From an insightful article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
If the argument is that The New Yorker cover was meant to depict the radical right's ludicrous portrayal of Obama as an apologist for Islam and its fundamentalists, then the question we might pose is this: Would Blitt consider it good satirical strategy to condemn child sexual abuse by depicting a young adolescent boy and an older man, obviously just having had sex, fist-bumping with knowing pleasure? In what world would that constitute satire rather than a failed imagination? Ultimately, all the lame responses by Blitt and Remnick don't persuade because of the sharp limits of their morning-after reasoning.
Good intentions are always present, even in the naïve, and so it must be that Blitt's artistic endeavor, Remnick's printing of it, and the responses of both can most parsimoniously be explained as ignorance about the mind and how it learns. But as our worlds get more complex, as we know more about what the outside does to our inside, it is the moral responsibility of the artist to know about how art is received by its intended audience.
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