Are they really this stupid? I’m talking about the editors who decided on Barry Blitt’s cover for this week’s The New Yorker — the one depicting Barack Obama in a turban, his wife Michelle done up as terrorist with an Afro, the two of them gleefully standing in the Oval Office while an American flag burns in the fireplace.

The New Yorker has put out controversial covers before — remember the famous Art Spiegelman Hasidic man embracing a black woman on the 1993 Valentine’s Day cover? They missed their mark back then (more than one of us never quite got the point), but this time they didn’t even aim in the right direction.

Forget the racism for the moment (it’s there, but others can deal with that). I’m interested in the editors’ defense of the cover, which is to claim it’s “satire.” Talk about a weak excuse. It’s up there with students who write a poor paper and then protest the professor’s reaction (a bad grade) by saying, “But wait. Listen. This is what I meant.”

For whom is it satire? For the chattering classes that read this elite magazine every week and already support Obama? Talk about preaching to the converted. Assume for the moment that all New Yorker readers “get” the message of the cover (that there are bigots who are crazy enough to think Obama is secretly a Muslim terrorist). So what? What about non-New Yorker readers (the editors clearly don’t know they exist) who end up seeing this cover and don’t get its putative point?

It’s too bad that The New Yorker editors apparently know so little about how images work — in general, within art, but more particularly, as objects to be manipulated in the age of the Internet. More than words, images, once released into the public sphere, take on a powerful life of their own. Unlike paintings (which are special kinds of images that invite lingering and ruminating), images like The New Yorker cover hit the viewer quickly, decisively, and all at once. The first response is always and without exception the strongest one, and it’s very difficult for it to be fully erased later on. Images have a longer and stronger shelf life in the mind than do words.

Literary satirists can be as complex, subtle, and indirect as they care to be. They have all the time in the world — provided them by the nature of words, which come in sequence, over time. Like cats, they can playfully toy with their prey. (Think Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or his The Battle of the Books). Readers cease reading when something is boring, but will read reams as long as the satirist is a master of the art of writing.

The visual satirist (the caricaturist), on the other hand, even when he or she is a bad artist, can have an enormously instantaneous and powerful impact. Caricaturists lure people by looks — by creating disturbing, long-lasting, and powerful images whose nature is to work their wily effects as a whole and all at once. Whatever the caricaturist’s underlying message, the image will predominate. Honoré Daumier, the greatest visual satirist ever, was wise enough always to aim directly for his target (we know right away that he loathes the king) and leave fooling around with subtlety to the writers.

Wiser than Daumier, The New Yorker editors want viewers of their cover to deny what they see (“the terrorist Obama and his wife are in the Oval Office”) and replace it with what they know (“Look at that terrorist Obama, but be sure to remember that’s only what stupid bigots think.”)

The problem lies with what people do or do not already know.