Oh. My. Goodness.
Jul. 14th, 2008 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meirwen_1988Sooooo
We, in fact, did go to see Wall-E yesterday afternoon. The Boy slept through the trailers (snores and all), but woke up for the movie. Very happy we went. Came out of the theatre into the tail-end of a massive rain storm.
Ran a couple of errands. As we were coming home on the very wet roads, we were on 19 (which for the uninitiated, intersects with our road). I saw flashing red lights on the road by our house. Make that RIGHT-IN-FRONT-OF-OUR-HOUSE! The FIRE TRUCK kind of lights. Then I saw said lights moving away. Sigh of great relief.
As we were coming up 18 (the road our house is on) I saw one of our near neighbors walking up his driveway with a chainsaw in this hands. And then I saw our yard. OMG!
There is a maple tree right by the corner of our house (for those here this weekend, the corner The Boy had hoped "to save" that ended up as demolished as the rest of that half of the porch). Well, there was a maple tree. It is now half a maple tree-split vertically. It fell. Across our yard, across the road, and onto the cornfield on the other side (yup, it was that tall). The neighbor (who has a wood stove) and the fire people cut up the part in the road. He took some. We went back, told him he could have the bits in the yard as well (yuh. bits. 20 inches in diameter and about 20 feet long). It's a miracle it happened Sunday, not Saturday.
If you haven't seen the latest cover of The New Yorker, just Google it. You will.
I will spare you a description.
Look, I get the fact that it is a parody of the moral caricature smear campaign about Obama and his wife that is being spread on the web by the lunatic fringe of the extreme radical right. But only the smug, self-absorbed staff of that magazine would be tone deaf to the fact that not only their readership will see that cover. Thousands of people will glance at it as it sits on newstand shelves. And draw a completely wrong conclusion.
Because satire requires context. And insight. And thought. And that doesn't happen as your eyes pass over the cover of a magazine you don't usually read. All you have is the image. And this one is a doozey.
I've never had much use for The New Yorker. Despite the wonderful cartoons, the exquisite Calvin Trillin, and the unfailingly elegant prose, I could never get past the fact that it was full of the self-congratulating moral liberalism that often attaches to the intellectually and economically privileged. It's a kind of liberalism I despise--the kind that rarely survives contact with bear markets and actually being called on to make material sacrifices in order to achieve social goals. Some of them are hypocrites, some of them are ignorant as only the sheltered can be. A very small percentage (of both the readers and the writers) are sincere, genuine social liberals who also value the level of prose that in American media is only found in a few magazines, and The New Yorker is one. But I don't find that small percentage worth putting up with the smug, blinkered, intellectual snobbism; with the self-absorbed hand-wringing; with the flat-out moral elitism of that publication.
So now the press will have a field day. People who never would have seen it, will. Any valuable point the cover might have made [in some universe I'm unaware of] will be lost in the self-righteous indignation of any number of "interest groups." The bloggers will diatribe about it (yes, the irony is not lost on me). The reality of American politics will mean the Obamas will have to decry it, thus bringing even more attention to it and the vicious attack it was intended to parody. Which, as any denial does, gives it credence thanks to the law of unintended consequences.
It bears repeating:
The editors of The New Yorker are morons.
We, in fact, did go to see Wall-E yesterday afternoon. The Boy slept through the trailers (snores and all), but woke up for the movie. Very happy we went. Came out of the theatre into the tail-end of a massive rain storm.
Ran a couple of errands. As we were coming home on the very wet roads, we were on 19 (which for the uninitiated, intersects with our road). I saw flashing red lights on the road by our house. Make that RIGHT-IN-FRONT-OF-OUR-HOUSE! The FIRE TRUCK kind of lights. Then I saw said lights moving away. Sigh of great relief.
As we were coming up 18 (the road our house is on) I saw one of our near neighbors walking up his driveway with a chainsaw in this hands. And then I saw our yard. OMG!
