You Know What They Say About Cake...

Remember about 18 months ago when a very prominent cartoon caused an enormous uproar, which ultimately revealed more about the subject matter of the cartoon than its actual creator? Some obscure Danish cartoonist dared to depict Mohamed with a bomb on his head instead of a turban, and the Muslim world exploded, literally and figuratively. Death threats were issued, embassies were bombed, retractions were demanded. And anyone with half a brain and a shred of decency inwardly went "Well, that says an awful lot."

And this week, the phenomenon repeated itself, though without any death threats or bombings (yet). But the indignation pyrotechnics were spectacular, and very, very revealing. The New Yorker magazine, a noted bastion of reaction and bigotry, had the temerity to run a cover featuring Barrack Obama and wife Michelle in the guise of, respectively, a Muslim fundamentalist and a guerrilla warfare radical, both of them anti-American to the core. The second it hit the Internet, you could practically hear Obama Nation's collective inhalation, the gasping prelude to the torrent of moral outrage about to be loosed.

Of course, this was meant purely as satire, to lampoon the allegedly paranoid fear of the Obamas among right-wingers. Thus, The New Yorker printed a patently absurd image designed to ridicule the idea that Obama's presidential aspirations are somehow sinister and terrifying. I believe this is an example of a relatively new tack in politics called "sarcasm."

But a whole bunch of indignant liberals aren't laughing. Why not? Because all those rubes out there in Middle America might not GET IT. They might think he really IS a Muslim (heck, some of them already think just that). How dare The New Yorker publish a cartoon that could give people the wrong idea about their beloved, unassailable, manna-from-Heaven candidate? Free speech is all well and good, but in such an important election, are we really going to trust their television-addled brains to interpret the joke correctly?

Think I'm being melodramatic? Just read this analysis of why The New Yorker cover is actually really, really bad. Most revealing quote: "[V]isually-based racial, religious and character-based framing does carry cognitive weight across a spectrum of higher- and lower-level reasoning, and, more than anything, it gains strength and veracity through repetition." All those lower-reasoning voters out there might just take it the wrong way!

At play here is a very obvious hypocrisy. Either this cartoon has no basis in reality whatsoever, it's completely absurd and therefore laughable, or it isn't. If it is a pure inversion of the truth, why all the angst about the damage it might do? When in the same breath the liberal, blogging community announces that the Obamas bear absolutely no resemblance to this caricature (which was the artist's point all along) BUT this cartoon shouldn't have been printed because it could give people the wrong idea, the liberal blogging community doth protest too much.