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Black and white chimpanzee and person1/30/2024 ![]() “Yes, yes, I compared the author of the stimulus plan, a Black man, to a chimp. It was a commentary on city life and religion, not a mobilization of imagery that dehumanizes Jews. But Jews, after all, are very likely to live in NYC, where there are lots of rats. “Yes, yes, I may have compared Jews to rats. ![]() I think it’s absurd to argue that if we can construct alternate explanations of racist imagery then they’re not really racist (or that racist). And I say that as a Gramsci scholar, so I knows me some hegemony annat.Īllow me to become immensely less popular. Ultimately, what I think is that if you have to find your pop culture exemplars of racism in optional readings of heavily coded ephemera, we’re doing pretty freaking well overall with the whole racism thing. The dead chimp is contingently available in current events, so reading assassination into it is generically plausible, but optional and contextually foreclosed. ![]() We could recontextualize chimps writing things with the old joke about a million chimps with typewriters eventually producing Shakespeare. I think the cartoon is plenty funny just on the reading that the stimulus bill is so awful it must have been written by a chimp, so we don’t _need_ racism to explain it. But to say that the subtext is racial is premature until we’ve considered alternatives and empirically incorrect, in the case of at least two readers above. So John is correct here that “This cartoon is a clear parody of two unrelated things, which we tie together…” with a subtext to produce a humorous effect. My old pal’s problem was that she had zeroed in on one and only one possible meaning of circles and lost track of the others. In order to pass the sniff test, decoding has to minimally consider plausible alternatives. ![]() I’m thinking of Teletubbies here, always a pleasure. But sometimes circles do symbolize anuses, just like sometimes cigars symbolize penises and sometimes triangles symbolize homosexuality. I think we can agree that this was a paranoid monosemia dependent on radical decontextualization. When an old friend of mine went crazy, one of the things she decided is that there were cameras in the toilet monitoring her poopage, that everyone in the world was watching and commenting on this, and that anything circular was an intentionally offensive representation of her anus. ![]()
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