By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2  

Not everyone has a sense of humor. It is like natural intelligence. Not everyone is smart. Some people in fact are just naturally thick. It does not mean at all that they in any way inferior, or less charming, or any less handsome, or any less strong or successful. But the fact is that human beings have different talents and capacities. This is one of the discoveries of life, especially for teachers. I know mothers are reluctant to accept this fact about their children; but it is true.

Satire is even more difficult. It is a form of humor that rests on innuendo. But there is a central rule about humor: it is not humorous if it requires explanation.

This week the cover of the New Yorker magazine depicted Senator Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as Muslim terrorists. She sported a huge Afro, 1960s style, and totted a machine gun. He was robed in Middle Eastern garb. They were standing in the Oval Office of the White House. An American flag burned in the fireplace over which was a portrait of Osama Bin Laden. It was not funny. In fact, it was a satire gone wildly astray.

The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, was quickly forced to explain that the cover was intended to show the absurdity of these images. But they are images that reflect a groundswell of anti-Obama propaganda that circulates widely around the internet and on the fringes of the political campaigns. In the liberal Upper West side of Manhattan the cover might seem an amusing put down of popular conservative perceptions of Obama, but not to anyone out in the real political world. Not only was it not funny, it was in fact more akin to pouring paraffin on a smoldering fire.

Will it harm Barak Obama? Probably not. He has been subject to worse. The old warhorse of the Civil Rights struggles, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, was caught on tape recommending that a certain part of Barack Obama's anatomy be cut off because he was "talking down to black people". The American press was too prudish to mention what part precisely the Rev. Jackson had in mind: but the BBC had no such problem on its world news broadcasts. When former U.S.

Secretary of State Madeline Albright used the same word at the UN, she did so in Spanish: cojones, and this the American press loved.

So buckle your seat belts. The general U.S. election campaign has not even begun.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper