Is this picture funny? I suppose somebody thought so. When liberal weekly The New Yorker ran a cover last week depicting Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama as an Islamic terrorist, his wife Michele in Angela Davis ‘fro with an assault rifle slung over her shoulder, the official story is they were attempting to lampoon the ridiculous accusations made against Obama during the primary season. Instead, they’ve created an indelible image that does grave injury to the Obama campaign by giving form and substance to the irrational fear of people undereducated about Obama and his goals. I spend a lot of time, here, complaining that Church Folk don’t read. But the truth is, hardly anyone reads anymore. We are living in a visually-oriented world, a world of video, of pictures. Language is becoming a completely lost art, and America has become increasingly less intellectually curious. We do not, in large measure, seek out the truth, but, rather, tend to prefer truth be handed to us. That’s how we got into Iraq. How we got into the mortgage crisis which devalued the dollar which caused investors to invest in oil which caused gas prices to double which caused massive job loss and price increases. We have an anti-intellectual president who clearly does not understand how This Thing affects That Thing and causes This Other Thing. And it is into this environment that the New Yorker launched their little sight gag.

Maybe a caption would have helped: This Is What Morons Think Of Obama. Something. But relying on the intellect of the American people to properly divine the purpose of this image is frightfully naïve on the New Yorker’s part. No matter that it has been said a thousand times, no matter that Obama’s former pastor has, himself, been the cause of much grief, there are still people out there who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. What’s not being underlined in the media: how ignorant it is to believe all Muslims are terrorists or all Muslims are evil. Islamic bigotry is so common in this country that anyone with an even remotely Arabic name has a veil of suspicion cast about him, a stigma Obama has struggled with all his life, but most certainly since 911 and the Bush administration’s obsession with Saddam Hussein.

The New Yorker, a fairly vocal Obama supporter, has created a poster for rednecks and extremists, bigots and lunatics. There will doubtless be tee-shirts made from it, banners hung with the image on it. The New Yorker has crystallized White Fear if not White Ignorance, while deeply offending most every African American by demeaning one of the most significant moments in our history: the nomination for president of the United States of an African American.

This was either tremendously short-sighted or incredibly smart, the New Yorker doubtlessly boosting sales of this issue and drawing much-needed attention to the slowly extinguishing world of paper publishing. Their tepid response thus far suggests the latter, as even so-called intellectuals can have a blind spot to the true nature of institutionalized racism. If Barack Obama were the third or, say, fifth African American to be nominated for the presidency, then, yes, perhaps this might be funny. But, given that he is the first, the cartoon demeans the moment and is, therefore, in bad taste. Worse, it energizes the lunatic fringe rather than lampoons them, these nuts embracing this ludicrous image rather than being persuaded of their own ignorance.