News for Feburary 19
February 19, 2009 by Barbara
Filed under News and Analysis
Drawing on Controversy
New York officials and civil rights leaders expressed concern on Wednesday over a New York Post editorial cartoon that showed two police officers standing over a chimpanzee that had been shot by one of the officers, with one saying, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” Many bloggers and commentators said the cartoon drew on strains of racism embedded in U.S. history, while some simply named the cartoon as a bad joke gone wrong. Links include:
dotCommonweal | “You’ve likely read the story about the crazed chimp that went ape and critically mauled a woman in Stamford, CT (where such creatures are considered house pets). Police had to shoot and kill the poor simian. This morning, in an eye-popping interpretation of the event, a New York Post cartoonist has depicted the shooting. … People here in Brooklyn were buzzing about it this ayem, and The Huffington Post has coverage here. I love tabloids, but this boggles the mind.”
ThinkProgress | “In a statement, the Rev. Al Sharpton questions the racism that appears to be in Delonas’s cartoon: ‘The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this’.”
Alas, a Blog | “Do I think Delonas intended to draw a racist cartoon? No, I don’t. But intention doesn’t enter into it. The fact is that through his blindness to his own privilege, he created a cartoon that was racist. It would be nice if he’d learn from this, take his lumps, and if we could all use this as a learning experience. Of course, given the way our country discusses race, I’m guessing that he’ll sniff that he wasn’t racist at all, and after a lot of heat and no light, we’ll move on to the next topic.”
Miller-McCune | “Today’s Post cartoon is not far removed from the “Curious George” Obama sock puppet, a “Curious George” Obama T-shirt, a Japanese advertisement depicting Obama as a monkey, and countless other Obama/monkey comparisons that cropped up throughout the year-long Democratic primary and presidential campaigns. Psychological science has long known that words and pictures, far from harmless, can be the very instruments of dehumanization necessary for collective violence-regardless of how innocently they are intended.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates @The Atlantic | “Getting a lot of e-mails asking me what I think of the cartoon the Post ran. Meh. I think it is what is. A bad cartoon. And a bad joke.”
Stimulus Infrastructure Funding Short-Changes States with High Unemployment | ProPublica
The money in the stimulus bill slated for transportation and infrastructure–a touch under $100 billion–is likely to be one of the stimulus’ biggest job-generators. But we crunched the numbers and found that the higher a state’s unemployment, the less money it gets.
Fight Against Poverty Unites Christian Left and Right | CSMonitor.com
Capitol Hill may not be embracing bipartisanship, but some in America’s faith community are making strides in that direction. Christians from the right and the left have begun bridging political and religious differences to seek solutions to one of the nation’s most persistent problems: poverty. On Tuesday, a new bipartisan group called the Poverty Forum released a series of specific proposals aimed at reducing domestic poverty and keeping Americans hit by the economic crisis from joining the ranks of the poor.
Blue Dogs Bark | The Nation
I’ve spent the past few months trying to sort out why the Blue Dogs get so much attention. The best I can tell, there are two main reasons. One has to do with the organizational mechanics of the Blue Dog caucus, which is more unified and cohesive than any other in the House. The other has to do with the ongoing Beltway love affair with “fiscal conservatism.”
Diagramming an Obama Sentence | The Millions
In a Slate piece published back in the fall, Kitty Burns Florey took on the unenviable task of diagramming the utterances of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, clearly has a unusual predilection for sentence diagramming (which I’m pretty sure the Army Field Manual prohibits as a form of torture.) Nonetheless, her project was more journalistic than aesthetic; she suggested that diagramming a sentence “provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator.” In honor of Presidents Day, I thought I’d return to the “lost art” of diagramming – last practiced (by me) in the Seventh Grade classroom of Mrs. Brenda Wooten – to see what I could learn about the mind of President Barack Obama.
Barbara Schwartz is the editorial director at the Xenia Institute. She lives in Oklahoma City, Okla., and currently is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.
