For decades, The New Yorker arrived 52 weeks a year, on the same day, must’ve been Tuesday, in Mom and Dad’s mailbox in Fort Smith. Rarely, it came on Wednesday. A little while before it dropped to 47 issues annually, the regular day ended, annoying Mom to no end. It might be at the bookstore before she received it at home. So on Thursday, July 17, my mailbox received the infamous July 21, 2008, issue, while it hit newsstands and the Web back on the 14th.
I didn’t mind. This is one of the “little magazines.” Big magazines have generally brief, vaguely sourced articles written with patronizing triteness. Little magazines have larger pieces using longer sentences and paragraphs, with bigger vocabularies. Some cross over, like most of Vanity Fair and parts of Esquire. I wanted this little New Yorker in both hands, not some low-resolution Internet image of the jacket, and time to think.
The cover, by Barry Blitt, is titled “The Politics of Fear.” Blitt has drawn a number of covers, as seen in this online selection, and all are topical and pointed. This time, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. and his party’s presumptive presidential candidate, is shown wearing Arab garb in the Oval Office, bumping fists (fearmongers call it a street gang or al Qaida greeting, because aren’t they all in it together, to get us?) There’s his wife, Michelle, topped by a foxy Afro with an automatic weapon slung on her back. A portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs above the fireplace in which the U.S. flag is burning.
Yeah, it’s satire. Look it up. Satire — usually some form of communicating the opposite of what is meant — isn’t always ha-ha funny. It’s not necessarily a New Yorker “mild-chuckle” funny. It can be a short gasp of recognition, of getting the point, yet finding irritation not humor. Let’s be clear:
I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”
— E.B. White’s caption for a Carl Rose panel cartoon in The New Yorker, 1928.
Another tack: When I was 11 years old my family took a trip that had a stop in New Orleans; Dad decades earlier attended Tulane. One evening, Mom insisted on seeing Bourbon Street, not for the music clubs but the strip joints, just to walk by them. Mom had me by one elbow, leading me as if blind, for I was: Her other hand shielded my eyes from the open, inviting doorways.
For quite some time, satire has been like that. You can identify it, even ascertain its strength, by both the number and variety of “brother’s keepers” who say, “I get it but others won’t.” People who are shocked on your behalf, would like to see it not published because it might encourage you or because you may not comprehend “opposites,” though young children’s humor shows they can create and understand opposites.
Here are some examples. First, Both Obama and his presumptive opponent, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. have expressed anger. Umbrage for politicians, though, is a matter of first of choice then of calculation.
- “That’s who we are in this country: ignorant, irony-impaired and petrified.” — Leonard Pitts Jr., The Miami Herald.
- “Dumb cover.” — Garrison Keillor, in Slate, and to think he’s both a lefty and a New Yorker contributor.
- “I think we all have to watch very carefully what we say — our attempts at humor, our attempts at informing people — because some of what we say can be misinterpreted and do real damage.” — New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in The New York Times
- It’s a recruitment poster for the right-wing. — Jake Tapper, ABC News
- “The New Yorker cover advances the virulent version of Obama as a closet radical with dangerous associations.” — Eleanor Clift, Newsweek
Thus, Blitt’s “The Cover of Fear” not only is satire but a modern-classic example because so many oh-so-important people have condemned it, mainly because it could persuade the unschooled that its various elements are true, just like they heard.
The only way for satire to win in this context is to be powerful. Thus the cable channel Comedy Central (caution, audio) gets only praise for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. The New Yorker, eh, not so big.
