Silence Broken: Obama Satire Isn't Surprising

The New Yorker magazine's July 21, 2008 cover illustration features a militant, Afro-wearing, gun-toting Michelle Obama and her husband as a turban-sporting Islamic terrorist. Appropriately set in the Oval Office, a hanging portrait of Osama bin Laden looks on as the unpatriotic duo give each other the "terrorist fist jab" and the American flag burns in the fireplace. A New Yorker press release argued that Barry Blitt's illustration, titled "The Politics of Fear," "satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama's campaign."

Given the outrage that followed, it's clear that the New Yorker's intentions were lost in translation. In my cynicism, I wondered, Have we substituted mediocre cartoons for witty satire? I didn't expect a response to such questions but writer Ta-Nehisi Coates cleverly commented:

"I think the problem is that it's very hard to satirize the rumors around Michelle and Barack. Satire needs overstatement. But the cover doesn't actually overstate the beliefs of the scaremongers. Indeed it's the sort of image you'd expect to see at one of the nuttier [conservative] websites or publications, and so in that sense it doesn't work very well ...Satire doesn't just reflect it actually exaggerates to comical effect. Sadly, that picture exaggerates nothing -- that's exactly what a slice of Americans believe about Barack Obama."

As another commenter noted, "Satire requires a point taken to the absurd." However, given that the political landscape is rife with speculative narratives about Obama, where exactly do you go when the subjects have already been rendered absurd?

The notion that Michelle Obama is the reincarnation of a fanatical Black Panther bent on removing whiteys from America to establish a Black Republic or that Barack Obama is an infiltrator working for sundry terrorist organizations is already absurd enough. Barry Blitt neither moved beyond the dominant narrative nor challenged us to interrogate media "scare tactics"; instead, he moved along an existing representational route and employed sadly familiar images.

Reflecting this election cycle's absurdity, Blitt's illustration comes across not as satire, but as rumor rendered on artist's canvas. If anything, the illustration provides a cheat sheet or Cliffs Notes guide to the rumors. Lazy Obama-haters needn't scour the internet to collect fictions, the New Yorker cover provides such narratives in a convenient format. The cover doubles as a Where's Waldo? of sorts, except in this case we're searching for Obama distortions, and unlike the striped-tee Waldo, it doesn't take an especially keen eye to find illustrated fictions.

Some might argue that the New Yorker cover reveals the farce of the media's imagery in depicting a black power couple in a presidential race that has been transformed into a cross between circus spectacle and awkward middle school dance. But we're already bombarded with myriad negative representations from Fox News and allied publications. So what's new about what the New Yorker is offering?

While publications that hold some weight in the distribution of "truth" and collective memory bear some responsibility when it comes to representation, when have artists and journalists ever been responsible about the framing of Obama and his politics?

In the end, I wasn't surprised by the illustration; I was perplexed. I didn't have to do any intellectual heavy lifting to decode it. I didn't have to consult a second opinion. I actually Googled for another image assuming the illustration I was looking at was a hoax.

I stared blankly at the page and said, "Really? I could have drawn this, and so could my 14 year-old brother."

I have previously written that this election season is plagued by mediocrity paraded as excellence. I guess this is not only true for politicians, but for the satirists who follow them.

Kameelah Rasheed was raised on a harmonious, yet eclectic mix of Islam and old Gil Scott-Heron records. Currently, she teaches 12th grade Humanities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more of Kameelah's writing on her blog, KameelahWrites , see photography at her Flickr page.