Glenn Reynolds rounds the whole thing up with what looks like one of the longest recent posts on Instapundit ever (or recently). It’s not surprising, because there’s so much going on there, so many angles, so much to munch. It’s stuff like this that always makes me chuckle at the concept that so many believe that so much in the world is predictable and that history in any kind of sense ever “came to an end.”
James Poniewozik, who writes a Time mag blog, actually hit the point I was going to make, before I could:
Judging the cover as a cover is pretty easy by me: it’s a pretty obvious and dumb stunt, the kind of subtle-as-a-brick cover the New Yorker has been doing now and then since the Tina Brown era, when it ran an Art Spiegelman cover of a Chasid kissing a black woman on a post-Crown Heights New York subway.
The New Yorker has gotten a lot better since Tina Brown moved on, but on this point I agree with Poniewozik. Like me, evidently, he’s been stewing over that cover for a while. But for what the Obama cover did to peel back more reality beneath the political, racial and religious posturing… perhaps that’s actually good magazine publishing?
UPDATE: Adweek is in accord: “As a cover, it’s attention getting, yes. But as inspired satire, that takes the visual image to another level of metaphor, it falls far short.”
