This morning, I caught the headlines on the Today show before I packed the kids up for camp. Brangelina spawn. Miley McSlutty. And the New Yorker cover.
When Matt Lauer described the furor and showed the image, I rolled my eyes. Big deal, I thought. Lauer seemed to think it was all about selling magazines. I thought, New Yorker humor, but pretty obvious and probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow when it showed up in the mail. I would just skim the contents for an Anthony Lane review and then plop it on the coffee table.
Most bloggers agreed with me.
Yeah, the ruckus hasn’t died down. CNN grilled David Remnick this afternoon. And he was all like "satire, people." And Wolf Blitzer was like, "no, hate mongery. People won’t get your humor." And then they found the dumbest people in America and showed them the cover and sure enough, they didn’t get it.
This nonsense is starting to tick me off.
Do we have to run all political humor past a focus groups of dumb people to make sure they get it?
Apt. 11d 
It took me a while to get that the picture was supposed to be the Obamas–she doesn’t look anything like that.
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What Atrios said:
“I certainly don’t think that the New Yorker cover is the biggest deal in the world, but the basic reason I find it problematic is that I look at it and I think, ‘Yes, well, that’s what the Right says about the Obamas pretty much daily.’ It channels what they say, but they forgot to add the funny. Hamas loves Obama, he hates the flag and America, he’s a Muslim, Michelle Obama is a black militant, etc. It isn’t funny to me because I read this crap every day all day. This crap isn’t just on obscure wingnut blogs, it’s everywhere. G. Gordon Liddy is thrilled.
If in 2000 they’d ran a cover which expressed in various ways things like ‘Al Gore claimed he invented the internet,’ ‘Al Gore claims he discovered Love Canal,’ ‘Al Gore grew up in a fancy DC hotel,’ ‘Al Gore is such pandering politician that he’s wearing 3 button suits and EARTH TONES’ (no I’ve never understood this one either), it wouldn’t have been a parody, it would have been channeling the media zeitgeist. The Obama thing? Not so different.”
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Here’s the thing that I find curious: What would a similar satire of McCain look like? Maybe an angry, testy old man, exhibiting profound ignorance (but absolute certainty) about everything but his POW experience (e.g. the economy, Iraq, etc). Maybe something about corporate lobbyists.
But that’s a pathetic image, rather than a fear-mongering one. Is there a SCARY image of McCain that irresponsible organizations have been promoting? I’m not in the US to see the overall picture of the MSM.
If there isn’t such a scary satire, then can we conclude something about the corresponding radical factions? I can’t decide.
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I keep hearing that McCain doesn’t know anything about the economy, and I realize he made some sort of self-deprecating remark to that effect, but I have yet to see anyone produce evidence of this ignorance. Obama’s statement that he can somehow force the auto industry to innovate and produce wonder cars seems a much more clear-cut example of economic ignorance to me. McCain’s spring speech on the housing meltdown was extremely insightful, although he since seems to have jumped on the bailout bandwagon with Obama. I would have liked to see a bit more “absolute certainty” there.
It’s been very interesting to me (never having had any affection for Mccain) to observe McCain’s metamorphosis from the-Republican-every-Democrat-loves-and-who-ought-to-be-president to crazy old coot.
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im not sure that you got the message: the zeitgeist has changed; satire isnt satire anymore. and seriously, who reads the nyer?
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Right, it’s impossible to give the auto industry incentives to innovate. Just like it’s impossible to give them incentives to produce SUVs. Oh, you mean we actually did that with government policy in the past decade?
I think Doug is basically right: if this is obvious satire, the problem is that there are a great many right-wing public voices that are speaking satire as if it were reality. Less an issue with the New Yorker cover than with those speakers, but at least some of the people who say, “This is obvious satire” are people who turn around and reproduce some of the memes in that cover with a straight face.
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Yeah, it’s just not funny. As they say, if you have to explain your joke, well then it’s not a joke is it?
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I don’t get what the big deal is. I very much doubt that the people who believe Sen. Obama is a closet Muslim are people who would eagerly vote for him if he were named John Smith and there were no rumors about his religion.
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TB,
Mindlessly cranking out SUVs is different than thinking up and producing revolutionary, hyper-efficient, alternative fuel cars. I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m not expecting the latter from Detroit any time soon (no matter how much money the government throws at it). If you do think that Detroit can and will produce innovative, highly fuel-efficient cars, I suggest picking up a couple dozen houses in Michigan right now. I hear they’re real cheap.
