The New Yorker’s Grotesque Cover Art

I enjoy the New Yorker in the way one finds amusement in overhearing the left-wing students at the table next to yours in a coffee shop talking about public transportation, social issues, and capitalism while sipping breves. A turn through the magazine’s pages offers views I understand in an abstract, academic sense but cannot fathom sharing. Political and cultural voyeurism — maybe that’s the best way to describe my relationship with the New Yorker. That said, the cover art for the October 17 issue is genuinely repulsive.

Depicting a darkened classroom with a shut door, the cover shows a teacher and young children huddled along the wall under the blackboard. The unseen menace of a school shooter is implied in the glaring white light pressing into the room from the hallway. An American flag hangs limply while the abandoned desks show drawings of flowers, trees, a house — things of life. There is naught but fear and yet acceptance in the body language of the students and teacher. The kids look downward with eyes closed, and the teacher looks to the door. The concept is as objectionable as it is indicative of the Left’s wonted assumption of helplessness regarding the rare but nationally traumatic atrocities of school shootings.

In fairness, magazines often use emotionally charged imagery on their covers, National Review included. But the New Yorker cover is arbitrary emotional manipulation of such a high order that one must question the decision to print it.

When we ran “The Dark Side” cover earlier this month, depicting Biden with fists clenched at the podium, with two Marines standing behind him, all in stark red and black, it was to reflect what we were discussing in our pages — the direction in which Democrats want to take the country.

But the New Yorker just lets its cover be, with nothing to offer in its pages expanding on the subject of school shootings beyond a portfolio of photographs by Greg Miller, called “Waiting for the Bus in Uvalde,” accompanied by a writer’s short text. The photographer, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, began photographing his own child and her peers as they waited for the school bus in their Connecticut town. “What world were [the parents] sending their daughter into?” the writer asks, expressing the parents’ worry — by implication, the worry that their child wouldn’t return that day. Three months after the shooting at Robb Elementary, Miller traveled to Uvalde, where he took photos of kids in the pre-dawn darkness as they awaited their buses. The photos show a girl alone or pairs of girls; the exception is a photo taken a little later in the morning (as the caption indicates) of five boys on bikes in a driveway, sunlight on their unsmiling faces. As with much of what the New Yorker produces, the portfolio is well constructed and beautifully laid out. However, all of this craftsmanship moves toward a sensationalist and lurid end that implies: Your children aren’t safe. Be afraid.

The pre-sunrise photographs are grim constructions with a wartime cast, with heavy shadow and the harsh, almost interrogative lighting of street lamps or headlights. The children are alone but for each other — an adult-less world — with the dark seeming to consume them. No hope, no salvific bus pulling up in the final frame, just tiny people abandoned to their fate.

In the final paragraph of text, the writer relates what the mother of a child who was at Robb Elementary (and escorted to safety) on the day of the shooting said to her: “A month after classes resumed, Hoskins told me that her anxiety has eased, although she doesn’t think it will ever go away. Her daughters, like children all over the United States, are becoming accustomed to a world where ‘nothing feels safe anymore,’ Hoskins said. ‘It’s how they’re growing up. It’s their new normal.’”

My parents, a cop and a jail instructor, made sure I was aware of man’s limitless capacity for evil well before many of my classmates. But at the same time, those things were “out there,” and my parents were between those things and my siblings and me. In that way, we lived wonderfully sheltered lives, whereas today, many kids are sent to school knowing that their own parents think it’s unsafe. It’s difficult not to think this an abdication of responsibility on the parents’ part. We as adults know that we cannot shield children from all harm, but we shouldn’t encourage anxiety and a sense of defenselessness either. The common thread between the New Yorker portfolio and the cover is the adults’ failure to inspire any feeling of protection in the children. There’s a point in a child’s development where he or she realizes that mom and dad are not all-powerful, that they don’t know everything. We should do everything to forestall that moment, because it’s the ugliest truth a kid will face and to have it happen at ages in single digits is a tragedy.

Beyond the cover’s manipulation, it’s really nothing more than a high form of clickbait. The cover implicitly promises something within the pages — proposals, a discussion, something connected to the terror — and fails to provide even fragmentary resolve, let alone catharsis. Instead, all the reader is left with is fear of the unknown and the words of other parents who feel powerless in keeping their children safe. It conveys a mindset that views the nation’s youth as living in mortal danger every day and adults as able to offer children nothing but shared helplessness.

Perverse.