What, Me Racist?

(Note: This will be printed in my college newspaper this month. Pray for my survival.)

Following the Second Coming of Christ in the form of the Obamessiah last November, many people naturally (i.e. stupidly) assumed that America was officially “over” the great race debate, all prejudice was now dead and the world now loved the United States for ever and ever and ever, ever, ever.

Many people are stupid.

Amongst those stupid people are those who, for whatever reason, decided that a recent New York Post cartoon was not only asserting that Barack Obama, our Nation’s first black President, was a chimpanzee but that he should be assassinated. Really.

The infamous cartoon was an attack on the recently passed economic stimulus and its authors. It features two police officers standing in front of a chimpanzee that has just been fatally shot by one of the men. One officer is saying, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

The bill is so awful, the cartoonist believes, that a chimp could have written it. That’s a valid criticism and a take-off of a rather common expression, as in, “X is so easy/poorly done a [insert non-human primate here] could have done/written it.” The cartoon was also referencing the recent chimp mauling/shooting in Connecticut.

But wait! The President – who is black, in case you didn’t know – supported the bill. Therefore, the cartoonist is calling Barack Obama a chimp because he is black and he wants him killed.

Really? Are we that dense?

It’s always easy to read into things and make ridiculous connections and get legions of others to agree with you. Otherwise, Loose Change would be nothing more than a random video on YouTube with a few thousand views along with the occasional comment along the lines of, “ya gorge bu$$hitler blew up the towers to give $$$ to his oil budies and cheney made off with the l00t.”

The obvious flaw with the assumption that the cartoon is an attack on President Obama – whose mere presence in any place at any given time is historic, and don’t you forget it – is the officer’s designation that the chimp wrote the bill, rather than signed it. Presidents don’t write bills; that’s Congress’ job. A cursory glance at the American political process should remove any doubt that the cartoon was, in fact, a critique of the authors of the stimulus plan and not of the man, His Holiness Barack Obama, first black President of the United States and fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha, who signed the plan into law.

Granted, it’s an understandable mistake to think that the President writes bills, rather than merely signs them. Most Americans can’t name all three branches of our government, so it’s only logical that most Americans don’t know how all three of those branches work. Hell, even our own esteemed Senator, Chuck Schumer, once asserted that “[t]he Supreme Court makes law.”

Um, no, Chuck. You “make law.” The Supreme Court interprets the law in accordance with the Constitution of the United States. In that same vein, the President signs and vetoes bills which are intended to become laws. See how simple it all is?

The same crew raising hackles over the New York Post were in a tizzy when The New Yorker published a cover cartoon last summer featuring then-candidate Barack Obama, whose Presidential candidacy was also very, very historic, fist-bumping his wife, Michelle, whilst dressed in stereotypical Islamic terrorist garb. The entire point of the cover was to mock the Obamas’ detractors as fear mongers who intended to whip up frightening imagery to terrify dumb, ignorant voters into voting for John McCain.

Now, The New Yorker is an avowedly liberal publication, unlike the New York Post, and, as such, it will more often than not be favourable towards liberal candidates and unfavourable towards conservatives, as well as target a decidedly liberal reading audience.

Ironically, it was liberals – not conservatives – who interpreted the cover literally and attacked The New Yorker for doing the very thing it was accusing conservatives of, rather than viewing the cover within its proper context. Conservatives, for the most part, got the cover – at least all of the conservatives I know did.

The only sort of person who might have misunderstood the point of the offending cartoon probably wouldn’t have voted for Obama (cough) FIRSTBLACKPRESIDENT! (cough), anyway. To borrow from the old stereotype playbook, this was the sort of slack-jawed yokel living in deepest Appalachia – probably named Cletus – who, upon viewing the cartoon, called out to his wife/sister, “Ah knew it! Lock up the guns, Brandine, that Obama feller is a terr’rist!”

No-one gets satire anymore. If Jonathan Swift were alive today, children’s rights advocates would be demanding he apologise for penning his essay, A Modest Proposal, and cease writing for the rest of his life.

But all logic and reason fly out the window when talking about President Barack Obama (ROLL FOOTAGE OF JESSE JACKSON CRYING DURING OBAMA VICTORY SPEECH). After all, this is the man whose goals include curing cancer, slowing the rise of the planet’s oceans and ending war.

Yeah, right. And I’m a monkey’s uncle.