Cover Controversy

The new issue of “The Socialist” magazine is out in the mail, and, to my utter befuddlement, its cover is provoking some controversy.

Apparently, some comrades take exception to linking Rosa Parks’ image and legacy with a stupid teevee show, no matter the ironic effect intended. The party’s female Co-Chair thinks that linking Parks with “Desperate Housewives” is “historically inaccurate, belittling to her as an individual, and demeaning to the Civil Rights movement.” Our young, white male Co-Vice Chair denounces the cover as “controversial in the eyes of women or people of color,” and Wayne Rossi dismisses it as “a smarmy, self-satisfied pop-culture reference…that sets a bad tone for the enterprise.”

I produce each issue of the magazine in collaboration with an Editorial Board, and I am always sure to direct their attention to items that I think might spur controversy (for example, I was awfully worried about the response to pinkocommiebastard’s investment advice). I never in a million years thought this cover would provoke any controversy. I was proud of it, thought the graphic was terrific, and was worried that – if anything – the “Desperate Housewives” allusion would be perceived as cliched or boring. No one on the Editorial Board thought it controversial, either.

When the inimitable Quinn Brisben submitted his article on Rosa Parks, I was excited to publish it. It is a typically breezy, yet gripping, account of the backstage planning and maneuvering of the Montgomery bus boycott, as well as the years of planning that went into it, and the spontaneous civil disobedience that started it. It is scholarly and funny, full of well-researched history, anecdotes and personal remembrances.

It was not intended to be the cover story until Steven Baumann, responding to a request for an illustration of Parks’ mug shot, submitted the stark and lovely graphic that now graces the cover. His Rosa Parks looks saintly and simultaneously dangerous. I took one look at it, and that phrase that is being bandied about in our media immediately came to mind: desperate housewife.

Here was a woman in a truly desperate situation: a second-class (well, third-class, as a woman) citizen who is daily spat upon by those on top in society, who trains and studies to overcome it and finally engages in a brave and noble act that puts her life, her livelihood and her reputation in peril.

Contrast that with a teevee soap opera about bored women in the affluent suburbs plotting adultery and mayhem and figure out what we are making fun of with the cover.

Please, let me know what you think.