The Cover

This week’s New Yorker cover drew criticism, raised eyebrows and got a few laughs, but I think many people missed the entire point. 

Before we get there, I’m going to talk about the obvious. 

Satire

Kelly McBride, Ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, reminds us what satire is and that it does have a place in journalism… as long as the message fits the medium. If this cover is on the front page of The USA Today, the message would be shocking and a bit confusing. The same cover on Klantastic Magazine becomes a home run with its readership and would probably be a huge, HUGE outrage among The New Yorker’s readership. 

But since it’s The New Yorker, which has a track record of ballsy covers and whose readership is employed, educated and middle-aged, every thing’s ducky because they all GET IT.

Context

Outside of The New Yorker’s in-crowd, people started seeing this picture out of context. It showed up attached to RSS headlines like “Obama Denounces New Yorker Cover” and “Photo [sic] in New Yorker Upsets Obama” on Google and Yahoo!’s news sites. Pretty soon the bloggers got hold of it and passed it around like the baby-sitter’s panties at a Boy Scout camping trip. All this happened at amazing, amazing speed outside the safe confines of The New Yorker’s GET IT set.

Imagine your mother looking at your Twitter timeline today of all days. Hell, you got the joke and it’s your timeline so you set the context. A quick scan of Summize reveals that a lot of people didn’t get the joke. Everything was out of context and caused confusion and some lost followers. Some gained*.

The New Yorker though, they brought this upon themselves. I applaud them for taking the risk but I cringe KNOWING that The Cover will be silk screened on t-shirts and sold to ignorant Not Obama supporters.

The Point

The illustration criticizes the FUD out there about the Obamas, the spreaders of said FUD and the blind-faith believers of afore mentioned bullshit. That’s obvious. Easy. Nobody though, in my reading of the reaction and “analysis” so far, has given more than a brief mention of the knuckle (fist) bump. That’s curious. I’m no artist, but isn’t it the focal point of the picture.

See, the fist bump is pretty played out where I come from. It might be what brothers in Chicago do. Most likely, it’s what brothers in Chicago did because brothers everywhere did it. Back before Michael Jordan retired the first and second time. Back when $20s had little heads, we bumped the knuckles.

In other words, the knuckle bump is so played out that White** guys now do it in leu of the High-Five. I know this because they do it to me instead of the handshakes and pats on the back they give other White guys.*** So, when Michelle and Barack Obama bumped fists on stage the night he earned enough votes to secure the D. Party’s presidential nomination, they put the former High-Fivers and current knuckle bumpers on another long cycle of played out urban hand touching. I’m guessing it will last at least four more years. 

The next day I read about the fist bump, I heard about the knuckle bump, I watched it on endless, slow-motion replays on YouTube AND CNN. You’d a thunk Time Magazine wrote a brief history of the fist bump or something — What’s that?

They did? Wha… 

wow.

It wasn’t as if this group of well meaning, liberal, knuckle bumping White folk were convinced Obama should be the Prez based on the fist bump, it was the fist bump that convinced them. Obama won tons of cool points with That Crowd. That Crowd is very vocal about everything else except for the fist bump in the cartoon. That Crowd got punked in this picture. Sure, it could be interpreted as a gesture of solidarity to harm the US of A but truly biting satire would be if the artist also dinged That Crowd. 

Amiright? High-Five.

end

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  • * I’m on vacation so I don’t give a shit besides Twitter is my personal thang.
    
  • ** I capitalize the word ‘White’ when used to describe people unlike the Associated Press Style Guide. Many, many, many people use “White” to describe themselves therefor it is a proper noun. I also capitalize ‘black,’ ‘yellow,’ ‘red,’ and ‘brown’ when people identify their ethnicity in those terms. 
    
  • *** Not you guys and gals.