Many folks were bothered by the recent New Yorker cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. Presumably he had been elected president (!), but he’s wearing Muslim garb (?). And his wife looks a lot like Angela Davis, replete with an AK-47 (??). Oh, and there’s a portrait of Osama bin Laden over the fireplace (???). And they’re burning an American flag (????).
Writers at Slate and Salon say liberals have lost their sense of humor. Really?
We can probably count on hip New Yorker readers to understand the cover as a satire of the liars and ignoramuses who, for their own reasons or lack of reasons, portray Barack and Michelle Obama as a Muslim and a sixties radical, respectively. Presumably such people know that Barack Obama is a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago and that Michelle Obama was an attorney at Sidley and Austin and later served as Associate Dean of Student Services at the U of C. That’s the sort of stuff you need to know for the cover to be “satire,” and even then, it takes a leap of imagination to know who in fact is the object of the jibe (the aforementioned liars and ignoramuses). Very nice, Obama has the vote of every thinking New Yorker reader. But as Adlai Stevenson famously said, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”
Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler wasn’t buying any of New Yorker editor David Remnick’s explanations of why he ran it:
This cartoon will sit on newsstands for a week—and it will be ceaselessly posted on cable. Maybe Remick really believes that this cartoon will “take a lot of distortions, lies, and misconceptions about the Obamas and … show them for what they are.” In reality, this cartoon will surely reinforce a lot of ideas in a lot of very dumb heads. It will keep ideas and images in play. It will help make our world even dumber.
This is the way disinformation spreads, though the Remicks rarely seem to know—or care. [In 2000 Atlantic editor Michael] Kelly deliberately floated an image of Gore as he wanted voters to see him [a glowering, unlikable man with a vampire tooth extending over his lip—ed.]; Remnick has floated a similar image, saying he thinks his brilliant work will (somehow) take distortions apart! Maybe he really believes this will happen. More likely, Remnick’s cover will keep deception alive. Sorry, this isn’t a rational process, though Remnick doesn’t seem to have heard.
Two articles that appeared in the Washington Post last year under the byline of Shankar Vedantam might have given Remnick pause before he printed such a cover. In “Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach,” Vedantam writes that “[t]he conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.” He cites experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who corroborated that, for a significant subset of people, the “negation tag” of a denial falls off with time.
“If someone says, ‘I did not harass her,’ I associate the idea of harassment with this person,” said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. “Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person’s name again.
“If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind,” she added. “Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11.”
Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that “Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did,” Mayo said it would be better to say something like, “Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks”—and not mention Hussein at all.
In “Bad Ideas Can Be Contagious,” Vedantam was writing specifically about market behavior, but some of the ideas he presented could find broader application:
[Yale economist Robert] Shiller argues that patterns of market behavior have a lot in common with infectious diseases. His book explores the idea of “contagion” in financial markets — except that instead of the flu, Shiller talks about the spread of dogmas from one place to another.
“I am talking of views that seem intuitively right,” Shiller said. “One hears other people saying things and confirming ideas you have. When things are commonly accepted, you file it in your brain as something that is true.”
It is “intuitively true” that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. The fact that it is objectively false will not be buttressed by the recent New Yorker cover. The fact that Obama has shown no affection toward Osama bin Laden, and has never said or done anything to suggest he would like to burn the American flag, seems to take this drawing into the farthest reaches of fantasy. Yet it will, in fact, reinforce these falsehoods in the minds of many. Granted, many who are “New Yorker nonreaders” already believe the lies and distortions about Barack Obama. But when there are unscrupulous people around whose job is to exploit this sort of confusion to put people like George W. Bush into office, why on earth would the New Yorker act as if that’s funny?
This is what I imagined when I saw the New Yorker cover, and that’s why I didn’t like it:
There’s another insidious angle to this: to satisfy some yahoos in this country, Obama is expected to repeatedly deny he is a Muslim (or assert he is a Christian)—as if there is something inherently wrong with being a Muslim. Juan Cole writes:
It is typical of the atmosphere in America today that the New Yorker cover caricaturing the Obamas is called offensive by the Obama campaign but virtually no one is talking about how demeaning it is of American Muslims. A little detail like that. Imagine if a US candidate had been depicted as an Orthodox Jewish settler with an Uzi machine gun in the West Bank, the hue and cry that would ensue.
The Nation has a graphic response that puts the Obamas back in normal clothes and Eustace Tilley (the rich New Yorker with a monacle) flat on his ass. “Round 2” says the sign held by Michelle.
