This is
Vanity Fair's
current "cover", an overt parody of the now ubiquitously discussed
New Yorker cartoon.
The editors write:
We here at Vanity Fair maintain a kind of affectionate rivalry with our downstairs neighbors at The New Yorker. We play softball every year, compete for some of the same stories, and share an elevator bank. (You can tell the ones who are headed to the 20th floor by their Brooklyn pallor and dog-eared paperbacks.)
And heaven knows we’ve published our share of scandalous images, on the cover and otherwise. So we’ve been watching the kerfuffle over last week’s New Yorker cover with a mixture of empathy and better-you-than-us relief.
One thing that's interesting about this, although nobody with any stroke at all outside of
Ralph Nader would ever mention such a thing, is the idea of collusion between media outlets. Nay, did Harrogate say collusion? Better to say, when a small handful owns the whole shabang, you're gonna get the same tripe rolled out in slightly different packaging. When was the last time we were able to say the major television and print media did a legitimate service for the nation?
But those days are over. Once they got rid of who was by far the most liberal President in the post WWII Era,
Richard Nixon (that's right, Tricky Dick), for being more overt about his criminality than other Presidents, that was pretty much it. From there on out it's been water-carrier city. Hello ditto-heads, and a carnivalesque homage about what a great servant ye were, when ye die. Etc.
But stay! lo and forsooth, enough of such things that Readers don't care about, and to the Cover itself.
Jeralyn at TalkLeft writes of the cover:
I think the VF cartoon is much gentler and less offensive than the New Yorker cartoon.
Also, the McCain cartoon has more truths: John McCain is old, Cindy McCain did have a love affair with pills (even though in the cartoon the pills she is holding are for her husband) and McCain does admire George Bush.
What would you have added to the McCain cartoon to clearly represent the "politics of fear"?
Well. Harrogate is going to, as someone said in
Office Space, "GO AHEAD and disagree" with her premise. After all, there really isn't that much you can make up about McCain that is harsher than the truth of what he represents.
But soft! What's that? Jeralyn's deeper premise is right, though? Does
Vanity Fair really have the gall to treat the burning Constitution as a caricature, after all we've already seen?
Okay, to Jeralyn's last question, Harrogate will answer.
In truth they should have depicted, on a War Room type screen, an image of a huge crowd about to be landed upon by a nuclear warhead. Or, to make the same point, simply a picture next to the one of Bush, except this one depicting McCain having lunch and laughing it up with William Kristol.
But then, how far off would those images have really been?
