The New Yorker Cover, Revisited

July 14th, 2008 Posted in Obama

It’s a Rorschach test for the comically illiterate. If you didn’t immediately get that this cover is skewering the political pliant and paranoid, then you may be among them. Right-wing or left, it’s a double-edged sword.

Meanwhile, why don’t you read the issue’s two very interesting articles on Obama. I forget: we subscribe to The New Yorker for the covers.

And no, we don’t have to conform ourselves to the stupidity of others:

But it’s still fairly incendiary, at least as these things go. I wonder what the reaction would be were it the Weekly Standard or the National Review putting such an illustration on their covers.

Intent factors into these matters, of course, but no Upper East Side liberal — no matter how superior they feel their intellect is — should assume that just because they’re mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won’t feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It’s a recruitment poster for the right-wing.

You have to be an “Upper East Side Liberal” to get any joke too sophisticated for elementary school students. Recommendations like these — essentially, for intellectual retreat — are why meatheads dominate our public discourse and why idiots like Bush end up in office. The The idea that New Yorker should cater to the intellectual feebleness of … er … the volk … is too much to bear. Gawker:

We look forward to this new era of political cartooning, when images must reflect precisely what the creator means without use of exaggeration or satire. Maybe the Mallard Filmore guy should do their next issue?

The icing on the cake is the clueless glee of the right wing.