My thoughts are quite mixed. On the one hand, I’ll defend their putting that image on the cover of a major magazine to death. First Amendment, and bloody hell, it is just a cartoon. People shouldn’t take it so seriously. The problem with the image, and the media’s frenzied reaction, was that the people criticizing the cover kept on talking about all these regular folks (aka dimwits) who might just not get that this was satire. The pretentiousness of this assumption is very off-putting. The people who read the New Yorker, yeah, they get it’s a work of satire, lampooning all the attacks made on Obama’s character. So do, probably, many people off the streets who do NOT subscribe to the New Yorker. Yeah, we’re a dumb country, but I refuse to believe individual people (who aren’t good enough to read the New Yorker and therefore idiots) would believe the lies printed on that cover as gospel truth, a point that once again shouts into my tiny brain, “It’s not a big deal.”

Is it tasteless? No, no, it leaves a pretty nice taste in the mouth. The taste of, “wow, this image has balls.” Is it offensive? Hardly. Is it a major media moment? It is for the New Yorker, whose editorial board is all screaming, “w00t! relevancy!” in their best Harvard-based monotones.

On the other hand, my main criticism of the cover comes in looking at it as satire (and this is purely unimportant criticism, because it’s intellectual rather than political). Satire doesn’t have to be funny. So, you can’t attack it for being unfunny. Check out plenty of editorial cartoons (cartoon is a misnomer here) and you’ll see many that make clever statements using contrasting images. They’re trying to illuminate some point, if they’re good, and not necessarily make you, um, LOL. I do feel, however, this was a half-baked joke. The concept is, “Let’s show all the lies that have spread about the Obamas in their fullest form.” Okay, good start. But what’s the punchline (or the point)? That these lies are ridiculous? That’s not necessarily what this image says. It simply presents the lies “as is” without comment. There’s no perspective. The reader infuses the image with his/her own reaction. It would be like putting John McCain on the cover, and picturing him with a walker, an AK-47 to the head of Ahmadinejad, rolling around on a pile of his wife’s money, with his former wife (disabled) despairing in a wheel-chair behind him. Oh, and throw in his black “bastard” child, with the BLACK WOMAN that he allegedly father this child with. Make her a crackhead, too. Or, for more pure entertainment, McCain sucking on George Bush’s teat.

Is that satire? Eh, I think it’s undercooked. Satire needs a straight man, or a perspective of reason, to make the point of the image clear. For me, for this image to work, they needed a punchline. And the most obvious, and kinda funny one, that I could think of was putting this image of the Obamas in a dream bubble coming from Rush Limbaugh’s head as he sleeps in front of his radio console. There’s bound to be a better way of putting us into the image, without spelling it out as I just did. Smarter men and women than I could do better than this.