By Patricia Lee Sharpe
The New Yorker depicting the Obamas as terrorists?
Having criticized the bombing of the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan and having also written that those Danish cartoons must be tolerated in the name of free speech, even if many Muslims found them blasphemous, I found myself reading reports of the latest New Yorker cover with dismay. No way could I advocate censorship on racist or religious grounds. I couldn’t advocate apologies from the editors either, not even for bad judgement. And I certainly couldn’t ask for a hiatus in distribution.
So the ox was being gored, and I had to smile, even though it hurt.
If people didn’t get the joke—and I have to admit that the so-called satire came across as pretty opaque to this person who cherishes her weekly dose of New Yorker humor, what would happen to the Democrats’ presidential aspirations in November?
However, I couldn’t properly judge the cover without seeing the real thing, so I was feeling pretty revved up when I went to the post office to collect my mail.
What did I find in my box? Bills. Supermarket ads. Slick catalogues. Invitations to art openings. No New Yorker.
Ooops! I’d cut my renewal too close, evidently. I pulled out my checkbook to confirm my foolishness. Nope! I’d paid in plenty of time. My New Yorker had been swiped. Since popular magazines had failed to make it to my box before, I complained to the postal authorities and drove to my favorite source for periodicals I don’t subscribe to. No New Yorker there either. Or in several other stores.
There’d been a run on the Obama issue.
Fortunately, I was planning to attend a meeting at the Santa Fe public library that night. I’d go to the periodical section and check out the cover before the meeting. I found the niche where the New Yorker is normally stashed, opened the padded vinyl folder which usually holds the latest issue, and found----a note of apology! The Obama issue had been swiped from the library, too!
Obviously, though I enjoy sitting on my porch and reading books, magazines, newspapers, whatever, all was not lost. I could study the cartoon on line and also read the Ryan Lizza article about Obama’s negotiation of the Chicago political scene, and so can you. Meanwhile, that daring and controversial cartoon has been a major circulation and publicity coup for the New Yorker people.
It’s been good in other ways, too.
The cover has broken through the ultra timid approach to the Obama candidacy. The historically-conditioned fear has been that lavishing on Obama the scrutiny and ridicule that White presidential candidates routinely come in for might be taken as racist. Serious pummeling would, at best, burden a candidate doomed to a context overdetermined by prejudice, thus adding the proverbial last straw to a burden of unavoidable negativities. Lampooning, if not racist by intent, would be deadly in effect.
Yet treating any candidate like an untouchable icon is also bound to be counter productive. To the extent that the Obama campaign has been normalized by this controversial cover it’s much the better for Obama—and for American politics as well.
Another barrier may also have been broken. If you read web comments, you’ll find a lot of them coming from the so-called heartland, where reactions are evidently as cool-headed as those from supposedly more sophisticated coastal readers. “We’re not boobs,” the comments say. “We can be trusted with satire.” New Yorkers, Californians and Bostonites need to take this cri-de-coeur to heart.
All in all, then, the Obama cover probably isn’t poisoning minds that aren’t already bigoted beyond redemption. Despite overly-protective initial gasps of horror and some hand-wringing better understood as political fear masquerading as laments over poor taste, the American public is handling this ground-breaking cover quite well. There’s certainly no danger of violence. Suggestions that it should be treated as “hate speech” have got little traction.
In fact, for all too many readers, after the initial double take, the reaction has been puzzlement. What exactly is the point? Explanations are multiplying, and they are useful. The joke’s on the bigots, it seems, not on the Obamas. But satire’s a medium of broad bold strokes, unlike the sneakier ironic mode. It’s outrageousness needs to be quickly accessible, as Jonathon Swift and Mark Twain knew. In Blitt’s case, the hoot of recognition is a long time coming. The fun’s all but lost in the explanatory verbiage.
In the end, this ox doesn’t feel gored. It feels bored.