In a world awash in random irony and snarky cynicism, it is wise to consider the healing words of David Remnick, editor of
The New Yorker. Defending satire and his choice of cover art, Remnick told
National Public Radio that he disagreed with those critics who thought that rank and file Americans would not get the humor in the cover. Yes, the Obamas are pictured as terrorists with a flaming American flag and photo of Bin Laden in the background. But the magazine does not mean that the Obamas are really terrorists. The artist and editor mean the opposite.
Remnick objected to the notion that only sophisticated New Yorkers would get the satire. He expressed the more egalitarian notion that even people in the heartland would get it.
But the record of Americans "getting it" is spotty at best. One of the most celebrated cases involves a magazine's publication of a short story by Shirley Jackson called
"The Lottery." This chilling little story, which first appeared in 1948, remains a staple of high school literature classes. Its use of foreshadowing and suspense, its tight construction and its cold brevity make it a perfect vehicle for instruction.
"The Lottery" tells the story of a small rural community that conducts a yearly ritual. Each summer the townspeople gather in the square and one of them wins the lottery, with lots chosen out of an old black box. The winner? Oh, she gets stoned to death.
The story, a fictional critique of the kind of scapegoating carried out by the Nazis a few years earlier, caused quite a stir among readers, a ruckus unprecedented in the history of the magazine, and one that Jackson would write about at length.
Her essay called "Biography of a Story" begins this way: "On the morning of June 28, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. ... I opened the box, took out a couple of bills and a letter or two, talked to the postmaster for a few minutes, and left, never supposing that it was the last time for months that I was to pick up the mail without an active feeling of panic. ... It was not my first published story, nor my last, but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name."
I won't wait any longer to reveal what you may by now have guessed, that "The Lottery" first appeared in
The New Yorker magazine, and that hundreds of nasty letters came to Jackson, including one from her mother, who did not "get" what she was doing.
"I have all the letters still," Shirley wrote, "and if they could be considered to give any accurate cross section of the reading public, or the reading public of
The New Yorker, or even the reading public of one issue of
The New Yorker, I would stop writing now."
She goes on, "Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at. ...
The New Yorker never published any comment of any kind about the story in the magazine, but did issue one publicity release saying that the story had received more mail than any piece of fiction they had ever published."
What follows is a scary sampling of the letters:
Kansas: "Will you please tell me the locale and the year of the custom?"
Oregon: "Where in heaven's name does there exist such barbarity as described in the story?"
New York: "Do such tribunal rituals still exist and if so where?"
And on, and on, and on.
Ten years before publication of "The Lottery," another fictional story bamboozled an American audience. A 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles of "The War of the Worlds," a dramatic narration of an invasion of Earth by Martian monsters, sent listeners into panic and inspired journalist Dorothy Thompson to cite the event as "the story of the century."
She wrote in the November 2, 1938 edition of the
New York Herald Tribune:
"All unwittingly Mr. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nation-wide panic.
"They have demonstrated more potently than any argument ... the appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery.
"They have cast a brilliant and cruel light upon the failure of popular education.
"They have shown up the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve and ignorance of thousands.
"They have uncovered the primeval fears lying under the thinnest surface of the so-called civilized man.
"They have shown that man, when the victim of his own gullibility, turns to the government to protect him against his own errors of judgment.
"The newspapers are correct in playing up this story over every other news event in the world. It is the story of the century."
In an National Public Radio interview with a group of women supporting John McCain, it was dispiriting to hear people insist that Obama was raised as a Muslim in spite of the cold evidence to the contrary. When those people pass a magazine rack and see the image on
The New Yorker cover, Mr. Remnick, they will, I guess, nod approvingly rather than see it as a sophisticated piece of satire.
I apologize for misspelling David Remnick's name. Errors tend to...
