Monkeying around

ESCONDIDO, CA – I had lunch with a long-time friend yesterday. That’s an uncommon thing for me; not the eating lunch part, I do that most days, the seeing an old friend part, I do damn little of that. I like to keep my human connections at arm’s length or further. Some people would think my life of self-enforced exile is kind of sad, but it’s not. It’s like masturbating – I meet a better class of people.

But yesterday was an exception. My friend and I ate and talked and dwelt upon everything inane in our bewilderingly inane world and the one thing that resonated throughout our midday repast-cum­-gripe session was how it’s not o.k. to say most things anymore. This wasn’t just an opinion tossed about casually by two curmudgeonly chums. We’d both been feeling it for quite a while and we just so happened to find that lunch on a Tuesday was the right time to voice our considered mutual opinion.

I’ll give you just one example of the things we agreed we’d like to say but can’t:

Silly person: I think the company would benefit from a female leadership style.

Me: “Female leadership style?” What’s that? Including ancillary people in endless deliberation about easily resolved matters? Responding to crises like a wildebeest in a river?

In case you didn’t know, now you do. You’re not allowed to say things like that anymore.

But it’s not just misogyny (no matter how fact based) that’s verboten. All of us have to stifle ourselves all the damn time about almost everything we’d like to say and as a result, very little of what gets said is worth saying in the first place and I’ve decided that I’m not going to stifle myself anymore. Words are just words. They only mean what they mean and they don’t hurt anyone unless someone wants them to. If we use words to make defensible statements, it shouldn’t matter if those statements are unpopular. The worth of the assertion should be measured by its accuracy.

However, before I get into a rant about things I’d really like to say, let’s dredge up something that happened a month back, something that got a bunch of those you-can’t-say-that people’s undies all wadded up, shall we?

It seems the New York Post had the effrontery to run a political cartoon that included a depiction of a chimpanzee slain by gunfire from crazed, chimp-killing cops (who no doubt need more training and should be forced to complete a course in simian sensitivity before being turned back out to the streets to slaughter the hapless denizens of ape city). If you didn’t see it, here it is.

Well you can bet your ass a cadre of self-styled black “leaders” got themselves all spun up over what they took to be a caricature of an interracial president as a chimp. I don’t believe the editors of that rag didn’t see it coming. I think the paper deliberately ran a provocative cartoon. I bet the editors anticipated the blowback and welcomed it. And if they did, more power to them. That’s what political cartoons are supposed to do: provoke a reaction. And it’s a sure fire bet that one silly cartoon got the Post more national attention than anything else it has published, like, ever.

Here’s the thing though: President Obama didn’t write the stimulus bill, the congress did, and there’s no reason not to believe the Post’s official account that the cartoon was intended to liken the Democrat-controlled congress, not the president, to a pack of crazed chimpanzees. I’m not sure the paper should publish something tacitly espousing the idea of D.C. cops gunning down congress members, but then I’m not sure it shouldn’t, either. Whatever.

The deal is that some (and only some) black people with a nose for the camera got themselves all high in the behind over the cartoon because they were just damn sure the bullet-riddled corpse of a chimpanzee was meant to represent Obama, not the congress, because after all, he’s black (an arguable assertion), and after all, everyone knows that white people think black people look like apes. Hmmm.

Do we all really think that? I don’t believe we do. Some of us apparently do, and historically a whole bunch of us did. But my niece doesn’t. She’s five. She has black friends and as far as I know she doesn’t think they look like, act like or in any other way resemble apes. But then that’s probably just because nobody has taught her yet that they do. Sad that bigotry has to be taught. It would be a whole lot easier if babies just came into the world hating people who don’t look like themselves. Alas, babies can’t generalize. But thank God we grown-ups can! We can generalize and stereotype to beat the band. I don’t know if it’s a survival mechanism hard-wired in us, or if it’s a tool we use to hew order from a complicated world. Whatever it is, we can damn sure do it. I’m particularly good at it and I’m not afraid to demonstrate.

Most gay men are good dancers. Most, but not all, are bad boxers.

Most Jews have more money than I do. Most also have conflicted, oedipal relationships with their mothers.

Most Mexicans breed like gerbils and many have packed their entire clan into a Chevy pick up. (By the way, why were there only 3,000 Mexicans at the Alamo? They could only get four cars started.)

Most Indians (feathers, not dots) can’t hold their liquor. Most Indians (the other kind) worship elephants and such.

Most white men are consumed with worry that their dicks are too small while most black men think having a big dick partially offsets all the things they don’t have.

A woman will use her vagina as a weapon. Maybe not all of them, but all of them I’ve met so far.

Now am I wrong or are the foregoing statements at least statistically accurate? Not all black people are bad swimmers. Not every last pixel in Hollywood is controlled by Jews. Not quite all gay men have good fashion sense. Not every, single Mexican in the world will skip work for a three-year-old’s birthday party. These are generalizations. They’re truish, but they’re not completely true. They’re applicable on average but not necessarily in any specific case.

However, it’s really not even partly true that black people in general look like apes. A few do. Sam Cassell, for instance, is the spitting image of Curious George, but Barack Obama is not. It’s the same for white people. The Olsen twins look like Tara Lipinski, who looks like Chaka from Land of the Lost, but Gina Gershon, she looks nothing like an ape.

And then there’s this; What if the Post actually did mean to depict the president as a chimp? So what? Just about every news outlet in this country ran political cartoons depicting George W. Bush as everything from a bubble to a dunce cap and many showed him as a monkey. There was outcry about any of those cartoons.

“But aha!” you might retort, “W is a white man and there was no reason to get upset over those cartoons because we all know that white people don’t really look like monkeys . . .” To which I would have to respond thus:

If you automatically assumed that the dead chimp in the cartoon was meant to represent the president just because he’s (purportedly) black, then that says nothing about the New York Post, nothing about the president, nothing about the congress, nothing about black people or white people and nothing about nothing in general. But it does say something about you.