(We have one Ford Taurus and try to spend about $100 a month on gas. It’s a nice vanilla car, it wasn’t very expensive used, and that’s all that one expects of US auto makers.)
By the way, I think I remember hearing that the government effectively pushed US consumers out of bigger cars and into SUVs by raising the fuel efficiency standards on cars while leaving a loophole for SUVs, which got treated as trucks. I’m not a car person, so I don’t know if that’s true.
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And oh yeah, there was an item on German cable news during lunch time today. The sound was off, so I don’t know what they were saying, but there it was on N24.
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The light truck regulations were only one of several ways that the federal government effectively underwrote the production of SUVs. It strikes me as no more difficult to establish meaningful federal incentives for the production of highly fuel-efficient cars, let alone more innovative hybrids and so on. One jaw-droppingly simple method: make the federally-mandated fuel efficiency standards more demanding. It would not be at all difficult in technological terms to up those by 10 mpg: Detroit can do that right now, they just don’t want to.
As far as more demanding or daring innovations, General Motors is putting a huge amount of money into developing the Volt, and taking serious risks in doing so. Obviously they think it’s possible to accomplish that goal. It wouldn’t be hard to toss them a few tax-break carrots as a reward, and make the same offer to any US carmaker who puts similar investment into R&D for fuel efficiency, alternative fuel sources, and so on. Somehow you’ve gone from “use incentives to stimulate innovation” to “the government will FORCE them”. I’d check your talking-points translator if I were you.
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BTW, the current GM goal is to roll out the Volt on a very large scale in 2010. By my standards, that’s “soon”.
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TB,
OK–you’re right, that needs some revision. How about, “Obama is planning to force taxpayers to make good Detroit’s stupid promises to auto workers.”
“Obama proposed that the government pay for 10 percent of domestic automakers’ health-care costs for retired workers through 2017 if the firms plow half the savings into equipment for making more efficient cars and trucks. Obama’s campaign estimates that this would cost taxpayers roughly $7 billion over the next 10 years.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/07/AR2007050701771.html
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If Mad Magazine had run that cover, no one would have blinked an eye. When the New Yorker runs it, everyone has to run around saying, “but it’s satire!” Which means, of course, that even if it had been intended to be satire, it’s not working as satire.
Modern Americans don’t do satire. The PC wars have killed most speakers’ desire to sail too close to giving offense.
I’m more conservative than liberal, and I find this cover offensive. It doesn’t add to the national debate.
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Remnick’s Soliloquy
Damn! We put out a cover satirizing the right wing and the left wants our scalp. Hell, it’s not the first edgy cover we put out. Remember the shooting galley we did on the cops’ murder of Amadou Diallo? That sure got us hate mail, but it came from the people we wanted it to come from: white cops, right-wingers, racists, Republicans (or do I repeat myself)? But now we get it from the very people we’re trying to elevate: African-Americans. Should we explain it to them? They’re demanding my resignation. That really hurts. They don’t get it. It should have been so obvious and THEY DON’T GET IT. What is it with blacks? Sometimes I . . . but don’t go there, don’t go there. Stay progressive.
And constructive. There’s got to be some way of making up for this. How about some tit for tat: McCain in his living room, with swastikas or something in the background. But no, that would implicitly concede the point (the stupid point) that our cover wasn’t a satire on the right wing but a true representation of how the New Yorker pictures Obama. Or else the McCain cover would be seen as a satire of the way the left pictures Republicans. That wouldn’t do either.
Just stay calm. There’s plenty of time between now and the election. Some soft-ball interviews with Obama, some nasty pieces on McCain – and Republicans in general – and some cover drawings that don’t try to get too cute but just go after McCain’s age, his phony war credentials, his friendship with Bush, whatever we can get him on. That was a good one we saw in one of the blogs, the one with the cancer with Bush’s face on it growing out of his cheek. Well, maybe that was a bit much; we can do something more nuanced. We’re a very nuanced magazine. You have to be clever to appreciate us. Alas.
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I think the cover is visually very striking, but it fails as political commentary, mainly because it doesn’t strike for the heart. The cover doesn’t capture the interesting combination of venality and messianism that is the unique quality of the Obama phenomenon–there’s no Rezko writing convenient checks, no Wright preaching social justice and retiring comfortably to a monster suburban home, no $300,000 make-work hospital job, etc.
