Chris #81 is 100% right. It is ironic that this conversation, if you will, takes place on the very day that Eric Holder calls us cowards for “not talking about this”. (By the way, Holder, kindly stuff a sock in it.)
Fact: this cartoon shows a chimp, NOT a man looking chimp-like, NOT Obama as a chimp, but a chimpanzee full stop.
Fact: It is published 24 hours after a big national story about cops being forced to kill a rampaging out of control chimpanzee. (i.e. out of control Congress)
For the rest of this, I quote Sean Bannion over at the blog ‘Cold Fury’, who answers very well both attorney general Holder and those caterwauling about this cartoon –
– Let me boil it down for you, Eric. Every time America – and not just white America – has sought to have the conversation and, God forbid, pointed out something is wrong in the black community, it was branded as racist. Ask Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Ask Thomas Sowell. …
…You get enough of that crap back in your face, you quit. Why? Because it’s not worth the drama. What the rest of America sees as not being worth the effort, Holder sees as cowardice.
In my case, this dynamic of hearing “Racist!” screamed every time my interlocutor didn’t agree with my points fully explains how I went from being a Massachusetts-born and bred Ted Kennedy (shudder) Democrat to a Republican. I simply got tired of being told I was supposed to feel guilty for being a white guy. Period. It wasn’t a failure to “confront my own white privilege” it was that I was tired of people who couldn’t and wouldn’t argue in good faith. Logic and argument being a “white construct” and all that jazz. Look, when you have discussions with people about what you see as the problems with race relations in this county and the response you receive in return is to consistently be branded a racist, it’s not cowardice when you stop engaging – it’s sanity preservation. —
So, in a nutshell, either we can be ultra “sensitive” to this cartoon, and thus DEMAND the same sensitivity be pointed my way when, for example, Reverend Lowry goes out of his way to insult me during Obama’s inauguration, which he most cetainly did…
… or we can all grow the hell up and stop whining like fourth-graders at recess whenever we CHOOSE to interpet something as upsetting our delicate sensibilities, and it certainly is a choice.
This is a mediocre cartoon at best, forgotten in a day if people don’t make an issue of it, just like the Mohammed ones. But they are making an issue of it, because they have been trained to make the issue whenever possible, while the events setting them off get smaller and smaller and smaller.
This is about terminal indignance and unquenchable grievance, and it has grown quite tiresome.
