Who’s image is it? - Black on Black Thought
July 16, 2008
This is part of the bi-weekly Black on Black Thought feature.
James wrote an interesting response to the New Yorker cover called “The New Yorker and Archie Bunker”. The gist of his analysis is the following:
Wlady Plesczynski, longtime editorial director of The American Spectator, blogged that the cover was “too clever by half, taking some generally known unserious tropes and having a field day with them, as if at some level the magazine actually thought such a caricature had some basis in fact.” That is exactly right. If the cover were an attempt to pre-empt and ridicule conservative attacks on Obama, two things went terribly wrong in that thinking:
- This will only embolden — it certainly won’t scare — conservatives. Now that a liberal publication has fired the first salvo, one far worse than any that Republicans have conjured up to date, it’s far more likely that we’ve entered Open Season than any chance of conservatives shying away from playing the race angle.
- Most Americans are, in the words of a former colleague, “only negligibly literate.” While the inside-the-Beltway types will see the cartoon for what it is — a poorly done jab at the right-wing — I doubt that the people in “Flag City, USA,” many of whom actually do believe that Obama is, or was, a Muslim, will see the nuance. More likely they’ll just take it as proof that see, I knew that Obama he was some kind of Muslim; my friends were right all along — even The New Yorker said so.
I agree with James that this is satire done with the skill of dog writing poetry. However, we differ on the underlying reason why this article cartoon cover failed so miserably.
