is there a thread about the new yorker obama cover?

loooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

baby bam ain't too happy about it, apparently.

i think it's an awesome cover.

nope haven't seen one yet

skot theres a big fun argument on the general election thread

STOP THE MADNESS

"skot theres a big fun argument on the general election thread"

ah, i should have checked there.

i think it's a brilliant way of underscoring a point and anyone offended by it really needs to think about that and who/what it is that they should truly be offended by.

xposts - that thread is gigantic, so not checking it for this one issue!

"big fun"

max, u dawg

lol thermo theres like 250 posts on it today, no one is talking about anything else

it's the most seismic New Yorker-related tempest since "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah"

max - i now see this. i think i was confusing it for the previous "candidates" thread.

michelle obama = smashable even in cartoon form

For real! That drawing of her is wicked awesomes.

a brilliant way of underscoring a point and anyone offended by it really needs to think about that and who/what it is that they should truly be offended by

Dunno about this. Yes, I like it; obviously the humor's in how absurd it is for people to hint at characterizing them this way; it's a funny "yeah right" joke. (And it can't be offensive on its own, since every detail is carefully plucked from other people's well-known smears and complaints.) But beyond being offended there is this slight worry where jokes repeated and addressed and bandied around often enough become "true," or the idea is free floating out there to be seized on or leaned on -- the seed gets driven deeper and deeper and just needs water, etc. And this is funny, but it keeps the idea bouncing around. (Which isn't offensive, just ... worrying.)

^^^ok, fair enough. I just think the worrying's not justified.

nabisco summarizes my gut reaction perfectly (ie otm).

my favorite part is the Afro

I am not yet awake enough to process images on anything other than an aesthetic level, if at all. WILL I EVER WAKE UP?

I'm going to convert Nabisco's "seed" to an ingrown hair and say that the NYer cover is the needle, a couple days' bloviating on the cable nets will be the squeezing-out-of-the-pus, and Stewart/Colbert will be the dab of antibiotic ointment that gets the "Obama's a muslim who got sworn in on the Quran" cleaned out of the body politic. I've already expressed my optimism on the election thread. (And yeah, before somebody else says it, sometimes you pop a zit and it gets infected worse, but I don't think it will here.)

I like the optimism, but it might be like saying "Natural Born Killers was a satire of America's addiction to violence..."

Stewart/Colbert as arbiters of the freakshow = under-45 fantasyland

NBK was a satire of news sensationalism and glorification of violence, not of America's addiction to violence.

my first reaction was the opposite of nabisco's. that the illustration - a blatant calling out of all the various smears he and his wife have endured - would serve to make any other such slanderous remarks and attacks seems absurd and nothing more than the cheap-shot mischaracterizations that they are.

xposts

gabbneb u mad

i do not understand your under-45 fantastyland speak, max

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t250/KillaKastro_2007/6fhaxc6.jpg

i don't even think i found it funny.
it's sad, really, that a man with a diverse background such as Obama's cannot be treated fairly due to, among other things, the xenophobic nature of the right (possibly even the population in general).

could be completely wrong about the reasons for it - but i find it sad nonetheless.

i do not understand your picture, max? is that person an american? is he a terrorist?

Why are they standing on a duck?

(I know, I know - joek)

Blitt missed his chance to do the lipstick-clad, beret-wearing John Kerry leading a boatful of troops down the Mekong River into enemy fire.

duck is official bird of ter'rist state.

LAME duck.

first reaction on one glance: awesome afro, michelle!

beyond being offended there is this slight worry where jokes repeated and addressed and bandied around often enough become "true," or the idea is free floating out there to be seized on or leaned on

but if the idea floating around stops being the original ridic stereotype, and becomes the idea that the stereotype is a joke, it could nullify whatever power it had to start with? i'm not pretending the original motives were anything more complex than "lol hicks believe this" but it's pretty obvious satire. i laughed.

Sure, Lex, it's clearly satire, and I find it funny as hell and kind of awesome -- this idea that they're gonna step into the White House and unmask all gotcha-style. (Though this probably has to do with the fact that Angela Davis images and Somali headwear are nonthreatening and somewhat likable to me, whereas for a lot of people those images are loaded with gut-level fear.) But the thing is that when it comes to image and branding over the course of a long campaign that most people don't follow very rigorously, it's more a matter of associations than messages, and I guarantee we'll hear voters this fall saying stuff like "I don't know about Obama, wasn't there all this stuff about his being anti-American?" -- i.e., it's not parsed out for meaning, it's just a free-floating "didn't I hear something about X," this trait that's continually associated with the candidate. Consider how often you read that someone is "dogged by allegations of X": it doesn't matter if the allegations are true or not, you just keep hearing that they're "dogged by" it, that it's an issue that's stuck to them and keeps getting discussed.

