I understand why people are having a strong reaction to the New Yorker cover. The image is, indeed, at first glance, hateful. Hateful and shocking.
Which is exactly the point.
Those emails sent from neighbor to neighbor, claiming Obama is a secret Muslim and terrorist sympathizer? Hateful, but we’ve all seen crazy emails. No longer shocking.
That video clip where the smiling Fox News lady asks if the Obamas gave each other a terrorist fist bump? Hateful, but what can you expect from Fox News? No longer shocking.
The insinuation that Obama doesn’t love his country because he considers a flag pin to be an optional accessory? Hateful, but that’s just what Republicans do. What else can you expect? No longer shocking.
The role of satire is to make us look afresh at what we have come to take for granted. To defamiliarize so that we can recognize the injustices embedded in daily life. By revealing the absurdity in practices believed to be "just the way things are," satire opens possibilities for action and change.
Consider the touchstone of all satire – Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Swift proposed that the Irish solve their economic woes by selling their babies to the English as food. Many of his first readers likely felt the same kind of shock and horror being expressed on the diary boards this evening. Swift violated sensibilities. And, worse, he pointed out that Englishmen – even good liberal Englishmen, there at the dawn of the Enlightenment – tolerated a situation in Ireland not much less barbaric than what Swift had modestly proposed.
All of us live in a country in which it is a common, accepted, unremarkable practice for a major party and its media organs to demonize a Presidential candidate with ridiculous, racist lies.
That’s what’s shocking.
Now, of course, the New Yorker cover does not rank among the great works of satire. But neither is it politically harmful to Obama, nor is it without artistic merit.
Those criticizing the cover assume that the image will reinforce the prejudices being deployed against our candidate, presumably in a way that will cost him votes. I believe it will have the opposite effect. These days, prejudice operates most effectively in the shadows. In 2004, a virulent discourse about John Kerry’s effete anti-Americanism thrived on talk radio and by word-of-mouth, largely undiscussed in (if not unnoticed by) the mainstream media. After a couple of weeks, The Swift Boat attacks were politely ignored in Washington, except perhaps when a pundit might note that "questions had been raised" about Kerry’s military service. From the shadows, these attacks drove record turnout for Bush.
We lose if we try to pretend this racist discourse about Obama is not out there. At stake are the millions of voters who are not consciously racist but who are susceptible to the kind of appalling imagery deployed by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. The election turns on decent white voters who, despite their decency, can be made to feel uncomfortable about Obama by ads that subtly place him on a chain of association that runs from Jeremiah Wright to Louis Farrakhan to Bin Laden to the Devil himself.
Look again at the New Yorker cover. An American flag burns in the fireplace of the Oval Office. A portrait of Osama Bin Laden has replaced George Washington. The first lady wears combat boots. That, my friends, is how Rush Limbaugh and Brit Hume want you to imagine the White House if one of the most promising candidates in our nation’s history wins the office. Funny, in an awful, thought-provoking kind of way.
This New Yorker cover, if it is indeed discussed on the cable shows and over the water cooler, will not stoke the prejudices of swing voters, nor rally more racists to go to the polls. It’s much more likely to help bring the toxic discourse out in the open, where it loses its force. Like the controlled virus in a vaccine, the cover may just inoculate some voters from the poisons in our politics.