YOU CAN SEE WHY THEY'RE SO UPSET


about that one.


The New Yorker staff, apparently, did not get the memo.

You know, the one that says Senator Second Coming may only be portrayed in the most flattering and/or dignifed and/or beatific and/or Messianic of poses. The one that says no ill words nor unflattering light, no pedestrian poses nor middling moments, shall ever befall a portrayal of him. The one that says you may not, even when you're defending him and attacking his most hateful and ignorant detractors, employ irony or subtlety or satire or anything else that could possibly be misconstrued as anything less than unconditional awe and/or uncritical adoration.

I'm not sure when we started worrying so much about what the great unwashed, the ill-informed and the under-educated, might do if they don't get a joke. And I'm still trying to figure out why, apart from hyperventilating news and internet coverage, all those people are suddenly looking at The New Yorker. But I do know that if we're going to do it, if we're really going to spend our time and our energy and a good chunk of our rhetorical capital fretting over the effects that one magazine cover ironically depicting Senator Obama as a terrorist can have on an impressionable and not terribly discerning or sophisticated electorate, then we should also, once we've finished plunging our knives and slings and arrows into the bloody corpse of satirical cartoonery, start wondering about what kinds of effects might also be wielded upon those poor folks by a constant stream of magazine covers worshipfully portraying the Senator as a cross between MLK, JFK, and Jesus Christ.

Posted: Tue - July 15, 2008 at 10:07 AM          

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