There is a maple tree right by the corner of our house (for those here this weekend, the corner The Boy had hoped "to save" that ended up as demolished as the rest of that half of the porch). Well, there was a maple tree. It is now half a maple tree-split vertically. It fell. Across our yard, across the road, and onto the cornfield on the other side (yup, it was that tall). The neighbor (who has a wood stove) and the fire people cut up the part in the road. He took some. We went back, told him he could have the bits in the yard as well (yuh. bits. 20 inches in diameter and about 20 feet long). It's a miracle it happened Sunday, not Saturday.
If you haven't seen the latest cover of The New Yorker, just Google it. You will.
I will spare you a description.
Look, I get the fact that it is a parody of the moral caricature smear campaign about Obama and his wife that is being spread on the web by the lunatic fringe of the extreme radical right. But only the smug, self-absorbed staff of that magazine would be tone deaf to the fact that not only their readership will see that cover. Thousands of people will glance at it as it sits on newstand shelves. And draw a completely wrong conclusion.
Because satire requires context. And insight. And thought. And that doesn't happen as your eyes pass over the cover of a magazine you don't usually read. All you have is the image. And this one is a doozey.
I've never had much use for The New Yorker. Despite the wonderful cartoons, the exquisite Calvin Trillin, and the unfailingly elegant prose, I could never get past the fact that it was full of the self-congratulating moral liberalism that often attaches to the intellectually and economically privileged. It's a kind of liberalism I despise--the kind that rarely survives contact with bear markets and actually being called on to make material sacrifices in order to achieve social goals. Some of them are hypocrites, some of them are ignorant as only the sheltered can be. A very small percentage (of both the readers and the writers) are sincere, genuine social liberals who also value the level of prose that in American media is only found in a few magazines, and The New Yorker is one. But I don't find that small percentage worth putting up with the smug, blinkered, intellectual snobbism; with the self-absorbed hand-wringing; with the flat-out moral elitism of that publication.
So now the press will have a field day. People who never would have seen it, will. Any valuable point the cover might have made [in some universe I'm unaware of] will be lost in the self-righteous indignation of any number of "interest groups." The bloggers will diatribe about it (yes, the irony is not lost on me). The reality of American politics will mean the Obamas will have to decry it, thus bringing even more attention to it and the vicious attack it was intended to parody. Which, as any denial does, gives it credence thanks to the law of unintended consequences.
It bears repeating:
The editors of The New Yorker are morons.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 07:19 pm (UTC)/sigh.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 07:39 pm (UTC)Maples, like satire, require context
Date: 2008-07-14 08:14 pm (UTC)Glad to hear everyone is safe.
Moo.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 08:20 pm (UTC)"It's a kind of liberalism I despise"
Date: 2008-07-15 12:00 am (UTC)I agree with you 100%. Actually being IN NYC exposes me to many many people with similar attitudes, and the smug, snottiness has made me absolutely loathe to ever describe myself as "liberal," no matter how open my mind might be (and generally is) on any particular issue. It's also the type that tends to lend itself to the "us vs. them" mentality, and I despise that too.
I admit-- I chortled a bit at the cover ONLY because I consider the New Yorker to be so highbrow that they're out of touch with most of reality. "Oh boy, that's really going to open a sh*tstorm," was my initial reaction, along with annoyance that they'd be so dismissive of half the country's demographic. Then again, politics is the currently accepted prejudice, which is a large reason of why I stay independent.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 01:46 am (UTC)Of course, the problem here is that the people who dream up this stuff honestly believe that if you don't get exactly what they mean by it, on sight, that you're too stupid and are probably from a Red State anyway. And who cares about people from Red States? THAT is a bit of liberal media f*ck up that is going to come back to bite them someday.
Who was it that said that Democracy lets people have whatever they want and exactly what they deserve?
no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 04:43 pm (UTC)There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be less than 100% enthusiastic about Obama even if you're a Democrat (and I DO intend to vote for him), like his support of the terrible FISA bill, his intention to continue Bush's Faith-based initiative (didn't Obama read any of the stories by the guy who was bamboozled into running the program and then quit when he discovered it was a sham?), his support of the Supreme Court's smackdown of the DC gun control law and so on. Why add fodder to the smear machine, even with tongue in cheek? I think the New Yorker will find that they're biting that very superior tongue off this week.