The problem with the New Yorker cover is that it doesn't understand the "audience" in the internet age. Were this a funny little thrust in the pre-information era it would be funny and forgotten. But it's not. We will see this cartoon again and again in fall election. Not in some artsy-fartsy magazine, but plastered all-over the web and everywhere by the very people it thinks it satirizing, the radical right. And it will reinforce the negative images and stereotypes of Obama and Michelle With friends like the New Yorker, Obama needs no enemies etc.

If this were this the nineteen thirties and this an anti-Semitic jibe composed by Joseph Goebbels in the name of satire, no would be leaping to its defense. And while this "satire" is an universe remove from Nazi propaganda, people of similar mindset will put it to good (bad) use.

Because you can't control eventual distribution, you have to be careful with what you write or distribute even among friends. Maybe one analogy would be the sex videos that keep popping-up to embarrass some celebrities. Among consenting adults, maybe such videos make sense and would be private conduct. But it's not something to show the kiddies at a birthday party, nor, with some exceptions, were they intended for mass distribution on YouTube. Somehow they get there. Often by a disgruntled ex-companion.

As a witty salon (no pun, small “s”) joke, it's good for laughs (maybe) among the intelligentsia. But the editors of the New Yorker ought to have realized that however pristine their subscriber base, this was a nuclear explosion of "satire" that would reverberate around the web and the world. Copyright laws will be no protection in the political debate.

If it was satire. When Jonathan Swift wrote that the best solution to Irish over-population was to eat Irish babies, no one, not even the Scotch, took him seriously. But the New Yorker cover records and illustrates every canard about Obama and Michelle. Satire that has to be labeled satire isn't satire. It's stupid.

Did the New Yorker have the right to publish? Of course it did. But as a noted philosopher once noted: “Stupid is, as stupid does.”

johnklotz@blogspot.com

A few years ago, my granddaughter Sara was in an exhibition by her gymnastics class where they kept playing Jimmy Buffet’s song "Proud to be an American" and I really heard the words for the first time. There is a line that ran that if "they" took away everything I had and I was destroyed by life, I would still be "proud to be an American." I was repulsed by the thought because it was so counter to my families history. We have been resisting and fighting “them” for decades. To be an American was to fight like hell for what you wanted and held dear.

During the Depression, before I was born, my father helped a charter a machinist union local, when that was a courageous act. My oldest brother (by 16 years) was one of those who flew the Berlin Airlift. My first presidential vote was for JFK.

The concept that ":they" could take it all away from any one of us, and we would not fight for what was ours, is repugnant.

Yet, that's what the song proposed because the "they," whether the Buffet could understand it or not, who threaten to take it all away from us, is us: the power “greed is good” elite.

In fact, with the sub-prime crisis that not only threatens to take it all away from us, but through resulting financial illiquidity, threatens to bring down of the mightiest American corporation, and has, in fact, already engendered massive unemployment, they have taken it all away from most of us.

Yesterday, seeing Obama in Berlin, talking about the Airlift my late brother flew, and speaking with an eloquence we have not heard from a politician in 45 years, seeing that vast throng with waiving American flags, I was, well…

Proud to be an American.

P.S. I have a cousin buried in Normandy. If you curious about my family story and want to discover who actually coined the phrase "multi-tasking" see: http://www.Johnklotz.com/billy.htm