McCain “Satire”

23Jul08

So this Vanity Fair cover creating a McCain version of the infamous New Yorker cover is half way funny. However, upon seeing it I had the same reaction as Daniel Larison, which was “yeah but it not the same type of satire”. Here how he put it:

The thing that seems strange to me is that every time someone tries to do a McCain parody of the now-infamous New Yorker cover, they end up denying the intention and context of the satire that they are parodying. There is essentially nothing in this image that is not an exaggeration, or just a representation, of things that are true about John McCain: he is old, his wife once had a problem with prescription drugs, he is closely aligned with George Bush and he does support policies that violate the Constitution. As a caricature, it works quite well. As a parody of an image that is supposed to be mocking absurd claims about the Obamas, it completely fails, because the point of the New Yorker image is supposed to be that everything in it is ludicrous and false and obviously so and, more to the point, it is supposed to be exaggerating the absurd claims to their most extreme form.

Exactly. The only similarity between saying McCain wanting shred the Constitution and Barack Obama being a Muslim is that you might have to go online to read about either story. The major dissimilarity is that McCain does want to shred the Constitution, while Obama isn’t a Muslim. It’s like because you might read in the Conservative National Review that Michelle Obama hates America and the only source I’ve ever heard anyone discuss Cindy McCain’s past drug problems was a lefty online site, that somehow both stories are both equally true.

I think the assumption here is that anything not routinely covered by the major papers is basically a rumor. Sort of like reverse truthiness.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Cindy McCain, John McCain, Michelle Obama, New Yorker, Vanity Fair