"Are you being sarcastic dude?" "I don't even know anymore."

This is the biggest, stupidest, yet rooted in true problems, controversy there is. I saw this cover last week, where Reddit had a pretty hefty debate on whether people should care about this cover or not. The original poster titled their post "WTF, has the New Yorker lost it's mind?!?" and the debate centered on people being indignant vs people just chalking it up to satire and that people shouldn't care so much. I've had a couple conversations about it, ranging from one side to the other, I don't get into politics too much here, this is a blog about illustration and design, not political leanings, but considering the line is blurred here, I'll dive in.

To start with it, and at the crux of the matter, is that it's bad satire, and bad satire is worse than no satire. Bad satire means that you missed the point you were trying to make, and in this case, you're REINFORCING what is being satirized. Now no seriously expects the New Yorker to ape the myths about Obama, so it's meant to be mocking what they know their readers will know not to be true, but that's, to use a stupid art term, too post-modern of a view to take, expecting people to understand your references automatically. If you take the New Yorker byline off, post it on Fox News, people would be crying wolf. That's bad satire. The problem here, and what is upsetting, is that none of what is being mocked on the cover is true, and when you put that in concert with bad satire, it becomes myth-reinforcement for people who aren't part of the New Yorker's "elite" readership. That's a problem.

The whole thing could have been fixed by posting the headline of the story "The Politics of Fear". (and this is where the scope of this blog comes in) The illustrator (Barry Blitt) does a good job with what I'm sure is the direction he was given, but given the fact that there is no accompanying text, it doesn't go far enough to press it into full satire.

let's take a look at some response editorials:

The first one by Jeremy Glass: this one is probably as close to the Obama cover as it gets, because i guess none of these are true, I don't think it's a take-down of the myths perpetuated against the man, but it's from the same place the Blitt's cover comes from. Then there's the Vanity Fair cover, which while looking the same, and is satirizing a satire cover, actually is doing it wrong (or in this case, right?) McCain is old. His wife does make huge subsidies off of pharmacueticals. I have no idea what the head bandages are for, but I'm thinking it refers to McCain's previous surgeries to remove lesions, which is also true. and then the burning constitution, well that's actual satire there, good for them. Though the fist bump makes no sense in this case.

And then there's David Horsey's which, while echoing the Vainty Fair cover, including a joke about bombing Iran that McCain actually said, it goes one further by actually putting words on the page to give it context. How about that.

Thing is, this cover has now become a cultural touchpoint (albeit a small one), and part of common visual reference. In a post-modern world, this is exactly the type of thing that can be parodied and refrerred to later on, which wouldn't have happened if the New Yorker had actually done their job right.

Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Joe Higgins of the Chicago Sun-Times had this to say: "I looked at it and I thought, I don't get it. Is it supposed to be funny? Because it's not. It seems sort of mean."

Higgins also stated that he thought the cartoon failed as a satire because it requires too much explanation. "A good cartoon shouldn't need an explanation; it should hit you within a few seconds," Higgins stated to CBS Chicago."

While Blitt said for himself: "I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic (let alone as terrorists) in certain sectors is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is."


of course, the Daily Show has a great take on all this: "The Obama camp shouldn't be upset by this, they should say 'We're not upset by Obama being depicted as a muslim extremeist. You know who gets upset by political cartoons? Muslim extremeists."