Obama New Yorker cover

I love satire and I generally really like the New Yorker. When I saw this cover, I didn't know what to think at first but I've since been mulling it over. I'm all for freedom of the press with extremely limited restrictions (generally, hate speech), and was even for the reprinting of the Mohammed cartoons, but this cover bothered me (not rioting bothered me, mind you, just a fleeting sense of annoyance). I saw Hardball with Chris Matthews, and to paraphrase his point, caricature (the type of satire in this case) should be about taking something that exists and exaggerating it ad absurdum. My extrapolation: the cover caricatures the wrong thing. The object of satire--the idiots who actually believe what's depicted--make no appearance in the image. We see only what those people have falsely interpollated into the Obama narrative, with no relation to any known reality. I think that's why there's all this talk about whether or not people are "getting it." Well, yes, most people are, but it takes a cognitive leap (that only takes a few moments, one would hope) to identify what's missing ("the point"). Subsequently, the problem is that Obama himself is mistaken for the object of satire--this is why it's not only tasteless, but a poor example of the form. It's not that I think that liberal magazines have a responsibility to portray the liberal candidate in a good light, but I do think they need to understand the complexities of representation and reception (that is their business, after all)!

The other issue, of course, is that some of the generally neutral signifiers (dap, afro, Islam) are made negative by association (black militancy, terrorism). This whole "being a Muslim" as a negative thing is quite disturbing, as in and of itself Islam's not any worse than religion-in-general (but then again, how can we decontextualize it from its manifest fundamental interpretations? then "neutrality" as a concept is untenable--nothing is innocent, ha ha). In the US, I would say Christian fundamentalists are more scary, because they're more unified--the Muslims are too few and diverse to become a strong political force.

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Addendum: Here's a funny cartoon.

Thinking about this a bit more, it seems like perhaps simply including title of the article, "The Politics of Fear" would be sufficient (and would serve as the object). It would also put the image in quotation marks, so to speak.

Of course, in a perfect world, this wouldn't even be a big deal at all. To quote the Russian from America's Next Top Model, "some people have war in their country."