It's not the New Yorker's job to worry about that, obviously -- they've run one of their funnier and more striking and likable covers in a while -- but all I'm saying is that there are levels on which it just keeps the ball rolling.

But beyond being offended there is this slight worry where jokes repeated and addressed and bandied around often enough become "true," or the idea is free floating out there to be seized on or leaned on -- the seed gets driven deeper and deeper and just needs water, etc. And this is funny, but it keeps the idea bouncing around. (Which isn't offensive, just ... worrying.)

this is exactly why I complain when ethan reposts similar ridiculous screeds on ILX from spam emails or wherever with not attributions or sources. Maybe I think people are just more stupid than everyone else does, but I don't have enormous amounts of faith in people's ability to discern nuance.

so why even support Obama then if most people will miss the nuance in his speeches and writings?

I've enjoyed some of Blitt's covers in the past. The one of Bush and his cabinet in the flooding Oval Office after Katrina was great. There are some parallels between that cartoon and this one, in the way that both use the setting of the Oval Office to satirize their subjects. In the Katrina cartoon, the point of the satire was that Bush and his advisers were having a relaxed discussion in that most rarefied and secure of environs, the Oval Office, oblivious to the waters rising around them (symbolizing the rising tide of outrage at the government's inept handling of the crisis). In this new one, Obama is pictured already in the Oval Office, the locus of his great ambition, but incongruously, he is garbed in the negative images of him that continue to circulate and be accepted by surprising numbers of voters, despite his best efforts to dispel them. Here the contrast is between Obama's lofty ambitions and his seeming inability to control his image, a necessary step to realizing those ambitions. I guess maybe the reason I don't find this new one as funny as the previous one is because my political sympathies align differently in this case, but I guess they could both be read as sharp satire.

hmmm - any link for the katrina ones?

On the far right here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/business/media/25magscnd.html

i didn't find the previous one funny, because i don't find the bush administration funny. the political waters rising around the Bush admin don't signify much when we have a 4-year term of office and Bush's unpopularity hasn't prevented him from accomplishing most of the easier tasks on his short to-do list. joke's on the artist.

In this new one, Obama is pictured already in the Oval Office, the locus of his great ambition, but incongruously, he is garbed in the negative images of him that continue to circulate and be accepted by surprising numbers of voters, despite his best efforts to dispel them. Here the contrast is between Obama's lofty ambitions and his seeming inability to control his image, a necessary step to realizing those ambitions.

this is some sharp work nate. I would maybe ask: "a necessary step?" because I'm not sure that it's so much necessary as it is hoped-for; desirable; ideal.

I mean it's necessary to keep too many people from accepting that image. It's hard to know exactly how many is too many.

Ha ha, look. His wife wears the trousers.

Deep on so many levels, or maybe not.

His wife wears the trousers.

Even the people who believe all this shit don't really think that though, right?

so why even support Obama then if most people will miss the nuance in his speeches and writings?

To be honest with you I think most people will miss the nuance of anything, which is as it should be, and which is what makes it "nuance," and which is why we say things like "most people," because rarely do "most people" all agree to do the same thing at the same time --

But to be clear I'm not saying people aren't going to "get" this! I'm not saying this is going to be misinterpreted by rubes who don't understand things! This will be interpreted fine. All I'm saying is that the longer a conversation continues about these alleged traits of Obama's, and the more people are able to bandy about the details of it jokingly, the more it becomes an accepted aspect of his image/brand -- the more it becomes a topic that springs to mind in relation to the image/brand. Which is not the New Yorker's problem, but is kinda going to be Obama's, because people on the right will try their best to keep a vague swirl of this topic going around him, to have it stick to him; it doesn't need to be true or defensible, just recognizable, at which point it's there to be leaned on.

(This is reminding me of some man-on-the-street interview I saw about John Kerry, where the person was saying "first you hear he's got all these medals, then someone else says he didn't deserve them, now some people are defending him ..." -- that's not some dolt to be written off, that's a normal guy paying a medium amount of attention and coming away with the sense that who knows, something's off about this and I don't know who to trust. That's all it takes.)

http://yirmumah.com/webcomic/draw-anything-030.gif

"We're through the looking-glass here, people."

http://www.whatdvd.net/WhatDVD-Graphics/main/174.jpg

haha is that for real

I like how no matter who you vote for, the Constitution's going in the fireplace

What's she holding? Cookies? Cans of beer?

pills

the amrikan flag was in the fireplace on obama's, shakey!

this one's awesome

http://www.condenet.com/images_covers/cover_newyorker_190.jpg

i suppose the security barriers would have busied up the art

I chortled over the New Yorky hare-hailing-cab / tortoise-taking-subway one.

