Satire or Slander: The New Yorker's Obama Mujahideens

As you see above, the New Yorker's latest cover features Barack and Michelle Obama dressed in the most fashionably scurrilous stereotypes of this conventionally bigoted election campaign. They're in the Oval Office. A portrait of Osama bin Laden (or should that be Obama bin Laden?) hangs above a fireplace roaring on the fibers of an American flag. Obama is dressed in a kind of garb you can't quite place anywhere between Fez and Isfahan except that the turban (the Yves Saint Laurent giveaway of wisdom and scholarship in the hierarchy of Islamic dress, by the way) is supposed to tag him as a Muslim, or better yet, an Islamist.

Michelle Obama is the rebel, the insurgent, evoking with her Afro some America-hating Black Power antecedent while the AK-47 links her up genealogically to the more mundane but deadly (and of course turbaned) insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two mujahideens are fist-pumping, a gesture that a few shout-show anchors briefly magnetized as a "terrorist fist-jab."

It's all a wild, almost (almost) wonderful bazaar of a spoof that manages to capture most of the base, idiotic, racist and just plain trashy slanders that keep being thrown at the two Obamas, by the sort of people who somehow manage to call themselves patriotic Americans. It's also, for my purposes, an equally arresting slice of prevailing stereotypes--the stereotype of the Arab as Muslim or vice versa (more vice than versa, obviously), the stereotype of either as Osama-worshipping, the faintly emerging stereotype of the insurgent woman as violent in her own scheming right (if those eyes are any indication of the tremors behind Michelle Obama's intent).

And yet the cover took me aback. Am I getting old? Has my sense of satire finally been dulled by the Age of the Appropriate, the Inoffensive, the Family Friendly (and all those other Adivan shots to the best of American verve)? My colleague Linda Lowen at Women's Issues notes in a post on the Obama cover that "the first thing that came to mind was Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (which on the surface seemed to advocate eating children as a way to solve the economic crisis in Ireland)." Logical enough, if one is willing to accept New Yorker editor David Remnick's explanation: "“What I think it does,” says New Yorker editor David Remnick, is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama's — both Obamas' — past, and their politics."

The first thing I thought about was the Muhammad cartoons controversy, and more specifically, the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, turbaned (as always), with a spherical, Pink Panther-type black bomb in his turban. The cartoon was among a dozen, you may recall, published in September 2005 by Jyllands-Posten, a newspaper in Denmark. The paper's intention wasn't to feature the works of great cartoonists. The cartoons were neither great art nor great ideas, and several were designed to be offensive, which degrades (but does not eliminate) their value. The point of the paper was to use the cartoons as a statement--that free expression must be defended in the face of demagogues.

Anyone familiar with the fate of Salman Rushdie and others who've dared take on, in word or in art, the sacred cows of Islam knows where the Danish paper's editors were coming from. Their aggressive, intentionally defiant stunt may have been excessive. Defending their right to pull it off should not be in question for anyone who considers civil liberties more than pretty words to teach fifth graders in civics class.

Was the New Yorker that intentional? I don't think so. The cover doesn't provide a context, as the Danish cartoons' editors did. It presumes it. And I think it presumes too much for two reasons.

One, assuming that, well, of course it's satire doesn't make it so in the eyes of the very people who are providing the raw material--the raw bigotries--of that satire. It legitimizes their bigotries, because this is the New Yorker and not just any old rag, because this is The New Yorker that has always in the past stunned but also elevated the discussion with its cover satire, and because it has always done so by basing its satire on inescapable truth, as satire usually is. But this cover isn't based on a truth. It's a totality of lies that are meant to imply what Remnick assumes is the obvious truth. So to him this is no different than previous satires of previous administrations: "The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are... We've run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration how many."

