Satire and all that screeching I heard Tuesday…

The wonderful and talented Omnipotent Poobah has posted a wonderful response to all the folks going ape-shit over the New Yorker cover with Barack and Michelle Obama. He links to a blog called Ice Station Tango, who has the following cartoon by David Horsey up:

You folks that have your friggin panties in a wad need to lighten the hell up. Its not the end of the friggin world..and frankly..anyone that still believes that Obama is a damn Muslim wouldn’t vote for him if he was the last candidate on Planet Earth for the job of El Presidente of the United States. Seriously..they wouldn’t.

I don’t give a shit if McCain said it was wrong and Obama said it as well. Its there for one reason..to sell magazines and get tongues wagging! Ok, that’s two reasons….

And it did just that. All day Tuesday I saw post after post about how horrible and despicable the cover was..the left and all the Obamanistas were just coming un-fucking glued over it.

All you folks did was hype it even more. You realize that don’t you?

Freedom of Speech and freedom of the Press..two things all progressives believe in, unless of course their candidate is the butt of the joke..then all bets are off evidently.

Another thing it might have done…draw attention to all the bullshit being spread around these here internets and of course Fox Noise, about Obama and his wife and how absolutely ridiculous it all is. Because it actually got people talking about the bullshit..Did you once ever think of that angle?

Probably not..you were too fucking busy yelling and canceling your subscriptions to the New Yorker. Christ I hate this election..I really fucking do. If I don’t have a fucking stroke before November it will be a damn miracle.

Every single progressive/lefty that I know will chuckle and laugh at all the photoshops of Bush, Cheney, McCain and every other damn neocon we all hate with a passion. So wtf is so different about the New Yorker cover? Sure, its on the front of a major magazine..but its the same damn thing. A blurb of Poobies post:

The much-excoriated New Yorker cover is no more over the top than a thousand other satirical cartoons produced by the left and right. Satire, especially political satire, always goes for the gut. By its nature, it’s a knife fight of dueling typewriters and cartoonists’ pens. It’s often over the top and vicious and it’s supposed to be. If it wasn’t, it would be a wonkish, stuffy policy discussion – boring as hell and not nearly as stress-relieving as a good belly laugh.Political cartoons – especially good ones – often reveal a truth. In this case, a truth about those who cry over spilt cartoonists’ ink with claims the cartoon will bring about a sure victory for Yertle the Turtle McCain and the simultaneous collapse of Western civilization.

Now get out there and find something to really bitch about ok?

Sphere: Related Content

Banality in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Two of the greatest philosophers of the 20th Century were born today: Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin. Derrida’s work on the Philosophy and Theory of Deconstruction, upends the Western metaphysical tradition.

Deconstruction is not synonymous with “destruction”, however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’ itself, which etymologically means “to undo” — a virtual synonym for “to de-construct.” … If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text’s critical difference from itself.
The Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson

Benjamin was a Marxist, and critic. His long essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, was extremely important to me when I was in art school – as was Derrida in general. Benjamin’s piece was an effort to define a theory of art that would be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art”. Benjamin talked about the “aura” of a work of art which, to him, meant traditional association with primitive, feudal, or bourgeois structures of power and its further association with magic and (religious or secular) ritual. In the age of mechanical reproduction (print, film, photography) where there is no actual “original”, the experience of art would be freed from specific place and ritual and made available to the masses. He wrote: “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”

Ah, but we live in the age of “Low Information Voters.” We live in an age where a philosophy that requires critical thought has been made banal by the age of mechanical reproduction – deconstruction meets mass media. Deconstruction no longer resides in philosophy, but “launches” fashion products, bathroom items, sports equipment, political attitudes. We have an irony deficit as the world becomes more and more banal.

Why does this matter? The New Yorker Cover that depicts Obama as a Muslim, fist bumping his wife who is clad as an afro-wearing, machine-gun toting militant in the oval office, portrait of Osama Bin Laden on the wall, while the American Flag burns in the fireplace, is why it matters. The New Yorker said the cover was illustrating an article called “The Politics of Fear”, a satirical look at the scare tactics being used to derail Obama’s campaign.

“The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall? All of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that’s the spirit of this cover,” a New Yorker spokesman said in a written statement.

I get it, I really understand what they think they’ve done and what they intended. But if you deconstruct the contradictions, you find that it did not work. The majority of people will not read the article, and will focus on the image. Mechanically reproduced images are fast, and say a lot. And the cover treads on very thin ice. It is offensive. It plays into the politics of fear. But it is charicature and it is satire and it is getting people talking.

More important: it was not censured.

I don’t care for the cover at all. In my opinion, it fails in its intent because so few people actually will go to the deeper meaning. Each of the “symbols” present in the drawing refer to various attacks by the far right against Obama, and the cover’s intent is a commentary on that type of politics of fear. But it plays too close to the actual fear – perhaps by not being absurd enough, perhaps because we’ve lived in a climate of fear for too many years now, perhaps because as a nation we have lost our soul. We certainly have lost our ability to think, to exercise critical thought and discourse.

But I would not cancel my subscription to the New Yorker. Nor would I demand they remove the cover nor would I demand an apology. I’ve thought this through, and I am now at a point where I applaud them for their big brass ones for risking so much ire. Yes, it is offensive. Maybe I am glad that somebody somewhere has decided to not be politically correct. Maybe we need to be offended more often. What do you think?

Sphere: Related Content