29 May—Below are three TIME magazine covers picturing Canada’s newly elected prime minister Mark Carney shortly after he met with Donald Trump at the White House earlier this month. Carney made it clear to Trump at the meeting that “Canada is not for sale.” (Carney could have told Trump, “Le Canada n’est pas à vendre,”—in French, Canada’s other official language. But Trump wouldn’t have got the message.)

Thus the TIME covers show Carney executing the popular and explicit ξεδιάντροπο δάχτυλο gesture, which dates back to Ancient Greece and is known in Latin as the digitus impudicus, the shameless (or impudent) finger.

Of course the covers are phony. While the top pseudo-cover could easily have been created using good old-fashioned cut-and-paste with scissors and wax (or rubber cement) or computer graphics software (like the Garfield comic strip), they’re said to have been generated by artificial intelligence (like the Garfield comic strip?).

The top TIME pseudo-cover is essentially a political cartoon, pointed satire, parody, comment—call it what you will. It’s clever, to say the least. Certainly it may offend some people. But that’s what it’s supposed to do. The two censored pseudo-covers at the bottom, on the other hand, are just disgraceful. In keeping with the peculiarly American practice of sanitizing too much for no good reason, Yahoo.com and Snopes.com, which posted the bowdlerized covers, obscured the very point of the picture. Not that there was any doubt about the meaning. And Mark Carney must approve.

God and common sense save us from prudes and control freaks . . .