…of New Yorker cover represented this week, in the words of local blogger Teddyvegas :
A few months ago (Dec. 5, 2005), The New Yorker had a cover [by Mark Ulrikson] showing a butch, cigar-smoking, beer-guzzling, hamburger-scarfing Dick Cheney reclining in a barcolounger while a wifey-looking, apron-sporting, feather duster-toting George W. Bush stands beside him looking lost and perplexed. While amusing and certainly in alignment with my politics (indeed I enjoy a good Bush bashing as much as the next left-leaning New Yorker reader), the cover struck me as an uncharacteristically cheap slam. Depicting the President (ouch..it still hurts to call him that) and his imperial vice as a dysfunctionally domestic top and bottom seemed a bit more Mad Magazine than Malcolm Gladwell. When I opened my mail box and looked at my new issue of the New Yorker last night, many of the same feelings returned. There on the cover was an image of Dick Cheney and George W. in jeans and cowboy hats engaged in a mock iconic Brokeback embrace. In addition, Cheney was blowing the smoke off his six shooter—an obvious and timely reference to his recent confusion of man and quail. I found the cartoon quite clever and quietly celebrated the flamboyant gesture of administration bashing, but I was struck, once again, by a sense of unease. It seems to me this kind of gratuitously emasculating parody is the last desperate resort of the political critic and it constitutes a flagrant departure from the magazine’s heritage of subtlety and sophistication. I do not turn to the New Yorker for broad burslesque or cheap political hack jobs. I turn to it as the one of the last bastions of intelligently informed, defiantly independent thought. I turn to it to see the hyper-articulate, passionately political Hendrick Hertzberg ripping W a new asshole with his pen. I turn to it to see W’s deceptions debunked and his incompetences exposed. I do not turn to it to see him in a skirt. Somehow, it seems to cheapen the institution. (I’m talking about the New Yorker, not the Presidency). Not to be grandiose, but in some way it brings to mind the most compelling argument against torture: That it hurts the practitioner as much as the victim.
OK. I’ve probably overstated the case. But I think you get the idea. I think there’s a longer analysis to be made of the way traditionally urbane journalistic institutions like the New York Times and the New Yorker that usually keep their editorializing very deadpan in tone have been seduced by the culture of comedic commentary (notably by the success of The Daily Show) into adopting a broader and more aggressively snarky voice. I think most journalists (like most everyone else) are frustrated comics and they just want to migrate to where the fun is. But in this instance, they do so at the cost of a certain unsettling inconsistency of tone.
Hope you don’t mind my reprinting your whole post, Teddyvegas; I like your style. As for the cover, it’s clever and timely, and I like that; it’s also skilfully done. (Here’s a larger image if you don’t have it right in front of you.) Still, depicting powerful men as women, cross-dressers, or gay-seeming to suggest their weakness or foolishness should really be going out of style by now. “What are you, girls?” my dad’s Army sergeant used to say—it’s an ancient slur. So, of course, is “gay.” But, uh…well, you know. Others would and will make the point that just representing cowboys or presidents or people with guns as gay is radical and paradigm-shifting, if done in the right spirit, and I say, true enough. But not everyone has the Proper Filters. Snobbery or bigotry; it’s a polar world we live in just by looking at stuff!
In more positive news (I like a nice balance), yay, a new Tad Friend piece! In my mind he’s joined the magazine’s modern greats, keepers and builders of the flame in their basic ballsiness (such a good gender-transcending term), patient sensitivity, dedication to form, and pure sparkle, including McGrath, Franklin, Frazier, Gourevitch, Orlean, Konigsberg, Boo, Antrim of course, Hertzberg, Lahr the invincible, and others I’ll remember later on and add to the list. Last year’s Pruzan and Wilsey pieces were a good start, to be followed by more, I should hope. I suspect Frere-Jones’ ultramodern prose will be crucial to the magazine’s future voice, the one we haven’t even heard sing loudly yet. I look forward to the interesting harmonies and aesthetically pleasing dissonance.
I also want to note that in the Gladwell debate with my well-read sister the other day, she said that Gladwell and Jim Surowiecki were the principal reasons some people read the magazine now, and I said that Surowiecki should get to do longer pieces as well as the Financial Page. I know Jim and his longer-form writing, and he’s very good. He’s good there, too, but confined; after he tells the week’s tale and gives his quick take, he gets the vaudeville hook. If Gladwell can go on and on about this and that, by God, so can Jim, and he’ll do it well. (Hey, that’s almost a chiasmus!)
