Psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji, in the Chronicle Review, takes issue with The New Yorker‘s recent cover depicting Barack Obama in Muslim garb fist-pumping his wife Michelle who is dressed as a terrorist. The flag burns in the fireplace of the Oval Office while a portrait of Osama bin Laden looks on. Banaji says the cover’s intended satire is a failure on the part of the magazine’s editors to recognize what actually happens in the human brain when it interact with such images.
From the Chronicle Review:
If he [cartoonist Barry Blitt] were cognizant of the facts about how the mind works, the simple associations that typify the brain’s ordinary connection-making, he might have thought differently before he sketched the first flame in that fireplace. If he had paid attention to a few of the dozens of experiments available — even in the popular media — that describe how the mind learns and believes, he and his boss wouldn’t have responded as they did to the questions posed to them the day after the cover appeared.
I am, as are most others in my social class, an emphatic defender of the arts as a primary vehicle to irritate, aggravate, and offend. I have been trained to step back and rethink my reaction to that which jolts and nauseates me. I know that, in such moments especially, I must look within for a possible inability to transcend ingrained values. For that reason, and because we who read The Chronicle are likely to be among the staunchest supporters of the First Amendment, we must, of course, defend the right of The New Yorker to print the image it did.
What we need not defend is the absurd naïveté about the basic facts of information transmission that accompanied the reasoning behind the drawing.
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