Lulled Into a False Sense of Security

Pretty much sums it up . . .

“When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

—Sinclair Lewis

September 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

For f*ck's sake, people, lighten up!

So, a four-month blog lapse. During a time when I had lots of stuff I could’ve blogged about. Been a lot of changes on Planet LIFSOS lately. (Not to mention a lot of changes taking place on Planet Earth, too.)

Not necessarily good changes for either planet. But I’m working on getting positive.

Now I return to blogging to rant on a topic that’s really inconsequential and which will be forgotten in a few days—but one that has really wound me up, to borrow a phrase from our British cousins.

I’m talking about the current furor over The New Yorker cover depicting Michelle and Barak Obama as Muslim terrorists.

The one that’s making so many media pundits and bloghards run around wringing their hands in righteous indignation.

[Hey, do ya like the word “bloghard”? I coined it myself to describe obsessive political bloggers. It’s a fusion of “blog” and “blowhard,” in case you weren’t able to figure that out.]

Oh please, people.

Lighten up. The cover is funny.

It’s a blindingly obvious satire of the right-wing wackjob propaganda about Obama really being a Muslim baddie and his wife hating on whitey and the good ol’ USA. Duhhh.

Except apparently it’s not so blindingly obvious, because New Yorker editor David Remnick is making the media rounds, painstaking explaining the artist’s intent—in words of one syllable—to various talking heads.

Lighten up. The cover is ironic.

Of course we Americans are famous (or notorious) for our “irony deficiency,” but seriously, this whole situation is just too absurd.

But I’m disappointed at the reaction of Obama’s campaign. His handlers have sniffed that the cover is “tasteless and offensive.”

Tactical mistake, I think.

I mean, for all his charisma, Obama comes across as a bit stiff, a little lacking in the humor department—am I right?

Obama could’ve scored some points with the electorate if he’d just laughed it off and said something like, “What really disappoints me is that the cartoonist didn’t draw my best side.”

Let me throw a hypothetical at you:

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1960, and in the midst of the presidential campaign, The New Yorker publishes a cover showing Jackie and Jack Kennedy in Russian and Chinese communist uniforms, with a picture of Nikita Khrushchev in the background.

You know how JFK would have responded?

He’d have laughed. Heartily. And made a wisecrack along the lines of, “Er, ah, I see the cartoonist couldn’t fail to capture my wife’s, ah, beauty, even in that shapeless Mao Suit.”

[JFK’s father, though, would’ve been on the phone to J. Edgar Hoover demanding that the FBI dig up whatever dirt there was on the cartoonist. But that’s another story.]

It gets worse.

I read an excerpt from some idiot’s blog that likened the magazine cover to those cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that a Danish newspaper published back in 2005, leading to bombings and riots and killings in several falafel-eating countries.

The guy (I think it’s a guy) said that like those cartoons, The New Yorker cover was just “offensive” and “served no political purpose.”

“Served no political purpose”? Hmm? How about representin’ for a little thing we here in civilization call freedom of speech and the press?

Seriously, if we’re not willing to defend these values than let’s just give up. And by give up, I mean surrender.

Throw out the bacon. Send the women to get fitted for burqas. Change the name of Washington, D.C. to “New Mecca.”

But once again I digress.

What really, really browned my meat was that some pundits have said that The New Yorker cover was “irresponsible” because it might lead “unsophisticated” Americans to believe that the scurrilous rumors about Mr. & Ms.’s Obama’s radical Muslim sympathies are true.

This is about the most contemptible, patronizing thing I’ve ever heard.

What do these people think? That Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel from The Simpsons is going to go into the Kwikee-Mart to buy a bag of chaw, pass the magazine rack, and say “Dang, Brandine! I knew them stories about that Obama fella and his missus was true! See? Lookit the pitcher on this fancy-pants magazine from the Big City!”

Come on.

As a card-carrying effete Blue State intellectual snob, LIFSOS will cheerfully admit that there are tens, if not many scores of millions of mouth-breathing morons living under the Stars and Stripes (what else can explain the popularity of NASCAR?) but really, only the stupidest of the stupidest of the stupidest are going to believe that the cover is representational artwork.

And these people aren’t likely to vote anyway, I think.

For them, something always comes up on election day. Maybe it overlaps with the start of possum-hunting season. Or the transmission of their ’77 El Camino finally drops out on the way the polling place. Or they can’t get out of the Barcalounger in their trailer because there’s an all-day Blue Collar Comedy Tour marathon on cable.

[Hey! Looks like LIFSOS can also do the Red State-contemptin’ thing, too!]

Bottom line is that here we have a bunch of Americans who can’t take a joke worried that a bunch of Americans can’t get a joke.

Which is a sad commentary on the state of public discourse in our fair republic.

But to return to the top of the dial, this whole thing is the proverbial tempest-in-a-teapot and it’ll be forgotten . . . by the time anyone reads this, probably.

July 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)