Art

Are you kidding me? When’s the last time you bothered to type a message concerning the NewYorker? In fact when’s the last time you even though about the NewYorker magazine. The people who make assumptions without reading the article are useless wastes of space that they aren’t marketing too. The cover did exactly what they were hoping it would do. THIS!!!!

A mistake. Intended as sophistication, it only says to the unsophisticated that this is what the sophisticated believe. Poor editorial judgement.

I have not read the article in the NYorker (yet) that is the reason for the cartoon – evidently an article about the whisper campaigns that spread lies about the OBamas (michelle is Angela Davis in pearls and pastel suit;  Barak is Hussein and you know the rest of the whispers and lies).  But the cartoon cover was a mistake because one apparently cannot ‘get’ the message without knowing the purpose of the cartoon – that it is meant to illustrate the stupid, senseless whisper campaign.  Sorry to say the New Yorker fell far short of its goal.  Seems to me that if a cartoon’s irony must be explained then it has failed in its intention. 

Your grandmother in Dubuque won’t "get it," no, but that’s not the problem.  The problem is that people who "get it" have gotten it in the sense that they understand why a bad joke is supposed to be funny but isn’t.  Sometimes satire just falls flat; it seems to me that that’s what’s happened here.  I don’t think the mostly negative reaction has (primarily) to do with people’s sense of political correctness being offended—satire (good or bad) is often "tasteless and offensive," in the Obama camp’s words…

http://theavocadopapers.typepad.com/avocadoblog/2008/07/this-weeks-new.html

Well said SM.

there is an emotional element to this cover. there is also an emotional element to racism. there is often an attempt to intellectualize issues of racism because it is more comfortable than dealing with the brutal reality of the past and our present conditioning. people of colour do not have the choice to intelectualize it away and pretend it’s no longer going on because there is a felt impact that continues to pervade their lives.

we all have a conditioned bias bestowed upon us from the society we live in, the family we were raised in and the communities we are apart of. By owning our own bias and having the courage to investigate it we may actually move the ball on racial healing for whites and people of colour. pretending we are in a post-race society and that this type of cover can be flippantly published and won’t have a devastating impact on the nation and beyond is naive and irresponsible.

While I can already hear the excuses for all this just being a joke, the trials held following Germany’s defeat in the 40’s did not see it that way.  The publisher of Der Sturmer was sent to the gallows for exactly this sort of propaganda.  As a native-born New Yorker of colour and as a person professionally trained in mainstream advertising the effect the New Yorker intended with this cover is clear to anyone with a mature sense of history and social justice.

The Black militant/Islamic Manchurian Candidate imagery is not simply a political ploy, it is a traditionally old-fashioned attempt to crush non-European progression, period.  I do not support Barack Obama, but I expect the United States and its European population to live up to their rhetoric of fair-play and the "Past being left in the past."

White fears are the focus of this disgusting piece of journalistic racism.  A fear of the "payback" Whites think will happen if they allow what they believe to be too much power given to peoples historically, traditionally and institutionally regarded as slaves and canon fodder ala Kipling.  

And Rhoehn, you are very wrong if you think that this will not have a negative effect not just on the election, but the community Obama figuratively represents.  He does not in any empirical way represent the African masses in the U.S., but since he has entered the race, the animosity everyday middle-class Euro-Americans harbour towards those many consider less than human has increased.  Social and economic bias against African people has grown in the past year and has become a serious problem.  As one young White man I know, someone who I thought knew better, candidly said to me, "Why should I vote away my White privilege just because I don’t like republicans?"