerable unjust harm to the candidacy of a presidential hopeful. I don’t think I’ve done any such thing to anybody just to get a laugh. Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic hyperbolizes that the outcry from folks like me is the “death of humor.” Yikes. If THAT cover was pinnacle of humor then I won’t be attending the funeral nor sending flower money.
The cover was and is tasteless and inappropriate.
[note: I am not going to reprint the cover here, since I don't want to pass the image along. I would hate to the butt of an irony].
July 16, 2008 at 9:10 am
I liked the cover by The New Yorker. I felt like I was watching somebody I don’t like shoot a paintball gun and it backfired.
Next week’s New Yorker cover: “Is schadenfreude good for America?”
Why should we feel weird about that cover or consider it tasteless? The New Yorker editors “intended” to point out the idiocy of right-wing critiques of Barack and Michelle Obama. What does the subsequent effect the cover had matter? Liberals are consumed by “intention” and rarely with end result. This cover gave them a rare opportunity to be concerned with both.
July 16, 2008 at 9:23 am
I would agree with you, Doug, if the untrue rumor about Obama wasn’t so pervasive and damaging. Maybe it is my naievete, but I want conservative ideas to win over liberal ones in the great marketplace of ideas by their merit - not by whisper campaigns.
As an aside, I find it a bit bizarre that so many conservatives are defending the New Yorker’s use of “satire” when it is obviously a self-serving move. The kool-aid drinkers very defintely want America to think Obama is a muslim. Your take, while different from mine, is at least more nuanced and informed than most.
July 16, 2008 at 10:26 am
Though I understand and respect your position, the fact that Obama knew and accepted campaign donations from the likes of uber-leftist William Ayers, who founded what is essentially a terrorist organization, tells me that though satire may have been the “intention,” the cover may have hit a little too close to the mark for liberal comfort.
http://www.nysun.com/national/obamas-ties-to-left-come-under-scrutiny/71421/
Replace Obama on that cover with McCain. It would be so incredibly ridiculous that it wouldn’t garner anything but chuckles from the right. But with Obama pictured in the same situation, the left freaks. Why? Because they know Obama’s a leftist. Sure, he’s doesn’t embrace what that picture stands for in total, but his radical beliefs and ‘former’ friends are certainly reaching in that direction for a short hug.
It’s true… you are judged by the company you keep. That cover may be more directed at Obama’s past company, but he was still in the picture.
July 16, 2008 at 10:56 am
Know what’s funny? Instapundit said it first but both Rush and the Daily Show joked about it too…
Who gets upset about silly cartoons? Yeah, Muslims.
If Obama can bring Rush and Jon Stewart together, he can do anything!!
July 16, 2008 at 11:02 am
Now that IS funny!
July 16, 2008 at 11:03 am
Watch the Daily Show bit.. Funny stuff.
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=176628
July 16, 2008 at 2:29 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/opinion/16dowd.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Okay, Okay. Maureen Dowd says I’m wrong and she makes a good case. Perhaps my umbrage was premature and a bit thin-skinned. I will say that when I first saw the New Yorker cover I winced in psychic pain - and this was well before the bedlam of words about it. I guess first instinct isn’t always right. Perhaps it isn’t “tasteless” and “inappropriate”, Though I still don’t find it humorous.
July 16, 2008 at 2:56 pm
You need to take a chill pill, Daren. The New Yorker’s idea of ‘Satire’ has in the past involved many mercilessly cruel caricatures of the current Administration’s officials, with far fewer good intentions, and this is mild and affectionate by comparison.
Rather than being tasteless and inappropriate, which is after all the nature of satire, the art and the reaction to it incident instead highlights the humorless zealotry and fulminatory victimhood of the Obama camp, far more so than it lends credence to any ridiculous internet rumors. Nor are there any car-show models, beer kegs, or monster trucks in the picture, so the odds are long against any gullible bumpkins noticing it in the first place.
Besides, he would never have become a Muslim, well, unless he had moved into a Congressional district that was predominantly Muslim, anyway. He really ought to just change his middle name to “Zelig.”
July 16, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I don’t have actual pills, but I do have a liquid form of chill pill that is imported from Scotland. I’ll be sure to take two (or six) and call you in the morning..
July 16, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Liquid works, just stay clear of the suppositories.
July 17, 2008 at 7:05 pm
I agree with DAT. The New Yorker was famous for ridiculing Depression-era businessmen clenching their fists at That Man in the White House.
I think this post is an elaborate ruse to get me to defend the First Amendment…so you can ask why I want broad free speech rights, but not gun rights. LOL Raptor Christ, you won’t trap me.
I’ve been thinking, however. Liberals tend to treat racism the same way conservatives treat liberalism: a gross error of first principles that poisons anything flowing from it. Thus federalism gets a black eye because it was used to justify slavery and Jim Crow. And many conservatives similarly treat anything flowing from liberalism to be poisoned.