The Force is strong in this one ...

My friend Mandy posted on Facebook the other day a link to images of a Barack Obama action figure, produced by a Japanese company. The pictures showed the figure in a variety of presidential poses: behind a lectern answering questions, delivering a speech, standing in a determined and heroic stance, and so on. And then, brandishing a machine gun. And then, standing ninja-like with a pair of samurai swords. And finally, as you see above, doing battle with Dick Cheney. I mean, Darth Vader. (No, I actually mean Dick Cheney).

Obama isn’t the first U.S. president to be made into an action figure, but he’s certainly the first that children in countries other than the U.S. would be eager to own, or be delighted to be given as a gift. His international appeal is genuinely unprecedented; he’s the first president to be a bigger celebrity than the musicians playing at his inauguration. (This, it occurred to me when I watched U2 perform, will be a monkey wrench in Bono’s usual strategy of lending his celebrity to politicians in exchange for action on Africa. Obama stock won’t go up just because he’s staged a photo op with Bono. On the other hand, people might take Bono more seriously if they think Obama likes him).

The new president’s celebrity has been a sticking-point for many people, but I tend to think that this uneasiness says more about the connotations “celebrity” has for us these days than anything else. The overexposure of such wastes of skin as Paris Hilton unfortunately tars all celebrity with the same brush. And the general contempt in which politicians as a group are held makes the popularity of Barack Obama at the very least unsettling and leads in some cases to egregious comparisons with the cult of personality surrounding such figures as Hitler or Mao.

For all of Obama’s personal appeal, however, I tend to see this overwhelming adulation not as adulation per se. Rather, I think what we’re seeing when Obama is greeted by hundreds of thousands of cheering people when he visits France or Germany or elsewhere is the sudden and unexpected return of love for America. There are two Americas, one loathed and feared outside the U.S., and one that inspires fascination and hope, best summed up in Bill Clinton’s great line in his speech endorsing Obama: “People around the world have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.” I tend to see each version of America antithetical manifestations of American Exceptionalism. The first, "example of our power," is the insular, nativist my-country-right-or-wrong, “America is great because it’s America” tautology (most recently exemplified by Sarah Palin’s characterization of “real America”); the second, "the power of our example," is the America defined as a unique set of possibilities, as potential for hope and growth and life undreamed-of elsewhere in the world. Barack Obama’s remarkable personal story exemplifies the latter, and people around the world see in him the idea of the United States that has captivated the world since 1776.


I wanted to post sooner after the inauguration, but it’s taken me this long for my thoughts to settle into something cohesive. I watched the ceremony at Bitters, Memorial’s grad pub. I had been planning to go home to watch, but decided that this was something better experienced in the company of others. And as I looked around the standing-room-only pub, everyone raptly listening to Obama’s speech, the thought that leapt to mind was that we looked like nothing other than people gathered around, not a television set, but a radio. True, most had their eyes on the screen; but the overall impression was not of watching, but listening.

This for me is emblematic of Obama’s promise: since Tuesday, I have read more columns, op-ed pieces, and blog posts parsing the speech—more attention paid to its substance and significance of a his words—than I have ever seen devoted to a political speech before. Granted, a large part of the attention paid the inaugural speech derives from the high expectations Obama’s past oratory has raised; but never in my lifetime have I seen so many people pay attention to a politician’s words. Rather, the cynical default—which, generally speaking, has been richly earned—has been that it is a waste of time listening to politicians, because at best they’re merely saying what people want to hear, and at worst are lying through their teeth.

The sea-change with Obama is that it’s not so much that he’s saying things people want to hear (although he is and people do); the difference is that he’s not saying what he does because people want to hear it, and we’ve arrived at a point where a plurality of people want to hear the things he says.

It is a subtle but seismic distinction, and one the places a premium on listening. Listening is something that has been absent from political discourse, and not just for the last eight years. The Bush Administration possessed the ideological equivalence of tone-deafness, but they can’t shoulder all the blame, or even most of it. Political discourse at some point became an exercise in people talking past each other—evinced most glaringly in the world of punditry, where volume trumps content and bullying trumps argument.

