It still sounds as if you want the satire to be too easy. The fact is that a sizeable number of English people considered the Irish to be subhuman when Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal.” That’s a view that persisted well into the 19th century, and can be seen in American political cartoons from that period too.

Serious satire, satire with teeth in it, takes on topics that aren’t “ridiculous.” In some ways, it seems to me that Blitt’s satire may have been more successful than he could have hoped: it revealed how many Americans see Islam (so that it’s a “smear”, in Obama’s word, to suggest that he is one) and African-American anger as bad things, and those are very much our issues.

Not much was ridiculous about that. It’s exactly how a sizeable amount of people in the US view the Obamas, and our media continues to push it. It’s a lot more different from things like Hitler being interviewed by Warhol and things like that.

It’s possible for people to miss this in Swift’s Modest Proposal partly because they’ve never read it (that 18th-century prose is, like, so hard to get through), but mainly because it’s so distant from us. If an Iraqi, say, were to suggest today that Iraqi babies be fattened up for American tables, I doubt that most American liberals would get it. (And “fat” is so insensitive! The babies would be big-boned, not fat! How can I say such awful things?) Someone in the comments said that the “comfortable” don’t do satire. Dean Swift was pretty comfortable, especially for an Irishman in his day, so that fails as a criterion too.

I discussed this at some length at my blog, so see http://thisislikesogay.blogspot.com/2008/07/strike-while-ironys-hot.html if you’re interested. To make my position clear, though, like nojojojo I thought the New Yorker cover wasn’t hip at all, just tired. I’ve never liked Barry Blitt’s work anyway. But the visual responses to the Obama cover that I saw were no better; I’ve linked to Vanity Fair’s and The Nation’s in my blog entry. The positive feedback they got from some Obama fans just confirms my feeling that a lot of liberals don’t understand what satire is supposed to be. That would be okay if they didn’t think they so were so much smarter than their opposition.

This would be why the New Yorker cover isn’t funny.

Wow, I can’t imagine why not. She sounds so lovely, and not at all, you know, incredibly fucking stupid.

or something along those lines…

i no longer interact with this person

Oh, in all honesty, I’d never read it that closely. I read it years ago because I’d seen it mentioned a number of times, and it seemed like something I should be conversant with. But obviously I ought to read it again.