HEART BEAT: Et Tu, Blatt?

Felicia Mitchell

Satire is hard.  It’s hard to create.  Sometimes it’s hard to understand. 

Jonathan Swift once proposed a macabre solution to a food shortage in Ireland.  Perhaps you know it.  His proposal, a “modest proposal,” was so bizarre, so exaggerated, that people just had to know that he was not serious about the solution.  He wanted to draw attention to the problem.

Barry Blitt, who sketched last week’s cover for “The New Yorker,” mixed the ingredients of satire that Swift used, especially exaggeration, but his concoction failed.  Why? 

Just as some pundits are calling Barack Obama “humor challenged,” maybe anybody who disapproves of the cover is too.  I myself don’t think so.  Swift and Blitt, for various reasons, aren’t in the same league. 

In the cartoon, we find a Barack Obama caricature dressed in Middle Eastern garb, tapping fists with caricatured wife Michelle, who is dressed in camouflage and bearing a rifle.  In the background of the Oval Office, an American flag is burning in a fireplace over which hangs a portrait of Osama bin Laden. 

The point?  Blitt was trying to satirize fears held by some that this presidential candidate is so far out in left field that he’s over the river and through the woods, as far from grandmother’s house as he can go.  The point?  To reinforce the fact that such fears about Obama are stupid.  Well, that should be the point.  That would be the point, if the satire worked a little better.  It just doesn’t.

The cartoon does mean well, according to the magazine’s representatives, who were quick to release a defense after Obama’s campaign denounced it.  This is what was said:  “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.”

John McCain also denounced the cover.  That could mean (a) he didn’t “get” it either or (b) he’s too smart not to notice that this caricature of his opponent is demeaning to liberals, conservatives, and most voters in between.  I mean, reasonable people who don’t plan to vote for Obama don’t really believe that he supports terrorism, do they?  Various fringe groups more often depict Obama as evil or, worse, subhuman.

Here’s the thing. “The New Yorker” was depending on its liberal reputation to provide a subtext to the cartoon.  Unfortunately, there are far too many similar caricatures of Obama appearing in other publications that are so hateful that I wouldn’t even call them conservative, just as I wouldn’t call Hitler conservative.  There’s another word for that. 

Mirroring prejudice may bring prejudice into the open, but it doesn’t necessarily subvert it.  For satire to make sense, it needs to stand on its own two feet and not rest on the laurels of a prestigious publication.