Like everyone in the world, I rely on the sharp eye and sharp tongue and the talent of black Americans to critique the whiteboy culture by interposing its own.
That is a carefully composed and edited politically correct statement.
The fact is, black Americans already are the arbiters of taste in world culture, as the Tupac posters on the walls of shacks and omnimedia boardrooms all over the world testify.
Now come the instapundits on the New Yorker cover showing the Obamas as Rush Limbaugh's worst nightmare:
There are many times and places where white people of good will should shut up. After due consideration, I submit that this is not one of them.
The instapundits of the black persuasion are saying that it's racist, not least because Michelle Obama is wearing an Afro. And that it wouldn't be racist, and would clearly be satire if a frame were put around it and it was depicted as a picture Rush Limbaugh is holding up. Or that there should be a mirror behind the Afro'ed Michelle and the Osama'd Barack showing what they really look like. Because you're too fucking stupid to get the joke.
No, people are saying that.
My first thought was, if black people lose their sense of humor, it's all over for us. Then I thought two things simultaneously, both the fruit of my long years in the feminist trenches. One, as women will never be equal until they commit great crimes, black people will never be equal until they have a vested interest over which to lose their sense of humor. When black people start being President and stop being hip, they will lose their sense of humor and take another step toward parity. Second, as everyone who has studied comedy knows, it is aggressive, nihilist, hostile and resilient. It has been, since Euripides. It makes nothing out of something. And along these lines, I'm thinking, Obama is a humor free zone because every black person is so worried about his assassination that any hostile attack, especially including humor, is seen as danger. I feel bad about this.
Not bad enough to shut up.
Because wit is the only thing -- the glimmer of some kind of light on -- that gives me hope for this country. It's why I keep on here in the blogosphere, despite the massive waves of bullshit and idiocy, because there are about 10 of you out there who have some wit and are applying it to this tired old world.
The idea that you need to put a frame around the New Yorker cartoon cover, or mirror it, in order to make it clear that it's satire, is stupid. Nobody in this culture, who watches 150 television ads a day, which are the most sophisticated video art there is, produced by the best educated filmn and art school grads, is that ill-educated visually. Even people who can't read or don't are extremely sophisticated in terms of seeing art in media, and indeed style, as well as reality, in the streets. I saw old black ladies, for example, back in the 1980s, wearing Bart Simpson t shirts, at which point I understood the Simpsons were hip and I needed to check it out.
The frame the insta pundits are insisting on to identify the cartoon as satire already exists. The New Yorker logo superimposed over it is the frame. Whether or not you are ignorant of the fact that every week since the 1920s the New Yorker has published a cartoon on its cover. If you have never seen the The New Yorker before, and you know nothing about the many things it stands for, some of them, like John Updike and the whole school of suburban adultery literature, completely loathsome and retrogressive and sexist and racist, you will dig that a drawing which is a caricature (you can tell by the big heads) of the candidate for the presidency and his wife in funny costumes with the words THE NEW YORKER over the top contains, shall we say, at least one clue that this is satire.
The instapundit blather that most annoyed me was that giving satire Michele an Afro is racist, because it's supposed to make her scary. Uh, yeah. I know hair is a huge issue for black women but art history of the image of the female Afro since the 1960s ranges from Angela Davis (which Afro, GIVEN THE HUEY NEWTON STYLE AK 47 the satirical Michele is packing on the cover, numb nuts, is the Afro The New Yorker references), and the close shaved ones of '60s people like Pearl Cleage, up through the blaxploitation chick Afro hair, which was and remains gorgeous and funny, the 1980s topiary effects of Grace Jones which any human in their right mind would covet, Alek Wek's millenial riposte to Naomi Campbell's retromingent weave, etc. -- oh please, I just can't go on.
And if the idiots who think Obama is a Muslim buy the magazine looking for evidence that he is, high fives all around.
As the Undercover Black Man, aka David Mills, said, years ago, when Ted Danson showed up in blackface at a roast for his then-sweetheart, Whoopi Goldberg, but what if it's funny?
But what if it's funny?
Now that is seditious. Can't have no sedition 'round here. Mama don't 'low no sedition 'round here.
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