Subscribe to Breaking NewsTeam Obama Needs Some Ellison
The Obama camp needs some Ralph Ellison this morning. The author of Invisible Man was also a noted essayist and his “Change the Joke, Slip the Yoke” has this line about the country’s call for independence:
“For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality.”
If anything about this election cycle stands out it is the “joke that always lies between appearance and reality” and Obama’s team needs to remember that when it comes to the most New Yorker magazine cover. Playing up all the kooky emails out there, the cover has Michelle Obama decked out like an Angela Davis clone, an American flag burning in a fireplace, Obama dressed in Muslim garb, and the couple doing their patented “terrorist fist jab.”
Instead of laughing it off and wondering how come the cartoonist didn’t include any pictures of Malcolm X or Karl Marx, Obama’s people went for the tasteless charge. Heck even John McCain’s campaign called the cover out. Sigh. We are in for complete boredom if no one running for the White House has a sense of humor.
I look forward to the follow up magazine cover on McCain that will highlight the ironic awareness of the joke that lies between the appearance of McCain’s position on marriage equality and the reality of his performance as a twice married man.
One isn’t required to be an advocate of same-sex marriage to know how to use the weakness of the argument against equality to one’s advantage.
Don’t let matters of taste stop you from being elected, Senator Obama. It hasn’t stopped anyone else.