The image of people gathered around the radio put me in mind of FDR’s “Fireside Chats,” the radio addresses he delivered to reassure the American people during the dark days of the Depression and the Second World War. You can read them here. And I do recommend reading them: besides being interesting in their own right, they are remarkable for what they did. Roosevelt paid his audience the tribute of assuming them to be intelligent and thoughtful, and he did not condescend or talk down. The “chats” effectively kept the American people in the loop in difficult times, informed them of what the government was doing and why, and engendered a sense of collective purpose. And what’s more, people wanted to listen to them.

Perhaps I’m still a bit starry-eyed, and looking at this past election too idealistically. Perhaps—though I certainly do not expect the Obama administration to accomplish all (or even most) of what it is expected to do, and we can already see the inertia of Washington exerting its gravitational pull. But as someone whose entire career is all about language, and the written and spoken word, there is no down side to the prospect of listening becoming again a central aspect of our political and social discourse.

Now, if we can just get our Canadian politicians to get that memo.

Wingnut roundup, Sunday edition

One of the pleasures I have had in the post-election phase is watching the conservative press in the U.S. fulminate, lather, rationalize, and generally tie themselves up in knots. Several themes have emerged:

1. Some have attempted to recast Obama’s victory as evidence that States is a “center-right” nation—some even going so far as to claim that he effectively campaigned as a “Reaganite.” This particular howler is bad enough taken on its simple merits, but somewhat more baffling when you recall that, up to and including the day of the election, these same voices were calling Obama a “socialist.” It’s amazing what 365 electoral votes can apparently do to the perception of one’s ideological tendencies—from Stalin to Reagan, all in twenty-four hours.

2. The current economic downturn has been labeled by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh as “the Obama Recession.” Yes, the President-Elect, who has held that title for not quite two weeks, is apparently responsible for our economic woes. Why? According to the Hannity/Limbaugh logic, people have lost all consumer confidence with the massive tax hikes promised by Obama looming on a horizon two months away. Which would be an interesting argument were it not for two key facts: (1) however else Fox News might spin it, Obama’s plan is for tax breaks for everyone earning under $250K, and a tax hike for those earning over that much (and, not to split hairs, but it’s not so much a tax hike as a return to pre-Bush taxation levels); (2) that very $250K+ demographic that Obama explicitly said would experience a tax increase VOTED FOR OBAMA. That’s right—exit polls indicated that those earning over two hundred thousand a year voted for Obama by a margin of 52 to 46 percent.

3. Sean Hannity in particular continues to bash away on the “how much do we really know about Obama?” theme, repeatedly citing the accusation that Obama isn’t really an American citizen, harping on the Bill Ayer connection, and making vague suggestions about the extent of his “radical associations.” Yawn.

4. Obama’s coming for your guns, America!! No less than that bastion of law, order and legality G. Gordon Liddy enjoined Americans on his radio show (yes, he has a radio show) that, during the coming Obama presidency, “The first thing you do is, no matter what law they pass, do not—repeat, not—ever register any of your firearms.” (This, mind you, was the same guy who in 1994 advised people that if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to your door, “Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests.”) Apparently, those people clinging to their guns (who may or may not also be clinging to religion) have been purchasing firearms at a greater rate than gun dealers have seen since the aftermath of September 11th.

Watch the Daily Show’s take on this here.

OK, so while items one through three are kind of funny, number four is just kind of scary. The 1990s were marked by this kind of militancy, in which paramilitary groups like the Michigan Militia prepared for the invasion of the U.S. by the U.N. and Timothy McVeigh and friends did dire things with fertilizer. The last I checked, the War on Terror was still a going concern … are we looking at the rise of domestic threats again because a more liberal administration might take the egregious step of registering guns and putting restrictions on assault rifles and grenade launchers?

Post-election musings: On the value of words

I can’t quite wipe the smile off my face.

I’ve been kicking around ideas for a couple of posts dealing with the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, but none of them are coming together. I tried to articulate one of them to my 20thC U.S. novel class, as the election is quite germane to our subject matter—we’re focusing on issues of race and identity in American fiction—but didn’t quite manage it. Perhaps I will come back to these thoughts when the dust settles a bit more.

