When satire falls flat

Liberal America’s favourite magazine, the New Yorker, this week found itself frantically defending its decision to put a caricature of Barack Obama and his wife Michelle on their latest cover. The drawing shows Obama dressed in Muslim robes “fist-bumping” his wife who’s kitted out like a militant black-power activist. The American flag can be seen burning in the Oval Office fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden gazes down over the whole scene.

The cover attracted criticism from all sides. Obama’s camp said it was “tasteless and offensive”. His Republican rival John McCain’s spokesman Tucker Bounds could only add: “We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive.” The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, did his best to explain the cover’s appeal: “It holds up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama… It combines a number of images that have been propagated… about Obama's supposed ‘lack of patriotism’ or his being ‘soft on terrorism’ or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen... That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office.”

Andrew Sullivan writes on the Daily Dish that the cover is simple satire. The notion that most Americans are incapable of seeing that it is satire “strikes me as excessively paranoid and a little condescending”.

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly disagrees: “It was gutless.” Proper satire, explains Drum, should have a contextual element. Drum says the artist Barry Blitt should have drawn the image inside “a gigantic word bubble coming out of John McCain’s mouth — implying that this is how McCain wants the world to view Obama. But he didn’t.”

Andrew Malcolm writes on the LA Times political blog that "A lot of people won't get the joke. Or won't want to. And will use it for non-humorous purposes, which isn't the New Yorker's fault."

Political blogger Taylor Marsh asks if the magazine would have been happy running a similar satire of John McCain: “Picture a drawing showing a very old man in a wheelchair, his hospital gown adorned with medals... babe of a wife pushing him, as his first wife wipes drool off of McCain's mouth... while Cindy McCain stops to open packages from Chanel. No, I didn't think so either.”

Finally the Huffington Post’s Dan Cesca sums up the press reaction to the controversy: “The New Yorker cover, regardless of how many people are blowing it off as a joke, fails to be funny, fails to accomplish its satirical goal and only succeeds in being a part of that which it had hoped to condemn.”

FIRST POSTED JULY 15, 2008