Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

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Monday, July 14, 2008

NO. IT'S NOT FUNNY. OR SATIRE.

The trouble with the New Yorker Magazine's cover is that the people who published it believed everyone would be smart enough to see it as satire. Instead, it is being used to reinforce rightwingers' bigoted ideas of Sen. Obama and his wife. IOW: IT REINFORCES THEIR WILLFUL IDIOCY AND MISINFORMATION.

3 comments:

Patrick M said...

And here I was getting the point and all. But Obama didn't, or assumed no one would. Does this mean I'm smarter than Obama?

If I were to meet him in the next few days I would have to offer him cheese to go with his whine.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Because you're in the white majority, you don't get why this is offensive.

It feeds into people's racial prejudices--Michelle Obama is an outspoken, smart black woman, therefore she must be a modern Angela Davis, uzi wielding, scary black woman.

And I've been on enough rightwing blogs to know that the cartoon only confirms to the Goopers their deepest uninformed fears--that Obama is a cryptic Muslim who would burn the American flag.

There's an alternative cartoon that Andrew Sullivan (a self-identified conservative) is showing over at his blog:

John McCain in a wheelchair with his wife Cindy offering him some of her illegally gotten drugs; a picture of Cheney over the fireplace, and in the fire, the Constitution*. [I would have made the cartoon even more outrageous--as outrageous as the NYer toon by having McCain and Cindy in bed together while McCain's wife, Carol was looking in the window.]

How do you suppose the McCains would react to that?


http://tinyurl.com/62dzet


Oh wait, the Sullivan cartoon would be using stuff on the McCains that is actually TRUE. The NYer cartoon is supposedly satire because none of it is true.

*It's funny, isn't it, people get more upset over abuse of the flag than shredding or crapping on the Constitution, the document that makes this county unique. Every country in the world has a flag, but only the USofA has the incredible Constitution.)

Patrick M said...

How do you suppose the McCains would react to that?

They'd probably laugh. After all it's not about Obama. That's the only thing McCain seems offended by.

Now, let's get down to the part that offends me:

Because you're in the white majority, you don't get why this is offensive.

This is the lamest damned justification anyone ever could offer. This idiotic obsession with race by most liberals, including you, is the reason much of the race war is perpetuated. If we're talking about real racism, you'd have me on board. But you damned well know this was not it.

I know the kinds of sites you've been on. You're talking about the militant wingnuts who puke out conspiracy theories about commies infecting everything. The very idiots who's perception has been set in stone since the first time we heard the name Barack Hussein Obama. And the very idiots parodied on the cover.

Now, instead of the three liberal snobs who actually get the New Yorker, and the dozen wingnuts searching for anything they can use to sling mud seeing the cover, the entire country is seeing it in all its glory.

Either way, Barry donked out big time on this one.

Oh, by the way, liked the toon. It was funny.