Column: Muslims, Cartoons And Satire (oh My!)

This story was written by Jon Gold, The Daily Iowan

It's another one of those sky-is-falling weeks, sad to say. The end times are clearly nigh, wherever that is. The president opened our coastline (well, not ours per se; you might remember that Iowa has very little coastline) to oil exploitation, because what the country really needs right now is a bunch of ugly derricks ruining the view and saving us almost nothing in gas prices. (Congress has displayed a heartening reticence to act on the president's latest dippy suggestion.) America's financial system is about one snide remark away from total disaster, thanks - as I understand it - to a couple of very irresponsible country folk named Freddie and Frannie.

But no, that's not the worst of it. Apparently, the cover of this week's New Yorker makes fun of Barack and Michelle Obama. Now there's something we can all pay attention to without disturbing our corporate overlords!

Full disclosure: I'm a New Yorker subscriber. I also listen to NPR, drink espresso drinks, and would be driving a Prius if I had the money, so if you can think of some liberal stereotypes I haven't fulfilled yet, please let me know. I have not yet gotten my copy of the offensive cover, however. (And whom do I talk to about that, anyway?) Said cover, as I'm sure you already know, depicts Sen. Barack and Michelle Obama as Muslim terrorists, in a funny, if heavy-handed satire of the staggeringly dumb rumors that the senator is some sort of secret Muslim.

There's nothing we in the media like more than inflating some nonsense issue into screeching prominence, because it helps us conceal the fact that we don't understand the more complicated ones and are frequently too lazy to figure them out. Front and center: The incredibly true story of Fannie and Freddie, those star-crossed, federally sponsored pseudo-corporations whose very natures are the subject of some debate. What's a "government-sponsored entity" when it's at home? Are we headed for another Great Depression? Why must taxpayers ante up every time some greedy half-wits in the financial sector cause a massive collapse? (It's not enough that they rob us; we have to pay for the privilege, it seems.) You see discussion of issues like this in maybe 10 percent of the nation's newsprint and almost none on its public airwaves. Sometimes it seems like the media attention paid to a given issue is inversely related to how important it actually is.

So let's leave aside the planned ruin of our coastlines and a possible impending descent into Hooverville and discuss the ins and outs of the terrorism cover. To me, the only particularly interesting thing about it is the fact that both campaigns have denounced it. You'd have thought that the Obama camp, at least, would have been clever enough to ignore it, for a couple of reasons: First, next to nobody reads the New Yorker, and second, don't you think that the people who do know satire when they see it? Some of these people actually profess to understand the cartoons, for God's sake! Now that takes a refined sense of irony, not to mention maybe a bong hit or two.

Seriously, I actually like the New Yorker cover, in part because I've always thought that humor is the best weapon against deceit and fear. These idiotic rumors fly around - believed by a sizable chunk of the population, no less - that Sen. Obama is some kind of clandestine Muslim, and they never seem to lose traction, no matter how facially ridiculous they are. So, like most good humor, the cover takes the concept to its logical, if absurd, extreme.

There are probably other reasons why the Muslim whispering campaign has had such success. (And by the way, let's not even get started on how crazy it makes me that being a Muslim is such an abhorrent thing to so many Americans.) I'd be willing to bet that there are more than a ew people in this country who will accept any rationale, however flimsy, to avoid admitting that they're not comfortable voting for a black man. In that sense, then, the New Yorker has actually done a service to the electorate by forcing some to examine their biases.

If more people stopped paying attention to the nonsense, we'd all be a lot better off.