"Outside of basic intelligence, there is nothing more important to a good political cartoonist than ill will." --Jules Pfeiffer
(World News Trust) -- Evidently there’s a lot of surprising ill will with the latest New Yorker magazine cover. That’s gotta be Barack Mohammed Obama there, right? (See! I KNEW his middle name was un-American!!!) There he stands in his mullah costume, a portrait of his “idol” Osama -- the guy whose name even Chris Matthews continues to mix up – hanging on the wall, above a fireplace where the flag is not only NOT being worn as a lapel pin, but is being burned for kindling. And look at Michelle Obama there in her combat fatiques and assault rifle -- like a latter day Angela Davis. The gesture between Mr. and Mrs. Obama? Total vindication for snarky Fox anchor-blonde E.D. Hill -- that must be the “terrorist…fist…jab ” she speculated about on the air. And look! There it all is, conveniently wrapped up in one neat package, on the cover of The New Yorker .
But maybe it’s not all that surprising. Unfortunately, not everyone gets the joke. Guaranteed -- there are people in this country who already have this kind of caricature epoxied onto their brains. Either they’re staunch, intellect-negating Limbaugh devotees or they swear by Fox News or they gobble up a continuing series of idiot emails shrieking all kinds of sinister-sounding, deceitful, unsubstantiated, utterly fictitious, and hideously paranoid nonsense. I’ve received a number of those emails from people smart enough and sufficiently well educated to know better. I’ve debunked a few, sometimes in great detail. It’s earned me more than a little hostility from some senders (and recipients) who now resent me as much as they do the dreaded Barack, or Hillary, or Bill, too, or liberals in general, because I dared to try to disabuse them of their cherished misconceptions.
I’m a graphic artist myself. I’ve drawn a few cartoons along the way, too, many of them satirical. I never used pen or pencil points sharp enough to draw blood, though. Beauty, humor, satire, and anti-Americanism are in the eye of the beholder, and for far too many, seeing stuff like this is all the believing they need. Without any prompting, my son, the student of politics and rock music, went immediately to -- “oh NO!” when he and a friend looked up the New Yorker cover on the internet. His friend responded with a worried gulp and a “wow, that’s really bad.” They’re smart kids. They’re pretty sophisticated. Ordinarily they get it. But this one stung. These are kids who pay attention and totally get Stephen Colbert. But they were stopped cold at The New Yorker.
If my favorite young people, and many of my friends are troubled by it, I can’t help but pay attention. I don’t want to be a Miss Priss and go ballistic just because the artist’s rendering isn’t pretty. Nor do I want to do anything to compromise the First Amendment. Heaven knows we have enough of our Constitution under assault already. Even the agonizingly curvy Jessica Rabbit once lamented that “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” But I’m also deeply torn by this, too.
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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/wnt-reports/commentary/cant-take-a-joke.html?mosmsg=Thanks+for+your+submission.
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