Published: July 15, 2008 10:04 pm            

STEPHANIE SALTER: New Yorker Obama cover: It’s offensive, so it must be a plot

TERRE HAUTE — That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.

— T.S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”



Would you like to see a terrific example of one of the worst things Americans are up against? Take a look at the reaction to this week’s New Yorker magazine cover.

Note, I did not say, take a look at the cover.

That is the now-infamous cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama by one of the magazine’s A-team illustrators, Barry Blitt. It depicts Barack in classic conservative Muslim dress, fist-bumping with Michelle, who’s wearing a ’70s-style Afro, urban combat attire, and an AK-47 over her shoulder.

The couple are in the Oval Office where an American flag burns in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs above the mantel.

The magazine was barely unbundled for newsstands when the outcry began. The nicest assessment of Blitt’s cover came from an Obama campaign spokesman, who called it “tasteless and offensive.” Most critics (and they are legion) used words like “racist,” “incendiary” and “fear mongering.”

Conspiracy theories still abound. People on radio and TV talk shows and online forums see every sort of plot behind the cover, from “closeted Republicans at the New Yorker” to “poor-loser Hillary Clinton supporters.”

David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, and Blitt say the drawing was intended in exactly the opposite way, as a satirical indictment of people who believe Obama is an al Qaida Muslim extremist and his wife a revolutionary bent on overthrowing the United States.

The cover’s caption, buried as usual at the bottom of the magazine’s table of contents page, backs up Blitt and his editor. The drawing is called, “Politics of Fear.” No one who has theorized about the New Yorker’s “real reason” for publishing the drawing seems to mention the caption.

Because I am a longtime New Yorker subscriber, because other Barry Blitt covers have made me spit with laughter, because I know first-hand how badly satire can miss its mark, and because conspiracies are about as rare as universally adored satire — I believe Blitt and Remnick.

My theory: They miscalculated the Obama cover’s effect.

Several thousand other people do not concur. And that is the example I mentioned at the start of this column.

It’s always a dastardly plot by craven and immoral demons with us anymore. Nobody does something in America just because he didn’t think it through, because she used poor judgment, because it never occurred to him or her that someone else might be insulted, hurt, in total disagreement or slow to “get it.”

Oh, no, we must have a smoking gun — and a cold-blooded shooter who planned it all along, and from whom we would expect nothing less than such a crime even though we really don’t know much about the alleged shooter or the crime.

(One online Boston Globe reader referred disparagingly to the New Yorker’s “disgusting photo” of the Obamas.)

And we must all weigh in with opinions that take no prisoners. Whether it was the commentary section of the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, Fox News, the Huffington Post — wherever I checked — almost everybody was clairvoyant about the New Yorker’s motives and dismissive of the entire 83-year-old publishing enterprise.

Liberals and Obama fans promised to cancel their subscriptions for such a heinous transgression while conservatives taunted that the cover was typical liberal insensitivity from a magazine real-world Americans don’t even read.

As so often happens these days, all of the New Yorker was condemned — everyone who writes for it and edits, draws, takes photos, fact-checks and sells advertising for it. In one fell swoop, a weekly magazine with dozens of articles about a wide array of subjects, entertainment and cultural reviews, short stories, poetry and cartoons was reduced to … Barry Blitt’s cover.

That is not only a lie — no magazine is one cover, no network one program, no person one sound bite — it is totally antithetical to the very practice Americans should be working at as hard as we can for the sake of our badly frayed social fabric: We need to stop and think before we go off on hate-filled rants about everything that comes before our eyes.

We need to cease and desist with this poisonous Us-and-Them stuff, this one-dimensionalizing of people we don’t even know because something they said or did — or something we heard they said or did — rubs us the wrong way.

At the very least, we really, really need to start playing the hidden-motive conspiracy card last, not first. As some wise but unnamed soul once wrote: “Do not mistake for conspiracy and intrigue what can best be explained by stupidity and incompetence.”

What a fine day it would be if we then scrapped our paranoia and good-versus-evil reflexes for a less hyper approach to about 99 percent of our daily encounters. A cartoon on a magazine cover would elicit something appropriate like, “I don’t agree.” Or, if we were really exercised, “That’s not funny.”



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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