Tuesday evening, I looked at the Greek newspaper Kathimerini online, and absently clicked on the "Cartoon of the Day", showing the political cartoon for the op-ed page. The day's caricature showed Georgios Papandreou, the leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Party, the current opposition party in Greece, preparing for next month's snap election by attempting to capture some of the magic that propelled Barack Obama to the Presidency.
By putting on blackface makeup. In front of a mirror on which is scrawled: "YES I CAN".
Here's the cartoon.
My jaw dropped. I honestly didn't know whether to laugh in disbelief or scream in outrage. I mean, even bleeping Limbaugh wouldn't have gone there. After sleeping on it, I still find it insulting.
But I keep wondering: is it something peculiar to Americans, something in our odd history, that makes such a thing a vile insult? Does one need the ugly history of slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Southern Strategy, and the like in order to take offense?
Or is it something more universal? Something that anyone who claims the title of "civilized person" should be able to understand?
I can almost pass for Greek, sometimes, so long as I keep my mouth shut and my weirdly French-accented Greek doesn't come out; this is my mother's homeland, but all too often, it's an alien landscape to me. Too many things I took for granted growing up are foreign concepts here. Diversity of religion (I almost got coerced into the Greek Orthodox church during my mandatory tour in the Greek infantry). Melting-pot society (though that may have been more from growing up in and around New York than something endemic to America).
Part of me wants to say to whoever drew that political cartoon: "Hey, you just can't do that, okay?"
But part of me wonders: is it only back home, back in America, that such crass denigrating humor is unacceptable?
And how much am I allowed to take umbrage, anyway? As a Caucasian-American in an alien land, is my outrage even appropriate?
Cripes, some days I miss my home. Jerkass ignorant teabaggers and all.
ETA: yeah, I guess quite a bit of it is me not looking at the cartoon with objective eyes.