It’s hard to miss all the controversy raging over the New Yorker Magazine cover, depicting Barack Obama as a flag burning Muslim and his wife, Michele, as an Ak-47 toting radical guerrilla. The media is apoplectic. Pundits and politicos are practically dripping with self-righteousness. As I sit and write this, Bill Bennett blunders about its bad taste while James Carville defends the cover in the name of the New Yorker’s time honored history of satire. At any moment peasants with pitchforks will gather before the New Yorker offices, demanding the head of its Editor-in-Chief, David Remnick.
Let me say at the top that is is far from my favorite New Yorker cover. In fact, this wouldn’t make the top twenty . Nothing will ever compare to the iconic and monocled snooty man in his high hat or the graphic depiction of a New Yorker’s perception of the fair island of Manhattan compared to the seemingly menial expanse of the the rest of the country. No, this cover doesn’t possess by half that kind of aesthetic quality. But it is selling magazines.
At a time when all print media is hurting, this cover has arguably more to stimulate interest in the New Yorker than just about anything else. Forget the fact that its covers for decades have established a benchmark for graphic quality in magazines. It’s cartoons are smart, incisive and actually funny. Historically speaking, some of the best writers in our nation have contributed to its pages. David Remnick defends the cover as satire. He claims the cover is to draw attention to all the misconceptions about Barack Obama and his alleged Muslim and anti-American past.
By animating public concern to a cartoon caricature, the cover , Remnick claims, is designed to put the lie to Michele Obama’s alleged dislike of America. While I believe the cover could have been better, I believe Remnick and the New Yorker has accomplished what they set out to do. Everyone is talking and light is being shed on the darker corners of a series of spurious allegations about Obama. That, overall, is a good thing. You can believe he is the best person for President, or you can think otherwise. The main thing is to understand who is really is and what he isn’t.
When ten to twenty percent of the nation still believes he is a Muslim, that he was sworn in to the Senate on the Koran, and all the other foolish allegations, we have a problem. More so, clearly the regular media, the sincere media, isn’t getting through with all if its soppy ingenuousness. Lord knows, we have seen enough and heard enough as the media has milked this campaign for all it is worth. But, still, a quarter of the population thinks he is a Muslim, has been a Muslin, may be a Muslim…what’s a Muslim?
So enter satire, doing service where it does it best. Going over the top to elucidate a murky discussion that no truckload of pundits with all their stiff necked sincerity can ever accomplish. Enter satire, although, sadly, most fail to recognize it for what it is. Most have been so programmed, so dumbed down by relentlessly bombastic media that they can’t differentiate ingenuousness from exaggeration. This is disturbing.
This could mean that that satire is all but dead. One of the great vehicles in history, one of the best means of shedding light on an issue by infusing it with humor and hyperbole is dying slowly in our very literal world. That and irony are, if not lost arts, are arts losing the battle of attrition against an increasingly closed minded and literal world.
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To support this rather horrific theory, unintentionally, of course, CNN’s commentators asked people on the street to interpret the cover. They didn’t get it. Not a clue. Maybe it was a bad survey sample, but everyone of them didn’t see it as satirical. They saw it as racial, offensive, threatening, and horror beyond horrors…negative. Oh, my, negative. We live in such a positive world, after all.
We are a nation that clamors for photos of our celebrities’ children. We are a media that will pay millions for photos of our celebrities’ babies, or for that matter any scrap of lurid knowledge about the most inconsequential people. And this is a nation that wants to kill off the satirical form and render irony to its marginal place among the twelve remaining people who can perceive it.
Why? Because we are literal. It is convenient to be such. We are intolerant. We are, culturally speaking, a bore. While we proclaim individual and social freedoms with our hair, tattoos, music, religious practices and personal hygiene or lack of it, we are increasingly a constrained and stultified nation that is on brink of being able to recognize an original thought. Or distinguish satire from reality. Somehow we got it in our heads, we have the right to not be offended. Nothing should impinge upon our social, political or religious sensibilities.
No contrarian should go over the top in making our point of view look ridiculous. Somehow we have garnered some convoluted interpretation of the First Amendment to where we believe that nothing offensive should pass through our ears or by our eyes. We do not want to our life perceptions threatened by another point of view. So whether we are politically correct or politically inept, we kill anything that challenges our senses. The worst thing is we don’t even know what we risk losing.
If we haven’t killed satire, we have dealt its tradition a terrible wound. We have stomped its relativity with our Crocs and Thongs. And tomorrow, we will probably feel better for it. We will feel safe and less threatened by that awful bugaboo, a magazine cover.
Perhaps sometime in the distant future a more enlightened population will find great works of satire under the rubble of our literal thoughts. They might even find the dreaded New Yorker Magazine cover of Barack and Michele Obama. I wonder what they will think of it.