I probably should have whipped together my deep thoughts last night on The New Yorker's Obama the Terrorist cover art. But I got caught up in the Home Run Derby on ESPN. (Love the State Farm muckety-muck calling Morneau "Jason" at the big, anticlimactic award ceremony. Note to State Farm: Next year send a baseball fan in with the hardware. ESPN reporter Erin Andrews's expression at the gaffe was also pretty amusing.)

Like most mid-summer outrage/umbrage flare-ups, this one will probably be over before I hit the "send" button. But within it are at least a couple tantalizing nuggets related our other great national pastimes: outrage and cultural warfare.

Here's the sequence of my experience with the Obama cover, and I relay this as a longtime subscriber (i.e. liberal elitist.) Surfing around, I saw it pop on some website. I looked. I laughed. I moved on. A few clicks later, there it was again, this time with the first barrage of "outrage" from Obama-friendly lefties. I looked closer at the drawing and read through a couple dozen comments, I think on Kevin Drum's site, Political Animal. The "incident" was on.

What I find interesting is that I, as a more or less typical New Yorker reader, immediately got the hyperbole of the joke. "As FoxNews would have us see it," I thought. But unlike other recent Barry Blitt political covers—here's a link—even in that first impression, I had the sense there was something missing.

But as someone who spends too much time shaking my head in dismay at the trumped-up outrage du jour of the forever-victimized right wing, I told myself I wasn't going to get trapped into my own expression of grievous umbrage over so obvious a piece of satire. Certainly not a drawing I immediately recognized as satire—and reflexively laughed at as satire. The degree of cognitive dissonance required to first "get" something as a joke and then turn around and make a convincing display of moral offense is the sort of intellectual dishonesty with which I'm happy to only tar the Other Team.

Moreover, a bit like Al Franken's old jokes here in Minnesota, there was a pretty high "us" and "they" factor in the complaints of outraged liberals.

Here's a comment from Spiegelman, the famous New Yorker artist, in the San Francisco Chronicle: 

. . . Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and former New Yorker staffer, was baffled that much of the negative reaction to the cartoon was coming from Obama supporters on liberal blogs.

"They sound so elitist," Spiegelman told the Chronicle. "The essence of what they're saying is, 'I get it, but I don't trust the people in Kansas to get it.' But isn't that what the whole hope and change thing is supposed to be about? That they will get it?"

(I also loved—note irony—Rahm Emanuel, the Democrats' campaign ramrod, declaring he was through with The New Yorker because of Blitt's cover. Right, pal. If House Democrats had done the quality of investigation The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh has done on the cooking of intelligence in Iraq and the Cheney administration's plans for Iran, they might double their approval ratings.)

But elsewhere in that same piece, someone put their finger on the "problem," which really only applies to "those who aren't as hip as us."

What Barry Blitt missed, in a cartoon about the ludicrous misunderstandings and phobias surrounding the Obamas, was a visual cue suggesting the genesis or the architects of this lunacy. Kevin Drum suggested Blitt needed John McCain down in a corner with thought bubbles imagining the Obamas in Al Qaeda-chic fist bumping in the Oval Office. That seems heavy-handed and, frankly, beneath McCain. But if he could somehow work Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham into that shtick, hypervenilating into a FoxNews mike . . .

I don't know what Blitt's solution could have been. But what was missing was the immediate, instantaneous recognition of whose absurd vision this is or from what whacked-out imagination it leaps. Unlike Blitt's other New Yorker covers—the Bush team in a flooded Oval Office post-Katrina, Bush playing Felix Unger to Dick Cheney's Oscar Madison post the '06 election, neither of which needed any additional explanatory elements or setup—the setup in the Obama cover was almost entirely inferred. It was precisely hip enough for The New Yorker audience room . . . who then began fretting loudly that it was too hip for the Kansas room everywhere else.

Never mind that Seinfeld was arguably the most popular sitcom of all time. Irony is regarded as a highly problematic technique. Big, groaning, mainstream-directed institutions—such as TV networks and presidential campaigns—treat irony like explosives. One fumble, and you'll blow your fingers off. The operative presumption being that too many of "them" don't get irony.

I'm not convinced that is true. There are way too many people who don't pay close enough attention to stuff that has a big-time impact on their everyday lives, and there are probably way too many people who still believe Obama is a muslim (which, if you read your favorite local metro columnist, is always tacitly synonomous with "America-hating terrorist"). But a cartoon? On the cover of a magazine with the title of The New Yorker? Even at the Little America Truck Stop in Rock Spring, Wyo., I'm thinking the clientele took it for some kind of weird "elitist joke."

New Yorker editor David Remnick spent most of yesterday explaining Blitt's joke—never good for anyone trading in comedy. He turned up on the evening news arguing that the cover had already served its purpose what with all the free airtime he was getting pointing out how absurd the image is.

If he's arguing that the cover does Obama more good than harm, I agree. (Hell, when even John McCain gets on national TV tut-tutting about how "offensive" it was, that's a good day for Obamamania.)