Good satire is pointed, sharp and precise. Blitt's New Yorker cover is not. Who or what is being satirized should be crystal clear. In this case, Blitt's sloppiness has already made many readers wonder who the target was. If readers are wondering, it's not because they're stupid or unsophisticated, it's because Blitt left out crucial elements in the cartoon. Where are the pictorial references to radio talk shows? To overwrought computer bloggers? To the sputtering talking heads of television? Blitt blew it.

Now the nation is discussing whether Obama should have taken umbrage and if low-brow readers are being patronized and if this cartoon should have been suppressed by the editors of the New Yorker. Yes, yes and no. However, I wish the editors had sent Blitt back to his drawing board for a better version so that we could have a substantive discussion on media over-reaction re: the media. (God, that's an incestuous world.) Another interesting and useful topic we could have been considering is the inherent sexism found through out the media, which this presidential election has so unwittingly and so obviously exposed.

Instead we're left wandering, again, in First Amendment territory or analyzing if we're a nation of whiners. The question of freedom of the press has been posed and answered ad nauseum for the last two hundred years. As for the whining question, there is no real answer to be found and certainly, no real point in asking the question.

I got the joke. I bursted out laughing when I saw it. Anyone who has been closely following politics in the past few months should get the joke.

True, the cartoonist could have dumbed down the image, but then he would have been insulting his target audience.

Of course, anyone who doesn't get the joke can open the magazine and see the title of the cartoon and read the article it is attached to.

Those who didn't get it are ones who most likely ascribed to one or more of the myths being satrized. the firestorm out of this satire shows exactly how succesful it was. How many didn't get Gulliver's Travels or "A Modest Proposal"? Each much more obscure and noxiious in their time.

"Satire should be this, satire should be that, blah, blah..."

Yeah, that's it - blame the artist for any possible failing of the viewers.

and this non-issue is old news.

Good thing the New Yorker isn't a newspaper.

Go away troll.

Obama didn't get it. How does he fit into your paradigm?

As for the 'dumbed down' comment, are all the people asking questions and discussing this cover really dumber than you and the other lucky, elite members of Blitt's target audience? I would hope such wise and balanced people in his target audience would not be so easily insulted by the addition of more contextual images.

Hey, I'm glad that you bursted out laughing. Nice touch.

This cartoon is a communication between the artist and his public. At the very least he's got to bear half of the responsibility, just like any other artist, whether it's Basquiat or Calder, Scorcese or Waugh. Sure, many viewers don't want to work to understand a piece of art. That's regrettable. I assume that Blitt wanted to be accessible since his art is after all a cartoon and a magazine cover not a canvas hanging in MOMA. It's supposed to be understandable, and quickly at that.

What if at the height of Jim Crow, The New Atlantan (No such mag but you get the idea) had run a cover of blacks acting dumb while trying to figure out a ballot?

Would it be the fault of the artists that the white southern majority didn't get the satire? That their belief in the mythos was so solid that they did not understand or recognize the falsity of their belief?

I don't think so.

Same applies here.

Of course the Obama campaign got it. That's why they reacted as they did. They had a twofold reason for their reaction:

1. It gave them a platform to once more debunk these whispers straight on
2. Learning from Kerry's experience with SBVFT, modern campaigns have to take every criticism head on or at least actively deflect it. By expressing umbrage at the content, it... gave them a platform to once more debunk these whispers and to attack those doing the whispering indirectly.

Well, I would like to see how an artist showed the blacks 'acting dumb', with the emphasis being on 'acting'. That would be hard to depict. I'd like to hear your ideas on how an artist could show blacks as intelligent, yet obviously 'acting' dumb. Anyhow, that the the white Southern majority would not get it seems very likely; in fact they'd probably take the magazine cover for an affirmation of their beliefs. And I'd expect lots of other people, neither black nor members of the white southern majority, would miss the point as well.

Once again, I would blame the artist. It would be another case of an artist having a great concept yet not having the chops to fulfill it.

It is a Political Cartoon. It is obviously constitutionly protected speech, as is the complaints by media and bloggers. Welcome to Democracy in action.

No one is strapping on bomb vests or issuing Fatwahs over it. We are simply arguing about it. So, what's the problem?

I personally found the cartoon to be inflamatory and a bit over the top, but I did not lose my head over it. It was an unusual choice for a magazine cover, a decision that may have had an eye on self-promotion, rather then editorial merit. Of course, such a decision may back-fire, but everyone is talking about the New Yorker this week. If the cartoon had appeared inside the magazine, there probably would not have been this much controversy.

shelf life--particularly political satire. We read Swift because he is considered a "Great Author" but have you extensively read Thurber? Or even a more apt example--the Wizard of Oz? Never realized that that "child's book" is actually political commentary--because the issues of water rights, the silver standard, etc, are so far removed from us here that the message is lost for us in 2008.

I'm not a cartoonist or a cartoon archivist but here is a Jim Crow era cartoon that shows blacks acting as is expected of them and yet... More on point to what I was suggesting is this cartoon - which albeit a contemporary cartoon, does provide that type of satirical ridicule.

and yes, just like the GOPers we are seeing coming out of the woodwork justifying their mythologizing of Obama's "muslim" hood - so too the Southerners that would have seen it as an affirmation of their beliefs would look that much more ridiculous. Satire requires having some connectedness to the outside world to realize how ridiculous it comes across.