Suffice to say however that Tuesday night was a night to remember. I had an election night party, and my living room was crammed full of people glued to the television as the returns came in. Never before have I seen, or would really have ever dreamed of seeing, such an extraordinary international response to an American election. Here we were, a group of Canadians who had watched our own recent election pass with barely a murmur, mesmerized by this spectacle and joyful at the result. The posts I had been kicking around all speculate on the reason for Obama’s extraordinary international appeal, and the passions he has managed to excite both within and without the United States. Those thoughts, still embryonic, will wait … I will keep this one personal.

I imagine it’s an occupational hazard, combined with too many viewings of The West Wing and eight years in the wilderness of Bush malapropisms, but the mere fact of an exceptionally intelligent and articulate candidate who speaks to his audience like adults was like intellectual ambrosia. Still, I was skeptical about Obama’s lack of experience, and sat the fence for the first stretch of the democratic primaries. As things progressed however, and the Obama campaign showed its true mettle against one of the most ruthless political machines this side of the Potomac, I became more and more impressed. It wasn’t just that he was articulate—it was that he was calm, cool, and utterly unflappable, and seemed genuinely to hold himself above the fray.

And then there was this:

And I was sold. The revelations of Jeremiah’s jeremiads against America should have been the end of things for Obama, and for any other candidate in a comparable position, it probably would have. Though Obama had so long succeeded in keeping the issue of race out of his campaign, the appearance of Reverend Wright’s intemperate (though for any halfway serious student of race in America, hardly surprising or exaggerated) sermons effectively made continuing in this regard impossible. So what does he do but address the issue head-on, in a speech that will one day be read alongside Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Negro is the Fourth of July?” and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” as pivotal moments of great oratory. If you haven’t already, watch the speech above or read the text of it here. It is at once honest and straightforward, and exceptionally intelligent: it threads an impossibly difficult needle and addresses an historically divisive topic in a way that respects its audience and challenges them to rise to the occasion.

I’d say that I’m a sucker for great oratory, but that would be at once understating and simplifying things for me. I am an English professor, a career choice that has not been arbitrary or accidental: it is rather one that proceeds from a deep and abiding investment in the belief that language and discourse are not only among the most powerful tools we have, but are the measure of what it means to be human—in both the positive and negative senses. Obama’s detractors have frequently attacked him for offering “mere words,” even suggesting that his eloquence and articulateness somehow disqualified from high office because they signified that he was a man of words and not action.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I consider the whole words vs. action equation something of a false dichotomy; once upon a time the advertising slogan of my alma mater, the University of Western Ontario, was “Leading. Thinking.” As one of my favourite professors there was fond of observing: haven’t they got that in the wrong order? Thought (ideally) should precede action, and, as I tell my students, unarticulated thought exists nowhere but in your own mind. The larger our shared vocabulary, the more nuanced and subtle our understanding of the world is.

On the other hand, words and action have run in opposite directions in the Bush Administration. Besides “terrorist,” “freedom” and “liberty” were among the few words Bush could reliably wrap his lips around, but he effectively emptied them of content by mouthing them endlessly while suspending habeas corpus, endorsing domestic wire-tapping, and manufacturing evidence for a fraudulent war; his fulminations against “evildoers” lost whatever traction they might have had when the photographs from Abu Gharib surfaced.

Al Gore accused the Bush Administration of waging a “war on reason”; I consider that synonymous with a war on language. To be well-spoken was to be elitist. To be articulate was to be ineffectual. To be intelligently critical was to be anti-American. When I watch or read an Obama speech, I am reminded on one of the basic tenets of my discipline: language taken in all its subtlety and nuance moves toward inclusion, to the expansion of vocabularies of understanding; language reduced, simplified, and delimited excludes and divides, and infantilizes those who use it.

George Orwell taught us that. I’d like to think he’d be wearing a smile today, too.

Causes for celebration

1. As of Monday, Newfoundland is no longer a have-not province. Ontario, on the other hand, is -- and I just want to say to all those lazy-ass financiers and bankers and hedge-fund managers in Toronto that I am sick of having my tax dollars siphoned off to support their lives of indolence

2. On the upside, now that Ontario is a have-not province, experts predict that Ontarians will become folksier, friendlier, and funnier

3. There was something else ... something else to celebrate. I can't quite think of what it is ...

None dare call it socialism

There were a few Halloween-themed editorial cartoons this past Friday, depicting Barack Obama taking away candy from some children and giving it to those who haven’t worked as hard at their trick-or-treating. Cute. Sort of funny too, but typically wrong-headed. The McCain campaign and conservative punditocracy have been beating the drum labelled “Socialism!” pretty heavily since the whole Joe the Plumber silliness, and will undoubtedly continue on unabated until polls close on Tuesday night. This much is to be expected during campaign season I suppose, but the refrain of “redistribution of wealth” is so disingenuous as to border on being frankly dishonest.

