The New Yorker Cover Controversy: A Case of Misplaced Umbrage

Timothy A. Clary / AFP-Getty Images 

For the past 24 hours, the hot topic in presidential politics hasn't been Iraq, or immigration, or even John McCain's "Googilliteracy." It's been the cartoon on the cover of this week's New Yorker magazine. Called "The Politics of Fear," the drawing by Barry Blitt depicts Barack Obama in the Oval Office, swaddled in the robe and turban of an alleged Islamist radical and "terrorist fist-jabbing" his Afro-wearing, AK-47-toting black radical wife Michelle as Osama bin Laden glares from a framed portrait on the wall and an American flag roasts in the fireplace. At this point, so much ink has been spilled over the cartoon that the commentary has almost surpassed, in terms of length, the article it was originally meant to accompany: Ryan Lizza's 15,000-word report on Obama's Chicago years. (I said almost.)

It's a shame they didn't just laugh it off.

Following the lead of the Obama campaign ("tasteless and offensive"), much of commentariat has taken umbrage with the image for reinforcing the false Internet rumors (he's a Muslim! she's Angela Davis! they hate America!) that have dogged the Obamas for years--even though, as New Yorker editor David Remnick pointed out yesterday, "the cover takes a lot of distortions, lies, and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are." (In other words, it's satire.) The trouble, critics say, isn't that the magazine intended to suggest that Obama hearts Osama--they know that the cartoon meant to mock the rumormongers, not the candidate--but rather that the "unwashed masses" will misread the image, once removed from its proper context on the cover of a liberal publication, as a confirmation of their suspicions. "The main problem with the New Yorker cover," writes the Washington Post's Philip Kennicott, "is that its humor is intended for a relatively insular, like-minded readership: subscribers to the New Yorker, a presumably urbane audience with strong Obama tendencies. No matter what the New Yorker says about holding up a mirror to prejudice, the cartoon certainly didn't do that. It was more like a spyglass... [on] the prejudices of the rubesoisie." The result, as Jake Tapper of ABC News put it yesterday, is a "recruitment poster for the right wing." He added that "no Upper East Side liberal—no matter how superior they feel their intellect is—should assume that just because they're mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won't feed the same beast in emails and other media." (My NEWSWEEK colleague Jonathan Alter weighed in with a similar take here.)

This line of reasoning--i.e., don't satirize something stupid because the people who believe it might be stupid enough to take you seriously--strikes me as painfully paternalistic. I don't think the cartoon is particularly clever--my friend Chris Beam of Slate recently penned a much smarter satire of the Obama rumor mill--but I also don't think it's offensive (let alone "racist" or "sickening," like many Obama supporters). Why? Simply put, there's a difference between what's potentially inconvenient for Obama and what's actually, you know, wrong. Does it help Obama to have Blitt's sketch broadcast on television? Maybe not--which why his press shop lashed out. (Although I, for one, am not convinced that it hurts him all that much, either. Hardcore bigots--that is, those who already believe every ridiculous Web whisper, with or without a liberal New York magazine to misinterpret--are the only people who will see the cover and say, "What did I tell you?" Normal human beings will get the joke and move along.) Regardless, it's not Remnick's job to do what's best for Obama. The fact is there's nothing wrong with pointing out the absurdity of a rumor ("Obama is a Muslim") by amplifying it to ridiculous, obviously satirical proportions ("Obama is a Muslim who will dress in Islamist garb and worship bin Laden as president"). In fact, laughing at a worthless belief is one of the best ways to show that it isn't worth believing. Unfortunately, by criticizing the New Yorker for refusing to "protect the common man from the potential corruptions of satire"--and not anyone dumb, bigoted or uninformed enough to take the image literally--the magazine's detractors have, in the end, made the rumors out to be much more credible than they actually are.

Call it a case of misplaced umbrage.

UPDATE, 3:32 p.m.: Smart points from the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, who echoes and expands on what I wrote above:

Reasonable people ought to be able to disagree about whether, had they been sitting at David Remnick's desk, they would have commissioned the same cover. We can debate whether it's funny, whether it's in poor taste, whether it's banal or immature, whether will strike the prejudicial id. But when art like this outrageous us to the point of condemning the New Yorker as an enterprise, of making facile allusions to anti-Obama propaganda, of insisting that the New Yorker vet its cartoons to make sure they don't spread stereotypes, we've lost the crucial distinction between what's hurtful and what's harmful -- a very important distinction for a liberal democracy to preserve. Everyone brags about their own ability to resist subliminal messages -- although this is quite liminal, but we assume the worst about our fellow citizens, and we assume that they can't handle the same complex images we can handle. By the way: those Outrageists who protest the cover are responsible for making sure that the New Yorker cover -- which, incidentally, a lot of us readers tend not to notice each week -- will be seen by millions and millions of more people.