Political satire and the New Yorker's cover

That New Yorker cover:
Can you recognize satire when you see it?

RICK SOISSON

Everyone, or no one, seems to know what to make of the New Yorker cartoon cover depicting a right-wing fantasy of Barack and Michelle Obama as closet Muslim terrorists (July 21). In the July 20 Inquirer, for example, Michael Smerconish suggests that the “blowback” about the appropriateness of this cartoon has effectively obscured the long story inside the magazine itself, which isn’t very flattering to Sen. Obama. Smerconish is likely right there. But the article he refers to is somewhere north of 14,000 words, and who today has time for that when you can debate a visual piece that requires no reading whatsoever?

My point isn’t our much lamented refusal to read as a society; rather, it’s that our lack of reading, coupled with a lack of instruction about how to think about satire, has rendered the use of satire in politics and other arenas a nearly defunct art form, except as a distraction.

You say: “Wait a minute. I know how to interpret satirical cartoons and writing.” Do you indeed? I would submit that satire has always been, in interpretation, more a mirror of the interpreter than any sure idea about what the artist had in mind. As Emerson (not to mention many psychiatrists) put it, one’s opinion of others is a reflection on oneself.

Some people believe soap operas

Let us consider the statement from Obama’s national press secretary, Bill Burton, about the notorious cover: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.” Smerconish, for one, contends that Burton “doth protest too much.” In Smerconish’s view, “Clearly the cover was satire,” and “[n]obody who saw that cover would take it as literal truth….” He also refers to the cartoon as “so MAD-Magazine-over-the-top….” (The italics are mine.)

Really? How many years has it been since we first heard news reports about TV viewers who took soap opera characters to be real people?

Let’s examine the New Yorker’s explanation of this cover: It’s not a drawing of Obama and his wife; instead, it’s a drawing of a notion or set of notions about Obama and his wife. It is, therefore, a concrete representation of an abstract notion that can only be “correctly” interpreted by people who are aware that some of what has been written on the Internet and in e-mails about Obama is ripe nonsense.

When do psychiatrists learn this?

My question is: In which grade did you learn about this pretty sophisticated notion? Child psychiatrists learn that children’s drawings of monsters are actually drawings of something else in upper-class college courses and in medical school. I learned how to correctly weigh the possible interpretations of satire in graduate school.

In one of my graduate classes, for example, we were presented with two medieval woodcut cartoons circulated during the early Reformation. I don’t recall the Catholic cartoon, but the Protestant cartoon has stayed with me for decades: It was a picture of the devil defecating popes from beneath his tail. Now, how did viewers of this rude creation see it– as a straightforward depiction of popes who were the equivalent of feces, or as a New Yorker-like “lampoon” of those unfairly assailing the Catholic Church? I would suggest that you have no way of knowing. Since this pro-Reformation drawing was placed in a context– sitting next to an anti-Reformation drawing– it was interpreted by the textbook writer and my class as being a straightforward missile aimed at the papacy, but who knows how it was seen by its contemporary “art lovers”? Notice, however, that our interpretation of this cartoon was a polar opposite of the New Yorker’s interpretation of its own published work.

A classroom stunt that backfired

But surely, you argue, we have become more sophisticated over the past five centuries. Have we? Let me tell you a story about several of my recent college-level classes.

In these classes, which included my students’ first look at the Internet as a research source, I endeavored to suggest that they should question this source very seriously, but I did this by the following indirection: On topix.net, one of the many open-Internet sites, I posted an article that purported to be a business report about the Sunday afternoon decline of restaurant and bar business in Pittsburgh during a recent, disappointing Steelers season. I included my own name, indicated that the piece came from the Associated Press (a naked lie, I thought), and identified myself as an instructor at the school where I first intended to use the “report.”

Then I filled the story with the names of my childhood friends in Pittsburgh and included what I considered “over the top” interview quotations from (fictional) bar and restaurant owners. One of these allegedly came from a sandwich shop owner who was hoping to drum up business by promoting a Steagles sandwich to honor the World War II merger of the Steelers and Eagles. Once the story was posted, I simply printed it from my home computer and photocopied enough handouts for the class. It did look fairly “official.”

My students believed it

My original intention was to indicate that this obvious fiction— this light parody of human-interest business stories that we sometimes see— was total nonsense dressed up in an AP attribution and my status as a college-level teacher, but obviously full of fabricated quotations and phony statistics. At least I hoped that my students would tell me that.

The problem was that almost none of my students initially questioned the article’s credibility. Indeed, even when I asked leading questions, only a few questioned its veracity– and then, only in part.

To be sure, recent high school graduates (even those who’ve taken advanced placement courses) aren’t the most sophisticated people in the world. But if they’re not sufficiently sophisticated enough to get this, how is a person who dropped out of high school in the tenth grade to get it?

Satire is perhaps the only art form in which context plays such an important role, the only art form that requires consideration of something other than the piece of art itself. Would the New Yorker’s cartoon have been interpreted differently (by elitists and everyone else) if it had appeared on the cover of the National Review?

Next time you imagine that you “get” a sharp piece of satire, pause before patting yourself on the back. You may not actually know what the piece means.



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