Why? Mainly, because redistribution of wealth is government’s primary job, whether it be FDR-style New Deal big government or the small-enough-to-drown-in-a-bathtub fantasy of Grover Norquist. But there is something more insidious when “spreading the wealth” is framed in the derisive tones of a Sarah Palin or a Sean Hannity, for it is invariably citing welfare—the spectre of having your hard-earned money taken away and given to some stoned slacker eating nachos on the couch, or an unwed mother who has children solely for the extra money it adds to the welfare check. These stereotypes have been repeated so often in the past that they don’t even need to be explicitly drawn.

What baffles me is that this supposed entitlement of the poor is more certain to get people’s hackles up that the entitlement of the wealthy. Why is it preferable to certain sectors of the American Right that the $700B bailout not purchase American taxpayers a stake in the banks they’re saving? Why is it preferable that these banks have complete autonomy over the money they’re given (as was Henry Paulson’s original demand)? The answer of course is that the former constitutes “socializing” the banks; any government incursion in the private sector is an impingement on freedom, never mind that when FDR made a comparable move in the Great Depression, the American people saw a return on that money.

The first version of the bailout failed in part because there remains a stolid core of free-market fundamentalists among U.S. legislators, who see any form of government assistance—much less assistance that would purchase a stake in private enterprise—as the leading edge of socialism. The $700B figure is serendipitous however, for the fact of the matter is that there is a massive sector of the U.S. economy already socialized to a tune just shy of $700B annually.

Defence spending in the United States accounts for, depending on how you read the numbers, 20-40% of the annual U.S. budget, and the total amount spent each year is equal to the defence budgets of the rest of the world combined. This however seems to have escaped notice in the current campaign silliness, that a whole host of research, development and production companies and corporations are largely or wholly subsidized by tax dollars. Vast numbers of people are reliant on government support: just see how quickly Congressman X loses his seat if he lets a military base in his district get closed down; see how secure Senator Y becomes when she lands a plum DOD contract for industry in her state. Three million people are employed by the Department of Defence; even more by corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, or Kellog, Brown & Root, all of whom receive billions in defence contracts every year. The economic presence of the military, as Eisenhower noted in his farewell address, “the total influence—economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.” Eisenhower then went on to make his famous warning against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Re-reading those words today sort of feels like closing the barn door, so to speak. As Chalmers Johnson, writing for Harper’s in autumn 2003, observes: “munitions making and war profiteering have supplanted the energy and telecommunications deals pioneered by Enron and WorldCom in the 1990s as the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough. To call these companies ‘private,’ though, is mere ideology. Munitions making in the United States today is not really private enterprise. It is state socialism.” The ongoing debacle in Iraq has only magnified this reality: a deadly quagmire for U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, but a no-holds-barred capitalist playground for companies and corporations in a position to receive government contracts, often without having the bid for them, and usually with little or no government oversight—the result being billions given to companies like the notorious Haliburton, with very little to show for it in the end aside from a very well-equipped Green Zone.

I don’t write this post as a polemic against US military spending, but to try and explode the egregiousness of the whole “socialism” accusation. A good hypothetical litmus test for free-market economy is to eliminate government spending and realistically speculate on what would happen. Would the economy chug cheerfully along? I’m not an economist, but it seems pretty clear that the recent Wall Street collapse would be a minor blip compared to what would happen if the military-industrial complex suddenly found itself without its $600B dollars in annual taxpayer money.

A possible counter-argument here is that I’m talking apples and oranges—that military spending (unlike, say, health care or social security) is an absolute necessity, and that we cannot talk of national security in terms comparable to banking, investment, or the auto industry. I do not agree with this assessment, however, for the simple reason that there is more to national security than being able to drop bombs or fire missiles (especially when the principal threat currently posed is not by conventional armies or nation-states). “Security” is itself a complex of factors, bound up in a nation’s level of education and literacy, its physical and economic health, and its confidence in itself as a nation. The already-cited fact that U.S. defence spending equals that of the rest of the world combined is something we often hear, but it never fails to shock and appal. Why that kind of government spending is utterly acceptable while universal health care is considered the vanguard of a communist revolution (as Ronald Reagan characterized Medicare) by a certain segment of the U.S. population frankly escapes me.

