Posted on 07/17/2008 10:35:53 AM PDT by Incorrigible
By CONNIE SCHULTZ [Wife of US Senator Sherrod Brown, (D) Ohio]
Oh, if only.
If only I'd known the New Yorker would run a cover depicting Barack Obama as a winking, tunic-garbed Muslim and his wife, Michelle, as an Afro-wearing, AK-47-toting terrorist.
If only I'd known that Barry Blitt's cartoon would show the Obamas fist-bumping in an Oval Office where a portrait of Osama Bin Laden hung over the mantel.
If only I'd known that editor David Remnick thought most Americans would celebrate this caricature as harmless satire.
If I'd known any of this, I would have invited Remnick to leave Manhattan and tag along with me to a baby shower in small-town, working-class Ohio. Then he, too, could have heard one of the guests describe her toe-curling encounter with the wife of a longtime county judge.
The two women have been friends for years. When their conversation turned to the presidential race, though, all smiles vanished.
"I'm voting for Obama," she told the judge's wife, who responded with disgust: "Barack Obama is the anti-Christ."
"You don't really think that," the woman said.
Oh, yes, she did. Nodding her head, she added, "You can read all about it in the Bible. In Revelation."
Keep in mind, this is one-half of a prominent political couple in a county where they know virtually everybody. Imagine how many people she might run into on any given day.
Maybe if David Remnick had heard that story, he would have felt the same sucker punch of shock that ended my appetite. At the very least, he might have had second thoughts about running a magazine cover that telegraphs just about every ugly misperception out there about the Obamas.
To most regular readers of the New Yorker, the cover was simply a poke at ignorant and bigoted voters.
To many of those voters, though, the cover is proof that even the New Yorker "gets it." And unlike just about any other New Yorker cover in recent history, they will actually see this one because it has been plastered all over the Web, cable news shows and in many of their hometown newspapers.
I live in Ohio, but the New Yorker has been part of my life since I was 17, when I found a copy in our doctor's waiting room. I was a factory worker's kid who quickly fell in love with the magazine that proved, week after week, that there really are two Americas: New York, and everyone else.
I still subscribe to the New Yorker, still love it, and I think Remnick is a brilliant editor. But the magazine's willful disconnect from the rest of the country doesn't hold the same appeal for me lately.
It's not that I don't think the New Yorker had the right to publish the cartoon. I do. It's just that, for a lot of us who live somewhere else, it isn't funny.
Oh, it's a mirror all right, but it doesn't reflect the people it was meant to harpoon. Instead it reveals far more about those who still think it's clever to ridicule the roughly 10 percent of Americans who believe this nonsense. Those people are just "knuckle-draggers" and "morons," to quote two of the many big-city writers defending the New Yorker this week. They also insisted that people like me need to get a sense of humor.
"Come on, laugh," urged the Chicago Tribune editorial. "Lighten up, people," chastised Tom Meyer, editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. We're suffering from an "irony deficiency," wrote the Los Angeles Times' James Rainey.
Maybe they're right. Maybe this current political climate has wrung the humor right out of me. But I'm so tired of people who don't live or work where I do insisting there's always a punch line to the ugliness around us.
Nearly every day I get e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim. The anonymous mailed letters are increasing, too, and so are the phone calls. Last Thursday I failed to convince a woman caller that Obama really is a U.S. citizen, and, no, the immigration department has not ruled otherwise.
She called me a liar and hung up.
Hilarious, I'm sure.
If only I could laugh.
(Connie Schultz is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at cschultz(at)plaind.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
HA HA! Somebody call a WAAAAAAAAAAmbulance for poor Connie. A pretend New Yorker stuck in flyover country.
I find her baby shower conversation likely exaggerated or Connie simply doesn't understand someone speaking in jest.
Liberals causing headaches for other Libs!
Here's a real ironic cartoon for the New Yorker readers:
Connie Schultz: get over yourself, lady.
The problem with that cartoon is that is how the MSM see all right leaning folks. that cartoon is not meant to be funny it is meant to depict...
His willful, long term associations who are domestic terrorists, American haters, corrupt financeres, etc., his stances on the issues, his own words have established the frame work and nuance by which he will be judged.
...and his running away from his own past does not help him in the least:
I live somewhere else, and I thought it was hilarious.
“Bigots Aren’t Laughing, So We Shouldn’t Either”
In which a hip, sophisticated, enlightend, progressive wanna-be attempts to score a tally with her betters in the promised land of NYC, with a hit piece on the mythological great American white Christian male bigot.
Offended? And here all along I thought the outrage was over lampooning conservatives. Regardless, thank you “The New Yorker” (VRWC charter member since 7/2008)
If Obamalama loses, I might just get it framed.
This must be one of those "bitter" people who insists upon "clinging" to religion, according to BHO.
How predictable; that an Obamanist would go out of her way to characterize any opposition to her Savior in the most extreme manner that she can possibly dream up.
The Left has to distort reality in order to make their points whereas normal people only have to state the clear, obvious and entirely verifiable facts in order to mount a devastating argument.
Smugly she is.
"You don't really think that," the woman said.
Oh, yes, she did. Nodding her head, she added, "You can read all about it in the Bible. In Revelation."
Keep in mind, this is one-half of a prominent political couple in a county where they know virtually everybody. Imagine how many people she might run into on any given day.
The woman who wrote this is nothing but a damn hypocrite.
cschultz@plaind.com
But Connie dear....
The New Yorker has been deluged by readers’ complaints about the cartoon.
I guess the supposed “Sophisticatd Readers” of the New Yorker don’t get the joke either!
Ohio Democratic Senator-elect Sherrod Brown and his wife Connie Schultz
No such thing. Leftist, elitist moonbats and leftist, elitist, moonbat wannabes are the regular readers.
LOL! As a native New Yorker I can say that the other "America" this rube is talking about is about four neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods that are inhabited almost exclusively by rubes like herself, not native New Yorkers.
The kind of people who "can't take it anymore" living in perfectly serviceable communities in the South and Midwest because of "all the narrow-minded" people (like their parents, teachers, pastors, etc.) there who refuse to acknowledge "my special gifts and talents."
Beat me by ONE minute
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