Leonard Pitts Among Intellectual Elites That Say Satire is Tricky
MKFreeberg at House of Eratosthenes on Jul 18 2008 at 9:14 am | Filed under: Election 2008, Feature Article, Media Watch
His point is that when you say outlandish things with a straight face, which is the essence of satire, there’s always the danger that someone will think you aren’t kidding.
So I feel The New Yorker’s pain. The magazine is under fire for a cover illustration depicting Barack Obama in the Oval Office wearing a turban, bumping fists with his wife, Michelle, who wears an Afro and fatigues, and has an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. Osama bin Laden watches from a portrait on the wall. An American flag burns in the fireplace.
The Obama and McCain campaigns have pronounced the cover offensive. There have been calls for a boycott.
Me, I like the cover. It strikes me as an incisive comment on the fear mongering that has attended Mr. Obama’s run for the presidency. Still, I understand why it is incendiary: Some of us will take it seriously.
As absurd, as over the top, as utterly outlandish as the New Yorker image strikes the more sophisticated among us, there is a large fringe out there for whom it will represent nothing more or less than the sum of their fears.
Indeed, as I sat down to write these words, there beeped into my mailbox an e-mail with this subject line: “WOW, The New Yorker got it exactly right, for once.” Said without a trace of irony.
But increasingly, that’s who we are in this country: ignorant, irony-impaired and petrified. So maybe we should just cancel the campaign and ask that the last intelligent person turn off the lights when he or she leaves. And bring the last book with you. Nobody here will need it.
Okay, I get it. Add Leonard Pitts to the list of intellectual lightweights who can’t dredge up any semblance of respect for mindsets differing from theirs. The cartoon means some things to some people, other things to others; Mr. Pitts comes to find out about this divide and it comes as a bitter blow that his perspective is not unanimous. So out come the most rancid insults he can manage to slip through his layers of editors. We are all supposed to agree with Leonard Pitts, don’t you get it?
See, satire is just like any other medium of humor. To work, there has to be a connection between the source of the comedy, and the audience. The assault rifle, the flag in the fireplace, the Oval Office itself, these are all metaphorical — it may be difficult for some to admit, but Sen. Obama has not been sworn in yet — and so the point of the cartoon, which is to be deemed too outlandish to seriously entertain if it is to be successful satire, is that Sen. Obama’s loyalty to the republic should be questioned. Well, I’m afraid the source and the audience have not agreed that that is outlandish. The Senator does have a rather lengthy and rich history of America-bashing dickhead friends.
And this is where satire is often abused, in this age of The Colbert Report. Far too often, is is wielded as a bully stick, to intone that certain ideas are to be thought of as ridiculous, without anyone bothering to explain why. When the existence of the satire is the only incentive we have to regard something as silly, the satire isn’t exactly being given a lot of advantages in doing what it’s supposed to be doing.
And that sad truth of it is — this is exactly what the Obama campaign needs right now. It probably cannot survive without it. It needs a way to bullyingly lecture people that it’s ridiculous to “question his patriotism,” without an associated burden of explaining why, exactly, said questioning is supposed to be ridiculous.
The situation is a rather rich target of satire in its own right.
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