Many have found it offensive, repugnant, or revolting. New Yorker subscriptions, predictably, have been canceled. Both presidential candidates’ campaigns have characterized it as in poor taste – one because not to condemn it would seem to be endorsing scurrility, and the other because, unanswered, it could damage the image the candidate is at pains to project. Both should lighten up. It’s classic satire in the best tradition of the genre.

Where was our defense of Islamic sensibilities worldwide when Muslims objected so strenuously to the images of the prophet Mohammed with a turban shaped like a bomb? That’s a classic example of the old aphorism, “It depends on whose ox is being gored.”

Satire certainly is nothing new. It’s been with us at least since Aristophanes and Juvenal. It relies on humor, irony, sarcasm, and exaggeration, among many other techniques, to criticize or skewer its object. Satire is a parasite; it feeds upon things that are disagreeable, ridiculous, or hypocritical to the satirist. It can range from goofy to bitter. Americans, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce notwithstanding, tend to be a bit more robust and straightforward in their disagreements and criticisms, and have never been quite as keen on the indirection and irony inherent in satire as, say, the British, who’ve always done it brilliantly.

Jonathan Swift, an Irishman and the dean of the Anglican cathedral in Dublin, published in 1729 an essay titled “A Modest Proposal.” Deeply upset by the ineffectual plans of upper-class government officials –  “Projectors,” they were called – actually to do anything to relieve the plight of poverty-ridden Irish families, he proposed in his essay that the children of the poor up to one year old be sold to the wealthy for food. It, like the Obama cartoon, was decried as in very poor taste. But it pointed, as nothing previous had, to the reality of the widespread poverty in Ireland.

Gilbert and Sullivan expose the stupid inequities of the traditional English caste system in their operettas. Monty Python clownishly lacerates the sober-sided myth of the Holy Grail, as his knights trot around the countryside without horses; and in The Life of Brian hilariously imagines the career of a young Jewish rebel born at the same time as, and a few stables away from, Jesus. Brian hit fairly close to home when it was released in 1979, goring many Christians’ oxen, and was roundly denounced. It’s still one of the funniest satires ever produced.

Beyond the Fringe was a quartet of Oxford students who brightened the early 60s and still occupy space in my truck CD player. Some of their stuff was ridiculous – a one-legged man appearing at a casting call for the lead in a Tarzan film – but other routines perfectly imitated then-Prime Minister MacMillan’s bleary diction and preachy pronouncements about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack: “You just pop into a big brown paper bag, you see?” A disconsolate British coal miner, who’d wanted to be a judge, but “didn’t have the Latin for the judgin’,” bemoans the fact that in mining, “when you’re too old and sick and stupid to do your job properly, well, you have to go; whereas with the judgin’, it’s just the opposite.”

Those criticizing the New Yorker cartoon as being in bad taste are perhaps right, but they’re missing something important: If satire doesn’t sting somebody, it’s not satire. A literary chocolate éclair, possibly, but not satire. What this cartoon is, quite clearly, is a preemptive strike against the shadowy Swift Boat warriors of the right and the innuendo attack bloggers who suggest the Democratic candidate is a radical closet Muslim because he once went to a primary school run by Muslims; that he does not recite the pledge of allegiance; et cetera.

Notice how the attack is framed: There is something inherently subversive and anti-American about Islam, and that Barack Obama, a Muslim mole, is in thrall to radical Arab mullahs in the Middle East. This is the same technique used during the last two presidential campaigns to frame taxes as an onerous burden of which we need to be relieved. Neither is true; but if you repeat either long enough, it will become conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom is a problem. As the immortal Ray Goulding once said during a Bob & Ray routine, “I don’t know why the network places so much faith in the opinions of the man on the street.” The folks who mask their prejudices by repeating the juicy information they receive from various blogs and at least one national network don’t read New Yorker in the first place. It’s like deploring roadside litter by writing a letter to the editor; litterbugs don’t read newspapers. The irony and satire in the cartoon thus will go right over the heads of thousands of Americans who, though educated at the public expense, believe implicitly the cybergossip depicting two Harvard Law graduates as dangerous radicals who privately dance on the American flag.

See H.L Mencken on the subject of American good taste, and pray that satire will never die.