New Yorker, Politics of Fear

The cartoon showing Barack (in turban) and Michelle (packing serious heat) burning an American flag in the Oval Office is dangerous. The effort to satirize politics of fear is valiant, but I'm afraid it's come up short. Satire is something that people have difficulty trying to understand. It's easy to regurgitate the definition that satire exposes vice by ridiculing it, and it's even easier to write off offensive material as "satire," but it's not easy to digest what it all means. In this case, satire missed the point, has become ineffective, and now poses serious problems.
I recently read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for a class. The work is sometimes classified as satire, but other times classified as racist. In order for Twain to attack racism, he had to use racist themes, words, images, whatever. For this reason, debates still swirl about Twain's intents. Is it racist or anti-racist? Those who think it's anti-racist end up attributing more intelligence to their audiences than is due. But not everyone "gets it." In reality, the text can be blatantly racist, offending some and developing stereotypes in others. With satire, authors can't count on preferred/intended readings. Because of satire's capability for being misunderstood, the New Yorker cartoon will produce wide-ranging, unfavorable effects.
I know I'm not the only one who has received those ridiculous mass chain e-mails smearing Obama as some sort of undercover, Manchurian-Candidate-esque agent of eeevil who is a small part of a much larger decades-long scheme to convert the US of A into a Nation of Islam. Or something like that. This is laughable, but it should seem threatening. There are probably people out there who actually believe that. When they see a political cartoon of Obama in Muslim-garb burning American flags, no light bulb goes off for them. There is no printed title ("Politics of Fear") on the cover to act as a disclaimer. We can't pretend that everyone who sees that cartoon will be able to identify it as satire. For the insane conspiracy theorists who go to fantastic lengths to smear Barack, the images on the New Yorker will seem like evidence.
When satire misses the point, it often reinforces the vices it hopes to destroy.
Sure the chain e-mails are stupid. Yeah the cartoon is stupid too. But so are a lot of (*ahem* ultra-right, hick-ass, knights-of-the-klan) Americans. And that's what I'm worried about.