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Showing posts with the label New Yorker

Sandy Hook Revisited

Documents just released years after a shooter murdered his mother, 20 students, 6 teachers and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School have been made available to Connecticut politicians and the general public in answer to a legal action brought by a persistent Hartford Courant. The documents had been carefully tucked away for five years and clearly point to the social and mental deficiencies of the shooter. All reports should have been released soon after the shooter’s suicide, because none of the information contained therein could have prejudiced any legal action. It is impossible to put a dead mass-shooter on trial for murder. In the absence of the necessary data unearthed above, a public trial of sorts, some of it sprinkled with absurd speculations, was conducted entirely in the mass media, and eventually one of the weapons used in the mass slaughter, an AR15 semi-automatic rifle , was pronounced guilty and banned in Connecticut.

The New Yorker Story

While barrels of ink have been spilled over the New Yorker cover, not much has been said about the story that appeared in the magazine. From the point of view of the publisher, the cover was a clever device. It certainly produced a good amount of controversy. If you are a magazine, it’s always better to be noticed, and the cover was the equivalent of a bared breast. Cartoons of this kind always carry a mixed message. The partisans on the right were not unpleased, and for those on the left, the cover made their point: that much of the criticism issuing from the fever swamps on the right was silly, cartoonish. Michelle Obama is not, as pictured, a bomb throwing 60’s radical; Sen. Barack Obama is not a practicing Muslim but a Christian politician. Even Fox News, generally held up by the left as the simulacrum of right wingnut politics, acknowledged that this kind of criticism was unfair. The real problem with the cover was that it detracted from a fair and fulsome account of Sen. Barack ...