Vanity Fair McCain Cover Falls Flat

Vanity Fair has apparently taken up the challenge of trying to craft the most boring, unfunny, and offensive cover ever on a mainstream magazine. Unlike the New Yorker, the Vanity Fair McCain cover will not actually be on an issue of the magazine.

Unlike the New Yorker cover that had Barack and Michelle Obama playing dress up, he as an ayatollah, she as a Black Panther terrorist, the Vanity Fair fake cover has John and Cindy McCain dressed normally. However John McCain is leaning on a walker and Cindy McCain has a bottle of pills at hand. George W. Bush's portrait adorns the wall above the fireplace in which a copy of the Constitution burns.

The Vanity Fair cover fails completely as a parody on a number of levels. First, it fails from being divorced from any relationship to reality. For comedy to work, it has to have some basis in fact.

For instance John McCain, while seventy two years old, has the vigor of a man far younger than those advanced years. Parodying John McCain as being decrepit doesn't fit any of the known facts about him. It is true that John McCain has sustained injuries from his five and a half years of torture in Hanoi, but that is not a place where comedy can go without being revealed as mean and cruel.

Mean and cruel, however, is where Vanity Fair chose to go by depicting Cindy McCain with a pill bottle. It s not generally known, but Cindy McCain once succumbed to prescription pain killer addiction. This kind of addiction is not something one willingly indulges in, unlike a heroin or cocaine addict. It usually happens, as with Ms. McCain, because a medical condition or injury causes pain so unbearable that it can only be dulled by pain killers, which can become an addiction long after the medical condition goes away.