Which brings me to the second reason why Remnick presumes too much. I have been collecting new Yorker covers since the Reagan administration. I took a look at those "many many satirical political covers." To begin with, there's been fewer than "many many." The New Yorker doesn't make them a habit. And when it has, the message has been, without fail, as direct as it's been, well, accurate. Here was the signature cover of the Clinton-Lewinsky years, from February 1998 (a couple of weeks after the scandal broke):

Vaguely offensive, especially when you follow one particular thread to its obvious conclusion, but, as Art Spiegelman tends to be, devastatingly on point, too. It's satire with a final verdict. There was also this subtler flip-side, from February 1999:

Now take, in comparison, the few political covers from the Bush years (George W., that is). There was George Bush riding on a horse on some Western landscape, his expression dead-set ahead while his horse is freaking out (it's October 2003, the Iraq war was unraveling as an unmitigated disaster). Tame, overall. Bush's approval was still in the upper 60s. The cover bowed to that approval more than it defied it. The floodgates opened after Hurricane Katrina, which showed the administration's incompetence to be as reliable at home as it was abroad. Here's the Sept. 19, 2005 cover:

And here's Bush as Dick Cheney's houseboy, from December 2005:

Satirical, yes, but hardly daring, or even offensive. These covers were more like glamorized newspaper cartoons, clever and biting, but attempting nothing like the grab down culture's throat that the Obama cover does. The point being that Remnick is off in his comparison between the Obama cover and the covers poking fun at (or during) previous administrations. The Obama cover isn't even along the lines of the great one, again by Spiegelman, from Valentine's Day 1993, showing a dreadlocked black woman kissing the Hasidic Jew to symbolize reconciliation between battling Hasidim and blacks in Brooklyn at the time.

Rather, the Obama cover aims somewhere it did not have the courage finally to define: If those rumors and slanders have become so prevalent as to make such a satire presumably understood for what it is by everyone, then the rumors and slanders are not on the fringes anymore. They're part of the mainstream. So much a part of it that one of the nation's most mainstream magazines can supposedly riff on them and be understood without further explanation. If that's so, the cover is missing something: the element of complicity in the culture's blithe acceptance of slurs on the Obamas.

The problem, of course, is that the slanderers see nothing missing. To them The New Yorker -- yes, the New Yorker -- is the accomplice.

Other Views on The New Yorker Cover:

• Kathy Gill of About's U.S. Politics: "My only regret about the cover is this: the gnashing of teeth over the cover has completely subsumed the substance of the feature on Obama inside: 15 pages entitled Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama. However, those yelling about the cover probably won't like the reporting, either. It's more robust than the Chicago Tribune feature from 2007.
• Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post: "[I]f the satire isn't carefully calibrated to a target audience, then it will almost assuredly be remembered for its offensiveness rather than its supposedly palliative effect on the body politic. The main problem with the New Yorker cover -- if it's a problem at all -- is that its humor is intended for a relatively insular, like-minded readership: subscribers to the New Yorker, a presumably urbane audience with strong Obama tendencies. No matter what the New Yorker says about holding up a mirror to prejudice, the cartoon certainly didn't do that. It was more like a spyglass."
• Cartoonist Art Spiegelman on liberal critics of the cover: ""They sound so elitist. [...] The essence of what they're saying is, 'I get it, but I don't trust the people in Kansas to get it.' But isn't that what the whole hope and change thing is supposed to be about? That they will get it."
• Gary Kamiya of Slate: "The more brain-dead among the posters on left-wing blogs angrily denounce the New Yorker cover as itself racist. Merely to acknowledge racism, for them, is to be racist. This view, which in its Manichaean purity oddly recalls the hysterical reaction of some Muslims to the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, represents the reductio ad absurdum of political correctness: Not a single work of satire could ever pass this paranoid test. With some exceptions (notably the conservative commentator Michelle Bernard on "Hardball"), few of the pundits who criticized the New Yorker went this far: They merely expressed outrage, or concern, that by running the cartoon, the New Yorker was unwittingly carrying the right's water for it."