Informed Speculation

I meant to blog on Bernanke’s comments today, and I’m long overdue in touching base on Iraq – but I’m out of time, so I’ll be lazy and just throw up a related post to yesterday’s.  Here’s Hitchens the Great on the Barack New Yorker cover:

Satire, according to Jonathan Swift, is “a mirror wherein every man will commonly discern every face but his own”. The New Yorker’s cartoon of Barack Obama and his lady wife, according to its editor David Remnick, “takes a lot of distortions, lies and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are.”

Swift’s satire on satire could hardly have been better, er, illustrated. The cartoon, by veteran satirist Barry Blitt, omitted no detail in showing the Obamas kitted out as a combo of Muslim and Black Panther, with a photo of Osama bin Laden on the Oval Office wall and the Stars and Stripes smouldering in the grate. Within hours, even Senator Obama’s Republican revival was heading for the moral high ground and denouncing the cover as “offensive”.

Ludicrous as it might seem to have John McCain enlisted as an art critic, and obvious as it should be that the New Yorker would never do anything deliberately to hurt the Democratic nominee, it remains the case that a Newsweek poll has just found 12 per cent of voters believing that Obama is a practicing Muslim and another 12 per cent (possibly the same 12 per cent) convinced that he used a Koran for his swearing-in ceremony at the United States Senate. These are of course exactly the sort of people who do not read the New Yorker, or go in very much for the ironic and the satirical, so that as usual the aesthetic effort is somewhat lost on what ought to be its target audience.

Instead, you have sophisticates in the metropolis laughing at a portrayal of the fears of the lowly white hicks. This set-up could itself be the subject of a satire, but probably at some other time and in some other magazine. Mr Blitt himself could hardly have been more anxiously literal, contacting the liberal “Huffington Post” blog to assure them that “depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness it is”. Let us by all means be certain that there is no ambiguity about our satires.

A well-meaning coworker of mine who is very sincere in his love of Obama (and thus due for one hell of a letdown when the man gets into office) echoed Kevin Drum when speaking to me about the cartoon.  “Maybe if it had some sort of explanation attached”…but I reject that categorically.  One has to draw the line against the dumbing down of culture somewhere – a successful satire is one that is so cleverly portrayed that, for a moment, even a serious person is fooled – until gradually, the light comes on.  To throw the light on from the beginning and to say, “See, what I’m trying to do here” is dull, unnecessary, and rather beside the pont…and speaking of beside the point, I’ve exhaustively covered this little non-story, so more substance tomorrow, I hope, time permitting…