Thursday, February 19, 2009

Toon-town

I'm sure you've heard of the New York Post chimp cartoon controversy and I was wondering how the class felt about it.

There are several different things in play. First of all, the rather horrific attack of a woman in Connecticut by a chimp about my size, where the police shot the critter.

Then we have an inordinately complex stimulus bill.

The "innocent" explanation is the "infinite monkey theorem," you know, with monkeys and typewriters and infinity they produce Hamlet, or in this case--a stimulus bill.

Do you buy the "innocent" explanation or the racism angle?

5 comments:

jimbow8 said...

It is either

A) completely and disgustingly racists; or

B) the cartoonist somehow decided to connect two utterly disparate items (in such a way as the cartoon appeared racist only as a coincidence), in which case cartoonist and editor are complete idiots.

schmidlap said...

Occam's Razor applies: by far, the simplest constructible explanation is plain old racism.

Even for the NY Post, this is pretty bold.

Anonymous said...

Well, my first thought was along the lines of jimbow8's second and based on personal experience; editors are complete idiots.

But then I started thinking from a different angle... what if Bush had written the stimulus bill and the same editorial cartoon had run verbatim?

Everyone would have connected the dead primate to the Commander in Chimp himself and never considered the infinite monkey argument. It would have been a personal statement directed at Bush.

One can't help but correctly make that assumption with regards to President Obama as the originator of the stimulus bill.

It's racist.

Carlos said...

I agree with INN; and there's one point here that's been overlooked. The chimp was SHOT. Need I spell out what the implication of this is?

Anonymous said...

The more I see of this guys "work" the more it's clear that he's a homophobic woman hater (why do those often go hand in hand?). No surprise that his list extends to racist.