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tb/amy P:
Detroit is NOT going to be able to produce cars like the used to becasue of the economics of post war organized labor: http://www.carlist.com/autonews/2005/autonews_131.html
Here’s the killer line:” why pensions are good:General Motors oldest retiree will be 110 years old this year. The employee worked for GM for 32 years and has been collecting pension and health benefits for 47 years”
Great for retired employees and sucks for the company as a whole.
Where you will see innovation is in car firms that establish new plants, which will not be in Detroit due to organized labor, who will be able to deal without the operating costs that competition have to deal with.
Is the VOLT going to save GM? Who knows. If the price is at $45K and it will save no one.
The better idea is to get out of try to multi task large scale conflicts(which we have seen repeatedly is not feasible) by any and all means necessary.
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There is an element out there is awfully afraid of the Obamas. I don’t see it in the mainstream conservative blogs, but it’s lurking in the comment sections here and there. When faced with something ugly and false, you can refute the ideas in a straight forward manner or you can make fun of it. Probably best if both happens.
I didn’t find the NY cover a laugh riot, but it didn’t bother me either. It’s an openly liberal leaning journal. Its audience largely got it. The audience may be a bunch of elitist pricks who like snarky reviews by Anthony Lane, but even effete snobs need something to read, too.
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Kip said: “Is the VOLT going to save GM? Who knows. If the price is at $45K and it will save no one.”
That number made me feel a bit faint, so I headed over to Wikipedia for a price quote for the Volt. Here it is:
“The Volt concept vehicle was officially unveiled at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) on January 7, 2007 in Detroit, Michigan.[2] An updated version was unveiled at the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2007 in Shanghai, China. At the time of unveiling, the Volt project had been in existence for less than a year. The Volt was targeted to cost around US$30,000. As of April 2008, General Motors Vice Chairman of Global Product Development Robert Lutz was quoted as saying that the realistic unsubsidised price had risen to US$48,000,[11] that he reckoned that US$40,000 might be possible, without making any profit, and that only government tax incentives could take the price tag nearer to US$30,000. When asked directly about the price later, Lutz indicated that this was a misquote – and said “The answer is that we don’t know.”[12]”
I realize that the early adopters are the heroes who take the bullet for the masses and make innovation work, but holy cow, $48K is steep. In my world, $10K is a perfectly adequate car.
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GM’s current plan is to subsidize the Volt themselves at first, e.g., to sell at a loss, because the high cost is primarily projected to be a consequence of the battery designs they’re presently working through, which they anticipate (not unreasonably) will drop steadily if they can get the car into mass production successfully. This isn’t that different from other tech products–Sony is still selling PS3s at a loss per unit, with the plan to make that back primarily off of software development. The target sticker price is 17-19,000, from what I’ve read.
I like that Amy’s ideal visual image with “political commentary” on the Obamas would basically be a fold-out poster with every nickle-and-dime talk-radio point nicely illustrated. Kind of missed the point that Laura’s question was “is this good satire?”, because if it *is* satire, it’s not satirizing the Obamas. It’s satirizing right-wing nastiness about the Obamas.
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Yeah, well, regardless of the target, it’s not satire if it’s not funny!
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Yeah, well, regardless of the target, it’s not satire if it’s not funny!
Do you think that everyone finds Swift funny? Does that means he didn’t really do satire?
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“Do you think that everyone finds Swift funny? Does that means he didn’t really do satire?”
Good point–how many of us chuckle through “A Modest Proposal”?
Isn’t there an old theater line about how satire is what closes on Sunday (or something like that)?
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“The target sticker price is 17-19,000, from what I’ve read.”
I guess they’ll make it up on volume (that’s a joke, by the way, TB). All I can say is, I’m glad nobody I know works for the Big Three (or however many of them there are nowadays).
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By the way, Horsey already has a drooling-McCain-in-wheelchair-with-pill-popping-wife cartoon and Megan McArdle has a post up on it. (As a Washingtonian I loved Horsey back in the late 80s–he had a fantastic comic strip then called Boomer’s Song about the lives and loves of Seattle Baby Boomers. We used to buy the Seattle P.I. just to catch the latest installment.)
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Laura, in the age of the Internet, can you really still make that kind of connection between object, audience and context? How easy is it to separate that image from the context, and what happens when you do?