So let’s all take a deep-knee bend and ratchet down the whole “socialism” thing, OK? Or at the very least approach the term with a little more nuance. Which is all very much like crying out in the wilderness during campaign season, I realize, but a boy can dream.

Cautious (cautious!) optimism

OK, so it has become apparent from the various comments and emails from friends that I've kind of been obsessing a wee bit over the American election, and have expressed sentiments about Barack Obama that verge on the worshipful.

And what I have to say to that is ... well, ya got me. True enough.

I will however stop quite short of getting myself the Obama Cabbage Patch doll, an image of which my friend Arlene kindly sent me. And I hereby forbid anyone to get one of these for me for Christmas! My admiration for the Senator does have limits ... and besides, as you can see, the doll really bears almost no resemblance to him. In fact, if it looks like anyone at all, it's Gary Coleman. (Anyone making a Whad'you talking bout? joke in the comments will be banned from this blog.)

Incidentally, there are also Cabbage Patch dolls for Sarah Palin and John McCain:

I think the McCain doll is the most lifelike, don't you?

In other news, I'm starting to nurse some cautious optimism. (Cautious optimism! Did you hear that, Fates? CAUTIOUS! Really, hardly optimism at all! Far be it for me to tempt the wrath of the guy from high atop the thing ...). There's a lot of back-and-forthing among the various pundits of late, pointing to Obama's static numbers, and a narrowing of his lead in some polls. However, things do look much better when you look at the electoral map. While I generally tend to find the whole electoral college system kind of fukakta, I'm taking some comfort in it now. Obama needs 270 electoral votes to take the election. At the time of this posting, a tally of the states in which he has a double-digit lead in the polls gives him 254; a tally including states with a single-digit lead gives him 375. Conversely, McCain's two-digit lead states give him 118, and with the rest he has 157. Which means that, to win on Tuesday, he has to take 113 electoral votes away from states in which Obama leads. Obama on the other hand has to cinch 16 votes, which he can do if he takes Ohio, where he's currently leading by six points.

I just want to conclude by assuring the Guy High Atop The Thing that I offer these numbers as an entirely neutral curiosity and am not making predictions or suggestion that anything here means anything at all.

Obama's new constituency

It is really rather painful to watch the ongoing American election knowing I cannot vote in it. Every time I see an encouraging news report that gives Obama a comfortable lead, or read a column like this one by Charles M. Blow in which he announces that it’s all over but the shouting and the Obamas can start measuring drapes in the Oval, I recall the last two U.S. elections. The margins by which Obama leads (on average) are comparable to those held by Al Gore in 2000, and let’s not forget that the exit polls in 2004 were trending toward John Kerry. Every time someone predicts a blowout for Obama I cringe, infected as I am by the congenital liberal certainty of doom.

On the brighter side of things however, an ongoing source of both hope and amusement has been in seeing conservatives south of the border attacking the McCain campaign or, in some cases, going so far as to endorse Obama.

What conservatives, you ask, are endorsing Obama? Well, none other that the inveterate pro-Iraq War hawk Christopher Hitchens, who writes in Slate that the debates “showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical.” Further, “the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience.” Say what you will about Christopher Hitchens (and I could say a lot), but he does have a way with words.

But it doesn’t end there … Christopher Buckley, scion of William F. Buckley, has also endorsed Obama in a column titled “Sorry Dad, I’m voting Obama.” In it, he says of McCain that his “once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises.” For his pains, Christopher (gotta say, I like the way the Christopher bloc is shaping up here) was turfed from The National Review, a periodical founded by Buckley Sr.

And most recently? Our old friend Colin Powell, formerly Bush’s secretary of state, and the most vocal moderate in Bush’s cabinet—which, to quote John Stewart, also made him “the blackest moderate, the whitest moderate, the tallest moderate, the shortest moderate …” You get the idea. Yes, just yesterday Powell went on Meet the Press and stated that the recent negative campaigning by McCain tipped the balance for him, as he “thought that was over the top,” and “was beyond just good political fighting back and forth.” He further called Obama a "transformational" figure, and that while Powell has a great amount of respect for McCain, it is time for a generational change.

