My word but we Americans have turned into a disastrously impolite lot.
It’s not as if we aren’t living in a time when embracing one another and endowing each other with just a bit of kindness and thoughtfulness would be an excellent idea. We have an extraordinary opportunity – right now – to show the world what we’re made of; to rise to the occasion and be unified and smart; to treat each other as the concept of Tongji suggests: all together, rowing together, working together.
Nah, screw that. It’s much more entertaining to be vicious.
We now have the New York Post publishing political cartoons of a chimpanzee shot dead by police and the caption, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” Though it was allegedly meant to connect two major headlines of the day together (a brutal mauling of a woman by a captive chimpanzee and the recent passage of a massive spending bill), the cartoon set off a wave of predictable and perfectly justified protests.
It should escape no one with an ear or an eye that the United States has recently inaugurated its first non-white President. It should also be painfully obvious that a long-lived and low-hanging-fruit means of dehumanizing and humiliating black Americans has been to liken them to monkeys. I personally think there is about a two percent chance that the artist who produced the comic may have been referring to the Infinite Monkey Theory. But, that doesn’t matter.
Did no editor at the New York Post take even a millisecond of pause to consider how such a cartoon would be received by its readers? Are we to believe that the Post’s management had absolutely no inkling whatsoever that such a cartoon could easily have been thought by many to be intentionally racist and cruel?
Seriously?
Even if the depiction of the monkey and reference to the recent spending package weren’t intended to raise fur, wouldn’t common sense and a touch of manners lead editors to shelve the drawing?
It didn’t. And now, one of the most circulated dailies in the United States has enough egg on their collective face to cook an omelet the size of a small town.
But, hey. Shocking sells.
Rolling Stone magazine has also thought very little of manners as of late. A recent ‘satire’, penned by Matt Taibbi and published by the Stone, titled Bush Apologizes, makes an excruciating failed attempt at humor by poking jest at Terri Schiavo. Because there’s nothing funnier than dead people, right?
Ask yourself how you would feel after opening up a pop culture rag (presumably to read yet another Coldplay review) and stumbling across the following content, directed at your dead child or sibling:
Let’s talk about some of the low points of your second term. Why did you make such a big deal out of intervening in the whole Terri Schiavo thing?
Well, Jeb calls me up one day and says, “A bunch of Jew lawyers are trying to pull the plug on some broad down here. I think we can spin it that they’re doing it because she’s Christian.”
I ask him what he means, and he tells me the story. I tell Karl, and Karl says to me, “Mr. President, I am fully erect. This is a winner all the way.” He says we can jam up Bill Nelson down there for his Senate race by forcing him to take sides with the husband in the story, who’s like this Mike Ditka-looking atheist guy who wants to starve his wife to death while he’s running around knocking up other chicks.
Politics is all about forcing people to make simple choices, that’s what my dad always told me, and this one was an A+ choice for us. Karl, you should have seen him, he was on the phone day and night, telling every news director in the country that he wanted to see that Schiavo lady’s face “on every channel, like it’s the State of the Union address.”
So sure enough, we’re watching TV later that night, and CNN just has her and her drooling-ass, doped-up smile on this endless loop. Karl is literally jumping up and down with excitement at the sight of her. “She’s the best thing since Old Yeller,” he’s saying. “I want to see every liberal in the country on Larry King campaigning to yank her feeding tube. Get Ben Affleck on there, Sean Penn. Show them side by side with her looking fat and helpless with those dead-fish eyes of hers, split-screen. She’ll get us 10,000 votes an hour.”
Too bad she died.
Yeah. Karl was almost inconsolable when she passed. He kept looking for a replacement. Karen Hughes called it his “vegetable hunt.” He’d call long lists of registered Democrats, asking if they had a brain-dead wife they wanted to pull the plug on.
Ho. Lee. Shit.
I’m not certain who urinated in Mr. Taibbi’s Cheerios, but that’s a whole lot of hate to pack into just a few paragraphs. I’m all for mocking politicians when you can, but why drag an innocent and helpless woman into it?
Could he possibly think, for a moment, that demeaning a dead woman would bring the chortles? And just what the hell were his publishers thinking when they said “Print it!?” To be certain, they weren’t thinking about how her surviving family members would feel upon reading such repugnant and misdirected bile.
Though I’m a staunch supporter of protected speech in all forms, how on earth could someone find this humorous or even print-worthy?
It was horrifyingly cruel, adolescent and mean-spirited. Why don’t the folks over at the Stone just go shove a few second graders around? It’s, essentially, the same spirit. How do people like this dare call themselves journalists?
And, if all that wasn’t enough to make you rip out at the root what is left of your own hair, we take you now from the media to our own government. That’s right, kids. The mayor of Las Alamitos, California – Dean Grose – thought it might be rather cute to circulate an email that had an image of the Whitehouse with watermelons photoshopped onto the front lawn. He called the subject of his email “No Easter egg hunt this year.”
This is a duly elected public servant who executed this magnificent display of steaming idiocy. Quite regrettably, one of the recipients of his email was a black woman. You have likely already surmised… she was none too amused.
Grose has said he will resign. Well, he probably should. He claims he had no clue that watermelons could be construed as a racial stereotype when linked with black people. Is that a fact?
Now, the core of the problem isn’t really the media or the dopes we elect into public office. I think there may be a greater picture than we’re seeing. When did Americans become so bloody impolite?
Is it that we’re all consumed with ourselves that we’ve forgotten the art of being human towards others? Are our cell phones really more important than acting like respectable human beings? When did this kind of low-brow, mean-spirited shit become acceptable?
Well, perhaps it’s always been that way. It’s just a bit shocking when it comes from the establishment types. You may tend to think of people in prominent positions as your ‘betters’ or as those who have arrived. It doesn’t seem as though they’ve arrived at anything more than vitriol and immature behavior.
And, that’s a sad note.
I’m not going to bother trying to tell anyone how to speak, what to think or which way to behave. Still, I think I’m going to mind my mouth a little more carefully from now on. Because, if being snarky is ‘in’, I’d rather not be in with the in crowd.
