Tom Avila is a contributing writer to Metro Weekly news magazine and a staffer for the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA). 

So … I’ll admit it. I laughed.

The first time I saw the Obama cover of the New Yorker, I laughed. Not some big loud guffaw. I didn’t double over or anything. I didn’t e-mail to anyone a link to the Web site where I saw it. I saw it, chuckled in that way anyone with a degree in literature is trained to laugh at covers of the New Yorker, and moved on.

It’s not that I was oblivious to the minor tempest the cartoon image of Sen. Obama and his camouflage-clad wife was starting. But frankly, in the grand scheme of all the things going on in the world, I felt it was OK to move on. To some, that admission makes me a bad person. Or, at the very least, a person who lacks the cultural sensitivity that would allow me to understand all the ways in which this cartoon was more than a commentary on the climate of fear that leads some to automatically assume that being black or bumping fists or, dare I say it, being a Muslim, is the equivalent of being a terrorist.

Let’s be very realistic. Before Sept. 11, 2001, it is safe to assume that the majority of the population of the United States had significantly fewer opportunities to learn about the Muslim faith and the various faces it wears in this country and abroad. Despite that shift, the fear inspired by that fall day continues to exist. The Muslim-equals-terrorist stereotype exists just as the single-black-mother-equals-welfare stereotype exists, just as the gay-male-equals-pedophile stereotype exists.

And as the media storm picked up speed, that initial chuckle of mine turned into something quite different. It turned not into fear, but into dread.

See, to my mind, the cover was intended to be an illustration of the ridiculous fears we allow to distract us from the real boogie monsters out in the world right now. The media frenzy of the moment pulls our attention from all the things we should be paying attention to – like which presidential candidate has a solid economic plan, environmental strategy, education package and platform on D.C. voting rights.

Instead, we devote air time and column inches and corners of the blogosphere to worrying that someone, somewhere will not understand the purportedly highbrow humor of the New Yorker. After all, what if people who already believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim extremist see the cartoon and view it as confirmation that he is a Muslim extremist? What if they hang it on their walls or in their lockers? What if they laugh out loud, double over and send a Web link to a friend?

Or, what if they read that sentence where I’ve emphasized the word “is” and, because of that formatting decision, remember only that I wrote “he is a Muslim”?

At this point, the easy thing for me to do would be to wrap this all up with a lesson about respecting your audience. Trust they are as intelligent and capable of grasping subtle humor and nuance as you. But you know that. More importantly, they know that.

I could point out the irony that all of the pointing, polling and blogging about whether this image was offensive is, in many ways, validation of the point the cartoonist was trying to make. It’s done a pretty good job of distracting folks from all the other stories that could be being told with all that newshole.

Or, I could do this. I could do what a few critics have suggested that would make the  cover work. Some have offered that the Obama cartoon would have communicated its intention more clearly if the image had been being held by any number of conservative Republican Party politicos.

Instead, in this column where I am spending time writing about how much time has been wasted writing about this issue, I’m going to ask you to hold it in your hand. (That’s kind of a figurative suggestion unless you actually have a copy. I’ll give extra points for that.)

What do you honestly think about the image? Don’t analyze it or put it through whatever filter you use when judging your own work or doing the thing we all do where we mentally edit or re-shoot a story. Just look at it and ask yourself, “Does this cover mean anything at all to me as a citizen of this country?” And, if so, what is it?

Like the proverbial ink blot pictures, there is obviously no right answer here. But ask yourself this. If every editor, news director, producer and blogger did the exact thing you just did, how many stories would have actually run about this issue? Was the Obama cover covered as it was because it was truly viewed as a critical public discussion or are we all just too ready to follow one another down the rabbit hole?

Consider that the readership of the New Yorker magazine sits at something over 1 million readers. The population of the United States is somewhere around 300 million. If the Obama cartoon hadn’t hit the headlines, to borrow a phrase, would it have even made a sound?

Again, there’s no right answer to this, though I have a sneaking suspicion I would have had to find something else to write about this month.

Tom Avila is a staffer for the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. The essays that he writes are his own opinions and not those of his employer … particularly when, like this, he writes nothing about LGBT coverage.