A belated comment on the recent (but, with respect to the pace of the CNN set, ancient) flap over a rather unsurprising New Yorker cover, pictured below:
I think that we’re overlooking a pretty crucial point here. Even most cursory knowledge of the New Yorker’s, and this artist’s, past provocative covers or, moreover, its absolute love affair with Obama (Hendrik Hertzberg may as well be the treasurer of the Obama editorial fan club), makes this kind of media explosion seem absurd, if not surprising. It’s doubtful that the satire would be lost on The New Yorker’s readership.
The controversy relies entirely on the idea that many Americans are intellectually lazy enough to not only look at the cover and let our flaccid minds draw absurd conclusions, but that we would be swayed without so much as flipping to the table of contents. Many of the arguments that I’ve heard against the cartoon, too many of which went unchallenged, revolve around an elitist assumption that of course, we (the few) understand, but they (the masses) couldn’t handle something so complex as irony.
It’s not in the style of the New Yorker to try to pander to the lowest common denominator, but rather to be fairly provocative. In this tradition, the cover performed perhaps too well.
