Last week a weekly magazine with a pretty small niche market made a big splash in the whole media world, including the 24/7 cable news world, the morning drive time radio world, and especially the still new and relatively untamed world of the web. The splash sent shock waves nationwide, was made by a silly drawing. Yes, a mere funny picture sent pundits and prognosticators reeling.
The cover of the New Yorker depicted Presidential candidate Barack Obama in the Oval office, dressed as Osama bin Ladin giving his wife Michelle a fist-bump. Michelle is dressed as an Angela Davis style sixties militant Black radical, complete with machine gun, camo and afro. A portrait of the real Al Qaeda leader hangs where George Washington should be and the American flag smolders in the fireplace. Describing it here in words makes it sound more offensive than the whimsically sketched caricatures really looks.
Obama expressed disappointment in the magazine cover and his rival, John McCain condemned the cartoon. The tragedy is that the uproar about it reveals that America seems to have lost their sense of humor because most of us seemed to have missed the joke.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mallory- you wrote this a couple days after it was a big deal, we’re reading it a week after that, so we’ve heard the story over and over again by now. The cartoonist and the New Yorker were trying to make fun of how many emails have claimed that Obama is really a Muslim, and that his wife is some kind of Black supremacist. That some yahoo on a Fox News morning show thinks that fist-bumping is some kind of gang sign and that some panicky extreme right-wingers think that Liberals are all flag burning America haters. We all know that they were trying to satirize Obama opponents, not slander the Obamas themselves.
Okay, okay. You get all that. And you know that I fancy myself a cartoonist too, and if you read this column regularly, it’s no secret that recent flip-flop on the FISA bill not withstanding, I’m pretty much on the Obama bandwagon. Fine. So what’s my problem?
Is it that some people don’t get that the cover was a joke about Obama’s opponents and find it offensive because they think it only serves to perpetuate the false rumors about him?
No, I understand that it seems to have back-fired. What I don’t get is why didn’t it work? Is it because since the advent of Saturday Night Live back in the seventies, our culture has been so super-saturated with sarcasm that we can’t recognize genuine irony when someone uses it? Nah… ya think? Pshaw-as if!
Or, is it that we’re so up tight and on edge that we’re suffering from some kind of Mid-Traumatic Stress Disorder that we’ve lost our sense of humor? I tell ya, it may only be a recession, but every time I drive by a gas station price sign or listen to the news, I go into depression.
Is it because we’re so polarized and passionate about our positions that we’re too freaked out to tease each other about anything political? That can’t be it, because our friends at the Republican booth at the county fair seemed to be comfortable enough to rib us about offering our kids candy as we ordered supper from the church booth across the exhibit hall.
Maybe those primaries put our teeth on edge about race. Bill Clinton lost his credibility with the Black community with as many not so subtle innuendos and back stabs as he could get in while many Hillary supporters blamed all of her problems the alleged sexism of Obama supporters. Maybe all these years the bullies on right-wing radio have been right, and progressives really are too uptight about political correctness to even have a sense of humor.
But as they say, no publicity is bad publicity. The Obamas got more attention so bad for them turned out to be good for them. The New Yorker, which has FAR fewer reads than People or US or any magazine that features the Spears sisters on the cover, got much more attention then they’re used to. So, even if they look like racist fear-mongerers instead of the Birkenstock wearing, Harvard elite liberals that they are, good for them too, right? McCain gets to look like a good guy for condemning racist fear-mongering instead of benefiting for it for once, that has to be good for him, especially with those independents in the center, right? And we all had something to talk about other than the price of gas for a week. Also good.
All I know is I don’t get it. But then, I understand that there are a lot of people who don’t always get my political cartoons either.
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