Powell, incidentally, joins other former republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger (seriously), Alexander Haig (who served under Reagan), James Baker (Bush Sr.’s administration) and Lawrence Eagleburger (who also served briefly under Bush Sr.) in endorsing Obama.

(Can I just say that I love the name Eagleburger? It sounds like a lunch special in the Capitol Building cafeteria, something you would order with a side of freedom fries).

Looking back over this list—to say nothing of the condemnations of McCain’s campaign by such staunch conservatives as Kathleen Parker and David Frum—I've got to say, if you’re John McCain you really have to be wondering “just how far from the pack have I strayed?”

When irony fails

So this morning I was contemplating a return to blogging here after my rather unintentional hiatus, rolling around a tongue-and-cheek entry about the controversy over the recent The New Yorker cover, in which Barack Obama is depicted in Islamic regalia and his wife Michelle in circa-1968 Blank Panther gear. I was considering writing a mock-serious constitutional discussion saying that conservatives afraid that Obama's secretly a radical Muslim shouldn't worry, because while he'll certainly convert the executive branch to Wahabism, he'll have difficulty getting around the separation of powers to do the same to the legislative branch ... and indeed that the sheer difficulty of getting the senate to confirm his jihadist cabinet and Supreme Court nominees would effectively bog down his administration for pretty much the entirety of his first term.


Or something to that effect. Anyway, I was kicking this around in my head as I walked back from the student center with my lunch, only to sit down at my computer to see this: in an online poll conducted by WorldNetDaily, 59% of respondents said the image "isn't too far from the dangerous truth about the Obama family."


America, meet satire. Satire, meet America.


Of course, given that WorldNetDaily is an online forum that stands slightly to the right of Genghis Khan, this should not come as a surprise. What bothers me is that a lot of people on the left, including the Obama campaign -- which called the cover "tasteless and offensive" -- are taking offense at what is very obviously a satirical answer to the right-wing attacks on Obama's patriotism (why doesn't he wear a flag pin??), his wife (do we really want a militant black First Lady??), and of course the ongoing harping on his middle name and repeated suggestion that he's secretly a Muslim ... right down to their adorable little fist bump, labelled on Fox News as a "terrorist fist jab." Um ... what?


Part of my annoyance here is fueled by my increasingy frustration with what seems to be Obama's gradual shrinking from the kind of principled stands he started with. He's wearing the lapel pin now ... honestly, the presence or lack of which should never have been a story, never mind a major issue, but once it did he was going to get grief over it either way -- if he didn't wear it, he wasn't patriotic, and if he did, he was a flip-flopper. So why not leave it off? But no ... I swear to god, if he dresses up in camo and goes hunting a la John Kerry, I'm pitching myself off signal hill. (Incidentally, scrutinize the picture of John McCain here: do you see a flag pin? I guess he hates America, too).


I won't catalogue any of the other ways in which Obama has started pandering, reversing positions, and otherwise lurching to the right -- lord knows, you can pick all that up from conservative pundits gleefully fitting the senator out for a pair of flip-flops.

No, I'm just disappointed that his campaign felt compelled to respond to The New Yorker with the language of offense when this was a golden opportunity to rise above the fray like he has at times in the past: to point out that this is satire, and to further note the simplistic thought that underwrites the assumptions being satirized -- that Michelle Obama's ostensible lack of "pride" in America translates into black militancy, that a reluctance to be a jingoistic flag-waver translates into a hatred of country, that being Muslim translates into extremism. I would dearly love to hear Obama stand up and say, "I am not offended that people think I may be Muslim. But I am offended, as all Americans should be, by the suggestion that being Muslim necessarily makes you a potential terrorist. It's the equivalent of seeing every rural Midwesterner as a potential Timothy McVeigh."

Because, really, that's what The New Yorker is saying -- it's pointing to the absurdity and indeed stupidity of that mode of thought.

I suppose Jonathan Swift is lucky he's not writing today. Half the readers of "A Modest Proposal" would try to get him arrested, and the other half would be eagerly flicking on the Food Network in hopes of picking up some recipes.