Oh, That Clever New Yorker

Oh, if only.

If only I'd known The New Yorker would run a cover depicting Barack Obama as a winking, tunic-garbed Muslim and his wife, Michelle, as an Afro-wearing, AK-47-toting terrorist.

If only I'd known that Barry Blitt's cartoon would show the Obamas fist bumping in an Oval Office where a portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs over the mantel.

If only I'd known that Editor David Remnick thought most Americans would celebrate this caricature as harmless satire.

If I'd known any of this, I would have invited Remnick to leave Manhattan and tag along with me to a baby shower in small-town, working-class Ohio. Then he, too, could have heard one of the guests describe her toe-curling encounter with the wife of a longtime county judge.

The two women have been friends for years. When their conversation turned to the presidential race, though, all smiles vanished.

"I'm voting for Obama," she told the judge's wife, who responded with disgust: "Barack Obama is the Antichrist."

"You don't really think that," the woman said.

Oh, yes, she did. Nodding her head, she added, "You can read all about it in the Bible. In Revelation."

Keep in mind this is one-half of a prominent political couple in a county where they know virtually everybody. Imagine how many people she might run into on any given day.

Maybe if David Remnick had heard that story, he would have felt the same sucker punch of shock that ended my appetite. At the very least, he might have had second thoughts about running a magazine cover that telegraphs just about every ugly misperception out there about the Obamas.

To most regular readers of The New Yorker, the cover was simply a poke at ignorant and bigoted voters.

To many of those voters, though, the cover is proof that even The New Yorker "gets it." And unlike just about any other New Yorker cover in recent history, they will actually see this one because it has been plastered all over the Web, cable news shows and in many of their hometown newspapers.

I live in Ohio, but The New Yorker has been part of my life since I was 17, when I found a copy in our doctor's waiting room.

I still subscribe to The New Yorker, still love it, and I think David Remnick is a brilliant editor. But the magazine's willful disconnect from the rest of the country doesn't hold the same appeal for me lately.

It's not that I don't think The New Yorker had the right to publish the cartoon. I do. It's just that, for a lot of us who live somewhere else, it isn't funny.

Oh, it's a mirror all right, but it doesn't reflect the people it was meant to harpoon so much as those who still think it's clever to ridicule the roughly 10 percent of Americans who believe this nonsense. Those people are just "knuckle-draggers" and "morons," to quote two of the many big-city writers defending The New Yorker this week. They also insisted that people like me need to get a sense of humor.

"Come on, laugh," urged the Chicago Tribune editorial. "Lighten up, people," chastised Tom Meyer, editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. We're suffering from an "irony deficiency," wrote the Los Angeles Times' James Rainey.

Maybe they're right. Maybe this current political climate has wrung the humor right out of me. But I'm so tired of people who don't live or work where I do insisting there's always a punch line to the ugliness around us.

Nearly every day, I get e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim. The anonymously mailed letters are increasing, too, and so are the phone calls. Last Thursday, I failed to convince a female caller that Obama really is a U.S. citizen, and no, the Immigration Department has not ruled otherwise.

She called me a liar and hung up.

Hilarious, I'm sure.

If only I could laugh.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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