Following my fisking of R.O. Blechman's horrendously awful cartoon in yesterday's New York Times, I saw just one defense of the cartoonist:
Uh, yeah, Blechman's cartoon in NYT today was clearly satire. Just wasn't very good, by any metric. http://t.co/0NTy7WwM69
— Rick Berger (@bergerrichard) August 14, 2014
And even that defense is pretty tepid (I'll address it below in a moment). Everyone else was on the same page as I. Indeed, the consensus was so broad VOX DOT COM's Max Fisher joined this here Kate Upton Warmongering Blog in saying hey, wtf NYT?
+1 RT @deborahamos: Hmm - this is really awful? NYT Publishes Bizarrely Despicable Cartoon http://t.co/3wfIfRL6Oi
— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) August 14, 2014
Horrible cartoons: building bridges* since 2014!
A bipartisan chorus of folks last night called on New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan to address the horrendous creation. I endorse this wholeheartedly. Here are a few questions she might ask:
- Of the cartoonist, R.O. Blechman: What was your intent? Was this actually a satirical knock criticizing the anti-interventionist POV? If so, why put the criticism in the mouths of poor Appalachian residents rather than leftist critics of reengaging with Iraq? The criticism of this intervention isn't really pouring forth from the coal mines of Kentucky. Do you actually think the Yazidis "have all the luck"? Or was that a dry bit of satire that everyone missed?
- Of the editor who approved the cartoon: Was this piece submitted or commissioned? Did you do any fact-checking of this cartoon? Did you not realize that the Yazidis are not in fact Arab? What was your read on the cartoonist's intent? Was the goal to drive clicks by publishing a horrendously offensive cartoon? What does this add to the conversation?
I mean, again, it's possible that I'm overreacting to a sub-Daily-Currant piece of satire. Perhaps Blechman is saying "The critics of saving the Yazidis are so dumb they don't even know they aren't Arabs." That's possible, I suppose.
I don't think I am misreading the cartoon, though. Who would be the target of the satire? Poor people in America?Are they leading the charge against aiding the Yazidis? As a colleague noted yesterday, it's telling that the cartoon's point—life in America for the poverty-stricken is so horrible it makes genocide in a foreign country look like a cakewalk—dovetails so nicely with the elite left's point of view on income inequality.
This isn't satire. It's a window into a worldview.
*Non-Trans-Israel