bks wrote:I saw it and had the same shocked/disgusted reaction, yet racism in big-city papers is rarely this naked, is it? There had to be some 'reason' for this, I figured.
Sure enough, there was a story in Connecticut recently where a chimpanzee mauled a woman, which supposedly provided the immediate 'context' for this.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,494067,00.html
Obviously I don't agree it makes this cartoon funny or acceptable, but that's the explanation I heard.
I think the cartoon's intended logic goes something like this: "The person responsible for creating the ESP is as crazy as the chimpanzee that bit off that woman's hands, and which was recently killed for it."
Just hilarious.
By the way, the chimp was reported to have been on Xanax, though that may be bullshit.
Oh, I knew the story of the rabid monkey and thus got the joke in the conventional sense. But you tell us: is that an inspiration or an opportunity?
The elements stand alone: monkey dead on the city pavement, luridly portrayed. White policemen who had no choice but to shoot, shaken but relieved. Multiple gunshots in a triangle pattern: no fear the beast is anything but dead. The messages are visceral and immediate in this culture's context, this time so unmistakable that even the usual denialists are scarce.
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/02/18/
2009-02-18_new_york_post_has_gotta_apologize_over_o-1.html
See the comments to the above article for more than a few denials in a predictable mode. The stimuls-writing monkey is not Obama of the "Obama stimulus plan" talk that's filling the airwaves of late; or Obama of the racial designation so many white people still call the monkeys and have historically associated with simians in a million racist depictions. No, that monkey is actually Pelosi! After all, Bush was caricatured as a monkey, too!
Well, the Bush-Chimp was never shown as one shot dead on the pavement by the security forces for being rabid and thinking it can read and write planned stimuli, but it's just the same thing. And what about the horrific atrocities to which the liberal press subjected pure-as-snow Sarah Palin? (This is the country where her ticket got 46 percent of the vote on a bid as clear in its appeal to race as possible without being explicit.)
Here's a comment from the gawker gallery of Delonas's cartoons:
So transgression is okay when it challenges traditional norms, but artists shouldn't dare confront the left-liberal consensus, right? Lame. This shit isn't very funny, but at least it's something of a counterweight to the lockstep, politically correct media that dominates the city. Let the freaks make fun of the squares and the squares make fun of the freaks and America will keep being America.
Once again, the regular white folk suffer under nothing so much as a PC-liberal tyranny that wants to make them feel bad. They are the victimized "squares." Now you may be thinking: Can one get more "square" than Obama? Yes. It doesn't matter how hard he tries. He's still a monkey. Oh, sorry, apparently a "freak."
Where's the lady in that cartoon, the real-life monkey's victim? This cartoon monkey's rabid outburst was not in biting her, but in writing a stimulus plan. Thinking he had book learning and could run a government, that boy! Like the chicken-eating legislators in "Birth of a Nation," still celebrated for its supposed artistic greatness.
There is only one debatable aspect in the denotations or connotations of this drawing, a side detail. The sign's cut off to say: War Dog. I believe the author in this one case means it as a kind of signature or declaration.
The cartoon is crafted in such a way that The Post can defend it as being related to the story of Travis the chimp that's been in the recent news cycle, but anyone with half a brain can read between the lines. However, to read between those lines opens one to the fatuous counter charge of being racist oneself.
The cartoonist takes care of that by associating the monkey with the stimulus package, no? Stimulus=Monkey=Obama. More importantly: he's rabid and dangerous and agents of the law have a compelling, urgent, overwhelming cause to gun him down, immediately, on the street. Shoot to kill.
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