Here's a quick point for all you intellectual "snobs" who are defending the New Yorker against legitimate criticism. "Oh, you don't get that humor" they say.
One of Don Imus' many defenses of his "Nappy-Headed Hos" comment was that no one understood the context, that he makes fun of everyone.
I didn’t offer any...think it was necessary to offer any excuse...I didn’t think there was any need for me to put into any sort of context what happens on this program, because I widely assume that everyone knows, and obviously everyone doesn’t...
[My] program has been, for thirty or thirty-five years, a program that makes fun of everybody. It makes fun of me, and it makes fun of everybody on the planet...That is the context in which we operate here.
So, congratulations New Yorker. You've managed to run a Don Imus cover. And because your audience is primarily liberals, you won't even have to apologize for being racist.
A now, a second dose of reality for those defending the racist, sexist, and remarkably unfunny comic strip.
Nobody is denying that the New Yorker has a right to print that cover. Nobody's trying to abscond with anyone's first amendment rights. By saying that, you sound like the Imus-defenders. "Free speech!"
Yes, free speech. But, just as Don Imus found out that free speech didn't mean that your employer was required to pay you if you choose to offer racist commentary, the New Yorker folks are going to find out that we're not required to continue subscribing to their magazine regardless of what they put on the cover. Nobody put Don Imus on trial, they just fired his ignorant, stupid ass.
You can be, in this country, a racist. You can be ignorant, you can be a shitty artist, you can be one of those insufferable types that thinks that only you and a select crowd of your friends are brilliant enough to understand your infinitely deep and unapologetically cutting wit.
But we, the American people, aren't required to pay you for being an idiot. We're not required to buy your magazine or listen to your show.
Oh, and, most importantly? We have the same free speech right to call your piece of art a pile of shit. Maybe I should expect to get paid for saying that, but I don't.
It's hard for my wife and I to cancel our subscription because I like the New Yorker a lot, they offer some good commentary on some issues, and some very insightful articles. But cancel we will, because we won't pay to support a coterie of Upper-East Side elitists to have their own little private joke at the expense of Barack and Michelle Obama's dignity.
Can they do it? Sure. It's America - where you're pretty much free to be as big of an asshole as you want. And I'm just as free to point out the obvious - that the New Yorker artists have more in common with Don Imus than, say, Salman Rushdie (as was hilariously suggested earlier). We're not calling a Fatwa on the New Yorker. We're just calling bullshit.