I may, of course, have missed some crucial nuance – but I am pretty damned good at crucial nuances – and I can only find the current cover of The New Yorker ill-conceived, off-target, and moronic. Aside from being appalled by The New Yorker’s frightening inability to discern where the line between satire and stupidity actually occurs, I can’t resist perversely asking what is so fucking wrong with being either a Moslem or an ideological descendant of Angela Davis? But digging deeper, I have to wonder if this isn’t really the product of a coy liberal racism that undeniably works beneath the platitudes and cocktail parties of the progressive. I figure it’s akin the friends who tell me the stumbling, potato-resembling McCain will be the next president because middle America will never elect a black man to the White House. They may be right, but some seem to exhibit a kind of the concealed pleasure on the pronouncement as though it reassures them to know that middle America is a swamp of racist fear. As an unreconstructed anarchist I have to believe that the people are somehow better than that and, at the very least, self-interest and the knowledge that a McCain administration would reduce the USA to chaos, depression, and abject poverty, faster than a falling Soviet Union, will place them grudgingly behind Obama. Or is total collapse what’s needed before change can come?
And talking of McCain, how does being shot down and tossed in a POW camp for five years qualify one as a military genius? Okay, so he was unlucky but…
The secret word has to be Revolt
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/07/new-yorker-edit.html
ReplyDeleteOr it could be to spark controversy and actually shift a few copies. It's easier than re-animating Charles Addams.
The answer remains :-
Del Casher, Whiskey A Go-Go, 1966.
http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/misc/1965-69.html
McCain is the Manchurian Candidate.
ReplyDeleteHis target is the USA.
Humor is subjective but I'm amazed that so many -- including you Mickey, of all people -- don't get the joke. The joke is not on the Obamas or Muslims or Angela Davis, but on all the idiotic accusations Barack and Michelle have had to endure. When I wrote a HuffPost on "Why I Like Annie Coulter" and explained that she made me laugh because she's so asinine and foolish and that she proves that "the right-wing are not nice people, but racists, homophobes, greedheads, and murderers", I got hate mail from both the right and left. The right because of the latter pronouncement and the left because I must be a homophobe if I think Ann Coulter is funny. (See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-simmons/why-i-like-annie-coulter_b_43046.html) Interestingly, only the right-wingers understood what I was really saying.
ReplyDeleteThe cartoonist took all the character snipes made about the Obamas and put them in one image. Why is that difficult to dig? Is irony really that dead?
Dig our pal Paul Krassner's take:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/fear-of-fun_b_112624.html
I considered the joke so fucking lame that it didn't work and playing totally into the hands of the anti-Obama whisperers. Colbert can pull off this kind of thing. The New Yorker is just too smug.
ReplyDeleteRaymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
ReplyDeleteRubbish, The New Yorker's been doing this and pulling it off for decades. Wildy overreacting to mundane and harmless satire by mainstream media of the mainstream media is just precisely the waste of energy and focus that the charades that are the equally fraudulent and racist McCain and Obama camps, and their multinational corporate patronage, want both left and right blogospheric critic types doing this very minute and through November 2012 while the candidates fail to address voters' basic needs and try to hide their crimes and sins. Don't forget that, especially after they both get re-elected and follow the splendid British example in Afghanistan while they power up your telly and toys with nukes, oil and 3rd world child labour before settling down to an arugala salad with a nice Chianti and your emails.
ReplyDeletePresumably we can expect many others who fell and fawned for the Manchurian Mr. Obama and who now realize it, on one level or another, to continue on a path of twisted logic as irrational as Mr. McCain's, whose thirty years in the United States Senate Armed Services committee are part of his superior credentials (no one has ever called it genius) along with his decade or so of military service.
The secret words are: stick to dead actresses and UFOs.
I don't like arugala salad and I suspect I don't like you.
ReplyDeletewell, if you think this cover is bad... I think the worst is yet to come.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in Hunter Thompson's "Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail," he relates a story from the '68 presidential campaign where Lyndon Johnson "told his manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent's lifelong habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows." The campaign manager protests that nobody will believe it. "I know," Johnson replied. "But let's make the sonofabitch deny it."
I think the same kind of dynamics are being applied here. The black power/gang thing and the Obama-Ossama name similarity will be perpetually echoed throughout this campaign with the purpose of spiking middle-America's fear. And everybody else's.
You probably won't hear it from McCain's camp directly - no, they will be too busy repeating the war hero mantra.
And while we're at it... But why the hell is a "war hero" (whatever the fuck that means) so ideal to be President??
It's almost like saying that a good gas station attendant would be a perfect CEO for Shell.
The hero myth plays a awful great role in people's subconscious during elections. Particularly, American elections. Everybody is waiting for the saviour.
Godamn it, even someone who calls himself an Anarchist has his secret hopes on Obama! Surely, I would prefer him instead of McCain... but, maybe it's like Bill Hicks said when he talked about people's hopes on Bill Clinton:
"I have this feeling that whoever is elected president, no matter what you promise on the campaign trail - blah, blah, blah - when you win, you go into this smoke-filled room with the twelve industrialist capitalist scum-fucks who got you in there. And you're in this smoky room, and this little film screen comes down ... and a big guy with a cigar goes, "Roll the film." And it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before ... that looks suspiciously like it's from the grassy knoll. And then the screen goes up and the lights come up, and they go to the new president, "Any questions?" "Er, just what my agenda is." "First we bomb Baghdad." "You got it ..."
And by the way,
ReplyDelete"is total collapse what's needed before change can come?"
YES.
History repeats itself. It just gets worst every-fucking-time.
MH
I guess I should remember in moments of doubt turn to Bill Hicks.
ReplyDeleteMark,
ReplyDeleteThanks. Great to be reminded of the Hicks bit. I'm thinking they've shown that film or some current equivalent (Paul Wellstone's plane or something) to Pelosi and most of the Democratic members of congress too.