All You New Yorkers Are the Same

From New York magazine's letters page:

We got 46 letters last week like: "How dare you, you arrogant Establishment jerks, print such an outrageous political cartoon as a cover? Shame on you! May your magazine perish within the year." What had we done? Nothing, it turns out. Those letters were meant for The New Yorker, which put on its cover the now-infamous image of Barack and Michelle Obama as gun-toting radicals. Now we hope they'll forward our mail.

In other New Yorker cover news, an Utne editor chimed in and pointed out that blogs by illustrators were lively in defense of the cover's artist.

Steven Heller:

In satire, however, context is everything--a delicate balance, to be sure. It must be pitch perfect, but not everyone need agree on whether it succeeds. Nonetheless, as a cover of The New Yorker, a magazine known for many covers, cartoons, and articles that "expose and discredit vice or folly," it's difficult to see this as anything other than what it is.

Steven Brodner encourages people to e-mail The New Yorker to balance "the Low IQ Club," which is bombing the magazine with e-mails.