When Satire Goes Astray

I think satire is one of the finest forms of human expression that there is in a world where we sometimes take things so seriously that humor can often seem to be a relic of the past. There are times when satirical humor can cut to the heart of the issue and bring to light the certain absurdity that is often our reality. And then there are times when satire goes a bit too far and ends up being fodder for the opposition to point to as if to say, "see? I'm right!" The recent cover of the New Yorker magazine is one such example. As you can see, the cover image is a picture of Barack Obama and his wife Michelle fist bumping in the Oval Office of the White House. That image in and of itself would have been okay but the image is further 'satirized' by having an American flag burning in the fireplace, a painting of Osama Bin Laden hanging over the mantle, Michelle Obama dressed in camoflague pants with a rifle and ammo and Obama himself dressed in Muslim garb.

The title of the cover article is "The Politics of Fear" and it is an apt title as this is the one image that many Americans tend to be worried about. They fear that this is exactly what they'll get if Obama is elected to the Presidency. Now this is exactly what satire is supposed to be. An humorous look at what many people perceive to be the truth and then taking it to such an extreme that you're supposed to look at it and chuckle. Unfortunately I think the timing of this image is a bit wrong simply because while Obama has been out campaigning for what seems like forever, he is still not widely known to much of the American public and so there's danger in showing such images. Unfortunately, for people living outside of the immediate Washington area, there is a vaccum in existance when it comes to an understanding of politics and our political leaders. Living in this area, one is exposed to a tremendous amount of political information. Outside the area, you smell one whiff of something slightly non-kosher and what you see is often times what you presume to get.

What that means is that most people outside the area will see this image and take it to be the truth. They won't bother to read that the article is meant to portray just how ridiculous some claims against political nominees can be. They will see this image of someone so unpatriotic that it won't matter if Obama wears a flag for the rest of his life, he will still be portrayed and assumed to be an anti-American the entire time. Now if the editors at the New Yorker magazine intended to show Obama in such a manner with the assumption that everyone in the world is as savvy or understanding as their readers from New York then they had better wake up and smell the reality of the situation. For most of us, we'd rather read the captions of an article than spend time and read through the entire article to understand what the context is.

Sure. Some people will argue that they are very much involved in reading the entire newspaper and that's wonderful for those who do but for the vast majority of us, it's just an exercise in futility. Not everyone goes out of their way to understand what is being said and in this case, these same people will likely see this picture and have even greater doubts as to what Obama truly stands for. It's just another sad state of affairs when you have to avoid such situations completely knowing that someone will take something so far out of context that the original meaning is lost. I can't help but imagine that this image is going to play out for a while, not long but for a while, and it will end up hurting Obama in some respects but not because of anything he did but because of what it shows. It's a fake drawing but it has a nasty way of becoming the truth.