Boy, Have I Got Some Satire For You

So, the New Yorker got in shit for doing a not-so-subtle satire of Obama all dressed as a terrorist on the weekend.

Jonathan Swift has had a chuckle, I'm sure. Me, I don't have too much of a problem with the cover because I get it, but I certainly get how some yokel somewhere's gonna go, "See? Toldja. Never trusted that 'coon."

I mean, really. You know that's going to happen.

But satire's never been swallowed very easily. Hence why we still know about that 30-page (give or take) essay, A Modest Proposal some 400 years after the fact. It's why it's still funny when referred to in the context of, say, Sealab 2021 and joked like "Mm, baby back ribs!"

It is always supposed to make use feel uncomfortable. It's always supposed to make us question our judgment and our choices. That's what satire is. It's not about respecting boundaries and bending over for convention.

The campaign may condemn Remnick and the New Yorker for its take on "the Politics of Fear", but I'm secretly waging a bet that the Obama clan is squirrelling a copy away for chuckles some decade down the line.

The cover's a horrible offense, yet the Republican party chanting all these lies and rolling them out one after another isn't similarly disgusting? I mean, are we not missing the point here? ALL of those things have been said about the Obamas. ALL of them.

Maybe Jonathan Swift isn't so amused after all. 400 years later and we still don't get the point of satire.