On Tuesday, July 15, 2008, one of our most promising younger bloggers, Brandon Soderberg, posted about the Obama New Yorker cover. His point was twofold: controversy about the cover being too easy for already bigoted Americans to misinterpret as an endorsement of their worst fears revealed the condescension of the American left toward the American people, but the cover was bad satire because it was too obvious, one-dimensional, and insiderish.Well, I thought about the cover AND read the Obama profile inside the magazine, and I think the cartoon actually WAS a suitably self-deprecating, subtle, and therefore strong work of satire on the New Yorker's part, one that worked on several levels.
On one level, the only level accessible to those who were only ever going to look at the cover of the magazine, this cartoon was sort of saying, "Yes, conservative, Republican, racist America, here at the New Yorker we are (more or less) visionary liberals. So of course we are happy that Obama got the nomination. Just as happy as the visionary liberals at Rolling Stone with their soberly reverent Obama cover. But wouldn't it be funny if being a visionary liberal really did mean being an America-hating revolutionary, as Obama's opponents imply it does? Wouldn't it be funny if we were overjoyed to have just nominated Obama because his nomination gets us that much closer to the End Of Days? Wouldn't it be funny if by running this cover we were coming out of the closet as terrorist sympathizers?" In short, I think the New Yorker was mocking the idea that liberals want the downfall of America.
In our Google Chat, my friend Ethan thought I was reading way too much into it. He thought the New Yorker was only satirizing the scandalous rumors about Obama, but I still think the satire went deeper, that presenting all the scandalous rumors in one place was merely the setup of the joke, because the article inside, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama" by Ryan Lizza, utterly dispels all of the rumors' insinuations.
In Lizza's article, the "money quote" is this: "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accomodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them." For those who read the article associated with the cover, then, the New Yorker's decision to run the Obama cartoon is revealed as a satire of the phantasmagory of many leftist AND rightist hopes and fears about Barack Obama, as well as a guarded endorsement of him as a serious and skillful candidate.
