Let's embrace satire, not boycott it

With a short piece in this week's Phoenix, I revisit the topic of the controversial New Yorker cover, satire, and lack of tolerance for the aforementioned.

Let’s face reality: for all the energy he has injected into the political process, Obama doesn’t walk on water. The New Yorker story accompanying last week’s cover documented some of the self-interested maneuvering he made while making his political rise in Chicago.

Yet some Obama supporters have been among the most vociferous voices reacting to the cover depicting Michelle Obama as a black-power activist and the candidate himself as a Muslim, with a picture of bin Laden on the wall and a burning American flag in the fireplace.

Local labor activist Pat Crowley, for example, on Facebook and on the Rhode Island’s Future blog (rifuture.org) called for a boycott of the New Yorker.

Are you kidding me? Have our sensibilities become so tender, so rigid, and so politically correct that it’s out of bounds to poke fun at a liberal favorite?

As I noted, satire is a tricky thing.

To two different people, the same piece can alternately be amusing or offensive — a situation reflected by the conflicting reactions of some media pundits to the Obama cover.

Yet it in our current national climate of hyper-partisanship, people are too often unwilling to disagree without being disagreeable. An analog to that is intolerance for satire that targets something other than one’s own favorite villains.

Philip Kennicott, a cultural critic at the Washington Post, nailed this point during an online chat: “As a working journalist, can I just suggest the possibility that we not all cancel our subscriptions every time something offends us? I know it’s tempting. But here’s an analogy: I live in a neighborhood with about two really good restaurants, at which I don’t always have a really good meal. If everyone refused to return based on one overcooked plate of tuna, I’d live in a neighborhood with no good restaurants at all.”

Since I took a swipe at Senor Crowley, I offered him a chance to respond. Here's what he wrote:

The idea that The New Yorker magazine cover was satire seems to me, at best, an after thought. A defense, as it were, when they got caught exceeding not just good taste, but reality.  Just because the New Yorker is a so-called “liberal” magazine doesn’t excuse its presentation of Mr. and Mrs.. Obama.  When Don Imus called the African-American players on the Rutgers Women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s”  there was outrage on the left for such racially and sexually explicit comments from a person with a major national platform.  We should change the rules because The New Yorker publishes Seymour Hersh?

Calling the reaction to The New Yorker cover political correctness dismisses with  two words centuries of outrageous portrayals of black people and other powerless groups by rich elites, both left and right. Just because the New Yorker thinks Bush sucks too doesn’t mean they get a free pass.

I'll say it again: Pat, are you kidding me? Equating the New Yorker cover with Imus calling African-Americans "nappy headed ho's"?