Satire Can Be Nitro: Obama's Lips

I hope this doesn't come across as "politics" or "bashing," as neither is intended; the subject is really satire, not personalities.  Like most of the known world, I've been following the THE NEW YORKER cover flap the past couple of days.  I read Maureen Dowd's column in the TIMES yesterday, and appreciated the irony of her humorlessness attacking Obama for his perceived humorlessness.  Then I caught David Remnick doing damage control on Charlie Rose's show last night.  When Remnick compared himself to Jonathan Swift, I admit I started to take notice.  Whence the disingenuousness?  Whence the defensiveness?  And whom is Maureen Dowd covering for?

Satire isn't usually as abstract as this; the subject of the satire is usually onstage, not offstage.  What I mean is, the Obamas, who are the ostensible victims here of prejudice by the offstage targets of the satire, are in fact victimized a second time.  Instead of the fat Hoosier in a ball cap who can barely get his gargantuan belly out from under the counter of the luncheonette as he turns laboriously on his stool to proclaim Obama a Muslim and his wife a terrorist, we see the projection on the part of a third party, the caricaturist Barry Blitt, of what he "gets" this to mean.  The "framing device" for this satire is an offstage abstraction called "American racism" or something, and we as viewers--if we're hip--are supposed to "get" it, too.  (Mr. Remnick was very clear about "getting it" on TV last night.)  The problem is, it's the Obamas who are mocked and humiliated by the force of the picture, the truly ugly vitriol of it; they're not vindicated by the abstract argument.  The Hoosier clown is nowhere to be seen.

When I was thirteen years old I lived in Indianapolis and my parents had realized their long-held dream of fleeing to suburbia with all the other white people.  We lived in an aluminum-sided house, not unlike a trailer, in a subdivision that was a barren treeless expanse of concrete and dirt; in fact, my job was to turn the clods surrounding our house into a lawn.  One night my father and several of the neighbors, high-spirited jokesters that they were, burned a cross in front of the house of the only Jewish family in the neighborhood.  Much hilarity all around, except for the Neffs, the Jewish family, who were--I remember quite clearly--hurt, very angry, and a little afraid.  Because they voiced their protests--and in particular, their anger--they were immediately vilified for their inability to take a joke.  For their "humorlessness."

Not to channel Woody Allen channelling Marshall McLuhan, but the medium here is very hot; is it possible that it has incinerated the abstract message?  As good liberal "theorists," surely we know that no artist finally projects any id but his own?  I'm not suggesting at all that Mr. Blitt--and by extension Mr. Remnick--are racist, just that whenever we cross the wires of satire and race in this country we have to be very careful.  Look at Mr. Obama's lips: they are rouged and pursed.  His face is prissy, effeminate.  He is a scold.  Does this vision arise from the parameters of the obese Hoosier's fears, or is it actually directed at Mr. Obama by hip Ivy League supporters who would like to cut his nuts off for his talking down to them, as Jesse Jackson acted out off-microphone last week?  Is Mr. Obama actually being eviscerated for his "humorlessness"--and the Hoosier joker is really the occasion, not the cause?

Or maybe the real thing here is that Mr. Remnick--as the enabler of Mr. Blitt's work--was carried away by his cleverness--their joke--without considering what the picture might reveal on deeper levels about them both.  In Mr. Remnick's case it could be that it was perfectly all right to trash the Obamas on the way to a wickedly clever white boy joke. 

Comments

[tlc]

JC has this just right. Except I don't know what he has against aluminum siding.

[Mitch Sisskind]

the person who "gets the joke" is always in the power position. so if i put some offensive illustration on this site and people get upset, i can say, 'don't you see it's a joke?' and no one can say i'm wrong.

in fact, i believe it was the former nazi paul deman who made the point that we can never know for sure what is the underlying intention of a piece of writing (or art), because we can never know if the writer was being ironic or not.

so in this case, as so often, the people who get the joke call the others stupid. that's always fun. but deman was right that no one can really know the intention of the creator -- but 'no one' also includes the artists or writers themselves. i think there was a mix of pretty funky shit going on here and the funkiest part is that it was probably an unconscious process for the most part. some people consider themselves to be sophisticated thinkers. but they don't know what they're really thinking.

[DL]

Great post, Jim. Looks like the magazine did get to be the talk of the town this week. I'm sure the people in the editorial offices spent the last four days sweating, but they must love the publicity, and this week's issue probably outsold the rest of the summer. They're all for Obama, but they have magazines to sell. To satirize the guy in Tacoma or the old lady in Dubuque by reinforcing their fears about the Obamas seems as weirdly self-congratulatory as it is condescending and reinforces the awful polarization of blue versus red states.

Everybody says that on the cover Michelle Obama looks like Angela Davis. And then somebody in the room says, "Who is Angela Davis?"

By the way, the last big New Yorker cover flap that I recall came early in the first Clinton administration and also involved the depiction of race: the cover featured a black woman and a hasidic Jew in an embrace.

[Noah Burke]

I recoiled at the cover then assumed there was a joke I didn't "get" then felt stupid for not getting the joke. A similar experience watching that Sascha Baron Cohen Borat movie and hearing the people laughing at the racist, anti-Semitic jokes and wondering if they were laughing as "insiders" or b/c they thought the jokes were funny when taken literally. I probably haven't made myself clear here. Thanks for the post.

[Bill Troy]

I also saw Remnick interviewed by Charlie Rose. Remnick kept saying that the secret to a successful magazine was that "we give our writers their head." I recognize the expression but I thought that removing "their" from that sentence would not lessen its accuracy.