Damn Dirty Ape!

So I have to weigh in on this one. Some time ago, the NY Post printed a cartoon. Like most political cartoons it addressed what was happening in politics at the time. Makes sense. But this one has caused a lot of outrage and while I also am ashamed of this ad, it's for a much different reason. For starters here's the cartoon.


I am kind of confused by this cartoon. I guess it's trying to say that an ape wrote the US's current "economic stimulus" (have we had enough of these words) bill. That's a pretty wealthy ape or at least a very powerful ape.

I say good for him or her. Writing a complicated bill like that would be a chore for any of us. Why not give the job to an ape? Take affirmative action to a new level.

Maybe it's one of those super intelligent apes from NASA. Did you ever think of that?

But to add to my confusion I wondered: why would police or security guards shoot an ape for writing a stimulus bill on a street in broad daylight with lots of witnesses driving by? Was the bill that bad? Doesn't it stimulate you enough? Do the editors of the NY Post want people to go to the zoo and shoot apes? Maybe they should shoot the greedy (suicide?) or economists instead since they are the real problem.

But back to the uproar. People think this dead ape is a stand-in for Barack Obama. This is a bit of a stretch. First of all Barack Obama is a homo (wait for it) sapien. But apparently people of African descent are considered apes or monkeys by silly racist people.

(As a side note, in Europe if you have black football players on your national team almost every country will make monkey calls at them. Hey fat, lazy, drunk white guys! Those footballers could probably kick your balls out of the stadium! Get a life.)

And do people actually think Barack Obama wrote the bill himself? Clearly not. I think this is a case of reading into things too much. I'm sure the NY Post has apologized for any offense by now.

The funny thing is that his predecessor was often portrayed as an ape himself. I read the Guardian on occasion and have greatly enjoyed political cartoons by Steve Bell. Bell's Bush is terribly simian and funny. How is portraying Bush in this way acceptable and just drawing a picture of an ape, far from having Obama swinging from tree to tree on the White House lawn, racist?

Even if you don't believe in evolution like our friend Bush, we're all still descended from apes in Africa.

And that's the real problem. It's not that this is another example of racism (I'm not disputing that by the way), it's that apes are demeaned by this cartoon and our culture more generally. Apes are apes and humans are humans, trees are trees and bacteria are bacteria. There isn't a hierarchy of intelligence or feeling or any of that shit we've been taught since we were kids. If God told you that, then God is wrong. We are all equal, all creation, all species on this earth and we all have a right to be here.

Apes, far from stupid, are too smart to waste their time developing a global economy and huge, bloated governments let alone writing an economic stimulus bill. Life is straightforward for them. Eat, fuck, shit, die, repeat.

Homo sapiens like the editor of the NY Post, Barack Obama and the racist football fan could learn a lot from them and pretty much every single other being on this earth.