Dear The New Yorker: WTF???
This shouldn’t even need explaining. But evidently, The New Yorker, which prides itself on its sophistication and wit, needs to have it broken down. Here goes: You idiots! What are you thinking?
An illustration by Barry Blitt depicts Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and his wife Michelle in the Oval Office, revealing their “true” selves: Michelle is in full revolutionary garb, an enormous afro making her look like a millennial Angela Davis, holding an automatic weapon and wearing military pants.
In the cartoon Michelle is giving dap, or fist-bumping, with her husband who is wearing a turban and is dressed in garb perhaps more appropriate for a madrassa in Lahore than the Oval Office.
A painting of Osama bin Laden hangs above the fireplace, where the American flag is being burned.
Could John McCain have commissioned anything that would help him more? I don’t think so. And saying they are just illustrating ignorance doesn’t let them off. It’s actually the problem.
Intent factors into these matters, of course, but 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 into the same beast in emails and other media. It’s a recruitment poster for the right-wing…
But I would assume over at the Conde Nast building, they think it’s droll.
If this is what the so-called liberal media produces, God save us from the right-wing.
Update: Comment from my friend Cathy, who is a New Yorker subscriber: “Do they need to hype circulation that bad? It’s the worst possible taste…not satire. What about Michelle and Barack sitting by the side of the road in dew-rags eating watermelon….would that just be satire???”
