Tempest on a Magazine Cover

What bizarre bedfellows and blood enemies this presidential election campaign has made. Each week seems to produce some new episode that, far from stoking the smoldering embers of partisan warfare, actually pits one faction of the American Left against another, causing them to fall upon each other like so many frenzied hyenas while non-liberals gaze on with bemused smirks, sometimes even lending a kind word of support to one side or the other. Like all entertaining spectacles, the primary clash of those two Democratic titans, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, had to come to an end eventually; but it was not long before America’s knack for crass bacchanalia stepped in to pick up the slack. In the past month alone, the 2008 campaign has brought us quadrennial shit-disturber Ralph Nader accusing Senator Obama of “talking white”—for failing to propose nationalizing the banking industry or abolishing unearned incomes, one imagines—as well as corporate shake-down artist Jesse Jackson’s stated wish to amputate the good Senator’s gonads for the principal sin of “talking down to black people”.

The third week of July has thus far treated us to the hue and cry over the cover art of The New Yorker’s latest issue. Its depiction of a turban-wearing Senator Obama fist-bumping a camouflage-clad, assault rifle-toting, fully-Afro’d Michelle in the Oval Office, with a wall-hanging portrait of Osama bin Laden overlooking a star-spangled banner merrily roasting in the fireplace:






















...has sent America’s chattering classes into their latest fit of outraged conniptions. “The New Yorker may think…that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” lamented Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.” It was not long before McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds and, eventually, Senator McCain himself hopped on the bandwagon, adding that they could see how many would find the cover offensive. Several months ago, the de facto Republican nominee commended Hillary Clinton, claiming she had indeed been the victim of sexist smears during the Democratic primaries. Now Senator McCain repeats that feat, defending one liberal voice from the purported mud-slinging of another. Meet Pair of Strange Bedfellows #1.

A frankly disturbing number of observers appear to have taken the magazine’s cheeky cover at face value. Does no one do any homework before passing political judgments anymore? Does no one realize that the New Yorker is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal publication, one that is openly sympathetic to the Democratic Party in general and to Senator Obama in particular? Indeed, the magazine is emblematic of the very same wealthy, white, college-educated, intellectually haughty, insufferably self-satisfied “limousine liberal” demographic that happens to constitute a pillar of Senator Obama’s electoral base. True to this form, The New Yorker has been harshly critical of the nonsensical caricatures of the Senator and his wife peddled by some of his less scrupulous conservative detractors. Given the content of the magazine’s cover, the track record of the publication itself and the context surrounding this whole situation, it is plainly obvious that the creator of this latest cover was taking aim at Senator Obama’s least reputable critics, not at the Senator himself. Yet that has in no way deterred legions of professional hand-wringers from braying over this latest faux pas. Now, here I am, implicitly defending the same temple of supercilious liberalism I lambasted in an earlier screed of mine. Say hello to Pair of Strange Bedfellows #2.

Needless to say, no such outcry was ever raised over the caricature of a caged, trussed-up John McCain being poked with sharpened bamboo sticks by President Bush and Senators Clinton and Obama, clad in Viet Cong-style black pyjamas, featured in last month’s issue of Rolling Stone magazine:






















Surely I needn’t point out how grotesque and disgraceful this cartoon was, especially when one considers that Rolling Stone—the hip, youthful, sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll, rage-against-the-machine liberal counterpart to the effete New Yorker—unquestionably meant for it to be taken quite literally. I am unsure when half a decade spent being tortured by communist jailers in the service of one’s country became an appropriate object of mockery and derision. What I am reasonably certain of is that Senator Obama himself has shown a great deal more good sense in his own personal response to the flap over the New Yorker’s cover than have his throngs of disciples. In his interview with CNN’s Larry King tonight, Obama coolly commented, “It’s a cartoon...and that’s why we’ve got the First Amendment. And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what’s happening with the banking system and the housing market and what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it…I’ve seen and heard worse. I do think that…in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead. But, you know, that was their editorial judgment.”

As tempted as I am to dismiss this reaction—unimpeachably lucid and sagacious to the untrained eye and ear—as just so much good-goody posturing, I have to conclude that it is sincere, given that it suits the generally unflappable demeanor of the Democrats’ newly minted nominee. If only the good Senator’s followers would take a page from his book on this matter.