The latest non-issue issue in the 2008 presidential campaign is blazing its way all over the 24-hour news channels and talk radio. It’s the highly irreverent satire on the New Yorker this week depicting Obama as a turban-wearing Muslim, fist-bumping his ’60s radical, rifle-totin’ wife, Michelle, while burning a U.S. flag.
It is genius.
The cover is coming under a mountain of criticism, a lot of it from the campaign itself, and most of those critics say it is irresponsible and only perpetuates the crazy rumor mill that has Obama as a Muslim, as having taken the oath of office on a Quran, as having attended an Islamic School, as having tried to change his middle name, and so forth and so forth. (All untrue, for those living under a rock for the past year. All of the Islam-related rumors regarding Obama have been thoroughly debunked time and time again.)
But the frustration is understandable. A colleague sent me a picture of a T-shirt he said was sold at a recent GOP event in Texas. “I know I shouldn’t take this shit personally,” he wrote me, “but DAMN… it pissed me off.”
Here it is:
The New Yorker cover is titled “The Politics of Fear” and it makes an important point about the postmodern United States, which has fallen so far into near-fascism that a significant majority of the public are very willing to believe anything scary about a public official. The cover is not going to convince any one who doesn’t bow to such fear that Obama is a Muslim; conversely, the folks who believe he is an Al-Qaeda mole won’t be unconvinced of it by the New Yorker, either. As a cartoon, the cover doesn’t quite work. As a devastating indictment of the level of unreasoned fear in our nation, it succeeds.
My hope is that the cover begins a serious discussion about the biggest problem our nation faces, and it ain’t oil prices or health care costs or whether to drill off the coast of Florida. It is fear. Because as our nation’s most physically challenged president told us in his first inaugural address, “… Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
