The most famous The New Yorker magazine image ever clearly has to be a 1976 illustration by Saul Steinberg for the cover depicting the view from 9th Avenue (the West Side) of Manhattan.
The landscape of the rest of the country is shown as mere random places on a blank landscape between the Hudson River and the Pacific ocean.
Having grown up in the NYC suburbs, I can tell you it was an absolutely accurate visualization of how New Yorkers thought of the country.
Jersey was over there, and there were some mountains most of the way across the country somewhere, D.C. was on the way to Florida, and on the other side of the ocean were three countries: China, Japan, and Russia.
That New Yorker cover has competition.
Sweeping Twitter is the image below, a cartoon depicting a passenger in a plane announcing that the pilots are too smug, and therefore passengers should fly the plane. The cartoonist’s name is Will McPhail:
It is a not very subtle hit at Trump’s victory, a victory viewed by the cartoonist and 99.99% of New Yorker readers as a victory of all those people who live on the other side of the Hudson, the people who are too stupid to run the country and live in Nowheresville.
Because running the country is just like flying a plane, apparently. And the experts who have run it so far are the only ones who can do it competently.
The reaction from liberals has been as expected – that the cartoon is a metaphor for Trump’s victory by the Stupid Class.
The reaction from others has been pretty snarky and mocking, particularly in response to this tweet of the cartoon by Ben Taub:
That reference in the tweet above to “The Flight 93 Election” refers to an article at the Claremont Review in early September, The Flight 93 Election:
2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
There are some parodies of the New Yorker cartoon, including this one by “Our Lawyer” Ron Coleman:
Here’s one I created:
Can you think of any other “appropriate” captions?
Here are some reactions on Twitter:
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