The New Yorker Writes

Got this email from the New Yorker today after sending a comment about their current issue's cover (Barack and Michelle Obama as a Muslim and a Black Panther). It really lifts my spirits to see intelligent people reasoning their way out of running images that are flagrantly distasteful. Satire of satire, it seems, does not good satire make.

Writes The New Yorker:

Thank you for writing. We appreciate your comments and, if you have a question, we’ll do our best to respond. However, owing to the volume of correspondence, we cannot reply to every e-mail individually.

About this week’s issue: Our cover, “The Politics of Fear,” combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are. The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall — all of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that's the spirit of this cover. In this same issue you will also see that there are two very serious articles on Barack Obama inside — Hendrik Hertzberg's Comment (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/07/21/080721taco_talk_hertzberg), and Ryan Lizza's 15,000-word reporting piece on the candidate's political education and rise in Chicago (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lizza).