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July 15, 2008
The July 21 cover of The New Yorker was drawn by Barry Blitt. It depicts Barack Obama as a Muslim U.S. president knocking knuckles in the Oval Office with his AK-47-toting, Afro-wearing, revolutionary wife, Michelle. Blitt completes the tableau with an American flag roasting in the fireplace and a framed portrait of Osama bin Laden looking down from the wall in the Oval Office. All that is missing is a vest bomb.
 The joke by The New Yorker's barbed drawings is that its satire is cataloging and sending up the most extreme and common of the anti-Obama smears launched by the Republicans. There the smears are in their full glory--the media's emerging, distorted portrait of Obama, exposed for all to see. The caption reads "The Politics of Fear."
What is missing is any suggestion that this is how the Republicans want the world to view Obama. The Republican connection is absent and so the The New Yorker bares is not picturing the antagonist whose opinions it is satirizing with this visual politics.
So we have satire that is subject to differing interpretations once it is taken out of the liberal context of the New Yorker and shown on Fox News for instance. The latter's viewers would read the image literally and as the truth.
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