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If Bernard Parks either composed or approved of the whining letter (see below) about The New Yorker that appeared over his name this morning in the Los Angeles Times, he should lower his head to half-mast, wheel on his well-shined right shoe and depart, wordlessly, from the room.
His dapper, button-down image suffered a needless hit. Has he fallen into the hands of advisors who seriously think this way?
As if this were 1950 in the Deep South, the 64-year-old Mr. Parks, who remembers and probably witnessed the bad times for blacks, invoked the hideous imagery of those days because he, too, like many fellow liberals, was born handicapped — without a sense of humor, or irony, or satire, as we said yesterday.
Even if you were going for the girl vote and the racist vote, Mr. Parks, 58 centuries of racial/cultural progress have been achieved in the last 58 years. Watermelon? Fried chicken?
I Will Speak Slowly and Loudly
For the benefit of those who stepped out of the room, The New Yorker — the finest English language weekly in America, I will contend — has been a solidly liberal magazine for 83 years. Not a nick in its political landscape. A conservative could not get in the front door of The New Yorker with a cannon. One would think that a moderately informed candidate for office, who may never have even flipped through its smart and sassy pages, would have, at worst, a dim inkling of the fact.
Subtle understanding is still another gift that has shrewdly evaded the predictable DNAs of liberals.
As even children know by this stage of the cleverest week in the history of The New Yorker, the liberal gods who edit the magazine approved of a satirical cover of Their Guy for President in a mockery of alleged mischaracterizations of Their Guy for President by the right.
This is not complex.
Uh 1, Uh 2, Uh 3
To repeat, the editors of The New Yorker want Mr. Obama to be the next President. They are on your side, Mr. Parks. The second rule of athletics is that it is not good form to slug a teammate in the kisser, especially when he is trying to aid you.
Tinhorn candidates in ghost towns behave this way. The more suave Mr. Parks — I envy his moustache — is known for comporting himself responsibly, except for this cheap departure from common sense. His letter served the same purpose as driving up to a fire and inquiring, “Anybody got a match?”
Here was a rookie-type gaffe in judgment. Like throwing a cream pie in his own face. A mature candidate for an office as powerful as a seat on the County Board of Supervisors would have treated this subject with dismissive, arm’s-length moral instinctiveness instead of surrendering to his base emotions. You don’t have to be Rodin, or even Dobie Gillis, to produce the correct answer. This is not multiple-choice. You do not have to consult your wife, “What do you think, Baby?” Mr. Parks should have flicked the temptation off his shoulder as if it were a dead fly.
Instead, he kowtowed to yahoo mob mentality, which does not augur well for our future, yours and mine. This was unbecoming of an ostensibly businesslike gentleman who usually has seemed to know when to remain above the fray.
Gonna be a painfully long 4 years in Newspaperland if Mr. Parks defeats Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas in November for the seat held now by Yvonne Brathwaite Burke. Not only did Ms. Brathwaite Burke, a practicing public relations disaster herself, endorse the City Councilman, the fast-aging lady must be giving her presumed protege lessons in bum judgment.
Mr. Parks’ letter:
While considering which voters are and aren’t smart enough to know that the cover of the latest edition of The New Yorker is satire, please also consider: Not long ago, a group decided who was white enough and male enough to vote at all.
Suggesting that these “clueless people,” as you call them, who “weren’t going to vote for Obama anyway” are the only ones affected by the portrayal of Sen. Barack Obama as a Muslim extremist and his wife, Michelle, as a gun-toting militant, is highly irresponsible. There is a thin line. A turban and an Afro today may be a watermelon and a piece of fried chicken tomorrow.
I dispute columnist Tim Rutten’s assertion that I called for a boycott of the magazine for political reasons. I have consistently defended civil rights throughout my career.
