Barack Obama magazine flap shows an irony deficiency
We've already scratched thrift, candor and brevity off the list of virtues in this presidential cycle, so why not eliminate humor too?
That seems to be the fondest wish of a few commentators and legions of Internet blatherers, who spent much of Monday vilifying New Yorker magazine for this week's cover, which depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as a couple of gun-toting, flag-burning, America-hating terrorists.
It seemed fairly obvious to me, my 8-year-old and, likely, the majority of readers of one of America's finest magazines that the cover drawing by Barry Blitt was a parody. In other words (for those still struggling with the concept), the joke was not on the Obamas but on the knuckle-walkers who would do them harm by trying to turn a couple of fresh-scrubbed Harvard Law grads into something foreign and scary.
Yet online discussion boards from coast to coast overflowed with anger and despair that the image of the golden young senator from Illinois had somehow been taken in vain.
A grass-roots organizer in Chicago named Mark S. Allen made his complaint to one of the Chicago Tribune's blogs.
"I will NEVER purchase or read The New Yorker Magazine again!!" mewled Allen. "I found your current cover on the Obamas extremely insulting, hurtful, racist and not worthy of the reward of my continuing to purchase The New Yorker."
That was mild compared to the shame that Chuck-in-Wichita heaped on the New Yorker via his comment to the Los Angeles Times' politics blog, Top of the Ticket. Chuck failed "to see the humor in that rag they call a magazine." Not content to merely boycott the magazine, he pledged "to never even visit New York, let alone live there."
But it was not only the general public that fumed. Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks, running for L.A. County supervisor, woofed on cable TV about the outrage of it all.
Chicago Tribune columnist/blogger Eric Zorn gave notice that he is waiting for the magazine to launch an equal-ink takedown depicting John McCain as "about 150 years old and spouting demented non-sequiturs in the middle of a violent temper tantrum while, in the corner, his wife is passed out next to a bottle of pills."
Actually, someone who has maintained a little more perspective already obliged. David Horsey, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, riffed on the Blitt illustration with a McCain portrait of his own.
