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Legal Commentary

: Althouse

Everybody's talking about The New Yorker... and balls!

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The power of cartoons! After devoting an hour to updating my post on the Barry Blitt cover, I go over to Memeorandum to see what else people are blogging about right now, and I see that everybody's talking about that New Yorker cover. I'm actually going to get around to reading that long, apparently well-researched article inside the magazine, the one about whatever it is Barack Obama did to rise to power inside that political mystery that is Chicago, but ? as Art Spiegelman once said ?

Comics "go directly to the id.''

Kick us in the id and we cry out instantly. It will take us a while to do the background reading. Meanwhile, we bloggers will do the foreground writing.

Here's Michelle Malkin, reacting to Obama's reaction: "Grow a pair, Obama."

And Kevin Drum is all at first I thought it was kinda funny....

But at the risk of seeming humorless, that reaction didn't last too long. Maybe it's because this kind of satire just doesn't work, no matter how well it's done. But mostly it's because a few minutes thought convinced me it was gutless. If artist Barry Blitt had some real cojones...

What is this fascination with balls? Jesse Jackson wants to cut Obama's, which presumes their existence. Michelle Malkin thinks they don't exist. Kevin Drum thinks they don't exist on Blitt ? they've been oblitterated ? though they may somehow exist in fake ? or un-Spanish ? form. But if Blitt had had real cojones...

... he would have drawn the same cover but shown it as a gigantic word bubble coming out of John McCain's mouth ? implying, you see, that this is how McCain wants the world to view Obama. But he didn't. Because that would have been unfair.

Uh... no... because it would have been absurdly cluttered, stupid looking, and hard to draw. Not to mention clunkily literal and no fun at all. Blitt lacks balls because he assumes we have brains?

Drum speculates about what would have happened if his dopey mouth-bubble idea had appeared as a New Yorker cover:

And McCain would have complained about it. And for some reason, the risk that a failed satire would unfairly defame McCain is somehow seen as worse than the risk that a failed satire would unfairly defame Obama.
So: gutless. And whatever else you can say about it, good satire is never gutless.

It's gutless because Obama and not McCain was the one to get mad? Why does Drum even think that makes sense? Surely, The New Yorker's readers overwhelmingly favor Obama. To offend McCain would be stroking their id.

All I can think is that Drum feels threatened by McCain's anger and unthreatened by Obama's anger. Is he still talking about balls?

Full post as published by Althouse on July 14, 2008 (boomark / email).