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Jackie – It is all too easy to separate context and audience from the object in the Internet age. And there is something tragic in that. I was watching Remnick squirm as Wolf Blitzer asked him ridiculous questions (a video clip is found in one of the links in my post) and I felt bad for him. What a pain in the ass it is to explain a joke. I hate political correctness. I hate caution. I hate that we all have to think twice, three times, four about how one group can twist meaning and intent so easily these days. And that problem is bigger than just this stupid New Yorker cover.
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If Sen. Obama does win, it will be a long four years if nobody can make jokes without getting scowled at.
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A long 8 years, MH.
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BJ, thanks for finally brining the funny to this thread.
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The first order of business will be to get rid of that ban on presidents serving more than two terms. If two terms of Obama is fantastic, four terms should be twice as fantastic.
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I don’t know who the next president will be, but I do know he will be a one-termer. The little gnome in my sock drawer told me. I let him use the internet while we are out of the house and he does me small favors. Usually, he just fixes shoes, but sometimes, when he really owes me, he lets me know small bits of the future.
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Loving this thread and time for a brain dump of thoughts:
tim=ps3 car. The PS3 itself is a portal for you to buy games that require teh sony software developer kit and royalties to be paid. Sony can sell movies via the download component and allow users to make micro transactions. And less not forget blu ray dvds, and all of the hipsters clammoring to watch movies that they have but in a blu ray version. You still can’t get a blu ray for your pc without shelling out some serious cash and the same thing goes for the discs as well. They are priced too high and broadband is going to kick physical media in the butt. Look at e3 adn the xbox: netflix on your xbox means no need to go to blockbuster, target or anywhere else and soon you’ll be able to get videos in HD. You’re buying a Volt so you never have to drag yourself to buy gas.
GM is expecting a quantum leap in personal buying habits that they are not going to get. Even at $10 a gallon, the volt will not be the key even at 30K or dare a 20K car. Why not you may ask? Becasue of teh buying habits of the american consumer. Scion is the perfect example of how they need to run the campaign and to plan prior to releasing this vehicle. GM needs to micro chunk and throttle the release of this to make sure they have the corret model and like the release of the xbox/ps3/cabagge patch kids, demand in excess of supply. They are not in a position to do that now rather they have all hands on deck trying to fight as many fires as they can.
Breaking out the CEO hat again, their current debt to equity ratio is not something that puts them in a tactical position for anything other than a home run aka making a profit from day 1. Period. The government is going to avoid at very large costs of bailing them out. Subsidies are a short term solution and with Ford’s new hybrids and VW’s diesels coming before or at teh same time, subsidies will still not be enough. Licensing of battery technology such as what is found in the Tesla is going to make money.
Additionally, they are going for a market that already buys small cars and spends less on fuel.They should have come out with a light truck, an f-150 killer instead of trying to kill the Prius. Too many eggs in one basic is a risk that I would not want to have to take. My prediction is that without immeidate over subscription to the VOLT, GM will be dead before the first model year of the Volt is done. It’s worth too much broken up.
Amy:
The government can only try and force and usually its well after the curve. Innovation is forced by market conditions, especially when it comes to emerging tech. Like Tim said, the govenment can force car companies to increase their mileage by changing the lighttruck categorization to be across the board for cars. Additionally, they could require increases to set mileage levels for all combustion engines so your lawn mower can actually work well. I’d love to see what the stats were for light trucks and the amount of gas spent because a pickup is likely driving a lot more going from job site to job site than my car for sure.
Laura: we need to have a post on the future of America and if we are gettign ourselves into a pre ww2 Japan reliance on oil. My guess is that things are probably close to paralelling that enviornment.
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I guess my point about the Volt is simply that Amy does not believe that American automobile manufacturers can innovate–and yet here’s one trying hard to do so. It’s not a big step from there to offering them the same kinds of incentives and rewards for that attempt that we’ve been generously serving up for building SUVs the size of the Death Star–and that’s a far cry from the Socialist Overleader commanding that there shall be innovation tomorrow along with ponies and apple pie.
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kip – When I find a good article to bounce off , I’ll post on this topic. It will have to be more politics and policy than car technology, because I’m way too stupid about that stuff.
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TB,
That’s right. I don’t think GM can pull it off. For one thing, I was just reading that as of June new car sales in the US are down to the lowest level in a decade, and one of the big US auto guys is predicting a “bathtub-shaped” rather than V-shaped recovery. I expect 2010 will not be a good year for GM, even if the Volt is a raging success.
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