JOLLY DAYS

The Obama Cartoon

This Newsweek blog post about the umbrage-fest evoked by the New Yorker Obama cartoon cover made a good point:

This line of reasoning—i.e., don't satirize something stupid because the people who believe it might be stupid enough to take you seriously—strikes me as painfully paternalistic.

Chris Hayes offered the insight that usually satire is directed at the figure pictured, but in the New Yorker cover it is the credulous audience for the absurdist subject matter attributed to Obama that is the object of satire. Satire at one remove, a little too much for the pop culture to handle, and certainly the media, which was all pursed lips and tut-tutting; all those Cotton Mathers of the media aka TV journalists.

In general the whole issue seems a foreshadowing of an Obama presidency. Obama could have put an end to it before it began by simply laughing it off — but his supporters took their cue from his non-reaction. There was an academic at Lehrer yesterday chattering about “signifying” — signifying nothing but his incoherence. He didn't seem to like the cartoon; he didn't approve. We'll see more of his type in the next few years.

The writer of the New Yorker article which the cover promoted was on Fresh Air. He was as indistinct as Terry Gross often can be and you wondered when you were done listening to the library whisper interview if anything useful had been said. The writer was fact laden — it could be given another interviewer there was more there — but little insight about Obama was provided. The writer mentioned, seeming to want to speed through it, that Obama had one devastating political loss in Chicago in his born-under-a-lucky-star career; the writer said Obama lost because there “was a lot of black attacks on Obama as not being black enough and anti-Semitism about Obama being controlled by Jews” — a striking and revealing look at the nature of Chicago politics. This is a familiar dance: a community exquisitely sensitive about racial offense expressing anti-Semitism without conscience. Gross had nothing to ask about that subject — her moral compass once again lost as she focused on her worse self, as advocacy interviewer — she was more interested in the cover.

It still seems apparent to me that Obama is more a sociological phenomenon rather than a figure of inherent interest. The groups, ideas, advocacy, around Rorschach Obama, are more a fascinating subject of study than is Obama, the conventional politician, without core beliefs, who seems a bit more narcissistic than most of his political class, if that is possible, and confident that whatever he says or does will be enabled by his long frustrated supporters.