Ponderings

You know you are beyond youthful indignation when you see the cover of the New Yorker and, ignoring the jeers and the cheers, all you can think is, ‘gosh, that Michelle is a great looking militant.’ I wish I could look that good with boots and an AK-47!

To be sure, I can see the offense. Whether the offense is given, taken, or both, though, is less clear to me these days. Frankly, I find a militant Michelle to be rather sexy and Obama in a turban isn’t bad either.

I admit to being more than a little confused about the flag thing. I know that the anti-Obama fringe (there are not many of them, but they are inordinately noisy!) likes to say that Obama somehow missed the patriotism boat. I can only conclude that is ageist. No one in our post-baby boomer pre-gen-x set can say the pledge of allegiance without some mental gymnastics, remembering our parents injunction that good Americans stand to say it with their hands over their hearts while our hippy public school teachers taught us to sit down and sing “Where Have all the Flowers Gone”. Obama is too old to buy into the post-911 blind patriotism and too young to remember the Civil Defence programs infamous “duck-and-cover” drills. I confess that I am a Pledge of Allegiance avoider, pledged to God and unwilling to pledge to nation-state, so admittedly I am not a good judge of patriotism. Personally, I found the obligatory flag pin debacle to be un-American.

As for the Obama-Osama thing, I confess to be being a bit cavalier. I spend a lot of my day with words and the deep layers of meaning to which they can allude. In a Jane Doe world, the words Obama and Osama are an irresistible invitation to word play. No good satirist can be forgiven for not having at least a wee bit of fun celebrating the leading presidential candidate with the arch nemesis of the outgoing one. The two O leaders could not be disparate. The O guy running for president has a lot in common with Oprah, a hard luck story turned around with grit and compassion who has spent his life nurturing hope. The O guy that we are taught to fear was born into luxury and has spent his life nurturing hate. Aside from the fact that their first names elude pronunciation by Midwestern middle class (read: white) folk, these two men have nothing in common. If our collective intelligence has degraded to a place where find an attempt to link these two to be anything but humorous, we have bigger problems than the election can address.

Barry Blitt, the artist who proffered the infamous piece, entitled his picture, “Politics of Fear”. Clearly, his intent was to satirize the ridiculousness of the fear baiting. Unfortunately, humor is dependent on our ability to parse fact and fiction and that ability is woefully missing in our current discourse. Not only have we devolved to electing presidents based on sound bytes, we have become so dull that we cannot be trusted with intelligent humor.

My faith says that humans are endowed with gifts, gifts that we are expected to use for the common good. One of these gifts is intelligence, another compassion, still another empathy. None of these is touted much in mainstream discourse, but together they would change our read on pieces like Barry Blitt’s. Although I want to believe that Blitt is right, that we as Americans can handle, enjoy and indeed learn from good satire, I fear that the naysayers might be right. Satire received at face value will fuel the very thing it aims to upend, and we can no longer trust Americans to engage in the depth that satire invites. Such a conclusion renders the piece offensive, but the greater offense is the loss of a thinking electorate.