Apparently, thousands of people are up in arms this afternoon about an image from the New York Post:
According to half of the folks on DailyKos, the image is racist. The monkey is clearly a stand-in for president Obama. And we should all be outraged.
Let's get a grip. This is why lots of people in the political mainstream don't take DailyKos seriously.
- Obama didn't write the bill.
- The Chimpanzee had no Obama-like features, and nothing on him indicating that he was supposed to represent Obama. You could interpret it as racist, but there are other plausible interpretations.
- We all know that there was recently an incident in which a crazed chimpanzee attacked a woman--- this was all over the news in the past few days. This, for me, is the most logical inference.
A highly trained 200-pound chimpanzee who once starred in TV commercials for Old Navy and Coca-Cola was shot dead by police after a violent rampage that left a friend of its owner badly mauled.
Couldn't the inference have been about Congress being a bunch of monkeys at a bunch of typewriters? Remember that old joke?
Is there, potentially, a more sinister inference here? Yes. But is it clearly the worst, most shameful, most terrible, most atrocious example of racism ever? No. Is it even clearly racist? No.
Even more so than any potential racist inference, I think the violence is more problematic. Because it says that regardless of who wrote the bill (Obama, the Democrats in Congress, etc), the way to handle it is through violence. That's what strikes me.
I see why it could be offensive, but I don't think this level of hysteria is really warranted.
Outrage gets a bit old when people get outraged at everything. And isn't this type of reaction from the left exactly the sort of thing that makes the New York Post giddy?
And besides, we have more important things to worry about.
UPDATE: Everyone can interpret it in their own way. And I, in turn, have a right to call the outrage excessive. I don't mind having dissenting voices in the mix. I'm not just an echo chamber for liberal outrage. So I guess this is what happens when I don't tow the party line...
UPDATE II: If I weren't in such a hurry, I would have instead written "lots of people in the political mainstream" instead of "some people".
UPDATE III: I got the same type of blowback when I said that there were, in spite of the bad things, some very good things about No Child Left Behind. God forbid someone take an angle that doesn't comport with the traditional, liberal take on a particular matter.
UPDATE IV: To all of you idiots talking about my "white privilege" or inability to understand racism because I've never been black in America...
That's a great try. But I'm am, in fact, every bit as black as Mr. Obama. . Here's my "white privilege", idiots:
Sadly, the comments below that assume anything about my racial background or experience are very telling.
Anyone who disagrees with your take on something being racist is not automatically a "clueless white guy", speaking from a position of "white privilege", with no knowledge of racism in America. You obviously have no clue who I am. We can sit down sometime and talk about when I was 6 years old, and the first time someone called me a nigger.