To: David Remnick, Editor, New Yorker Magazine
Subject: Reader Feedback
Have you people completely lost your minds?
Or is Ann Coulter holding your editorial board hostage at gunpoint?
What in Allah's name prompted you to publish a politically obscene cartoon on your latest cover featuring Barack Obama and his wife in the ovoid office, she wearing terrorist garb, complete with AK-47, and he in a muslim "man-dress", doing a "terrorist fist-bump" while the American flag burns inthe fireplace? (And no, I'm NOT going to reproduce it here. Anyone who is morbidly curious enough to want to see it can find it easily enough by doing an internet search.)
In your magazine's news release introducing this issue you describe this cover "art" as "satiriz(ing) the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the presidential election to derail Barack Obama's campaign."
Begging your pardon sir, but by putting this utterly tasteless and offensive cartoon on news stands all over the country you are doing nothing but disseminating the same ignorant and perverse kind of stereotyping you would have us believe you decry. It is NOT clever. It is NOT cool. It is NOT smart. It is NOT funny. And it is NOT journalistically ethical.
This "cartoon" is so pathetically unsubtle it would make Thomas Nast blush, and so lacking in tastefulness it would make Harold Ross retch.
If you have ANY integrity (which, judging by this editorial decision, appears doubtful), you will pull every copy of this issue off newstands immediately, and hang your head in shame.
P.S. You can cancel my god-damned subscription.
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Comments: 24
Now where do I go for information?
Fortunately, you are mistaken. In any event your use of the present tense in your last sentence is erroneous--the verb you used should have been "was".
It was tasteless, no doubt about it. The New Yorker has had many other tasteless covers also. But no way am I giving up on Calvin Trillin, Roz Chast, Seymore Hersh, and countless others who provide for me a breath of fresh air. I'm not defending the cover but I'm not giving up on the one mag (other than the Atlantic Monthly) that I've subscribed to since I was in college. Countless other covers have satirized others, usually Republicans, there was never so much as an outcry but along comes this and OMG! I think it's over-reactive and don't be nasty toward me, I was in no way criticizing you or your article. Peace out, man!
Chill out, my friend. I won't be nasty with you. I've been a loyal New Yorker reader myself for decades, which is one reason I find this particular "lapse" so indefensible. This image ("a picture is worth ten thousand words") not only denigrates Senator and Mrs. Obama, it perpetuates reprehensible stereotypes about Muslims. All "satire" is not deserving of the same degree of tolerance. Some, as in this case, subverts its own intended purpose. How many thousands of non-New Yorker readers will glance at this image, never bothering to investigate what's between the covers, and believe that it validates the vile lies of the radical right-wing rumor mongers?
The 9/11 cover eerily dark with the ghost of the WTC, the marvelous Bronxatistan/Manhattistan map of the Near East, the Dick Cheney one after his duck hunting incident, the numerous Bush ones, the Wall street jitter ones, the list goes on and on.
The New Yorker ain't no PT Barnum. Then again I've always felt I'm the reincarnation of Pauline Kael but, sadly, knowing she died 12 years after my magnificent birth.
About the cartoon: I would have felt fine about it if The New Yorker actually had a piece inside discussing the satrical aspect of it...or any aspect of it, for that matter. But there was zero.