Obligatory New Yorker post

Feels like it’s already old news, with the backlash to the backlash going full strength, but here’s my two cents’ worth anyhow.

The unspoken heart of the debate is that lots of people are simply too stupid to read cartoons. Specifically, New Yorker cartoons. Which are, let’s face it, often kind of hard to figure out: Seinfeld managed a whole episode on this. You need to do some work on them. You often need a not inconsiderable amount of social capital to figure out what they’re alluding to. This is part of their appeal. At least for me. I kind of like patting myself on the back when I finally get the joke, and if I were completely honest, I’d have to say that I also enjoy the vague feeling of superiority I get knowing that some folks just wouldn’t get it, if they were of a mind to read the damned thing (which many of them are not).

This is relatively mild snobbery, all things considered, made even milder by the sorts of subjects that New Yorker cartoons often address: trophy wives, jokes made at the expense of cultural stereotypes about cowboys and science fiction movies, etc. But this year, attitudes toward the often silly controversies of Presidential-year politics, which tend to be standard fair for satirists, have changed because of the perceived stakes. Don’t you understand? The response to accusations of humourlessness seems to be, There are whole wide swathes of idiocy growing out in the Heartland right now! They don’t believe in evolution! They elected a cretin to fill the position of most powerful human being on the planet! Then they re-elected him!! We just can’t trust them to handle this sort of humor responsibly! Or, as a friend of mine put it to me yesterday on the subject: “What is some farmer in Iowa going to make of this?”

So, a couple of things. First, as the son of a farmer, I am pretty certain that not many of them are going to be looking at the covers of The New Yorker magazine. Second, while I can attest, from personal experience, that farmers believe in lots of stupid things (university professors too, for that matter, which is a topic for another day), it’s not quite clear to me what the mechanism of persuasion is supposed to be here. It’s one thing to believe that Barack Obama is really a Muslim, and was just going to that Christian church in Chicago for 20 years as a kind of front. But if you do believe that, it’s probably because a relative that you trust, or a blogger whose views you like, or an email from a friend, told you so. Not because someone sketched a caricature of him. We all share the same media culture, and we all use the same sorts of modality cues. Like for example: photograph—documentary account; cartoon—fictional account. Nobody, not even farmers, takes a cartoon as veridical evidence of anything. They might not understand it, but they’re not going to be convinced by it one way or another.

The thing is, at this point, I think the level of suspicion on the part of educated and liberal groups in this country—not even of the fundamental decency of their opponents, but of their basic intellectual competence—is now so strong that they seem to be able to imagine that ordinary rules of epistemological judgment no longer apply. And while I often fume about the elitism of the chattering classes, in this case I am a little more sympathetic: not to the particulars, but to the mistrust that helped spark the outcry. I just can’t get over the fact that some people (many of whom will be able to vote in this year's election) actually believe that a wealthy, preppy, Ivy-league educated lawyer is really a radical, American-hating terrorist in disguise: a conclusion that they’ve come to without any help from David Remnick.