Parody...

So, I have three things on my mind today, and none of them have to do with explaining why I have not blogged for almost a year. I will post them separately so the posts don't run too long.

First, about that infamous New Yorker cover of Barak and Michelle Obama...



You have to wonder what kind of drugs they're doling out in the press room to think this was a good idea. This is cowardly, sensationalist journalism at its worst. There's nothing clever or satirical about drawing a cartoon which depicts the most racist, misogynistic, anti-Muslim, anti-American, discriminatory drivel which festers around the bottomfeeding rumormongers who spam email inboxes, sell inflammatory T-shirts at GOP events, and otherwise pollute the system through which we choose our next leader. I am probably not voting for Barak Obama, for reasons which I may delineate in a later post. But none of those reasons include the abject stupidity depicted here.

The bigger question is, why does The New Yorker think this cover was, in any way, acceptable? By pointing out a controversy, do you have license to demonstrate it to an extreme? Or create an image that becomes it's own controversy? Case in point, would it have been okay if the New Yorker drew a cartoon of Curious George with Barak Obama's face on it? Perpetrating a controversy is not an effective way to comment, even satirically, on that same controversy. If anything, it has the opposite effect. A writer for the Huffington Post sums it up nicely: "Anyone who's tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who's tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism— well, here's your image."