…also known as: I’m Writing About That Damn Picture Too, Are You Happy Now, David Remnick?
So that cover. Does it confirm the lies that Obama is a closet Muslim, and his wife a dangerous radical? Or does it reaffirm them? Does it add to the fog of half-truth and send the subliminal message—even to people who know it’s a joke—that Obama is dangerously “other,” or does it do a service by forcing a discussion about suspicions that are festering out there anyway? There’s the simple question, Is it tasteless?, but ultimately that one is personal. The question that matters politically is: what effect will the picture have on other people?
Questions like this—which involve citizens guesstimating how other citizens will receive a particular message—always fascinate me, because they usually come down to one universal: as a rule, Americans are united in a belief that other Americans are dumber than they themselves are.
Someone has to be wrong.
There is a much-cited refrain in politics about Americans’ attitudes toward Congress. Americans—even in times unlike now—tend to give their own Congressmen much higher ratings when polled when they do Congress in general. In other words, I usually make the right choice when I vote; it’s those other morons whose lamebrained decisions are screwing up the country. Likewise, ask people if they themselves are prejudiced, and you’ll get a much smaller percentage than if you ask people to guesstimate how many other Americans are prejudiced.
Again, someone has to be wrong, right?
Judging the cover as a cover is pretty easy by me: it’s a pretty obvious and dumb stunt, the kind of subtle-as-a-brick cover the New Yorker has been doing now and then since the Tina Brown era, when it ran an Art Spiegelman cover of a Chasid kissing a black woman on a post-Crown Heights New York subway.
The reader-reception call is tougher. There are ways of doing this kind of satire where, set in context, it would be applauded by many of the same people who are blasting it now. Say The Colbert Report or The Daily Show had done the same image, as part of a fictional 527 ad using actors to portray the Obamas. It’d be clear enough what sort of attitude the scene was spoofing, and how.
The New Yorker cover, on the other hand, shows how in the video era, old-fashioned print images still have a kind of power, and danger, that video satire doesn’t always—precisely because they are more decontextualized. (Remember, for instance, that it was Danish cartoons of Muhammad that set off a firestorm in Europe—not Danish animations.) When you simply see the cover on a newsstand, or on a cable news show, there are plenty of ways you can read it. You can see it as a satire: “Isn’t this ridiculous? The way some people talk about Obama, you’d think this would be the scene on Inauguration Day!” Or you can see it, on a very simple level, as spreading the same kind of smears that it’s meant to attack.
But there are more than two choices. You could also interpret it as a “straight” editorial cartoon: i.e., sure, he’s not actually a radical terrorist, but his politics are so radical that he might as well be. You could see it as a satire, or simply some kind of lame joke, and yet, in the back of your mind, add it to the catalog of subtle editorial/cultural cues that send the cumulative message that this guy is fundamentally different from you.
The New Yorker cover doesn’t provide much help, since (as is usual for a New Yorker cover), it is not an illustration of a story inside the magazine, it has no caption, and the title inside the magazine on the table of contents, “Scare Tactics,” “The Politics of Fear,” sits there demurely, unnoticed by most people who will see the image.
Now there are ways of doing a cartoon like this that would make its message crystal clear. For instance: put the image inside a thought bubble attached to the head of someone working in an office for an independent attack group. But, as that example demonstrates, most ways of making the cartoon crystal-clear would also make it suck. And this may be the problem in general with the New Yorker’s “controversial” covers of the past decade or so: they want to be cryptic and non-literal, like sophisticated New Yorker covers of old, but they want to be button-pushing and topical like editorial cartoons. And they end up failing at both.
That said, I don’t think the cover is, net-net, damaging to Obama—at least not any more than, if it hadn’t existed, something else would have been damaging to him. It’s a distraction, and I suppose it throws Obama’s campaign off message for a day or so, but that’s campaigning. Also, it reinforces the message—which I’ve been blogging about a lot lately—that as far as pop culture is concerned, there is only one candidate in this race: it’s a yes-or-no vote on Obama. I almost wonder whether John McCain wouldn’t like an “offensive” magazine cover about him, just to let us all know that he’s still alive. (“Come on, Remnick! I’m old! I was a prisoner of war! There are a million tasteless ways you can go with that!”)
Ultimately, though—and call me a Pollyanna—I generally believe that Americans are more capable of processing irony, satire and meta-messages than other Americans give them credit for. “Low-information voters” has become an overused buzzword of this campaign, but while I agree that they exist, I don’t think “low-information” equals “stupid”; rather, there are simply people who would prefer to pay attention to other things in July than an election that will be held in November. And while there are some genuine, bigoted idiots out there, life has proved time and again that they will always find an outlet for their idiocy and bigotry, regardless of what the New Yorker puts on its cover.
But like I said, someone has to be wrong. Is it me?
[Update: Gawker says it best: “This obvious and heavy-handed satire has enraged Democrats and liberal media critics because now they are pretty sure this nation of child-like imbeciles will believe it to be an un-retouched photograph from the FUTURE. … We look forward to this new era of political cartooning, when images must reflect precisely what the creator means without use of exaggeration or satire. Maybe the Mallard Filmore guy should do their next issue?”]