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Obama, "The New Yorker" and the Politics of Fear
Of course there's a chance you haven't seen this week's New Yorker cover, but being the PBS-watching, public radio-listening, blog-reading sort you are, that chance is a slim one. The cover, which hit newsstands Monday, has been the topic of much commentary this week. It shows Barack Obama in the oval office wearing a turban and burning the American flag as Osama bin Laden looks on approvingly from a portrait on the wall. Michelle Obama is there too, decked out in Black Panther regalia, giving him a fist bump for good measure. Yikes.
It's satire, of course (this is the New Yorker, after all) but that does not mean the joke has gone over well. Obama's campaign condemned the cartoon immediately expressing concern that “most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."
Tasteless? Maybe. Offensive? Perhaps. Their greatest concern, though, is those who inspired the cartoon by spreading ridiculous rumors of Obama as an Al Qaeda-loving Muslim plant, seeking to subvert all the values we Americans hold so dear. They're the ones after all that won't read the article inside, won't see that the illustration is titled “The Politics of Fear,” won't care that the cartoon is actually making fun of them. For those conservative fear-mongers, it's just more fuel on the fire.
But there's a bright side, too. In this morning's Globe and Mail, Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change, explained why this might not be a bad thing after all. Obama, she says, can and should use this cartoon to further unite his country against those most unpatriotic of Americans who utilize the politics of fear.