(Also the Saunders inside)

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/65590-Parody-flunks-out/

yeah only read 3 paragraphs of that before deciding that person was talking out of his ass

I don't love Harvard but I don't think you can call it the birthplace of political correctness, nor do I think negative reactions to a poorly-executed satirical cover can be held up as proof that satire is forbidden.

yeah it was weird, dude basically has my position on the NYer cover but then when he started defending that horrendous sounding article about the dead professor he lost me

That's pretty typical Boston; start out with a rational position, then link it to something egregiously brain-damaged, thus undermining all of your credibility.

actually I don't know if I mean Boston in general or Boston Phoenix in particular

i hope it's just the Boston Phoenix!!!

Oh, whew, that Phoenix link didn't work for me, and I thought you were talking about SAUNDERS talking out of his ass, which would be ... umm ... well here's the thing, it was funny:

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/09/22/080922sh_shouts_saunders?yrail

yeah that saunders thing was great

here's a better link but it's really not worth it

http://thephoenix.com/tools/Print/?id=65590

Yup, y'all are spot on about that one

wow sometimes i think "when will i be a real writer" and then i see people making a living on articles like that and then i think "wow do i really want to aspire to that"

saunders made me laugh out loud on the PATH train a couple times tho

wow sometimes i think "when will i be a real writer" and then i see people making a living on articles like that and then i think "wow do i really want to aspire to that"

i take it yr talking about the Boston Dip and not Saunders here, yes?

Please bring a moose to me, over by me, and down that moose will go, and, if I had a kid, I would take a picture of me showing my kid that dead moose, going, like, Uh, sweetie, no, he is not resting, he is dead, due to I shot him, and now I am going to eat him, and so are you, oh yes you are, which is responsible, as God put this moose here for us to shoot and eat and take a photo of, although I did not, at that time, know why God did, but in years to come, God’s will was revealed, which is: Hey, that is a cool photo for hunters about to vote to see, plus what an honor for that moose, to be on the Internet.

lol yeah id kill to be saunders, he basically writes 800-wd ILX posts and gets them published in the nyer

really good 800-wd ilx posts

seriously.

basically nabisco

nabisco is good on ilx but he is no george saunders. (sorry, nabisco.)

yah i just meant he tends to make really good 800-wd posts

Dude, I like Saunders to the extent that he is the only writer I have a T-SHIRT for; you do not have to apologize for noting to me that I am totally not him, writing-wise.

woah, what t-shirt? i didn't even realize he had t-shirts. i would probably wear one too

okay not this one

http://216.240.135.143/customtshirt/il_George_Saunders_FP.jpg

I chortled over the New Yorky hare-hailing-cab / tortoise-taking-subway one.

it's funny cos it's true

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/080924/stewart-colbert-cover/stewart-colber-cover_l.jpg

plus what an honor for that moose, to be on the internet.

The t-shirt is this one:

http://www.briefandfrightening.com/art/wigphoto.jpg

i thot the saunders thing was lame, but i usually think that about shouts and murmurs

you think annie hall is lame tho

tho if you read it strictly as political satire, sure, it's not that great or whatever. but his fictional voice in the piece is outstanding

If I go more than a few months without reading any Saunders (and it's probably been, like, six), I am pretty much guaranteed to crack up over any of his funny phrasings and/or rhetorical questions, due to I killed a man.

Okay Entertainment Weekly has redeemed that New Yorker cover.

you think annie hall is lame tho

i think, pace dave kehr, that it's not as smart as it thinks it is, and a little too much of its time (which would be more interesting if its time were).

it's not as smart as it thinks it is, and a little too much of its time (which would be more interesting if its time were).

― gabbneb, Thursday, September 25, 2008 3:21 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

reminds me of someone...

What, everyone on ILX?

nah ilx is a little too much of MY time amirite

needs more me

saunders made me laugh out loud on the PATH train a couple times tho

― Mohammed Butt (max), Wednesday, 24 September 2008 21:08 (Yesterday)

Whatchu doin in Jersey boy?

http://www.hellomynameisfabulous.com/images/i_live_here_fc_3vjr.jpg

reminds me of someone...

this may be because you were looking in the mirror

better close-ups

http://blogs.abcnews.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/25/ht_ew_stewart_colbert_080925_main.jpg